This takes up time. Time I could be spending with more valuable contributions to the forum. I could write more valuable posts. I could add more functionality that would be helpful to users.  I could write more blog posts. I could write more articles for A Padded Cell. I could clean my house.

The topic of SEO

Most of these spammy posts come in the SEO and Marketing forums. I suspect that many of these people work for those companies that send you unsolicited email telling you that they can get your site to the “top of Google”. Unfortunately, many unsuspecting website owners fall for that.

These people think that forum signatures are a good way to get backlinks, and they have a tiny bit of knowledge of SEO (seeing as how they work for an “SEO company”), so they post a bunch of crappy posts in our forum. Thus, our forum becomes filled with crappy SEO posts.

We don’t want to be an SEO forum!

We don’t! And yet, because we rank well for “Webmaster Forums”, this is what we have become. If given the choice, we wouldn’t call that. This is a legacy thing for us. This forum was started back in the 90′s. It was one of the first forums of it’s kind. In those days, SEO was only one of the many things as “webmaster” might do. In those days, web people weren’t nearly as specialized as we are now.

What I’d really like to do is ditch the Webmaster Forums domain and  merge everything into A Padded Cell. Then we might have a better chance of attracting the kind of members we want. The problem is that we’re currently first in Google UK for “webmaster forums” and second in Google Canada. How can you abandon a #1 ranking in Google?

Where do these people come from?

We have noticed that the majority of these spammy posts come from South- and South-East Asia. Normally I’m a big fan of diversity. It’s always been one of the strengths of our community. But this is starting to become a bit of an issue. Lately they’re even becoming more open about where they’re from. They used to say they were from the US or Britain, but now they’ll be honest (which I don’t mind, because lying about where they’re from really annoyed me).

Why is it an issue? Well, mainly because I think it can be off-putting to other members. They may think that everyone in our forum is from these regions and therefore they don’t fit in. These members don’t write English very well and their posts often don’t make sense. They also tend to use wording that would seem strange to native English speakers (e.g. calling other members “dear”). Add this to the fact that the actual content of these posts is not very strong.

All of this would be fine in smaller amounts, but when the majority of our posts have one or more of these issues it tends to lower the quality of the forum overall. If the quality of the post content was better none of this would be a problem.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that all members from South-east Asia are problems. They’re not.  We have some very good members from that part of the world. It just so happens that most of the spam comes from there too.

Do people even want to talk about design & development?

It seems that few people want to talk about anything other than SEO. I was wondering what it is about these topics that make them more popular than others. There are a few factors that could contribute to that:

• In design & development, forums aren’t that important. I imagine there are a lot of designers and developers who have never participated in a forum community. In SEO and Marketing, the opposite is true. Forums are an important part of the professional community, and there are a lot of them. In comparison, there are relatively few forums that focus more on design and/or development. Why is that? Do people just not want to talk about web design? I actually think that the SEO community overall is much stronger than the design and development communities (but that might be a topic for another post!).
• SEO is easy to talk about. It’s easy for people to have an opinion about simple questions like how to improve your site ranking (not that these opinions are necessarily good ones!). It’s also easy to articulate what these techniques are. How do you explain a process of problem solving in design or programming? How do you explain a design approach that is innate?
• Design & development questions often don’t prompt ongoing discussion. A question on SEO, such as “how do I get more traffic” can get a lot of responses over time. In contrast, design and development qustions are often very specific. This doesn’t line up in IE6. How do I fix this code? They don’t need answers from multiple people, let alone an ongoing discussion. Once the problem is solved the topic is over.

We are also targetting a more beginner level audience. These people don’t live and breathe web design like the professionals do. It might be a hobby, or a tiny part of their job. They might just be starting out in the profession. Engaging these users is tough. Currently I am reading the Art of Community by Jono Bacon and it’s giving me a lot of ideas.

The sentimental value

I met my husband on this forum. I have spent a tremendous amount of time over the years posting, deleting spam, and otherwise improving the place. This alone is the main reason why I keep doing this.

What else could they do?

