Web of Success: 15 Years of KidPub.com

Just a few weeks after my post evaluating backup and recovery solutions for Linux, we had a hard failure on one of the machines that we use for daily editing work. It holds most of the master files for active books. It was one of those failures that ends up being cheaper to replace the machine rather than repair it.

On the plus side, it was an excuse to pick up one of the quad-core Intel machines that Gateway and others are deep-discounting right now. And it was a perfect lesson in the value of regular backups. Since we Ghost the machine daily (sometimes more often, using Ghost’s triggers), we were able to recover our data with just a few hours of lost work. It takes about ten minutes to set  up automated backup tasks in Ghost and other backup software, and then you just forget about it until you need it (and you WILL need it!).

On the minus side, I’m now starting to be obsessed with data protection…a rack of RAID is just what we need right now…

perryd Uncategorized, tools

About a month ago I started evaluating backup solutions for the web sites I host on my remote servers. I’ve had a little Netgear NSLU2 (Slug) doing the job…the Slug is a tiny Linux server…it’s about the size of a deck of cards…that come with two USB ports and an ethernet connection. Although the NSLU2 is preinstalled with a Linux distribution, I reflashed it with Debian. The little Slug has been doing nightly backups via rsync for three or four years now, storing them on an external drive. Once a week I burn a snapshot to DVD.

Why replace something that works? I’m beginning to worry that the NsLU2 might give up the ghost. I suppose it’s just paranoia, after all the thing has an uptime of 342 days today, and seems to be working fine. I think it was the launch of the new KidPub Press bookstore that made me rethink the backup strategy.

The difficulty I had finding a solution is that the servers are running a Red Hat variant of Linux (CentOS), and I wanted to to backups to a local Windows 7 box, mainly for ease of use. Even though the Slug does a great job, it’s incredibly slow…it takes a couple of hours to build a1G ISO image for burning to DVD, for example. My requirements were pretty simple. I need to do a one-way daily mirror of several directories and the MySQL databases.

I evaluated seven solutions:

• SiteShelter
• HandyBackup
• Backup4All
• Site Vault
• Unison
• DeltaCopy
• cwRsync

The first four are commercial products ranging in price from $200 to $40. The last three are open source.

Of the commercial solutions, only SiteShelter was able to properly mirror the remote server. The issue is that most of the backup programs rely on an Attribute flag on a file to determine if a file has been archived, however the flag doesn’t exist in the Linux filesystem. The symptom of this is that an incremental backup will download everything, even ify ou’ve just done one, because the software doesn’t have any way to tell if it has already downloaded a file.

SiteShelter is able to correctly manage incremental backups from the Linux box. Its interface leaves a lot to be desired, though. In its defense, the program is supposed to be run as a service, but I don’t think that’s an excuse for having an awkward human UI. Of the three commercial solutions it is the most expensive, at $200 for a single license. Although I thought SiteShelter was promising, I really didn’t see any advantage in using it versus using rsync, which is free.

The trouble, of course, is that there is no native rsync for Windows. I started looking for rsync ports. Most of them rely on Cygwin, and excellent Unix emulator for Windows that’s been around for as long as I can remember. Installing Cygwin just to get rsync seemed like overkill, ven for a Linux guy like me. Instead, I found three packages hat bundle just enough Cygwin with rsync to provide a backup solution for Windows.

Unison is the most complicated, and I rejected it for its complexity. It just does way more than I need, and just configuring it for a quick test took an hour.

DeltaCopy works but suffers from a very poor user interface. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in it because of this.

I settled on cwRsync. Although it has a UI based on GTK, I didn’t use it. It is identical to rsync on the Linux side, so I simply copied over my rsync script from the NSLU2. I had to change the destination directory, but that was the only configuration required, and the exclusion file I’ve added to over the years didn’t need to be changed at all. Ten minutes setting up the batch file to run in Windows Scheduler and I was done with my backup solution. It’s fast, secure (uses SSH), and just works, which is my #1 criteria for any product.

One other bit of information…a few of the commercial products try to back up MySQL databases by logging on to them directly. I didn’t get a lot of good feelings about these, and they seemed terribly slow. Because I ended up using rsync, I stuck with my old database backup strategy, which is a cron job that runs on the server that uses mysqldump to create snapshots of all of the critical databases. These files are dropped into a directory that rsync monitors for its daily run.

I now have a solid backup system to a Windows machine that is fast, easy to use (the remote directory structure is duplicated locally), and provides a quick burn to DVD. That it is free and a familiar and trusted solution is icing.

perryd optimization, tools, web sites backup, linux, rsync

I recently spent about a week evaluating shopping-cart platforms for the new KidPub Press online bookstore. My requirements were actually fairly simple; I wanted something that:

• Is easy to administer
• Can be made to look like a bookstore
• Has PHP as the underlying code
• Integrates with Linkpoint as a payment gateway

The three prime contenders were Drupal (already in use at kidpub.com), Magento, and Zen-Cart.

