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I recently read a fascinating post entitled “URLs are for People, not Computers”. It references a research study by Microsoft which showed that people spend almost a quarter of their time looking at URLs when looking at search engine results. The article goes on to talk about how people use URLs to decide on whether to click on them and how URLs can be created to look friendly to users, and not just search engines. It talks about how so many URLs are still messy and hard for people to read.

Key points include:

• URLs which are nicely organized enable people to “hack” them to find what they’re looking for by removing or changing parts of the URL.
• URLs can help you see relevance of content – either by including the date, and/or the post title in it.

The number of times I look at, and change, URLs in order to find what I’m looking for is significant. It frustrates me when blog posts don’t include the date in the permalink; it makes it harder for me to determine how current the information in it is. While newer is not always better, tutorials for how to do things can often quickly become incorrect.

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There’s plenty of other messy little things online. I have this habit of always noticing incorrect spelling and grammar on websites – particularly professional ones. The ones which stand out to me the most are those which are inside graphics on a site, so aren’t as quickly fixable.

I also have a weird habit of looking at the background of photos people upload online — and I’m not looking for photobombs! I don’t just look at the subject, I’m curious about what their house is like, whether the TV is on, how much paperwork is piled up in the background, how tidy things are etc etc. I really love looking at candid shots of decor and life in real houses: what real life is like, compared to Pinterest and blog photos where everything seems placed and staged for a photoshoot. To be clear, I’m not looking to judge, I just love the realness of backgrounds. Real life is messy.

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I read SF Girl by Bay‘s blog post on how our lives online are edited lives which aren’t as messy as real lives:

“life is not as perfect as it may appear in social media… we are our own worst editors. predominantly, we’re not sharing the lousy days, or the piles of laundry, or mascara running down our faces because we’re sad, or lonely or just having a really crap day, week, or month. we’re putting out there this message that life is just so pretty and so perfect and here i am having yet another amazing time with all my many friends — lalalala. this is not reality. social media is very often creating a faux reality that makes people feel really left out, and that’s not something i feel good about.

i’m probably going to continue to post lots of pretty images on instagram and tweet the madcap, great sides of life… but i want you to remember when i share them, that they are just snapshots. they are not the whole picture. they are a slice of life that in that moment, yes, is quite lovely. but real life is just not always like that and these moments are fleeting. of course there are lots of crazy happy moments, i’m not saying they don’t exist, but it’s always a balance and i wanted to present that in an honest light.”

231 people have commented to date. People like honesty, rawness and passion and the mess showing just a little bit too.

This is the stuff of blogs which I love too. No matter how much I turn to Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest, I’m constantly directed back to the content creators: bloggers.

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I really dislike mess but I’m living with a decent amount of it at the moment. I struggle with my inner organizer and need to be patient and pace myself. We’re still going through the boxes of things from our move and there’s a lot left to go through. I have two boys who love to pull put out boxes of lego, or discover a box of cocktail umbrellas to play with on the floor, or make popcorn out of broken up pieces of acorns. I need to let go a little more and be OK with a little mess on display.

I love this cartoon by John Atkinson which helps explain various social media to newcomers and entertains those who already know:

As a result Google’s recent announcement that they’re closing down Google Reader on July 1, 2013, there’s been a lot of outcry and discussion about the implications of this. We’ve been getting quite a few questions from clients as a result, so have put together these FAQ for bloggers:

Do I need to make any changes on my blog as a result?

No*.

* Unless you have put a Google Reader bundle on your blog. (This is like a blogroll and isn’t related to people subscribing to your blog.)

How will closing down Google Reader affect my blog?

You may experience a drop in traffic if those reading your blog via Google Reader don’t move their subscriptions elsewhere. To try and minimize this, many bloggers are adding a blog post describing other ways to subscribe to their blog (via other feed readers, email or social media) to try and encourage people to move over in time.

How many people read my blog via Google Reader?

You can get an idea of this by subscribing to your blog via Google Reader and then clicking on “Feed Settings” and then “View details and statistics”:

For my blog, I see that there’s 71 subscribers. Google says that these numbers include subscribers across all Google services but this is still an indicator of numbers via Google Reader.

If you use Feedburner to manage your blog’s feed, you can also look at those statistics. I have 1059 subscribers showing in there, of which 338 are categorized as Google Feedfetcher. Feedburner says that these include Google Reader and iGoogle. There’s quite a big difference in numbers, and from what I’ve read and understand, that’s due to other feed readers which are built on top of Google Reader’s infrastructure.

Will my feed be affected by Google Reader closing down?

No.

Is Feedburner closing down too?

No*.

* While there have been many rumors, Google has not made this announcement. Google has shut down Feedburner’s API and Adsense for feeds, which doesn’t look promising for Feedburner’s future.

If Feedburner closes down, what will happen?

You will still have a feed. WordPress and other blogging tools create them by default. Feedburner just reformats it and provides additional features such as subscribing via email and feed statistics.

Like Google’s Takeout service for Google Reader, there would likely be a clear plan for handling any switch off for Feedburner.

What could I do to prepare just in case Feedburner closes down?

If you use Feedburner’s “subscribe via email” functionality, you may wish to switch to another mailing list provider which offers this, such as MailChimp. You will get a lot of additional functionality too – such as being able to fully design how the emails look and be able to send them other emails too.

