by joe on December 12, 2007
One of my best stories, “The Great Rodeo Trainers” was published on Helium, and sold on the Marketplace there. The publisher (who wishes to remain anonymous) purchased the story with exclusive rights, which means it can’t appear on any other web-sites for a while. Once they expire, it will return to Helium, and I’ll probably publish it here on the blog as well under the ‘Memoirs of a Horse Trader’s Son’ category.
Another story – one I had submitted to Maissonneuve 3 months ago but never heard back from, I’ll probably submit somewhere else. Its a humorous account of a group of ponies roaming loose, and the havoc they wreak on an upscale golf course. After 2 months I sent a follow up inquiry Maissonneuve, but still nothing. I don’t know if I should try another in-print publication or just break down and put it on-line, either Triond or Associated Content. The Wild Horse Race Story is doing pretty well there.
Finally, another story is nearing completion. I’m not sure of the title yet. It will probably either be “To Mourne a Horse”, or “Here Lies Good Ol’ Mopsie-Flopsie”, depending on the mood that the final draft instills.
by joe on December 10, 2007
I recently wrote an article on Helium, trying for a Marketplace sale. The topic was on the benefit of static landing pages for marketing web sites. I have my doubts about getting the sale, as my article is only rated 5th out of 7 right now, but you never know. In any case, here’s an excerpt:
While dynamic pages offer a number of desirable features for web site owners like design consistency and up-to-date information, in order to optimize the effectiveness of your internet marketing website you’ll want a static landing page. Static landing pages offer several advantages over dynamic pages where attracting and retaining visitors is concerned. This is of course essential to converting web site visits to sales.
First, assuming you advertise your product or service on other web sites, when users arrive at your site after clicking one of your ads, most of them will leave within a few seconds if they don’t immediately see the information that prompted them to click on it in the first place. They do not want to fill in any forms, navigate your site looking for the information, or wait while the page is generated dynamically. Having the relevant information presented in a concise, statically loaded page will capture their attention and keep them from wandering away. For best results, this page should be customized for the advertisement or ad campaign that brought the visitor in. Thus, if you have different ads for a variety of products or services, each should link to a different landing page, optimized to deliver information relevant to that product or service, with a clear indication on what the user should do next. Many on-line marketers are realizing higher Click Through Rates this way.
Second, when content is dynamically generated, it may not always present the information your visitors are looking for. Pages are generated based on data, and if the data is unavailable (if for example, a service is not responding or a database is down), the page may not contain any information useful to your visitor. It may give error messages, or it may not render at all. Nothing will turn off first time visitors faster than a web site that appears to be broken. They’ll leave and likely never return.
by joe on December 5, 2007
Well, I still haven’t solved the earlier problems (see other posts in this category), but now I’m having a new problem. One of the Windows servers we’ve had OpenSSH running on for quite some time suddenly seems have issues. It will stop accepting connections. The message in the sshd.log is always some variation of this:
63 [main] sshd 7632 child_copy: linked dll bss write copy failed, 0x207A000..0x207CAA0, done 0, windows pid 8136, Win32 error 998
Stopping the service, with the intent of restarting, didn’t work, as the service would then not start at all. cygrunsrv -S sshd would yield the mysterious win32 error 1062, and would refuse to start, with nothing showing up in the event logs. A complete re-installation of cygwin fixed the problem, but it returned within one day. Now I find out that this server is short on memory (it’s used for some heavy-duty data processing), so I suspect that the problem is related to that. If you’re researching the same issue, check your available memory. I’ll report more details here as they develop. In the end, I’ll probably write a comprehensive article for publication on Associated Content.
Update: 12/06/2007: Some of our scripting relied on multiple successive ssh connections to a target server. The idea was to maintain as much of the scripting logic as possible on our build server, executing remote commands one at a time, each via an SSH connection. This may have caused a resource bottleneck. I re-wrote some of the scripts to do a number of things in a single connection. I also added retry logic, in case of the “resource unavailable” error. We’ll see how it goes.
