Here we are with Day 3 of our Reader Appreciation Week random featured commenter showcase. Today’s lucky comment number was 1102, which belonged to our good friend Matt Davies, who we have even interviewed way back in October. Since then his site has been redesigned, so be sure to take a look at today’s featured reader!

Today’s featured site for Reader Appreciation Week came via comment number 657, by Jonathan Landrum. The link lead to his personal blog, which talks about him being a Missionary in Thailand. It’s definitely interesting, so please have a look.

Check back tomorrow for Day 3′s featured site, or learn what all this is about.

The first Reader Appreciation Week featured site is Kokopelli, a personal weblog. Coming in at comment number 324, KP features a seemingly two column layout (split between black and white), with each side pulling it’s own different posts. It’s powered by, what else – WordPress, my favorite blogging / cms system around.

Be sure to check back tomorrow when we’ll feature someone else!

Yes, Reader Appreciation Week officially kicked off yesterday. While I was thinking about what I could do to honor all of you, I finally had an idea late last night. Since this is a web design and development resource, I decided throughout the rest of the week (and Saturday, since I missed a day yesterday), we will be showcasing a random member’s site each day? How exactly? If you’ve ever commented here, you’re already in the mix. I’ll be generating random numbers based on the total number of comments, and matching the selected number each day with that number commenter. So long as that commenter used an actual link and their site is online, it will be showcased. So if you want the chance to get featured and steal a bunch of our traffic, please comment (something useful!) on one or more of our fantastic articles.

I’ll be doing other things here and there this week to honor you, the reader, so stay tuned!

Traffic is one thing that people strive for. Whether it’s using the pillar technique of building traffic over time, or a spike technique to create bursts of heavy hits for a day or two, traffic rules not only the way your website is seen, but it can affect how likely repeat visitors are.

People are like sheep. Lemmings, if you will. People go where other people go. It’s like having a favorite sports team. You either choose it by location, or because someone else, or a group of people have already. You might hear a lot of people saying, “If you have less than 50 subscribers don’t display the number“. I don’t personally go by this theory, but it’s true. If someone likes the content, but sees only 10 other people read it regularly, they’re less likely to subscribe themselves.

Same goes for traffic. You’ll find the less traveled sites need to virally build up traffic to get going. Other sites prefer to use pillar traffic to start up.

Pillar Traffic is when you write quality content over time and your stats and traffic rise slowly but surly. This is more of a ‘sticking it out’ method, but is more likely to work in the long run than any other method.

Spike and Viral traffic are when you get massive bursts that last for a day. This can happen when one of your pillar articles gets a lucky break on a social bookmarking site, or other aggregator. Things return to normal very quickly.

Another option that I’ve seen quite a bit of lately is buying traffic. This simply consists of paying a company/person who will send you a guaranteed amount of visitors your way, everyday. You can get 250 unique hits a day which is very good by any standards, or you can pay the extra buck for 10,000.

The problem with this however is that this traffic is very thin and the visitors do not convert to readers/subscribers, ad clickers, clients/buyers or comments. It’s just dummy traffic that you can do absolutely nothing with. It’s great if you’re trying to sell a site, until the potential buyer asks for your referral logs.

So how do you build traffic, or Pillar Traffic?

There are a variety of ways. But remember: this is not a short term solution. If you’re itching for 50,000 hits a day and now, you better start writing bad stuff about Microsoft and Reddit hoping to get on Digg.

1. Use search engines to generate organic traffic. Organic traffic is the most likely to come back, or convert. Certain search terms, where people are looking for an answer convert well for ad clicks (contextual), and the new reader will likely come back later to read some of your other content. But…
2. Make sure the content is there. Don’t even try to get good traffic without good content. This is what I mean by pillar articles. People don’t come back for no reason. You need to give them a reason to come back. It’s like moving away from home. If you move out and make a better life for yourself, then there’s no reason to go back to where you won’t be as happy. (Weak, I know )
3. Getting Spike Traffic is OK. No one will look at you differently for trying to throw in some Digg-bait with your good content. If you get on Digg and receive 50,000 hits that day, at least 50 are going to come back, most likely more.
4. Get links from sites on the same topic. Who’s most likely to subscribe to Devlounge: someone from a webmaster site like DigitalPoint or a stray HabboHotel player?

