Over the long weekend I made a change to our local network that has worked very well so far: switched the DNS from Comcast to OpenDNS. Some pages load faster and I’ve have found the shortcut functionality handy (pictured above).

Although you can do shortcuts with other programs (think a less powerful ActiveWords in the browser) the nice thing about OpenDNS is it works across every browser in every machine connected to the LAN so if I add a shortcut from the bedroom, I can use it on my tablet PC or my wife’s laptop or the Pocket PC WiFi.

Cut down long typing your favorite sites on the Wii
Yes, the shortcuts even work with no additional configuration necessary on the Wii and PS3 browsers!

One thing I’ve been disappointed in so far is the OpenDNS stats function. After 24 hours you are supposed to be able to see stats on total requests, top requests and unique domains. In our case it took more like 72 hours and what’s showing is a broken view with no data and a message that says: “not enough data has been collected yet.” As much as our family uses our LAN I’m finding it hard to believe not enough data has been collected.

How to add OpenDNS for free to your network
But enough of our family’s experience, how can you get your LAN into this?

STEP 1. Visit OpenDNS and click the Get Started tab.
STEP 2. Choose the router option and pick out the model of your router.
STEP 3. Login to your browser. In our case we have a Linksys router so it’s a matter of going to the browser and typing 192.168.1.1 and then entering our router password (and yes, we have changed the default factory password).
STEP 4. Before changing your router DNS settings, write the current settings down so you can revert when you no longer want to use OpenDNS. Then add the static OpenDNS DNS settings for:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

STEP 5. Restart the router and computer (I didn’t need to restart our lone Vista box, but restarted the Windows XP) and visit:

welcome.opendns.com/

If everything went well then you should see the welcome to OpenDNS page. You can test the OpenDNS typo correction system with makeyougohmm.com by adding an extra ‘w’ like this:

wwww.makeyougohmm.com

STEP 6. Create an OpenDNS account. This will enable you to add shortcuts to the network.

STEP 7. Once logged in, click on the “Networks” link in the My Account section. From here you’ll need to add your IP address. You should see an option to add your current IP address.

Note: if you are on a dynamic IP then you’ll need to change the IP when your ISP changes. Cable companies like Comcast don’t change their dynamic IP addresses that often, so it’s not a big deal. OpenDNS offers an optional program that you can download and install on your computer that will detect when the IP address is changed and update this setting.

STEP 8. Start adding shortcuts! That’s it, these 8 steps take only a few minutes to execute.

What if I don’t want to change the router, only my computer DNS settings?
You can change the DNS used on a computer by computer basis if you want. OpenDNS provides instructions by machine on the getting started page.

In closing, adding OpenDNS to our LAN as the designated DNS has been a very positive move. Give it a try on your LAN and let me know what you think. If you have had a negative experience with OpenDNS — I’m particularly curious about how long the stats take to start showing some real data — let me know about that below as well.

I’ve never watched the Oprah Winfrey show. Not a single episode. Not even one segment. At best I’ve seen a few scattered minutes of it on other people’s television sets and have turned my attention elsewhere. Sill, I’m sure she’s a good talk show host or she wouldn’t have amassed a large audience and following. This is important because of an endorsement Oprah has made that I’ll get to shortly.

As readers know, our family of five hasn’t had television service for nearly a year now (I’ll write a post updating how things are going around the one year mark), but even if we had TV, I still wouldn’t watch Oprah. I’d rather sit through one of Robert Scoble’s raw footage videos than watch Oprah (although I see Podtech finally gave him an editor). So there’s my Oprah experience and disclaimer.

Oprah endorsed this mega bestselling self-help book called The Secret by Rhonda Byrne based on a DVD of the same name. I had to look the book up on Amazon (pictured right, affiliate link if you really want to buy) to see what it was about:

The Secret contains wisdom from modern-day teachers — men and women who have used it to achieve health, wealth, and happiness. By applying the knowledge of The Secret, they bring to light compelling stories of eradicating disease, acquiring massive wealth, overcoming obstacles, and achieving what many would regard as impossible.

Whenever someone tells me about a single idea, concept and/or non-spiritual belief that changed their life I have to hold back from snickering. Are some people really that gullible? There can be no single secret to making your life better. There are several things you can do mentally, physically and spiritually to increase the odds of living a more fruitful, happy life but a single life altering secret? Rubbish. If such a mind blowing powerful secret existed it would be the worst kept ’secret’ on the planet.

