Dan Makovec’s blog

Selling Cars

Recently we launched our online Cars portal, and so far it’s been reasonably successful at attracting private sellers due to its relatively cheap pricing, array of payment options and seller features when compared with its competitors.  As with any new commercial site, we’ve faced a chicken and egg situation.  You need visitors to make a site attractive enough for sellers to advertise, but you need enough stock from sellers in order to attract visitors.

The powers that be, until recently, have been advocating an “organic” approach to developing the site’s business.  Indeed, “if you build it, they will come” has been a bit of a mantra around here since long before I joined.  Fortunately though, that has changed somewhat in recent months.  In one month, we’ve doubled the amount of stock advertised on the site, and we’ve started promoting the site via both traditional media and Google AdWords.

I wouldn’t say that traffic has shot up, but it’s increased steadily.Our analytics system tells us that users are spending more time on the site compared to before, and our sign-up rates have increased dramatically as I’ve made little tweaks to the system’s software to iron out kinks and bottlenecks.

As of today, we launched the first round of our dealers listings section - something which dramatically increases the attractiveness of the site to potential shoppers.  We’ve also outsourced the site’s look and feel re-design to some experts in the field (the current design has proven that I’m no HTML artist) to give it a more polished look and improve its SEO.   The redesign is coming along and we’re hoping to have it up in the next couple of weeks.

Also coming along is the part of the system that most excites me.  With the majority of the classifieds functionality live, we’re expanding Cars.com.au out to become Australia’s premier motoring portal.  We’ve got some partnerships with content providers signed up, and we’re working on the content management system at the moment.  I can’t say too much at the moment, but when that part of the site goes live, we’ll have a really useful motoring site ready for the Australian mass market unlike anything that’s out there at the moment.

Fun times ahead! 

Just moved to DreamHost

TCH’s comparatively miniscule storage quota was getting on my nerves, particularly with my IMAP addiction.  So I’ve moved to DreamHost, where the hosting’s cheap and the storage and bandwidth abound.Actually, I moved my mail across to DH a couple of months ago.  I just moved my web across this evening so that I can finally give TCH the flick (as soon as the DNS updates, which I’m hosting at E-Info, propagate).It also gave me a chance to install Joomla and a couple of other pieces of software I’m investigating for work.  An interesting afternoon’s research. 

Reducing Information Overload

I love reading about what’s going on out there in the big wide world.  Like just about every other techno-nut out there, I get a lot of my news via RSS feeds from all different sources.  I use Bloglines to keep track of all my news and categorise it.

Unfortunately as time has gone own and I’ve added more subscriptions to Bloglines, I’m at the point where if I don’t read my news feeds for even an hour, there are more articles than I can hope to skim through in the next hour waiting for me.  Solution: trim the fat.

Why subscribe to 3 Wired news feeds when just the “Top Stories” feed tells me all I need?

Why subscribe to Java feeds when I no longer give a shit about Java?

Why do I even have subscriptions to all of those “general interest” blogs that I must have found amusing on at least one occasion, but now completely clog up my inbox?

Why am I even subscribed to recipes feeds when I can’t be arsed cooking anything beyond stir fry, pasta or the occasional burrito?

I think at some point, possibly during my time in Yahootopia, I became addicted to RSS.  Now I’ve finally come to realise that the vast majority of shit that’s out there is exactly that - shit.  I had over 120 feeds on my list.  I’ve already cut these in half, and I’m going to keep on trimming until only the stuff I actually read is left.  That should reduce my sense of information overload!

Feeling lucky

One of the side effects of my little SEO experiment earlier this year is Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky feature.

Thanks to my efforts, any Google search for my name now puts my blog at the top of the search results, with the consequence that clicking the “I’m feeling Lucky” button brings my blog up straight away.

An extension of this comes from the fact that Mozilla browsers (Firefox et al) make use of the “I’m feeling lucky” feature using the contents of the Location bar as a search term if it doesnt’ resolve to a valid URL. Consequently, typing “Dan Makovec” into the firefox location bar now brings my blog up straight away. Cute!

Anyway, the Snowies were great, although not too snowy except for right on the mountain peaks. It was admittedly a little bit cold up in Thredbo, but the air was fresh and the sky clear. Brian and I spent most of our time walking around the village, sipping hot chocolates down at the cafe, or bobsledding on the steel track down by the village.

On Sunday we went for a long drive right through the mountains, stopping to admire the views of the alpine peaks and beautiful valleys.

We also got to check out the Murray 1 Power Station, one of the core parts of the Snowy Mountains Hydro scheme that brought in over 100,000 migrants to build post world war II. The stats of the scheme are amazing. over 100km of high pressure water tunnels, even more aboveground aquaducts, powerstations all over the place, and enough power to supply 70% of Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney’s peak electricity needs.

It also opened up a massive area of land west of the mountains for farming, as it takes control of the water forming from melted snow and diverts it to irrigation schemes to make otherwise uninhabitable land completely usable.

