Martin Kelley.com

SaveStMarys.net

2008-05-06T21:50:06Z

On a Friday my wife Julie and older son attended a rally to save a favorite church threatened with closure and by Sunday we launched Savestmarys.net. It was a weekend where I was already swamped with deadlines, so it's standard Movable Type but with all the tricks of mashed-up Web 2.0 sites to let Julie pour content in: Flickr, Slidoo, Slideshow Generator -- and soon Youtube. Visit site.

AmyOutlaw.com

2008-05-06T21:35:41Z

This is a fairly standard Movable Type blog except that the client wanted two separate blogs: one meant for daily posts and the other for more weekly posts (it's all set up in MT via categories). This also shows the use of Slidoo for a photo banner head. The pictures are all pulled from a particular set of her Flickr account. Visit site.

Using VMWare Fusion to run Windows on a Mac

2008-05-03T17:13:45Z

I just purchased a MacBook and have the joy of learning a new set of routines and programs, all while reconfiguring my services again. I've used Macs in various work settings but the bulk of my development time has been on Windows, most recently XP.

I will recommend VMWare's Fusion for other Windows users making the switch. Fusion is an $80 program that lets you run Windows through Mac (you have to pay for a fresh version of Windows, a copy of XP put me back $200 at Staples). Apple has an alternative called Boot Camp which lets you install Windows so you can start up in it when you start your computer. This presumably runs faster (there's no Mac OS overhead while in Windows) but Fusion is much more practical since I'm using simultaneously with my Mac programs. The speed is fine, even with lots of Mac programs running. Fusion is also more flexible about disk space allocations.

I'm quite amazed about what it can do. Netflix's Watch Now service is unavailable for Macs but runs fine through my Fusion-powered Windows XP. The Rhapsody music client also works and I'm listening to music as I'm running my Mac programs. In an amazing feat, I was able to use Rhapsody to sync songs on my Palm T/X via USB cable. This is Windows XP running atop Mac OS X syncing digital rights managed-protected data with Palm OS over USB. Really amazing that it all worked!

I'm sticking with Windows XP because of all the nightmare stories I've heard about Vista, but also because it uses less memory and so will run faster. Also, I know XP very well and don't really relish the thought of learning a whole new system in addition to Mac OS. I'm presuming that over time I'll use Windows less and less and will just have it for browser cross-checking purposes and to run the occasional Windows-only software like Rhapsody and Netflix.

Tags: vmwarefusion, mac os, windows xp, windows vista, netflix, rhapsody, boot camp

Floating on Clouds

2008-04-27T00:25:58Z

Last weekend I found myself with the scenario no solo web designer wants to be faced with: a dead laptop. It was eighteen months old and while it was from Hewlett Packard, a reputable company, it's always had problems over overheating. Like a lot of modern laptop makers, HP tried to pack as much processor power as they could into a sleek design that would turn eyes on the store shelf. They actually do offer some free repairs for a list of half a dozen maladies caused by overheating but not for my particular symptoms. When I have a free afternoon, a big pot of coffee and lots of music queued up I'll give them a call and see if I can talk them into fixing it.

Once upon a time having a suddenly dead computer in the middle of a bunch of big projects would have been disaster. But over the last few years I've been putting more and more of my data "in the cloud," that is: with software services that store it for me.

Email in the Cloud

I used to be a die-hard Thunderbird fan. This is Firefox's cousin, a great email client. I would take such great care transfering years of emails every time I switched machines and I spent hours building huge nested list of folders to organize archived messages. About a year ago Thunderbird ate about three months of recent messages, some quite crucial. At that time I started using Google's Gmail as backup. I set Gmail to pick up mail on my POP server and leave it there without deleting it. I set Thunderbird to leave it there for week. The result was that both messages would be picked up by both services.

After becoming familiar with Gmail I started using it more and more. I love that it doesn't have folders: you simple put all emails into a single "Archive" and let Google's search function find them when you need them.You can set up filters, which act as saved searches, and I have these set up for active clients.

Why I'm happy now: I can log into Gmail from any machine anywhere. No recent emails are lost on my old machine.

Project Management in the Cloud

I use the fabulous Remember the Milk (RTM) to keep track of projects and critical to-do items. Like Gmail I can access it from any computer. While messing around setting up backup computers has set me back about ten days, I still know what I need to do and when I need to do it. I can review it and give clients renewed timelines.

