Remember the buzz about Google Plus when it launched? It was a nice bump while it lasted. But I think it’s safe to say it hasn’t sustained itself. My #OccupyXmas piece over at Salon.com has had 504 Facebook likes since it went up a day and a half ago. How many Google +1s has it had? 18 — a little over 3 percent as many. I’d say the ball is in Google’s court. They’d better come up with a new feature, or this game is over.

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Google Plus versus Facebook: Where things stand today

These days I’m pretty casual about my web presence, but a few years ago I gave some thought to maximizing the impact of blog posts. I ended up scheduling most of my posts for 5:00 am Pacific time. My strongest geographical regions were the U.S. east and west coasts, and that would be 8:00 Eastern time. A lot of people check their feeds in the morning, and it is incontrovertible that most people do the bulk of their browsing at work, little as employers like hearing this (so I mainly post on weekdays).

A new study purporting to track people’s affective states through the day brings new information to this topic. Researchers tracked the relative use of positive and negative words in tweets at different times of the days throughout the week. They found that negative terms predominated early in the morning and mid-to-late afternoon, while positive terms were most common from 6:00 to 9:00 am and in the late evening. The pattern held even on weekends, when most people aren’t going off to work.

The methodology can be questioned. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert points out that “if you counted the good and bad words people said during intercourse, you’d mistakenly conclude they were having an awful time.”

Supposing the results are valid, what are the implications for people posting to the web? Should you make negative posts when people are most negative and positive posts when they are most positive? Or should you always try to post when people are positive and will presumably be most receptive to what you are saying? Or does this not matter at all, and what you should really be looking at is the volume of traffic — my guess is that while people might be feeling positive around 10:00 pm there are probably significantly fewer of them online at that time than in the morning.

Well, I’m moving my post time forward an hour, from 5:00 am to 6:00 am. I hope you’re happy.

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Informational graphic via the New York Times

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What is the best time of day to post to a blog?

I recently lamented my belated discovery that “alt” text was not being displayed on mouseover of my images.

The estimable Peecay of Bibliodyssey has replied by e-mail with a description of his system:

I try to abide by the pure description (for a blind person, is how I understood it) to approximate an image with alt tag (eg. “woodcut of cat in colour from Japan, 16th cent.”)

But then I try to put something specific to the book or author or illustrator in as the title tag.

I’ve always worked under the assumption that – when including captions as well, below the image – I was priming those images as best they could be to be open to image search engines.

What I hear from the “SEO” types is that alt tags seem to help with search engines but title tags less so. That’s hearsay, really, and I haven’t tested it.

According to SearchEngine Journal, it is indeed important to keep the various tags different. Ann Smarty, speaking of the alt and title tags, says, “include your main keywords in both of them but keep them different. Keyword stuffing in Alt text and Title is still keyword stuffing.”

Wily Michael Gray has a helpful guide to optimizing images for search engines.

All good advice. But kind a lot of work to provide three different kinds of unique nonrepetitive text for all your images.

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More on the “alt” tag

Man, I guess I’m late coming to this realization but I just noticed that in my default browser, Chrome, my images’ “alt” text was not being displayed on mouseover on a page I was working on. A little investigation revealed that nowadays you’re supposed to use the “title” tag instead. I’ve got seventeen years of web pages that use the “alt” tag. My older version of Dreamweaver has a field for “alt,” but I would have to insert “title” manually. Color me bummed.

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Nope, that’s not me. The image is from jugbo’s photostream.

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“Alt” text not displayed on mouseover

I made a simple landing page for 1616. (It’s just a big image map — a picture with clickable areas –that’s about 200 KB.) If it doesn’t load and look okay for you let me know.

There’s room to expand to the right. If I get another blurb or two I’ll shift the brief descriptive copy right. That copy is adapted from the publisher’s catalogue. Even though I live in Richmond, home of Rosie the Riveter, I would not normally refer to my own writing as “riveting.” But I am trying to be a good compliant author.

UPDATE 1: The blurb text was too small so I moved the descriptive copy right. Compare the finished page to the thumbnail above by clicking though on it.

UPDATE 2: I added a simple slide show of sample spreads.

