Fonts for Web & Blog

Fonts on the web
Originally there was only a limited set of fonts available to website builders. Even now, the fonts readily available in a web browser differ per platform. Even those that do not aim at advanced typography want to have some control over their fonts, for both 'titles' and 'content'

CSS font stack
To overcome the problem of differences in available fonts in various web browsers, css allows a web designer to define a 'stack' of multiple font-families. The browser simply use the first font that is available. The downsides of course are: 1) still a limited set of fonts available, and 2) your page will look different in every browser, especially when using less supported fonts.

Text as image
For titles (ie non-changing pieces of text), one can present text as an image. These images are created upfront in an image editor. This allows you to use every font you can find. Even nowadays this is still often done for titles and such, but has 2 downsides: 1) Google only indexes text, 2) inflexible: for every change in text or font you have to go back to your image editor.

Custom fonts
Nowadays, it is also possible to add custom fonts to your website. This functionality is available in 'most browsers'. This may sound discouraging, but as a web designer, this is often the best you'll get anyway and because of font stacking (see above), it is really easy to present a very practical alternative.

Options
For those who want to do stuff manually, I gladly refer to this post. As often, there's workarounds needed to increase the spread of browsers that will understand you. In such cases, it is nice to make use of frameworks that do this for you.

Google font API
Google font API is such a framework. It is accompanied by a set of freely available font directory. All you have to do is include a css file from Google's server, and you can use the font in your css font definitions as any other font:

<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Font+Name" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

You can define multiple font families (ie 'fonts'), as well as font styles (such as regular, bold, italic, bold-italic).

Blogger fonts
Let's look at Blogger, then Wordpress.com. Blogger enables you to change HTML and CSS, so you are free to go. I realized along the way, though, that Blogger makes it even easier! In the template editor, under 'advanced' you can not only select 'commonly' used web fonts such as Arial and Georgia, but also all (?) available free fonts from the Google font directory. Awsome!

Wordpress and TypeKit
Here we go. Wordpress.com. Here I even needed it more, because I haven't found a way to increase my font size without paying for custom css. TypeKit is really well integrated into Wordpress. The tool itself is quite nice, but due the the degrees of freedom it wants to offer you, quite complex. If you want to stick to 'free', you are limited to 2 fonts and 1 website. For me it was enough to test things.

You have to subscribe to TypeKit, and enter your TypeKit id in your Wordpress dashboard. Then you can use the TypeKit website to select a font and css tags the font should be attached to (if you are lucky, and the template you chose is already in the list, TypeKit does a lot of the work for you). If you publish and wait (they say it may take a few minutes), you should see the changes applied to your blog.

So, although you are limited when keeping it free, it is possible to use TypeKit to change fonts to non-web fonts in Wordpress. In practice however, I found this quite tedious, and previewing is not an option, due to the delay after pressing the publishing button.

Closing remarks
So all together, you can add 'custom' fonts to your webpage, or blog. In Blogger it is super easy, in free Wordpress.com unpractical but doable using TypeKit. Google font API is your friend if you have your own website. Realize however that a full font, including different styles and with extended character sets can become quite big files. Adding 4 fonts to your page can really add up. So be selective in which styles, characters and fonts you really need.

Offspring Update

So at the beginning of this year I set some goals. One of them was to try out various niche blogs. The first one is up and running for a while now and I have used it to experiment with various ways of promotion. This involves Twitter, Twiends, Facebook, Farmville (yes really), Bit.ly and comment-posting.

This post
For bit.ly I wrote a post already. For Twitter, Twiends and Facebook I will write separate posts but only when I have a better understanding of these platforms. For now, I'll update you on what I tried so far.

Facebook & Farmville
First, I created a Facebook page, and started playing Farmville. Why? Because Farmville is popular and Farmville requires neighbours. People are actually willing to crap their friends list with random Farmville players if their true friends don't actually play the game. External websites promoting this didn't really work (should try and make one myself!), but posting on Facebook Neighbour fanpages (there's a bunch of them) did. If you want to speed things up a lot you can actively add others.