The quality traffic that you build is better than thin traffic that you buy. 100 hits of quality visitors will do you more good than 1000 hits of bots and 1 second visits.

In the end it’s all up to you: do you want 10,000 hits today, or do you want to be getting 10,000 hits everyday in a year? Sometimes its better in the long run to forget about the stats now. You’ll also be surprised how fast these pillar techniques work.

Conclusion:

• Write good content.
• SEO for organic traffic.
• Contextual links.
• Pillar over Spike.
• Spikes are OK every now and then.

My name is Connor Wilson and this is my first post at Devlounge. I hope you enjoyed it and get something out of it. I’ll answer anything in the comments, or email me using the staff contact form.

iSalient is a hosted survey solution by the people of ActiveCampaign, makers of 1-2-All, Triolive, Support Trio, and KnowledgeBuilder. iSalient promised to be an easy to use, quickly deployable hosted survey solution, that could gather stats and responses used in analyzing user trends. I decided to take a look and see how exactly it stacks up.

What is iSalient?

iSalient is a ajax powered form creation service, similar to Wufoo, but focused more on larger forms, such as multiple paged surveys. iSalient is a paid service, which ranges from $8.95/month to $129.95/month. Each plan has different levels of max responses and administrators, but all plans support unlimited survey / form creation.

For the purpose of this review, I’ll be using a 30 day Free Trial. All responses to my example survey were provided by myself, to speed up the review process but still show live examples of charts, etc.

Features

Upon completing registration, you can quickly login and immediately begin creating your first survey. I navigated to the “Surveys” tab in the navigation, exposing a drop-down menu where I went to “Add”.

From the “Add” screen, you are presented with a few basic options. They include name, display title, window title, design style, start and end dates, and max number of responses (if required). Additional option categories can be exposed by clicking the different sections to expand the required div. For example, clicking the “Security Options” header will bring up the options of protecting the survey with a password, unique codes, or IP. Other additional category headings where you can fine tune different settings include response options, navigation options, and what the user sees or what page they get redirected to after successfully and unsuccessfully completing the survey.

Once you finish saving changes to your survey, you are brought back to the main survey view, or “Manage” under the survey tab. Here you can edit, change the options, copy, deploy or delete any of your surveys. It also shows you if each survey is currently opened, closed, or in the design stage, how many pages a survey has, and how many questions are in that survey.

Adding questions to a particular survey is probably the hardest part of using iSalient. By clicking edit, you are brought to a screen where you can add various fields to your survey, all using ajax, so the page updates right in front of you. Because these are surveys, and surveys tend to be long, the creation wizard will first guide you to create a page. In my experimental survey, I’m only using one page and 5 questions.

There are 18 types of questions to choose from – from single line or paragraph text, to matrix radio button, text boxes, or check boxes. Once you specify which type of question you wish to add, the page will refresh and will load the options required for you to fill in based on what type of field you just created. When you are all set, you can save changes and continue building the survey. At any time you can re-order the questions, and when finished you can simply leave the page, as with each field save the entire form is saved.

Survey Style

Once I completed my test survey, I went back to the survey tab and found my way to the “styles” link. From here, you can create your own style in a wizard (or edit and existing one), or import an .XML file you may have already created and exported in iSalient.

If you create your own theme or edit one, there are a lot of customization options, starting with being able to upload your own logo. You can set the colors and fonts for the body, page (survey) background, question headers, progress bar, and footer, just to name a few. You can also associate your own custom css with each customization area (i.e. body). There is also pop-up color pickers available in case you don’t have an exact hex value in mind.

Reports

The reports tab can generate Google Analytics like graphs for each survey, and more specific, for each question of each survey. Depending on what type of question it was seems to depend on what kind of graph iSalient spits out. Sometimes they are bar graphs, and sometimes they are pie charts. This provides a quick overview of everyone’s thoughts on one specific question, without reading into the data too too much. You can also limit the time-frame for which you look at results for.

