Archive for May, 2009
Part of my job is to check out the bloggers who sign up for Lijit every day. This is always one of the best times of my workday because I get to see such an interesting cross-section of what people are blogging about and how they go about conveying their passion to others. Of course, when I see a URL that pops out at me, I become even more intrigued. This was the case with PJ. His blog is called Real Men Drive Minivans and he’s a proud daddyblogger. (Hey, if real men can eat quiche and wear pink, I’m pretty sure they can drive minivans and use their kids as blog content…)
In addition to blogging about his son, PJ shares a Wordless Wednesday series and writes extensively about his adventures in the kitchen. I reached out to PJ and asked if he would be kind enough to answer some questions for this profile. Read on to find out what real men think of blogging…
How long have you been blogging and what made you start?
I’ve been blogging since January 2008 with an NFL football blog, but kind of dropped the ball on it shortly after my son was born a few months later. For a number of reasons, I didn’t attempt to revive that site, but rather launched my current blog, Real Men Drive Minivans, as a creative outlet while being a stay-at-home dad. Initially I wanted to get into blogging to learn more about web 2.0 and social networking, and now I’m using it as a way to learn new skills for an eventual return to the workforce.
What has been the greatest thing you’ve gotten from blogging?
I’d say the relationships I’ve managed to develop in a short period of time with some other dad and mom bloggers out there. As a new parent trying to find my way, there is a ton of information out there and some anecdotal evidence that the decisions we’ve made so far have been good for our son.
Of all the posts you’ve written, what has been your favorite and why?
Recently I’ve been participating in Fatherhood Fridays over at Dad Blogs where us daddy bloggers link up our individual blogs with posts relating to fatherhood every week. As part of my contributions I’ve been writing a series of posts examining whether or not fathers matter anymore. Aside from the generalizations made about stay-at-home dads, there are a lot of poor characterizations of fathers in the media. I’ve already posted two times in this (number to be determined) series and I have at least two others planned for upcoming Fatherhood Fridays. My first post “Don’t fathers matter?: Kneeling on concrete” that I published on March 20th is kind of what got my fire going to discuss this issue, so I would have to say that, at least for now, it is one of my favorite posts.
With all the media attention surrounding mommybloggers, what are your thoughts about the future of daddybloggers?
I think we’re still trying to find our voice. There are a lot of stereotypes being perpetuated about dads–that we’re dolts, we get lost in the supermarket, we don’t know the difference between a frying pan and a Santoku. The rhetoric is even worse for stay-at-home dads–we’re lazy, we’re unemployable, we’re destroying the family dynamic. While this may all make for a funny TV commercial, the dads I’ve met through blogging are highly focused on the very important role they play in their families. I really enjoy reading some of the mommybloggers as well and they deserve all the accolades they receive. My hope is that in time, we daddybloggers can take the momentum we are building to fight these stereotypes.
How has Lijit helped you to become a better blog publisher?
I’m still pretty new at this but I really like interpreting the stats and looking for trends. I spent nearly twelve years in the financial services industry, so I’m a bit of a numbers geek. My blog is still pretty new and I’m just now expanding my focus beyond the content to capturing my target audience.
Thanks for your time PJ and if you’re interested in searching for more of what PJ has to say, please use the Lijit search on his blog and follow him on Twitter.
Tags: daddybloggers, Lijit publishers, publisher spotlight | View Comments
At Lijit, we continually try new things to improve the end-to-end search experience for our publishers. Knowing that revenue is a key driver for some publishers, we took a hard look at how we displayed ads in search results, and experimented with a few ideas to see if we could increase ad performance. On April 30, we launched a new ad layout in our search results and asked a few of our publishers if they would try it out. With a couple weeks of data collected, the participating publishers saw an increase in the ratio of clicks to searches ranging from 10% to 300%.