Twitter
Next, I created a Twitter account and started to follow other people by searching for things like 'need inspiration' and posting links to my blog. Roughly 10% actually followed me back and it did generate a few hits and even a retweet. But this doesn't really scale up. Actually Twitter's rules are against aggressive following. And against advertising. Aggressive unfollowing is even worse. Furthermore, I don't really feel comfortable harassing people like this.

Twiends
In came Twiends. It is an odd website where you gain credits by following others, visiting websites, watching vids and liking facebook pages (you can also buy credits). You can trade these credits for people returning the favor. I followed a bunch of people that offered many credits and then started to like facebook fanpages like mad (you need an 'approved' facebook page for that, which wasn't a problem for me because I had a lot of friends already because of Farmville). In the end, I quickly had 300 followers on Twitter. The sad thing is that most of these are quite hollow (like mine). A few weeks later there's still 200 left, but posting a link to a blogpost doesn't result in any visit. It may however, help to get started (ie if you follow a random person and have 100's of followers, he/she might be more prone to follow you back?).

Facebook again
Back to facebook, I now created a fan page (tried a group first because I didn't know the difference, as I said I'm mainly doing this to learn by doing) for my blog. I invited my 'friends' and switched my Twiends strategy from getting Twitter followers to getting Facebook likes. See where this ends up...

Closing remarks
In a nutshell, I'm working on and over the boundaries of what I would normally find acceptable. For now I am far from convinced by anything I have seen. What did generate some visitors was commenting on other blogs and the postaday2011 Wordpress tag I added to my posts. My goal was to write a post every other day, so I need 30 by the end of February. I've been posting every day for the first two weeks. I think I'll spread the other half over the remaining time. Also, I will try the commenting-strategy a little more actively. Although less scalable (I do read the post).

Wordpress.org

In my previous post I did a little comparison of Blogger and Wordpress.com, both free online services to host your blog with lots of extras. Wordpress however is orginally an application you can install on your own server. This Wordpress is still alive, kicking and available through wordpress.org. I thought it was nice to evaluate this and share my thoughts on my blog. So here we go.

CMS or Blog?
Full fledged Wordpress.org is more than just a blogging tool. You can also make entire websites with it, comparable to Joomla and Drupal. So it is not just a blogging tool but can be seen as a full fledged Content Management System (CMS). For now I'm leaving Joomla and Drupal out of the equation by the way.

Basics
Wordpress is just a pack of files. It requires PHP and MySQL. Installing is quite easy: download, upload to your server (more about server specifics later!), edit wp-config.php: enter MySQL settings and copy-paste some salt'n'pepa, visit the site with your browser and easily complete the install from there. Now you have something that looks a lot like what you see when subscribing through wordpress.com. But in this case, this is really only the beginning!

Themes & Plugins
Wordpress can easily be extended with plugins and themes. Themes take care of the looks of your site, plugins come in all forms and shapes. Many plugins behave as a widget: a small piece of UI/functionality you can customize place in your (side)bar. The availability of themes is extensive, even if you don't want to pay. WordpressThemeBase has a lot of them and provides one-click browsing from one theme preview to the next. Wordpress.org also provides both themes and plugins. And if your not satisfied, just write your own (adjustments).

Installation of themes & plugins
Installation of themes and plugins can be done in two ways. First, you can upload them by ftp. Luckily, every theme or plugin is just a single folder that contains everything it needs. Further configuration can be done in your browser through the dashboard. Much more convenient is installing plugins directly from the dashboard. You can search, preview and download/install them really, really, really easily.  That is, if this works on your host (this type of interaction requires a bit more 'freedom' which is not allowed by every host and sometimes may require a bit of tweaking from your side).

Wordpress.org VS wordpress.com
The huge amount of plugins and themes available if you install Wordpress.org yourself makes all the difference with Wordpress.com. I'd almost say Wordpress.com is bad publicity for what this platform is actually capable of!

