Category: All

All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.

Ask, don’t punish

We are all very familiar with how authorities like to punish citizens for any kind of wrong-doing.  Fines, tow trucks, arrests, warnings, police reports – you name it.  Different means of punishment are so widely used that it’s almost a norm.  Like there is no other way.  But here is an excellent example from the city of Copenhagen in Denmark.

If you park your bicycle illegally, the City will move it over to the bike racks. Instead of finger-wagging, they will then oil your chain, pump your tires and leave a little note on your bicycle asking to kindly use the bike racks in the future.

Brilliant!  And the best part is that the idea worked.

When the project started in April they were moving around 150 bicycles a day. Today that number has dropped to between 30 and 50.

Front page design is overrated

I was looking through my website statistics yesterday and I arrived to this decision – front page design is overrated.  There are, of course, different circumstances and such, but overall, I think this should be true for pretty much every content-based website, except the monsters like CNN.  If you are CNN, then, I guess, people just come to your front page to check up on things.  But if you are not CNN, or some other huge news outlet, chances are, you’ll get most of your visitors from the search engines.  And if that’s true, then I bet your front-page won’t be the landing page for all those visitors.  They will come directly to content pages, like articles, products, and so on.

Consider an example.  Yesterday, this blog saw 593 unique visitors.  The front page was seen by only 46.  That’s less than 8%!  Of course, days are different, and each website is different in its own way.  But I think that in general the correlation between the numbers will be somewhere there.  Around 10% of visitors will check your front page.  Most of them will check the landing page and leave (what’s your bounce rate?  70-80%?).  Some will continue to “Contact Us”, “Related Posts”, “Similar Products”, or search.  And then more of them will leave.  A few of those, who are still there, will probably check the front page by now.  By which time they probably already got what they wanted out of your website or lost all hopes.  No matter how beautiful your front page is, they are likely to leave now.  Dont’ think so?  What’s the average pages per visit metric for your website?  1.5-2?  There you go.

So, don’t bother too much about the front page.  Yes, it is nice to have a cool one.  Yes, it might be important for those direct visitors.  But if you are on a tight schedule or budget, concentrate on improving your content pages.

Installing Google Talk plugin for voice and video on Fedora Linux

With recent news of Google adding support for telephone calls from GTalk, I thought it was time to finally setup voice and video plugin on my system.  The good thing is that Google provides the Linux version of the browser plugin.  The bad news are that the plugin is only packaged for Debian-based systems, while I am a Fedora Linux user.  But thanks to a couple of Google searches, the solution is known and is quite simple in fact.  Here is what I had to do.

  1. Download the browser plugin-in (.deb file, 6 MB).
  2. Extract the content of the google-talkplugin_current_i386.deb file, using ark, or file-roller, or, like me, using Midnight Commander.
  3. In the extracted files, you’ll see data.tar.gz .   Extract it to your system folders (/opt, /usr, /etc).  In fact, you can skip /etc part that sets up a cron job to update the plugin daily.  It relies on apt, which you probably won’t have installed and configured on your Fedora system.
  4. Try running the plugin in command line, using: /opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin
  5. If you see the error like “/opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory“, fix it by creating a symbolic link: cd /usr/lib && ln -s libssl.so.1.0.0a libssl.so.0.9.8
  6. If you see the error like “/opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory“, fix it by installing Adobe Reader: yum install AdobeReader_enu-9.3.3-1.i486 , and then creating the symbolic link: cd /usr/lib && ln -s /opt/Adobe/Reader9/Reader/intellinux/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 .  If you don’t have adobe repo configured or want an alternative to having Adobe Reader on your system, examine the output of “yum provides libcrypto.so.0.9.8“, which will tell you which other packages have the required library.
  7. Restart your browser.
  8. Check that the plugin is installed and enabled by looking at “about:plugins” or a similar page of your browser.

Now you should be able to use voice and video chat in GTalk.  Here is a screenshot I made of a video chat after I did all of the above steps.

If your browser still complains about not having the plugin installed, or plugin crashes for some reason, just run it from the command line (step 4).  Examine the output and act accordingly.  Usually everything should just work, and pretty much the only scenario when it doesn’t is when you don’t have required libraries installed on your system, or you have them installed in a different path than the plugin expects them.  Symbolic links should fix the path issue.  Yum should help you with locating any missing library.

Enjoy!