So I’m doing this content inventory at work
I hit 400 pages today. I’m maybe 25 per cent of the way there. If I had my druthers I think about 380 of them would be kept near-line if not deleted. Of course I’m working my way through a part of the site that’s rife with disposable content. Namely bulletins about various rounds of bargaining.
So my friend Teresa Healy aka @FinnegansMum has a blog
Teresa is definitely one of the people who should be publishing a blog. And now, she has one. Courtesy of yours truly. Congratulations Teresa on your first couple of posts. I hope to read many more.
What does it mean to ‘scan’ web content?
Trying to use numbers to settle an argument today at work I found this (somewhat old) Jakob Nielsen column about how much reading most people actually do on the internet. The answer? Of the words you write, about 28 per cent on average get read.
Urgent action required: remember you are not your audience
I send and receive a fair number of appeals for online actions. And I see phrases like “Act now” or “Urgent! Your help needed” a lot and I admit if I ever have any control over it, I usually edit them out. Especially if they’re in the subject line or any other essential bit of the message.
Content inventory: what if it all just “went away”?
The flagship site at work – the one I’m mainly responsible for – needs a complete overhaul. Near as I can tell, it’s more than 3500 static pages composed mostly of little news nugget items about various rounds of bargaining between us and the various employers who sit across the table from us. But there’s other stuff too, hidden in the catacombs of landing pages and listing pages that litter the server.
Numbers or it didn’t happen: measuring the impact of a social media campaign
In my little corner of the social media participant universe we’re just digging into this issue as we pursue my employer’s first ever social media campaign. I can’t speak for where I currently work – I’m still too new – but at other organizations, the whole issue of campaign objectives and evaluation has always been a bit problematic.
Facebook cuts off blog feeds: making me feel sad
I must say for the near constant dribble of bad news about privacy, its galloping commercialism and all that I’ve always liked Facebook. It’s allowed me to reassemble and in some cases reconnect with the diaspora of people I’ve known over the years. So I haven’t minded being the product they sell to advertisers. Until now.
Social media: lessons from Chapstick
I am late to the party on this one, but I thought I’d flag it. The Globe writing on Facebook. Not usually where I go for info on social media but I’ll make an exception.
Launch day plus two: never let a good deed go unpunished
Two of the seven re-designed regional websites my employer operates have recently gone public. I admit I was pretty excited when it happened. It looked like I could sort of see the end of this project which has extended well beyond its original end date. And people were excited to see the new, fresh look and the new functionality.
Good web content is not about writing “punchy”
And in fact, that headline breaks another cardinal rule about web writing. You’re supposed to write positively – what things are, what you will do as opposed to what they aren’t and what you won’t.
Good news. The internet won’t collapse
The Supreme Court has ruled that hyperlinking does not constitute defamation. Or more specifically, if you hyperlink to a site, you have not “published” or “broadcast” it for the purposes of determining if you’ve libeled someone.
And now the server load is back to normal
From what I could tell, it was a series of bots making repeated requests for the wordpress pages of one of my hosting clients. I hardened both the Wordpress site, Apache, and banned as many IP address ranges as could be easily identified, and now it’s back to calm, peaceful normal.
Someone or something is hammering my server
Normal load level is around 0.9 or something like that. As you can see in this picture, it’s up around 56 now. That means for every one request the server can respond to without delay, there’s 56 other waiting in the queue.
Power Workers Union caught astroturfing
I believe PWU official John Sprackett when he tells Postmedia that social media is new territory for the PWU. It’s a plausible form of denial given how bad unions are at social media.
Smell ya later MSIE
For the first time ever last week the number of Firefox visitors to my blog exceeded the number of Internet Explorer visitors. By less than three per cent admittedly, and my audience is neither statistically significant nor representative of the population of the Internet, but I take it as a sign. A sign of what? [...]
