Gadgetopia

Just a quick pitch to follow my Twitter feed. If you like Gadgetopia’s posts in general, you’ll probably enjoy the Twitter feed too. It’s full of interesting, random stuff generally too short to post to the blog.

The last half-dozen Tweets.

• Had a demo yesterday from Coveo, a search vendor. It was amazing, and made me seriously regret the three Google Mini installs I’ve done.

• How many videos can you watch on this site and keep a straight face? http://is.gd/lSfC The navigation is NSFW. Seriously.

• This is absolutely nuts. http://is.gd/lScv

• If you store a PDF as a BLOB in MSSQL and then put a full-text index on the table, MSSQL will extract the text from the PDF and index that.

• Is it just me, or do threaded discussion forums (as opposed to flat) just invite people to drift off topic? I’ve learned to dread them.

• Transferring domains from one registrar to another has to be one of the most wretched, tedious, crappy tasks in all of Web-dom.

• Quite smitten with Balsamiq Mockups for making wireframes. Probably the best Air app I’ve seen.

• Riva FLV Encoder is a nice little GUI wrapper for FFMPEG. Includes the ability to extract an image (or even every frame) as a JPG. Free.

What’s the next step for Gadgetopia? To date, it’s been a blog, and a pretty successful one, I think. But, growth is more or less flat, and I’m trying to figure out where to go with it next.

So, dear reader, I come to you. What could Gadgetopia do that would add value to you?

We’ve toyed with the idea of expanding to a “community,” which would, in the short-term, involve adding a forum so all you long time readers can have some two-way conversations with people you’ve known from comment threads. I think the group of readers we have is great, and I know I’d like a more informal space in which to bounce questions off of some of you.

Let me know your thoughts on it. Is there something about Gadgetopia that we could change or expand to makes things more interesting around here?

Or should I just shut up and keep posting?

We’ve talked before about the posts where people misunderstand that we just wrote about something, and are not actually connected to the thing we wrote about. Consider the legendary Bill Gates, Philanthropist post.

Well, when we re-designed this site last month, I decided to include a helpful contact us page, and put Blend’s phone number on there.

Since then, we have:

• Taken a phone call from a welder looking to buy a T-Rex
• Gotten two voice mails from people wanting to verify their Craigslist ads
• Taken two phone calls from people wanting to CANCEL GOOGLE!!!

The phone number is now gone.

Office Snapshots » Blend Interactive Offices: Blend’s office made the Office Snapshots blog this morning.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota isn’t usually the place I think about when I think of great looking, well-designed office spaces, but after seeing the Blend Interactive offices, that might change. This place is pretty dynamite looking with lots of character.

…but I just can’t put my finger on it.

We redesigned, finally. If you only ever read Gadgetopia through RSS, stop by the actual URL and take a look.

Our first post, about The Gutenberg Project (check out that URL…), was six years ago today.

Gadgetopia readers, I come to you for your help.

I am looking for a 11” x 17” movie poster of “The Net” — the 1995 movie starring Sandra Bullock. I have looked, and been unable to find it (please don’t ask why I need it — all will be revealed…)

I offer a $25 Amazon gift certificate if you find one that I buy.

Federated Media and Pheedo have struck a deal to provide ads in Gadgetopia’s RSS feed. They’re fairly unobtrusive, and will only appear on one in four posts.

This post, therefore, is nothing but a notice and a place to vent. I know some of you have strong opinions about ads in RSS, but this is particularly sensitive for Gadgetopia, since probably 80% of our eyeballs come through RSS. The HTML side is fine, but RSS is where the lion’s share of our traffic is.

Comments are open. Have at it.

Fire at The Planet takes down thousands of websites: If you were wondering what happened to Gadgetopia over the weekend:

A fire at The Planet’s H1 data center in Houston, Texas on Saturday has taken out thousands of websites.

[…] About 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers are affected by the outage.

We lost a server (this one, in fact) Saturday afternoon. We were just about to start bringing 45 sites up on a new machine early Monday when the server came back online.

That’s always tricky — at what point do you failover? If we had, the server would have comeback right while DNS was rolling or something.

Amazon.com The Kindle Store Bestsellers: The most popular items in Gadgets, PCs & Consumer Electronics. : According to this page, Gadgetopia is the third-most purchased blog in its category Amazon Kindle store.

There are 14 sites in this category, and Gadgetopia is ahead of sites like Scoble, Crunchgear, Techdirt, etc. I find this frankly amazing, and I suspect we may have been purchased once, which put us ahead.

Even more interesting is that we’re #8 of 44 in the entire “Internet and Technology” category.

I have no raw sales figures. I’d be curious to know who purchased this feed to read on a Kindle and why. If you’re out there, speak up.

We took a cue from our arch-rivals over at Electric Pulp and finally created a Flickr account (give us six years or so, and we’re bound to pick up on a new trend or two).

Our first activity is a photoset of the Blend Offices. So, take a tour and learn about the safe, the robot, the gnome and everything else that makes Blend a fascinating place to work.

So FM has sent me a new gig from Microsoft, where I have to make two audio posts every week for 10 weeks. So, like, 20 times I have to talk into a microphone, say something intelligent, and then post it here through an apparently snazzy little system they’ve built.

I have zero idea what I’m going to talk about. In fact, my first post might just be about how hard it is to do audio posts.

If you guys think I’m an idiot in print, trust me — audio isn’t going to change that perception.

I looked through Google Analytics and found the top posts of the last year.

What you have to understand, however, is that 80% of our content comes from search engines (most of that from Google), so this list doesn’t represent what Gadgetopia readers were interested in. It just shows an intersection of (1) what the public was searching for, and (2) what Gadgetopia posts got well-positioned in Google.

1. Tea Games
2. The Cell Phone Water Detection Sticker
3. T-Rex
4. Installshield Update Manager
5. Bitlord

Notice a pattern? Each post was named for the subject, and nothing else. So the TITLE tag of the post page was for the exact same search phrase someone would use to find it. Some things in SEO ain’t that hard.

Here are the top posts by comments gathered throughout the year.

1. The Cell Phone Water Detection Sticker
2. Intelius
3. Geek Squad
4. Why Macs Suck
5. Why Mac Ads Suck

As for numbers #4 and #5 there, I can only assume that “Macs” and “suck” just go together when searching the Net.

Just a quick note to everyone that I’m in DisneyWorld this week. I was hoping to be able to post something from here, but Internet access is sadly expensive from the room, and every time I go near the laptop, I get the Evil Eye from my wife.

I’ll be back in action after the holidays.

One quick story —

We were at the Animal Kingdom today, and my son was sad to find out that the Expedition Everest roller coaster was closed due to “technical difficulties.” The truth, however, was a little more sinister.

(Interesting note: right about the time this would have happened, I remember several stern-sounding announcements over the PA that went “would [name] or [name] from Navarre, Florida (I specifically remember the city) please pick up a courtesy phone and dial [number].” It’s sad to know now why they needed to find these people.)

Someone mentioned to me today that this post has risen to #17 on Google (#15 in Canada) for “content management system.”

I find this extremely cool. I’m really proud of that post, though it was so long I don’t know how many people actually read it. It only got one comment.