An additional advantage to using Remember the Milk and Gmail together is the ability to link to emails. Every email in Gmail gets its own URL and every saved "filter" search gets its own URL. If there's an email I want to act on in two weeks, I set up a Remember the Mail task. Each task has a optional field for URLs so I put the the email's Gmail URL in there and archive the email so I don't have to think about it (part of the Getting Things Done strategy). Two weeks later RTM tells me it's time to act on that email and I follow the link directly there, do whatever action I need to do and mark it complete in RTM.

Project Notes in the Cloud

I long ago started keeping notes for individual projects in the most excellent Backpack service. You can store notes, emails, pictures and just about anything in Backpack and have it available from any computer. You can easily share notes with others, a feature I frequently use to create client cheatsheets for using the sites I've built. Now that I use Gmail and it's URL feature, I put a link to the client's Gmail history right on top of each page. Very cool!

Another life saver is that I splurge for the upgraded account that gives me secure server access and I keep my password lists in Backpack. There's a slight security risk but it's probably smaller than keeping it on a laptop that could be swiped out of my bag. And right now I can log into all of my services from a new machine.

Keeping the Money Flowing from Clouds

The latest Web 2.0 love of my life is Freshbooks, a service that keeps track of your clients, your hours and puts together great invoices you can mail to them. I'm so much more professional because of them (no more hand written invoices in Word!) and when it's billing time I can quickly see how many unbilled hours I've worked on each project and bang!-bang!-band! send the invoices right out. Because the data is online, I was able to bill a client despite the dead computer, providing my exact hours, a detailed list of what I had done, etc.

Others

Calendar: I always go back and forth between loving Google Calendar and the calendar built into Backpack. Because I can never make up my mind I've used ICal feeds to cross-link them so they're both synced to one another. I can now use whichever is most convenient (or whichever I'm more in the mood to use!) to add and review entries.

Photos: Most of the photos I've taken over the past four years are still sitting on my dead laptop waiting for me to find a way to get them off of the harddrive. As tragic as it would be to loose them, 903 of my favorite photos are stored on my Flickr account. And because I emailed most of them to Flickr via Gmail most of those are also stored on Gmail. I will do everything I can to get those lost photos but the worst case scenario is that I will be stuck with "only" those 900.

Your Examples?

I'd love to hear how others are using "the cloud" as real-time backup.

NemosAquarium.com

2008-03-25T15:16:07Z

A multimedia website displaying the very colorful aquarium out near Norristown Pennsylvania. The Flickr photos are cached and display with a Slimbox clone when clicked. Movies are included both as optimized-for-download WMV files and on a independent Youtube account. View Site.

Nickwattspiano.com

2008-01-10T08:03:55Z

South Jersey piano instructor Nick Watts advertises his services online. Be sure to check out the Entertainment page for music samples. I used Box.net to allow Nick to upload his own songs any times he wants! Visit Site.

Banking on reputations

2007-09-29T02:32:00Z

I was referred to a website the other day that barely exists, at least in the way that I see sites. It's homepage was built entirely in Flash, was completely invisible to search engines and barely functioned in Firefox. Domaintools.com gave it an SEO score of zero (out of a scale of one hundred). It's Google PageRank was three out of ten, making it less visible that my kid pages. But this was a website for a high-flying web development house, a company that works with some of Philadelphia's most prominent and well-endowed cultural institutions. Their client work isn't quite as invisible, but their website for Philadelphia's relative-new $265 million performance arts center has a PageRank equivalent to my personal blog--youch!

I think there's a lesson here. Prominent cultural institutions don't look at Google (and SEO-friendly developers) because they're big enough and well-known enough that they assume people will find them anyway. They're right, of course, but how many more people would find them if they had well-built websites? And what's the long-term vision if they're relying on their established reputation to do their web marketing?

It's perhaps impossible for a net-centric start-up to replicate a hugely-endowed cultural icon like an orchestra or ballet, giving some degree of insulation to these institutions from direct internet competition. But if these nonprofits saw themselves in the entertainment business, competing for the limited attention and money of an audience that has many evening-time possibilities, then you'd think they'd want to leverage the internet as much as they could: to use the web to reach out not only to their existing audience but to nurture and develop future audiences.

Are the audiences of high brow institutions so full of hip young audiences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?

