Belchfire Seo

Well trying something new. Switched my blog from Serendipity (which is still one of the Best blog systems available) to Typo running on Ruby on Rails.

Unfortunately during the import from serendipity to Typo, I seem to have lost all line breaks in the imported posts. Quick edit and update of each post changing text_filter to ‘markdown smartypants’ fixed that small issue.

Anyways, reason I made the change was that I was never happy with the themes available for s9y, or any other blog to be perfectly honest. I donno, maybe I just have particular tastes. Or maybe I had a vision of what I wanted my blog to be and that vision required a framework (Web 2.0, Ruby on Rails, Ajax, etc.) that simply didn’t exist until now. Plus just wanted a change. But wouldn’t recommend Typo for anyone but hard core developers or anyone not running their own dedicated server and intimately familiar with compiling and installing source files. Root helps too. But damn sure is pretty no?

Apple’s senior vice president of design, Jonathan Ive, was honored by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth on Friday.  The London-born designer was awarded the title of Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his hand in designing the iPod and other Apple products.

Source :AnandTech

If you are not satisfied with the CTR (Click-Through-Ratio) or revenues from your ad campaigns, try changing the position or format of your ads.

I’m always changing the layout, style and design of my site (Belchfire.net) and I’m always intregued by how those changes effect the performance of my ads. Just recently I changed my site skin from a rather busy blue on white scheme to a rather monotone, dark scheme and now to a bright, clean rust on white and grey. I noticed that certain of my ad media quadrupled in generated revenues just by changing the colour scheme. While I was at it, I changed the positioning of my Google leaderboard Adsense banner to position it closer to the body content. Only moved it about an inch, yet in doing so my CTR went from an average of just .5% to fully 1.0%.

While I was at it, I also added a second Adsense banner to the bottom of my main content in the form of Google’s new Link Unit ads, colour match to the rest of the site. Still monitoring that channel’s performance but looks promising.

So don’t hesitate to ‘mix things up’ as it were, and never be satisfied by mediocre results. Some simple changes in layout, colour or ad placement can yeild some impressive results!