What did we do, you may ask. We increased the number of ads at the top of the page from 1 ad to four. We also eliminated the yellow background of the top ad unit, and modified the text colors of the ad. If you would like to have your search results pages displayed with the new layout, please click here to let us know.
While we were under the hood, our developers made some modifications to the way the ads and search results load, resulting in a quicker overall load time for each search results page. These changes that relate to speed are already in place for all publishers, regardless of the ad layout. Because they are your search results pages, if you prefer to keep the existing layout, don’t do anything. You’ll still see the faster load times.
While we expect these changes to bring about ad performance improvements, we will continue try new things to make it even better in the future.
Tags: ads in search, enhancements, Lijit ad network, release announcements | View Comments
We love offering value to blog publishers and the folks at AddThis share the same passion. If you haven’t already heard of them, AddThis is the most used sharing and bookmarking site out there. They make it easy for visitors to share your blog posts with their friends on different social networks. Who doesn’t want their content in front of even more readers?
In addition to easy bookmarking, AddThis helps to increase SEO to your site, offers powerful analytics that let you better understand your readers, and has a global reach that allows your content to be shared worldwide. Like Lijit, AddThis is a free service and has a simple sign-up process. We’re using AddThis on our blog…shouldn’t you?
Spelling aside, we take our search wijit very seriously. It is by far the most visible component of Lijit’s offerings and, as such, necessitates some extra special design attention. A few weeks ago we noticed that a rendering issue started showing up in webkit based browsers (Safari, Chrome, iPhone), which was affectionately dubbed “the missing pixel.” This bothersome bit of negative space was much more than a compatibility issue. It was – to put it simply – our wijit failing on us.
How Did We Get Here?
So how does something so simple get so complicated, such that it starts breaking in the most modern, standards-compliant browsers? Well as it goes in any start up, results must come quick and that often costs certain details. We had written so much CSS quickly, to solve so many one off issues, our code was becoming brittle. And the missing pixel wasn’t even half of it. We had focused so intently on our technically supported browsers that the unsupported browsers were treated as second class citizens. Opera was a mess, both desktop and mobile. And with IE8 on the horizon it was time to go back to the drawing board and build a better wijit.
Planning a Happier Wijit
Rethinking the wijit posed a unique design challenge. It needed to render exactly the same across every browser/OS/rendering combo imaginable (text-based mobile browsers excluded). This is contrary to an extremely popular mantra in web design: websites do NOT need to look the same in every browser. Just ask Dan Cedarholm. I still advocate this philosophy in almost every context. However, a piece of functionality as visible and essential to our product as the search wijit requires visual consistency. And considering the alternative who’s name we do not speak, we had to do it with good ‘ol HTML/CSS/JS.
Step One – Identify Rendering Issues
After analyzing the legacy CSS we identified the source of almost every rendering issues: quirks mode. Quirks mode is a deprecated method of CSS rendering used by browsers on pages that fail to declare a document type. You can learn more about quirks mode and the doctype switch here. Because of the diversity of blogging platforms and web sites that our wijits reside on, supporting quirks mode was a must. We had previously written CSS that simultaneously accommodated quirks and standards mode. This created a very unstable house of cards. Make a change for standards mode and something falls over in quirks. Not a good place to be.
Step Two – Target Quirks
With a little JavaScript wizardry we were able to detect the browser’s rendering mode. Mix that with a conditional quirks mode style sheet and voilà! We have healthier, happier wijits. The main rendering inconsistency between standards and quirks was the height of the text input field (hence “the missing pixel”). This is due to various box model differences that I won’t bore you with here. All we needed to do was set the height for the input 6 pixels higher in quirks mode like so.
Standards Mode CSS (base styles used by all wijits)
- /* Text Input */
- #lwp_main #lwp_sfd {
- float: left;
- height: 15px;
- padding: 2px;
- margin: 0;
- font-size: 12px;
- }
Quirks Mode CSS (only loads when browser is in quirks mode)
- /* Text Input */
- #lwp_main #lwp_sfd {
- height: 21px; /* overrides standards mode height */
- }
This solves 90% of our wijit rendering issues. The rest are taken care of by a swooping CSS reset.
