Google Friend Connect and the back button

If you wait long enough, generally whatever feature you’ve wanted to add to your website gets implemented by somebody in such a way that you can reuse it yourself, so I was pleased to see Google Friend Connect had the ability to let users add comments to web pages, as this is something I’d wanted to add to the Random Pub Finder for a long time, and hadn’t got round to doing, mainly due to laziness. Admittedly Friend Connect may not be the perfect solution, particularly if you want to keep in control of your data, but it looks good as a quick and dirty hack.

So I added it and almost immediately I noticed a bit of a major problem. Hitting the back button didn’t take me back to the previous page, I needed to press it again. In fact, it turns out that for every Friend Connect gadget that you add to a page, another entry gets added to the history list, making backwards navigation even more difficult. It looks like it’s an IE only issue, but given that most web users are still using IE, I think it’s pretty big problem (unless normal users don’t use the back button?). After doing some searching on the internet, I discovered this problem has been around for quite a while but still hasn’t been fixed. Which is a shame, because Friend Connect looks cool. But it looks like I’ll have to remove it until this issue is addressed.

Adding Street View to web pages

Street View has been available for a while but it didn’t interest me too much until recently when it launched in the UK. Then I noticed it was available as a part of the Google Maps API so I decided I’d add it to the Random Pub Finder. I initially thought it would work like the user interface available on the Google Maps website, but it doesn’t seem such an integrated solution is possible. To be fair, dragging the little man around your map probably isn’t what you’ll want to do generally so this isn’t a big issue, and if you’re clever you could probably implement this kind of solution anyway. I was pleased to find it was very easy to add to the site. First add a div to your page that will contain the Flash control

  <div name="pano" id="pano" style="width: 750px; height: 300px">
    <div id="panoError" style="text-align: center; margin-top: 100px;color: #aaa;">Loading...</div>
  </div>

Then add  a reference to the Google Maps API script.

<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&amp;v=2.x&amp;key=ABQIAAAAjtZCgAx5i04BiZDO6HlxhRSDF8NMhBf90dVWYNzYEfop4QQs3RSkYVE7vnmvtIBRRQjoFXq4kz15Mg" type="text/javascript"></script>

Finally add some JavaScript to initialise the control.

    function load()
    {
      var latLong = new GLatLng(51.412640159832, -0.30039334012124);
      var panoramaOptions = { latlng:latLong };
      var myPano = new GStreetviewPanorama(document.getElementById("pano"), panoramaOptions);
      GEvent.addListener(myPano, "error", handlePanoError);
    }

    function handlePanoError(errorCode)
    {
      var error = "An error occurred";
      if (errorCode == 600)
      {
        error = "No street view available";
      }
      else if (errorCode == 603)
      {
        error = "The Flash plugin is not available";
      }

      document.getElementById("panoError").innerText = error;
    }

Actually a lot of this JavaScript isn’t even needed, you can get away with just the first three lines of the load function, but the rest is useful for error handling. Error 600 can happen quite frequently so is best handled in some manner. I’ve not seen error 603 myself but I’ve shown it here because some of the code examples I’ve seen use the constant FLASH_UNAVAILABLE, which doesn’t seem to be defined anywhere, meaning when any error occurs you’ll actually get a script error if you use this constant. I guess there are more errors that can occur but I’ve not come across them yet.

Content is still king

One of the phrases that was coined during the early years of the web was 'content is king'. The basic idea was that content drives traffic to your site. This is clearly correct for the simple case - if you have no content at all you'll get no visitors and when you add some content you'll hopefully get more than zero visitors.

But that was in the days of not so clever search engines. These days search engines don't just take notice of the content on your site, they look at all kinds of other things so there's much more emphasis on using search engine optimisation to optimise content to get as many hits as possible. I don't think there's anything wrong with using SEO and fiddling around with keywords, layouts, titles, URLs and reciprocal linking can certainly help (although it's quite possible to get it wrong as well and lose traffic) but it seems to miss the point. The absolute simplest way to increase traffic to your site is to add more content.

To illustrate, lets take a look at some real data. I've used archive.org and data from Google Analytics to produce this graph for the Random Pub Finder.