SteadyFootsteps.org

2007-06-23T02:37:36Z

Blog by an American couple living in Vietnam and advocating for greater motorbike safety. The technical aspects are pretty straight-forward but the neat part about it was watching the client learn about blogging and online photo sharing as we worked on the site: I introduced her to Flicrk, Picasa and Gmail! She took to it like a fish and the site is full of great photos taken by her husband David. Read more about their work doing physical therapy in Vietnam and their posts about life in Da Nang.
. Technology: Movable Type, Flickr. Visit Site.

Publicizing your blog via Flickr

2007-06-14T02:39:25Z

Integrating the Flickr photo sharing service with your blog is a wonderful way to easily add photos to your site. With a little extra effort you can get Flickr to work for you.

Flickr in your blog

When you want to embed a Flickr-hosted photograph into one of your blog entries, first start by going to the photo's page in Flickr. Click on the "All Sizes" button on top (with the magnifying glass icon), and then pick the size you want for your blog post--small and medium work well for blog entries.

Underneath the resized picture is a box with Flickr's coding (you have to be looking at your own account and be logged in to see this). Simply cut and paste this into your blog entry and the picture will appear there. If you want your text to wrap around the picture you'll want to add a little coding to what Flickr gives you. Somewhere inside the "img" text you need to add wrapping instructions. An easy place is between the text that reads:

height="180" alt="whatever it says"

...now reads:

height="180" align="left" alt="whatever it says"

Change left to right to have your photo align that way.

Your blog in Flickr

Many users don't realize that people sometimes find your Flickr photos and not your blog. Google indexes Flickr nicely and Flickr's own search is popular. In the description of your photos you should add a link back to your own blog. If you have a blog entry concerning that actual picture, link directly back to that entry.

You'll have to hand-write the HTML link for this (sorry, Flickr doesn't have a link button). It should look something like this:

Description of the photo. For more read, <a href="http://www.site.com/blogentry">What I know about Flickr</a>.

Here's a screen shot of the editing screen for this Flickr entry:

Results

That post about my trip to a legendary South Jersey locale is one of the most visited pages on my personal blog. A good bit of it comes from the links in Flickr!

Remember to put a lot of desired keywords into your Flickr title and all link text. Keywords are those phrases that you think people might be searching for.

Tamspub.com

2007-06-06T06:58:33Z

Vietnamese restaurateur and surf guru Tam shares photos and stories from one of Southeast Asia's best surfing towns. Hands down this is the most handsome photo site in my portfolio! Visit Site.

Movable Type and RTL languages

2007-05-08T02:40:52Z

I'm working on an international site built in Movable Type and including statements in multiple languages, including "Right to Left" languages like Arabic and Hebrew.

I was pleasantly surprised when I cut-and-pasted an Arabic text from MS Word into Movable Type and found the letters looking good both in the MT entry box and the resultant post. I didn't realize just how powerful UTF-8 encoding is and how well MT supports it throughout the system. Still, the output wasn't correct, as it wasn't displayed in right-to-left fashion. I needed to figure out the CSS for this kind of output and an easy way to allow the client to set this without forcing them into coding.

Using the highly-recommended Rightfields Plugin I added a checkbox field for posts that should be displayed in RTL. Here's a screenshot:

RightFields has an IF function that we can use to set a new DIV with our RTL style. Here's the coding in the MT template, stuck in just after the "entry-body" div:

<MTExtraFields>
<MTIfExtraField field="RTL">
<div class="rtl-display">
</MTIfExtraField>

Note: you'll also have to add similar code to close the div at the end of the passage.

Finally, as best as I can determine, this is the proper CSS designation for RTF display (Microsoft has a good webpage on this). It works in Firefox, IE7 and IE6.

.rtl-display p {direction:rtl;text-align:justified;text-align:justify;}

I'd be happy to get any feedback or corrections to this. I'm a typical 'Merican whose foreign language skills don't go far past a dozen phrases lifted from Sesame Street and long-ago French classes. Arabic and Hebrew typesetting are quite unfamiliar terrain.

