Tag: Conversant

There was a time when I was pretty obssessed with the traffic stats for my site. I’ve reached the point, however, where I don’t even think about it anymore and it’s largely the fault of Mark Morgan and Seth Dillingham and their respective companies.

Back in 1999, for example, I was very impressed that my web site served up more than 2,000,000 page views. Heck, I was impressed at the end of 2003, that I racked up an average of almost 16,000 page views/day. My goal was to reach the 34,000 page views/day mark, so I could hit the 1 million/month level.

And then came Seth and Mark and ruined it all for me. First, Seth’s company, Macrobyte, created Conversant, which lets me do a lot of sophisticated categorizing and other content management niceties without having to hire a programmer or become one myself. Then Mark and Yanisar redesigned my most popular site, AnimalRights.Net with an awesome new design.

The result? This server is currently serving up about 70,000 page views per day and growing. That’s just insane.

Why blog? I used to write for a local newspaper with a pretty sizable circulation and on occasion for a large metropolitan newspaper. I’m easily being read by more people now than I could have ever hoped for as a lower level stringer/occasional op-ed writer, and the pay’s about the same (i.e., barely covering my expenses).

More than three years ago, Macrobyte added custom fields option to Conversant, the software I use to manage this and the rest of my web sites. That was like a revelation and I think I’ve exploit the feature more than anyone else using the software — I have some sites that have a couple dozen different fields and close to 2,000 values within those fields. The extensive, detailed categorization that has is one of the reasons my sites have been as successful as they have been.

Now the rest of the world has discovered “tagging” posts with categories (I hate that word “tagging” — sounds like I’m out spraypainting graffiti) thanks to services like Flicker, Del.icio.Us, Technorati and others. And that’s also brought a bit of a blacklash which goes something like this: tagging posts is a pain in the ass and users will quickly abandon it.

Dave Winer captures this view in describing why he doesn’t categorize his posts,

I’ve seen the same thing. I have a very easy category routing system built-in to my blogging software. To route an item to a category, I just right-click and choose a category from a hierarchy of menus. I can’t imagine that it could be easier. Yet I don’t do it.

It’s also very easy to add a new category, or to even reorganize my whole taxonomy. Never do those things either.

A picture named billg.jpgI have a theory that it’s like desktop calendar software, which people were very excited about in 1985 or so (they called them Personal Information Managers or PIMs). Seemed like every new Mac software product had a calendar in it. John Sculley and Mitch Kapor were singing their praises. Users got all excited about them too, and set them up imagining how great it was going to be to finally have an orderly life. They happily entered appointments, until they spaced out or got lazy and didn’t enter one. All it takes is one for the excitement to turn to guilt. You don’t even want to look at the thing because you screwed up. Quickly you never use it. I’ve seen this happen both in my own work, and in others.

The category stuff works the same way. At first I delighted in the ease of routing stuff to categories. Eventually I would only route to one or two categories, and then I stopped altogether. Not because it wasn’t easy enough, but because the guilt had taken over.

People like Dave and others are basing their guilt on a fundamental misconception, however, that categorizing posts has value only if you do it to every single post. But adding metadata has value even if you only end up tagging 1 in 50 posts or 1 in 100 posts.

I’m a categorization freak, but I am also fundamentally lazy and sometimes I just don’t feel like categorizing my posts. So, I don’t. For example, all of the articles on this page are ones that I was just too lazy to bother categorizing when I posted them. And that’s okay.

Even a little metadata can add a lot of value. For example, you might be a hockey fanatic and decide, you know, that the only posts you really care to tag are the ones related to hockey. Why should you feel guilty over not obsessively categorizing everything? You shouldn’t. Go on with your life. Get over it.

The other error I think a lot of people are making is assuming that tags only have value in relation to services like Del.icio.us and Technorati, etc. The single best use of a categorization scheme is to present a page or pages on your site that show, for example, all of your posts about hockey or, taking it to the next level, having an RSS feed of all of your posts about hockey.

