Pek Pongpaet

So my blog is exactly one month old. I thought I’d do an analysis of my site and break down some vital statistics. I’m interested in data such as number of visitors, where they are coming from, how much time they are spending, and finally income.

Keep in mind this is the very first month. Nobody knows who I am, and I don’t have a whole lot of content. I haven’t done much in terms of promotion. I was very surprised to see that Google indexed my blog 3 days after it started.

So let’s analyze this a bit. At 27 posts, that’s almost 1 post every day. My goal was to try to post about 5 times a week corresponding to 1 per work day. I was pretty successful with that, but we’ll see how long I actually keep it up. At 26 comments, that’s an average of 1 comment per post which I think is pretty good.

As for visits and page views, I don’t have much to say about that other than I use it to calculate the cost per click. Average time on site was interesting. I think it was probably skewed by the fact that I was still doing design coding on it and had the site open for long sessions at a time.

Google bringing in the most traffic was no surprise there. Overall, I’m quite pleased with StumbleUpon as a social bookmarking platform. I did not try delicious although that’s something I will want to explore next. Digg did not bring a significant amount of traffic and I didn’t expect that it would after reading many a blog articles about how skewed it is.

Here is where it gets interesting. My most popular page was the Ruby on Rails Tutorial. It was a really simple tutorial, but apparently RoR is teh hotness because many people are searching for it. I’m not Rails experts by any stretch of the word. It was so hard for me to figure out how to even get a Hello World app that I had to write it all down. Top Mac software also made the list. What’s interesting is the 3rd most popular link was my Martial Arts category tab. I would have expected another article.

For some of you, this will be the most important part of the report. How much money did I make? A grand total of $3.69. Sources of revenue including advertising and affiliate residual income. That comes to a CPC (Cost Per Click) of almost $0.06. Considering that I put in about 30 hours into this, my hourly rate is about $0.12. Woohoo! I think manual laborers in India and China earn more than this.

The primary goal of this website wasn’t about trying to make a professional living out of blogging. I figured, if I was gonna blog, I might as well throw some ads up, and if it makes money – great. I think the only people who are making any serious money blogging are the ones who blog about how to make money blogging. So if I was serious about making money blogging, I would start a blog about making money online. To me, that’s a hard road where the chances of success are slim. Plus I don’t know much about the subject, and I probably wouldn’t be very passionate about it. And about the products and affiliates I endorse, I either actually have or use the product or it’s in my wishlist. I’m not going to push anything just to make money if I didn’t actually believe in the product or would use it myself.

Actually, my financial goals for the blog are quite modest. I’d be happy if the revenue generated pays for the hosting. At least that way, the blog doesn’t cost me any money – just my time, which I am willing to give in order to share my knowledge and passion about certain subjects. That said, I believe my goal is quite attainable. My hosting costs $20/month. At the rate I’m earning, I would need about a 5 fold increase in traffic per month which comes to about 7,200 page views a month. That’s really not all that much traffic. Keep in mind that on top of the new content I will be writing, my old posts would still be generating traffic.

I also found this fun little widget. It calculates your blog’s valuation based on the amount and source of links to your website. At the time of this report, my blog is worth $1,129.08. Of course this is paper value, and even if it was worth a lot of money, it’s not like I can sell it.

To conclude, I had no expectations about the performance of this blog, this being the first month and all. I was just happy about the one thing I could control which was that I was able to push myself to write almost daily on top of all the other crap I’m involved in.

Popularity: 1% [?]

So Dell’s been getting pretty bad rep when it comes to customer service and it’s stock got hammered as a result. Even though they’ve taken measures to fix that, the perception is still somewhat tainted. Well, recently, I bought a Dell monitor to increase my productivity so I thought I’d blog about my experience as it was somewhat unique.

I decided to purchase the widescreen LCD through an employee purchase program. My employer is a Dell partner so Dell offers a discount for us. Fair enough. I quickly searched the net to see if there’s a coupon for it as Dell’s always running a promotion. I found one for $45 off and thought – sweet – employee purchase discount AND $45 off. So I went to the employee purchase portal and tried to order the monitor and apply the coupon. I could not get the coupon to work, but needed to monitor so I went ahead and bought it anyways. I tried to call customer service, but it was already too late so I waited till the next day.