I ruled out Drupal pretty quickly. even though I’ve used it for several years for the main KidPub site, I see it as a CMS platform, and what I really wanted was an e-commerce platform. Drupal can certainly be made to look and act like a bookstore, and it does have a Linkpoint module (though it is ‘beta’ code), but at the end of the day Drupal is about managing content, not transactions.

Next up was Magento. I’d read rabid reviews of the thing written by people who are just in love with the platform. I tried for about a day and a half to get Magento running correctly on my staging server without much luck. Wrong PHP version. Wrong SSL library. Database problems. I’m no slouch, having been knee-deep in Linux and Unix for about twenty years now, and I couldn’t get Magento to run in a way that gave me any sort of confidence. Letting it manage credit card transactions was out of the question, and it turns out that Magento and Linkpoint don’t play well together. Authorize.net? Out-of-the-box. Linkpoint? Good luck.

Zen-Cart was actually my second choice. Magento LOOKS fabulous, and I wanted that look for the store. Zen-Cart looks, well, a bit homemade, and there’s an expectation that you will roll up your sleeves and dig into the code if you want anything other than default behavior. To be fair, I’ve seen some outstanding sites powered by Zen-Cart, but I honestly don’t have the talent at hand to do such design work.

What sold me on Zen-Cart was that after literally two days of wrestling with Magento (and not getting ANYTHING to work), it took about ten minutes to get Zen-Cart up and running. Another few hours of tweaking and adding product, and I had a complete e-commerce site with full payment gateway integration AND that looks and acts like a bookstore. There’s a ‘book’ product module available, and I paid for a template look-and-feel that I thought was nice.

I’m pretty comfortable tweaking the PHP code in Zen-Cart, and I’ve done a moderate amount of customization. My impression of the Zen-Cart community is that there isn’t a lot of deep coding expertise, at least among the majority of users. There’s a lot of ‘find this line and change this value’ advice in the forums. That’s fine, Zen-Cart is a simple system and if I need to tweak a table or edit PHP to change some text, I don’t mind.

If what you need is just shopping-cart functionality without a lot of bells-and-whistles, consider Zen-Cart. Magento, in my opinion, just isn’t ready for commercial deployment. And Drupal? It’s still a pretty good CMS system.

You can see our Zen-Cart implementation at the KidPub Press bookstore.

perryd Uncategorized, tools, web sites

Fresh, constantly changing content is the lifeblood of many web sites, but generating content can be challenging. The audience at KidPub are voracious readers of books written for teens and tweens, and we’ve turned to Twitter to help drive traffic to our site.

There are about 150 well-known (to teens at least) authors who regularly use Twitter. We use a simple script developed by Kent Brewster to search Twitter for updates from 100 of these authors and display them on a page called YA Tweets. KidPub readers love it…they can catch the latest news from their favorite authors in what feels like a very intimate way. What did Meg Cabot have for breakfast? What’s Maureen Johnson thinking about as she writes her next book? It’s all there in the tweets. You can see our page in action here.

You can easily apply this technique to your own demographic. What is vitally interesting to your audience? Create a search filter for Twitter that reflects what matters to your readers, and display it on your site. Surround the page with links out to your other content, and you have a self-generating, constantly updating traffic attractor.

perryd building traffic, tools content, traffic, twitter

Here’s a chart of recent traffic at KidPub. Keeping in mind that our audience is under the age of 15, what day of the week would you expect those peaks to fall on?

You’d think that we would see a nice little peak on Saturday and Sunday, trailing off as the kids went back to school for the week.

You’d be wrong. The peak traffic day for KidPub is Wednesday, and it’s been that way for years. Our lowest traffic day of the week is Saturday. I’ve never quite figured out why this happens, but you can practically set your clock by it. Is it that homework is lighter in the middle of the week? Are the TV shows less enticing? I’ve asked my members in the past bu haven’t come up with anything conclusive.

Because it’s so regular, I plan around it. I tend to send press releases out on Wednesdays so that visitors from the press will see a very active site. I try to do maintenance tasks and upgrades on weekends when I know that traffic will be lighter. It’s the Rhythm of KidPub.

perryd building traffic, tools

Many small companies, like KidPub, have to watch every dollar spent. I’m always looking for ways to cut costs while not sacrificing either quality or progress toward my business goals. For a publishing company, PR is incredibly important, but it can also be incredibly expensive. We send out a press release for each books that is published, plus releases for contest announcements and general news.  It can add up to five to ten releases each month.

When I started shopping around for a PR agency to handle my account, I quickly realized that press releases were going to be a significant slice of my marketing budget. I wanted to know if there were alternatives to traditional agencies that might save money but still be effective.

I’ve used some of the online firms in the past with limited success. They typically charge a per-release fee with a suite of add-on services that can inflate the final bill. These companies, such as PRWeb, do an ok job of sending out your release and tracking it, but it seemed that my releases were getting lost in the flood of PR that goes across their wire.

