Another fine mess

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You may notice a few hiccups over the next couple days, I accidentally upgraded the templates on the wrong blog.

I started to quickly go back, but it seems some of my template modules have been backed up up too. Which leads to ...

 mtinclude = barf 

That plus I want to use some of the new features... so... I'll be tearing everything apart and putting it back together over the next few days. But I have client meetings all day tomorrow.

In the mean time, I think the RSS feed is still being sent to Feed Burner, so you won't miss anything if you're already subscribed.

Now with 100% more community

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Whatever that means.

I wanted to take a minute to point out what everyone else who uses Movable Type a lot has already pointed out: Movable Type 4.2 is out.

Movable Type is now the name of the core (Open Source) product. The generally recommended product is MovableType Pro which is free for for everyone except businesses. If you are any kind of business (other than a sole proprietorship) then you need to purchase a license to use the product. At $399, it is a good value, but now I have the feeling I will have to ask my accountant or the IRS to help me out selecting a license for various projects.

On the bright side, if you are reading this, the upgrade went without a hitch. I was very impressed by that. More to come.

Why back when I was a whippersnapper, they didn't have video on the Internets. [sic] We had some animated gifs, sure, but the images we dealt with back then are nothing compared with what we see on websites today.

sinatramug.jpgServing large files, and in some cases video streams is a whole different can of worms than a couple of promotional product photos and a mug shot of the chairman of the board. As a hosting provider, I understand some of the technical challenges involved, but this article is not about that. Today, I want to write briefly to let you know about two websites that face challenges related to images, and how they face those challenges. It is also interesting to me that although the sites show vastly differing levels of visual development, I suspect they both accomplish the business goals they set out to achieve about as well.

Both are photography web sites, but they could easily be video or any other visual medium for the purposes of this article. The author of the first site is a professional photographer. Within a few weeks of posting this article, my close associates and friends may chuckle to remember this post when I launch a site that looks very much like James Duncan Davidson's site. This similarity is because his, like the site I will launch, is managed with Movable Type's Universal Template Set. (The MTUTS?) I think this is an effective choice, both from a cost perspective and from a communication perspective.

As a photographer seeking to sell photographs, he is concerned with the details of how his product will be presented, and also issues of quality in the production of the prints which visitors can purchase. He has, wisely in my estimation, chosen to outsource both those functions.

At the same time as he outsources the ecommerce and fulfillment function he maintains full control over his ability to promote the "store" using his own website. He uses his MT based site to publish articles about his work, which of course use all the right keywords for the product he is trying to sell. In the comments he hints at future articles he will write to attract viewers, including details of how he works with his printing company to communicate color information:

Indeed, I can post something up about that at some point. The short versions is that I run totally color managed here and check prints on my printers to have a good idea what happens in the translation between transmissive and reflective color and then I ship the photos up to Zen tagged as sRGB, the profile that Zen and Mpix recommend using for the process.

Davidson has started very small, so the image issues he is seeking to resolve (quality of presentation, ability to sell prints cost effectively, ability to have orders fulfilled by yet another service) do not so much center around storage, which is usually one of the central issues with image collections.

Web space is sold based on two metrics, how much is stored, and how much is transfered. Rates will generally vary depending on the quality of the network and platform, and the level of personal attention required. My friend Jesse at PlasticMind has his own private server and he uses Movable Type as the foundation for many of his web design projects, including his own. But every one of the photos he shows in his photoblog, are in fact stored on his Flickr account.

I know of two benefits Jesse gains from this. The first is performance. If you are serving large multi megabyte images files off the same web server as your thirty kilobyte HTML files are served from, one or the other will suffer. (For the other web server administrators out there... OK, this is a gross generalization, but you know its true! If not why would there be so many web servers such as Apache, Mongrel, Lighty, Ngix, Lightspeed, etc? )

The second is sheer storage. If you have ever managed more than a few hundred megabytes of files on a remote server somewhere you know that the just issues of backups can be pretty costly to deal with, both in terms of dollars and time. Not only does Flickr provide a particular kind of storage (pictures) at a good price point (free and professional accounts are available) but their service also helps to promote the images thought their own business model. (Well, Yahoo's business model anyway.)

All of this reinforces my thinking that traditional small web hosting providers and the sites they host need to become the glue that holds together their client's extended Internet presence. Small providers that are aware of and promoting this idea to their small clients will help their customers use the Internet to its maximum impact while keeping costs inline with the scale of their customer's business.

Thats what Jakob Neilson would have us do, if you can read all the way through the 1068 words he uses to tell us this. (Which his summary would have us believe you probably won't.)

Summary: On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

Neilson is a usability expert. This means he studies the way we use the web and he suggests ways in which we can design the sites or pages to better for users of those pages. Many of the things he talks about are relevant to my own business consulting with other small businesses and developing web sites for them. More and more, I am encouraging my small business people to take the time to write their own websites with me. If you are thinking of writing your own web pages, you may want to see this article.

How Little Do Users Read?

Page vs. Entry

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Movable Type 4 gives us a rich vocabulary of information elements from which to construct small business web sites. As I write this the ultimate irony is that I am using version 3.xx to tell my clients about a feature of 4.x; I really must get this blog cut over to the new version.

An Entry in MT is sometime called a post. This is because MT was originally weblogging (blogging) software. Blog posts, or entries are sequential over time. The last one you write is more current than the previous. Over time they will both become history, archived as it were, but no longer front page news, so to speak. For many business web sites, blog entries serve the same function as news.

Entries can be organized into Categories, and they are placed in chronological Archives by default.

A Page in MT has only existed as a separate informational entity since the latest version, 4.x. Pages are similar in their scope and general information make-up (such as title, content, keywords field, etc.) to a news item but they are more timeless. The information they contain is very slowly changing if at all.

Pages can be organized into Folders.

Both Entries and Pages can be indexed using logical devices called Tags.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

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