Free 
Well, this difference fades a little I guess if you are willing to pay for Wordpress.com, but you don't need to pay for the .org version either, do you? Well... you do need a host that serves your pages. Nowadays there is free PHP/MySQL hosting available, but do they work with Wordpress? I first tried Awardspace, 000webhost and Dreamhost Apps. But I wasn't pleased. The first two were slow and I couldn't get the installation-from-backend to work, 000webhost even banned me from my site for a day. The latter only provides a pre-installed version with a limited set of plugins and themes. They say you can edit your themes but I don't think you can upload stuff.

Space1 troubles
I also tried  a payed hosting provider I am with (Space1), but their MySQL version was too old. They did provide an auto-install for an older version of Wordpress, but I fear that many plugins would be incompatible. And that problem would worsen over time since I also couldn't upgrade Wordpress (because of the MySQL version AND because their php safe mode didn't allow scripts to run long enough for an upgrade to run smoothly).

Finally
Finally, I came across x10hosting. It did take a little bit of guessing to get it uploaded and get MySQL running over there (there's a forum though, with lots of knowledge already available). But once that hurdle was out of the way, everything else worked like a charm, including installing themes and plugins from the dashboard in the browser! Perhaps there will be times the server is slower than it was when I was testing it, but for now it looks like a decent solution. Your url will be a little bit trashy (their words) like blah.x10.mx. But you can connect your own domain if you want to (if you have one). This is of course not much different from Blogger and Wordpress.com.

Perhaps, when the next offspring blog is coming up, I will try and use wordpress.org on x10hosting!

Wordpress

As I wrote before, I used Wordpress to create my first experimental offspring blog using Wordpress (this one is using Blogger). For those that are about to put up a blog, or are just interested, here's a quick overview for you of my (first) experiences with switching platforms.

Wordpress
So Wordpress is originally this open source project that offers you a system you can install on your (hosted) server, it helps you to easily build a website or a blog. Since it is open source, and since there's a huge community around it (a necessity when using open source products, always look at the past and future  release schedules and the activity of the surrounding community), there's a huge amounts of resources (templates, plugins, books, forums, etc) available. Nice! The project itself is free, but some of the extensions cost money (which actually presents opportunities for developers and designers! I'm taking mental note of my own remark!).

Two flavors: wordpress.com and wordpress.org
So what's with wordpress.com vs wordpress.org? Well, the latter (.org) is where you get the stuff that you have to install and configure yourself (see previous section). Wordpress.com is a platform comparable to Blogger, that offers you a pre-installed wordpress blog / site, including an url in the form yourblog.wordpress.com. The basic functionality is free of charge. The .com version is what I'll be discussing in this post! Maybe you can also install Wordpress (.org) on a free webhost (000webhost is the most obvious choice here), I must try that once and blog about it!

Wordpress.com
So I went to wordpress.com, spent some time in registration process (it's quite straightforward) and before I knew it my blog was online. So far, so good. And comparable to Blogger. Next, I needed a simple but effective layout. I didn't want to spent days designing something, because of the nature of the project.

Templating
Just as Blogger, Wordpress.com offers you a choice of templates. These templates often have (a few) configurable options, such as changing the layout (1, 2 or sometimes even 3 columns), the location of the sidebar (left vs right) and the header image. In contrast to Blogger, I had a hard time finding a template that I really liked. In my opinion, most of the templates are rather crappy. 'No worries', I thought, 'I know CSS'. And I started to change some colors and text sizes, switching back and forth between a browser tab with the online editor and one with a preview.

Money
At some point I noticed a remark: to actually saving the CSS, I needed to pay money. I have to say I don't know how much, and perhaps it could be worth it, but once again this was totally against the whole idea of the project. Furthermore, Blogger does offer you the opportunity to change CSS. Also, Blogger offers you to go mad on the template's HTML, including whatever you want (such as Google Analytics, but more about that later). For Wordpress.com, if you want to go beyond the default offerings, you have to pay.