What does this show? I've taken the number of monthly visitors to the site and divided them by the number of pubs reviews on the website. This doesn't give the complete picture of the amount of content on site but I'm not sure how I can work out the number of unique URLs historically. Note, using page views instead of visitors produces a pretty similar graph.

So does it prove anything? I guess if content was the only thing affecting the number of visitors then we'd expect the trend line to be horizontal so there are clearly other factors at work. We've got more inbound links than we used to have (that big spike is when we got linked from another site). I also think age of content helps search engine rankings, although I don't have any proof for this theory. But given that I've done very little SEO work on the site, it does suggest increasing content increases visitors above and beyond a direct linear increase.

As a comparison, looking at the number of visitors to www.doogal.co.uk, where the amount of content has not increased very much, shows visitor numbers haven't increased as dramatically.

To look at it another way, every new page you add to your site will add X new visitors to your site, where X can be anything from zero to a very large number. Adding a new page will probably increase the number of visitors to your site, however small.

So in conclusion, don't waste your time and money on snake oil SEO 'experts', just add some more content to your site if you want to get more visitors.

The RPF book has a cover

Thanks to my other half, the Random Pub Finder book now has a proper cover. Unfortunately, in the mean time, Lulu has changed their publishing prices which means the cost for an A5 book is now much more than their standard sizes. Which, in these credit crunch times, may be putting off some purchasers. So now I'm busily repaginating it to fit into a US Trade size, whatever that is. Whatever it is, it's much cheaper to publish. So you still may want to hold off purchasing it for a bit, if you were planning on doing.

Sales so far - 4. Ho hum...

How to recover the hits to your website

I discussed a month or two ago about how the Random Pub Finder database died and our visitors disappeared. So how to recover from that? It turns out we didn't need to do anything, Google (and presumably the other search engines, but really who cares about them?) re-indexed our pages and presumably ranked them as highly as before because October was our best month yet for visitors, finally over the 10,000 mark.

Do you really need to use a CAPTCHA?

I am completely lazy so I've put up with the spam coming to me from the Random Pub Finder for a long while now. Eventually I realised the signal to noise ratio was so low that I was actually missing real people submitting pub suggestions so I decided I had to do something. Again due to my laziness my first attempt at fixing the problem was just to block submissions from the common IP addresses used by the bots trying to submit things. This helped but still stuff was getting through.

So I started to think about implementing a CAPTCHA system, but even though there seems to be at least one good PHP implementation out there, laziness again got the better of me. I remembered Coding Horror which has used a sort of CAPTCHA system for several years but the difference is that the image is always the same. And has been as long as I remember. So I must assume that it is reasonably effective, given it's a site that gets a lot of hits, so I thought I'd try out the same system on the Random Pub Finder, since it's dead simple to implement.

I've only just implemented it and it's working 100% so far. If it continues to work, then it suggests all these spammy form submissions are completed automated and there is no human behind them at all. Which then leads to the conclusion that a full-blown CAPTCHA is probably not necessary for most sites.

Capital boozing - the Random Pub Finder book

It used to be called vanity publishing. An aspiring author, having been rejected by all the standard publishers, would decide the problem wasn't with themselves and their work, but with the publishers who were clearly blind to the author's genius. So the only solution was to go out and get their work published themselves and sell hundreds of thousands of copies that way. Of course what generally happened was that, after paying out thousands to the vanity publisher, the author would be left with 2472 copies of their masterpiece sat in the loft, after giving out the other 28 copies to friends and family.

Things have changed, we can now all be published authors via the wonderful lulu.com. The beauty of this system is that a forest doesn't get destroyed to sate the author's vanity. Books are only produced if somebody is actually interested in them. And because they are published on demand, books can be updated and corrected quickly and easily.

So to take advantage of this system, we've taken the reviews from the Random Pub Finder and put them all together in one convenient book shaped package. I don't know about you but even with all the latest technologies for reading on a screen, I still much prefer a book. No power problems, no waiting to boot up, no random crashes.

Anyway, if you want to buy a copy, hop over to http://www.lulu.com/content/2003276. I'm still waiting for a design for the cover, but other than that it's all done.

