Es wird mit Sicherheit Themen geben, die ich von der “englischen Version” meines Blogs fortführen werden, aber ich denke auch, dass es neue Themen geben wird. Mal sehen, was die Zukunft bringt

Auf jeden Fall gibt es ein paar Sachen, die ich hier erst einmal anpassen/aktualisieren muss. Z.B. hatte ich ein paar Plugins, die das JavaScript im Admin-Bereich ausgehebelt haben(!). Einige Teile der Seite will ich in Sachen Privatsphäre für die Besucher anpassen, darunter fällt u.a. dass Google Analytics rausfliegt.

Dann will ich noch 2 “Spezialseiten” aktualisieren, kleinere Änderungen am Template vornehmen, vielleicht noch die eine oder andere “Spezialseite” hinzufügen…ach, wenn ich so darüber nachdenke, gibt es eine Menge zu tun und durch’s darüber Schreiben wird es auch nicht erledigt. Also mach ich mich mal lieber an die Arbeit.

picsrc: Flickr

Unfortunately for my english-speaking/reading readers I’ll most likely not post in English anymore. I decided to go for my native language which is German.
It doesn’t mean I won’t write in English anymore, I may have an English post once in a while, but I can’t promise that though.

German starts here

Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob jemand meiner alten Leser noch dieses Blog verfolgt, dennoch habe ich die Lust, mein Blog zu wiederbeleben.

Unglücklicherweise werden so meine fremdsprachigen Leser meine Posts nicht mehr lesen können, da ich fortan in Deutsch schreiben werde.
Aber vielleicht kommt von Zeit zu Zeit ein englischsprachiger Post, wer weiß.

I finished my job education, became a member of a political party in Germany (Piratenpartei Deutschland) and right now I’m looking for a job.

Also, I got two new blogs, one is very personal, so you better ask me for a link The other one is my German blog where I post my political opinions: Marco’s PolitBlog

For now this blog got pretty cold and I have no plans to continue writing here as I don’t have the time (or ideas) anyway.

Feel free to drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook

I really need to get back to writing again, maybe I’ll get more visitors then

and yes, I know, StumbleUpon is known to bring a huge peak and after that only some visitors. Still…

P.S.: Some friends of mine started a German website called Projekt Datenrettung (no frame version of Projekt Datenrettung).

Dear Sir or Madam,

I’d like to inform you that my website, www.ruelicke.net, no longer violates the blog quality standard rule 12. I’d appreciate it if you undo the deletion of my account.

Further I’d like to complain about the policy regarding the deletion of accounts. I can understand it, if you delete accounts which heavily violate the rules, however, I do not understand, why you just delete an account because the last post was longer than 3 months ago. In my opinion, at least a warning and a request to update the blog/website is a must.

If you consider the “Entrecard – critical load” email as a warning, be assured that I did not read it as a warning. I suggest you review your policy regarding deleting accounts, especially as we, the authors of the blogs/websites, do not know when one of your moderators reviews our site. Maybe we scheduled a post to update our site but the deletion was done before/exactly on the day the post went live? Just some thoughts about it.

Regards,
Marco Ruelicke

Their reply

Please read the following from our blog quality standards page. This is not a new rule, and has always been our policy:

Blogs that do not meet our quality standards will be removed from the network. Due to the large number of accounts in the system we are unable to warn account owners of violations prior to deletion. It is your responsibility to ensure that your site does not violate our standards. This account was not deleted until a few days after you received the notice to review the rules.

Because your blog has been inactive for over 90 days, it will be treated as a new blog and we will require 5 quality posts in order for it to be reinstated. The one where you wrote under pressure, complaining about not getting a warning does not count towards that quota. And FYI, your widget is not working and has not been since your account was deleted, so no one is “grabbing” any clicks from you.

My reply

I assume with this kind of policy you’ll most likely loose many customers. I have no interest in signing up again as there is no way to re-gain the points I accumulated until now. I didn’t even have the time to spend those points, meaning that I had no benefit from Entrecard at all.

As far as I’m concerned about the quality standards policy, I do not remember ever reading about it when I signed up. I did read everything important to make sure I do not violate any kind of ToS.

Using the excuse of not being able to inform/warn account owners doesn’t work in my opinion. You have the time to review each account, so you’ll have the time to send pretyped emails to the account owners.

