Category: Site News

This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.

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.

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.

Rebuilding mamchenkov.net – Step 2 – Monitoring

The best practices of web design and development suggest that I need to set up some goals and monitoring before I make any changes to the web site.  This way, I will be able to track how the changes affect the performance of the web site.

The problem is that right now my web site is not set very well for goals that I want it to achieve.  But insufficient monitoring is better than none, so I logged into my Google Analytics account and configured the following goals.

According to my own goals for this web site, as described yesterday, I want to get hired more.  The only way to track it now is to see how many people used the Contact me page.  I will eventually improve my contact details and contact form to be able to track more details.  Once that is done, I’ll reconfigure this goal.

One other thing I want people to do is read more of my movie reviews.  Again, there is no easy way of monitoring it now, so I just setup a goal for the Movies category.  This will probably get reconfigured later.

And just to have some generic goals for an overall picture, I added tracking for those who visit more than 2 pages  and for those who spend more than 2 minutes on the site.  That should be enough for starters.

Rebuilding mamchenkov.net – Step 1 – Ideas

It’s that time of the year again, when I am looking for more inspiration, when ideas are brewing, and when I feel this uncontrollable urge to change the appearance of this blog.  However, this time I want to do more than that.  I don’t just want to get another theme.  I want much more than that.  In fact, I want so much that this time I am sure I won’t be able to do it in one big step over a weekend.  I want a re-make.  Re-birth.  A complete makeover.

I decided I will take it slowly. Because otherwise I’ll lose passion soon and the initiative will die.  I won’t work on it somewhere else in hopes of finishing and releasing it one day.  Because then it will drag forever.  I’ll do it step-by-step, I’ll do it publicly, and I’ll document the path.  Just so that I get a better understanding of what is involved and why I decided to make certain things a certain way, and for someone else to hopefully learn of this experience.  And there is another, hidden, you wish, hope.  That someone will watch me suffer and will step up and help.   Not begging yet, though.

So, step 1.  Ideas.  Here is what I want with the new site.

  1. Focus.  I started this blog a long time ago.  It was about everything.  Then it spawned a few niche blogs, which lived and died, and folded back in.  While there will always be something outside the main topics to blog about it, I want to focus this blog around my primary topics of interest.  Which are: technology and movies.  Technology as in programming, system administration, Open Source Software, web work, social media, etc.  Movies as in movie reviews, trailers, trivia, etc.  I’ll also often blog about my personal life, things that happen in Cyprus, this, and that.  But that shouldn’t be the primary focus.
  2. Goals.  This blog was always my personal place on the web.  It didn’t really have any goals. Probably, that’s because I didn’t have any goals on the web myself.  And now I do.  And I want this blog to reflect it.  So, what are my goals on the web now?  Earn money.  I don’t want to completely lose the personal touch of this blog, but I think it can make way more money than it does now.  And there are two ways it can earn me money: by finding me better jobs (either full-time office jobs or once off consulting gigs or anything in between), and by ads.
  3. Presentation.  There are more than 4,500 posts on this blog.  That’s a tonne of links, images, videos, and code snippets.  But all of it buried in the archives with no easy way of finding it.  I want to change the presentation so that posts of value swim up to the top.  Movie reviews come to mind.  They have poster images, and ratings.  They are tagged with actors and directors.  They have recommendations and comments.  But there is no easy way of getting to them.  I want to change that.
  4. Social web integration.  I spend a lot of time on the Web.  I have a number of profiles, accounts, streams, and portfolios all over the place.  I want to have better integration of this blog with my other places on the web, such as Flickr, delicious, Twitter, Google Buzz, Google Reader, and whatever else that might be at the time.
  5. Mobile.  More and more people are using mobile devices to browse the web.  I do more of the mobile browsing myself.  It’s a pity that I find browsing my own blog annoying when on the mobile.  This must be improved.

Now that I look at these ideas, written, in front of me, I already have a better understanding of all the changes that have to be done.   There is no magic theme or plugin that will just do all that for me.  And there probably isn’t even a combination of those.  It will take a number of trials and errors, some hand coding, some content fixing, some A/B testing, and some of something else to get there.

What have I done so far? I got some new ideas yesterday by installing a number of themes and playing around with them.  All of them was online and in real-time, so some of you were probably confused.  You’ll see more of that in the near future.  I’ve also slightly rearranged the categories – moved technology categories under a parent of Technology, removed Blogging category (which fits under Web Work anyway), and a few other minor changes.  I’ve installed some more plugins and added a few more rules to the ever-growing .htaccess file.  I won’t go into details now, since that’s something I’ll have to re-work soon anyway.

What’s next? My mind is busy working on the visual concept.  It doesn’t share thoughts with me yet, but I can feel the buzz.  I’ll give it some time.  In the meantime, I’ll fix and tune a few things around.  There is a lot of mess to clean and it will take a long time to clean it.  There is no reason to wait.  Also, to monitor the progress, I’ll need to tune my Google Analytics setup.  Goals, conversions, funnels, landing pages, blah, blah, blah.  I’ll share the details with you, once I have an idea what I am doing.

Stay tuned for more news from the fronts.  Here I come…

Trying out IntenseDebate

It’s been some time now since I wanted to play around with IntenseDebate.  Something triggered an action today and now this blog’s comments are powered by IntenseDebate.  All previous comments are imported and fully synchronized, and the new comments should be working now (tweaking ahead though).  I’d appreciate if you could leave a test comment to this post just so that I could see if it is really working.  You could also tell me what you think of IntenseDebate – and that would make your comment so much better…