Posting
You can write posts in Blogger with an editor inside the browser, just as for Google's Blogger. You can embed pictures, videos, mark up your text, etcetera. You attribute tags and categories to your post easily. There's a auto-saving feature and version control. Also, you can schedule a post for later. I don't think Blogger has version control, but all other features it does have as well. However, I found Blogger's editor much more flexible, user friendly and intuitive. I've been having a hard time putting in extra newlines in the Wordpress editor, and inserting videos from another place than Dailymotion and Youtube didn't seem to work. You can edit HTML in Wordpress.com but if you insert an embedded vid or even a BR tag, and switch back or save the post, it's gone. I have to say even Blogger's editor is being a pain sometimes with inserting seemingly random tags that put more whitespace than I want, but this I can easily fix later in HTML mode. I've had much more troubles with Wordpress' editor. Both have a read-bore break-here tag, but the Wordpress template I chose templated the read-more link so hideously I decided not to use it.

Widgets / Gadgets
Blogger gives you lots of gadgets due to its compatibility with OpenSocial and iGoogle, and you can even create your own (see this post). Wordpress does have comparable functionalities and there must be a lot of cool things available, but not in the free online Wordpress.com version. Okay you have a few nice ones, and you could misuse the feed-reader gadget a little, but that's really it.

Useful stuff
Since you can not edit Wordpress.com's HTML, signing up for Google's Webmaster Tools could be a problem. Luckily, there's an option in the tools section in which you can set your identification code. So, this is actually a really nice feature! It does the same for Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center. I didn't even know these so this presents a great learning and blogging opportunity for later!

Community
Wordpress.com does seem to present more of a community. If you use certain tags, your post pops up in Wordpress site wide lists for those tags. I've seen a few people come in this way. Also, you can search all wordpress.com blogs. The comment system is linked to your Wordpress.com account, so your Gravatar (something else, maybe I will be talking about this in a later post) is visible and people are directly linked to your blog. This is actually the same in Blogger. It does present opportunities to generate traffic.

Pinging & Google
Both Blogger and Wordpress do the basic broadcasting to search engines such as Google for you.

Final verdict
Blogger vs Wordpress.com, without willing to pay for anything. I have to say: Blogger wins. Especially if you have some knowledge about HTML and CSS. Wordpress.org might be another story, but I'll have to come back to that later.

Offspring & Niche Blogging

Well, my first offspring-blog of the year 2011 has seen the light. InspiritualBlog. If you asked me what it is about (someone did..), I will have a hard time explaining, but will come up with something like 'inspiration', a little bit on the soft side.

Niche?
Is that a niche? Probably not. By the way, I learned the other day that 'niche blogging' is actually (according to Wikipedia at least) a combination of 'blogging' and 'niche marketing'. According to that page, 'niche blogging is the act of creating a blog with the intent of using it to market to a particular niche market'. The bold-italic is by me, because that's what makes the difference with my original interpretation. What do other sources say about it? Well if you Google niche+blogging, most what you find is about making money anyway, preferably by sleeping. Another source mentioned the 'marketing' part only as an option down the road.

Niche??
In the process I stumbled upon a post about how boring niche blogging is, how nice it is to step out of your shed once in a while, and that this might be okay since many visitors will come for YOU. I think he has a point, although I have seen blogs were visitors would not come for the blogger him/herself. The latter will definitely be the case if you're going for the quick win. I think in that case a niche blog is still the way to go. Otherwise, he has a great point.

Murlu
Who is 'he'? He's murlu.com and I really liked his blog (layout-wise I have seen better though). It feels more 'real' than problogger.com. He has a lot of good content on his site, and (that's what I really like / appreciate), a high level of meta posts, for instance about his revenues.

Offspring
Yes, I was actually talking about this new blog I set up. I'm trying a few new things here, which gives me the chance to learn (the whole point after all) as well as a chance to write about it on this blog. So, coming up will be articles about Wordpress as a blogging platform, Twitter and Facebook as marketing tools and bit-ly as a nice tool with a hidden agenda.

Monetization

Yep, there's the M-word.

What is monetization?
For non-native English speakers like me, what is monetization? In short monetization is a more classy word for making money. Well, the original meaning is a little different (the process of attributing 'value' to a bank note, sea shells or gold) but in blogger's language it means starting to make a profit from something (that was previously free or unprofitable).

I have seen the M-word pop up already a number of times this month while getting acquainted with the world of blogging. I also have to admit that I find these posts, be it videos or writings, quite interesting / inspiring to read. That is probably part of why they were written.