This trip to the mountains has got me thinking about getting a few friends together to go skiing. I haven’t been for over two years now so I’m pretty rusty (I snowboarded last time and didn’t touch the skis), and would love to go again. I wonder how many of my friends would be interested in a trip either to the Snowies or NZ for about 5 days this August. I’ll have to put the proposition out there and see who’s interested.

Google sensors results in China

Much has been made recently about Google’s sensoring of results on its Chinese search engine.

The long and the short of it is that Google are a public corporation, and as such its primary priority is to increase profits for shareholders at the expense of any moral and/or ethical obligations they would otherwise like to meet. So when a government such as China says to them “you will censor your results or you won’t be allowed to operate in our country” - especially a country posessing the largest search market in the world, they have no choice.

The results of censorship you see here. Try doing a search for Tian An Men Square, site of the infamous government crackdown on citizens demanding democracy, on Google Image search.

First, the US version:
http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

Then the Chinese version:
http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

Ah, corporations

2 weeks left

With the Australia Day holiday tomorrow, I’m two weeks out from leaving Unwired and going off on my own.

The past few weeks have been tough, but we’ve just hit a major milestone tonight. One more goal to achieve next week and I’ll be able to leave on a happy note.

My leaving will mark the end of a year in Sydney with more than its share of ups and downs, and hopefully the beginning of some new adventures. Whether they take place here or not is still up in the air though; we’ll most likely remain Sydney based until November (we like our current house and would like to spend a year in it).

I’ll certainly be bouncing between here and Adelaide a bit this year - and it looks like there’s a strong possibility of travel to other towns. I’m glad I have the car!

In other news, Bloglines is behaving erratically. It just told me Mykro published 4 entries in the past few hours. Actually the oldest of the entries was dated just after his visit in December, but I hadn’t read it until now since I didn’t know it had been written! Myk - I might give Google reader a second glance!

Search engines have finally caught up

It took four weeks in total, and it was Google dragging its feet. Searching for my name now brings up my blog at number 5 on Google. Searching for my name with “blog” hits it at number 1, with my home page at number 2.

Yahoo puts the new blog at number 2 when searching by name, with my old blog at number 1. I’ve added meta tags to the old blog to stop engines indexing it, so hopefully that link will disappear in a few weeks. Same results by adding “blog” to the search string.

MSN still has the site at number 1. That was easy!

The tricky part is that my name pops up in a few places online, so optimizing the site to lift it above the other pages took a little work. OK, so I think I’ve got the basics of SEO figured out. I wonder how I can apply this now?

Engines are starting to see this blog on the new site

Time for an update on getting my blog URL published… For the purposes of not skewing indexing results, I’m deliberately not writing my name here. Substitute firstname and surname for their appropriate values
Since moving the blog to the new URL, MSN was the first engine to catch up. Typing my name, or my name with “blog” after it, brings up my new blog URL first, and my home page second.

So far so good, it looks like optimizing for these guys is simple enough.

Google isn’t so good. Just searching for my name brings up my home page at number 16. Above it at number one is a link to my account profile page on mysql.com, followed by a couple of references to an article i co-authored back at uni in the 90s and some hopelessly out of date email archives from god knows when.

Searching for my name + “blog” brings up my old blog address, some references to my old blog address (some of which I removed about a month ago), then my new home page (not blog) at number 8. My blog doesn’t show up at all. Weird.

Yahoo isn’t so good either. Searching by my name brings up my top level domain home page (my surname.net) at number 26, and various other links. Interestingly, the first listing is my blog entry on Livejournal mentioning that I’ve moved the site to the new URL, although this URL never shows up anywhere in the listings.

Adding “blog” to the search moves my top-level domain link up to number 11 from number 26. I do have the phrase “ramblings blog” in the meta keywords. I wonder if this is affecting things?

For my next trick, I’ll try adding hyperlinks directly to the blog from the top level page and removing the “blog” keyword from the page. We’ll see if that changes anything. In the meantime, if anybody reading this through my old LJ site could update their bookmarks and blogrolls to point to the new address (http://firstname.surname/blog) I’d really appreciate it!

Catch up

Yes, I’m still around.

I haven’t been blogging for a while, mainly because I’ve had a lot on lately. Trips to Adelaide and Melbourne, a rediculously increased workload, preparing to move house, and something big, that if everything pans out the way I’m expecting this week, I’ll be able to mention publicly next week.

I’m thinking about setting up a mini-wiki for my own personal use (and for the use of any friends/colleagues). A colleague has one up that he uses to store handy notes to himself when he learns something new, and I think it’s a great idea. I’ve been playing with Wikis at work over the past month, and finally get them. More soon.

In the meantime, here’s a link to a great tutorial for setting up virus scanning on the Mac using the free ClamAV (we use it on our Linux servers at work). Here’s another one, to an AppleScript that lets Mail.app scan your mail for viruses and deal with it accordingly.