Step Three – The CSS Reset
As stated earlier, the wijit needs to look consistent across countless platforms and within countless codebases. A common problem with the old wijit was inheritance of CSS from the blog or site it lived on. This can be good in certain circumstances, but is usually undesirable. For example, if your blog theme placed a custom bullet icon on list items in the sidebar, all the list items would inherit those bullets unless explicitly overwritten in CSS. In steps the CSS reset. By telling all HTML within our wijit to start completely unstyled, we can maximize rendering consistency. We used a fairly liberal reset which allows us to start our wijit’s rendering with a clean slate.
Now we have a (more or less) bulletproof CSS/HTML wijit that will render consistently in more places than you can shake a stick at.
Step Four – Testing Testing Testing
Once this new front end code was integrated with the back end and we were serving wijits to real Lijit users, it was time to start testing. I set up a WordPress install and ran through roughly 100 different WordPress themes on every browser I had handy (IE 6/7/8, Safari 3/4, FireFox 2/3, Chrome, and Opera) and that’s before handing it off to QA. Things looked good. Really good.
The missing pixel was found and we now have a much more stable wijit that lives up to our publisher’s needs. We hope you like it as much as we do.
I don’t even know where to begin with introducing this one. Grace installed Lijit on her cute blog soon after moving to town and I reached out, via email, to thank her. Next thing you know, she’s working for us. Nice how things work like that in Boulder.
We’re so glad to have Grace’s youthful outlook and enthusiasm around the office. She’s a crazy mad tweeter and constantly blogs up a storm. With all of that Gen Y energy, how can she not help our company succeed? (Plus, she likes to pretend she’s tumbling for international judges.)
What is your Lijit contribution?
My title is Business Development, which means I help acquire new bloggers or publishers to understand and use Lijit while also helping to bring in any new business. I do a mix of customer support with our current users, account management, marketing and connecting with new bloggers not yet using Lijit. With that being said, I probably discover and talk with hundreds of bloggers each week!
What sound or noise do you love and why?
The sound of a wine cork popping open and/or a champagne bottle, then the fizzing afterwards. Not only is that sound related to celebrations and happiness, but I love me some wine.
What is your least favorite word and why?
When people (in real life) say out loud, “LOL”, “OMG”, or “WTF”. Why do you have to shorten and abbreviate? I’m right in front of you and you aren’t typing. Express yourself!
What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt and why?
I’ve secretly been harboring this idea and I recently revealed it, so I’m going to keep going and see where it takes me. Drumroll…Traveling Food Critic. Let me tell you why. It combines all of my passions: I love to travel and explore different cuisines from around the world. I think that writing is a fantastic way to express yourself and I enjoy interacting with people, so if I could have all those bundled up to one profession I would love it. That is, I could still live-tweet, blog and v-blog my way around the world with my very own “Grace Happens” global culinary tour.
Something you’re guilty of…
Laughing at inappropriate times and busting into dance moves when no one else is dancing (ie: middle of a street, empty dance floor, in my chair at the office).
Grace is an amazingly unique individual and is doing wonderful things for Lijit. To get even more Grace in your life, be sure to check out her blog, Small Hands, Big Ideas (take my word for it…those hands are tiny), follow her on Twitter, or look for her traveling food show coming soon to either the Food Network or the Travel Channel. Thanks for all you do to make us smile every day Gracie!
Tags: get to know Lijit, Lijit employee profile | View Comments
Lijit gets around. For some Friday afternoon fun, I wanted to share some of the Lijit sightings we’ve been sent….
If you happen to see Lijit as you’re out and about, be sure to snap a pic and send it our way. We love having photographic proof of where we are. Big thanks to everyone who helped make this post possible.
Tags: Lijit field trip, Lijit fun | View Comments