Hi - I'm Fiske Miles

FiskeMiles · Experienced Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Posts: 108 Gender:

Hi! My name is Fiske (pronounced Fisk but spelled with an "e" anyway).

I'm a computer programmer. My hobbies include astronomy bird-watching, wood-working, and reading. My big hobby project at the moment is building a 22-inch Dobsonian telescope.

I have my own website -- www.fiskemiles.com. I've just converted this from a blog to a standard html/css style site and haven't moved a lot of my previous content over yet. I have posted an article about finding a black & white warbler where I work and how that led to meeting one of the top field ornithologists alive.

My favorite topics to read about (and discuss) are science (especially evolution), philosophy, and atheism, but my reading habits are eclectic and I read all sorts of things that catch my fancy.

And now I'm heading over to The God Delusion thread...

Fiske

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 12/6/06 3:22 pm

Chris OConnor · Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 3:21 pm Post subject: Re: Hi

Welcome to our reading group, Fisk.

First of all I really love your web site. It's clean and designed well. Sometime in the next month or two our site will be drastically simplified in design, but made far more extensive in coverage. I'm currently studying "search engine optimization" or SEO and am learning that for 5+ years I have been approaching quite a few aspects of web design all wrong. I see you're a programmer so you have significant computer knowledge that I definitely lack, but maybe some of what I have read would help you too.

What I am learning is that you do yourself a service by putting some thought into how you name your pages. For instance, your page located at /goddelusionreadingnotes.php would do better with search engines if it were named /god-delusion-reading-notes.php. SE's read the "-" as a blank space and will read "god-delusion" as two unique words more easily than "goddelusion." It would do even better if it were named /god-delusion-book-review.html I would think.

But I love your site and will add a link to it when I get a second! And I wish I had your knowledge of CSS. Our site has a few CSS files, but I didn't create them. The original web designer did. I own Dreamweaver and that is what I use to make edits and create new pages, but the CSS part if still difficult for me. I can open the CSS files and make edits, but I run the risk of screwing things up. Our site has far too much code due to me not understanding CSS.

Oh, and nice to meet you. I'm enjoying reading your posts on BookTalk.

Chris

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 12/6/06 3:25 pm

FiskeMiles · Experienced Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Posts: 108 Gender:

Chris:

Thanks so much for the warm welcome and your kind remarks about my website. And thanks too for giving me the tips about how to name files for search engine optimization. That makes total sense to me, and I will change my file names accordingly.

I wish I could recommend a good CSS book, but all of the books I have worked with so far make CSS seem a lot more complicated than it really is. I learned more about CSS finding sites through Google than from books. To learn CSS it's a good idea to create small test projects with just one html page and one css file to play around with. Large CSS files, especially those created by a program like DreamWeaver, are hard to understand and discouraging to learn from.

One important thing I have learned, which isn't easy to understand at the outset, is the DocType specification at the beginning of the html file is more critical than you would first think. Correctly specifying a strict doctype forces browsers like InternetExplorer, FireFox, etc. into what is call a "standard" mode instead of their native "quirks" mode. If you don't do this, CSS formatting differences between the browsers will drive you up the wall!

I can recommend Steve Krug's book on website design titled Don't Make Me Think. A second edition has been published and it is an excellent resource for making websites user-friendly. It doesn't cover specifics of html or CSS but is more of a general guide about what to do (and not to do) when designing web pages.

I think your site is excellent, personally. Maybe a few things could be done to make it easier to navigate, but I haven't had much trouble finding my way around. And the content on your site is first rate, which is the primary thing anyway.

I look forward to lots of fun and enlightening discussions at booktalk. Thanks for all the hard work and time that has gone into building this site. It's a wonderful internet resource.

Fiske

MadArchitect · Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2006 9:57 pm Post subject: Re: Hi

www.w3c.org is a really good resource for all things related to design. Checking out their links of CSS is how I learned what I know about style sheets.

FiskeMiles · Experienced Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Posts: 108 Gender:

Dear Mad:

Another point on which we agree...

Fiske

Chris OConnor · Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 10:25 am Post subject: Re: Hi

Fiske

Quote:
I wish I could recommend a good CSS book, but all of the books I have worked with so far make CSS seem a lot more complicated than it really is. I learned more about CSS finding sites through Google than from books. To learn CSS it's a good idea to create small test projects with just one html page and one css file to play around with. Large CSS files, especially those created by a program like DreamWeaver, are hard to understand and discouraging to learn from.

I'll take your advice and start experimenting with CSS on some test pages. But I'll hold off on this educational project for a few months. Right now I have some more important web design issues to handle.

