Tract Association of Friends

March 15, 2011

Tract Association of FriendsThe Tract Asso­ci­a­tion is ven­er­a­ble Quak­er pub­lish­er dat­ing back to the ear­ly part of the Nine­teenth Cen­tu­ry. They had a web­site but want­ed a new one built with a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem that would allow for eas­i­er edit­ing. The new site is built in Word­Press. Befit­ting the orga­ni­za­tion’s ethos, the site is rel­a­tive­ly plain but there’s a lot going on under­neath the surface.

Many peo­ple use the site to print out copies of the tracts. There’s a spe­cial print stylesheet – cre­at­ed by the tem­plate design­er and cus­tomized by me – that means print-outs of these pages will be very clean and unclut­tered, per­fect for per­son­al pho­to­copy­ing. There’s the abil­i­ty to make tracts avail­able as PDFs through Scribd and there’s a inter­face in the Word­Press dash­board to allow embed­ding of these in the sidebar.

Floating on Clouds

April 26, 2008

Last week­end I found myself with the sce­nario no solo web design­er wants to be faced with: a dead lap­top. It was eigh­teen months old and while it was from Hewlett Packard, a rep­utable com­pa­ny, it’s always had prob­lems over over­heat­ing. Like a lot of mod­ern lap­top mak­ers, HP tried to pack as much proces­sor pow­er as they could into a sleek design that would turn eyes on the store shelf. They actu­al­ly do offer some free repairs for a list of half a dozen mal­adies caused by over­heat­ing but not for my par­tic­u­lar symp­toms. When I have a free after­noon, a big pot of cof­fee and lots of music queued up I’ll give them a call and see if I can talk them into fix­ing it.

Once upon a time hav­ing a sud­den­ly dead com­put­er in the mid­dle of a bunch of big projects would have been dis­as­ter. But over the last few years I’ve been putting more and more of my data “in the cloud,” that is: with soft­ware ser­vices that store it for me.

Email in the Cloud

I used to be a die-hard Thun­der­bird fan. This is Fire­fox’s cousin, a great email client. I would take such great care trans­fer­ring years of emails every time I switched machines and I spent hours build­ing huge nest­ed list of fold­ers to orga­nize archived mes­sages. About a year ago Thun­der­bird ate about three months of recent mes­sages, some quite cru­cial. At that time I start­ed using Google’s Gmail as back­up. I set Gmail to pick up mail on my POP serv­er and leave it there with­out delet­ing it. I set Thun­der­bird to leave it there for week. The result was that both mes­sages would be picked up by both services.

After becom­ing famil­iar with Gmail I start­ed using it more and more. I love that it does­n’t have fold­ers: you sim­ple put all emails into a sin­gle “Archive” and let Google’s search func­tion find them when you need them​.You can set up fil­ters, which act as saved search­es, and I have these set up for active clients.

Why I’m hap­py now: I can log into Gmail from any machine any­where. No recent emails are lost on my old machine.

Project Man­age­ment in the Cloud

I use the fab­u­lous Remem­ber the Milk (RTM) to keep track of projects and crit­i­cal to-do items. Like Gmail I can access it from any com­put­er. While mess­ing around set­ting up back­up com­put­ers has set me back about ten days, I still know what I need to do and when I need to do it. I can review it and give clients renewed timelines.

An addi­tion­al advan­tage to using Remem­ber the Milk and Gmail togeth­er is the abil­i­ty to link to emails. Every email in Gmail gets its own URL and every saved “fil­ter” search gets its own URL. If there’s an email I want to act on in two weeks, I set up a Remem­ber the Mail task. Each task has a option­al field for URLs so I put the the email’s Gmail URL in there and archive the email so I don’t have to think about it (part of the Get­ting Things Done strat­e­gy). Two weeks lat­er RTM tells me it’s time to act on that email and I fol­low the link direct­ly there, do what­ev­er action I need to do and mark it com­plete in RTM.

