Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Wake n’ Bacon
No one likes to wake up, especially by an alarm. This clock gently wakes you up with the mouthwatering aroma of bacon
via Crave
Thursday, February 08, 2007
ESPN Gets a Mini-Facelift
ESPN.com has restyled the top portion of the home page. I figured I’d give my initial (disclaimer: late-night) thoughts.
There’s a new double menu, with some 2.0-y offerings on top, and the standard leagues/sports menu on the bottom.
The area up top: logo, ad, search box, tv schedule have also been redone.
The gradient behind the top looks more subtle (even if it’s not, this is just my impression of it), and both menus are text on flat colors.
The old-style menus, which you can still see on the inner-pages, had the leagues/sports on a gradient and the submenus on a flat color with a bevel/border highlight on rollover.
The new yellow background for the submenus is a drastic change, but easy to read and the rollover has a nicer look than before.
The top is nice and neat. I have to admit I laughed a bit when I’m shown these are the “hottest searches”: Bracketology | Sports Guy | NFL Draft | TMQ | NBA rankings | NHL rankings
An interesting thing to note is the change in order for the leagues/sports.
Old: NFL, MLB, NBA, NASCAR, Autos, NHL, College, Golf, Soccer, Tennis
New: NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, ESPNU, College FB, Men’s BB, Women’s BB, NASCAR, Autos, Golf, Soccer, Tennis, Boxing, Olympics
Fantasy has made a shift from far-right to far-left, in between ESPN (home) and NFL.
Consideration: the new menu stretches across the home page, designed for a 1024x768 resolution. The old menu, that I’m comparing from the inner pages, is designed for 800x600 resolution. The inner pages do have more conent to the right of it, but the menu is cut off there, so there is room for more menu choices on this new homepage design.
Some sports sites do change menu order depending on season, but the positioning is curious as the NHL is given better position than before and NASCAR, maing its return to ESPN, is pushed towards the right. Most menus are generally left to right in order of importance (at least for English pages). Sometimes important items are broken up, to give the items in between a better chance of being seen, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what ESPN is trying to do here or the NFL and MLB would be the goalposts of this menu.
ESPNU is the only ESPN brand that gets a prime menu position (most are under the home submenu). February is probably the best time for them to push the brand with fans anticipating March Madness. Yesterday was “Signing Day” for college football, something I didn’t know before. The lines between pro and college continue to blur.
Back to the new double menu, with the 2.0-y offerings. It starts off with MyESPN, something I’ve heard little of since the first release. Is anyone using this out there? The only plus for me right now would be to not have ESPN Motion autoplay.
Insider, the ESPN.com offerings behind a paywall is the second option.
ESPN 360 wants to launch a video player. It does. Out of curiousity, I hit “Video” and I get the same player, and it starts the same content. I realize ESPN wants people to bug their ISPs to sign deals for 360 content (as that’s how you get access to it), but I’m not sure if it’s really worth two menu options that lead to the same place.
Page 2 and SportsNation have become ESPN.com standards, and then after that is Blogs. But, they’re all “Insider Blogs”. You need to subscribe to Insider to read any of them. I’m guessing that’s making ESPN some nice coin, because they’re certainly not popular to link to on any of the blogs I read, large or small. I know revenue, not traffic, is the name of the game for ESPN, but I still wonder what the numbers would be if ESPN’s top reporters would have open blogs.
Podcenter is just what you’d think it would be.
After that is Video Games, a partnership between ESPN and 1UP. There’s a good amount of reviews, but not a lot of fresh content. It seems like it’s there as more of a promotional area, which is a good lead-in for the last few options: Travel, Contests, Shop.
The last link is actually to ESPN Deportes, which I haven’t visited in quite a while. It has a look very similar to the one ESPN.com had before this slight makeover.
The change does strike me as a “clean up”, and I think it works well. I hope ESPN takes this approach soon with all their pages.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Getting a Read on Active Users
Active Users of a feed is a very hard number to try and estimate.
A lot of sites will flaunt RSS numbers, but from casual observation, it seems people rarely unsubscribe from feeds.
Sometimes webmasters and bloggers get a clue when a feed is moved and you can see old subscription numbers vs new subscriptions.
Yesterday I read about PVRWire shutting down on Jason Calacanis’ blog. Tonight I read the farewell from AdJab.
