Tag Archives: content

Events

DC FAN Meetup last night

Ligia and I attended the DC FAN (FeedBurner Ad Network) meetup last night. It took place in downtown DC, at Capitol City Brewery. It started around 6:00 pm and lasted well after 8:30 pm. It was lots of fun and we really enjoyed it. Got to meet the cool folks from FeedBurner, without which my site wouldn’t be where it is today.

I use all of their services, and love them. I burn my feeds through them, I offer email subscriptions to my various content, I repackage my feed content and display it on various web pages like this one or this one for example. I use their ads, of course, which is how I monetize my site and feed content, along with Google’s AdSense. I use and love their feed stats, and I’m really excited they recently introduced site stats as well. I also use something they call feed flares, which are the little snippets you see at the end of every one of my posts. They let you do things like subscribe to my feed, email me, add a post to del.icio.us or submit it to Digg, etc. It’s really, really cool stuff.

I covered FeedBurner on my blog in the past as well. If you’re interested, you can read more here, here, and here. And of course, let’s not forget the time when Rick Klau, VP of Biz Dev at FeedBurner, stepped in and stopped me from making a feed gaffe early last year. Rick was at last night’s meetup, so I was really glad to meet him.

Rick Klau

So, who attended? The folks at FeedBurner were well represented. There was Rick of course, and Eric Olson and Jake Parillo.

Eric Olson

Jake Parillo

Eric coordinated the event and invited me, so a big thank you goes out to him. Various folks showed up throughout the evening. Sphere CEO Tony Conrad and VP of Biz Dev Jeff Yolen were there.

Rick Klau, Tony Conrad and Jeff Yolen

A few people from AOL’s content division showed up. George from Fat Pitch Financials was there as well. As we left, more people showed up.

Sitting at the table

George (Fat Pitch Financials)

I really liked being able to interact directly with the FeedBurner folks. I got to hear about some cool upcoming features like blog networks, got the scoop on how Site Stats hit the ground running, had a chance to give some direct feedback about the Ad Network, and of course, the highlight was that Rick Klau loves photography. We had fun chatting about that!

Shutterbug meta

There was an interesting mural on the wall above our table.

More beer

Beer

There was plenty of food, and of course there were pretzels as well. 🙂

FeedBurner pretzels

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Reviews

Giving thanks for innovative technology

This year, there were a handful of technology/software products that truly changed my life, and I wanted to take a little time to thank their makers publicly.

WordPressThe first, and most important, is WordPress. Without it, this site wouldn’t exist, because I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to combine the content from my various other sites into a single, easy to use collection. The WordPress motto — “a state of the art semantic personal publishing platform” — couldn’t be truer, and I’m here to attest to that. It was easy to combine content from my previous Blogger blog and two of my personal sites into what I now call ComeAcross, and it is easy, every day, to publish more content that may benefit others. That’s really the purpose of ComeAcross — sharing what I think is useful information with others — and WordPress made it possible.

Updated 1/1/08: I’ve since merged ComeAcross into Raoul Pop, which is the site you’re on right now.

GmailGmail has been another wonderful product. Although I started using it in 2005, it was this year that I really started to appreciate its features, ease of use, open standards and fantastic spam filter. The account size is more than generous, the ads are not intrusive, I love being able to label my messages, and the search feature is right on. On top of that, I can retrieve copies of my messages through the POP protocol (that’s Pop, as in my last name :-)), and make them searchable on my iMac through Spotlight.

LoudblogFinally, I’m grateful for Loudblog. It’s an open-source podcasting platform that’s fast, easy to install, and easy to use. I use it to publish my three podcasts: ComeAcross and Dignoscentia (in English and Romanian). I have to apologize because I haven’t had time to publish any podcasts recently, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate how easy Loudblog made the publishing of podcasts for me.

So there you have it, three products that have made it incredibly easier for me to publish content and communicate this year. I’m truly thankful for them, and who knows, maybe they’ll help you as well!

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Thoughts

Who we are

➡ Updated 3/9/08: This post reflects the state of the site back when it was still called ComeAcross and I’d just started it. That’s no longer the case, as I’ve combined all of my content since at this domain. For more on that switch, have a look at the About page.

If I asked you who you were, it’s only fair to tell you who we are, or what my site is. If you already know, hang in there, you might learn some new stuff.

I’m Raoul Pop, and I launched the site with Ligia, my lovely wife. She doesn’t post much, because she works behind the scenes. She takes great care of me so I can keep on writing and working.

I launched the site on May 3, 2006 — not quite 5 months ago. Here’s why some of the content is older than 5 months. That same page has an explanation of the ComeAcross name.

So far, there are about 20-30 loyal feed readers for the Blog, about 10 or so for my Photos feed, and a couple for my Videos feed (although I suspect those are just my own subscriptions). There are about 8-10 really, really loyal Podcast subscribers, who’ve hung in there with me even though I haven’t published a podcast since May. Thank you! Who are you folks?

I started checking stats with Google Analytics on May 31, 2006. From that date until today (October 25, 2006), ComeAcross has had 8,927 unique visits and 16,055 page views. 14.75% of those visitors were returning ones. While most people were from the United States, if you look at the map below, you’ll see they’re coming from a lot of other places: Europe, South America, the Middle East, the Far East, and of course, Australia and New Zealand. A big, American HI to everyone! Google has been my biggest referrer by far (Sergey, Larry, thank you, and thank you), and I’ve also had significant traffic from Digg, StumbleUpon, and Yahoo.

