New Flickr Image Counter
Look right. Not that far…look to right of the page.
What I’m trying to get you to look at is the new counter I put on the side there. Like it says, it counts the number of flickr photos that have been tagged with “hellyeahbitch.com”. Why am I doing this? Mainly I thought it could be a useful way for all to share something stupid or odd or whatever. You have a photo of something weird, fun, stupid, or even a hot girlfriend just tag it with “hellyeahbitch.com” and bam, the counter will change and we can all have a good time. Although I’m sure no one other than I will do this, I do intend to, and have tagged all my photos appropriately…so at least one person will be helping move the counter.
The second reason is that I needed a break today at work from the web project I’m working on right now, so the 15 mins it took for me to play with the flickr API was a nice break. Next time I need a break I’ll work with it and add a few more features.
Have fun. Take pictures. Tag them with “hellyeahbitch.com”. Feel good for sharing.
Hell Yeah Bitch! .com Changes Web Hosts
We are moving this site from our old webhosts to a shiny new one (Dreamhost if anyone is wondering.). This move will give us some extra space and lots of extra bandwidth to play with. It should be nice and hopefully will allow us to continue to grow at the rate we have over the past year.
The real reason I’m telling you this is, as most of you know, to change a domain name to a different server takes 48 hours until everyone sees the new server. So if you are seeing this, then you are on the new server. Congrats.
Note: If you see anything broken or not working 100% right, please let me know in the comments. Thanks guys.
Web Advertising and Hell Yeah Bitch! .com
What does it take for a guy to get a graphical advertisement on his website? When I changed the look of this page a month or two ago, I changed the “Ad Section” of the front page to be a little bigger to accommodate a graphical advertisement. I just thought it would give the front page a bit more of a “front page” feel, like that of a magazine or newspaper. However after modifying the space and changing my adsense settings I still have not seen any graphical ads appear in that slot. What gives?
Dumping Technorati
Remember back when I announced that we were going with Technorati as our source for finding link backs? Well thats over.
Hell Yeah Bitch! .com is following in the steps of Kottke and the Weblogs Inc group with ditching Technorati. I, however, will not be nearly as mean as the aforementioned were:
From Kottke:
Pretty much everyone I talk to in the industry thinks the site sucks and we’ve just been waiting for it to get better because, well, it would have to at some point, wouldn’t it? Well, I’m tired of waiting. Goodbye, Technorati…your url will darken the door of my browser no longer.
I know the guys over at Technorati are trying their best, but right now IceRocket is kicking your ass. Its nothing personal. Dave Sifry , the “man” at Technorati, was nice enough to post here when I made my initial announcement welcoming Technorati. Dave, its nothing personal, but we are going with IceRocket for the time being. I know you guys are working on speed issues and quality results, but untill I see some actual and major increased in speed and quality of results we are sticking with IceRocket…I would imagine that, besides our kick-ass name, we aren’t much different from many of the other sites out there.
Remember “It’s not you, its me!” (Actually its you) and if you get it going again, your only a rebuild away from being BFFs with Hell Yeah Bitch! .com again.
Changes Changes Changes: Hell Yeah Bitch! .com v 3.5
It looks a little different around here…familiar, but different.
I decided a somewhat minor change was needed to Hell Yeah Bitch! .com so I’ve brought some color into the site with the help of phaticon, the fantastic artist that did the new background image for us.
I also changed the header. To keep the header from getting stale, there are two major changes. Its now two different pictures instead of the one easy big image, each side being random pictures. The second change is that anyone is welcome to submit a picture to the header. Just go to the Change Our Header page, and upload a picture. Easy. Now noone can say that our header sucks…just change it.
You want more changes? Ok. You know that “About” this site has always needed? Well we have one.
Ok, one more change for the guy in the back…we have dumped Technorati. I’ll get into this in a later post, but we are now doing link tracking via IceRocket’s search.
If something is broken, or just ugly or any other problems / comments you might see, please let me know about it via the comments for this post. I realize that most likely noone will comment, because noone ever comments on the posts I have about site changes, but I feel like I have to say that anyway.
Movable Type 3.2 Burned Us.