Project Notes in the Cloud

I long ago start­ed keep­ing notes for indi­vid­ual projects in the most excel­lent Back­pack ser­vice. You can store notes, emails, pic­tures and just about any­thing in Back­pack and have it avail­able from any com­put­er. You can eas­i­ly share notes with oth­ers, a fea­ture I fre­quent­ly use to cre­ate client cheat­sheets for using the sites I’ve built. Now that I use Gmail and it’s URL fea­ture, I put a link to the clien­t’s Gmail his­to­ry right on top of each page. Very cool!

Anoth­er life saver is that I splurge for the upgrad­ed account that gives me secure serv­er access and I keep my pass­word lists in Back­pack. There’s a slight secu­ri­ty risk but it’s prob­a­bly small­er than keep­ing it on a lap­top that could be swiped out of my bag. And right now I can log into all of my ser­vices from a new machine. 

Keep­ing the Mon­ey Flow­ing from Clouds

The lat­est Web 2.0 love of my life is Fresh­books, a ser­vice that keeps track of your clients, your hours and puts togeth­er great invoic­es you can mail to them. I’m so much more pro­fes­sion­al because of them (no more hand writ­ten invoic­es in Word!) and when it’s billing time I can quick­ly see how many unbilled hours I’ve worked on each project and bang!-bang!-band! send the invoic­es right out. Because the data is online, I was able to bill a client despite the dead com­put­er, pro­vid­ing my exact hours, a detailed list of what I had done, etc.

Oth­ers

Cal­en­dar: I always go back and forth between lov­ing Google Cal­en­dar and the cal­en­dar built into Back­pack. Because I can nev­er make up my mind I’ve used ICal feeds to cross-link them so they’re both synced to one anoth­er. I can now use whichev­er is most con­ve­nient (or whichev­er I’m more in the mood to use!) to add and review entries.

Pho­tos: Most of the pho­tos I’ve tak­en over the past four years are still sit­ting on my dead lap­top wait­ing for me to find a way to get them off of the hard dri­ve. As trag­ic as it would be to loose them, 903 of my favorite pho­tos are stored on my Flickr account. And because I emailed most of them to Flickr via Gmail most of those are also stored on Gmail. I will do every­thing I can to get those lost pho­tos but the worst case sce­nario is that I will be stuck with “only” those 900.

Your Exam­ples?

I’d love to hear how oth­ers are using “the cloud” as real-time backup.

SEO Myths I: Analyze This

January 22, 2007

Every web design­er under the sun talks about search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO), but it amazes me to see how often basic prin­ci­ples are ignored. I’m in-between jobs right now, which means I’m spend­ing a lot of time look­ing at poten­tial employ­ers’ web­sites. I’ve decid­ed to start a series of posts on SEO myths and real­i­ties that will talk about design­ing for max­i­mum visibility.

I’m not going to focus on any of the under­hand­ed tricks to fool search engines into list­ing an inap­pro­pri­ate page. Google hates this kind of tac­tic and so do I. You get vis­its for hav­ing good con­tent. Good search rank­ings are based on good con­tent and the best way to boost your con­tent is to present your page in a way that lets both humans and search engines find the con­tent they want. Part one is on web­site analy­sis and tracking.

Don’t assume that your web­site is easy to nav­i­gate. One of the neat­est things about the web is that we have instant feed­back on use. With just a lit­tle track­ing we can see what pages peo­ple are look­ing at, how they’re find­ing our site and what they’re doing once they’re here.

Javascript Trackers:

My most advanced sites are cur­rent­ly using four dif­fer­ent track­ing meth­ods. Most uti­lize javascript “bugs,” tiny snip­pets of code that send indi­vid­ual results to an advanced soft­ware track­ing sys­tem. I put the code inside a Move­able Type “Mod­ules Tem­plate” which is auto­mat­i­cal­ly import­ed to all pages. Installing a new sys­tem is as easy as cutting-and-pasting the javascript into the Tem­plate and rebuild­ing the site.

