By default, WordPress creates URLs like http://www.wholeweal.com/blog/index.php?p=80. But this isn’t helpful for SEO purposes, and it isn’t very useful to the reader, either. So it has a feature to create URLs like http://www.wholeweal.com/blog/2009/04/05/a-nice-customer-testimonial-for-everybodyinn/ instead, which are vastly preferable from the point of view of both readers and Google. In order to do this, it uses a web server feature called mod_rewrite, which is built into the Apache web server which is frequently used for running WordPress. But IIS, the web server used by Windows, doesn’t have an equivalent feature by default - you have to purchase a third-party add-on to get that functionality.

(Subtext, by the way, is an ASP.NET application where WordPress runs on PHP. Subtext also creates SEO-friendly URLs, but it does it in a different fashion: it installs a custom 404 Not Found error page that does a redirect based on the incoming URL. To me, this is a much less elegant solution than using mod_rewrite, and makes it difficult to write your own custom 404 page for your website.)

So now that CrystalTech had installed IIS Mod-Rewrite, I almost immediately moved my blog to WordPress. The actual installation of WordPress is almost trivial - create a MySQL database for the blog, edit a configuration file with a few settings, and upload the WordPress folder to the web server. Since I only had about 20 blog posts, I chose to manually copy-and-paste them to WordPress as if I were writing new posts. If I had significantly more posts, I would have looked into a more automated importing process. Subtext can export a blog to the BlogML format which WordPress can then import, so that would probably have been the solution if I needed to go that route.

Why did I choose to move from Subtext to WordPress? There are several reasons.

• Subtext was significantly harder to make minor modifications to. Most changes required editing the actual code files. With WordPress, you can do a lot just using the administration interface.
• Subtext didn’t do pingbacks and trackbacks correctly in many cases. This is pretty important if you’re using a blog to grow your Internet traffic and visibility.
• Mostly, I moved over because of the much larger community and infrastructure available for WordPress. There are many themes available for WordPress, and an enormous number of plugins. For example, with Subtext I had to manually edit code files to add traffic statistics with Google Analytics. With WordPress, there’s a plugin available to do this for you. It’s not difficult to add the necessary code block, but it makes doing upgrades that much more difficult, because you have to remember to add the code again each time you upgrade.
• I find the default theme, and most themes, more attractive on WordPress than the themes available with Subtext. I still need to find a WordPress theme that I really like (right now, I’m using a slightly modified version of the default theme but that will change soon), but I’ll have a lot more choices than I did on Subtext.

Moving things over wasn’t very difficult. It took me just a couple of hours last night to install WordPress and copy over all of my old blog posts. I lost the few comments that I had, but I’m not going to lose too much sleep over those (there weren’t that many anyway).

Another benefit of having IIS Mod-Rewrite available is that I can now to permanent 301 redirects, which means I can make sure that wholeweal.com gets redirected to www.wholeweal.com (which is important from an SEO standpoint). I also redirected www.everybodyinn.com to www.wholeweal.com/EverybodyInn/, just in case anybody tries to type in the product name as a URL.

Last week, we received an email from one of our customers with a terrific list of suggestions for new features and enhancements that would be useful to existing features in EverybodyInn. We love emails like that - suggestions from customers are the #1 way we gather ideas for the next release of the program. Coming up with our own ideas is good, and asking B&B owners and other innkeepers for general suggestions is better, but nothing can beat the advice of someone who is actively using our software to run their business. They tell us exactly where the rough edges and tell us the things they currently have to do manually that they would love to be able to automate.

This particular customer had some very nice things to say about EverybodyInn, and I asked for and received his permission to post his comments here and on our main website as a testimonial.

I just want you to know how much I am enjoying this program. We have gone from about $4000/month to over $12,000 per month with our four units in less than 60 days. Part of this has been a new approach to advertising and pricing, but without your program, we could not have kept up with the reservations.

Thanks to Charlie Smith (no relation, honest!) for the very kind words! Emails like that really make our day!

Here are a few tech events in the next month or so near Buffalo. I’ll be attending all of these. It’s really nice to see a fairly active tech community in the area, especially given the economy.

• BarCamp Buffalo - tonight (3/31/09) at 7:30 PM at the Pearl Street Grill & Brewery. Informal presentations and networking for anyone interested in web and other tech topics. And really good microbrews!
• Western NY .NET Users Group - Monday 4/6/09 at 6:00 PM at the Bulger Communication Center at Buffalo State College. Dan Martin is presenting an introduction to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
• Toronto Code Camp - Saturday 4/25/09 at the Manulife Financial Corporation, 200 Bloor Street East, in Toronto. This is a free all-day conference focused on .NET development.

