Month: April 2010

Rebuilding mamchenkov.net – Step 3 – Targets

Once I installed the monitoring of goals and gathered some initial data, it was time to start with the changes.  One of the obvious problems from the previous step was that I actually didn’t have my targets on the site.  The action points were missing – no easy way to read movie reviews and no easy way to know that I want people to hire me.  So these were the first things to change.

If you have a look at the site now, you’ll notice that the main menu is re-organized. Most notably it features Movies and Hire me! items.  Movies will take you directly to the list of my movie reviews, which I also improved by filtering out generic movie-related posts.  Hire me! link will lead you to a page which briefly describes what I can do and suggests where to find more information and how to get in contact with me.  Neither one of these action points are in their final stage yet – more changes are coming.  I just needed to start somewhere, so here they are. I have, of course, updated my goal tracking  to use the reviews page and added the new “hire me” goal.

While I was at it, I decided to fix a few other minor things that annoyed me.  Here is what I have done so far:

  • Tags clean-up.  This is still work in progress, but I managed to get a large piece of this work out of the way.  I had almost 2,000 tags in my database and many of those were too generic, tagging a single post.  I renamed and re-organized quite a few of them and now I am left with approximately 1,500 tags.  There are a couple of hundred more that will go away shortly.  This re-organization will make tags more useful and will help visitors find related content easier.
  • Added ‘About me’ section on the front page.  After the main menu reorganization I thought that I had too much of me in there.  “Contact me”, “Hire me!”, “About me”.  So I moved the “About me” into a section and made appear only on the front page.
  • Fixed the RSS image.  The default RSS image from Studiopress theme read “Grab our RSS feed”, but since I am publishing alone on this site, the “our” bit wasn’t making any sense.  I just cropped the image to have the widely recognized RSS icon.
  • Changed search results to feature excerpts instead of full posts.  Full posts were on by default since the last time I edited the theme.  I don’t use search too much, so I didn’t notice how annoying it was.  I tried several ideas to make it better and the only one that actually remains now on the site is excerpts instead of full posts.
  • Changed the tag line from “You just stepped in a pile of posts” to “Thoughts on movies, technology, and everything else”.  I think this one is more focused and that it should help a bit for the search engine optimization.

I’ve also experimented quite a bit with split testing and Google Website Optimizer, but realized that it is too difficult to use for the changes that I am working on now and decided against it.  Later on, when I will test smaller changes, it will come handy though.

Green Zone

A couple of weeks ago I saw “Green Zone” in the cinema.  I barely heard anything about this film – only that Matt Damon plays the main character and that it was directed by the same guy who did some of the Bourne trilogy – but even that was enough.  I wanted to go.

First things first.  This film is not like the Bourne trilogy.  There are a few moments that bring back the memories, but overall it is a totally different film.  The subject is different, the characters are different, the way it was shot is different.  Second things second.  I enjoyed this movie.  As most other Hollywood-made war-related movies it had its share of propaganda, but once I switch on the propaganda filter, there was plenty to enjoy.

Matt Damon acting was awesome as always.  He is very natural and very, how should I put it, believable.  It is often easy to relate to his characters just because of his acting, and this film is not an exception.  The visual content of the film was interesting.  While I am not a big fan of handhold shaking camera effect, it works for this film.  And gladly not the whole film is shot this way – only the scenes where it adds to the atmosphere.

There was plenty of background work in this film – scenery, decorations, costumes, routine, etc.  One of the common ways to avoid this work in a war movie is to switch between a command bunker or Washington office and a blind darkness of the jungle, or something like that.  In this film everything is happening in the war zone and story switches between neutral and hostile areas.  This creates a nice feeling of being there.

Now, to the important part.  The story.  While, as I said, it holds plenty of propaganda, I still liked it.  At least it attempted to show things from a different angle and explain how things go wrong and what it takes to make them right.  There is something to think about and even know, a couple of weeks later, I find myself rethinking parts of the movie.  I do want to see it again and probably I will once I get my hands on the DVD.

Overall, a good film.  Recommended.  4 out of 5.

The end of the road

After a rather lengthy discussion and several beers with my friends yesterday, I got convinced. This whole blogging thing is just a waste of time.  It will not make me any money.  I am not learning anything out of it.  And nobody cares about it.  The only good reason to do it is sharing of information, but I can share using a number of social networks and email, where all my friends are anyway.  After thinking carefully about how much time, effort, and money I am pouring into this site, I decided that enough is enough.

This is my last post and I won’t write any more.  I’ll keep my social networking profiles, email, and instant messaging.  I will keep this site online for a couple of more month, until the web hosting expires, and then it will go offline.  I suggest you do the same.

See you on the social web.  Good bye and thanks for all the fish.

Update (April 2nd, 2010) : This, of course, was my attempt at April’s Fool joke.