On pricing philosophy

2007-04-17T02:43:36Z

Via 37Signal's Signals vs. Noise blog I came across a fascinating post written by Brian Fling of Blue last year on pricing a project. I'd like to talk about it and to explain my own philosophy. First a extended quote from Brian:

I find it funny... in a sad sort of way, that we often start out our partnership with bluffing, no one saying what they are really thinking... how much they are willing to pay and how much it should cost... Though every book I've read on the topic of pricing says to never ever ballpark, I have a tendency to do so. If they can't disclose the budget I typically try to start throwing a few numbers from previous projects to help gage the scope of what we are talking about, call it a good faith effort to start the discussion... While this is very awkward part of the discussion it is almost always followed by candor. It's as if once someone starts telling the truth, it opens a door that can't be closed.

I completely agree that candor is the only way to work with clients. Maybe it's the Quaker influence: we reportedly pioneered fixed pricing back when everyone haggled, with the philosophy that charging true costs were the only honest way of doing business. My official rates and contact page includes my list of "typical costs" -- essentially these are the "ballpark estimates" that Brian talks about.

When I put together estimates I base it on my best-guess informed estimates. I start by tabulating the client's requested features and determining how I'll achieve them. I then estimate how long it will take me to implement each feature and use that to determine a first-guess for project cost. I then compare it to past projects, to make sure I'm being realistic. I know myself well enough to know I always want to underestimate costs--I usually like the project and want to make it affordable to clients!--so I do force myself a reality check that usually ends up adding a few hours to the estimate.

When I put together my official estimate I try to guess where potential bottlenecks might happen. Sometimes these are technical issues and something they're more social. For example, a client might be very particular about the design and the back-and-forth can take longer than expected. If I think anything like this might happen I mention it in the estimate. Sometimes as we work through the details of a feature I'll learn that the client wants some enhancement that we hadn't talked about previously and which I didn't factor into the estimate.

When I do see a particular part of the work taking longer than expected I flag it with the client. I try to keep them informed that this will add to total costs. In many cases, clients have been happy to go with the extra work: I simply want to make sure that we both are aware that the estimate is changing before the work happens.

I charge by the hour rather than on a per-project basis since I find it to be a much more open business model. Brian Fling's post agrees:

The problem [with per-project billing is that] one way or another somebody loses, either the client pays too much, meaning paying more than it's market value, or the vendor eats into their profit... One benefits to hourly billing is the client is responsible for increases of scope, protecting the vendor and the customer. If the project is completed early the client pays less, protecting the client. This puts the onus on both parties to communicate regularly and work more effectively.

I have very little overhead: a home office, laptop and DSL. This means my rates are very competitive (one client described it as "less than plumbers and electricians charge, more than the kid who mows the lawn"). Being very careful with estimates mean that I often communicate a lot with clients before I "start the clock." I've often worked with them a few hours before the estimate is in and we're moving forward and of course some of this un-billed work doesn't result in a job.

Putting together fabulous websites is fun work. It's very much a back-and-forth process with clients, and it's often impossible to know just what the site will look like and just how it will work until the site actually launches. Half of my clientele have never had websites before, making the work even more interesting! It's my professional responsibility to make sure I work with clients to foresee costs, dream big, but most of all to be open and honest about costs as the process unfolds.

Working with Pipes #2: A DIY personalized community with Del.icio.us, Flickr and Google Blog Search

2007-03-18T02:45:14Z

It's not necessary to develop your own Web 2.0 software infrastructure to create an independent Web 2.0-powered community online. It's far simpler to set a standard for your community to use on exisiting networks and then to use Yahoo Pipes to pull it together.

I decided on about a dozen categories to use with my DIY blog aggregator (QuakerQuaker). I only want to pull in posts that are being generated for my site by community members so we use a community identifier, a unique prefix that isn't likely to be used by others.

This post will show you how to pull in tagged feeds from three sources: the Del.icio.us social bookmarking system, the Flickr photo sharing site and Google Blog Search.

Step 1: Pick a community designator

I've been using the community name followed by a dot. The prefix goes in front of category description to make a set of unique tags for the aggregator. When someone wants to add something for the site they tag it with this "community.category" tag. In my example, when someone wants to list a new Quaker blog they use "quaker.blog", "quaker" being the community name, "blog" being the category name for the "New Blogs" page.

Step 2: Collect the community prefix and category name in Pipes

You begin by going into Pipes and pulling over two text inputs: one for the community prefix, the other for the specific category.

Step 3: Construct these into tags

Now use the "String Concatenation" module to turn this into the "community.category" model. The community input goes into the top slot, a dot is the second slot and the category input goes into the last slot.

