As long as I’ve been designing, one of the biggest gripes Web Designers have (other than Internet Explorer) is the limited stack of web-safe fonts. What we mean by web-safe fonts are fonts that are installed on a very high percentage of visitors Operating System. Web-safe fonts (Georgia, Arial, Verdana) work well, and are nice to show to the guests visiting a site designed by you.

Typography is much of what web design is today. Having the ability to let designers be a bit more creative with font choices is a huge sell to any designer. This is where Typekit comes in and saves the day. Typekit replaces web-safe fonts with what would normally be non-safe fonts to use in peoples designs, while maintaining the ability for people to interact with the font like a normal font would (copy, paste, enlarge). There are some other options such as SIFr and Cufon but these use either flash, heavy javascript crunching, or allow people to download (and use) licence restricted fonts. Typekit instead uses @font-face, which will allow you to privately use fonts, by linking the browser to the font files on the typekit servers. This makes the fonts just like any other web-safe embedded font online. Typekit also has a increasing number of font foundries who they work with to allow you to legally use their fonts on your sites. This alone is a huge plus for the Typekit setup.

Typekit has 4 different stages of membership, each with added benefits, different amounts of fonts included, and pageview limits. While it may be considered pricey to some, for a year it is cheaper than a video game, which when put into context of more typography control is easily worth the money to me.

The best part about Typekit and @font-face is that this works in IE6+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 3.1+ and Chrome 4.0.294+. The only major browser that it doesn’t support is Opera, but heres another great thing; graceful degradation. Typekit will allow you to use their fonts right in your CSS’s font stacks, so if it is not enabled on the browser the guest is viewing the site on you can still have a web-safe font show up easily.

So here is what I think of it. Overall, a great service at a rate that is quite good when you consider some of the font foundries you’re getting to use, and the typekit servers speed from what I’ve been seeing. There are only a few negatives that I think are even worth writing about. First and foremost is the added load to the page. Fonts are linked via your browser, and depending on the font it can be from 10k-50k per font. This may seem like a lot, but thinking of it as images, that is 1-3 larger images on a page, not something I’d say is a deal-breaker. The other negative that I see is many fonts aren’t good for use at small sizes. This is to be expected, and typekit even has some suggestions for type used in paragraphs and lower sizes.

P.S. – If you’re on a supported browser, the font you’re reading is a typekit font (FF Tisa Web Pro). Headings are also a typekit font (Adelle)

I’ve always been interested in OpenX (formerly OpenAds and other names before that that I can’t keep track of) as a way to keep my sites advertisers happy with trackable clicks, page views, and more.

The problem was I tried to install it once on a older site and host, and OpenX and my hosting account were not getting along.

Along comes a new way to use OpenX. You can now sign up to enter a beta program for OpenX Hosted. This is a basic version of the OpenX platform, but you sign up on their site and they host the program. So far I enjoy it, and it makes life much easier by keeping all of my sites in a single location when it comes to advertising and campaigns. I highly recommend signing up for the beta and trying it out yourself if you’re looking for a Ad Management system. The only problem I’ve ran into so far was I had a 15 minute period of time at around 1am this past week that the system must have been down. This slowed loading on my pages dramatically, but I have not had any other problems with it since then. This could be from an update OpenX was doing to their platform.

If anyone has any questions about vBSEO and are wondering if its worth the money.  Well the short answer is YES!

I’m just a regular guy, who researched a bit of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics, and then ran across vBSEO and thought it looked interesting but couldn’t get over the price.  About 5 months after my forum started I bit the bullet and bought the software for my Camaro & Firebird site.

I installed vBSEO on August 13th, 2007.  I’ve had some up and downs since then, but one thing that has never gone down during this time is search engine referrals (especially google).

Since I installed Google Analytics only 2 and a half months before the install of vBSEO I can understand why skeptics could be a bit turned off by the above graph.

However, this one gives real proof

When a Forum that is little over 1 year old and has only 700 members is ranking higher on almost all terms than forums with 10′s of thousands of members and 5+ years online, something is working well.