These, and any other blogs shutting down over at Weblogs, Inc. have an opportunity to test out their active RSS base. They can keep the feed urls going and watch the subscription numbers, and how quickly they decrease. Sure, everyone doesn’t unsubscribe right away, but over the course of a few months you should be able to get a good read on things.
I know a lot of people don’t want to know these numbers as they feel it can hurt promotion, but for accuracy’s sake, I think it’d be a good experiment.
Just a thought.
Anyway, so long to AdJab, I was a loyal reader. Chris, Adam, Bob, Ryan, and Tom, did a great job over there.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Can One Commercial Change a Brand?
Ok, how about two? Through Bruce Campbell’s experience commerical (the quiz is pretty good too) and the one below, Old Spice is suddenly making a bit of a splash. I’ve had the Campbell one sent to me over and over (and I still like it when it comes on tv, which is pretty amazing) and the other is a strong follow-up (assuming it came out shortly after the experience one).
Could a few more turn Old Spice cool? Make it a younger brand? Apparently that’s a popular question and the goal of Wieden & Kennedy, the agency behind the spots.
The NY Times has some more details, including a description of one of the print ads:
To underscore authenticity for Old Spice, the campaign gives a prominent role to the brand’s original trappings and trade dress, including the cursive script logo, the clipper ship from the fragrance bottles and the vintage whistled commercial jingle. But they are treated playfully rather than reverentially, in a manner Ms. Taylor described as an “inside-the-joke feeling.”
For example, a print ad for Old Spice fragrance, featuring a 1968 photograph of the actress Faye Dunaway sprawled out before a roaring fire, declares, “If your grandfather hadn’t worn it, you wouldn’t exist.”
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Unwrapping Rapping Paper
Monday, January 08, 2007
Tickle Me Elmo on Fire
Satisfying and disturbing all at the same time.
via BoingBoing
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Caption Watch
From the did-they-do-that-on-purpose department.
This is the current photo and caption on Sportsline right now:
Giggity.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Walk the Line
Just a random observation: I was on 59th Street today, also known as Central Park South. There are a lot of horses and buggies there, waiting to take people on rides through the park or around the area. One thing that was interesting was the caretakers (I’m not sure what they’re called) would talk to each other, many leaving the horses alone. When the front horse left, the horses all moved up on the line, without their caretakers, leaving just the same amount of space between the horse in front of them as they had before, just as people do when they’re waiting in line. I guess sometimes we’re all trained the same way.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Random Youtube Thought
Youtube, now owned by Google, only has “add to Yahoo” links on their RSS page. Was there a previous deal in place with Yahoo to have these links shown, or has Youtube just been slow to pimp their new overlords and change it to “add to Google”?
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
ISAPI Rewrite for Expression Engine
I use Expression Engine (or EE) for many of my blogs, and I mostly use a WIMP setup (and I know the LAMP users love that acronym).
WIMP = Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP
LAMP = Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP
While I do have a LAMP box, I also use SQL Server and .NET, so a couple of my WIMP boxes are a bit more than well… WIMP-y, for lack of a better term.
EE has a nasty default URL. It would look something like this:
yourfunkydomain.com/index.php?/templategroup/templatename/article-title
Most people want to get rid of the /index.php? and I can’t blame them.
IIS doesn’t have mod_rewrite for URL rewriting, but there is ISAPI Rewrite and it’s very powerful, if not on par with mod_rewrite. I’ve posted my methods in the past for when I used Wordpress and decribed them when I added an All Posters front to hockeyfights.com.
I was reading the EE forums on pmachine.com today and saw someone asking specifically about getting rid of the /index.php? with ISAPI Rewrite and IIS and thought I’d post my method here:
First, it’s helpful to read the wiki entry about removing posts from your URLs.
Second, go into your control panel and remove index.php from any of the urls defined for your blog.
Third, in the control panel set “Force URL query strings” to no.
Fourth, get your httpd.ini file ready to go with this code:
[ISAPI_Rewrite]
RewriteRule (/(?:template1|template2|trackback|member|search|P\d{1,8}).*) /index.php?$1 [I,L]
That’s it 
I’m using what the wiki entry describes as the inclusion method because I use many other directories that aren’t associated with EE and I don’t want anything related to them. For someone like me who only has a few templates per domain, it’s not a big deal. For someone who might use many template groups and names, it’ll be a little more work, or they might want to look into using another method.