JohnCacka.com

I haven’t really addressed any of my readers directly yet in a post because I don’t have much of a reader base yet as far as I know. You can tell a little bit from the stats (I use google analytics) and most of my readers are new visitors. For any regular or semi-regular readers out there, this is for you. I know I’ve been a little slow on the content lately, but that’s hard to tell since the blog is still new. I’ve been getting ready to go to Europe for a month, been spending some time working out all the details.

I’ll be gone for basically the entire month of March so there probably won’t be any updates for a while. I’ll try to post some while I’m there but its hard to say what I’ll find or run into. So this should serve as a fair warning, I haven’t given up blogging, I’m just taking a vacation.

I’ll be in London and Prague and I’ll be taking lots of pictures. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some pictures while I’m there but any time you go to any foreign place its just hard to say what will happen. In the very worst case, I’ll be back around the 5th of April.

Julian Beever is a sidewalk chalk artist that has taken his art to a level higher than most will ever achieve. He is extremely talented at creating 3d illusions by working in perspective so that from the right angle the things he draws come alive. It’s really something you’ll have to see for yourself. Check out his website at http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm. Below are a few examples of his work.

I recently found out about MyBlogLog.com from John Chow. It is a website that helps bloggers form communities with their readers by putting a face to them. It also allows readers to see and talk to each other, and if they have blogs to get their blogs a little more exposure too. If you join the MyBlogLog community, then you will appear as a recent reader on other member’s sites that you visit. This should help increase traffic for everyone involved, and it is a nice service. Simple, to the point, and free. Basically it just helps more people connect. They offer color customization and then give you a snippet of code. I chose to put mine in the sidebar, however nobody has joined my community yet. You can join my community here.

These are probably too extravagant for most people at $250 for a dozen roses, but then again who wouldn’t want 6ft roses at least once in their lifetime? Gerald Prolman founded OrganicBouquet.com in 2001 and in early 2007 introduced what he calls “extreme roses”. With high demand for long stemmed roses in the Russian market, they decided to see how far they could push it. What they came up with were really long stemmed roses, often taller than the person receiving them.

Nestled between two volcanoes at more than 9,600 ft, these stunning Forever Young and Red Intuition red roses grow naturally tall in their native Ecuadorian soil. Days of prolonged sunlight and cool nights allow these oversized beauties to flourish beyond expectation. The ultimate in elegance and beauty, each stem boasts a large head which opens to an astonishing 3-4 inches in diameter, creating a sea of lush red rose petals that stay fresher longer.

They are grown in Ecuador in specially controlled conditions to ensure they grow tall and that the blossoms open wide. Don’t expect to get any in time for this Valentine’s Day however, as there is high demand and limited supply. Here is the ordering page.

You’ve probably noticed that some websites start with ‘www’ and others do not. Sometimes you’ll see http://www.example.com and other times you’ll just see http://example.com. What’s the deal with this and why does it matter? The World Wide Web is a collection of pages, hypertext documents that are hyperlinked together creating a body of information. This runs on the Internet, which is a collection of computers servers and cabling. The default protocol for the web is HTTP and thus browsers will prepend http:// to the URL entered and then attempt to connect on port 80. Mail servers don’t require you to send mail to recipient@mail.example.com, likewise why would a server require you to use the ‘www’ subdomain? The convention of adding the ‘www’ subdomain to your website is redundant, and often without purpose, consuming extra time for no particular reason.

For many people this will have little bearing on their sites and you can choose what you like best, but from an SEO standpoint it can have an effect. You probably don’t want Google having a separate index and pagerank for both www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com. You should rather have Google only index you once so that all you visitors are focused on the same url.

I have http://www.johncacka.com redirect silently to http://johncacka.com, this allows visitors to type in the URL either with or without the ‘www’. After the url is typed in however, it will always change to http://johncacka.com. On my hosting account the interface allows you to easily set this redirect without editing the .htaccess file. If this is not the case with your host the following will work if you are using apache with the Mod-Rewrite module enabled. Be sure to change ‘yoursite’ to your domain.

