Lately my time has been consumed by minecraft. It’s a game. A stupid game at that. The graphics are pretty bad, but for some reason I can’t stop playing. It reminds me of when I was a kid and played with Lego blocks all day long. You pretty much just mine as much material as you can and then attempt to craft random things. You can make anything from tables to TNT. It’s developed by an indie developer who attempts to release some kind of update every Friday. This is the first game I purchased in awhile and while it is still alpha, it was well worth the $13(I think) price tag.

If you feel like getting nothing accomplished for the rest of your life check out minecraft.

I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to this site. The original purpose was to get me a new career. Once that worked out I somewhat forgot about this. During that time we did have some problems with ftp accounts being leaked on our server. I thought I had everything cleared up, but it looks like their could have been more problems than I thought.

I found a strange catchall domain setup on the account for this site. It appears that someone was using that domain to forward spam. I’m still not sure about the specifics and will have to look into it. I think I have the spam stopped for now. Maybe I will post something interesting on here from time to time. This will probably end up being more of a personal site than technical related since I post all of my tutorials over at TeamTutorials.

The htmlSQL project is a PHP class that will allow developers to access HTML tags and attributes using SQL like syntax. It looks like the project has actually been around for a few years, however I just heard about it. I have worked on several personal data scraping projects that use HTML as the source. My normal route is to just use regular expressions to get the data I need and then dump it into a local database. htmlSQL could really speed up the time it takes to select the right data and I see big potential for those types of projects.

I haven’t got to play with htmlSQL yet, but I do plan on writing a tutorial using it soon. If you are interested in htmlSQL you can check out the htmlSQL Live Example or the htmlSQL site.

It’s been difficult to find the time to write tutorials lately. I finally decided to sit down and write one today. A wrote a tutorial on Simple XML to XHTML Transformation using XSLT. It should be pretty simple for beginners to follow.

I have been working up revamping on of my tutorial sites lately. I wanted to create a new layout that was somewhat minimalistic and also wanted to brush up my WordPress skills. I mocked up the layout in Photoshop and coded the design using XHTML/CSS. The main goal was to increase readability. One focus of the design was ad placement. I wanted to include more ad spots for purchase monthly and also make the ads less intrusive. The solutions was to remove some of the more intrusive in post ads and replace them with 125×125 side bar ads.

I also wanted to add some additional functionality to the site. Being a tech related site I saw that we were getting a pretty significant number of off topic comments on posts. We decided to launch a forum to accommodate these requests. Now users can ask anything they feel with out interrupting the discussion at post level.

The comment section was updated to include avatar images and also nested comments. The main category pages also feature a thumbnail for each post. On each post page there is a box at the top giving the description/categories/tags/etc. I also wanted to focus promoting social network/bookmarking services. That was accomplished using the sociable plugin.

Overall I am happy with the changes and think that we will see a great response from our user base. TeamTutorials is on of the long term projects I am focusing on. There is one feature that I wanted to implement that is not yet ready for production and that was a post rating system. I hope to have that feature release in a few weeks.

Check out the new layout.

This is an example of how to ruin the user experience on a perfectly fine website. Like most developers when I am trying to learn something new, one of the first things I will to is search for tutorials on the topic. If you head over to Google and search for “tutorials” one of the top results you will find is tutorialized.com. Tutorialized is the website previously known as the best tutorial directory on the web.

Tutorialized was create by a man by the name of Kurt. I would give you a link but he has somewhat vanished from the face of the internet (if you are curious you could try searching for his handle pdxkurt). When I was introduced to Tutorialized, you could tell that Kurt really had a love for tutorials. Kurt created the best tutorial directory on the web, period. At one point I believe that the site was ranked number one on Google for several tutorial related terms, providing a mass off traffic. Like most sites Tutorialized capitalized on this traffic by showing advertisements. These ads were highly targeted and didn’t interrupt the usability of the site.

In early 2007 Tutorialized revealed a new theme which was very clean and actually one of my favorite designs at the time.

Shortly after the new design the website was sold. Being the top tutorial site online I can imagine that Kurt made a pretty penny. Well, I hope he did because what he create was awesome and really helped develope the entire online tutorial scene as it is today. I don’t blame Kurt for the sale at all and I hope he is enjoying whatever it is he is doing right now.

Here is a screen shot of the site right after DeveloperShed took ownership.

As you can see there are a few more ads, but it was all that bad. Then dev shed decided to scrap the current layout in order to, I believe, align the design with their network of sites. That’s great but compared to the design that was put in place before the sale the new design looks like it is from 1997.

Then came the change that convinced me I would never use this website again. One of the biggest changes was made to the frame. On the original site, when you click a tutorial a very small frame would load above the tutorial giving you options to rate the tutorial and such. The entire frame was probably between 50-100px tall. Take a look at the frame now.

That is a screen shot on my laptop. As you can see the tutorial is completely unreadable. Now with the new layout in place and ads all over the screen I am sure the new owners are making a pretty penny. Let’s take a look at the estimated traffic (source Quantcast)after the sale.

More estimates from Alexa:

While these are not actual stat, the trend is the same. Since the change traffic is dropping. My question to devshed is how much money can you make off of ads if nobody sees them. This is a perfect example of how to ruin one of the best websites online. I think we will see some changes in the search results also as people stop linking to Tutorialized because it is useless now. Who will be there to pick up all that traffic?

Just in case you can’t tell this post is an iponion of mine and should not be taken as fact. Check out tutorialized and form your own opinion.

This is the first post on my newly created blog. I am a web developer at heart that currently does support work. I plan to post on a variety of topics related to the internet. I have spent some time developing web site, running internet marketing campaigns and lately digging into some search engine optimization techniques. I hope can post some case studies on a few of these topics as well.

As for my personal life I have a wonderful girlfriend, Adrienne, who loves to travel. I like to workout 5 days a week and am pretty dedicated to weight lifting. I’m also a Pittsburgh Penguins fan!

If you want to know more about me check my about page and also my two latest projects: Team Tutorials and Tutorial Grad. Also don’t forget to sign up for my RSS Feed to keep up with my latest posts.

That’s a picture of me by the way. Haven’t go to go snowboarding in a few years though.