KillerSites Blog

Are newsletters still an effective way to keep in touch with your audience?

April 14, 2008

I’ve been running the killersites.com newsletter (among a few others) for several years now. Though I’ve found it to effective, with regards to keeping in touch with people, it is clearly not what it used to be.

Stupid Spammers

Yea, the porn and pill spammers have really done a lot of harm to newsletters. These days, if you send out a newsletter, you will have to deal with a few things that just get in the way:

1. Email filters – gone wild.
2. Angry (crazy) recipients.

These days, email filters are really fined tuned to catch just about any type of spam. Unfortunately, they tend to trash real email from time to time. So when writing my newsletter, I have to be careful to avoid certain keywords that might get my newsletter blocked.

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idea22.com Updates

August 14, 2007

Hi,

With some of my post, I try to come up with a story to add a little ‘color’ my writing…. my mother complains when I don’t.

Unfortunately, unless you want to hear about the ongoing saga of my teeth, I haven’t much to say.

🙁

OK, I have something to say:

One thing that painful teeth have taught me; take care of little things before they turn into big things. Otherwise you risk an expensive and painful punishment for being lazy.

Which reminds me of an expression (I think?) I came up with:

“You either pay now … or you pay later with interest!”

Keep that in mind in all aspects of life.

Onto things nerd-like:

We made some good progress getting the new free video tutorial website up and running – www.idea22.com.

We now have a cool new interface that allows you to quickly browse through the last 50 videos. We’ve fixed a lot of bugs and polished up the look of the site overall. You should also check out the full-screen view of the videos – I think they are the sharpest on the Web.

That’s all well and good, but what’s in it for you? Well, we got a bunch of new videos up on things like:

* – Web design
* – PHP
* – Photoshop

I invite you to take a look, join up and please comment on the videos and the site. We are still doing a lot of work and your input will help us build a better web site.

Some specific pages:

http://www.idea22.com/video/details/id/200708147122666750

http://www.idea22.com/video/details/id/200708082373232020

A few of videos are actually from the killersites.com archive … buried deep in killersites.com. I am moving them all to idea22.com over the next little while so they are easy to find.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

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Why Youtube became so big so fast and what its’ growth can teach you about the Web

August 13, 2007

Youtube is the new big thing on the Web. But you have to wonder why Youtube got so big so fast?

… Consider that there are web sites that have existed long before Youtube and did the exact same thing – user generated videos/video sharing.

As a web designer/web developer, my first instinct would be to look at:

1. Functionality
2. Usability

I found that Youtube is very good in both camps (for the most part,) but so are several other video sharing sites.

The answer to Youtube’s success:

Youtube went to the top because of content.

Unfortunately, the content that drives Youtube is the content that the other big video sharing sites (ethically) removed from their websites – all the professionally produced videos.

.. We all like to see videos of cats falling off tables once in a while, but let’s be honest, most of us go to Youtube to see copyrighted videos:

• The Daily Show
• Colber Report
• Family Guy

… etc.

While the other video sharing sites removed copyrighted material, Youtube turned a blind eye (at least that is what I think,) and Youtube saw its’ traffic skyrocket.

So now Youtube is being sued left and right … they deserve it. If someone was selling ad space from an audience largely attracted by my hard work (not that would ever happen …) I would be pretty pissed off.

Side note:

My relatively simple video tutorials take a while to produce: you are taking about 5-7 hrs of work (easily) for every hour of video!

–

Google says (Google bought Youtube) that in September it will introduce its’ video filtering technology and flush out the stolen content. I wonder if Youtube’s traffic will go the way of Napster?

Just in case you forget; Napster was the big name in music sharing (again stolen content,) until they were sued and forced to remove all the big-name songs. Napster has since fallen off the radar … no content.

Content is King:

That was the first rule of web design I learned back in 1994: content is king. You have to have good usability etc .. but at the end of the day, a web site needs good content.

… And that (my nerd friends,) is what Youtube and Napster can teach us about the Web.

Thanks for reading,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

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Mac OSX vs. Windows

June 20, 2007

It has been 6 months since I picked up a MacBook Pro and I have been very impressed with this machine.

To be fair, it isn’t perfect but it is the best computer I’ve ever used:

• OSX is stable and pleasant to use. Things just work!
• The Mac book hardware is top notch.

For example:

Every MacBook comes with a tiny webcam (iSight) built into its’ cover – no need to buy an external cam anymore. It is convenient to be sure, but how about the image quality?

… To my surprise, the little webcam produces a better image quality than even top notch webcams from Logitech!

How about 3rd party hardware?

As is consistent with Mac OSX (in that things tend to work), when you plug in any piece of hardware, it seems to just work.

At first it was a little strange to me, as I was expecting dialog boxes to pop up etc … as you have with Windows. But after a while you get used to it.

🙂

Security?

OSX has an intelligent security system where it only prompts you for permission, if you are installing core components of the OS. Contrast this to Vista where even deleting shortcuts will require extra annoying clicks!

Crashing?

I’ve had Mac OSX die on me twice in 6 months. Both times, it was problems related to having a few external devices connected, and me being very impatient, clicking a lot of buttons.

… A simple restart, and OSX came back like nothing ever happened.

With Windows, I find when you boot back up (after a crash), half the time, you have restart again because the OS will be .. shaky. It as though Windows needs another crack at cleaning itself up …?

–

If you’ve never used Mac OS and are considering a new machine, I think it is time for you to consider.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

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idea22.com: how to produce a video tutorial

May 28, 2007

Hi,

I’ve put together a PDF document that outlines the process on how to create an effective video tutorial:

How to create a video tutorial

Although I wrote this to help people who want to contribute video tutorials to idea22.com, you will find it packed with a lot of tips on:

• On how to create effective videos.
• Software options for creating videos.
• How to work with both Windows and Mac when creating videos.

Hope you find this useful.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

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CSS Menu Templates now on Webshapes.org

April 27, 2007

We’ve now added another category of web templates to webshapes.org: CSS menus.

Check out our web template widget:

You can access the collection of CSS menus here: CSS menus

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

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