See you there!

Well, the last bugfix release didn’t quite stamp out every last bug from EverybodyInn. In fact, we were alerted to a another bug that caused similar behavior to the last one under slightly different circumstances. Very frustrating. What can I say… calculations with dates can get quite tricky. But everything should be working correctly now, and you can finally make back-to-back reservations in all circumstances.

As before, this is a free update to all EverybodyInn customers and free trial users. Download and install the EverybodyInn Setup program again, either from the free trial page or from within EverybodyInn by clicking on Check for updates on the Help menu.

Thanks to our customers who reported the problem, and for your understanding and patient while we fixed it.

Today we shipped a maintenance update to our bed and breakfast software, EverybodyInn. This fixes a bug where under certain circumstances, it was impossible to make back-to-back reservations (with one guest checking out in the morning and after guest checking in in the afternoon). Obviously, that’s not going to fly! So as soon as this problem was reported, I quickly tracked down the error in the code and fixed it. It took a little bit longer to rework the setup program to handle both the case where a new customer is installing the program for the first time, and the case where someone is upgrading over their existing installation.

Still, from the problem being reported to having a fixed version uploaded to our website took all of two business days. That’s one of the real advantages that a small business like Wholeweal has: we can be extremely fast and nimble and very responsive to our customers.

This is a free update to all EverybodyInn customers (and our free trial users). Get it by downloading and installing the EverybodyInn Setup program again, either from the free trial page or from within EverybodyInn by clicking on Check for updates on the Help menu. ]]> http://www.wholeweal.com/blog/2009/02/25/everybodyinn-101-now-available/feed/ http://www.wholeweal.com/blog/2009/02/05/wholeweal-twittering/ http://www.wholeweal.com/blog/2009/02/05/wholeweal-twittering/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:46:11 +0000 admin http://www.wholeweal.com/blog/?p=76 All right, but only because everyone else is doing it; I signed up on Twitter. Follow me and Wholeweal Software at @wholeweal. We’ll see how it goes. A lot of times there are conversations I’d like to participate in but don’t feel that I can come up with a whole blog post to contribute. So this may be a good way to keep those casual conversations going.

General Content

The format of the book is quite simple. There are 40 chapters, each being an interview with a particular blogger. The interviews, with only a few small exceptions, use the same series of questions, suggesting that the interviews were done by email and not interactively. On one hand, I feel that by using this technique Steph missed some opportunities to further probe into some of the bloggers’ responses. On the other hand, by standardizing the list of questions, it becomes easier to compare each blogger’s advice and opinions. I’m not sure whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages; let’s just say that Steph chose a particular set of tradeoffs.

The group of 40 bloggers cover a range of different topics in their blogs, although the group is heavily stocked with bloggers who write about small business and entrepreneurship, in particular small software companies. This is not really any surprise, seeing that Steph runs a small software company himself, but it just goes to show how insular the blogging world can be. There may indeed be millions of blogs out there, but on any given topic, there are only a few big names. Prior to reading Blog Blazers, I was already a regular reader of 10 out of the 40 bloggers that Steph interviewed.

On that topic, I don’t really believe the oft-hyped statistic (trotted out again in the introduction of this book) that there are 70 million blogs in the world, with a new one created every second. I expect a great many of those “blogs” are just “spam blogs” that republish content from other sights in hopes of attracting traffic for their advertisements, and most of the rest are personal “what my cats ate for breakfast” blogs. The number of blogs worth reading in any given field is still an almost manageable number.

Lessons Learned

So what do we learn over the course of 40 interviews? The main conclusion that I drew was that every blogger is idiosyncratic, and the methods by which they found success are not guaranteed to work for anyone else. Several bloggers of more or less equal success offered advice that essentially flatly contradicted each other. Some say “write short posts more than once a day” and “don’t spend much time editing”. Others say “write long articles no more than once a week, and spend days revising them over multiple drafts”. Maybe I should write medium-length posts every 3 days!

This isn’t much different from any other business venture. You can read anecdotes and stories all day, every day, but in the end, you just have to experiment with different things until you find something that works for you. If there was an easy method that anybody could follow and be successful with, I suppose everybody would already be doing it! So in the end, I view this book as another interesting and thought-provoking set of business anecdotes more than as a compilation of actionable advice. I’m OK with that, although it leads me to the only real problem I had with this book.

Where It Falls Short

The back cover makes a lot of exciting promises. Steph asks what’s the difference between a successful blog and an unsuccessful one, and teases, “What if it were just a few relatively easy-to-do things?” He says that “transforming a blog from ‘crash-and-burn’ to blast-off isn’t rocket science!” He promises that “you’ll learn what the top blogs all have in common”.