ComeAcross Stats - Executive Summary

The top five keywords that people use to find ComeAcross so far are:

  • HP dv6000
  • Davison Inventegration
  • War between Israel and Lebanon (I don’t know why that post struck a chord, I didn’t think it was that good)
  • Funny animal photos (always a hit with folks, I gather)
  • Lasermonk (don’t know why this keyword is so popular)

ComeAcross Stats - Marketing Summary

The top five pieces of content on ComeAcross are:

ComeAcross Stats - Content Summary

I couldn’t have accomplished this without two wonderful products/services: WordPress and FeedBurner. They’re both fantastic, each in their own way, and amazingly useful. I am truly grateful for their existence, and the fact that they’re both free to use, easy to use, and feature-packed is a testament to the ingenuity of today’s web developers, thinkers and dreamers.

ComeAcross was once a dream for me. I dreamt that I could have a site where all of my content from my disparate sites was drawn together, and made easily accessible to anyone who wanted to read it, view it or search it. That dream is now a reality, and thanks to you, my readers, ComeAcross is shaping up very nicely.

I really do hope you’ll continue to read ComeAcross, and if you like it, spread the word. I’d like the site to continue to reach new readers, every day.

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Thoughts

Who are you?

If you’re reading this, first, I thank you, and, I kindly invite you to say hi. Write a comment on this post, and tell me what’s up, who you are, and if you want, when you started reading it. Do you like the site? Do you like the posts? Are there some things you’d like to see? If you don’t feel comfortable writing comments, write me an email. C’mon, let me know who I’m writing for. Thanks!

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Reviews

Zoom Search Engine: a powerful and inexpensive search engine for your website

Zoom Search EngineI’ve been using the Zoom Search Engine for over a year, and I’ve been very happy with it. But today I realized I hadn’t told many people about it, so I had to fix that.

So what’s the Zoom Search Engine? It’s a beautiful piece of software written by WrenSoft, an Australian web software company. Here’s what I think is amazing about it:

  • It’s inexpensive: the Standard edition is $49, and the Professional edition is $99. (I have the Pro edition.) There’s also a free edition for smaller sites. A side-by-side comparison of the different editions is available on the WrenSoft website.
  • It’s small in size, but feature-packed. The executable is 1.65 MB. Bloatware this is NOT. It is small and it packs a powerful punch. If you don’t believe me, install it, then run through the various options. There are a LOT of them!
  • It does the job — no crashing, no malfunctions. In over a year of serious use, with it running daily to index a lot of files for most of that time, it didn’t crash once. It just did its job.
  • Tech support is great, and included in the price of the software. I needed to contact them twice to ask them about some advanced configs for the app, and they responded within 12 hours. What’s more, they actually solved my problem. There were no excuses and no passing the buck.
  • It’s a scalable piece of software. Not only will it index small, simple sites, but its indexing engine can use ASP, PHP, JavaScript or CGI. The CGI engine can be used for enterprise sites – we’re talking hundreds of thousands of pages here! Not only will it index sites hosted on web servers, but it will also let you put a search engine on a site that runs off a CD or DVD.
  • It spiders and indexes most document file types with the aid of free plugins that work with the paid editions of the software. They’ve got plugins for Word, WordPerfect, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Flash and FlashPaper, and Rich Text formats. Having used all of these plugins over the last year, I can tell you they work a treat. They certainly do the job, and there’s no false advertising involved.
  • It’s a customizable and flexible piece of software. You possess the search index. You have access to the actual files used by the search engine, and you can tweak the engine and the index as you please. You can adjust everything. I can’t think of any other solution on the market that will let you do that. When it comes to this, it beats Atom and Google and any other solution, hands-down. Google’s search appliances are a black box. You can play with the options, but you don’t have access to the search technology. You can’t pop the hood and have a look at what makes their searches tick.

So how exactly have I been using the Zoom Search Engine? It’s been powering the site searches on Exprimare and the Road Management Catalog, among a few others. While Exprimare is a fairly small site (it’s my consulting/portfolio site), the Road Management Catalog is a big site in terms of the content, file types and number of pages. It belongs to the World Bank, and vendors of various road construction, measuring and testing equipment have accounts where they submit company information and upload brochures in various file formats. The Zoom Search Engine’s job on that site is to index all of the uploaded files, all of the various companies’ info, the regular site pages, and to make them all available in the search index. It’s been doing a wonderful job over the past year, and I love it. I’ve scheduled it to run every day, and to index all of the files. When it’s time for it to start, it does so automatically. It spiders the site, builds the index, uploads it to the site through FTP, then closes automatically. I don’t have to do anything other than adjust search parameters here and there as the need arises.

Here is a screenshot of the main app window, just as it’s indexing the Road Management Catalog. Once it’s configured, it spiders the site (you can set it to start multiple threads so the indexing goes faster) and then it goes about its business.

Zoom Search Engine

When it’s done, it gives you an index status report, to let you know what it found. It also outlines in red any indexing errors, such as files or pages it couldn’t download or index.

Zoom Search Engine

If I had to talk about the many configuration tabs, I’d have to reproduce their user manual. Instead, let me just show you a screenshot of one of them, the Indexing options. How cool is this! I get to decide what gets indexed, what gets boosted, and how words get joined. And this is just a small sample of what the app can do.

Zoom Search Engine

A lot more screenshots are available on the WrenSoft site. Their support section is extensive, a forum is also available, and their tech support is only an email away.

The Zoom Search Engine is an amazing product, and well worth its price. As a matter of fact, I’d call it underpriced. It’s a tremendous value given its functionality. So if you own a site and have been looking around for a suitable search engine, don’t settle for something that’s overpriced or inflexible. Get something that’s been tried and tested, something that’ll work, something you can use on a daily basis and tweak until you get just what you want.

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