David Chan’s Blog

By bounce, I am referring to bounce rate. A bounce is recorded when a visitor views only one page of your site during the visit. As someone who runs a blog, I strive to make my content coherent (ie. my blog contains a lot of programming and technology content) so that it appeals to a certain audience. A good indicator of whether my blog is coherent is if people view more than one page per visit on average, or if I have a low bounce rate.

People usually find my blog through search, and so they land directly on a post (instead of the front page). Likewise, when my blog get Stumbled, the landing page is always a post. When visitors finish reading that post, ideally they’d take a look around to find more of the same content. With that in mind, would the bounce rate of visitors from Google and StumbleUpon be the same? Here is my referral data from the last two months (July 1st - Sept 11th):

As you can see, the bounce rate from StumbleUpon visitors is very low compared to visitors from my other top referrals.

My conclusion (well, it’s more or less an assumption, but an educated one) is that the StumbleUpon Interests selection works very well to channel interested readers to your content. It’s not a bad bet that users who go through the entire process of signing up to StumbleUpon, installing the tool bar, and setting up their interests must really be passionate about the selected topics.

That or they have a lot of time to kill, which, admittedly, is something that StumbleUpon also does very well.

The moral of the story? Tag your Stumbles wisely!

P.S. If you have a blog which gets Stumbled often, post some of your findings on your bounce rate!

It just occured to me that Twitter’s emo whale likes self-inflicted pain.

Like many others, I am excited about the Firefox 3 release today.  Unfortunately for all fans, the release is delayed as the official website is still not updated as of this morning.  Word on Twitter is that you can download Firefox 3 from the Japanese Firefox site.

With that installed you might want to update your Firebug plugin, if you haven’t done so already.  The Firebug site has been down for a while now and there is no indication on when it will be back, but there is a great guide at A Tiny Pixel which will help you get Firebug on Firefox 3.

Lots of work arounds, but I find it all worth it.

Recently there has been lot of whispering on my Twitter friend’s timeline as to who’s on, or will be joining Plurk.  I took a quick look at it and my initial impressions were underwhelming, but I decided to make an account anyways.

The first thing in any new social network would be to find friends from other social networks.

I used the find friends from Twitter feature, and it gave me a list of Plurk users to add, which was great - until I realized it doesn’t send them a friend request. Now I was stuck as a fan of my Twitter friends, and to add them as friends on Plurk, I had to manually go to each person’s page and click the “Add as friend” button.  Not exactly what I had in mind when I initiated the import functionality.

As a developer, I’m always looking to see if something has an API.  Plurk doesn’t have one yet, but that doesn’t stop others from making their own versions.  I particularly like this one from YungSang.  Mashables say that an official API is coming.  I’ll be looking at that as soon as it comes!

What Plurk does offer in comparison to Twitter is a more social experience.  The whole Karma system and the numerous rewards found throughout the system work great to attract users and build adoption.  However, it feels a bit gimicky to encourage usage with rewards.  Time will tell if this is a good idea, when the novelty of the Karma rewards system runs out.

Plurk looks great, but it’s not enough to attract me to use it over Twitter.  Other Twitter folk express similar first impressions.  Lets see if my mind changes in the future.

A mid-term mission of mine is to appear on the first page of the Google (US search) index for the search phrase “David Chan”.  I’ve been working on it on and off, studying SEO here and there on my free time.

A tool I use to check my search engine ranking position (SERP) is the Top 100 Rankings Position Checker.  Not noted for its looks, it’s pretty useful in finding if an url is within the top 100 Google results for a particular keyword or phrase.  Best of all is the ability to bookmark your query so you can validate your ego in one click!

Hmm my current rating is “very nice”, but as this tool points out, it’s not good enough.  More work on this in the future.

You’ve probably read something on the web which has shocked you, made you angry, and down-right pissed you off. Whether it’s a blog post, a tweet, or even an instant message, you couldn’t help but to feel strongly about what was being said.

It’s a good thing.

I find that a lot of people don’t like to express their opinions for the the fear of being judged or inciting conflict. No one likes to be judged, and no one likes conflict (okay, that last one isn’t totally true), but not being firm and opinionated means you’re being wishy-washy. And besides, people with opinions are much more interesting than the me-too’s.

You can’t make everyone happy, so just say what you want. Put the expression back into self-expression. Otherwise, why are we all on this “social web” anyways?

Twitter is a phenomenon. People are always finding new ways to use it and it becomes more and more addictive as you follow new people. But why is following people fun? This isn’t a MySpace “I have more friends than you” kind of deal. Following someone on Twitter means that you are listening to what that person has to say. Scoble summarized this very well in his “The secret to Twitter” post.

But what really makes Twitter great is the ability to have conversations between any number of people. Using @<username> you can send a reply to someone’s tweet. Replies to your tweets will show up automatically in your timeline. However, by default, Twitter is set to only show replies from people you follow. This doesn’t really follow the listening model, but luckily, you can listen to anyone reply to your tweets by changing a simple setting:

From the Home screen, click Settings, click on Notices, click on the @ Replies dropdown and choose “all @ replies”, and click Save.

Now you’re listening.

There’s a first for everything, and today I launched my first Facebook application. It’s an interesting idea, and the premise is simple: Strendr takes the keywords from your status message and displays them in a cloud format (think tag clouds for blogs). The execution was on a “good-enough” level; the entire thing took about 60 hrs of work, including all the research. I wasn’t surprised by the wealth of documentation and information available for the developers - it explains why there are so many applications out there.

Next steps for my application include refactoring and cleanup. Working on the eve of Jesus’ birthday doesn’t promote good coding standards. I will also look into user experience and documentation. My UI has been made to be as friendly and uncluttered as possible, but I believe that the content could be worded better and with more consistency. Of course, there’s also a social-viral component of the app that must be nurtured. There is a “Trends” page that tracks the usage of keywords amongst all users of Strendr, and it will need to be presented in a way so that users will want to send app invites.

If you have time, check out my Facebook app, Strendr!

(comic from xkcd)

Reminds me of how I learned (the hard way) about SQL injection attacks. Did you ever have a security blunder (of course you did)? How bad was it?

Although there are increasingly more and more things fighting for a slice of my time, I always find time to read a bit every day. The material I have been reading in the past included a lot of coding language references and insights into best practices and methodologies, and I still enjoy leafing through Joel on Software or the Pragmatic Programmer every once in a while.

However, over the last two years I have been immersing myself into books about marketing and startups. My work deals solely with the internet, and I figure that trendiness and quick beginnings make for success in this field. Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin have earned a spot in my “Non-trivial Blogs” tab in iGoogle (which includes 37signals and Joel, and also Kathy Sierra before March of this year). I am looking to continue increasing the size of my bookshelf, and will be looking to read Love Is the Killer App in the very near future.

Looks like I’ll have plenty of things to keep me busy during the unpleasant autumn (read: cold and wet) in Vancouver.