Also, check that any feed links on your site link to the original feed created by WordPress (or the like), rather than linking directly to your Feedburner URL. That way, if you switch off the Feedburner plugin which redirects people to Feedburner, you will lose less subscribers.

Here’s some recent resources I’ve discovered which are worth checking out:

Free social media icon set

100 free icons in eleven sizes with transparent backgrounds, making them nice and easy to adapt. It’s current for 2013 and includes Vine, Pinterest, Good Reads, Google Plus etc. Grab them from Simple Icons.

Free website icon set

300+ free icons for websites which can be resized and also used as a webfont. Grab them from Batch.

Handwritten font maker

iFontMaker is a $6.99 iPad app which makes it easy to create your own fonts. There’s also a gallery of fonts people have created with the app for you to download and use (check the license).

Content idea generator

Stuck for a blog post idea? Try this content idea generator. It’s a bit of fun but I do love the little tips you get and it could help you think of a new idea or two.

Free terms of service template

Most bloggers have a terms of service but many just copy and paste theirs from elsewhere rather than hiring a lawyer to write them for them. Editorially have released their well-written terms of service under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and have helpfully written advice about the process too. If you’re looking for a terms of service as your starting point, have a look at theirs.

I’ve been an iPhone user now for four years, but was excited to get offered the chance to review the new Samsung Galaxy Note II phone and compare it with the Android experience.

Setting up the phone

It felt odd to remove the entire back of the phone case to put in my SIM card, but once I did that the set up was incredibly smooth. I filled in a number of settings including my Gmail and Dropbox accounts (which I already use a lot) and everything was set up for me. At first I thought that I’d lost my contacts from my iPhone and started Googling for how to import them in but they were already all there; I just needed to find them. I’d bought my iPhone 4S in the US and had to configure all the settings for Telecom NZ and the set up was much more involved.

I quickly started installing my favourite apps via the Play Store and discovering that one I’d been keen to try on the iPhone – Vine – was not yet available for Android. The rest were all there. I like the Play Store navigation options much more than the Apple store ones, it seems easier to discover apps.

I got a bit frustrated before accidentally figuring out that there’s a hidden “back” button which only appears when you touch on the case to the right of the “home” button. I am so used to only having the one button down the bottom of the phone! There’s also another hidden menu button to the left of the “home” button. I’m also needing to adjust how I hold the phone when watching a video in full screen mode so as not to accidentally press that back button. My four year old son also got frustrated with this and said YouTube kept quitting on him! The voice search on YouTube was pretty cool, and understood my accent well, better than on my iPhone!

There’s a lot of sounds, notifications and vibrations which started up after installing apps. I have turned lots of these off as I find them a bit much (same as on the iPhone). I’ve also noticed there’s a lot
of gestures I could learn if I took the time to read all the little notices which pop up.

I love the big screen and lightweight feel of the phone! I haven’t found it too difficult making the switch from the iPhone and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of all the phone features and set up. I’m looking forward to discovering more of the phone.

This post has been enabled by Telecom NZ, but the thoughts are my own. Find out more about the Samsung Galaxy Note II

Today there was a tragic fatal shark attack at a beach near where I live.  Thankfully they’re very rare in New Zealand.  There have been 15 deaths due to shark attacks in the past 176 years since records began.

When friends started sharing the story on Facebook, this is unfortunately how it looked:

Not the most tasteful of images to go with the story…

A growing new trend is to move Pinterest buttons away from the rest of the social sharing buttons which traditionally appear at the bottom, top or side of blog posts.

Instead, bloggers are overlaying Pin it buttons on each image in the blog post when someone hovers over it. Some are using a standard Pinterest button style, others are making their own.

On Oh Joy, when hovering over an image you see the following button appear (see bottom right):

Designlovefest does something similar, but also slightly fades the image when you hover on it. Here’s the before (top) and after (bottom):

Decor8 uses an official Pinterest style button when you hover on an image:

Meanwhile, Ban.do has a very loud call to action when you hover on its images with a pink tint and large lettering. Before (top) and after (bottom):

For blogs with large photos that people will be likely to want to pin, this is a great option.

By tying the pin it call-to-action buttons immediately with the images (rather than having to move elsewhere to do so), I would expect increased rates of pinning. I would imagine the Pin it overlays would work best up the top of images, rather than at the bottom. I am yet to see any quantitative data to back these theories up – if you have any figures on pin rates, please let me know!

By showing the pin it buttons on hover, it means one less social sharing button at the bottom of posts. Since images are pretty large on these blogs (and for it to be pinned), there’s a good chance that you’ll see the pin it buttons show up while scrolling down and reading the post.

Issues to consider

The first time I encountered this however, I found it a confusing to use. You have to click on the overlaid button or text in order to pin the image, rather just than clicking in any position. This makes sense when the rest of the image is linking somewhere else (e.g. Decor8 links over to the photo source on Flickr) but not so much when the rest of the image isn’t a link (e.g. Ban.do). Oh Joy I found the most confusing: clicking elsewhere on the image loads the image up in a new window by itself. Lots of bloggers do this. I’m guessing this is due to a default image link setting which they haven’t changed.

These buttons are also not so user-friendly on touch screens where there’s no such thing as “hovering” on an image. The examples listed above ranged from not working at all to working only if you knew to click on the image on my phone and tablet. A standard pin button might be more appropriate for these screens.

WordPress plugins to achieve this effect

• “Pinterest Pin It Button For Images”
• “Pinterest Plugin”