Pedro Assunção » blogging

HTML WYSIWYG editor with Flickr upload support?

Pedro Assunção — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:08:14 +0000

Lately i’ve been tinkering around with the idea of recreating my blog in a more handcrafted way (ruby on rails) as opposed to the current implementation using WordPress. Don’t get me wrong WordPress is awesome. It has many years and millions of websites as a testament of it’s awesomeness behind it. But i guess my hacker’s vein popups up every now and then to whisper the reasons why i should have something custom made

The biggest problem with this, is that WP’s interface to create posts is, again, awesome. You can find plugins for pretty much anything, especially to do tasks that are otherwise plain boring, like uploading pictures to your flickr account and instantly have them available in your post for inclusion. I’ve been trying to find something like that for those nice HTML editors out there (like tinyMCE and CKEditor), but so far have had no luck.

Anyone out there knows if something like that exists yet and where can i find it?

New blog layout

Pedro Assunção — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 20:04:45 +0000

It was bound to happen; I get easily bored with website layouts and i saw that cluttered old design going away for some time now.

This new theme, a much more clean version, is an adaptation of Fiver, by Stinkyinkshop. I think it works really well, wouldn’t you say?

Browser and visitor statistics

Pedro Assunção — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 22:50:33 +0000

Was just now looking at google analytics for my blog and got some surprises, especially when it comes to the browser people use to access it. Seems that Chrome is leading and Internet Explorer is dead. Long live Internet Explorer

Browser usage

Also, very interesting is the fact that i’m Portuguese and Portugal is not on the top visitors’ countries list. Special thanks to my followers in India, you know who you are

Language

UPDATE: As requested by a friend of mine, here are some more statistics: Top sources and keywords.

Top sources chart

Top sources list

Top keywords

Peace out

How to lose half your page visits in 1 month (and how to recover from it)

Pedro Assunção — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 21:58:43 +0000

A while back i changed my blog domain name from diffract.me to pedroassuncao.com. However, i was dumb enough not to redirect the traffic to the new name – in a transition period. The result? A drop from 100+ visits per day to less than 20.

I have to admit that it kind of bummed me out a little. Being a Buddhist-light i tried my best not to let it get to me and told myself that it would eventually recover just as long as i kept writing stuff that can help some people – combined with nicely chosen post titles and search engine keywords.

Turns out i was right: a couple of months later the visits are slowly recovering – as you can see from the screenshot of my analytics account.

That is all very neat but where is the “helping people” part, you might ask. Here it is: I thought i might share some of the techniques i currently employ to attract people to look at what i write. They are no different from what others have blogged about before, but it’s always good to share this information around with prospective new bloggers:

Write about stuff that you think will help other people. This may mean writing about solutions to problems you yourself encountered, or just writing about interesting stuff you did/saw/ate/whatever that other humans will possibly find interesting
Read a lot of news/blogs/stories about stuff that you have interest in. And *write insightful* comments on them. Most comments systems will allow you to enter your URL and/or twitter name and will show those in the comments you write. This is a great way to drive the curious people back to your site;
For every helpful post you write, submit the link to the major news sites (think digg, reddit, hacker news, etc). This will make sure that search engines will have more interest in your site, since you will be linked back when they crawl those. It will also make some more people aware of what you are writing, which leads me to the following point…
…Write catchy post titles. And by catchy i don’t mean cheesy or sensationalist. Create a habit of getting to the point in your titles while – at the same time – being original to entice curiosity. Writing titles is a form of art in itself, believe me;
Link whenever you are referencing something that can be linked to. Again, search engines will use this information to your advantage in page rankings. And other bloggers will appreciate the traffic, so it’s a win-win situation

That’s it. Happy blogging, and feel free to drop me a line

Dropbox plus Mercurial -driven development. Anyone tried that?

Pedro Assunção — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 08:47:12 +0000

One of the biggest pains of any developer is maintaing the source code. Especially if you – like me – have a gazillion pet projects that need to be updated whenever you come up with “cool idea #20000″ for one of them.