How does one perform the beautiful art of monetization?
Ah. To know, you want? To be, you should. To understand, you must! And only the beginning, that is!

Seriously
Seriously. Would I be writing blogpost after blogpost, for free, if I knew how to make money out of it? Actually, maybe I would. I kinda like it. But still I don't have the answer for you my friend. I will try to find it though. And I will tell you all about it.

Droste effect, or the rabbit biting of it's own head
When you Google for money making, you will probably find these extremely crappy sites promising you loads of money. All you have to do is buy there (e)book, which is about how to make loads of money. The book you buy itself is then probably about making loads of money by writing a book about making loads of money and selling it to fools like..you. (No, not you, because you didn't buy the book). This stuff smells funny, no?

So how much different then, are blogs that make money by showing you how to make money? That depends perhaps a little on what they show you, and whether it works. And most importantly whether it involves doing something else than the original writer is doing.

I will stop here. It is just a shiver I had for a moment seeing people commenting on blogs to get people to their own blog (which is then on turn probably about getting people to a blog), seeing people follow people on Twitter to get followers, that in turn are probably only following to get more followers themselves. Probably to attract readers to their blog, which is then on turn probably about how to get more followers on Twitter.

See where I'm going at? How much of this stuff is just a self-containing bubble? And will it burst before I can do some serious monetization?

Time will Tell.

Metagain

Meta...again
I thought it was time for another meta blog post. There's only a few days left of December and with this post I am back on track for the one post per day goal. I admit some posts were shallower than others, but all together I do think it is a nice display of my current capabilities as a Blogger (leaving open whether these capabilities are any good). Let's look at how the Blog is doing.

Visitors
Woot, my site gets visitors! The transition from a total flatliner to getting-some-hits is very cool. I also have to admit that some promotional tweaking does help, at least in this phase. A few backlinks in other blogs (mostly comments I made myself I have to admit) and a niche subject that started to generate some hits did help a lot. Last two weeks I'm at +/- 15 visitors a day (multiple page hits per visit though), 20% are returning visitors: thanks! Really! Thank you! :-D

Tools / statistics
I have three tools I commonly use: Google Statistics, Blogger Statistics and Google Webmaster Tools. They all have their pros and cons. Blogger's statistics are real time, the other two are lag 1 or 2 days behind. I  only recently discovered the cool things that Google's Webmaster Tools offers. Some features only become interesting when there's enough data available. One that works (for me) nicely at the moment involves Google's searches.

Pingywebedition
Apparently Google keeps track of every search, including the pages that were returned, their position, and which hits are actually clicked on. The only search query I see info for is pingywebedition. Although the amount of searches per day are around 50 (very low!), I have a CTR (Click Trough Rate, the percentage of times that my page is actually clicked when it is displayed) of 20% (this has been rising the last few weeks). This gives my roughly 10 visitors a day (each hitting perhaps a number of pages). Although these numbers are soooo low and insignificant in any way, it nicely shows how 'being big in a niche' can be better than 'being small in huge topic'.

New hits
Today I noticed I'm also being found once in a while now in searches for the Harmony Remote 650. Maybe this is coincidence, maybe some other factors play a role here that I do not fully understand (yet)! Don't tell, but I tried to push that a little more today by posting my review at a few other (relevant) blogposts. It is micromanagement, I know, and it is only worth the effort because of the learning experience. And the rush of rising graph's :-D

Next?
What's next? I had another idea today: start a new blog each month, niches this time, stopping what doesn't work or isn't fun to do, and use this blog as a meta blog about the whole process. That way, this blog would also get some focus (and less-than-a-blogpost-a-day). Haha, this is so me, not wanting to choose, even when I have to pick a niche, I think about picking 12 :-D Will let you know how this evolves!

We blog, we are

It's the little things that matter.
pingywebedition got my attention and blogged about it. During the process I came across various blogs that were pleased with the referral. A referral more volatile than a puff of smoke in a tropical storm. So I decided, as a spin-off, to blog about and refer (a referral that does not change in a day) to these blogs, which I stumbled upon through sheer serendipity. United by two things: we were once mentioned by pingywebedition and we blog. And therefore, we are.