Quote:
One important thing I have learned, which isn't easy to understand at the outset, is the DocType specification at the beginning of the html file is more critical than you would first think. Correctly specifying a strict doctype forces browsers like InternetExplorer, FireFox, etc. into what is call a "standard" mode instead of their native "quirks" mode. If you don't do this, CSS formatting differences between the browsers will drive you up the wall!

I've been studying SEO for about 6 months and I am hearing the same thing about DOCTYPE. The problem is that I didn't create our original site. I found a web designer in Turkey who did it for a discounted fee. Now, years later, he is not doing much web design and spends his time as a real estate developer in Turkey.

So now it is all on me no matter what changes or edits I wish to make to the site. Having this responsibility has actually been quite a bit of fun, but every time I run into a new challenge it is more like hitting a brick wall then going over a speed bump. I don't know what DOCTYPE to add to our header. Is there any way for me to look at our source code and figure out the proper DOCTYPE? And then once I know the DOCTYPE do you know if it needs to be added to every single page, or just the index.html page? Any help on this would be appreciated.

Quote:
I can recommend Steve Krug's book on website design titled Don't Make Me Think. A second edition has been published and it is an excellent resource for making websites user-friendly. It doesn't cover specifics of html or CSS but is more of a general guide about what to do (and not to do) when designing web pages.

I just added this to my Christmas "wish list" so thanks for the recommendation! I already put another book about SEO on my wish list. Hopefully, someone in my family will get one or both of these books for me. Or maybe Santa is reading BookTalk right now and will check his list twice.

Quote:
I think your site is excellent, personally. Maybe a few things could be done to make it easier to navigate, but I haven't had much trouble finding my way around. And the content on your site is first rate, which is the primary thing anyway.

I appreciate those comments. Here is my take on things. Our Home page is far too complicated, dense with unnecessary graphics and code and links. It is not even remotely search engine friendly.

I'm slowly making massive changes to every single page on our site, but the whole page will be completely redesigned. My primary interest is to get most of the content off the home page and onto the other pages you see in the top orange navigation bar. Those pages are being redesigned so that each page is a starting point for other pages.

Take a look at the current "Books" page found at www.booktalk.org/books.php. Currently, this page is about 2x the recommended file size for any web site page. From what I've read no page should really exceed 70 - 90k, but our "books" page sits at 160k. The reason is that I keep adding new books to this long list of our past book selections.

And besides the large size the page is not optimized for search engines. If someone runs a search for any of those books they are unlikely to come up with our books page anywhere near the top of their search results. The reason is because the page contains 33 different books right now, so the keywords and metatags aren't optimized for any one of the 33 books, but for all 33 books.

The solution, from what I have learned, is to make an individual page for each book. I should be done with this within a few days. Once I have all the individual pages created I can put an index of our past books on the "books" page, and people can click on any one book to go to the individual book page.

Here is an example of one individual book page www.booktalk.org/guns-germs-steel.php Note the page name, page title, keywords, alt tags, etc... Much thought has gone into that page design so that it has a strong chance of placing well in searches for "guns germs and steel."

I'll be doing a ton of work and am expecting our average daily hits to go up by at least 10x in 2007. I should have spent the time learning all this SEO stuff years ago, but now is better than never.

Quote:
I look forward to lots of fun and enlightening discussions at booktalk. Thanks for all the hard work and time that has gone into building this site. It's a wonderful internet resource.

Again, thank you. And it will become even better over time. As my schedule permits I will be creating sections for author biographies, book reviews, member essays, book suggestions, etc... We will become the #1 online resource for atheist authors who want to get some publicity and for readers interested in finding quality books about atheism and/or subjects of interest to atheists and freethinkers.

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 12/7/06 10:26 am

FiskeMiles · Experienced Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Posts: 108 Gender:

I'll take your advice and hold off on the DOCTYPE for now. This is an area that I need to study more and I sure don't want to do anything that screws up the site, because I really don't have anyone to turn to for help. If the site goes down it will be down for a while as I scramble around begging for help, OR search the web for the appropriate information. This can be scary, but I seem to be learning more and more each day.

Quote:
The DocType change will have to be applied to every page, but I wouldn't be in a hurry on this item. In the first place, your page renders consistently across multiple browsers (a good thing). Also, changing the DocType to some strict version will probably break lots of stuff that isn't even noticeable right now.

This is good news. I haven't received any complaints from anyone saying they're having trouble viewing the site, so I won't worry about DOCTYPE now, and possibly not ever.

Quote:
I'm not sure what browser you favor.