1. Provide an language option when purchasing the product and only provide documentation in that language.
2. Skip the paper documentation and provide a little card with a link to the download site. Nobody reads the documentation anyway, might as well save some trees.

And the worst part about it is that the user’s guide is mostly a bunch of bullshit. Thank you for purchasing this product blah blah blah, this is what it’s does, and this is what’s included in the package. Um, I bought the product I think I know what it does!

The connection instructions are on a separate poster with diagrams only, no words at all. I’m not sure which is worse.

The dock was also wrapped in molded syrofoam, unlike the LaCie external hard drive that arrived yesterday (not for me), which had egg carton like cardboard packaging. Boo to Lenovo (although I really like my laptop so I won’t criticize them too much!)

Here’s something I don’t say often: Suck It Up. If you work on more than a few projects, they can’t all smell like today’s fresh linens. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad programmer. It simply means that you’re prioritizing.

And I think that’s something that goes for any type of project. There’s rarely enough time or money to make everything perfect, whether it be a programming project at work or the paint job in the dining room. You have to find the point of balance and decide when it’s worth it to put in the extra time and/or money. Does this really matter in the big picture?

This can be a difficult thing to get over and, as a perfectionist, I know I often spend time on things that don’t matter that much.

The W3C has made it clear that it’s okay to serve xhtml as html. I came upon this several times in my research:

From the xhtml spec:

XHTML Documents which follow the guidelines set forth in Appendix C, “HTML Compatibility Guidelines” may be labeled with the Internet Media Type “text/html” [RFC2854], as they are compatible with most HTML browsers.

From the HTML and XHTML Frequently Answered Questions:

Why is it allowed to send XHTML 1.0 documents as text/html?

… However XHTML 1.0 was carefully designed so that with care it would also work on legacy HTML user agents as well. If you follow some simple guidelines, you can get many XHTML 1.0 documents to work in legacy browsers. However, legacy browsers only understand the media type text/html, so you have to use that media type if you send XHTML 1.0 documents to them. But be well aware, sending XHTML documents to browsers as text/html means that those browsers see the documents as HTML documents, not XHTML documents.

From the xhtml recommended media type usage:

The ‘text/html’ media type [RFC2854] is primarily for HTML, not for XHTML. In general, this media type is NOT suitable for XHTML. However, as [RFC2854] says, "[XHTML1] defines a profile of use of XHTML which is compatible with HTML 4.01 and which may also be labeled as text/html".

Most if not all of the warnings against serving xhtml as html are only valid if you decide to go back and change the mime type to xhtml if/when it is supported. Who is going to do that?

I was a bit hesitant because it is clear that serving xhtml as html isn’t the ideal situation. However, for me this was overruled by the extra strictness in xhtml. If new users only used html they wouldn’t learn that you need to write in lower case, close all your tags, quote attributes etc.. Xhtml requires you to develop better coding habits and, even as an experienced user, I like the extra level of detail from the validator.

I really wish they would consider adding these requirements to the html 5 spec. It’s kind of ridiculous that omitting start and/or end tags for such vital elements as <html>, <head>, and <body> tags is permitted.

Can anyone help me find where, on the W3C site, they list the elements where start/end tags are optional? I came across it at one point during my research for that article but now I can’t find it again.

You just need to make a few small changes. But the CSS is such a mess! It would be so much better if you could just re-write it. Cut down on the crud and make it all nice and clean and elegeant. Take it all down like Mike Holmes.

But there’s not enough time for that. The changes are due by tomorrow so you have to just make do with what’s there and add in your own necessarily crappy code.

Sigh… this happens to me all the time these days. And I’m sitting here thinking, should I just fix it? How long would it take? There’s a little brick wall here — do I just climb over or do I start again?

Granted, this code isn’t *that* bad. It’s relatively standards-ey (circa 2004-ish). Just lots of layers of disorganized CSS a bunch of IE5 hacks. It still bugs me though.

We chose Drupal partly because our content site was already built on it so it’s a good opportunity for integration. We also have the programming expertise to make it work just the way we want to. With vBulletin we were often making do and putting in work-arounds to accomplish certain tasks. We also considered Vanilla and punBB – both open source, standards compliant, modular forum platforms.