Anja loves it
Anja is German, which makes her blogs a little harder to read for me. But her posts are joyful. There's lots of pictures, make-up, fashion there's stories, there's music and there's movies. In short: it's about what makes her world go round. She definitely has a lot of interests! She blogs mostly during wintertimes, or perhaps next year she'll keep on blogging all year long?

Babysteps
Kimberly is 15 and has a lot to tell to the world. Her blog's all nice and pink. She had only 4 hours of sleep last night due to homework, but managed to post like 16 times. Today. Where does that leave me? Trying to post once a day for a month? She had to go to the doctors today. I sure do hope she is ok!

HTML's magic
This person is truly sincere and devoted a whole post to it's readers from all over the world. It's a nice proof that if you just keep focus on creating a nice / good blog, the visitors will start coming more and more. This blogger definitely puts an effort in the blog posts. They are quite long and often contain lots of photo's / images / screenshots. The subjects center around HTML, but actually vary across all that is life.

Zoomflux
Zoomflux is productive! Only after spending some time on the main page I realized all posts were from today! I do wonder if there's any reader that can keep up with this pace :-D The posts vary in subject from daily life stuff to making money online to entrepreneurship. By and all, the blog is interesting and original.

nerdartnerd
This guy only posted a shell command to ping the pingy site a considerable number of times. Network pinging that is. The name of this blog suites the contents very well! It's about art and truly nerdy stuff, including art from the blogger himself.

Maine Writer and Photographer
Ronna writes about writing. And photography. On her website poemsforalloccasions.com she offers custom poetry.

Heir Tight
This blog consists of one post, about blogspot / Google and a mistake concerning ads. The theory is that a visitor came by the otherwise unknown blog and messed it all up. By accident of course. Ya'll be warned!

Not So Witty Witterings
This time, the mentioning of pingywebedition was not on the blog itself, but on a forum. The blog itself is about weddings. Not something I read about daily, but the design is nice and so are the pictures.

Well, that's it for now. Took me some time actually. And I was thinking this would be one of the more easily done posts :-D It was great fun however, diving a little into all these very different blogs.

Keep on posting!

Less is More

It doesn't always hold true of course. Nothing does, really. But it can be an eye opener. My eyes are open yes, but they need stitches, or wooden sticks - the latter being favorable because less irreversible - to prevent them from closing again. Time can do that. That, and much, much more. Oh no, it is less, it's less that's more.

Less what?
Less different subjects (my blog, especially this month, will NOT be the best example for this :). Writing about a whole range of different subjects will most certainly get you a bunch of roaming visitors. But they will see only 1 page, 2 at most, and be gone. Gone forever. Yes. But if you focus on a particular subject or if your posts share a certain theme, chances are you will get more loyal visitors. Furthermore, your blog becomes a brand on itself, and you start being mentioned elsewhere. There might be only a handful of people Googling your subject, but if they do, you have a fair chance of being visited (because there are so few other sites about the same subject).

Writing less blog posts can also be 'more', especially if you leave out the less interesting posts. Also, when you blog too much, people can't keep up and loose interest.

Paradox of choice
The paradox of choice is something I can heavily relate to. In essence it means: more choices can result in worse decision making, or failure to make a decision at all (so: 'more is less' holds true as well). They often say that the current generation of 20/30-ers experience this paradox in their careers: too much choices make them insecure about their decisions, which leads to stress and unhappiness.

Less products
The 'less is more' philosophy is also important when selling products. Why? Well, for starters there's the aforementioned paradox of choice. More choices might lead to less sales! This is counter intuitive, but an important consideration. This can concern the amount of product categories as well as the amount of products (brands, types, colors) inside a category. A very good strategy might be to severely decrease the amount of categories (for instance: instead of clocks, frames and gadgets, sell only original Seiko watches from the Kinetic range) and modestly expand the remaining category/categories. Such a focus would also makes your shop more recognizable and easier to brand. Moreover, it saves you time and energy, which you can then spend on quality, specialization and depth.

Less writing
Yeah, yeah, I know. People are lazy. Being to the point helps to get the message across!