  • AXS Vis­i­tors Track­ing System
    This soft­ware installs on your serv­er but don’t let that scare you: this is one of the eas­i­est instal­la­tions I’ve ever seen. AXS gives you great charts of usage: you can nar­row it spe­cif­ic pages on your site, or even par­tic­u­lar search engines or search phrases.
    There’s also a option to view the lastest traf­fic by vis­i­tor. I love watch­ing this! You can see how indi­vid­u­als are using the site and where they’re nav­i­gat­ing. I’ve been able to iden­ti­fy dif­fer­ent types of vis­i­tors this way and under­stand the com­plex­i­ty of the audience.
    It does­n’t seem like AXS is not being devel­oped any­more. The lat­est sta­ble ver­sion came out over two years go, which is a shame.
  • Hit­Tail
    This ser­vice watch­es search-engine links and makes rec­om­men­da­tions for new key­words. I wrote about this ser­vice yes­ter­day in Blog­ging for the Long Tail.

  • Reeferss​.com
    This is a sim­ple sim­ple bit of soft­ware. Like every oth­er track­ing sys­tem it keeps track of refer­rers: search engines and web­sites that bring traf­fic to your site. But unlike the oth­ers that’s all it does. Why care then? It pro­vides a real-time RSS feed of these vis­i­tors. I bring the feed into my “Netvibes” page (a cus­tomized start page, see below) and scan the results mul­ti­ple times a day.

  • Google Ana­lyt­ics
    The inter­net’s gate­keep­er bought the Urchin ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny in April 2005 and relaunched the prod­uct as Google Ana­lyt­ics short­ly there­after. This is becom­ing an essen­tial track­er. It’s free and it’s pow­er­ful, though I haven’t been as impressed by it as oth­ers have. See its Wiki page for more.

Internet Trackers:

It’s easy to find out what peo­ple are say­ing about you online.

  • Tech­no­rati
    This ser­vice tracks blogs but you don’t need to have a blog to use it, for Tech­no­rati will tell you where blogs are link­ing. Give it your URLs (or those of your com­peti­tors!) and you’ll know when­ev­er a blog­ger puts in a link to you. You can also give it key­words and find out when a blog uses them.
  • Google Blog Search
    Google can also let you fol­low blog ref­er­ences or key­word men­tions on the blogs. Google will also track beyond blogs of course. Type “site:www.yourdomain.com” into the main Google search page and you’ll see who’s link­ing to your site (or to the com­pe­ti­tion). There are lots of oth­er ser­vices that track blogs and men­tions – Sphere, Blog­lines, etc. They all have dif­fer­ent strengths so try them and see what you think.

  • Feed­burn­er
    The best RSS mas­sager has always focused on ways to track your RSS feed. They’ve recent­ly intro­duced page track­ing soft­ware too. It looks great but I just installed it this week. I still have to see if it’s as good as Feed­burn­er’s oth­er offerings.

Keeping on top of this flow of data:

It’s easy to get over­whelmed by all of this infor­ma­tion. Most of the track­ing ser­vices pro­vide RSS feeds (See The Won­ders of RSS Feeds for an intro). I use Netvibes, a cus­tomized start page, to pull these all togeth­er into a sin­gle page that I can scan every morn­ing. Here’s a screen­shot of part of my Netvibes track­ing page – the full page cur­rent­ly shows four­teen track­ing feeds on one screen:

So why is tracking important to SEO?

With track­ing you find out what peo­ple are look­ing for on the inter­net. This helps you cre­ate pages and ser­vices that peo­ple will want to find. You might be sur­prised to see what they’re already find­ing on your site. Some examples:

  • Ana­lyz­ing one site, I noticed that few pages I thought were obscure were bring­ing in high Google traf­fic. I looked at these pages again and real­ized they did a good job of describ­ing the com­pa­ny’s mis­sion. I con­se­quent­ly redesigned the site home­page to fea­ture them and I made sure that those pages con­tained direct links to its most impor­tant services.

