So yesterday I decided to send out a newsletter to all those folks who signed up at Diysearch. The mailing went quite well, and I got some very friendly responses from some kind souls, because well, there is kindness out there.
As a good and responsible webmaster, I provided an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the newsletter, because well, that’s just the right thing to do. And that link actually WORKS and it does REMOVE folks. But I get this response, we’ll call him “Service”.
“Service” decides in his or her own obvious years and years of internet experience that I am a spammer. I mean clearly they recognized the fact that the email address as the “from” was my actual email address (dpalmer at diysearch dot com) or that in the email headers I didn’t bounce the message around a dozen or so zombie machines to hide where it originated from. I mean, clearly anyone who has been on the net for 4 or maybe 5 hours would know that the lack of these things means that the message is clearly from a real person and not a spammer, right?
I mean anyone with 2 maybe possibly 3 IQ points could recognized that? Yes?
Well, I think I found one of those rare few who can’t quite figure this stuff out. Too bad really. I’m glad they are gone. I don’t suffer fools lightly. Its not in my nature.
Sorry about that folks. There was an outage that caused the database connection to drop. My fault, I was fixing the database rules (to tighten up some security) and forgot to update the connection string for the main application. Ugh. I’m stupid.
Everything seems to be running normally now.
I created a survey to help us better determine what kind of changes we need to make around here. We’ve based the survey around the name change, but we are also wanting to get feedback on functionality and purpose as well.
If you have a few minutes, take the survey. Help us out. We’ve asked some tough questions of ourselves and would really like your input. It’d be truly valuable.
So as I keep thinking about all the changes to make this site a better place, something occurred to me, and that’s the name. Its difficult to pronounce, it has absolutely no poetry or interest to me.
As a result, I’m thinking of a new name. DIYSearch has served the site well for the over 11 years it has been around, but now, i think its time.
A prospective name: we.rnot.us (we are not us)
I’m going to be considering this over the next few weeks.
Last night after fixing a weird database connectivity problem to the blog systems, and looking at the Google Analytics for Diysearch, it has dawned on me that we need to re-examine a few things around here. Not that anyone is reading, or cares… this is just here as a way to document the process of re-examination.
What struck me, aside from the flat-line traffic growth, is the huge “bounce rate” as it is called in GA. Basically, that’s the rate at which visitors “bounce” off the site. Its a staggering 62 percent.
I asked our editor about this, and she had a pretty firm grasp of the problem. Here’s how it breaks down:
- The home page needs a serious re-design. New visitors have NO IDEA what the site is about, what’s purpose is. This is my bad. I thought the re-design from last year, to make it lighter and simpler, ala Google, was the key, because prior versions were just too cluttered. This doesn’t mean we’ll clutter up the home page, but we’ll come up with a way to make it more inviting, more welcoming, more instructive.
- We need more content. Plain and simple. After the great purge of last year, we’ve skimmed down the database about 93 percent from its original size. We simply need more links, but that’s not all. It can’t just be about links. I’ve known this all along. There just has to be more utility to the site.
- More time. If this is ever going to amount to anything, it requires more of my time. That’s probably the toughest thing. What with my hectic day job, going to the gym, this fall we are taking a Japanese language course, spending time with friends, and just relaxing, and all in there i need to figure out a way to budget more time for this.
So, that is it. I sure hope this comes to something.
Anyone want to help?