Mass Emailing

One of the most appealing features is the ability to also use iSalient as a mailing list manager. You can create lists and import subscribers or add them manually, then create emails directly from iS to go out to everyone. It would be very helpful if you intended to create a specific test panel, and wanted them to fill out new surveys on new products or services before being released into the wild. This way, you could submit a mass email and everyone would get the link to your newest survey quickly.

Where iSalient falters

The biggest problem I have with iS is the interface. The features are there, but the interface does not do a nice job backing them up and exposing everything the service has to offer. When you first login, the page looks rather blank. There’s nothing eye-popping and very little color, which seems to keep things hidden away. The interface is very compacted, and you can tell they tried to simplify the process of the using the application as much as possible, but they may have overdone it. The navigation is rather boring, and without even so much as little icons to distinguish different sections of the admin end, it leaves the application feeling like it has little to offer.

I think a fresh interface would be the best way of improving iSalient. I understand the need for a simple user interface, but by being too simple, it leaves features unexposed unless you go digging. Drag-and-drop abilities should also be integrated into the form / survey creation screen, as it would speed up the process of adding fields. Remember, surveys are generally pages upon pages long, and it would take an awful long time to add fields the way the survey creation page is currently set up.

All in all, the service is not bad at all, it could just use some tweaking to expose everything it can really do.

The preceding was a paid review for iSalient by ActiveCampaign. Regardless, all of our reviews are 100% accurate and are not influenced in any special way, regardless of whether or not they are paid. We hope to provide constructive criticism to help our reviewed companies and services improve their product for everyone. If you have a concern about our reviews, please contact us.

We’re experiencing some weird feed problems at the moment, where the feed isn’t showing images and isn’t putting anything into paragraph’s either. This makes for an ugly looking feed, and makes it very hard to read. I’m in the process of trying to figure out what’s going on, so please bear with us. Ronald just pointed this out to me (I don’t subscribe to my own feed, just check the stats on Feedburner). If anyone knows if this has been happening for a few days, let me know, because it could have to do with the upgrade to 2.1.3. Thanks for understanding, I hope to have everything sorted soon!

Update: The feeds are now fixed, but we’ve had to disable Podpress until an updated release with a fix is published. Not that we have many wonderful podcasts (yet) anyways.

Friday Focus has returned to our regular schedule of being published on Fridays! Ronalfy has also rejoined us this week after taking some time off for the Reader Appreciation Project.

Sites of the Week

First up this week is a tourism site for Knoxville, Tennessee. The design is really fun, and I really like the active/energized approach they took instead of trying to make something too standard to draw people in. It looks much better than average tourism sites.

Next up is Scrapblog. The design was updated here and there, and I think they did and excellent job. Just looking at the homepage alone makes me want to register, regardless of all the pink .

And finally rounding out this week, is BubblesSOC. I first discovered this site when the designer joined Mintpages a few weeks ago, and I was impressed. It’s a very “cute” and fun design by 23 year old designer Sidney Collin, out of the University of Alabama.

Digg Weekly

Design – Choosing the right font for the job
A pretty good read on choosing the right font for your different projects. An issue frequently discussed by a lot of people, especially when cheap fonts are used instead of paying for premium ones.

Programming – Facebook Releases Thrift
Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift was developed at Facebook, and they are now releasing it as open source.

Up and Coming

Design – 10 Tools to help you Select a Web 2.0 Color Palette
But where are the tools for a Web 3.0 color palette?

Programming – 12 More SEO Tips for 2007
A nice list of 12 things you can do for search engine optimization.

Design Dilemma

The purpose of Design Dilemma is to post one dilemma a week and allow the readers to voice their suggestions and/or opinions. If you have your own dilemma, please send Ronald yours using the Devlounge contact form.

Your newest client wants a new design, but wants the design up front before any cash changes hands. You’ve been screwed over in the past and are beyond working for free. How do you respectfully let your client know that this is not acceptable without burning the bridge.

WordPress Plugin Spotlight

Instant Upgrade allows you to upgrade your WordPress installation from your admin panel. Gene Steinberg told me it usually takes less than a minute.

WP Ajax Edit Comments is a plugin I wrote that allows users to edit comments inline via AJAX. This is a plugin you will have to try for yourself. There’s a test page where you can add your comment and edit.