  • When I start­ed work for anoth­er client I looked at their site and sus­pect­ed that they’re most impor­tant arti­cles were not being seen – vis­i­tors had to click through about four times to get to them. Six months of track­ing con­firmed my hunch and gave me the hard data to con­vince the exec­u­tive direc­tor that we made some small mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the design. Hav­ing this strong con­tent linked right off the home­page helped bring in Google traffic.

Avoiding Plain Dress Designer Clothing

July 21, 2004

A guest piece by “David,” orig­i­nal­ly post­ed on the Plain and Mod­est Dress Yahoo Group.

From: “mquadd” <mquadd@y…>
Date: Wed Jul 21, 2004
Sub­ject: Intro­duc­tion and questions

Hi. My name is David and I attend but am not a mem­ber of the Friends Meet­ing here. I was actu­al­ly raised as an Epis­co­palian although I had sev­er­al uncles who were birth-right Quak­ers. I grew up (for my first 10 years) in Chester Coun­ty, PA which tra­di­tion­al­ly was an area with a high con­cen­tra­tion of Quak­ers. I would expect that this is no longer true as the area has become quite sub­ur­ban with a big influx of new res­i­dents. Nonethe­less, I grew up attend­ing meet­ing now and then with rel­a­tives at var­i­ous meet­ings in Chester Coun­ty and north­ern Dele­ware. That was in the 1960s and was a time when some peo­ple, most­ly old­er peo­ple (peo­ple most like­ly born in the 1800s mean­ing these peo­ple were in their 70s or 80s in the 1960s), still used plain talk. Even in the 1960s, in a fair­ly rur­al area, this was more of an except­ing than the rule and was lim­it­ed to the old­est mem­bers of the meet­ing and nev­er used out­side the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty. Those who used plain talk nev­er used it out­side of the Quak­er com­mu­ni­ty – home, Friends, and meet­ing. As far as I know, they nev­er used this type of talk for busi­ness or rela­tions or out­side the community.

At age 10 we moved to Lan­cast­er Coun­ty. At that time, many Mem­monites who now no longer dress plain or wear cov­er­ings did still did both of these. I went to school with many Men­non­ite kids. In addi­tion I became friends with sev­er­al Old Order Amish fam­i­lies (and one Beachy fam­i­ly) with whom I am still friends. That was 35 years ago, I have wit­nessed the plain tes­ti­mo­ny weak­en in each of these groups includ­ing the Old Order Amish. I actu­al­ly spent much of my child­hood and teenage years hang­ing out with one patic­u­lar Old Order Amish fam­i­ly as way to escape the insan­i­ty of hav­ing drug addict­ed and alco­holic par­ents. In their very sim­ple and unstat­ed Chris­tian­i­ty, they were very will­ing to pro­vide food, shel­ter, and love to a very con­fused boy (me).

Any­way, the Lan­cast­er Con­fer­ence Men­non­ites (now part of the largest Men­non­ite group) seem to be total­ly main­stream. Per­haps there are some who still fol­low the for­mer order. The Beachy Amish now dress like con­ser­v­a­tive Men­non­ites and less and less like Amish. Final­ly, I was watched the Amish allow lots of mod­ern changes in their dis­ci­pline although their basic cloth­ing is pret­ty much unchanged but sun glass­es are now allowed and many Amish girls and women pluck their eye­brows – both not allowed in the 1970s. By the way, in the late 1960s they had already adopt­ed cotton-poly blends for both cloth­ing and quilts!

