I am now freelancing full time which is an adventure all by itself. I am spending time making connections here with what seems to be a strong developer community. It’s exciting to meet people who speak the same language I do and are passionate about some of the same things. That’s something that was very hard to find in upstate New York.

Free Speculative Fiction - http://www.freesfonline.de/rssfeed.xml

Speculative Fiction, a superset of science fiction, is a latent passion of mine. When my Xbox died I spent a lot of time reading lots of short stories that I found through this great feed.

Wil Wheaton: In Exile - http://feeds.feedburner.com/wwdn

The actor, well known for playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek, is an accomplished writer and all around geek. His site features a lot of life stories from the point of view of a geek father and husband. It is at times inspirational and always entertaining.

TorrentFreak - http://feed.torrentfreak.com/Torrentfreak/

A news site which covers issues related to the BitTorrent downloading community. Its viewpoint is decidedly pro-torrenting.

GameAI For Developers - http://aigamedev.com/feed/

A site that does a wonderful job of bridging the gap between professional and hobbyist video game programmers and the topic of Artificial Intelligence. The site is a mix of practical articles describing AI techniques and thought provoking articles that generate discussion in the comments. Commenters range from individuals who are still learning to code and seasoned developers who have shipped multiple commercial games.

Okay, so it’s not a mega-ton announcement. For me it’s a good thing because it has been nagging at the back of my mind for a few weeks. Now it’s one less thing I have to think about.

For those for you who are using a feed reader already then I think you get it. (Yes, I’m talking about that one guy in the back)

The ones who aren’t excited by this are the ones that I want to talk to.

The web is a big place. You are a busy person. You don’t get paid to sit at a computer all day, like some people.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t make the web work for you.

There is a treasure trove of valuable content on the web. There is entertainment, education, news and ideas and it’s all being created by people like you. These people understand your hobbies and interests. 

• Like making gourmet confections? Try The Chocolate Gourmand.
• Like poetry and politics together? Check out Sillman’s Blog.
• Like building your own stuff? Go to Instructables.
• Those don’t suit your tastes? Don’t worry, there’s more.

So, yes, the Internet is this great magical thing with all this interesting crap in it. But, you still don’t have time to go to twenty different sites. How can you possibly keep up, especially when they keep making more everyday?

Some people solve this by just not going to all of those sites. You don’t miss what you don’t know right? But, whether you care or not, you are missing something cool.

What if there was a way to fit some of that cool stuff in among all of the other things (read: life) that want your attention too?

Watch this film by the creative guys at Common Craft. They explain in English what feeds can do to solve this problem.

So let’s sum all of this up and get to the final point:

• The web has lots of cool stuff
• Feeds help to manage all of that cool stuff
• GloryFish.org now has full text feeds

Now, if you are subscribed to Gloryfish.org’s feed, you can read the entire article in your reader, without having to come to the site to read the whole thing. You couldn’t do that before. Sorry it took so long. ;)

1. The Website is a novel - It is carefully designed to be read and understood completely. This is how the website builder thinks.

2. The Website is a billboard - It will be glanced at quickly, stripped of the required information, and forgotten as soon as the visitor moves on. This is how the website’s visitor thinks.

Krug asserts that as designers, we need to build better billboards.

It can be a tough step for a designer to take. We tend to labor over design decisions like font sizes, colors, and placement of elements on the page. It’s painful to think that the hours spent crafting an aesthetically pleasing website will go unnoticed during the three seconds that a visitor spends on it.

However, that is the reality that we live with. To become better designers we have to understand more than color wheels and grid layouts. A good web designer needs to be concerned with interaction as much as presentation.

Just now I had an experience on a PopSci.com that made this point very clear.

I arrived at an article about videogame technology through a link on Digg. The article is presented as series of images with accompanying text.

I briefly glanced at the image of a computer chip and decided to save that for later. My eyes moved quickly to the right to find the article proper. I read through the text under the heading “1. Processing Power.” The numbered heading told me to expect more sections. My brain subconsciously stored that away.

When I got to the end of the first section I was hooked.  I quickly clicked the “next” link and the page disappeared.

Wait, what? Where did that interesting article go? I pulled the page up again. Looking closely, my mistake immediately became clear. The “next” link I thought I clicked was actually a “X Close this Window” link.

It was the right color (orange) and in the right place (lower-right of the article) which turned out to be just enough information to make a “click commitment.” Experience on the web has taught me that multi part articles tend to have their navigation in that spot. That was a mistake.

I completely missed the “Previous | Next” links that appeared above the image. Those didn’t seem to apply to the article anyway. And I was initially confused as to why the article would have a “Close this Window” link anyway.

Further investigation on the PopSci.com revealed that the article appears in a pop-up window when accessed from their homepage. The Digg link made it appear in a full browser window. That distinction does very little to affect the layout of the page. However it had a huge impact on how I interacted with the it. I don’t normally expect a normal web page to offer me a close link in the middle of an article.

You may be tempted to write it off as user error and go about your business. However, in the real world these split second judgements occur every time someone visits your site. In this case it spawned a blog post. A less positive outcome would be me giving up when the site disappeared and moving on to one of the other myriad things demanding my attention. 