Now, when you have a tag in Flickr with a dot in it, Flickr automatically removes it in the resultant RSS feed. So with Flickr you want your tag to be "communitycategory" without a dot. Simple enough: just pull another "String Concatenation" module onto your Pipes work space. It should look the same except that it won't have the middle slot with the dot.

Step 4: Turn these tags into RSS URLs

Pull three "URLBuilder" modules into Pipes, one for each of the services we're going to query. For the Base, use the non-tag specific part of the URL that each service uses for its RSS feeds. Here they are:

Del.icio.us	http://del.icio.us/rss/tag
Flickr	http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds
Google Blog Search	http://blogsearch.google.com

Under path elements, put the correct tag: for Del.icio.us and Google it should be the community.category tag, for Flickr the dot-less communitycategory tag.

Step 5: Fetch and Dedupe

Fetch is the Pipes module that pulls in URLs and outputs RSS feeds. It can also combine them. Send each URLBuilder output into the same Fetch routine.

Since it's possible that you'll might have duplicate posts, use the "Unique" module to deduplicate entries by URL. Through a little trial and error I've determined that in cases of duplicates, feeds lower in the Fetch list trump those higher. In the actual Pipe powering my aggregator I pull a second Del.icio.us feed: my own. I have that as the last entry in the Fetch list so that I can personally override every other input.

Step 6: Sort by Date

With experimentation it seems like Pipes orders the output entries by descending date, which is probably what you want. But I want to show how Pipes can work with "dc" data, the "Dublin Core" model that allows you to extend standard RSS feeds (see yesterday's post for more on this).

Google Blog Search and Del.icio.us feeds use the "dc:date" field to record the time when the post was made. Flickr uses "dc:date.Taken" to pass on the photograph's metadata about when it was taken. Pipes' "Rename" module lets you copy both fields into one you create (I've simply used "date"), which you can then run through its "Sort" module. Again, it's a moot point since Pipes seems to do this automatically. But it's good to know how to manipulate and rename "dc" data if only because many PHP parsers have trouble laying it out on a webpage.

Update: it's all moot: according to a ZDNet blog, "Pipes now automatically appends a pubDate tag to any RSS feed that has any of the other allowable date tags." This is nice: no need to hack the date every time you want to make a Pipe!

Step 7: Output

The final step for any Pipe is the "Pipe Output" module.

In action

You can see this published Pipe here, and copy and play with it yourself. The result lets you build an RSS feed based on the two inputs.

Working with Yahoo Pipes #1: Pulling in Del.icio.us Feeds

2007-03-17T02:47:32Z

A few weeks ago, Yahoo unveiled a new mash-up service called Pipes. It's sophisticated AJAX-powered graphical interface lets you pull in XML feeds, combine them, filter them and output the result as a customized RSS feed. I've recently used it to create specialized events pages for my blog aggregator. In this series of posts I'll show you how it's done. Each post will be one part of the puzzle.

The first tutorial shows how to pull in a Del.icio.us feed.

Step 1: Input tags

The Del.icio.us social bookmarking system runs much of my aggregator: users see a post they like and bookmark it in Del.icio.us with a special tag.

The first step in Pipes is to collect the input (right). Pull the "Text Input" module (above) onto your Pipes work space. This lets you collect user input. Give it both a name and a prompt. In most instances it's fine that these be the same as the prompt won't be visible in the end. It's good to put something down in Debug for later on in the Pipes process.

Step 2: Construct the RSS call

We take our two input tags and use them to construct an URL by using the "URLBuilder". The base URL is Del.icio.us's RSS feed (http://del.icio.us/rss/). The URL builder adds the user input then the tag input to give us a valid URL (http://del.icio.us/rss/user/tag/).

Step 4: Grab the feed

Yahoo Pipes' "Fetch" module takes that URL input and turns it into an RSS feed. Shown to the right is Fetch with the final "Pipe Output".

See it in action

You can see how this fits together by going to my Del.icio.us Sample page on Pipes. You can make a copy and play with it yourself. Add "&user=username&tag=tagname&_render=rss" to that URL and you've made it a feed.

Okay so I've turned a Del.icio.us RSS feed into... a Yahoo Pipes RSS feed with identical input and output. Well, we're only getting started. Our input tags can be reused for other searches and spliced together inside of a more elaborate Pipe. That's where the fun starts and I'll get there soon.

