heyrocker's blog

So the spam situation here has gotten pretty bad, as many of you have perhaps noticed. The service I use (Mollom) helps a lot but not completely, and I am trying to avoid adding CAPTCHA to all submissions because I know a lot of people find it irritating. I don't think it would help much anyways, a lot of the spam these days is actually done by real human beings who get paid pennies per comment posted on websites with decent Google rankings. A while ago I deputized AJDaGreat to help as spam cop, giving him the ability to delete spam comments and block spammers. However he has been busy lately and is about to go into law school, therefore I am looking for some volunteers to help out. If you are an active Listology member in good standing and would like to help killing spam, leave a comment and I will get in touch.

Since launch there have been some problems with comment notifications and after Feif's poll this weekend I thought I would bring people up to date about what has been happening to alleviate them.

As everyone knows I had disabled search at one point to improve site stability. Since then life has been in the way and I have not found the time to fix things up. It may still be a bit before I get a handle on this, and in the meantime people have been clamoring to have search return, so today I turned it back on. We may experience occasional downtime but I hope to keep it as minimal as possible. If anyone notices the site is down, feel free to email me or ping listology on Twitter.

Tomorrow I will be appearing on the Colin McEnroe Show on WNPR, Connecticut Public Radio. The topic will be listmaking and why people love it. The show is from 1:00 to 2:00 EST, but my segment will start at 1:30 EST. You can stream the show at http://www.cpbn.org/listen-live or if you're local listen in your car or at home! The show will also be recorded and made available later at http://www.cpbn.org/program/colin-mcenroe-show. I think there will be Q&A at some point if anyone wants to call in and talk about why they are driven to list their lives.

It's that time of the year again, time for Listology Secret Santa! For those who don't know, this is a fun game run every year wherein Listologists trade mix CDs of their favorite music that get randomly shuffled between all the participants. Here is the rundown from last year's program:

http://www.listology.com/story/listology-secret-santa-2008

As everyone knows, the site costs money to run. Currently this is in the neighborhood of $90 a month. I am trying to make sure the site breaks even, and I've very slowly been adding ads here and there to see what works, and trying to do so in the least invasive way possible. So far that is bringing in a chunk of the costs, but not enough to cover it.

Today I added a new ad above the title of content pages. I have always hated ads in this position. They tell your users that your ads are more important than your content, and this is a terrible message to be sending. However, there is absolutely no doubt that these ads bring in more money by quite a significant amount. So, in order to reach a compromise between my distaste for these ads, the need to break even, and the needs of my users (especially the ones on the site creating content and leaving comments) I came up with a twist - if you are logged in you will not get this ad. You see, an interesting aspect of Listology's traffic is that around 93% of the traffic is from users who are not logged in - they come in from Google searches or referrals from sites like StumbleUpon, view a page or two, and then move on. For these users, well, they get the ad. However regular users, the ones making the content that keeps this site going and makes it special, you are spared!

So if you ever encounter this ad, just log back in and it will go away. I will probably continue messing with different ads, but I will always try to keep it as light as possible for the users who make this site go. As always, if you have any comments, please let me know.

I have finally gotten comment notifications running. It works slightly differently than the old site, so jump through for the details.

So it's one week in, and things seem to be going pretty well. There have been a couple of downtime blips, but overall I'm please with how the site has been holding up. After a week of listmaking, how do you guys think things are going?

If you're reading this, then it means that everything went according to plan and you are now at Listology's permanent home! Good news all around, I hope everyone enjoys the new digs. If you encounter any problems, let me know. One note - I put in a script which automatically maps old urls to new urls, however I seem to have missed the urls that have their genre appended to them. I will try and get a fix in for this later, but for the time being these links will return a page not found error. If this is the worst problem that we encounter I'll be pretty pleased.

So some things are different in the new site from the old, here are some of the highlights.

So after a long wait the big day is finally coming. Sunday, May 10 will be the launch of the new website! Unfortunately this will involve taking the site down for about a day while the data transfer takes place.