Sure, I’ve done other things to help my search engine rankings as everyone should.  No one states that vBSEO or any other SEO product is a magic install that just works and you can leave your site stagnant for 1 year and then blame them when it goes wrong.  However, I am no SEO Expert, just a guy who started a site online, read some free articles and watched some videos, talked with others and am now on the top of google (for a few terms-more will come with time).  I see the price tag of vBSEO now and wouldn’t think twice of buying a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th license if I had the forums that needed it.

I just recently purchased a book that should interest most (if not all) Forum Owners. The Book is “Managing Online Forums” by Patrick O’Keefe. Patrick is well versed in forums as he owns/manages more than I can probably count, runs the largest phpBB modification community (phpBBhacks.com) and is the owner of the iFroggy network. Anyways, on to the book…

I’m not a big bookworm to be honest (not at all really) but this book caught my attention as I haven’t seen anything like it yet. I sat down with it at Barnes and Noble to see if I thought it’d be worth the time and money in buying and reading it. I was impressed at the detail that Patrick goes into for just about everything you need to know to own and manage a forum.
The book details many of the tough topics such as moderation, problem users, guidelines, and much more. Patrick gives many of his real-life examples and tips he’s gained through almost a decade of forum management. You’re most likely not going to agree with Patrick on all of his issues, but he explains his reasoning and tactics so that you can at least see and decide what will work for your and your community.

I’m about 3/4 of the way through the book as of right now and enjoy the read so far. I definitely suggest any Administrator gets this, or at least gives it a try. It’s got something for just about any level administrator-whether you’re still brainstorming a community you’d like to grow, or already have a booming forum.

I’ll update this as I finish the book.

Now that I’ve been running vBulletin 3.7.0 Gold on my forum for 2 weeks or so I figure I can give a decent opinion of the progress of vB.  There are positives and negatives to 3.7, but I do think it is worth the hassle of upgrading templates and files to update.

What Changed? (more…)

I just signed up for ADSDAQ, a CPM advertising site (much like google’s adsense, but CPM). Signed up and had their ads up within 3 minutes. Very fast and easy registration and as simple as pasting a little script of code into your pages just like adsense, YPN, or other scripts. One of the unique concepts is ADSDAQ lets you decide what your CPM prices will be, and then you keep track of your Fill Rate and then adjust the pricing accordingly.

ADSDAQ CPM Advertising

I’ll update with some stats and fill rates for different prices later.

Sorry for the lack of updates to the site this past month or so. I’ve been swamped with work for my classes and other projects and haven’t had the time to work on any of my sites as much as I’d like to.

Anyways, This will be a in-depth look at how vBSEO has affected our search engine rankings from August 15th until now on F-Body Online.

First, we’ll compare the search engine stats from July 15th through August 15th, and compare them to August 16th through September 15th.
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I sat with a vBulletin forum for 10 months before installing vBSEO because the pricetag (~150.00 USD) was a bit steep and I wasn’t quite sure it would work. Well I figured I’d take the stab at it (as you already know if you’ve read any past posts) and the results have been nothing but good.

Not only have my Rankings for Google, Yahoo, Live, and MSN all over tripled, I’ve also been getting more traffic that wants to be here . Before vBSEO was installed during a month I was averaging about 3 pages/visit, in the month and 10 days since, I’m averaging 7.5 pages/visit.

I am now in the top 10 in google for “f body forums” and top 15 for many other similar phrases like f-body forum and others.

Or lack there of…

Since installing their script and waiting for offers for text links, I’ve gotten nothing in about 2 weeks. Now I know that F-Body Online isn’t a huge forum, but they are supposed to price your links “according” to your traffic. However it seems it might be too high at $15.00 a month for a forum with only 175 members. That is why I suspect I am not getting any offers as of yet. I’ll keep it around a bit longer, and see if I can lower the price after that but I don’t see the ability to.
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Considering I just signed up for Text-Link-Ads a few days ago and plan on reviewing it I thought I’d give it some friendly competition through Linkworth.
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