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1616 landing page

Google has quietly introduced an API (application programming interface) for web fonts. This could potentially result in better — and also worse — web typography — depending on the skill and knowledge of the people who implement it. Unfortunately only a small minority of font users these day take the time to educate themselves about the print tradition.

Google’s font system involves referencing fonts stored at fonts.googleapis.com. The open source license fonts are then served up by the Google servers and should appear on your web pages without your needing to upload or embed them. There are instructions here.

Only a small number of fonts are available at present but no doubt the list will grow. I wonder what the type designer community will think about this.

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Google font API

Dear blogger:

Since you objected to my referencing your item I have removed that post from my site.

I was if anything excessive in giving acknowledgment to you. I linked to your post twice in mine. I quoted a few sentences from your piece as a direct quote, signaled with quotation marks, attribution, and a link.

To make sure this doesn’t happen again (I guess because you don’t wish to be bothered by traffic to your site) I have removed your site from my feeds. You can rest easy.

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The web is a wide and mysterious place

*

Via Daily Wh.at

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How the internet works

I like the way I can rearrange tabs in Chrome — I can move the one I opened last to the left if I want. I can type a search term directly into the address bar. I can open a download from the status bar at the bottom of the page. On the New Tab page I can see a list of pages recently closed, and links to my top sites are opened automatically.

In Chrome I can easily sync all my browsers — if, for example, I change something on my netbook the change will be made on my laptop and my work computer as well. Extensions are intelligently managed. One click gets me to facebook, local weather, Google Translate, Google Docs, and my calendar (which is synced to my smartphone).

There are a few things Chrome lacks that I miss: There is no print preview button, which is crazy. The back button for some reason takes me to the top of the page rather than the place I left from. And because my laptop has a wide screen I liked to have the sidebar open in Firefox.

I hate the idea of one company controlling so much of the world’s information and the ways we access it. I always seem to come to Google products a little reluctantly. But in the end it’s the features that win me over.

Sorry, Firefox.

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Why Google Chrome is my default browser

In recent months a flood of so-called books have been appearing in Amazon’s catalog. VDM Publishing’s imprints Alphascript and Betascript Publishing have listed over 57,000 titles, adding at least 10,000 in the previous month alone. These books are simply collections of linked Wikipedia articles put into paperback form, at a cost of 40 cents a page or more. These books seem to be computer-generated, which explains the peculiar titles noted such as ‘Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit.’ Such titles do have the marketing effect of turning up in many different searches. There is debate on Wikipedia about whether their ‘VDM Publishing’ page should contain the words ‘fraud’ or ‘scam.’ VDM Publishing’s practice of reselling Wikipedia articles appears to be legal, but is ethically questionable. Amazon customers have begun to post 1-star reviews and complain. Amazon’s response to date has been, ‘As a retailer, our goal is to provide customers with the broadest selection possible so they can find, discover, and buy any item they might be seeking.’ The words ‘and pay us’ were left out. Amazon carries, as a Googled guess, 2 million different book titles, so VDM Publishing is currently 1/35th of their catalog, and rapidly growing.

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Spamming Amazon

Bronwyn van der Merwe has an interesting post over at the BBC Blog about redesigning their web content. Whether you approve of all the decisions or not, what’s wonderful about the post is how through and generous it is in sharing the various elements of the design. The design uses a grid system, which is pretty standard for print materials but is more difficult on the web because of the lack of uniformity in screen resolutions. The post looks at banner design, embedded media, mobile platforms, fonts, sources of inspiration, type over images, color palette, and more. They are moving away from lefthand navigation to top-of-page horizontal navigation. They even created a new set of icons. And a style guide, which they are sharing as a download.

I’m not crazy about the aqua tones (this site also uses a blue palette but I hope with a bit more soul), and I don’t really understand combining Helvetica with Gill Sans. Etc. Still, it’s a great look at the process of rationalizing design on a large site with many different kinds of pages.

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A new look for the BBC

Anyway, I have a handful of invites left to share, so if anyone wants to try the beta version, send me an e.  Google says “Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times. Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick. Happy waving!”

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Google Wave

Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole recently released an interesting WordPress theme called Basic Maths. Like Vinh’s own blog, Subtraction (which the new theme somewhat resembles), Basic Maths aggressively foregrounds the underlying design grid. In fact, you can even hit a shortcut key combination to superimpose the grid over the blog as you’re working on it.