Karen Cerulo, a professor at Rutgers University studied how human beings deal with the future.

Cerulo found that when most of us look out at the world and plan for our future, we fuzz out our vision of any failure, fluke, disease, or disaster on the horizon. Instead, we focus on an ideal future, we burnish our best memories…

Now there is a study I can get behind. Most people want to look ahead at a positive future, who wants to think they’re going to be living in a van down by the river? (Ok, maybe in a Chris Farley SNL skit). I strongly believe in positive grounded thinking which requires routine analyzing of your past and present life. Look around and ask yourself if you really need some secret to help you change the future. Just look at what you did yesterday and are doing today to help change tomorrow.

7 guidelines for a better present and future
If you want to make a positive future for yourself than the following are my 7 guidelines to a better present and future and you don’t need to buy some book or DVD. In fact, I’d say most good advice you receive in life will come from family, friends or research and exploration you conduct yourself, not something a stranger tells you (and if I’m a stranger to you then yes, that applies). I like the number 7, it’s a positive number. If you get three sevens in Vegas it usually means you win something.

1. Put family first, friends second, yourself third, strangers last
2. Work hard, play hard
3. Learn something new every day
4. Don’t hold onto stress, release it
5. Eat right, exercise more
6. Make choices in life that won’t ruin a good night’s sleep or make you wary of looking at the reflection in the mirror
7. Smile, laugh, love, sing (yes, even off key), pray and cry as these are all vital release points

There, my non secrets about being successful in the present and future. Oprah probably won’t recognize or endorse them, I mean who endorses a guy who writes at a blog called Things That … Make You Go Hmm, but if you do those seven things above consistently, if you live by those guidelines, no crystal ball will be necessary to live a happier present and future life.

Myself, I’m weakest at #5. I don’t eat very healthy and my exercise regimen is terrible. I’ve tried to get a good exercise plan going, but it gets back burnered too often. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten better about releasing stress (#4) but that’s still a problem a few times a year. It’s amazing what a good night’s sleep will do (#6) and I feel successful about making good decisions I can live with (#6), which many times lead to making less money than I could have made by choosing a different path. Worth remembering that money and good decisions sometimes don’t go hand in hand.

As for #7 where prayer is mentioned, I don’t want to get too religious on readers here because I’m not a deeply religious person. However, I do believe it’s important to have some kind of spiritual belief and to spend a portion of life on earth exploring and developing this belief. Something to believe in that controls life beyond our earthly existence is a very real and necessary part of our species.

I’m not yet convinced there is a single supreme entity but I don’t consider myself an atheist either. I think there is something beyond life on earth and it could have one or more supreme beings in control, but I haven’t worked out the details yet.

I would like to think that people who have lived life honorably will go somewhere once their hearts stop beating. Heaven? Not sure, but there has to be something beyond this relatively short life we live. Something where our essence marches on. I’m fascinated by this subject but continue to search for the answers. One of my prayers is that my exploration on the subject will be complete before I die. I feel like the yearning years (retirement) will yield the greatest success in my spiritual journey.

The eighth rule (bonus)
Because I like bonuses I’ve added one here for readers who made it this far in the list: serendipity. Remember me writing above that by doing several things you could increase the odds of having a happier present and future. I believe fate plays a role and that some amount of luck is involved. Even if we do everything right, we can still fail.

Even if I write the world’s best blog post ever there is a chance only a very small number of people will read it, that it won’t get slashdotted or dugg, be linked by major newspapers, get me on radio, TV and so on. Everybody, myself most certainly included, needs a certain amount of luck in each and every endeavor.

The biggest difference between those with more personal success and happiness are the ones who keep trying. You’ll fail a whole lot more than you’ll ever succeed in life but one, two or more lucky breaks will never happen if you stop trying.

Final thought: money isn’t everything
My problem with a lot of self-help books is too much focus on “being wealthy” as if being wealthy means someone has lived the happier life. There are lots of hard working, good people who will never be wealthy and yet live a wonderful life. Having more money and stuff shouldn’t be anybody’s #1 goal in life. It’s not mine. Having more happiness? Now there is one to live by! Wealth can be very transitory. Ask those who had it at one point but don’t have it any more.

What are your guidelines to living a better present and future life?

Kent Newsome asks a good question:

If you were a struggling blogger and you had $1,000 to use to increase traffic to your blog, how would you spend it?

