Just another nerd.
And while I’m praising Conversant, I should mention that Yanisar Enterprises also did an excellent job of taking my web sites to that sports cliche “next level.”
I hired them to do a redesign of AnimalRights.Net and they also did some basic re-architecturing — the two in combination have sent pages views at the site through the roof.
They were very reasonably priced and very professional. I hope to put them to work redesigning this site very soon.
A couple years ago I received what I think was the strangest e-mail anyone’s ever sent me. The author of the e-mail was an individual who set up a web site devoted to the same topic as one of my web sites. I liked and respected his site, but the e-mail was to the point — he felt that my site was so well done that his had become pointless and he was shutting it down.
Wow. That floored me. Personally, I don’t think my sites are all that, especially since I get bored or busy quite frequently and just stop posting for months at a time.
Anyway, I’ve said a lot of things about Conversant in the five years since I moved all of my web sites to it (wow, can’t believe that much time has flown by). But the bottom line is this — pick any topic and using Conversant I could build a kick-ass site by myself that others would have to spend thousands of dollars and bring a team of people in to keep updated and organized.
I’m working on a special project now and, of course, I looked at all the sites that I’ll be competing with for attention. They all have made design decisions that leave me scratching my head thinking, “why would they do that?”
The answer is clear on closer inspection — the software they’re using to run their website pretty much limits them to that. So I’ll go live with my site this summer, and by January 2006 I’ll be in the top ten on Google for the search term while they’re still wrestling with their clutzy CMS.
So, in summary, give Conversant a try. It will turn you’re skinny weakling of a website into a muscle-bound one that all the search engines will love in just 15 minutes a day!
Via Boing! Boing! comes this awesome announcement,
May 18-20, All Day – Namco Hometek – We LOVE Katamari Ball – Help the Prince please the King of All Cosmos at this E3Expo with the We LOVE Katamari ball. The King of All Cosmos has requested all attendees to provide items throughout the three days. Items should be lightweight enough to be attached and as nutty and creative as possible. Items should NOT be x-rated in nature or include clothing, books, magazines, papers or garbage. Those representing the Prince also have full right to decline any item.
Excellent. Can someone say, ROYAL RAINBOW!?
According to Seth Dillingham, Weblogs.Com has started ignoring pings from many Conversant sites, including this one.
Seth writes,
I’ve debugged the pings we’re sending, repeatedly. The server always returns the “thanks for the ping” response that indicates the ping was received successfully. Yet, our sites are never listed. The same is true for pings I’ve sent manually. It appears to be accepting the pings and then ignoring or forgetting them.
The service is run by Dave Winer. I wrote to Dave on May 6th to find out if he knew about the problem. No response. I wrote again on May 8th. Still no response. I wrote again this morning. Still no response.
Wow, there’s a shock. Remember how Dave freaked out when he thought Google and de-indexed his sites and how angry he was because he couldn’t get a response from the company? But, hey, the rules don’t apply to Dave. If he wants a problem to go unresolved for weeks at a time, its not a bug, its a feature.
Since I know the pings are going through correctly, and Dave is ignoring my email, I’m concluding that we’re being intentionally ignored. Why, though? I haven’t a clue. Is it something personal against me? Something technical about Conversant that he doesn’t like? (Then why didn’t he inform me?) Is it some business consideration? (I can’t imagine what that could be, since Dave isn’t in business right now.)
. . .
Being ignored by weblogs.com isn’t the end of the world, but there are a number of blog tracking and categorization systems (including Blogshares) that using its changes.xml files in the heart of their applications. Not being listed means we basically fall off the radar.
Yep. Not a major problem; more of an annoyance. A service so widely used by others probably needs to be in the hands of someone a bit more stable and responsive to fixing outages than Dave.
Dave’s great at innovating and coming up with incredible ideas, but he’s not the person you want in charge of implementation and support.
Don’t tell Dave Winer, but Mark Pilgrim has launched a Dive Into Greasemonkey online book, featuring a nice tour and how-to guide to Greasemonkey, the fantabulous Firefox extension that lets users radically alter web pages as they surf. Learn how to slice-and-dice the web in your own spare time!