It’s great that the authors have done so much to bring a grid design system to the web. In addition, they have enabled single-click color control, a clever approach to category and tag display, and a thoughtful archives page. I like the style sheet that enables a large number of different image sizes and placements, all oriented to the grid.

What isn’t entirely to my taste at both Subtraction and Basic Maths, however, is the very heavy reliance on rules to emphasize the grid. I guess I prefer my grids latent rather than in your face — sometimes these pages look like one of those puzzles where you have to move one match stick to make a different shape.

Still, a disciplined and versatile design with careful typographic functions, well implemented. The authors are selling licenses at the “introductory price” of $45.

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An interesting WordPress theme

Recently Wired magazine asked a group of designerz to reenvision Craigslist. According to Wired, “Visitors arriving at craigslist are confronted by a confusing homepage cluttered with links most people will never click on. Overall, the user interface is in dire need of an organizing principle that guides you to the details you seek while filtering out extraneous information.”

The design above was submitted by a team from the NY Times led by Khoi Vinh (I  think — ironically, the Wired page is a little confusing and hard to follow). According to Vinh, “It feels more open, more nimble,” than the existing site.

I believe the weird little pointer thingees are not part of the design but were added by Wired to highlight elements of the design. Probably their colored circles are intended to signal something — but what?

The main functional difference appears to be that when you click on a section it opens within a window on the page rather than taking you to a new page.

All in all, the proposed redesign seems a reasonable piece of work. But I wonder how it would be received by the Craigslist community.

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UPDATE: Khoi Vinh discusses the redesign on his blog.

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Redesigning Craigslist

Seattle-based design/branding firm Methodologie (not sure why they use the French term) have created a useful guide to web canvas size. As you may be able to see from the above detail, they estimate that everyone on the web can see a 760 x 640 px screen without scrolling, that 92 percent can do the same for a screen 960 x 600 px, and 50 percent can read a 1210 x 640 px page without scrolling, while only 11 percent can do the same for a 1370 x 730 px screen.

Of the first group, they say “Choose this canvas size if you are targeting users with poor eyesight or those who are likely using legacy hardware (e.g. the developing world). This canvas size also caters to non-HD TV-based browsers.” You should choose the last resolution, on the other hand, “if you are targeting media professionals.”

Their percentages are based on statistics from thecounter.com and marketshare.hitslink.com, “two of the most well known sources of screen resolution statistics.” To see how this site’s users compare I looked at my Google Analytics statistics, Which gave me the following data about my visitor’s five most common screen resolutions:

GA goes on to give statistics for 247 different screen resolutions — I had no idea there were so many! But looking at the top five I see that they make up more than 80 percent of all my visitors. Something tells me the relatively few among the other 20 percent who have smaller screen resolutions are used to scrolling, and I see no need work on a smaller canvas to accommodate them. Still, the smallest size among the top five, 1024 x 768, makes up almost a quarter of the total. That might not be a bad size to aim for. For now.

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What screen resolution is your web canvas?

The blog of the museum for which I do publications recently appeared on a list of “100 best curator and museum blogs.” The list was attributed to someone named Emily Thomas at onlineuniversities.com. That was nice, but there was no explanation who Emily Thomas is or how the list was arrived at, and a visit to the onlineuniversities site raised as many questions as it answered.

Some days later the museum received an e-mail from Emily Thomas suggesting that she guest blog for us and pointing to the list to establish her bona fides. We have a responsibility to be true to our nonprofit mission, and I wrote back with some questions:

• How was the list of 100 museum and curator blogs arrived at? Were there specific criteria you considered? Is it your personal list or were others involved in formulating it?
• What is the mission of OnlineUniversities.com? Who is the website’s intended audience? Are you a for-profit organization and if so what product or service do you sell?
• Have you written guest posts on other museum sites that you can refer me to?
• What is the nature of your interest in our museum? What topics would you feel most interested in or qualified to write about?