What’s the payoff? Traffic. The one thing that most bloggers share is they seem to want more traffic. From my experience, tagging posts and then aggregating them on topical pages will drive traffic to your blog/web site like nothing else. I am definitely not an A-list blogger and get very little traffic directly from other bloggers, but I’m currently averaging about 40,000 page views/day thanks to search engine friendly topical pages.

Of course most people probably aren’t as interested in obsessively categorizing everything as I do, but sites I run where I have done only minimal categorizing, that categorizing has helped push the traffic levels to relatively high numbers compared to what I see other bloggers — even very popular ones — out there reporting they receive.

Seth Dillingham recently created a nice, long summary in outline form to answer the question he hears from clients — What Is Conversant? Its pretty exhaustive, and I don’t really have anything to add to the specifics.

To Seth, Conversant is groupware. To me its a sophisticated toolbox for categorizing, arranging, ordering and indexing information that really is realtively easy to use.

There are some very nice, very easy-to-use blogging software platforms out there like Movable Type. They’re very good and very powerful for what they do, but its difficult to do things outside the blogging model with them.

On the other hand, there are extremely powerful but also extremely difficult-to-use (at least for non-experts) content mangament systems like Mambo. I don’t have time to take a course in PHP to administer my web site.

Conversant lives in the happy middle with all the power of a system like Mambo but with a much shorter learning curve. If you need a site that goes beyond the blogging basics, but don’t want to deal with learning programming or hiring someone to install and code the specifics (as I would have to do if I were going with something like Mambo), Conversant hits the sweet spot in the power vs. convenience tradeoffs.

It seems like yesterday, but it was in fact four years ago this month that I started switching over all my web sites to use Conversant. For the first five years of maintaining my web sites I just used an FTP client and then, later, Dreamweaver, both of which were very limited.

The main thing that attracted me to Conversant was that it was completely browser-based and that it was a full-fledge CMS/groupware software rather than just another blogging tool.

Four years later, Macrobyte has added a number of essential features to the system that I had no idea I even needed at the time. The single biggest was the addition of custom fields in combination with conditional macros.

As far as custom fields, a lot of blogging and other CMS software today lets users catagorize posts or stories, but I have yet to see one that does it half as cleanly as Conversant does. My animal rights site, for example, currently has almost 1,000 categories that stories and other posts can be assigned to. I’ve played around with most of the other software that other people use to manage their sites and have yet to find one that could scale categorization to that level (by the end of the year, I will have close to 3,000 categories across all of my sites).

Categorization is a good start, but Conversant’s template and conditional macro system really ties everything together and lets me do some very cool things. A lot of blog software that features categorization, for example, basically lets you categorize posts and then spits out what are essentially filtered views of the blog showing only the posts assigned to a specific category. Conversant can do that, but using templates I can output pretty much any view of the underlying posts that I want (I prefer just article titles with links such as in this page).

Conversant also lets me do a lot of things beyond simply aggregating related stories. Using conditional arguments, I can tell Conversant that if I’ve assigned Category A to a post that it should use a different stylesheet or use an entirely different template than the rest of the stories on the site.

I can also automate a lot of processes without having to run to Macrobyte with a feature request for every little thing. On some category pages, for example, I like to run right-hand sidebars with links to other sites. All I had to do for that was add a Sidebar custom field that defaults to “No.” If a category page has a Sidebar I just check “Yes”. Using a conditional macro, the site template checks this field and if it is set to “Yes” inserts the sidebar I’ve set up (I won’t go into the details about how it knows what to put in the sidebar, but it is pretty easy to implement).

All-in-all, Conversant still amazes me with the amount of power it has under the hood and how fast it runs given how much of each page is dynamically generated and some pages can have literally dozens of conditional statements that need to be evaluated in order to decide exactly which content to display.

Don’t take my word for it, though, go to Free-Conversant.Com, get a free account and kick the tires.