How to kill the hits to your website

I went on holiday a few weeks ago. Unbeknownst to me the Random Pub Finder's database died the day I went away. With no web access I only found out on my return. A few days of emails to our ISP followed (yes we should have had a backup but we didn't; fortunately our ISP did have) and finally the site was back online. A few days after that I went off to Switzerland and what do you know, the database died again. A more paranoid person than myself might think somebody knew I was going away and did it deliberately. I'm not quite that paranoid but am obviously paranoid enough to consider it as a possibility. After the first data loss I'd done a backup, but I didn't have access to it whilst I was out of my office. Anyway, upon my return, the site was restored pretty quickly. So in all the Random Pub finder was offline for about three weeks.

Prior to the database crash, we were averaging about 300-400 visitors a day, now we are barely reaching 100. I guess the broken pages are still in the search engines' caches and who knows if and when we'll get our visitors back...

0871 numbers

I've been updating the Random Pub Finder to include phone numbers for the pubs on the site and during my Internet searches I've discovered that a few pub websites are showing 0871 numbers, rather than the actual pub's phone number. The phone call costs 10p a minute and the website gets a cut of the money made.

I don't have a problem with advertising on websites as a way to cover costs, so long as it's low key and relevant to the site. Certainly some sites over do it, but mostly it's harmless. The Random Pub Finder has never had advertising because our running costs are pretty low and we prefer not to have ads. Getting several hundred visitors a day is enough to rock my boat. If we ever got so many visitors that we had to pay significant hosting costs, we'd almost certainly have to get some advertising.

But something seems wrong about making money out of phone numbers. For a start, if I use the 0871 number I never actually find out the pub's phone number, so I'm stuck if I need to call it again (unless I use the 0871 number again). Second, why make money out of something that should be freely available? (and yes, directory enquiries should be free as well)

Fortunately, most sites still provide the pub's real number. If you agree with me, I suggest you vote with your feet and start to frequent these sites instead.

What are spammers up to?

The Random Pub Finder has a form for suggesting pubs to be added to the database. For a long time, we've had spammers posting lots of dodgy URLs via the form, which is not unexpected, since they think they will get added directly to the database. In fact, the suggestions just get emailed to me, in part to reduce the risk of dodgy URLs ending up on the site and also because I've never got round to automating the process.

Lately the spam has been increasing but not in any sensible way. I'm getting things like "Bill, Man Hatten", "Halo, Moscow" and "Diesel, Washington" coming through. It's left me scratching my head as to what these guys are up to. Why would they be submitting this stuff? It isn't linking through to anything and doesn't seem to contain anything of interest. Are we just the victims of an exceedingly stupid spammer?

Another way to get more hits to your site

I guess like most sites the Random Pub Finder gets most of its hit through Google searches. But a drunken chat with a friend led to another way to drive more traffic to the site. I've uploaded all the pub images to Flickr and added links to the reviews on the site. So far results have not been spectacular but it means we have deep links into some of our pages so their PageRank should improve. And who knows, it might work for you.

Build it and they will come

After five years, the Random Pub Finder has finally become an overnight success. Google seems to have started re-indexing pages, although there's still a random nature to its indexing. We were up to 300 pages indexed, now we're back down to about 150. But the main reason for the sudden surge in traffic has been appearing at Programmable Web. Thanks to that, we've been covered on a couple of other sites. We've never had so many hits.

Now I'm actually getting traffic here as well, thanks to this post. Seems I'm one of the top results on Google if you search for directmailchat. Clearly I'm not the only one suffering from this spam.

How to have a reasonably successful website

I can't pretend to know a lot about making a website a huge success, none of the sites I've been involved with have been massively successful, but I've kind of worked out how to get a reasonable number of visitors to a site without any kind of massive outlay. Here are a few of my thoughts.

Don't spend a lot of cash

Websites are pretty cheap to run. Even if your website is your business, you can probably keep it running with no visitors and no income for a pretty long time. Blowing any money you do have on advertising before you're even sure your site is up to scratch is a sure fire recipe for disaster. Better to get just a few visitors in who'll give you a good idea if you're heading in the rifgr direction and you can fix any problems you have before too many people spot them.

I think advertising in the old media is pretty much a waste, it's very expensive and it's hard to see if it's been a success. You can advertise using AdWords for next to nothing, giving you the chance to see if it works at all and also trying out different advertising approaches.