RewriteEngine On
# Remove www., always.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yoursite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This will change your site to always remove the ‘www’ but still take visitors to your site, without merely turning it off and dropping visitors. The other thing you may wish to do, is to set the preferred domain with Google, which you can do easily with their webmaster tools, http://google.com/webmasters. This will tell Google which way to list your site in their index, and will help keep all the links out there contributing to the pagerank for one copy of your site rather than two.

To many people Google is just a search engine and nothing more. The truth is, Google has lots of little features and services that are not very well publicized at all. Probably among the more well known services are Google Adsense and Google Adwords. Many of their services are listed on their page, but many of them remain more obscure for whatever reason.

Typically I use lots and lots of bookmarks. I browse the web everyday and I just constantly have bookmarks piling up. If they are made at work then I don’t have them at home and vice versa. Since I work on more than one or two computers regularly, this can be quite the headache trying to manage them all and find them when you want them. Some of the browsers offer bookmarks that you can sync between several computers, but again the problem is that I don’t have the same browsers on all the computers that I work on.

The solution is Google Bookmarks. It allows you to make all you bookmarks online, accessible from anywhere independently of what browser you are using. It has a neat little button that you drag to your browser’s links bar (works with Firefox and IE) that makes a ‘create bookmark’ button. So when you’re browsing the web and find a site you like you just click the button and it pops up a little window with the url already in it. You can then label it, change the title if you want, and even make a note about it.

Labels in this case aren’t just text names about the bookmark, but they are like tags you see on social sites or like labels in gmail. It allows you to label each bookmark with multiple labels for easy sorting and categorization. This allows you to use it the way you want to use it, and be creative in the way you use labels. I use an organizational system where I label things categorically for the most part, which is probably the way most typical users would organize things, but labels can do more than that. For example, I use a convention with a label I named ‘inbox’. This is where I bookmark everything that I don’t want to read right away. If I’m at work and can’t watch a video somebody sends me or can’t look into something I wish to research, I just inbox it and look at it later. This has been a huge time saver for me and makes my work much more efficient. I also have labels specific to things I need to address in a timely manner. I have a ‘to blog’ label, for ideas and information that I think is worth covering on here. Basic categorical organization mixed with a little creativity and Google Bookmarks can go a long way towards making your day more efficient and hassle free.

As this blog grows and gets more popular, I will be showing you everything that I have done so far to build traffic and keep things running smoothly and automated. These will be broken down into a series of articles on the various aspects of running a site, as well as monthly review articles. Tracking stats and making changes is one of the best things you can do for your site, especially once you get up ads. You’ll want to maximize your revenue by tweaking placement and sizes and whatever other features specific ad programs give you.

January was a big month because it was the starting month of the blog, so there was a lot to do to tweak the initial set up and options. I didn’t launch the site until Jan 8, so we’re looking at 23 days here really, rather than a full month.

The blog is running on wordpress, which makes it really easy to switch out themes and plugins. This makes it easy and hassle free for anybody that doesn’t want to do a lot of coding, or doesn’t have a good handle on the languages necessary to tweak a blog. Wordpress has a good user community so there is good support for new plugins and themes, and it was also the natural choice since my hosting account offers one click installs of it.

I didn’t spend a lot of time traffic building this month, as there was no content for people to see. I focused on writing a few articles that came to mind to see how I felt about the article content and what I wanted to focus on. So far it has been, whatever I feel like, provided that I think somebody will find it interesting and worth reading. As content builds I will be placing more effort into traffic building which I will cover at a later date as it becomes more applicable.

As soon as the blog launched, I did several things right off. I submitted the url to google, yahoo, and msn. I hooked the website up to google analytics, which is basically a hit counter on steroids that provides lots of very useful information. I installed a plugin that creates a google compliant xml sitemap automatically with every posting to keep it up to date. I then submitted this sitemap to google webmaster tools, which provides other information about how google bots crawl your site and if you are in the index or not. Very useful information for anybody running a website and fairly easy to set up.