The rea­son for that, per­haps odd, bio­graph­i­cal sketch is to give some back­ground on my expo­sure to plain groups and, more impor­tant­ly, plain thought. I have toyed with the idea of plain dress­ing although I can’t give a clear rea­son why I feel this. Is it a call­ing or am I just crazy? I do know that the sta­bil­i­ty I found in that Amish house in the 1970s most like­ly had a giant influ­ence on me (a hap­py Amish fam­i­ly where I had fun vs. liv­ing in a fam­i­ly that was in the self-distruct mode due to addic­tion). I also I have clear mem­o­ries of hav­ing Quak­er teach­ers in ele­ment­ly school and van­i­ty and world­li­ness was a bad thing. It was dur­ing the height of the Viet Nam war, so there was this odd hippy-Quaker thing going on with some of my teach­ers. I am sure some of you who were around the RSF in the 1960s can relate. So here I am still toy­ing with these ideas and still attempt­ing to define my own reli­gious feel­ings at the mid­dle of my life (I am 45).

Here are a few things I do know that apply to me. First, I feel very at odds with our soci­ety that focus­es on the most superf­i­cal things. Our soci­ety spends BILLIONS on make-up, hair dye, plas­tic surgery, breast inplants, push-up bras, design­er clothes (that are no dif­fer­ent that basic clothes except the label and might even be of low­er qual­i­ty).… Peo­ple are judged on the these issues. Char­ac­ter and moral­i­ty (a loaded term that seems to have been high­jacked by the rightwing and ultraconservatives)seems to be sec­ondary to these very super­fi­cial things. What we tell our­selves and our chil­dren is that we are not ade­quate as we are. We have to change our body and then drape it was over­ly priced clothes to count. The out­side is more impor­tant that the inside. This is sick. It is dis­truc­tive. It is a sin.

Beyond that, my feel­ings about plain dress­ing get less clear. Is a uni­form what I am seek­ing? Those groups who were very uni­form cloth­ing tend to be insu­lar and often attact as much atten­tion to them­selves as a bel­ly shirt and design­er jeans! If you doubt this, go to Lan­cast­er Coun­ty and attempt to dri­ve on Rt. 340. The attrac­tion that the plain peo­ple attract in that area rivals any movie star or rock con­cert. Lan­cast­er gets lit­er­al­ly mil­lions of tourists each year. So is that type of uni­form dress­ing that is quite dis­tinct serv­ing a good pur­pose? I am not sure but am just offer­ing a ques­tion rather than a judge­ment. Oth­er groups that dress quite plain such as ultra-orthodox Jews are not so much a tourist attrac­tion but clear­ly are insu­lar and seper­ate from the larg­er soci­ety. Many peo­ple view this as being “stand off-ish” which I hope is nobody’s goal. I have heard peo­ple apply this type of judge­ment to plain chris­t­ian groups also.

So, I would be very inter­est­ed in hear­ing what dri­ves oth­ers to dress plain? If you are a Quak­er, what has been the reac­tion at your meet­ing? I once met a plain dress­ing Quak­er who said that he had received more neg­a­tive than pos­i­tive reac­tions when vis­it­ing oth­er meet­ings. Are there any meet­ings where all or most mem­bers dress plain? In my child­hood expe­ri­ences, there was no plain dress­ing in any Quak­er meet­ings in Chester Coun­ty or in Dele­ware. I have not even run into any­one who uses plain lan­guage for over 30 years except that one plain dress­ing man. Clear­ly, I know no Quak­ers who have been raised with the idea of plain dress­ing or plain lan­guage includ­ing some of my cousins who are world­ly to say the least. What makes plain. I know of “black bumper Men­non­ites” who dri­ve a black bumper Mer­cedes. Is that plain? Why is a Vol­vo often con­sid­ered ok but a BMW is bad? They both cost $40K. Often I see this type of think­ing in those who claim to fol­low a less than world­ly life style. I think there is always a risk of falling into the mind­set of some labels being good and oth­ers being bad. Once a par­tic­u­lar brand, say a type of hat or type of jeans, is thought to be the prop­er “plain uni­form” does that not become the designed cloth­ing of the plain dressers? I am not sure. What I find is that once you jump into this top­ic, it becomes com­pli­cat­ed and that is not the point.

One final ques­tion, what ben­e­fits do you recieve from plain dressing?
Thanks. David