Version control systems like Mercurial are awesome, but they are only part of the equation; there’s still the time consuming process of deploying the changes to “production”. So i wonder if it would be a good idea to have a Mercurial repository sitting on a dropbox account and develop directly there. This way any changes to the source code would be instantly reflected on production.

I am aware that this is unthinkable for serious projects (the kind you get paid to do), but it can probably work for fun pet projects.

Do you have any experience with something like that? Share your thoughts, if you have any

Idea for a better customer satisfaction/feedback service

Pedro Assunção — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:34:04 +0000

Recently i had to fill one of those client/customer satisfaction surveys. Endless pages of “how well do you grade feature X” questions that frustrate you beyond the point of killing yourself and your colleagues.

And that got me thinking: how about a simple form that asks “Are you happy? Yes/No”? If you answer “yes”, case closed. And some people are just plainly happy with the service/product/job so this is definitely a time saver. If you answer “no”, you are presented with a text field where you can start typing what you are not happy about and, as you do, it queries for responses from other people to suggest you with stuff that might be a problem to you. If you find one that applies to what you are trying to complain about, you choose it and another text field presents itself to complain about something else. If you don’t find one previous reply, yours is added. Repeat until done.

How’s that for simplicity?

And while we’re are it, why not make it an online survey service and make tons of cash?

Who’s your friend? Now start coding!

How does one change his domain name without losing hits?

Pedro Assunção — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 11:58:34 +0000

I recently decided to drop one of the domain names that points to my blog. After (finally) getting the proper domain (pedroassuncao.com), i figured there was no sense anymore in keeping the old one (diffract.me).

Now here’s the problem: A lot of google links that bring a huge percentage of my traffic are pointing to the old one. That explains why – from last week to this one – i got a 90% traffic decrease in visits and page views. I definitely should have done something to prevent or at least minimize this “problem”, but i didn’t.

So my question is: What could i have done? Anyone out there has had this problem before? If so, what did you do to mitigate it?

UPDATE: Thanks for all the comments, that was really helpful. One in particular (by Ryan) explains a nice solution really in detail.

Trying out the android app

Pedro Assunção — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 01:39:17 +0000

So I come back from the road trip and what’s they’d first thing I do? Install the wordpress android app so I can blog anywhere, hehe. I kind of decided to use my blog as it was intended (as a web log), not necessarily as people see them these days (as places to write longer pieces of text that cannot be tweeted).

Peace

Good blogging desktop client for mac (osx)

Pedro Assunção — Wed, 26 May 2010 08:13:47 +0000

When i think about my mind’s typical excuses not to write on this blog, the one that pops up the fastest is usually the lack of a good blogging desktop client for mac.

I know, i know, i should just shut the hell up, use WordPress’ web admin interface, and quit whining. But i have a big problem when it comes to writing: i’m lazy. Anything that takes more than a few clicks in order to start writing will make me want to fire up my desktop PC and play something. I once bought a desktop blogging client called Ecto (which i still use, from times to times), but i think it’s no longer maintained properly since illumineX acquired it from it’s maker – Adriaaan Tijsseling – in the spring of 2008. And to be honest it never felt quite awesome, complaining all the time about the malformed-ness of my youtube embedded code.

So i was wondering if any of you – the 2 people that actually read my blog – know about a nicer (WP) desktop client for the mac.

In other – completely unrelated – news: I have my own parachute rig now. Here are some pics:

DSCF0866 by nocivus

DSCF0867 by nocivus

Irony of searches and one iPad visit to my blog

Pedro Assunção — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 10:47:46 +0000

Just a couple of pictures this time.

The first one is about something i noticed i was doing, while searching for a code fragment. One could call it ironic, trying to find “find”

The other is proof of my amazement by the fact that there was one person who visited my blog using an iPad

UPDATE: Turns out i was looking at a 2 day period only. This month there have been actually 4 iPad visits, hehe