PigPog

After a week of testing, I’ve removed the small Project Wonderful boxes from the top left. They never brought in more than a few cents, but more important was the effect they had on AdSense. The AdSense ad unit under them didn’t generate a single click while they were there. The leaderboard (big banner) near them at the top of the page got far less clicks than normal, and made almost no money.

PigPog doesn’t exactly bring much money in at the best of times, these days, but at least it’s usually not too far off covering the hosting costs. Adding the PW ads, though, took it to the level of making almost nothing. I removed those ads, and total revenues shot back up again immediately.

At the moment, there’s still a PW ad at the bottom of each pager, but I may well replace that soon, too. PW has been a better experience this time than when I last tried, and I still like their model, but there just don’t seem to be enough general advertisers to make it work for a general site. Within their core area of online comics and crafters, it’s probably a different story.

We’ve tried Project Wonderful for advertising on PigPog before, and not had a lot of luck with it. They seem to have carved out a successful niche in online comics, but have very limited advertisers in any other area. Still, I liked the idea enough to give them another try with this redesign.

PW works as an auction system – until all the ad boxes on your site are taken, everybody pays £0. Once people have to start bidding for them, though, the people willing to pay the most win the ad placements. I was pleased to see the first paying advertiser was actually a comic I regularly read – Buttersafe. Buttersafe is strange, and often makes no sense – my favourite kind of comic.

One of the things we wanted with the current redesign was to have a simpler homepage – less busy, without the mass of posts and links. We also wanted to get a decent sized photo up there as soon as people arrive.

I was inspired somewhat by Inspiredology’s post on sites with large photo backgrounds. We haven’t gone that far, but the photo is the biggest element on the page.

I wanted to rotate images randomly, though, so people could see different ones, and a range of images would show up on different visits.

Showing a random image with PHP is something I’ve coded myself before, but I figured it would be easier to Google for one than either write from scratch, or even try to dig out an old one I’d written before. The first one I found takes a different approach that I wouldn’t have thought of, and was easier to implement than what I was going to do – Matt Mullenweg’s Random Image Script. Matt is the guy behind WordPress, so he probably knows what he’s doing

PigPog hasn’t performed well for a long time. Pages have been taking a long time to generate, and a long time to download and display.

I’ve designed a new theme today, keeping it very simple. The result is that pages take around a fifth as many database queries to generate, and are created in a fraction of the time by the server. The difference seems pretty noticeable. The front page doesn’t display any posts any more – it’s just a static introduction.

I’ll probably continue tweaking it a little, but I like the simplicity, and I like the speed.

I’ve made a few minor changes here again today. This sidebar section used to be called Oinks. The idea was they were the PigPog equivalent of Tweets. The term probably meant nothing to most people, though, so I’ve changed it to the term being used for services like Twitter – Microblogs.

I’ve also modified the feeds so that if you subscribe to the main default feed, you won’t get the Microblog posts. We’ve been a bit reluctant to make much use of these little posts, as they’d be too much chatter for most people. Now, if you want our inane chatter, you have to specifically choose it.

I’ll post in the main area about it to let subscribers know once it’s settled down a bit.

I’ve fixed a few little things here today. Paging through archives wasn’t working, so I’ve fixed that. I’ve also added dates and authors to these little oinks when they’re in the sidebar. It didn’t make much sense that you’d have to click through to the entry’s permanent page to see who wrote it.

If you’re following our RSS feed, and are getting irritated by these little ‘Oink’ posts (bits of mindless chatter), I’ve just made a version of the feed that skips them.

If you want us to shut up a bit, but still want to know when we’ve actually written something of a little more value, you can switch to this feed.

If you actually like the chatter, just stick with the normal feed.

I had a bit of time at home today, while Sam was out at work, so I continued poking our custom theme. I managed to get the tabs working on the right, so there are five ‘pages’ of content always available.

All but the ‘Oinks’ tab are WordPress ‘sidebars’, so they can contain widgets – makes it easy to change them from the WordPress Admin screen.

I’ve also got some ads back in there – fairly simply done, and reasonably subtle. We’ll see how they go, and add or modify if they don’t work reasonably well.

I’ve got the comments displaying again here. That turned out to be the ‘Comment Mover’ plugin – I’ve disabled it for now.

I seem to have got jQuery working, and got some javaScript being called when the tabs in the sidebar are clicked – they don’t do anything yet, but I’m getting there. That’ll do it for today, though. Time for a beer, and another dinner…

I just wanted to say a quick thank-you to the people who have commented recently. They aren’t showing up, but they’re not lost. We’re still seeing them fine here, and I’ll get the theme fixed soon so they’ll show up for everyone.

Thanks for the feedback on fonts, Peter – I’ll try to make it better soon!