Though Kent didn’t use the word “established” I decided to add that to title. There is a difference promoting a site that is new versus a site that has hundreds or thousands of pages (posts in a blog case). If it’s new then the promotion focuses around what the future promises more than what is already there. For readers who just started a blog there is something in the post for you particularly in the free promotion tips section toward the end of this post.

Now before cutting through the fog and answering Kent’s question a few important items struck me that require reflection and explanation.

The hiatus
One, I’d sort of left Kent for dead toward the end of 2006 and beginning of 2007 as a blogger. I don’t mean that literally as in heart stopped beating dead. He went on this extended blogging hiatus without much (any?) explanation to his readers and recently reappeared energized, generating smoke and some strong posts from his keyboard. To go from a couple posts over a couple months back to several posts a day, wow, rock and roll.

As subscribers we didn’t know if Kent had quit blogging, was on an extended vacation, had lost the mojo or had been abducted by aliens. Kent now suggesting after this absence that he is willing to budget $1,000 to promote his blog plus his increased blog output is strong evidence that he’s back. Or wants to be back at least. Good news from a good writer.

These hiatus periods are problematic. Fortunately, I’ve managed to avoid them here but it’s hit me on other less trafficked blogs I contribute to (thus a good reason they are probably less trafficked, doh!). The minute we get some momentum flowing one of the absolute worst things we can do is stop or significantly reduce regular posting. And I don’t mean stop posting for a couple days or even a week or two for vacation a couple times a year. Everybody deserves a vacation and subscribers will happily concede a little R&R time to their favorite bloggers.

Subscribers with their own blogs aren’t quite as patient as non-blogging subscribers I think though. They want expect to see you cranking good material or it’s off to the delete stack where some other more hungry blogger is clawing for their attention and is more regularly posting the kind of linkable, quality material they crave.

The stall
The second thing that occurred to me is every blog (at least that I’ve ever been involved with) reaches a stage where growth stalls — or at least seems to stall. For some blogs it’s 10-50 unique visitors a day. Others it could be 100-250 uniques a day. Some can make it to 250-500 uniques a day. Some even get into the thousands or more unique visitors a day before the inevitable stall happens.

A couple years ago I remember being stuck at the 250-500 uniques per day mark thinking how could I get this blog to the next traffic level? Basically, I kept doing the things I mentioned in the free section below and never budgeted any money for promotion. I have, however, budgeted money to promote other types of sites our company owns over the years and would like to experiment paying to promote an established blog someday.

Anyway I got over the plateau by continuing to produce posts consistently and regularly. Last year around this time the stall was 2,000-2,500 unique visitors a day and I was thinking the same thing Kent is pondering, but decided again to focus on the content instead.

After I came back from summer vacation refreshed and renewed I broke through the stall again and created a new plateau of just shy of 4,000 unique visitors a day. The major change made was to increase the depth of the posts and focus even more on quality and depth rather than post quantity. The average amount of words per post increased dramatically from posts made post July to December 2006. The increased word count and breadth of posts worked.

With the new post quality focus I was still able to stay over 75 posts a month (except for October 2006 where there were 65 posts) which, IMO, is the bare minimum a blog needs to have in order to be in growth mode. Less than 75 posts and you aren’t posting enough to maintain ongoing reader interest. It’s possible of course to post less than 75 posts a month and have a growing audience, but your posts had better be dynamite.

The new growth we experienced here represented an over 33% increase in both visitors and revenue (thank you to all new readers and for telling your friends). Unfortunately most of this increase has since evaporated in 2007 and we’re back to the same levels we were before my vacation last July, so this particular story doesn’t have a Cinderella ending. However, I am encouraged by the experience and strong possibility that it can be done again and perhaps keep more of the higher traffic levels this time around.

Isn’t this fun?

BTW, I’m at least partly to blame for the traffic runoff here by making a somewhat dramatic content change: namely my weekday video experiments and completely resetting my reading list at the beginning of 2007. Those readers who had come to expect the meatier, more pensive, longer posts in the second half of 2006 have since been treated to a more regular dose of vlogging trials and tribulations. I can see those who dislike video in general being disappointed with the changes. Personally, I think the Hmm blog content has improved because it has become more original and less external, but I can understand readers fond of the content in the second half of 2006 seeing a change in the material and looking elsewhere. For those still hanging on and nodding your head please don’t despair, I’ve got some ideas for how to deal with that situation which I’ll deal with another day.