Your job as an interaction designer is to help your visitors fall into the pit of success. Make it easy for them to succeed when they are on your site. Succeeding can mean finding a piece of information, posting a comment easily, updating a personal setting, or going to section two of the article they are reading.

PSDTuts - http://psdtuts.com/feed/

There are lots of great sites online for Photoshop Tutorials. This is one of the better ones. The author takes a lot of time to create interesting and well presented tutorials with lots of high quality images.

Wondermark - http://wondermark.com/wondermarkrss.xml

A very funny comic from a guy that seems to really care about comics in general, which I totally dig.

Freelance Switch - http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreelanceSwitch

FS serves the modern day web worker with articles that offer both practical advice on freelancing as well as commentary on the merits and drawbacks. Articles are written by actual freelancers so moms like it too! (also check out http://feeds.feedburner.com/Webworkerdaily)

David Byrne Journal - http://journal.davidbyrne.com/index.rdf

David Byrne, the acclaimed frontman of Talking Heads fame, who went on to cultivate an amazing body of work as a solo artist, blogs his views on life, art, music, culture, et al. I find myself frequently disagreeing with those views yet I am drawn to each new post for his thought provoking insights that are presented in a very approachable way.

Removed

Despite what your 3rd grade teacher told you, not everybody is a winner. These are the feeds I dumped this month due to lack of updates, lame content, or general boringness. Maybe your mileage will vary? Subscribe at your own risk.

Red Steel - http://blogs.ign.com/Red-Steel/rss/

Gaming Steve - http://www.gamingsteve.com/index.xml

Data Center Knowledge - http://feeds.feedburner.com/DataCenterKnowledge

It kept me awake the first night I heard it until I pulled out my guitar and learned to play it. I couldn’t find the chords anywhere online so I thought I’d post what I came up with here.

My Belruel by Jerry “Tycho” Holkins

                  A
’twas the twelving day of Everfair

            E
When fell my maid of raven hair

      D                                                     F#m       E
Beneath her cloven standard of the wren

           A                     
And damn that roiling goblin horde

            E 
We’d almost slain the overlord

       D                                       F#m    E
But I could never roll an elf again

(This pattern repeats through the rest of the song)

“The Queen of Bells and Battle-Downs”
She wore the title like a crown
Foes so deep a man would drown, but she still stood alone
A princess and a duchess both
And sworn to nine prestigious oaths,
Her duties, they would take her to that twisting spire of stone

Against his tower, a silhouette
She called like a coronet
And the green sea of his armies burst from warrens far below
The pacts he’d made with demonkind
Had rent his thin and tattered mind
And hellish princedoms occupied the arrow he let go

They took her through the crowded square
And laid her at the temple stair
The sorcelled barb of Arudair beyond their healing arts
There stands a circlet on her brow
That turns the blades of men around
But if Belruel could hear me now
This song would pierce her heart

’twas the twelving day of Everfair
When fell my maid of raven hair
Beneath her cloven standard of the wren
Damn that roiling goblin horde!
And damn their hell-bound the overlord!
But I could never roll an elf again

Download my_belruel_chords.txt

Tycho sang a soulful acapella version at PAX last week too. If you have any suggestions for the chords or another version you’ve put together, post them in the comments. I’d love to hear them!

Update: I’ve updated the chords I have here based on a suggestion from David in the comments. Thanks David.

The technology to do that is very simple but what it represents is very compelling. When your content is on the web you gain the ability to see how that content is being used instantly. This information goes above and beyond seeing what your “circulation” is.  Back in the day your hit count was the magic number, but these days we have far more powerful tools at our fingertips.

Hit counters have become obsolete for a few reasons. One of those is lack of context. A hit counter only tells you the number of times a page has been loaded or refreshed, also called “pageviews.” This leaves out the bigger picture. Imagine that your hit counter reads “500 pageviews since last Friday.” This could mean you have 5 very avid readers who have looked at that page 100 times during the week. Or it could mean you have 500 visitors who looked at your site once and never came back. A hit counter alone can’t provide that insight.

Because they are inherently  meaningless, having a hit counter shown on your site is a little bit tacky. It is a remnant from a much older Internet and it fails to provide useful information to your visitors. It’s time to let the hit counter go and start using the new hotness.

Several companies provide comprehensive stat tracking through small JavaScript blocks that are placed on each page you want to track. Typically I place this in the header or footer of a site which usually is reproduced on every page automatically.

The JavaScript code uses cookies to identify unique visitors and can track their browsing habits as they move throughout your site. This opens up a whole world of info as you can now see the path that a visitor will take from their point of entry (which could be your home page, a content page, or even you 404 page *gasp*) through the site and finally to their point of exit. Is there a particular page that seems to be causing your visitors to flee? Perhaps you can rework the content to keep them around.

These stat trackers also provide information about the systems that your visitors are using most. If more of your visitors are using the Opera web browser you want to make sure that you are testing your layouts in Opera. Thinking of putting some Flash content up? Check to see what the most common Flash version is. Having this information available and using it can keep you from alienating your visitors.