I use IE, but not sure which version. I think the latest. And from what I can see most of our visitors are using IE.

MS Internet Explorer 76.3%
Firefox 17.2%
Opera 3%
Safari 2.1%
Netscape 0.4%
Mozilla 0.2%
Unknown 0.2%
Konqueror 0.1%

I just noticed that 58.1% of our visitors add us to their favorites. I think this has to be a high rate.

Quote:
I've been an Internet Explorer fan for many years, but last year I started using FireFox, and I have to say there are a lot of things I like about it. The current version has all sorts of free add-ons that can be downloaded to extend functionality. These include various source inspectors and other development aids.

I use the Google Tool Bar and there are all types of similar tools.

Quote:
For whatever reason, your pages generate lots of errors displayed by an Add-On called "FireBug" (one of the inspectors). They show up as a little red Error count in the lower right corner of the browser. Right now I am seeing a count of 1324.

Clicking the count opens a dialog with some details. Every line has the same error message -- "Doc is not defined." They are coming from line 38 in a tooltip.js file at the following location: http $:\$ hr>

Here is the deal with that. The original web designer (guy from Turkey) added a tooltip or floating pop-up box on our Home page. I deleted that off the Home page because it was a pain in the ass and gave us errors all the time. But I never deleted the tooltip.js file. Well, I just did and we'll see if there are any more problems.

I'm not sure if you have ever used Dreamweaver for web design, but it is the program I use for BookTalk. I ran a search of the code for the entire site just now for "tool tip" and found only one page with this code still present. I have now deleted it. I hope this doesn't screw anything up, but it shouldn't....I think. We haven't had that tooltip active for 2 years or more.

When you are on any of our booktalk.org pages everything seem fine, but when you are on our ezboard forums pages you see an "Error on page" message in the lower status bar of IE. And I think this is because the code still exists in our ezboard HTML for the tooltip, yet that file isn't there. So it is looking for it and not finding it. I will try to fix this, but now I am moving into another area where I am inexperienced. Instead of the web designer from Turkey, our ezboards were custom designed by an actual employee of ezboard. And she is too busy working on the new system that is soon going to replace ezboard, called "Yuku.com." She probably cannot take the time to go into our code and remove the tool tip code. So I will try to do it myself by copying it inot Notepad and removing only the tool tip.

Quote:
One thing you might consider is increasing the right margin in the page area and increasing the font size to bring the per line character length down to somewhere in the 60s. At a glance I would say your per line character count is somewhere in the 90s, which makes the text a little tiring to read. A little more space between lines would also be helpful in this regard.

You're referring to the book pages? Or just about every page should have a more readable font size and bigger margins?

Quote:
As a new user I did have trouble finding the login link.

This will be fixed soon too.

Quote:
I'm not sure the long author chat listing is pulling its weight on the home page.

The home page will be wiped clean in the next few days. None of that stuff is helping us. We need that page to be a hook to get people here by means of the search engines, and you're right about the author chat listings. But so much more is also confusing the search engines and it will be removed and moved to different pages.

Quote:
Maybe a smaller box promoting author chats with a couple of recent items and a more... button or something?

The author chats will be off the home page. I will be adding a link in the top orange navigation bar called "AUTHORS," which will be situated after BOOKS and before FORUMS. The chat transcripts will be linked from there AND in all of the associated individual book pages AND in the associated author bios. Each author will have their own author bio page. We'll stick with authors of relevance to freethought, so the index of authors doesn't get to large. I think we'll slow down around 30 authors - 50.

Quote:
Anyway, this is the most engaging forum I have visited in quite some time. I think you're doing a lot of things right.

I appreciate that. We're going to see some dramatic improvements soon too.

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 12/9/06 11:32 am

Chris OConnor · Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 12:34 pm Post subject: Re: Hi

Fiske! Holy smokes! I have never done that before!

I just made my post inside your post by means of an "edit!" I am really sorry about that. I was trying to reply to your post and I edited it instead! Most of what you said was included in my post, but plenty wasn't. Wow. I am embarrassed. sorry about that. I am working too fast today and not thinking. ::17

Chris OConnor · Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 12:48 pm Post subject: Re: Hi

Hey, can you check now and see if you get any error messages!? I think I just solved the problem! There was a bit of code that appears to have needed to be deleted...

onmousemove="overhere()"

I deleted this and I no longer see error messages on our forums!

Chris OConnor · Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 12:56 pm Post subject: Re: Hi

3 years of a page error gone! I'm excited. Page errors hurt a sites search engine ranking, from what I'm reading.


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