Anyway, as I see it, Entrecard has no interest in keeping a customer. Even with no real time to keep my page up-to-date, I still had the time to give other Entrecard users the chance to have their ads on my site. In my opinion, you should use “account activity” as another part to decide if a site has to be considered “dead” or not.

It is just a suggestion from a costumer, who stayed with Entrecard even after many of his friends decided to quit.

Have a nice day
Marco Ruelicke

The conclusion

I drop Entrecard, like many other people did. I’d guess, Entrecard is going down, quality and customer wise. Maybe they should reconsider parts of their policy as it is anything but healthy.

What’s your opinion about Entrecard?

Anyway, to get on topic, I just received a mail notification that my EntreCard account got deleted:

Your account ‘Ruelicke.net’ on entrecard.com has been deleted. The administrator gave the following reason:
Rule 12:

http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=blog_quality_standards

Please contact deleted@entrecard.com if you have any questions regarding this action.
Please include the following:
User ID: ####

Thanks for just deleting it without asking me to update my blog! The only “warning” (though I don’t consider it as one) was another mail received 6 days ago:

Greetings, faithful Entrecard members.

We are experiencing a slowdown as a result of regularly increasing load. In other words we’re becoming more popular and it’s causing problems

Those who have been with us the longest are aware that these things happen when Entrecard hits milestones or users and widgets, etc. and we always scramble to fix it as fast as possible. Most importantly, we always do what is necessary to get the site back to its typical fast self.

So we will be having a performance-related outage 7 hours from the time of this email (on the hour) which will last for 2 hours max. We have also taken some temporary measures, in the hopes that things will be better for the next 7 hours.

I really do appreciate your patience as we continually evolve our site’s architecture to handle the load of bloggers who like our service. This compete graph illustrates how our service has grown sharply in September, and is on track to grow even more in October:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/entrecard.com/?metric=uv – hence the load issues.

A Note about Quality Standards

While we’re down, please take advantage of the opportunity to review our quality guidelines located here:

http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=blog_quality_standards

Among the recent changes, and other rules we’d like to remind you of:

1. Blog’s must be updated within the last three (3) months
2. No full screen ads or popups
3. Blogs cannot consists of more than 50% advertisement posts, paid posts, or affiliate-linking posts
4. Entrecard widget must be present
5. No auto-playing audio -all audio must be initiated (played) by the visitor

We have taken a handful of new moderators onto the scene, and they have been combing over Entrecard weeding out everything that does not adhere to our basic quality guidelines. Thousands of accounts have been removed. To our rejoice, the overall quality of the Entrecard network has grown in leaps and bounds over the last month, and I’m sure you’ve noticed the difference. We strive now and always to create a high-quality network of bloggers that we can all be proud to participate in.

So, to wrap up, thank you for being patient with us while we deal with our increasing usage, and while we move quickly to enforce the updated quality standards network-wide

I don’t call it a direct warning. I only had like 5 minutes to read their “quality standards” and after that I didn’t have time to write any posts (this one here is written under pressure, because I actually don’t have the time, but feel like I have to write it.).

The way EntreCard is enforcing their standards is not the best way. There are other methods than just deleting an account. Right now I’m writing a mail to them, I’ll keep you updated.

on a sidenote:
the entrecard widget is still working – looks like they still enjoy grabbing some clicks from my page although they deleted my account.

Well, let’s start at the beginning:
A couple of weeks ago I finally got time again to take care of my blog. I wrote a few articles and wondered how long I’ll stay active here again.

I believe by now I’m known among my blogging friends as someone who is active like hell and then suddenly vanishes for quite some time.

I thought about the reasons which made me “vanish” and that’s what made me find my very own tagline:

“…when coding passion, gaming addiction, Internet surfing syndrome and the real life collide…”

As I read that tagline a few times I figured that I can’t stick to my theme as it won’t fit anymore. Also, I’ll have to change a some things to make my blog work with the tagline.

So here it is, my new design:

A white-blueish theme (yes, I wasn’t able to say goodbye to my blue) which is looking very clean and which is easy to read. Actually, way easier to read than the previous theme(s).

What changed? What stayed?