There are two stat tracking services that I have used extensively. They each have strengths and weaknesses. Both are free at the moment and allow you to track multiple websites (domains) from the same interface. To use them you must be able to add custom JavaScript code to every page of your site.

Google Analytics - Google bought the Urchin Web Analytics company and made it a free service. They have since rebuilt its interface and made it an extremely easy to use and powerful tool for monitoring web stats.

It is well integrated with Google Adsense an Adwords, so if you are already using those services you will find a host of tools to help you track your keywords and ad performance.

Analytics also provides a sophisticated goal tracking system. This allows you to define a preset path through your site and attach monetary values to the eventual target. With a bit of work this can be applied to an ecommerce site and would allow you see how a particular marketing campaign was working with a real world dollar amount.

reinvigorate - The upstart in the web stats space is reinvigorate. The interface is similar to Google’s however there is a stronger focus on up to the minute monitoring of data. Default timespans for the various views are hours and days as opposed to weeks and months in Analytics.

To further support this focus, reinvigorate provides a desktop application called Snoop. Snoop, connects to the reinvigorate service and provides realtime notification of traffic on your sites.

reinvigorate also allows you to track individual users of your site at a very fine-grained level. For example, if you were running a forum you can configure the JavaScript to tag your visitors based on their username. The stats data could then show the individual paths of those users through the forum highlighting their favorite topics, with their username attached.

The reinvigorate is still in beta and requires a beta invite to participate. This is evidenced in the Snoop application which tends to disconnect form the server randomly. This greatly reduces the value of a set and forget website monitoring application. 

Each service provides a set of compelling features and handles the job of presenting comprehensive site data to you in a clean and consistent way. Depending on your site strategy this information can help you to keep visitors on your site longer, move them to important information more quickly, and meet their specific needs. Whether you are a small blog site looking for an audience or a large corporation trying to connect with your community, the point is, you are now in control of a wealth of data that will make your site a better place for your visitors and more productive for you.

Depending on the feedback to this post, I’ll make it a two or three-parter and get down to the nuts and bolts of installing the tracking code and working with some of the advanced features. If you want that, just leave a comment down there.

Mahutaville.com - This is the personal blog of my good friend Brian Mahuta. He writes about his life with a style and personality all his own. It is intelligent and thought provoking. I adapted the template from an existing one.

Williamsonfbc.org - This is the website for the First baptist Church of Williamson. It was designed and created by Francis Gasparri, the church’s pastor. I provided some consulting on the project but Francis did the work and provided the excellent design. It features the church’s newsletter, a pastor’s blog, and even streaming video of the services.

30 Seconds With Email Guy - This is a parody of Merlin Mann’s hilarious 30 Seconds With Phone Guy. Just for fun.

Of course, I also finished GloryFish.org. It was a productive month.

The old forums are still online and can be found at gloryfishforums.com. I’ll keep them around as long as it is popular.

I have imported all of my old blog posts from Blogger. These chronicle my online life since April of 2004 up to December of 2006. I should warn you not to venture all the way back to the beginning unless you have a strong constitution. After December 2006 I took a break from blogging to focus on work but I eventually started a semi-secret Vox blog at gloryfish.vox.com. Those posts continue up to the present (August 2007). The last post illustrates my frustration with the entire Vox platform, one of which being the inability to import my posts into WordPress.

On the right you see a section called “What am I doing?” This shows little snippets that I post to my Twitter feed throughout the day. If you know what Twitter is you can go ahead and subscribe. If not, you can simply enjoy the insight they may provide to my daily life.

My latest Flickr photos show up on the bottom left of the home page. To the right of that area regularly updated list of my Del.icio.us links. These are items that I find online and bookmark to remember later. You may be interested to see the types of things I bookmark. I also have SnapPreviews enabled for these links. Simply hover over them and you can view a quick preview of what the link goes to, for your convenience.

Right now I have a space for Google ads but that may change in the future, I haven’t decided yet. I’m open to suggestions.

The projects page is not done but should be ready soon. If you’re reading this more than two weeks from now and the page doesn’t work contact me.

Likewise, the archives are not up. I’m trying out a few different archive plugins to find the best one. They should be available very soon.

Edit: Archives are up.

As always I’m open to suggestions and comments.

Webcomics

KittyBot - http://www.kitty-bot.com/rss.php
The title should be all you need. Kitties? Bots? Sign me up. It's actually much better than that even. Gorgeous artwork, engaging writing, and some really interesting science fiction. And big robots.

Tech

GigaOM - http://gigaom.com/feed/
The always entertaining Om Malik (often seen on CrankyGeeks) writes about the telcos and has a new show "The GigaOM Show."

Update: I almost forgot this one!
Data Center Knowledge - http://feeds.feedburner.com/DataCenterKnowledge
Info about data centers and colocation facilities.

Gaming

Level Up - http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/rss.aspx
N'Gai Croal, the best gaming writer in the biz. I could do without the news summary posts but his articles are fantastic

Other

thought bucket - http://thoughtbucket.tumblr.com/rss
A Tumblog with a buch of interesting stuff.