Well, that’s a lot of questions, so maybe it’s understandable that I never heard back from Emily Thomas. Meanwhile, a colleague did a quick check of onlineuniversities.com and found that it is owned by “P. Gavins.” One might assume that this is the Patricia Gavins who is mentioned in the site’s “about” page. Here is the text of the “about” page in full:

My name is Patricia Gavins, and I am a former professor with experience in both traditional and online educational settings. With over twenty years of teaching and research experience, I am committed to spreading the lessons I’ve learned to people considering an online education. I hope to provide valuable advice regarding new developments in online education, learning tips for both online and traditional education, and important information every student should know about degree accreditation. Check out my blog to stay on top of the latest news and trends in online education.

No resume or further bio or specifics about Patricia Gavins is provided. A quick internet search finds scant information corroborating her “twenty years of teaching and research” — but as I said this was a quick search, and maybe I just didn’t look hard enough.

But in turns out the domain’s registration address leads not to Patricia Gavins but instead to Patrick Gavin (Patrick, not Patricia; Gavin, not Gavins), who owns an SEO consulting and online marketing firm in Iowa City and appears also to operate domains related to nursing schools and online dating.

So those are the facts — draw your own conclusions about onlineuniversities.com. But here’s what I find really interesting — whatever you think of their credentials, their link-building strategy is working! Witness:

• The Museum of Jewish Heritage blogs about being on the list
• The Cleveland Museum of Art talks about being on the list on their facebook page
• The Burke Museum reruns the list on their site
• Design Museum Blog blogs about being on the list
• The Carolina Curator blogs about being on the list
• Curator’s Corner blogs about being on the list
• Current.com cites it
• Hamsurfer also cites it
• And even the National Scouting Museum tweets about being on the list

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Link-building anyone?

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Image from P/\UL’s photostream

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100 Best Curator and Museum Blogs; Or, Link-building Made Easy

Which search engine gives the best results? Sure, Google’s by far the most popular and has the largest infrastructure. And there could be interface preferences to take into account. But just in terms of sheer relevance of results, which is best?

Now you can test this yourself, using Michael Kordahi’s blind search web application. It strips the formating out of the results for a search and show you results from Google, Yahoo, and Bing in random order. Above are the results for a search for “right reading” (without the quotes). Out of vanity and self-interest, I don’t much care for the results on the left, which presume I’m most interested in finding a book guaranteeing reading improvement for my child. The other two show my website in the first slot, but I prefer the middle results, which also show this blog (as opposed to the html home page) in the two spot rather than the four slot as on the right.

Results were running about 45% google, 30% bing and 25% yahoo, but someone was gaming the system and Kordahi has removed the totals for the moment. But you can still do your own tests.

Okay, let’s unveil the contestants.

I pronounce Google the winner on a search for “right reading,” followed by Bing; Yahoo brings up the rear, from my partisan point of view, on this one. Which is best for you?

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Blind testing search engines

I mentioned earlier that I was working on a blog for the Asian. I’m sure it will continue to evolve and get refined as we figure what works and what doesn’t, but we have now announced the blog, and there is more and more content going up, including:

• Education director Deb Clearwaters on tea master Sen So-oku coming to the museum
• Assistant registrar Cristina Lichauco on preparing objects for the Samurai to be shipped from Japan to San Francisco
• Retail expert Nicole Harvey on Japanese glass floats arriving for sale during the samurai show
• PR specialist Jennifer Yin on saying good-bye to our visitors from Bhutan
• Graphic designer Jason Jose on a favorite samurai film.
• and more . . .

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Asian Art Museum blog goes live

I’ve been setting up a blog for the Asian Art Museum.  We’ve been putting up a little content but haven’t announced it yet, so I’m kind of letting the cat out of the bag with this post — consider it a special private preview for Right Reading readers.

Maybe one of those readers can help me think about a problem I’m having. At the very bottom, below the footer,  I’m seeing an “undeclared entity warning” error message. I think this means I have some weird character somewhere — a sort of illegal alien, if you will — but so far it eludes me. Where can this thing be coming from? I am, for the moment, stumped.

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UPDATE: I determined that this error was caused by the “Twitter for WordPress” plugin.

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Undeclared entity

I have been busy constructing an index to my 7 Junipers site, which is devoted to Asian Art and Culture. The index in process is accessed via one of the site’s navigation tabs. Tag clouds are often seen in sidebars, but I think they work better as pages. At 7J I made a brief post summarizing the steps involved creating an index page  via the tags function.

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Making a WordPress index page