Sephy’s Platzish

Back from a one-week vacation, TW3 returns this week with more of the usual links, including a wrap-up of the last two weeks on the blog here.

Posts I liked

• Have you ever wondered how the inner workings of a TV broadcast work? The Daly Planet received some high-resolution photos from the folks at ESPN showing off their broadcast capabilities.
• Ah, Russia. The land of all kinds of oddities, including some lax plane maintenance. Thankfully, these are just cosmetic things as far as I can tell…
• Passive-Aggressive notes has dug up a classic note, from around 2001. Apparently at Condé Nast Restaurant, someone was unhappy with the lack of egg salad…
• The UK continues to be a source of things comedic, and this is no exception. If you’ve watched the 24-hour news channels (or even the local news), you know how often they’re begging you to give your input. So, what exactly do you reckon?
• Lastly, if there is one link you read out of this whole wrap, it should be Raj Dash’s explanation of why he hates WordPress 2.5. Sadly, it seems that we’re stuck with it. We can only hope that the folks at WordPress will keep the 2.3 branch alive. Either that or someone will come up with a replacement dashboard that is like the one everyone’s used to already.

New Blogs in the US Blogs Community

• Along the Lakeshore News

The US Blogs community is open to bloggers in the US that are a part of the Bumpzee community. If you’re interested in more about the community, you can view the main page of the community.

Keywords

• wordpress 2.5 missing subpanel - I can’t say I’m surprised that something’s missing in there - it seems they released this one half-baked…and an update isn’t forthcoming for a few weeks yet
• driving test tips singapore - Erm, I dunno; maybe don’t stall the car if it’s an automatic? Or, don’t try to interfere with the F1 cars as they round the corner? I’m at a loss y’all!
• dress like a whore - Another one I’m at a loss on. All I know is that I’m not an authority on that one. Maybe you should consult Britney Spears or that chick who hosts that show on Speedvision - Vida Guerrera I think her name is. I call her Slutty McSlut…she looks like she has experience…
• wordpress designers fuck up widgets - Could not have said it better myself. In fact I think I said just that.
• what to wear on a plane in june - It might be warm, but you should always dress with safety in mind. I’d personally go with a pair of sweatpants, as surprising as that might seem - there’s no chance that you will trip over them in case you need to move quickly, and you can easily roll up the legs for comfort…

This week around the blog, I’ve been talking about this theme that I’m making. First up, I had to do some reading of the Codex, but then I quickly got an idea together and it suddenly had some form to it. Right now, it’s still got that basic form, but the comments box has gotten to a more appropriate width.

I also asked about why Entrecard changed their pricing system, when it didn’t need changing (sound familiar?), along with having a discussion of cash gifting. Just so you know, I’ve offered an opportunity to some of the folks on YouTube to be interviewed by me; whether they do it or not is up to them, but I think it would be a quite fascinating look into what could be considered almost a second world.

Coming up this week, I’ll have that announcement about a new service that I’ll be providing, along with wondering if someone is happy about the state of certain things.

Til next week, y’all!

Admittedly, I haven’t been the most active with Entrecard dropping and getting my blog advertised on other blogs (in fact, I’ve got over 10,000 credits now just kinda sitting there at the moment). As I was browsing the site today, however, I noticed some new things - most of them good, but one of them quite confusing.

First, (somewhat like I did with WordPress), let’s go to the good stuff.

Drop Statistics

One of the new things you’ll see when you view the profile page of a blog on the site, you’ll see this new addition to the blog information -

That’s a pretty cool feature, because it lets you see if a potential advertiser has taken an interest in your site before they decided to commit their credits to advertising with you. For me, if I have a whole bunch of ads queued up in my queue, I can go through and see who’s had the most drops and kinda order them as to that, instead of trying to make a personal preference sort of thing…

Navigation in the Inbox

By far, this is the coolest new feature that they’ve added. You can now see everyone who has ever dropped their card on your widget in the inbox, instead of the “old” way of the last 70 or so. Also, to fix one of the more tricky problems of the old inbox, they’ve added a dropdown so that you can choose if you want to show the cards you have or the ones you haven’t dropped on yet today.

For both of these, I think the answer to “why” is fairly obvious - it’s something that there has been demand for in the past. However, something that I don’t understand the reasoning behind is something that kind of blindsided everyone - the new Ad pricing structure.

New Ad Pricing

As I was looking in my dashboard, I noticed that my price to advertised had almost halved itself from the around 200 that I’d been maintaining for quite some time now (thanks to averaging about 100 drops on my site per day, multiplied by 2), to 128 (or 2⁷).

The strange thing is that, if you look at the post announcing this change, there are some of the same generalities strewn about, somewhat like WordPress did. In my (and probably about 90% of Entrecard users), apparently this was discussed in the Forums, but like WordPress, the changes seem to have no bearing on what users have been used to - a system that (for the most part) worked.

Just as an explanation of how the old system worked - the price to advertise was based on the average number of cards dropped on your blog over the last 5 days, multiplied by 2. Now, it’s based on varying exponents of 2, with the number of ads determining the exponent used for 2. For example, if you have 1 ad in your queue, then it costs 2 credits, 2 means 4, 3 means 8, et cetera.

Now, all those cards dropped on your site? Well, that just means you and the dropper get a credit for it, along with positioning on the popularity rankings (which are now available in the Browser feature).

