Tag Archives: readwriteweb

Every Sunday, when my cartoon gets posted on ReadWriteWeb, I head on over to have a look and join whatever conversation’s going on.

Today’s visit was much the same thing… until I noticed a little wonkiness: a sentence that stopped dead just before the cartoon. Worse, it was a linked sentence… and worse yet, it was the sentence that links from ReadWriteWeb to Noise to Signal.

I clicked on it. Good news: I landed on RobCottingham.ca. Bad news: I was on a 404 page. Because I forgot to include a closing quotation mark in the link to my cartoon site, that link points to:

http://robcottingham.ca/cartoon%3ENoise%20to%20Signal%20cartoons%20here
%3C/a%3E.%3C/em%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cdiv%20style=

No surprise it doesn’t go anywhere useful, right? That’s kind of a big deal, because a) I don’t like people getting frustrated when they click on my links, and b) a lot of people drop by my site every Sunday thanks to that link.

I dropped my editor a note apologizing and alerting him to the issue (apart from everything else, it also broke the layout on that page). Which is a start, but there’d be a few hours until he saw my email (remember, this is Sunday). And in the meantime, there’d be a lot of people clicking and saying “Wha’a?”

What I wanted them to do was click and be taken instantly to the original link. To do that, I needed to set up what’s known as a redirect – an instruction to my web server saying “If anyone tries to load that screwed-up address, take them to the real address instead.”

And ideally, it should be a particular kind of redirect — a 301 redirect, to be technical — that tells search engines, “This item has permanently moved to this other location.”

I could have done this by editing a file in my site’s folder named the .htaccess file, which has a series of instructions for the server covering everything from memory allocation to redirection. There are plenty of great tutorials on how to do exactly that.

But that’s a little cumbersome (especially because this happens just infrequently enough that I have to relearn how to do it every single time). And as a WordPress user, I’ve grown accustomed to talented programmers creating great plugins to solve nearly every technical issue that might come up.

Which brings me to John Godley, and a great little plugin called Redirection.

The Redirection plugin allows me to deal with a whole slew of issues. Had to change my permalink structure because of a plugin update? I can take care of it with a few clicks and keystrokes, permanently redirecting traffic from the old URLs to the new ones. Discovered a bunch of frequent 404 errors from someone’s mistyped URLs? Fixed! And I can see all of my redirects at once, group them however I want, and see just how much traffic each one has diverted (read: “just how much traffic Redirection has routed to the right destination”).

It’s great, it’s free, and it saved a lot of people from thinking ill of me tonight. Check it out.

Big news: ReadWriteWeb acquired by SAY Media

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For years now, ReadWriteWeb has been a go-to news source for all of us who follow the social web. Launched in April 2003, RWW has chronicled the high-speed rise and fall of great social platforms and little startups; they’ve broken big stories like Google Circles; and since the summer of 2007, they’ve run my cartoon every week.

And this morning, this news from RWW head honcho Richard MacManus:

I’m thrilled to announce that ReadWriteWeb has been acquired by SAY Media, a digital publishing company headquartered in San Francisco. ReadWriteWeb will anchor SAY Media’s growing Technology channel, which reaches more than 75 million global consumers each month.

ReadWriteWeb is going to get bigger and even better. Our plans include widening ReadWriteWeb’s editorial scope and expanding our team. That starts from today, with the addition of SplatF‘s Dan Frommer to our team as an editor-at-large. We will also be doing a re-design, utilizing the sophisticated designers at SAY Media. With SAY’s technology and services, we’ll be able to scale ReadWriteWeb in ways previously unavailable to us. So I’m very excited about our team joining SAY Media. We’re going to take ReadWriteWeb to the next level!

I’d suggest this is Richard’s big reward, and that he’ll now retire and go live on an island somewhere, except:

It’s hard to imagine Richard retiring. And
He already lives on an island.

Congratulations to Richard and the whole ReadWriteWeb team.

Lessons from cartoon-blogging at the Real-Time Web Summit

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October’s cartoon-blogging at the Real-Time Web Summit was a well-received experiment in innovative event coverage. The response was overwhelmingly positive, the Twitter stream showed people appreciated the added dimension to the event, and the organizers were more than pleased.