The move didn’t go entirely smoothly. We decided to do it at Christmas time because we knew traffic would drop andway and if there were going to be problems, this would be the best time to sort them out. The biggest problem turned out to be the module that was generating the Google sitemaps, which brought the sever down a number of times before Liam figured out how to fix it. Unfortunately, our server admins are in the UK and weren’t availble to respond as quickly as we needed them to.

As with any change, we are experiencing a temporary drop in search rankings and visitor traffic. Members will awhile to get used to the new format, and surely some will choose not to come back. It will take some time to build the community back up again but in the end we feel the change will be well worth it.

If you’re not a member already, I hope you’ll stop by the forums and join us. We work hard to keep up a friendly, knowledgeable, spam free community.

(This actually happened just before Christmas but I wasn’t able to post because I’ve been sick for 2 weeks Expect a short flurry of posts as I catch up on things I’ve been thinking about).

Comments are now closed on this post. I was getting a lot of spam on it for some reason. If you would like to discuss this further, please visit the Webmaster Forums discussion on this topic.

Sure, getting comments isn’t a true sign of readership, but I think it’s at least an indication that people are finding my posts to be interesting. But I don’t know if it’s really about that for me. If nobody was reading, would I still write?

To be honest, that’s not the main reason why I started this blog. Sure, its nice to share knowledge and insight with others. But it’s also good to get things off my chest. Sometimes I tend to over think things and can’t get them out of my mind. Writing them down, even if nobody is reading it, gets it out of my head. And then I don’t have to think about it anymore.

But don’t get me wrong, I do really appreciate and value any participation I get here. It’s amazing to think that there are people out there who are interested in what I have to say. And I do really want to engage with you, if you’re reading. Thank you for being here

I could take a different approach with this blog, and write more linkbaity type stuff, although I tend to save that sort of content for A Padded Cell. I don’t really want this to be a place where I’m just trying to get more traffic or more readers or more comments. I want it to be authentic. I know I need to try to draw out the readers more than I do. I also should be linking out and participating in discussions more than I do now. Maybe those can be my goals for 2008.

So that’s why I blog. For any bloggers who happen to be reading, why do you blog?

Front and centre, just under the search box. Now, I don’t know if this is always there… for some reason I think it might be a standard, but the recent rise in the value of the Canadian dollar changes everything. As of this morning, the Canadian dollar is valued at almost $1.04 US ($1.0382 to be more precise). This means that online shopping is a lot more attractive than it used to be when our dollar was worth 80¢. We don’t want to go to Amazon.ca where our dollar is worth $1, we want to shop at Amazon.com where it’s worth $1.04 (or $1.06 as it was last week).

To add to that, book prices are stuck where they were months ago when the books were printed. This means that the price for most books is $2-$4 higher on the Canadian site, if not more (I think Amazon may have adjusted these prices for the dollar value already). Buy a few books and you’ve covered the $5 + tax Canada Customs charges at the border (don’t get me started on that!). Oh, and I think the limit to qualify for free shipping is lower on the US site.

Another problem, which always applies to Amazon, is that the US site has a much broader product range than the Canadian version does, plus all those affiliated sellers. I can get a lot of stuff on Amazon.com that isn’t available in Canada at all. That’s why I want to shop there now.

For anyone running a US eCommerce site, now is the time to optimize your site for Canadian shoppers. Do you ship to Canada? Are the rates reasonable? You could even put up a little Canadian flag to welcome your neighbours from the North

Who just surfs the web anymore anyway? There’s so much crap out there, I can’t be bothered to sort through it. But I still like the web. I want to look at websites. I see a lot of websites and subscribe to a lot of feeds, but it’s just boring somehow. What sets StumbleUpon apart from other aggregation sites is that it’s just more fun! The randomness makes it entertaining, and you can pick from a wide range of topics. I don’t have to look at just tech news and even on that topic I’ve come across a ton of neat stuff I never would have found elsehwere.

That’s my 2 thumbs up for StumbleUpon What about you? Have you tried it or are you more into a different bookmarking site?

Here they are!

BTW, I will post something interesting soon, I promise