Other than this I only tried a few tricks to get traffic. I told just a few friends, did a review of johnchow.com, and dugg one of my own articles. I also left my url in a few comments on a small number of blogs. So what has this done for traffic so far? So far I have 209 unique visits and 417 pageviews. This is a good sign in regard to viewers looking at more than one page of the site, but it could definitely stand to be better. Further, some of these views are from myself, checking to make sure articles post right on the site. As the site gets more traffic, the stats should become more accurate and my own visits will become negligible.

As you can see in the referring sources, digg.com and johnchow.com are my biggest referral sources, which also represent the only two major tricks I tried to get traffic. The lesson here is that tricks work. You can also see however that I have a lot of direct visits. Those are probably from the people I told directly (my friends) and from my own visits to the site, so I’ll disregard them for now and see how it changes over time. Among the other information to be learned from google analytics, the top site entrances were /, /a-geeks-dream-plane/, and /john-chow-rocks/. Again this verifies that the digg and the article review were my best traffic sources along with direct. However, these three were also my top exit pages, which indicates that most of the people that viewed those articles didn’t poke around at all to see if there was anything else of interest on the site.

Overall January was a slow start, but I actually got more traffic than I expected. I need to create more content, write more articles, and put more time into the site in general. I haven’t quite gotten used to updating it at a regular frequency, but I’m getting the hang of it.

Guido Daniele [warning: some artistic nudity] is an Italian painter that specializes in body painting. He creates images for commercials and advertising using a combination of painting and photography. Below are some samples of his fine work, making human hands look like wild animals.

Source: http://www.guidodaniele.com/ [warning: some artistic nudity]

Rapid Prototyping or 3D printers as they are sometimes called is relatively new technology. It involves taking a 3D model and through various means ‘printing’ that item into a physical 3D object. This is used in prototyping for all sorts of products that will eventually be made with injection molding and other processes. For anybody that does 3D modeling as a hobby or professionally such as myself, this is the ultimate dream. The ability to make a statuette or toy out of something you designed and created digitally is very exciting.

The problem is that these machines typically cost tens of thousands of dollars and are expensive to operate. There are a few services online that will do the prototyping for you, but these can be fairly expensive as well and have limitations. The cheapest and most flexible service that I’ve found is http://3darttopart.com/. They accept a wider variety of file formats than most and their pricing is cheaper than most as well.

Hod Lipson and Evan Malone are working a project called Fab@home. Their goal is to get this technology cheap enough to get it into the hands of the common computer user. They are hoping that this type of technology will be used in the future where people can manufacture everyday objects in their homes rather than having to buy replacements or throw things away. They made a wiki of all the information they provide including plans, parts lists and vendors to buy from. It comes out to a total of around $2500 USD using the cheapest manufacturers they can currently find. This puts it well within the range of the serious hobbyist to manufacture items at home. Below is a video that shows the fabber Model 1 in action making a silicone rubber squeeze bulb. The quality isn’t great however, there is a larger version at their site. It is 16mb though so you may just want to check out the youTube version below.

Virgin Airlines wants to come to America but the DOT has denied their request due to foreign ownership. Started by billionaire Richard Branson, Virgin America has one sweet plane. If you love gadgets and tech, its hard not to want them to be here, unless you are concerned about non-competition in the airline industry. Whatever your views, check out their plane. In this video Virgin America CEO Fred Reid makes his case, which promotes Virgin to the American people, hopefully giving their case more power with the DOT.

Below are a few of their prime features:

• Every seat has a 9in LCD screen in the seatback in front of you that runs on embedded linux
• You can play multiplayer games with the other passengers including the classic DOOM
• You can order your meal directly from the screen and don’t have to worry about chatting with flight attendents
• Every seat in first class has an RJ-45 ethernet port for hooking your laptop into
• And every seat on the plane has 110-volt power so you can plug in all your necessary devices
• They have a built in music library of around 3000 mp3s, and your playlists follow you from plane to plane

If that isn’t a geek worthy plane I don’t know what is!