Simple installation: Once the application is on your web server, installing or upgrading the system is as simple as a few clicks.
Ha! Earlier today I succumbed to the shiny website and long feature list of Movable Type 3.2, so against the nagging of the little guy in my head that never wants to upgrade anything that is working fine, I decided to go for it. I should have listened to him.
Here’s the quick version: I uploaded the files, I ran the “check” program (I passed). I then ran the install and I got a nice little paragraph of Perl errors. I checked the permissions…I ran to their support site…neither helped. Thank god I did a backup, right? Well I managed to chose the very day when the “restore a home directory backup” feature at my webhost didn’t want to work. Long story short(er than it could be), I finally did the restore by hand and I think we are back to normal.
The moral of this story? Listen to the little “don’t upgrade” guy in your head more often.
Interface changes
Ok, how do you like this? I’m toying with the layout oh so slightly, and I’m wondering how you all feel about it. I thinking bringing the recently commented and history up closer to the front, maybe we’ll see a bit more action on the comments. Also, gone are the three color stripes…I think…I’m not sure on the color yet.
Let me know what you think. If noone comments I will assume that everyone thinks it is an amazingly inspired change.
Should I Get Rid of Categories?
I’ve recently been thinking recently about whether or not to get rid of categories on this site, and going with a strictly “tags” or keywords method. I just don’t think the categories are really doing their job. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe many people are using the Category Archives below are used at all. Apparently, I’m not the only one out there thinking about this subject for their site. Deane @ Gadgetopia was just discussing this topic, and feels that category archives are useless as well. Gadgetopia is a wee bit bigger than Hell Yeah Bitch with 4,000 posts to our 500, so their archives are a tad bigger. Deane has gone the way of capping the category archives at 20 posts. Thinking about this subject more, I’m not really a fan of that approach. Can you really call it an “archive” with only the last 20 posts? Sure, having huge archives that, of course, make for huge files and are rarely indexed by Google, but if you are only going to do that last 20 why not just take the category archives out of the picture entirely? One could go with just a tagged / keyword categorization where for each keyword you use basically makes a small category (which by the way, there are MT plugins that do that for you), or you can keep the categories, and just not make a static page archive of the posts in them.
I say keep the main category archives, which would allow for some simple high-level organization. Then use keywords and tags to allow the user to pare down that possibly huge grouping within one category. And what of the large category archive files? Dump them. Just don’t rebuild them any more. If you want to put a link on your site that allows the user to look at recent entries in that high-level category, then just make the link a search string. If they want to search via a keyword to put a finer point on that search, then they can do that.
Ok, I’ve convinced myself. Thats what I’m going to do. I think a simple re-organization of some of the categories might be in order, but unless anyone has any better ideas, then the category archives might get flushed soon.
Google has finally accepted us!
I don’t know what happened. Maybe Hell Yeah Bitch! .com has finally been around long enough or maybe its finally gotten enough traffic and links. No matter the reason, it seems that Google has finally accepted us! (Just to be clear: We have always been on Google but we are getting to the top of the list on many more things than before.)
Believe it or not, up until a few days ago, if you searched “hell yeah bitch” in google, this site didn’t come up first. Now it does. Also, previously if you searched for “mike flynn” (thats me) there were tons of results. We weren’t on there at all. Now? We’re number 6.
Its not much I know, but we’re going somewhere.
The 501st Post
I just realized that Hell Yeah Bitch! .com has just reached 500 posts (This being the 501st.) What does this mean? Nothing I guess. It does mean that somehow this website has managed to capture my attention for over 2 years and now 500 posts. It means even less when you think that this is just the beginning. In recent months the growth of the readership and external links and comments have never been higher. Hell, its not even just me working on this anymore. The addition of Dan to the the crew has helped me focus on other things than “Oh crap I have to think of something to write about today.” I’m trying to plan other things and projects that will give Hell Yeah Bitch! .com some more exclusive content and make this site get even more traffic and attention.
So 500 posts really doesn’t mean that much in the big picture. Hopefully soon we’ll see 1000 and 2000 numbered posts come and go.
…sweet jesus, I just hope I’ve gotten a project or idea off the ground and to the web by then.