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March Update: 10 Books in a Month

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Disappointed, that’s how I would describe my March reading results.  I really thought this month would be the first month I actually  completed my goal, instead of just getting close.  Unfortunately, a vacation, a 63 hour work week, and a week and a half of being sick conspired to give me one great excuse for why I didn’t read all that I wanted to this month.  I read four books, so about one a week.  a lot more than I normally would, but still under half of what I planned.

Here is what I did get through:

SimplePie – Easy PHP RSS

Code

SimplePie RSS LogoI write for this and two other blogs, and I like the homepage of my personal portfolio (www.brentswisher.com) have up to date information about all of my posts.  It makes for an easy one-stop-shop of all of my online activity, and I like the idea of having a dashboard of my recent activity as a home page. The issue is that manually updating the page each time I create a new post would be a bit tedious.  Since all my blogs have built in RSS Feeds, I though that would be a great way to embed new posts.

These were the criteria I was looking for:

  • Customizable so that I could make it match my sites theme
  • The links would be visible by search engines
  • I could customize what would show (titles, date, domain, etc)

After a little searching, I found something that works great: SimplePie RSS

SimplePie is a PHP based RSS parser.  It’s a PHP class that allows you to access RSS feeds in a object oriented way.  It is really simple to customize as you specify which parts of the feed to display, and you can insert them using standard PHP code anywhere in your site that you need.  It’s fast, easy to learn, well documented, and I would recommend it for anyone looking to use RSS in their website.

Advantages:

  • It uses PHP as opposed to a scripting language, so the links are indexed by search engines and will count for SEO.
  • It uses a object oriented approach to the feed, making it easy to customize what you want to display (title, link, body, etc)
  • Easy to install, just download and include.

Tips:

  • Make sure that you have the page encoding set to utf-8.  If you forget to specify this or use another encoding, strange characters will replace items like dashes and apostrophes.
  • Be aware that SimplePie caches your feeds.  If you make changes and expect to see them in the feed right away, you might need to wait for the cache to be refreshed.
  • To make it easier to make changes, create a separate page for each feed, and then include the page wherever you want to display the feeds on your site.

I would definitely recommend SimplePie for a RSS parser, what about you? Let me know if you have another solution you enjoy!

Forbes: 18% Content, 40% Ads

Random

I was browsing the web today and came across this article: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0328/billionaires-11-profile-yuri-milner-billionaire-friended-web.html. It looked interesting and I wasn’t sure who Yuri Milner was so I thought I would check it out.  Once I got to the page though, I was so confused by Forbes layout, that I never got to actually reading the article.  By far the most overwhelming thing on the page was an ad about investment mistakes. WTF? I came to learn about Yuri Milner, not my own lack of investment prowess.  I then looked around and realized something: the vast majority of the page wasn’t actual content. I was curious so I fired up Photoshop and broke down the different sections (White Space, navigation, Content, Ads) of the first screen of the website, (no scrolling aka “above the fold”) by width and height.  Then, brushing off my basic geometry skills, got the pixel area of the different sections and compared them to the total pixel area of the page.

Here are the results:

Navigation: 15%
White Space: 27%
Content: 18%
Advertisement: 40%

No, you didn’t read that wrong.  Advertisement took up over twice as much space on the first screen of the article than the content.  Maybe that’s why the article had to be six pages long.

Just another example of print media just not getting the web, and page design being driven by a bottom line.

Here are some screen shots:

 

Forbes Article Screenshot
Forbes Article Screen Shot
Green = Content, Red = Ads, Light-Blue = White Space, Dark Blue = Navigation
Forbes – Content Overlay

March: 10 Books in a Month

Random

This month I wanted to focus on something other than a physical activity, so I decided to focus on reading more.  As a goal I am going to read ten books this month.  Since my new year resolution last year, I have been reading more., but lately it has slacked off a little.  I also just recently read the first “fun” book in a while (Inside Delta Force – good read) and it made me realize how long it has been since I have read anything other than a technical or business book.  Ten books a month is about one every three days, which might be pushing it, but I think is still realistic (I’m a fast reader).  I’m looking for good books (particularly “fun” reads) so if you have any, let me know in the comments.

So far I am planning on:

February Update: Work out five days a week

Random

For February I was trying to work out five days a week for a month, as a kick off for my four month triathlon training program.  it was actually a lot harder than I thought, as much because of the amount of time it took out of my schedule as the actual physical stress of the workouts.  In the end, I only worked out five days one week, but worked out four days every other week, so while it wasn’t a blinding success it wasn’t a complete failure.  Prior to this I was at most working out three days a week.  It served it’s purpose, I’m on track to be able to finish the Grand Rapids Triathlon and I know what I have to do to manage my time properly.  I’m still deciding what to try next month, so check back soon.