The other advantage of sending things through Pipes is that we can easily rename fields. Del.icio.us, Flickr and other services often extend RSS standards by including metadata in "dc" fields, an abbreviation for the Dublin Core standards extension. A recent entry from my Del.icio.us feed includes this:

     <dc:creator>martin_kelley</dc:creator>
     <dc:date>2007-03-15T05:18:53Z</dc:date>
     <dc:subject>tech tech.design</dc:subject>

Standard PHP parsers like MagpieRSS and SimplePie often have trouble pulling dc data. With Pipes you can rename the fields you like; in theory that should make them more accessible to the parsers. You can also combine fields and use Pipes' Regex module to operate on them with regular expressions.

SEO Myths II: Content Content Content, the Secret to SEO

2007-02-28T03:53:32Z

Whenever I talk with fellow web designers, the issue of "SEO" invariably comes up. That's techie slang for "search engine optimization," of course, that black science of making sure Google lists your site higher than your competitors. Over the years a small army of shady characters have tried to game the search engine results.

I've always thought such tricks were pathetic and bound to lose over the long term. Search engines want to feature good sites. It's in their best interest to make sure the sites listed are the ones people want to see. A search engine that returns unsatisfactory results quickly becomes a has-been in the search engine competition. So as soon as a site such as Google notices some new SEO trick is skewing the rankings they tweak their secret search algorithm to fix the SEO loophole.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In theory it's easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other big search engines happy: give potential visitors site they'll want to visit. Forget the tricks and spend your time putting together an amazing site. Search engines like text, so write, write, write.

I'm looking to join a web design house, which means I've been interviewing with slick web developers lately and whenever they ask me the best way to increase SEO for their clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I'm an idiot but it's absolutely true: two blog posts a week will end up being over 100 pages of pure content. All of these sites full of Flash animation get you nowhere with Google. (An aside: I've been having fun going after the keywords of some of the design firms I'm interviewing with. I've actually been pretty successful. I am the king of Minotola Web Design, muhahahaha!)

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web system can achieve many of the same results--blogs are just the easiest way yet to get content on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to people about starting a corporate blog they quickly start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Humbug--your company's life is probably already filled with bloggable material!

I used to work in a bookstore where I did most of the customer service, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I'd get a particularly intriguing query and would spend a little time researching an answer (mostly by looking through the indexes of our books and searching the arcane sites of our niche). This research didn't always pan out to a book sale, but it marked our bookstore as a place to get answers and gave us a competitive advantage over Amazon and its ilk. Each of my email answers could have easily been reformatted to become a blog post. By the end of a year, I'm sure the volume coming from these obscure searches would be quite high (see yesterday's Long Tail Strategy post on the HitTail blog for an account of how attention to search engine's one-hit-wonders helped achieve a widespread keyword dominance).

Whenever something new happens that breaks you out of your routine, think about whether it's bloggable. At the bookstore, a new book would come in and we'd spend ten minutes talking about it. That conversation reached half-a-dozen people at most. In that same ten minutes we could have written up a blog post saying much the same thing.

Last Spring a controversial article appeared in the local newspaper that tangentially involved my employer. That morning my workmates gathered together in the reception area for the better part of an hour trading opinions and wisecracks. After about five minutes of this, I slipped back to my office and wrote my opinions and wisecracks down into my blog. I hit post and came back to the reception area--to find my workmates still blathering on, natch. My post reached hundreds and took no more time out of the work day than the reception pontifications.

Humans are social animals. We're always blogging. It's just that most of the time we're doing it verbally around the water cooler with three other people. Learn to type it in and you've got yourself a high-volume blog that will add invaluable content and SEO magic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Lastly, a point to webmasters: it usually pays to think about ways to re-package your content. My most recently experience of this was tagifying my personal blog over at "QuakerRanter.org." Every time I post there a Movable Type plugin fishes out the key words in the article and lists them afterwards as tags. These tags are all linked in such a way that results send the term through the site's search engine to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I've used that term.

Tags are like categories except they pick up everything we talk about (when we use them aggressively at least, and especially when we automate them). We don't necessarily know the categories that our potential audience might be searching for and tagifying our sites increases our keyword outreach exponentially. My personal blog has 239 entries but 3,860 pages according to Google. It's the parsed out and re-packaged content that accounts for all of this extra volume. This doesn't increase traffic by that nearly that much, but last month about 30% of my Google visits came from these tag indexes. More on the mechanics of this on my post about the tagging.