Whoops, I forgot to post yesterday’s Friday Feed, so I’m reduced to posting it late as a Saturday Syndication.

It’s a good job I did too, because I came across a new blog tonight that I’ve added to my Google Reader. The first post I discovered was Alister’s “How To Grow Your Blog By 2000 Percent In One Month“, which had some very common-sense pointers for setting up a blog, scalability planning and stuff like that. Then he really hit home with some great viral ideas, latching on to breaking news and creating content with a unique spin and giving value to his readers. Check out his SEM Search using Google Co-op, if you want to see what I mean.

I took a poke through Alister’s archives and came across some pretty interesting ideas on blogging and blog development.

One thing I would say, for a blog consultant, his theme sucks big time and I would have expected something much more attractive. But I’m not complaining - the content is what counts and it seems to be growing pretty well. Well enought for Alister to become Friday Feed this week!

I read a little while ago that Mark Boulton has shifted his blog off the Media Temple Grid Service. He cites the poor performance and unexpected overage costs as part of his reason for moving:

Why? Well, in addition to continuing connectivity issues MT are charging for GPU overage. Since they can’t give me more details as to why I’m going over to the tune of about £30 every month (so I can attempt to reduce it right?), then I’ve got myself one of their nice new DV dedicated machines (with a little help and guidance from Andy and Steve).

It’s a little disappointing to read this, because we were al lead to believe that the Grid Server (to quote mt) would be the last hosting plan we’d ever need. We had boasts of how you could run up to 100 sites off a gridserver account and talk of how you could easily withstand a Digg-ing.

I missed the bit of small print that mentioned GPU overages when I signed up.

In fairness to Mark, he’s stuck with Media Temple, just upgraded to a dedicated server. Presumably that’s the pain-free route to take, as (hopefully) the Media Temple staff will help out with migration.

My own experience with the Grid service has been less than happy. We get regular database outages which knock our sites for six as they’re all WordPress driven.

Darren mentioned this the other day, and it’s taken me this long to have a look at Nik Cubrilovic’s original post.

Nik’s argument is that to make real money online, bloggers need to move away from AdSense-based models and investigate other ways of making money online. He cites Guy Kawasaki’s blog as a popular site that made a pittance from AdSense.

The basic intelligence is that AdSense doesn’t pay out big dividends, because your readers become blind to the ads and don’t click through. The problem is that the alternatives are quite difficult to get into unless you’ve got a hyper-popular website.

An increasingly attractive notion is selling advertising space directly. I’ve tried this, and it’s not easy. You’ve got to be prepared for frequent rejections, especially if you target companies who think blogs are small-time or amateur - you won’t get anywhere fast!

For instance, I run a blog that receives between 3-400,000 hits per month. That’s great exposure for a canny advertiser, but it’s harder to sell that space, so I’m still relying on AdSense. It’s bringing in a reasonable amount of money (~$600 per month), but my feeling is that it could be doing better with another solution in place.

I’ve looked at other services, like Federated Media. They seem really good, but turned my blog down because it was UK-based and they didn’t have the advertisers relevant to the region.

I wonder what other successful revenue models bloggers are using as alternatives (or supplements to) AdSense?

Savvy bloggers use press releases as a method of getting exposure for their blogs in the mainstream media.

We’ve used it recently with our reality TV website and had good coverage with local press and media. In fact, word has it that the BBC spotted my wife on a rival channel and tried frantically to get in touch, even ringing people with the same surname in the village! We must’ve forgotten to send them the press release!

Aaron Shear, who I’ve been reading for the last few weeks has some useful pointers if you’re considering press releases as a marketing strategy for your blog.

Firstly, Aaron recommends using an internet wire service, presumably PR Leap or PR Web. This is your best bet anyway, although we’re trying to amass a database of relevant journalists and publications that we can contact directly also.

Another important point is to include hyperlinks in the document to specific pages in your site. You should also target the link text for appropriate keywords, because if your release is used, you will receive very well targetted backlinks!

Probably the strongest suggestion Aaron puts forward is to publish press releases on your website. This is an approach I hadn’t considered before, but it would be useful to have an archive of press releases available for journalists to look back at prior developments.

With our reality TV blog, I try to write a thought-provoking piece on a topical show (say the recent race controversy in Celebrity Big Brother) or perhaps start a campaign to support a particular contestant. I’ll then create a press release linking to that piece and stating our opinions.

The most important thing - if you’re going to use press releases frequently - is to document the process: publishing a newsworthy piece (in my case), writing an interesting press release and then releasing it. You’ll be sending to targetted people as well as general services like PR Leap, so get a spreadsheet or database of contacts and use this every time. Add to it as other sources come up.

By documenting the process, you’ll be able to carry out a press release campaign with military precision every time.

On the heels of a standard feed icon being published for RSS feeds by Matt Brett, some clever folks have got together and created one for OPML files too.

It’s not terribly different from the feed icon (rounded corners, smooth gradients, very Web 2.ugh).

I still don’t think OPML has quite the immediate benefits of RSS, except perhaps when transferring your list feeds to a new feed reader service. What else is it useful for?

That whoooosshhh sound you heard earlier this week was the sound of countless Apple zealots simultaneously wetting their pants about the iPhone announcement.

Having witnessed the frenzy across the web, I’m moved - for once - to write about Apple. But only to say that I don’t care. Not about Apple. Not about Steve Jobs. And as for the demented community that can turn a blind eye to corporate bullying, well…words fail me. And don’t even mention DRM…

You just wouldn’t see this kind of mass hysteria over a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device, yet I’m still not sure what makes the iPhone so damned special. Cameron Moll explains why the iPhone won’t revolutionise the mobile phone industry.