As I mentioned at the start of 2007, you don’t make bigger gains without taking risks and trying new things especially when things are going well and sometimes these moves payoff, sometimes they don’t. Our traffic and revenue dropoff could also be related to the time of the year (spring/summer slowdown has been a common phenomenon on the web) and the fact that I’m not posting as many text blog posts as I was last year at this time (*except January 2007):

(128) April 2006 vs. (58) April 2007
(92) March 2006 vs. (81) March 2007
(90) February 2006 vs. (78) February 2007
*(83) January 2006 vs. (93) January 2007

Last month in fact was one of the least posting months this site has ever had with 58 posts. We have to go clear back to July 2004 for a month where there were a smaller number of posts (52). The month with the least ever number of posts? December 2003 when 40 posts were made. Most posts ever made in a month as of this writing? 149 in June 2005.

If you look at the output on this blog from December 2005 to January 2006 you’ll see 12 out of 13 months had more than 100 posts published. From a quantity standpoint that was the most productive period this blog has ever had. It’s not by coincidence either that at the same time this blog went from hundreds of visitors a day to thousands, so I’m not simply offering these stats for naval gazing purposes but to backup why I believe there is a direct correlation between action (posting) and reaction (increased readership).

If you’re looking at the lower posting numbers I mentioned and saying: wow, how can you paint that as a bad month, then right now the #1 thing you need to work on should be clear. You aren’t in the game if you aren’t in the batter box taking swings. If you are making a lot of posts but aren’t seeing any noticeable readership increase then it’s time to be more critical of the quality of what you’re publishing.

Are your posts of the linkdump or Twitter variety with no explanation for readers about why you think they are worth sharing? Are you just rewriting news stories or restating what other (more prominent) bloggers have already written?

Why focus on a number of posts per month?
The sweet spot for a blog is 75-150 quality posts per month. That should be the goal number of posts for most (but not every) blogger wanting to grow their traffic. Notice I threw the word “quality” in there. Others may disagree but I don’t count linkblog type posts as quality. I count a quality post as something with some meat to it, something with an original or unique take, substance; something where another blogger might find a juicy quote to launch into their own post (and trackback) as I hopefully have done here with Kent’s question.

A post with only a few words and and link or two is an appetizer, not a main course. Twitter posts are, well, good for Twitter, they aren’t necessarily good fodder for blogging. 300 words is a good generic word target but don’t be seduced into thinking that hitting a number of words is all that you need to do. Exceptions abound so try not to take the word count too literally. BTW, 300 words is also the number my word count plugin automatically calculates so that any Wordpress self-hosted blogger using the plugin can see what the percentage of posts they have that reaches 300+ words.

(For those who think every post I write is more than 300 words, not true, my stats as of this writing: 1,466 [33.0032%] posts contain 300+ words).

I digress.

The traffic/income increase was a fun ride while it lasted (almost six months, woohoo!) but now I’m pretty much back in promotion mode like Kent.

When there isn’t any $$ budget $$ available to spend on promotion
The third and final major thing that occured to me after reading Kent’s question is the reminder that I’m part of a growing group blog — yesterday we just voted in our eighth author — and are wanting to promote and grow the traffic for our blog. That blog currently has about the same amount of traffic as this blog did a couple years ago, 271 uniques a day average via Site Meter as of this writing.

However our group doesn’t have the budget to spend $1,000 USD, although we do have 1,000 Linden dollars (L$1,000 = about $27 USD at current exchange rates) to spend promoting the site. Don’t laugh out loud too much now. There are some worthwhile promotional activities that can be done with L$1,000.

Our group voted to start setting aside 5% of the site profit or L$500 whichever is greater each month beginning with last month for promotional purposes. Since we don’t have the budget to spend more money we’re having to take more organic promotion methods described in the free promotion section below.

How to spend $1,000 promoting your site
Now onto answering Kent’s question and how I think he should spend $1,000 promoting his site, which can be broken into 4 evenly distributed parts: blog design, widget/gadgets, contests and third party advertising. Keep in mind if your blog is brand new then my advice would be much different than I’m suggesting to Kent: you don’t need to spend money promoting something that isn’t there yet. Establish your site content. Work on creating an archive of high quality material that’s worth promoting. In Kent’s case, he already has a stable of good content, so the advice for somebody like him would be as follows:

$250 - blog redesign with focus on site interaction and features. The more posts you have, the bigger your archives, the more important the focus on search should be at your site. If your current search solution is Google then you’re sending away people who came to you. Google site search should not be as good as a focused site search.