Announcements

Just a couple of things to point out here today. The first is, if you have yet to get a design going for our refresh contest, get going now! The contest comes to a close on April 16th, so be sure to submit as soon as you can. Also, if you are participating, please let us know in the comments on the Refresh contest page so we know if we’ll be getting a decent amount of entries or not.

And finally, if you haven’t already, give our recent interview with the Digg Crew a read, as it was user-submitted questions that were used in composing the interview! While it is short compared to some of our others, the answers are worthwhile and to the point, so make sure you take a look!

With all the content management systems out there (CMS), it’s very hard to pick the perfect one to run your blog or project on. This question frequently comes out everywhere I go: “Which CMS Should I use in this situation?” There are thousands of CMS systems out there – some self-hosted, and some hosted for you. While we can not cover them all, I’ve rounded up a few of my favorites, based on past experience, what I’ve heard from others, and which ones seems to show the most promise, and broken down some of the essential features for you to have a look at all in one glance, for a nice, quick comparison.

Self-Hosted Solutions

WordPress – Free/Open Source (PHP)
Key Features: Standards Compliant, automatic feed generator for almost everything, comments, user registration, mass amount of themes and plugins, bookmark and link management.

My Experience: In the past year, WordPress went from a script I would use from time to time, to a cms I put to use in all my client work when some form of content management is required. I find WordPress to have an extremely helpful community behind it, with more and more extensions constantly being created, and a (very) frequent update schedule.

Movabletype – Free/Paid Licenses (CGI)
Key Features: Multiple database support, activity feeds, spam protection, extensive plugin and theme lists.

My Experience: Before becoming such a huge WordPress fan, I was very much into Sixapart’s Movabletype. That began to fade out a bit when they introduced pricing schemes and limited what you could do with the Personal (free) edition. Still, I really liked the admin end of MT, and found it just as easy as WP to use. Since the last time I used MT, they have added a host of new features, which are worth checking out. Just be aware of the pricing scheme, and make sure you know the limitations of the Personal edition before you try to do to much with it. MT also uses cgi scripts for the backend and can run on multiple types of databases.

Expression Engine – Free/Paid Licenses (PHP)
Key Features: Built in mailing list and manager, comments, captcha, built in hit tracking, multi user system, member groups, robust template system, decent amount of plugins available.

My Experience: The last time I used Expression Engine, it was called pmachine. Yes, it has been a while, and it appears that EE has added a ton of extra features, not to mention an update backend design. I have heard a lot of people sign praise for EE, the only problem is that features are limited in the free license version.

Textpattern – Free (PHP)
Key Features: Unlimited site sections, browser based file upload, built in search engine, xml feeds, unlimited site authors, multiple languages.

My Experience: Textpattern is very similar to WordPress, even the admin backend. If your contemplating between using TP and WordPress, the better choice would be WordPress due to its much more frequently updated release schedule, and its extended plugin availability.

Simplelog – Free (Ruby on Rails)
Key Features: Elegant administration interface, tagging, comments with spam protection, quick search with boolean logic, multiple author support, automatic pinging to Ping-o-matic, RSS 2.0 feeds, permalinks.

Radiant – Free/Open Source (Ruby on Rails)
Key Features: Fast loading, simple admin interface, custom template language, flexible site structure, page caching, custom text filters.

My advice: Although I’ve never used Radiant (besides the demo), it looks very nice and very simple to use. We had originally planned on using it to run Devlounge, although it was still very new at the time so we didn’t go through with it. If you’re looking for a RoR cms, it’d be wise to give this a look.

Mephisto – Free/Open Source (Ruby on Rails)
Key Features: Mephisto is the WordPress for Ruby on Rails. Theme uploading and editing, “overview” feed, asset manager, multiple authors, great looking backend design.

My Thoughts: Mephisto looks very promising. It even recently got long time WordPress user (and past Devlounge interviewee) Steve Smith to move his entire blog and site over. I think throughout the rest of the year, Mephisto will continue to develop the product as more big-namers make the switch.

Symphony – Free (PHP)
Key Features: Modular system, XSLT template system, clean url structure, clean admin interface.

