Year: 2010

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!

Traffic jam of the year

Every time I complain about getting stuck in a major traffic jam for 20 minutes, my Moscow friends are laughing at me.  They say that I have no right to complain about 20 minutes, when they spend hours waiting in traffic.  And that’s on a daily basis.  It’s not anything out of the ordinary to spend 3 hours on your way to work and another 3 on your way back home in the traffic jam in Moscow.  But today I heard something that makes those 3 hour traffic jam sound like nothing.

Picture this: an epic traffic jam in China, where some people are stuck now for nine days! It’s been there for so long, that there are businesses starting up around this whole mess.  And some people go as far as to call it a temporary settlement.

Via kottke.

Lag

As they say, knowing the problem is already half a solution.  Here is my problem – lag.  I am lagging far behind in a lot of things, which slowly-slowly, one-by-one built up to an impressive list of tasks.   I knew I was lagging for some time, but yesterday I spent a few minutes trying to realize how much and how far behind really I am.

In terms of movie reviews, here is the list of films I’v watched in the past couple of weeks: Cop Out, From Dusk Till Dawn, From Paris with love, Hitman, Jarhead, Michael Clayton, Tenacious D – The pick of destiny, The Girl with the dragon tattoo, The great debaters, Un Prophete, Rush Hour 3, Remember Me, Repo Men, Armors of God, Armors of God : Operation Condor, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Terminal, Terminator, Bruno, Collapse, Tapped, The Rise of the Footsoldier, Ong Bak 3, Armored, Traffic, The Brave One, Religious, Capitalism, Goodfellas.  Some of these are new, some are old.  A few of these I have already reviewed before, but most I haven’t.

In terms of photos, I am even worse.  Latest pictures at Flickr photo stream are those of my Eurotrip last year.  And I haven’t even got half of those in.  More than a year!  Just the thought is horrifying.  There is almost 500 new photos that I still need to sort through, post-process, and upload.  At least I got them all off the camera and into my laptop yesterday – that’s the first step.

I am also lagging in a few other areas – work, side projects, hobbies, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I always had things on my todo list.  Never, for as long as I can remember myself, I thought that everything is done, all is in order, and I can sit back and enjoy myself.  But for the last year or so things are getting out of control.  I’ll need to reorganize myself a bit.  Starting now.