Now, two things:

First, the ReadWriteWeb report, The Real-Time Web and its Future, is now on sale. Edited by Marshall Kirkpatrick – one of the smartest guys I know – the report sells for $300, and distills interviews with more than 50 real-time web honchos along with insights from the over 300 folks who attended the summit. Plus there are 10 case studies, 20 profiles of leaders in the field… and a package deal on the report plus RWW’s guide to online community management. Details (and a free sample chapter) here.

And second, I just came across some notes I took on the experience, and I thought they’d be worth sharing. As with most experiments, this one held a few surprises for me – and some useful lessons. Since I want to offer cartoon-blogging as one of our Social Signal offerings, those lessons take on a special significance.

Here’s how it unfolded, and how I’ll fine-tune my approach next time:

I arrived with my MacBook Pro and Cintiq, and settled in at a table. Handy tip: bring a power bar. Conferences usually max out their electrical outlets, and being able to turn one outlet into many is a valued skill (and a not-bad way to make friends). I have a nice little Belkin that also happens to have USB ports, which can be handy if you want to charge, say, an iPhone. As it turned out, I needed to.
I had hoped to live-stream my cartooning on Justin.tv (one of the event sponsors). It worked fine on both the Vancouver International Airport and Holiday Inn wireless networks, neither of which was especially fast. But conference WiFi is notoriously unreliable, and bottlenecks and signal dropouts made live-streaming impossible. If live-streaming is anything other than a nice-to-have for you, make absolutely sure there’s a rock-solid Internet connection.
If WiFi fails, you’ll want to have a Plan B ready to go so you can at least upload your cartoons – or email them to comeone who can. In my case, it was tethering: connecting my computer to the net via my iPhone. (Given the cost of data roaming for this itinerant Canadian, my Plan B would also have involved a second mortgage and possibly a night job.) As it turned out, the wireless connection was reliable enough that I stuck with it.

Now, what I’ll do differently:

While the main room for the event had plenty of electrical outlets, the same wasn’t true for the breakout sessions. And for that matter, the Cintiq isn’t exactly a mobile device; picking up, moving and setting back up was a time-consuming effort. Next time I’ll take my sketchbook into breakout sessions.
My digital SLR broke down right before the conference, which meant that when I did use my sketchbook, I was shooting with my iPhone camera. That required a lot of Photoshop work… which I ended up abandoning: the quality just wasn’t good enough. Instead, I wound up redoing the sketchbook in the Cintiq, which doesn’t take as long as you might think but took longer than I’d have liked. Next time, if this comes up, I’ll do bigger, simpler drawings, and shoot them under bright, even light.
This was a day that relied largely on breakout groups rather than keynotes or panels. Since most of the ones I attended were facilitated rather than led, they were certainly interesting… but they lacked the narrative coherence that can make for good cartoons. Next time I’ll choose more carefully (admittedly, a little harder with the spontaneity of unconferences.) And when a session has me completely out of my technical depth (a debate over whether a particular app has a RESTful API is a solid clue), next time I’ll have the humility to smile and leave.
There were several sponsors there, and a few made it into one of the cartoons… but most didn’t. I wasn’t playing favourites, but I wouldn’t want to inadvertently put the conference convenors into an awkward position. Next time I’ll clarify with the organizers in advance how to handle sponsors.
I learned a lot about my own workflow in cranking out cartoons and getting them web-ready. I discovered, for example, that it’s a lot more efficient for me to work in batches: do several sketches, then polish them, and then fire them off. But I’d made some assumptions about how things would go on ReadWriteWeb’s end (through no fault of their’s) and when those proved to be mistaken, I had some scrambling to do. It all turned out fine, but next time I’ll make sure I understand clearly how the workflow will go, establish the organizers’ expectations for the pace and volume of cartoons, and make a personal plan for the day.
We could have done more to think about presentation: whether the cartoons would have a stream of their own, and where they’d live. As it turned out, they did perfectly well as part of the ReadWriteWeb blog flow, but if I’d cranked up my pace, the day’s blog posts might have been lost in a cartoon sea. (We could have done more to feature them on the Social Signal site too, but as it happened we had a little competing news that day.) Next time, I’ll work with the organizers to suggest ways of presenting the cartoons in a way that enriches the conference experience without detracting from other communications.

The fact I took away some important lessons doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun, of course – I had a great time, learned a lot and, I think, contributed something of real value. And I can’t wait for a chance to do this again.