$250 for widgets for other people to use interacting with your site - Another 25% of the budget should be dropped on your favorite programmer(s) to build a bunch of widgets promoting your site. Dashboard Widgets (Apple), Y! Widgets, Google Modules (or whatever they are calling them these days) and Microsoft Gadgets for Vista and XP. Here are some widget ideas:

- RSS Reader widget. Think most popular / most read posts, author favorite posts, most useful posts, etc.
- site search widget. Make sure you have a Firefox search that interacts with your site search.

$250 for a site contest Giving back to readers/subscribers is a good thing, especially when some (many?) of them too might be bloggers and could thank you by writing about your contest. Budget 25% for a contest or better yet, a couple different contests with prizes related to the niche you write about.

$250 for third party advertising. This is a good chance to try Google Adwords. Look at all the new things you have to promote: a freshly redesigned, site search friendly site, new widgets to promote and share. You could also write about your experience spending $250 on Google Adwords and how it helped or didn’t help grow traffic.

Money is gone, now what? (free section)
Now that the $1,000 is gone, there are still many little things you can do to promote your site that will cost you time, but not necessarily any out of pocket dollars.

• Make a goal to sign up for five new sites / services every work day. With every new site add your site URL to your profile. That’s five new profiles to get spidered with links back to your site every work day. 25 per week (5 days x 5 work days = 25 new profile URLs per week).
• five two-way trackbacks a day. This means you find five good blog posts to link to every day. This doesn’t mean five separate posts, it could be one post with five links. By two-way trackback I mean you link inside the post body and send them a trackback post. Does the blogging software you use not have trackback functionality? Here’s a PHP trackback script I wrote that can send trackbacks to any blog. You just need to upload it to a PHP-enabled server with cURL, change the extension from phps to .php, fill out the form, and submit. Do not tell anybody else where this is at on your server though or they can use it to trackback spam others. I’ve been using this script to help harden my trackback anti-spam filters. Also useful to test if trackbacks are working at your website.
• add your site URL to your email signature. If you send a dozen emails a day, that’s 12 free email mentions
• add your site URL to messageboard signature space where you post if the site rules allow. You are involved at messageboards somewhere on the web, yes/no?
• offer to guest post on other blogs and write articles for other places to increase your site exposure (author site/blog link considered customary)
• join a group blog. This usually guarantees a bio that can point back to your home website/blog and also will give you valuable experience networking with other bloggers. I’ve learned a lot about working with other bloggers with our group project and it’s been fun trying to grow a blog’s traffic and site revenue as a group.
• submit your best work — and emphasis on best as not every post on your site can be your best and/or more useful to others — to sites like digg, stumbleupon, bookmark with del.icio.us, etc, basically any site that does not frown on self submissions. Also be wary of submitting only your own work. Try to regularly submit high quality work of others you are reading. This post, for example, if you honestly feel it fits that description might be something you’d consider adding to one of the sites. Thank you, if you do.

Patience, Danielson
Site promotion isn’t an overnight thing. I know we all would like to think we can increase the average unique visitors and subscribers by drinking some magic elixir, but unless you get some TV or major media exposure, slashdotted, front page dugg, etc, any growth experienced will come slowly and incrementally, not between the time you read this and the next stats refresh.

The point I’m trying to make with this post is that the focus should be on having something that makes people want to stay, interact, return, interact again and subscribe. Is your site a destination or some place to stop by once and never or rarely return? If you want site traffic to grow then you need to make it a place where the thing that drew people to your site can be experienced consistently and regularly.

Hopefully any “struggling bloggers” as Kent defined now know at least a few places they might look to start their promotional tour. Good luck, because you’ll need some of that too. I can think of worse things to invest $1,000 in than your own blood, sweat and tears.

I’ve got to try using one of these dent remover techniques, thanks Wisebread. The first involves applying a chunk of dry ice to the center of the dent and then letting a few minutes of time for the dent to pop back out. The second shows using a hair dryer and CO2 air cannister.

Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror rants about checking the source before perpetuating false information encouraged me decide to actually try this on a dent on one of our vehicles before passing along to you:

The real problem is that this erroneous information was echoed by blogger B, and then echoed again by blogger C. At no point did anyone stop to actually verify the claims of blogger A, even in the most rudimentary, basic of ways.

Well, that’s what I wanted to do before making this post, but I keep forgetting to buy a CO2 cannister.

Atwood was talking about Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash called Silverlight, not inexpensive dent removal techniques, but I decided to take Atwood’s words to heart and see how good at least one of these two techniques actually worked. The YouTube video quality was pretty lousy and made it difficult to see how good it worked which increased my skepticism level so this proved to be a good test.

The problem? We didn’t have any dry ice laying around. My wife has a hair dryer but I use a compressor, not C02 cannisters. Therefore, I need to remember the CO2 cannister and where does one buy dry ice at anyway?

Any readers try out either of these techniques? I think it would make for a good future Hmmcast. Hopefully one that wasn’t as dark as yesterday’s.

Just the other day in IRC a few friends were talking about creating Wordpress themes. WordPress theme generator has been added to the growing Hmm web generators post. Will probably be converting the generators post into a page soon so it can grow and expand beyond a single post.

At the end of one of the spookiest weeks in recent memory including a commenter this morning declaring the Virginia Tech shooter is “Jesus” we could really use a laugh. Got a nasty troll or somebody flaming you, why not break out the Biblical Curse Generator and say something like: “May you be captured by Midianite maniacs, thou plaything of Beelzebub!”

Added this to our growing web generators list. And if you don’t like this then: “Listen, O thou dabbler in abominations, for you will see your pomegranates wither!”

A feature expected since the announcement that eBay/PayPal bought Skype for billions was the ability to send money to others via PayPal has arrived with the Skype 3.2 beta download (thanks 901am -> GigaOM.)

How does sending money work?

STEP 1. In Skype navigate to TOOLS->Send Money… The screen you’ll see is shown at the top of this post. When you click “get started” you need to login but for those with PayPal security keys it does not ask for your six digit security key. Wonder if they’ll fix this in the final release version?

STEP 2. Choose which Skype contact you want to send money to in the Skype dropdown menu, enter the amount, purpose and comments (optional).

STEP 3. If your Skype contact is not using v3.2 beta (likely at this point since it just came out), then you’ll see the screen below asking you to enter in the person’s email address.

STEP 4. Verify the details. You can also change the payment type on this page to whatever your PayPal backend funding source is (credit card and/or checking account).

STEP 5. Your payment has been sent confirmation.

If the other party has Skype 3.2 or higher they will receive confirmation of the money inside Skype, otherwise they’ll get an email that looks like the normal “you have received money” PayPal emails.

In the UNIX world cron is used to schedule events like updating a web page, retrieving RSS feeds, changing a file and countless other activities. Among other updates, cron is used here to update the daily stock graphs at the top of the finance category page.

Yesterday, I noticed these graphs weren’t updating and logged into the shell and entered crontab -l to see if there were any errors in the crontab syntax. None. A sudo ps aux command showed cron was running (pictured above) … and yet it wasn’t firing any of the jobs.

The UNIX forum offers suggestions for making sure cron is running like checking the cron log files, using touch to a file and watching the timestamps in a cron job like this:

* * * * * touch /tmp/.cron_is_working

To see if it’s running it’s as easy as watching the timestamp on the files and seeing the time changes. If you aren’t familiar with the format, those asterisks from left to right and separated by spaces indicate:

minutes, hours (0 = 12am, 23 = 11pm), days, months, weekdays (0 = Sunday, 6 = Saturday)

EXAMPLE. let’s say you only wanted to touch a file called ‘thursawday.txt’ in the /tmp directory at 12:01 am on Thursawday (4 = Thursawday), the cron code would look like this:

1 0 * * 4 touch /tmp/thursawday.txt

What if you want to touch ‘thursawday.txt’ every five minutes of every hour on Thursawday?

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * 4 touch /tmp/thursawday.txt

If you’d like some help generating cron jobs, a couple years ago I created and shared a cron generator you’re welcome to use. It also includes keyboard hotkeys (edit, save, exit) for using common UNIX shell text editors AE and VI.