Don't ignore SEO

Google is fond of saying that you should optimise for the end user, not the search engine. I can understand where they are coming from but essentially this is pretty much untrue. If end users can't find your site, whether the site has been optimised for users or not is pretty much irrelevant, they'll never see it. Chances are search engines will be the biggest source of traffic to your site, so of course you need to optimise for them. I managed to triple the number of visitors to the Random Pub Finder just by applying some simple SEO, all completely above board and not impacting on the end user at all. I found this free download a very useful read.

Design isn't too important

There are many examples of butt ugly sites being pretty damn successful (craigslist being the most obvious example) and plenty of examples of beautiful sites that have crashed and burned (boo.com comes immediately to mind). The fact is if the idea behind your site is appealling, people will come back. If the idea doesn't appeal, it doesn't matter how good looking it is, people will go elsewhere.

One company I worked for redesigned their site about 4 times in one year, in an attempt to get more conversions. I've no idea how much they spent in total but the effect on conversions was pretty minimal, so it was pretty much wasted cash. Every redesign brought a host of new problems that needed fixing, along with pages stored in search engines that no longer existed. Not only that but time spent on those redesigns could have been spent refining and improving what was already there.

Keep focussed

I've never really stuck to this advice (this site covers whatever I can be arsed to write about) but if you want to get people coming back to your site it sure helps if your site covers a single topic, or a few related topics.

Iterate and watch

I come from a software development background and I've always practised a kind of iterative development technique. And I use the same approach when developing websites. Make a small change, see if it works, move on. Unlike software development, when developing websites the 'see if it works' stage doesn't just mean 'make sure it runs OK'. it also requires looking to see how it has affected traffic, so the iterative cycle can be somewhat longer. and to see if it works, you need to have some data. The cheapest tools (i.e free) for this job are Google Analytics and Google Sitemaps, which tell you how many visitors you're getting and what keywords are driving them there, along with heaps of other information.

Take advantage of free advertising

There are plenty of opportunities to get more hits on your site that cost nothing. When I post to a forum and I'm given the opportunity to provide a URL I always do. Of course, posting randomly to forums just to get a link to your site is generally considered as spam and will likely cause more harm than good. Sites like Technorati and digg can drag in more readers and directories related to your site can help pull in yet more eyeballs.

Wait, and wait some more

I have no knowledge of the search engine algorithms but I'm pretty sure, all other things being equal, a site that has been around for 5 years will rank higher than one that's been around for 1 month. So if you just hang around doing nothing, your site should start to get some more hits. I've never really done anything to get hits to doogal.co.uk, but I now get about 200 visitors a week.

PageRank update

I've just noticed that Google seems to have updated PageRanks across my various sites. And finally The Random Pub Finder has got some PageRank! It's been PR0 for about a year, now we are up to PR3. My home page and this blog are both up, wahey!

Google Maps and the Random Pub Finder

OK, I got bored waiting for a response to my queries about ripping off people's code so the Random Pub Finder London Map has gone live. Trying not to be too big headed, I think it's superb. None of it would have been possible without phpcoord and overplot. If programming is an art form then the old adage 'good artists borrow, but great artists steal' must be true...

SEO works, but it shouldn't

It all started about two or three months ago. I got into an email conversation with the webmaster of a website doing a very similar site to the Random Pub Finder. He claimed to be getting about three times as many hits as we were. After looking at his site, I thought the site (to my eyes at least) was no better than ours (and I'm not talking about Beer In The Evening which is clearly better) so I couldn't work out why this was. After talking to a couple of SEO gurus I started making a few changes to the site and over the last couple of weeks or so, we've started to increase our hits. In fact, we are now getting about the same number of hits as he was claiming to get. Now this may not be entirely due to my changes, the search engine algorithms may have changed along with a whole host of other things. But if it is down to the SEO changes, then the search engines have a lot of work to do to optimise their search algorithms. For instance, why should putting the title of the page in a h1 tag make a difference? Surely the search engines should be clever enough to realise any old tag (a div for instance) with the correct style applied will look just the same. Why should h1 be considered as special? So search engines still have a lot to learn. People who put content on the web shouldn't need to know the special magic they need to apply to their pages to get attention. Until SEO gurus are no longer required, search engines will not have perfected their art...