• The basic frame of my old design stay: a two column layout, with the content on the left and the sidebar on the right.
• I added a short menu at the top and tried to use the page foot a bit more.
• I got rid of the categories and use the Tags instead (why they are better)
• The trackbacks are no longer shown (except under “Recent Comments”). Maybe I add them later again. (HowTo: separate trackbacks and comments)
• My Advertisement section got reviewed and I’m now testing Matt’s WP125 Ad plugin
• Some plugins are gone or will go pretty soon, speeding up the loading time a bit.
• One or two plugins where added or re-implemented. (e.g. NicEdit)

Although the list is pretty long (or short), there are some things I don’t mention because they are still in the works. One of the things is my “play with me” sidebar. I’m working on making it remember which “box” you left open or which you closed, so it will show you said boxes the way you left them. Also, I plan to allow you to arrange the boxes the way you want (and make it remember it).

There are also a few bugs and some of my categories (no longer shown), tags and pages need to be updated.

Last but not least I’ll have to get a better header image. Right now it is the worst looking part of my new design, but I just have nothing better right now. I hope to get a better one, but maybe I’ll have to find a blog contest solution although I can’t offer much

that’s all for now, I hope you like the new look

Marco
P.S.: I have to admit something: I stole some of my ideas from Slevi.net and ProBlogDesign.com

Image by belljar

So far I finally got all plugins updated and even got the time to fix an issue with the menu on the right:
If you visited the “Tutorials” or “About Ruelicke.net” section of my blog, you may have noticed that the sub entries got messed up a bit. It is fixed now, but my “friend”, the Internet Explorer, messes it up now.
I’ll see if I can fix it, if not, you may look for an alternate browser

I even got the time to finally align my Firefox advertisement properly at the bottom so it fits a bit better to the design than before.

It seems to me as I only have two or three things left which need my attention, then I can start blogging again. Two of those things are the Internet Exploder bug with the NicEdit WYSIWYG editor and the, currently missing, Gravatar avatars in the comments.

Enough for now

Marco
P.S.: I hope Germany wins the UEFA cup…

A lot happened in the world since then. Quite a few updates were released for Wordpress and now I have to take care of getting up to date.

Also, my feed reader collected a few thousands of articles which I couldn’t read due to not having enough time. At least there is a button which marks them all read with one click

So, what happened to me which prevented the posting of new articles or at least regular messages on twitter?

First of all my real life got quite busy. I had to concentrate more on school (though some grades won’t be better this half year either) and then I got somewhat World of Warcraft addicted. I believe I have to blame my friends on the Warcraft part as they convinced me to start playing in September last year.

Aside that I was forced to reformat my computer about 2 or 3 weeks ago. My computer catched something nasty and since it had already had a lot of bugs I decided to take the opportunity and make a clean installation of Windows XP, including Service Pack 3.
I still struggle with installing a few missing programs, but my computer is more or less back to normal

Well, that’s enough for now. I better see to it that I update my blog, have a look at that new NicEdit and start writing more often on here again. I guess some of you remember that I had one or two good ideas. Of course I plan to continue them when I have the time.

So long,
Marco

P.S.: I hope Germany wins the UEFA cup

It is not a complete “revamp” of the design, I still stick to my header image and the colors, but in total the design changed to the better…I hope…

What has been changed?

1. The whole page has now a higher width than before. The old design, or RuelickeNet v1 as I call it, used to be about 800px width and this one now uses a width of about 960 px.

2. With the increased amount of space, I re-designed the sidebar and de-cluttered it.

3. The display of the articles changed and the page list view now shows only 5 articles at a time.

4. The font size and line height were increased for a better reading experience.

5. The style for any link on my blog changed.

6. Influenced by Michael’s subscription promotion part of the Pro Blog Design design, I also optimized my subscription part to be more eye catching.

7. Although you can’t see it, I’m now using the latest Google Analytics code

What is new?

1. My blog now features an Entrecard.

2. You can see my latest tweet in the sidebar.

3. Added a background image to the main part of the blog.

What is planned?

Right now I still have a few minor things to add to the design and most likely to fix (like the page view of attachments). I intend to have a pagination additional to the “previous entry” and “latest entry”.
I still have to add my valid XHTML/CSS badges and there are a few more minor things to do.

Just keep the eyes open and maybe you see the tiny updates.

What do you think about the new Ruelicke.net Design? Or do you prefer the old one?