New Theme

My first major change was the development of my own theme. My old theme was clunky and overall I didn’t like the feel that it gave to my reader base. I became greatly discouraged looking for a new theme as most are more of a testament to art and less on readability and functionality. So I decided to create my own that had a very simple layout.

Optimization of Load Time

One of the things I hated about my other blog was the fact that I didn’t have control over how the HTML and thus JavaScript was laid out. Especially the JavaScript because I had duplication where I didn’t need it. The script that Technorati gives you is hardly optimized for load time because of duplication of a supporting script file.

<a class="tr-linkcount" href="http://technorati.com/search/{your URL here}">View blog reactions</a>
<script src="http://technorati.com/linkcount" type="text/javascript"></script>

If you notice the 2nd line in the script above never changes. Well to optimize this I only included the 1st line in my post text and the 2nd line is at the bottom of the page with the rest of my JavaScript.

The next thing I did was optimize my load time using YSlow. See Jeff Atwoods Description.

1. Add Expires headers to all my static content for 10 years from the day it is downloaded.
2. Enabled Gzip compression for all my static content.
3. Put all CSS at the top of the page.
4. Reduced all DNS lookups by downloading images from LinkedIn, Technorati, and others and hosted them locally.
5. Moved all JavaScript to the bottom of the page.
6. Removed duplicate Technorati scripts.

I also moved hosts from GoDaddy’s shared Linux hosting. To GoDaddy’s virtual dedicated hosting on Windows. This proved difficult since URL Rewriting isn’t currently built in to IIS 6.0 like it is in Apache. I will talk a little about this setup in a later post.

SEO and SEM

I did a decent amount of SEO and SEM work to get my blog up to snuff. I took the following steps when redesigning the HTML for easy of indexing by Search Engines and Googles Media Bot (Used for giving relevant results in AdSense)

1. I download the MySQL file from the database and normalized all the URL’s to the one you see above.
2. Google AdSense only allows you to have 3 AdUnits per page and the placement of the AdUnits counts. For instance I had to red0 my theme so the content was before the sidebar, in terms of the HTML, so that the AdUnit in the articles placed first so that it received the highest quality Ad.
3. I reduce my categories to a handful of manageable ones, and migrated the rest to the new Tags feature.
4. Use H1, H2, and H3 tags sparingly. They should be a way to document the internal structure of your HTML page. (i.e. logical sections) My logic is as follows
   1. H1 is used for the blog title.
   2. H2 is used for the article title.
   3. H3 is used for sections of the article.
5. I started using the Post Slug is very important and should abide by the following rules
   1. No more than 3-7 keywords
   2. No common English words such as (if, about, when, my, etc.)

So that was how I spent my holiday creating a new design for my blog. If you have any suggestions, I am all ears about how I can improve my blog for the better.

As you can see from the graph above everybody has helped make this a very successful year for Coder Journal. Some information that I have been able to compile is:

Top 3 Posts:

1. Setting up iTunes on Windows Vista 64-bit
2. 5 Easy Steps To Get iTunes Working On Windows Vista x64
3. Remove Updater5 from My Documents Folder

The majority of my daily readers use Internet Explorer with Firefox being a close second, and of that 87% are new users that have never visited my site before. The majority of people find my site via organic results through Google, but about 9% come from Digg.com and Direct links.

Top 2 Favorite Search Engine Topics:

1. updater5
2. itunes vista 64

Top 5 Referring Sites:

1. digg.com
2. hanselman.com
3. dotnetkicks.com
4. forums.asp.net
5. start64.com

Top 3 Referring Search Engines:

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. Microsoft Live

In this new year I pledge to keep providing the same level of articles that you have come to expect. I also pledge to try and post an article at least every other weekday. My goal is to double the traffic by the end of 2008.

If you have any other suggestions please feel free to write me to nick {at} coderjournal.com.

I didn’t know this until today, but ARPANET adopted TCP/IP as the official communication protocol between computers on January 1st, 1983. I found this break down of the two protocols which form TCP/IP. The IP protocol and the TCP protocol is explained below:

IP

IP ensures that packets are routed to the right place. You can think of a packet as a package of information, and on this package IP holds information about the address and sender (note: your IP address, a number that identifies your computer online is contained in the IP portion of the packet).

When you visit “facebook.com” you ask facebook’s servers (computers) to show you its login page. However, your request must typically travel through 10 network nodes (routers) or more before finally reaching the facebook servers.

TCP

is a “protocol” built on top of IP (every TCP/IP packet has an IP portion). TCP’s entire job is ensuring that the connection occurs in an organized matter. To understand TCP’s purpose, let’s reconsider the package analogy. Say you have to send a script over the “normal” snail mail, and for whatever reason you have to send it in 2 separate packages. This occurs in TCP/IP all the time. So, it’s up to the receiver to arrange the individual packages into one whole package. TCP/IP connections have been handled with TCP/IP handshakes since January 1, 1983.

Check out a more technical description of January 1 tcp/ip

Al Gore invented the Internet in 1994 to combat global warming.