And I don’t really feel that this book delivers on that promise. In the end, the book is a nice collection of interviews, but lacks any in-depth analysis to tie them all together. It’s left as an exercise to the reader. There’s an anemic one-page epilogue, but it’s basically just a pep talk to get out there and start (or improve your) blogging. Steph did a great job at getting all of these bloggers to respond to his interview questions and at assembling their answers into this book, but I wish he had contributed more of his own intellectual analysis to it and answered some of the questions he asked on the back cover blurb.

My Attempt at an Analysis

I’ll take a stab at it, because I do feel that there were some common themes. Here are some of the ideas that kept coming up in the interviews:

• Don’t try to imitate other bloggers; find your own personal voice.
• Headlines/titles are very important, both for SEO purposes and for luring in readers who only see the headline at first. Don’t write “clever” headlines that don’t make it clear what your post is about.
• Enough bloggers recommended reading ProBlogger.net that I subscribed to it (and I agree that it’s worth reading for bloggers aiming to build their readership).

And the most important concepts that just about every blogger emphasized:

• Write interesting original content; don’t just echo what other bloggers have written. This is where most blogs fail, because it’s hard to consistently create new content. And you say it has to be interesting, too? Oh, man!
• Perseverance is essential. A blog becomes successful and builds readership over many months or years. Expect to be able to count your regular visitors on one hand for quite a while. This is the other place where most bloggers fail; they get discouraged and lose interest in writing.

These concepts shouldn’t surprise anyone, really; it’s no different in any sort of business or artistic venture. Anything worthwhile involves the creation of something new and valuable to others, and perseverance to push through the times when you are discouraged and pessimistic.

Final Recommendation

So is Blog Blazers worth reading? Yes, I think so. I was already familiar with many of the bloggers interviewed, so it was interesting to read and compare their various views on blogging. Some of them had very thought-provoking things to say that have helped me consider how I should manage my relatively new blog. And I did get some useful tips and advice, and a few new feeds for my blog reader.

Would I recommend buying it? Probably, but I would recommend buying the ebook, which is at least $3 cheaper than the paperback, is searchable, and saves paper. It’s not the kind of book you’ll be flipping through as a reference after you’ve read it once. But I’m glad I read it, and if Ian hadn’t sent me this review copy, I would have bought the ebook and felt that I had received more than my money’s worth.

I decided the green was a bit dark and I wasn’t happy with some of the fonts and line spacing on this blog, so I changed to another theme/skin that came packaged with my blog software (Subtext). I think this one is much more attractive, even if it no longer goes with the green and white color scheme that I sort of have going for Wholeweal.

I don’t want to spend too much time tinkering with my blog’s visual design - there are far more important things to spend time on - but at the same time I don’t want anyone to visit my blog and immediately hit the back button because it’s UGLY.

Hopefully this’ll do the trick for a while.

We generally meet at 6:00 PM the third Thursday of each month, usually at the KnowledgeAir offices in Suite 628 in the Larkin at Exchange building at 726 Exchange Street, Buffalo. There’s always great presentations, great networking and mingling with fellow developers, and lots of free stuff to raffle off (developer tool licenses and more). Oh, and free pizza.

I’m hoping to put together a presentation on Windows Forms development (and the wider history of Windows desktop programming) to present at the group at some point, since it’s an unfamiliar topic to many developers, compared to ASP.NET programming. For some reason, much of my professional work over the past five years has involved Windows Forms, so I think I’m in a good position to teach some of the tricks that you won’t get in the beginner documentation.

So Dr. Dobb’s Journal has finally folded. I’m a little too young to remember the real glory days of Dr. Dobb’s, when it was a hardcore programmer’s magazine full of code. I actually started reading it only a few years ago, when another magazine that I did read, Software Development, died out and folded some of its feature articles into Dr. Dobb’s. The last year or so there was so little of interest left there that I would simply toss each issue directly into the recycling bin (I had a free subscription).

So Software Development became a feature in Dr. Dobb’s. Now Dr. Dobb’s is becoming a feature in InformationWeek. Any bets on where InformationWeek is headed?

Like I said, I have no memory of the “real” Dr. Dobb’s, but I’m still a bit sad at its passing. My lingering memory (as I tossed the last issue into the bin) is of, as Eric Sink pointed out, the amateurish grammatical error slapped across the cover. What an embarrassing way to go out. ]]> http://www.wholeweal.com/blog/2009/01/07/dr-dobbs-fades-into-history/feed/