So I call Dell customer service and explained my situation to the lady on the phone. This is what she tells me. The coupon was meant only for Dell Home and Home Business and not employee portal. Well, I’m not sure how I was supposed to know that but whatever, had I known that I would have taken the course of action that would have offered me the most savings. She was not helpful at all. She recommended that I should RETURN the monitor as soon as I get it to receive my credit back, and then REPURCHASE the monitor through Dell Home with the coupon (which also comes with free shipping btw). I said, lady – do you realize what you’re saying? You’re gonna lose money on the coupon AND ship the exact same monitor to me for free. Does that make good business sense or even common sense? She said, there’s nothing she could do to help and that was the only option if I wanted the coupon. At this point I thought wow – either they’ve got really stupid employees who have no common sense or their policies are so stupid that it serves them right that they’re doing so bad as a company. I was ready to blog about them and add yet another scathing review of their customer service.

Well, being Asian (and cheap) I still wanted to save that $45 so I called Dell customer service again. This time I got another person. I explained the situation to him and did not mention my terrible experience with the previous Dell rep. This guy was the exact opposite. He understood the unique situation, didn’t know how to resolve it, but he was gonna try his best to see that I get the discount. He asked me to hold for a few while he got a hold of someone who could handle this. Once it was clear that he couldn’t he asked for my number and said he’ll do some research and get back to me. He calls me up later to give me an update saying that it looks like he should be able to apply the coupon towards my purchase and that I should see the charge back in a couple of days. Sure enough, I get an email from Dell days later saying that I got a refund. The next day after, the same guy calls me up to ask if I did indeed get my refund and if everything was OK. I told him it was great and that I was very pleased with it. I was pretty happy with the guy and it’s people like him that make the difference.

The sad thing is, this is how it was supposed to be in the first place. There was a time when you drove to the gas station that there would be attendants who would wipe your windshield, pump your gas, fill your tires and generally just take care of you. Sadly, nowadays, the mighty dollar man is all about saving pennies at the cost of customer service. What they don’t realize is that consumers will just go somewhere else.

Popularity: 1% [?]

A friend of mine just got his first Mac. I’ve finally brought him into the light LOL. He’s been a PC guy for as long as he’s been using a computer so this is a big deal. I want to make sure his transition is smooth and that he doesn’t feel lost or unproductive. Just to set the context, he’s a business guy who works in technology. Thus his needs may be different that say a graphic artist or a journalist who makes the switch.

Adium is free open source instant messenger client for the Mac. What’s really cool about it is that it integrates with AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, GoogleTalk and a whole lot more, all in one neat little app. No more having a whole bunch of IM clients on your already cluttered desktop. Plus, it’s mascot is a friggin green duck! How cool is that? Not some glassy pawn, or a smiley face, a flower, or the word “talk”.

Quicksilver is free app launcher that lets you start applications using keyboard shortcuts. You can do all sorts of tasks via quick keyboard shortcuts including: launching apps, opening documents, move files, email files, or even uploading files. This is a must for any power user. To put it bluntly, Quicksilver makes the Mac Dock archaic. It just takes longer to move your cursor to the desired app on the Dock than it does just to make a few keystrokes.

iWork is the productivity suite for the Mac. With this you get: Pages ’08:a word processor, Numbers ’08:a spreadsheet app, and Keynote ’08 which is the Mac presentation app that runs circles around Microsoft Powerpoint in terms of ease of use and style. To this day, I still haven’t figured out the “Ribbon.” Not to mention iWork costs $68.99! For $129.99, you could get the uber crippled *Student Edition* of the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. Hmmmm. No brainer. Personally, for home use, I’ve mostly been using Google Docs. It’s able to import my Word documents. I have the added benefit of just having them online. But, some companies probably frown on having their documents stored on the Google cloud.

VMWare Fusion is a virtual machine application that lets you run multiple operating systems on your Mac, without having to reboot. This is crucial for the knowledge worker that needs to occasionally run those obscure corporate applications which were written only for Windows. I use it to run Windows XP so I can Remote Desktop into the machines at work. With this piece of software though, you can install just about any old operating system like Windows XP, Windows 2000, Linux, whatever. There’s another application that does the same thing called Parallels, but based on feedback from people I know, most users preferred VMWare Fusion.

Undercover is the ultimate software in Macbook laptop security. This app runs in the background on your Mac and periodically reports to the Undercover Recover Center. If your Mac gets reported as stolen, this software will not only collect vital information like IP addresses, but also screenshots of your Mac in use in hopes that it will help reveal the identity of the thief. Here’s the best part – it uses the built-in iSight camera of your laptop to take pictures of said thief and sends it over. If my Mac ever gets stolen, this thing would be worth its weight in gold – provided the thief doesn’t just throw away my harddrive and gets a new one.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tonight, I had the great pleasure of meeting Steve Krug, one of today’s leading experts on web usability design and author of the famous book “Don’t Make Me Think.” I’ve actually read this book about 3 years ago on a plane ride. It was a very quick read of about 100 pages, but very very easy to digest, practical and applicable. My background is development and being a typical developer at the time, I was very much an engineer who built software for other engineers. Of course this always leads to software and applications that ordinary people hate because it’s hard to use and not intuitive. Anyways, his book opened my eyes to the world of user-centric design methodology. This wasn’t design mumbo jumbo in the creative sense. This was design in the sense of “make something easy to use, easy to learn, and hard to screw up.” His book made it easy for developers to understand how *good* designers applied basic understanding of users to create user interfaces (UI) that made sense.