Personally, the iPhone doesn’t offer enough benefit to justify the price tag. Anyway, who wants to pay that kind of money over to be contactable all the time? Not me.

Update: Mike’s gushing is making me feel sick:

It is so fulfilling to watch technology unfold like this, in the hands of the most indispensable and world-changing CEO of our lifetime. It makes all other work you may be doing in the technology world seem like peanuts.

Joy of joys, Drupal 5 has been released today! This truly is a reason to celebrate, as one of the most complex content management/blog platforms has had a decent usability makeover, and has a hot new default theme as well.

I’ve had an itch to work with Drupal for a long time. Perhaps the biggest barrier to entry is how dense the interface is. Lots of options with no explanation as to how it worked or how the pieces fitted together.

That’s all changed. Virtually everything in the admin area has a short descriptive paragraph next to it. They’ve also reorganised the admin area so that things are more logically grouped together. They’ve even ditched the term “taxonomy” for “categories”!

Another new (as far as I know) feature is the ability to have a separate theme for the backend. This really helps you to work out what the public can see and what they can’t.

The best new feature by far is the Garland theme, the new default theme for Drupal. Not only is Garland gorgeous to look at straight out of the box, but thanks to some PHP genius, you can reconfigure the color scheme with a color picker and it will regenerate the CSS and graphics on the fly. In truth, I tried this on my personal site, but got a message back from the server saying that there wasn’t enough memory available to PHP to complete the operation. There’s probably a way to fix this, but I’ve not spent much time with it so far.

If you’ve been watching the Drupal platform, check out the what’s new video clip for an overview.

Maybe it’s because John Oxton was once a chef that he opted for Bite instead of Byte, but who cares? Last year (and this year), Drew McClellan launched a highly successful advent calendar for web designers called 24 Ways. Each day in the run-up to Christmas, there’d be a little nugget of information about how to achieve effects in XHTML/CSS.

Well, Bite Size Standards is the all-year-round version of 24 Ways. (Almost) every day, a new article is posted looking at some aspect of site design or another. There’s always a surprise and you end up thinking “Damn, I’ve always wondered how they do that!”

BSS fell by the wayside until recently when management of the site was undertaken by Andrea Arbogast. I’ve been a follower of Andrea’s for a while now (in a non-stalker way) and I think it’s great that she’s involved in this and driving it forward!

Subscribe to the feed: Bite Size Standards.

Lifehacker has a post about dragging unlinked URLs to the address bar to navigate.

Let’s say you come across an URL that hasn’t been linked. Select it (careful with spaces at the start and end) and drag it up to the address bar. Release the mouse and FireFox will automagically jump to that page.

In fact, you can even drag regular links to the address bar for the same effect.

Other FireFox Navigation Tricks & Techniques

This got me thinking about other navigation tricks I wanted to share. Let’s try:

• ALT+HOME: This shortcut will take you back to the browsers default homepage.
• Changing Your Default Homepage: Drag a link from the address bar over the Home button. Release the mouse and you’ll be asked if you want to reset your homepage.
• ALT+D: This jumps you straight into the address bar and allows you to either type in a new address or modify the address that’s already there.
• ALT+Back Arrow/ALT+Forward Arrow: The essential Back/Forward browsing commands. Don’t leave home without them.
• CTRL+T: Open up a new tab in your browser window. It’ll start up with the cursor in the address bar waiting on your command. Literally.
• CTRL+TAB: Cycles through the various tabs you have open in FireFox. Bonus points for using CTRL+SHIFT+TAB to cycle backwards! Got too many tabs open? Then you might need…
• CTRL+W: Closes the current tab you’re looking at. Be careful, closing the last tab shuts down FireFox!
• Preloading Pages: I like to read stuff right through to the end before reading material that’s been linked to in the post. To have all the material ready and waiting, I middle click each of the links as I browse and they load up in new tabs while I’m reading.
• Bookmarking: If you’re old school and insist on bookmarking, CTRL+D will bookmark the page you’re on. Actually, I’m using the Del.icio.us Bookmarks extension for FireFox and CTRL+D brings up a new bookmark in that too! Hooray!

Conclusion

Well, the conclusion is that I am a FireFox ninja! Most of these tricks should work in Internet Explorer, only a few work in Opera (unfortunately). If you’re a Flock fan, everything should work as I foretold it.

Nonetheless, learning them has improved my web browsing experience no end.

Over to you. Care to share any Power User tips for FireFox?

Mani Sheriar has written an interesting post on the Vitamin website about her experiences with XHTML and CSS web design.

Though Mani touches upon the basic benefits of streamlined CSS/XHTML design, like improved accessibility, page loading and search engine friendliness, she focuses mostly on the long-term benefits of the Standards-based approach.

How easy is it to approach a redesign in the future?

Well, Mani suggests approaching the XHTML structure first, regardless of what the final design will look like - Let’s code our XHTML as if we plan to have 10 different designers apply their own unique layouts to it. If we can do it that way, then we will be able to execute minor or even major design overhauls without touching a single page in the site.

The logic of this idea is carefully explained through experience of several site designs and subsequent realigns, which were achieved with virtually the same XHTML structure.

I must say, this idea appeals as a designer. The closest I have come to this in the real world is through adapting the Sandbox theme for WordPress.

Sandbox is an incredibly complex and powerful WordPress theme that makes the best possible use of semantic XHTML, even implementing Microformats where they can be identified.

The idea behind Sandbox is that it can be skinned completely through CSS, and is flexible enough that you can move containers around in the CSS rather than constantly change your XHTML.

Essentially the whole idea harks back to the ethos behind the CSSZenGarden site: one well-formed XHTML document can be styled in unlimited ways with the right creative input. Very good article and a reminder that we should be striving to improve the art of web standards, not merely resting on our laurels!