Download Hmmcast #83 mp4

Visual Communicator, beginnercode, define:chroma key

Hmm first covered Topix.net in November 2005 (pictured above) and here’s how they look today, a year and four months later:

Tomorrow? They will likely be emphasizing topix.com. Let me disclaim before getting too far that this blog has been treated very well by Topix.net. Their algorithm has an almost uncanny ability to pick out what is news and what is not from this blog, something that often changes from post to post. I’m impressed.

But I’ve never been impressed with their .net domain name.

Something mentioned here repeatedly — especially when reviewing other sites and services — is the importance of business sites owning their .com. This is a drum I’ll keep beating until the vast majority of domains purchased are no longer dot coms (likely never). You can take all the .us, .tv and so on, they are worth a tiny fraction of the value of the .com. Sure there are exceptions like the absurdly difficult to type de.licio.us, but the advertising has been out there for 10+ years and people think dot com by default. Places like the podcast/videoblog company podtech.net are leaking traffic to type-ins and only helping to freely promote their .com counterpart.

Topix.net is another site that launched without owning the .com. They must have realized the error of their ways and paid $1,000,000 for topix.com, Rafat Ali reports:

About 50 percent of visits to Topix come through a search engine, and about 90 percent out of that is through Google…Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10 percent, that would essentially be a 10 percent loss in ad revenue, CEO Rick Skrenta said in the story. Topix will run its site at both Topix.net and Topix.com for awhile, in order to get over any unpredictabilities in Google and other search results.

There’s a serious, important business financial lesson to be learned here. If/when you have the choice to choose a business/product/service name, get the .com domain first. Even if you aren’t opening for business for a year or more, you need the domain early on. Get a blog setup and write about the process of launching your business.

Choosing the right domain name
If you are an already established business offline starting develop a presence online you might have to come up with a creative take. Just remember some simple guidelines for choosing good business domain names below. Some of these don’t apply to non-business sites and depending on how you classify this blog (personally I don’t classify Hmm as a “business” site), you’ll note we’ve violated several of them.

1. Keep the size of the domain as short as possible, preferably under 10 characters and using one or two words
2. Watch for domains using combinations of words that spell something very different than intended (therapistfinder.com anyone?)
3. Tread carefully with gimmicky domains like Flickr without the ‘e’ — you know people are going to flicker.com which is one of those domain parking for $$ pages.
4. Avoid using words in domains that can be shortened like “you” (MakeYouGoHmm is a bad example: we’ve had to purchase numerous domain variations because of mistypes). Worse is: ‘for’, ‘4′, and ‘four.’
5. Keep words in normal order for example on yesterday’s Hmmcast I mentioned bandboston.com as possibly the worst domain name for a rock band that sold millions of albums. Bostonband.com would be better, but that was already taken.
6. Be careful with names that can be easily pluralized by mistake (a few mainstream publications have wrongly linked to this site as makesyougohmm, hence we bought that one and redirected too)
7. Using more than one hyphen in the domain looks like spam (bad example: this-is-my-domain.com), it is preferable to use words without hyphen like makeyougohmm instead of make-you-go-hmm. We do have an established domain that uses a hyphen and don’t own the non-hypenated domain which I wouldn’t do again if I could start over. We’re sending type-ins the other way, but it’s not the same amount of bleed as not owning the dot com. Consider it a tradeoff for a really good name if you can get the-name.com as opposed to thename.com. Also it pays to see how good the non-hyphenated name is as you might have/build a much better site with the hyphen.

I’m sure there are plenty more suggestions other webmasters could recommend. Please use the comment or trackback area below to add to the list.

So my domain name sucks, now what?
If you don’t have the money to buy the .com for your domain and stuck with a dot com domain that could be improved, you still have options.

Time is perhaps the biggest enemy, so buy a better one and work at building the new name ASAP.

The longer your site is establishes itself with a lousy domain name, the more time consuming and difficult it will be to migrate to a new domain. Will there be search engine listing problems? In the short term probably yes, but what’s more important long term? Making it easy for both new and experienced site visitors to find you without being bookmarked, or being a hard to remember and type domain name?

Eventually your existing domain can become a redirect and the search engines will learn. The content is what drives pages over time more than the domain name. Of course there are other factors like a tedious directory structure that/looks/like/this.html.

At the end of last year we switched our group blog project from a third party free hosted blog service to our own domain and server. Our group had spent nearly a year adding content to the blog elsewhere. It took Google less than a week to adjust their engine to point to our own new domain and other sites continue to build up the new domain.

Best of luck with your domains both new and existing being easy to remember and type.