My Experience: Symphony looks like a nice system. I first heard about almost a year ago, but at the time, it was only a paid download. Since then, Symphony has become free. Because it uses an XSLT template engine, it make time some time to adjust to if you’re used to using PHP and Smarty templating engines.

Drupal – Free/Open Source (PHP)
Key Features: Clean urls, expandable modules, personalization, searching, polls, multiple users, threaded comments, built in news aggregator, caching, and nice collection of themes already available.

To see many of these cms systems and more in live demos, visit O.S.C..

Hosted Solutions

Metacanvas – Paid
Key Features: Clean url, file manager, database driven with backups, all content is indexed and fully searchable, fully managed and hosted for you, automatic updates, standards compliant.

Pagety – Free/Paid
Key Features: Super simple administration, easily and quickly management multiple parts of your site, add and create custom forms, template system, manage all your sites from one place.

My Experience: I recently played around with Pagety a little bit, and while it is true, it’s very simple, you can do a lot with it. Hosting is included, and there is a free plan available, so give it a try if you’re looking for a web based, hosted solution.

Got a favorite we should I add? Please let us know in the comments so we can keep the list fresh. With so many CMS choices out there, we can’t list them all, so we’re trying to list our favorites and the ones with the best promise.

Earlier this morning, the WordPress team put out two new versions to their two separate product lines of WordPress currently supported. The 2.1.x series was updated to 2.1.3, while the 2.0 release was updated to 2.0.10. Both releases fixed minor security issues. Keep in mind, WordPress 2.2 is due in a few weeks, assuming they’re on target for the April 23rd release in the roadmap.

For more information and download, head over to WordPress now.

The much anticipated interview with various members of the Digg staff team is finally here! We thank the ever busy development team for taking the time to give us some responses.

Q: What’s the best part of working for a young company? Is it the same as an everyday job, or is it more fun to be part of such a highly successful site?

The Digg team is still relatively small, but we are completely focused on developing new features for our users..and yes, it’s a blast to work for a company like Digg because we have such a loyal following and close relationship with the community.

Q: On a hosting / tech specs related question, how do you estimate or determine the amount of bandwidth you’ll need each month to run such a high traffic site?

We grew fairly quickly right out of the gate, so before too long one server became two servers, myisam become innodb, we moved to Debian then we went to three servers, Apache 2.x, mysql master-slave replication, started using memcached, moved to PHP 5.x, hired a dba. And then the pace picked up yet again. We try to account for 1,000 requests per second at high points in the day for traffic.

Q: How likely is it that you will be going strong and still run by the same people in the next 5 – 10 years? Is selling to another company something that you see in the near future?

We just recently closed a 2nd round of funding, and are completely devoted to focusing on growing the site internally into something that will continue to offer users the best social experience on the Net.

Q: What’s it like knowing that everything you do front-end wise is going to have both positive and negative feedback from the hardcore users? Do you take a lot of the feature and design suggestions to heart?

We always listen to the users, and check every email that comes to the feedback address. It might take some time for us to get everything that’s requested rolled out, but that’s because we want to do it right.

Q: How long will it be before the Digg API is released?

Soon, very soon.

Q: Are there any plans for allowing users to register as “owners” of a particular URL (similar to how a user can register as the owner of a blog at technorati) and to allow them to “adjust” poorly chosen (or sometimes blatantly false) titles and descriptions that link to their content?

We don’t have any plans along those lines at this time, but I would add that Digg currently provides users with a variety of tools to report inaccurate content on the site. With these tools, Digg empowers its more than one million users as editors of content on the site.

Q: Care to shed some light on any future plans and what we should be looking out for from Digg in the coming months / year?

Stay tuned. As always, Digg will continue to innovate and offer cool new features. Also, please come out to the Digg user celebration party at Mezzanine in San Francisco on April 19th.

The Spring Refresh contest is now officially open, and the entry period will be from today, April 1st, until April 16th, 2007. Please visit the Spring Refresh page for more details about the contest, prizes, and how to enter. Be sure to tell your friends, because the more entries, the better look you’ll be seeing around here come this summer! Please help us get the word out by digging the official entry post.