OzWebMasters

A subscription flyer dated 8 Feb 2008 lists numerous reasons why I should subscribe. One of those is the opening sentence, which says:

“…but for less than $5 a week, BRW really is your best investment.”

At the bottom of the page the price for a 50 issue subscription is $199, incl. GST.

$199 divided by 50 is…. $3.98.

• perhaps they decided that less than $5 sounds more appealing than less than $4
• perhaps they can’t count
• perhaps they didn’t update the whole flier when they reduced the price

I’ve emailed them to ask. Their marketing email address (as listed on their site) doesn’t work! So I tried one of the others…

See the preview here. It is now filled instead of an outline, and is two-tones of blue instead of one. My 2yo could have achieved that!

I’m always a fan of differentiating two words when they are used to form one word, ie OzWebmasters - either using color, font, style or capitalization. They should have done this from the start, emphasising the two important words PAY and PAL.

I use public transport in Melbourne. I regularly need to look up timetables. Each time I go to the official site - I can never remember if it is called MetlinkMelbourne or MelbourneMetlink - they have “improved the design and layout, and each time it is still overly complicated!

The latest version requires me to type in a destination, and then asks me if that was the train station, the bus stop or the tram stop I am after, and only if I spelled it correctly. What’s wrong with drop-down lists?

Anyway, the reason for the post, is for me to complain about the idiocy of owning metlinkmelbourne.com
and not doing anything with it!

Of course it makes sense to own it, that way you stop someone else from owning it - but how hard is a redirect to the proper site?

What do you if you have more websites than you can manage? What if they are your babies, that you care about? It’s an agonizing decision, to keep something for sentimental reasons, or sell it to give yourself more time. It’s like finally putting those holey jeans (or rotten sneakers) in the bin, despite years of being close.

Hence my current dilemna. I used to make a minor living providing a USA people tracing service. It was a unique service (service, as in “helping people”), I loved doing it, and I doubt I could sell it to someone who could do the job as well as I did. The domain name, fiind.com, might even be worth something now, given that sites like Digg are using similar mis-spellings successfully.

But now I cannot justify doing something than earns me $10/hr. But who knows, my web empire could easily crumble, and then I could resume the Fiind service and still afford to feed my family.  And yet if I get rid of it, it will free up some brain space and lessen the guilt I have from it sitting there, hibernating….

Maybe I’ll just put off the decision a bit longer!

I’ve seen this before, with Looksmart. A few hiccups and folk start jumping ship. And then the management act like they don’t care, and wish they could jump too. And then we all notice folk leaving, and we leave as well, or at least just stop participating.

Apparantly editors have been unable to do their unpaid job* for the last month or more. And the job is getting worse, as cunning webmasters try to trick editors into listing them. But basically it is hard, tedious, boring unpaid work. Who has time for that?

http://www.searchengineguide.com/searchbrief/senews/009197.html

It is commonly believed that if you use Google’s Site Maps, (aka Webmaster Tools), your site will be more frequently indexed, and more accurately indexed. To get started all you need to do is use Google’s Python script, or a 3rd party solution.
Problem is, most 3rd party solutions just crawl your site, as Google does, so there’s nothing to gain. And the python script, what is that, something from the eighties? At the very least have a php script for us to use!

The way I see it:

• Every site should have a site map, not just for Google, but for visitors
• Site maps generated from crawling your site miss the page you forgot to link to
• Site maps should be generated automatically

Solution:

Hosting companies provide loads of scripts today (like Fantastico). Why not a server-based, Google-friendly, publishable sitemap generator? And make it a once-a-week cron job. And install it by default, but let us know how to turn it off.