Finally, by a stroke of luck, I found Mondo Times and its sister site, EasyMediaList. Mondo’s goal is to be a source of media information. Say you wanted to send a letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Herald. it takes just a few clicks on Mondo to pull up contact information for the paper. Mondo is a membership site, and to get the phone, fax, and email of the editor it’s $80 a year.

That’s actually a pretty good deal, and I use this service to look up editorial information for hometown news media of each author that publishes with KidPub Press. I’ve found that the local newspaper nearly always will run a story about the young author.  Mondo lets you search by city, so it’s quick work to find the half a dozen news outlets in an author’s hometown and put together a list for the press release.

The better deal at Mondo, though, is their Professional level membership at $199 per year. You get all of the data and lookup features of the $80 membership, but you also get five free mailing lists for Mondos sister site, EasyMediaList.

EasyMediaList sells contact lists for media. You can purchase lists by state, major metro area, subject, and so on. The lists are priced according to size and range from $30 to a few hundred dollars each.  For KidPub, I used four of my five free lists from Mondo membership to grab the top 100 media outlets, the educational media list, and the parenting and kids media lists. The lists are high-quality (for example, Parenting Magazine, Scholastic, Nickelodeon, and Sports Illustrated Kids are included) and clean…I get very few bounces on the emails included.

I send out press releases to segments of these lists, depending on what the news is. Do they work? Yes. I’ve gotten responses from many major media outlets from releases sent to these lists. It’s well worth the $200 annual membership fee.

The other piece of the shoestring is Skype. We only have one phone in the office, and for $5 per month we’ve set it up with an inbound phone number and unlimited domestic calling, and it includes an answering machine. I can afford to spend afternoons on the phone calling media contacts…the phone numbers are on the EasyMediaList lsits…to follow up on press releases. I think that editors appreciate hearing an actual person on the other side of the press release, and I’ve gotten a great response.

Between Mondo and Skype the majority of KidPub’s PR needs are met, and I can concentrate on growing the business instead of worrying about the marketing budget.

perryd marketing, tools PR

I’ve written before about Quantcast and how I believe that they are one of the few services producing reliable market data on website performance. One of the features that they offer is a little graphic showing the mix of users of your site. They don’t name it, but it’s a kind of classification graph that splits your traffic among addicts, regulars, and passers-by.

An addict is someone who visits your site at east once each day. Regulars visit at least once each month, and passers-by drop by once and then never show their face again. Here’s an example from KidPub:

The way to read the information is that fewer than 1% are KidPub addicts and represent 4% of all visits.  Fourty four percent of the traffic is from regulars, who represent 20% of all visits. Just over half of the traffic is generated by passers-by, who make up 80% of all visits.

This is extemely useful information that shows that I need to work on converting passer-by into regulars. These numbers are substantiated by the Google Analytics bounce rate number for the home page of about 70% (in other words, 70% of visitors to the site leave after viewing the front page of the site).

In comparison, here’s what Facebook looks like:

Well over half of their visitors are regulars, which is where I’d like KidPub to be, too. Facebook rival Myspace has a similar pattern. These are sites that are capturing and keeping a community of loyal users. Even though KidPub has a dedicated group of users, we need to do a better job of pulling in the passer-by, helping them see that KidPub can be a fun, engaging place to visit again and again.

Data like this can be invaluable in helping you track and understand your traffic and should be the baseline you use to measure work done in this area.

perryd building traffic, facebook, site optimization, tools

I’ve been working over the past few months on better search-engine results for several key phrases related to KidPub. There are two tools that I’m using to help track them:

• SheerSEO
• SEOBook Rank Checker

SheerSEO
This site monitors weekly changes in placement of search results on Google and Yahoo. It’s currently free to sign up. You can track a large number of search phrases, and the results are shown in an easy to understand table. You can also export the results to a Excel file. Here’s a snip of a recent report:

You can see that ‘kids stories’ is moving up nicely, from 37th spot to 24th. You can also see that ‘publish my story’ doesn’t point to KidPub’s home page, which I need to fix.

SheerSEO’s service runs once per week and sends an email to you when new results are ready. You can add or remove search terms at any time.

You can see a position chart for each phrase on either Yahoo or Google:

I think that this is really useful information, and it saves me the trouble of having to track and chart a spreadsheet full of keywords. I can measure the effect of changes I make on KidPub, both positive and negative, and know when I can stop tweaking.

SEOBook Rank Checker
For spot checks I like to use SEOBook’s Rank Checker, which is an add-on for Firefox. You can grab it from the SEOBook site. Even though it does offer historical information, I tend to use it when I want to know how a particular keyword is standing on Google or Yahoo (it also does Live Search). There’s a scheduling option that will run the checker periodically for you in the background.

The results are typically identical to SheerSEO’s.

Both tools give you a great bit of intel on how your SEO work is progressing, and you can quickly see if something has either gone wrong (fix it!) or is working well (duplicate it!). This level of detail might seem overwhelming, but remember, half to three-quarters of your site’s traffic is probably coming from Google and Yahoo, so it make sense to pay attention to search reult positioning!

perryd seo, site optimization, tools