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In the end of it all, this (as they call it) Long-Awaited change to the pricing structure sounds to me a bit like WordPress 2.5 - a half-baked “fix” to something that really didn’t need fixing with little to no explanation as to why it was done. The old system was simple to figure out - you drop a card, that site’s price goes up by around 2/5th credit. Now, we have a system where if you want to advertise on even a moderately popular blog, you need to have a ton of credits bankrolled.

The only question, which for all intents and purposes is rhetorical, I have is “Why?”. Why, when you’ve made such good changes as the new features in the inbox and on the individual pages, did you drop the blog information from the Browse by Category page? Why did you drop the Nearby tab, which was useful for bloggers to connect to folks in their country? Lastly, why did you change your advertisement pricing from a stable one based completely upon merit to one that becomes based upon daily fluctuations in ads appearing or not appearing, with anyone with more than 7 or 8 ads in their queue (128 and 256 ec per ad respectively) having drastic jumps in the price of an ad?

Perhaps, a suggestion would be that beyond 8 ads in the queue, the next “level” of ads would be at a set separation - say, 128 or even 256, thus making a progression of 256, 512, 768, 1024, 1280, etc. (with the 128 progression being 256, 384, 512, 640, 768, etc.). That would eliminate the exponential growth problem that is natural with the exponential system in place, along with making the most popular blogs more accessible to everyone out there for advertising once again.

And it has nice pastel colors, heh.

Actually, I did the pastels to tell where stuff was, I’ll work on final look and all that stuff later. Right now, it’s a basic shell of how the site will be, with the just the bare essentials in there at the moment.

The good news is that so far, I’ve only managed to completely break the site 3 times, but that was due to missing bits of code from the page that were kinda necessary (i.e. ?> at the end of a PHP statement).

Anyway, the moment you may have been waiting for (and I gotta say, it kinda came quickly considering that just a couple of hours ago, I was looking at one of the files from the default WP theme and going “Huh?” at some of the stuff in there; I’m still doing that, but not as much ) - when I show off a first screenshot of the theme in action.

It will be a little while before I have anything releasable to y’all, but I just wanted to give you a look at what might be coming down the pike.

Tomorrow Later today: TW3, and/or shopping for a bank.

I’ve taken the first step in getting a theme out there for y’all to view - and I’m still quite a long way from having anything concrete. Why? That’s because I am taking the time to read the documentation on how to go about making a theme. I started this afternoon by printing a couple of articles out from the Codex - Theme Development and Designing Themes for Public Release.

As I was reading through the first article as I was working, I started getting bombarded by terms that made no sense. For example, the WordPress Loop (which is explained in another article or two) and the word concomitant (which, incidentally, is a correctly-spelt word in Windows Live Writer, while swear words aren’t - makes no sense to me!). I’m all for expanding language, but when using the word concurrent would suffice, why not use that one?

Anyway, I then read the article about designing themes, and one of the most interesting bits of advice was couched in a long blockquote section (which was on the first printed page, as I had printed it in WLW - which turned out really stunning because of the font it’s printed in ). The advice was something so simple, that if you think about it, this makes total sense, and even if you don’t think about it, you should see the sense.

That advice is - lay out your theme on paper first, and do it away from the computer. After getting that down solid, then you can start dealing with writing the code for it, and by solid, he means that you should have the layout decided on, along with the main colors of the site. Fortunately, I have a bit of an idea in my mind, but now I need to get those onto paper - and decide on some base colors to go with.

However, you know what? I know it’s going to be a quite challenging project to start with, but I’m looking forward to the challenge.

This is a bit of a rain-shortened version of the weekly wrap up, but I have all the regular features in here, with a slightly different focus.

Posts I liked

• First up, some sad news in the blogging world - Radioactive Jam is calling it quits. At least for today.
• Also, if you’re in the UK, you can check out BBC’s iPlayer for video of penguins flying; or just view the spot that aired showing off this rare species of the bird.

New Blogs in the US Blogs Community on Bumpzee

None this week

The US Blogs community is open to bloggers in the US that are a part of the Bumpzee community. If you’re interested in more about the community, you can view the main page of it.

Keywords

• scroogle blog - They don’t have one as far as I know. However, I can do nothing other than wholeheartedly recommend using their search instead of google - it’s the same, just without the tracking.
• offline blog writer - I’ve talked about w.bloggar, however I think that there’s a new winner in my book - look for the details soon.
• home security - This came in via Google Blog Search; why are you searching blogs for that? If you’re concerned, try regular google or the yellow pages…
• blogger paid move to new domain and host - If you’re looking to move your blogger blog to a new domain, then that’s as easy as setting it up. If you want a paid service, then you might want to consider going with WordPress 2.3
• wordpress 2.5 why do dashboards look different on different blogs - Well, that’s likely because some blogs upgraded to the new version and others didn’t. Apparently user input was sought for the 2.5 dashboard - I’m still not buying it…

Around the blog

This week, I talked about my misadventure when it came to my first go at releasing a theme. I’m glad that I’ve learnt a lesson from that, and now I just need to get cracking on reading the information in the Codex about themes.

Another adventure I had was the one in getting the ingredients for an attempt at making risotto. It came out fantastic, and the leftovers tasted really good, especially when I added a bit more cheese to it.

Also, with the release of WordPress 2.5, came my trying it out. First, I wasn’t excited, and now I know it’s going to be given a wide berth when it comes to being placed on my main site now.

Coming up in this shortened week, I’ve got a bit of a complaint about gasoline - yes, the price is high, but everyone is pointing fingers everywhere but where they deserve to go.

‘Til next week y’all!