Anywho, I was able to meet Steve Krug because RoundArch hosted a happy hour for Steve Krug and Lou Rosenfeld *who I did not get to meet * because they were in town for some usability workshops. Steve was always swamped it seemed and I finally got a chance to go up to him and introduce myself towards the end of the night. I told him I loved his book, and he mentioned he had another one coming out at the end of this year about doing user testing.

I asked him if there was one thing that he could tell people to educate them on usability what would it be? He said “watch users.” He said you’d be amazed at what you can learn and garner from the simple act of watching how your users interact with your software without you intervening. He’s made CEOs sit down and watch users fumble through bad websites to show them how little they know about their users. Often times too, a simple change such as placement or color can have a huge impact on the usability of a website.

Ever since I’ve read his book, I often test my web applications with non technical people. I just let them drive. Lately, my guinea pig has been my wife. She’s super smart but she’s not technical, although that’s slowly changing. Anyways, I put the computer in front of her and let her figure it out. She’ll say, “but I’m not technical, I won’t get it.” to which I reply, “if you had to be technical then I’ve failed.” So she’s a quick and easy litmus test for me when I make stuff. It’s the same principle as designing a car. It should be easy enough for the average person to learn how to drive. If I had to know the inner workings of the car in order to drive it, that’s a bad car design.

Anyways, I highly recommend his book, especially to developers because you’ll see things differently. You’ll be able to empathize not only with designers more but also your users. And when you create software that users love, that’s a very rewarding feeling.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I’m not gonna bore you with an explanation of what Twitter is. There’s plenty of that to be found on the net. A particularly good one is the Twitter in Plain English from the “[insert technology here] in Plain English” series. I do however want to give you my impression of what I think of Twitter after having used it for a period of 2 months. I’ve heard about Twitter long before but had the same reservations I initially had about blogs. Why would I want to write about my minutia and who would read it. Tells you what I know.

To make a long story short, after attending SXSW this year, I came to realize maybe there is something to this new fangled wizardry called Twitter. How could I pass judgment so swiftly without having first tried it and deciding for myself? What could it hurt to try using it for a bit? After all, it’s free. I believe to be good at my job, I have to be up on the latest trends and technologies. Before, I would take a passive approach to knowing about a technology. Reading up on it was good enough and unless it really interested me, I really wouldn’t do much with it. Nowadays though, I feel like I ought to at least dabble with anything before I make up my mind on it.

So as soon as I got home, I started Twittering and finding people to follow. Only a few of my friends were on it so I made it my business to start following some people who had interesting things to say at SXSW. What I was really hoping to get out of Twitter was some occasional glimpse of the minds of these brilliant folk. I wasn’t sure what I was gonna Twitter about, but I decided that it would probably be a mix of technology, martial arts related stuff, and my goings on. I even managed to get my boss interested in Twitter despite his initial dismissal of it similar to my reaction.

So what DO people use it for?

• Logging random daily crap that I would have no interest in
• Posting interesting finds and links on the net
• Throwing it out there that the user is at a certain place
• Asking for recommendations
• PMS outlet
• Shameless self promotion

What do I use it for:

• Posting cool links
• Bitching Complaining about how old I’m getting and how hard wushu is becoming
• Interesting life events that I’d like to remember
• Making random comments and inside jokes
• Evangelizing wushu to the world – at least to the techy social media world anyways

I guess I find Twitter useful. I’ve found EverNote and cooktime among other things through Twitter. Occasionally I will gather something insightful or interesting from the people I follow but for the most part it’s noise. Maybe with a search or a filter tool – I could get more useful info out of Twitter. It’s my hope that Twitter would be around long enough that I would be able to look back on my Twitter logs in my old age and reminisce about some thing I Twittered about that only I or my circle of friends would care about. It’s definitely a new medium of communication and it will be interesting to see what corporate spin it will take and how the general public will embrace this. For now, I think it remains a very niche tool for a very select subculture.

Popularity: 1% [?]