Please provide feedback on recent changes to dotTech
September 15, 2012 70
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Hello dotTechies,
I’ve recently made a few changes to dotTech and would greatly appreciate any and all feedback you all have.
Content Changes
A few months ago I decided to make a major change in what dotTech covers. Instead of just doing reviews and tips and tricks, dotTech started posting interesting tidbits on the happenings of the tech world. While some dotTechies were resistant to changes, eventually many people can to enjoy the new articles. However, last week I realized dotTech’s core value is providing reviews and recommendation on software and apps. Combine that with the fact that there is only so much interesting tech news that happens in a day, I decided to try to find a balance between news and reviews. As such, as some of you may have noticed over the past few days, dotTech is now going to be posting three reviews on Windows, Android, iPhone, iPad, Mac OS X, and Chrome/Firefox/Internet Explorer/Opera apps and programs each day.
With these reviews we have decided to not write extremely long articles that no one reads (yes, I know some people read the title and skip to the download link) and not write extremely short articles that are nothing more than infomercials. Rather, we want to find the perfect balance between too much information and too little information; our goal is to provide you with all the necessary knowledge (major pros and major cons) of an app/software so you can make an informed decision without having to spend an hour reading each article. Please do let us know how we are doing by posting a comment below.
Now just because we spending more time reviewing software does not mean we will completely ignore tech news. While we will try to no longer writer those annoyingly useless “XXX has released XXX” type articles, we will still continue to write tech news. The only difference is we will now try to focus on only the most interesting news of the day rather than post whatever we read, like some blogs do. Feel free to share your thoughts on how we are handling tech news in the comments below, too.
Other Changes
I spend most of the day Friday making back-end changes to dotTech, which is actually why you saw me post no news articles on Friday — I was busy polishing the beloved machine that holds this awesome blog. (Yes, I will never shy away from praising dotTech.) One of the major changes I made was simply the URL for dotTech posts. Now URLs will no longer say the category that which the article belongs to, rather only showing its unique identified and the name of the article. Why did I do this? For two reasons.
Firstly, saying the category name was redundant seeing as the title is already there, and the category actually caused confusion among some readers when an article would be categorized in more than one category yet the URL only showed one category. Secondly, and more importantly, many users have been asking me to put the operating system tag (e.g. [Android]) at the beginning of article titles as opposed to the end. Until now I resisted this request for SEO purposes but with the removal of category name from URLs, I have absolute no issue with placing the tags in the beginning and dotTech will do so from now on.
The change in URL comes with one drawback — there might be broken links. So, please, if you ever come across a broken link do report it to me. You can always e-mail me or simply post a comment below.
Aside from changing of URL, I made upgrades and optimizations to dotTech’s server which should — hopefully — make dotTech load faster for everyone. Let me know if this isn’t the case.
Conclusion
I have nothing to say here. It is your turn to talk.
-Mr. Boss
About the author: Ashraf View all posts by Ashraf
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I consider dottech as one of my major, enjoyable sources of tech info. Yes, the amount of info may be overwhelming, but such is the nature of our tech society. Filter out what you want. Thank you Ashraf.
I got pretty confused these last days about the changes brought to e-mail notifications. My years-old subscription defaulted to one-mail-per-article – which I didn’t object to, thinking this was just part of a reorganization process and that sooner or later things would revert back to more or less the same situation as before. However I kept being flooded with mails at a rate that I couldn’t cope with… I also followed notifications of the changes at hand. (BTW, I would never mark any site that I’ve used for so many years without any problems as spamming me. There are other ways to report possible malicious activity when you’re in doubt, no?)]
So today I subscribed to one-mail-per-day… and tried to unsubscribe from one-mail-per-article.
Now I feel like a complete moron because I haven’t found the way to this. I may have overlooked something or misread or misinterpreted posts dealing with the changes.
So I used “contact us” to request to be removed from the “old” mailinglist one-mail-per-article. I’ll see what my mailbox says tomorrow morning but I have no doubt everything will be taken care of :-)
Still a few questions:
1. I hope that my approach was the right thing to do. Is there a shorter way?
2. Would it be possible to integrate mailnotification changes into “my profile”?.. Which, IMHO, would be a logical place to put them in the first place ?
Somewhat off topic…
3. Provide a “Help”-tab?…
4. The search engine… I’m really sorry, but this may use some further development. [This actually is the only thing I've always found "below standard". But I admit it's no easy job integrating a good search engine into a large existing DB...]
Many thanks for a great site, though, and I do appreciate your experimenting with layout and architecture. It does take some courage.. A lot of sites lose visitors because they don’t evolve or evolve too fast….
Keep up the ideas & good work,
Patrick.
You guys are doing great work here. Keep it up!! :-)
The new site looks great. I have only one small quibble. On the left side of the page is a very unwelcome “Tweet email” block that blocks an approximately 1.5″ high by 1″ wide rectangular space from view. That block stays on the left side and in the middle of the page whenever I scroll, and it blocks the portion of the page I want to read. My screen resolution has almost two inches of blank (blue) space on either side of the text area. It would be very helpful if you could move that obnoxious and in-your-face “Tweet email” block to the blank space on either side, or just delete it altogether. Thanks!
Edit: After I clicked to submit this comment, the “Tweet email” block obligingly relocated to the blank left side where it no longer causes any aggravation. Is there a way to tell it where to go without submitting a comment?
Dear Ashraf,
First off, please don’t regard what I’m about to say as criticism. Unlike many people on the internet, I don’t think that if someone absolutely has to offer me a free service, the least they can do is offering it to me exactly the way I want it. (Yes, I’m being sarcastic.)
Whatever you do is fine with me; if I don’t like it, I can always leave it. But you asked if people might prefer things being done differently, so here it goes.
I discovered your blog a long time ago through your excellent reviews of programs offered on GotD. I certainly miss those (though given what they’ve been offering recently there, not having a review of something that looks pretty useless anyway is not much of a loss), and I also haven’t seen one of those in-depth comparisons of computer safety tools you used to do in a while, if I remember correctly. To me, they were both unrivalled in their quality, as far as “private”, non commercial sources go.
The new mini-”reviews” of free tools are potentially useful in principle, though I’m only interested in those for Windows (not including W8), and what I’ve seen there so far could hardly ever have been called a review. They usually sound as if most if not all of the text was copied from the program authors’ material. Still potentially useful, as I said, as one can always discover a tool one would have use for and didn’t know existed, but I wouldn’t really call them reviews.
I’m not at all interested what the next cellphone from Apple is likely to look like or other things like that, but then I’m just an old fart.
Here’s how I use the blog, in case that might be useful: I get the RSS feed, and will go straight to an article if anything looks interesting in the feed. I never browse.
All the best!
@Leslie:
Many thanks ‘Leslie’.
I too missed the original advice, but now thanks to you I have adjusted my preferences and look forward to a more appropriate flow of emails.
To Ashraf and all the crew – you do a great job, long may you carry on.
I too feel, like ‘Mags’ above, that the daily quantity could perhaps be safely reduced, but otherwise the changes have been fine with me.
Thanks.
I clicked the mail button to subscribe to the one-a-day but don’t see anything about unsubscribing to the multiple ones. Is this to be done from the emails themselves? What would be handy is one place for email maintenance, like what they do with PC World and ZD Net newsletters. Just a simple page with a description of each newsletter/category and a checkbox to subscribe/unsubscribe to each one. If there’s one here I cannot find it.
Otherwise, I’ve liked each upgrade to the site as they have come along. My only complaint was long load times on occasion, especially yesterday, but I see now why that was. It’s breezing along now!
The archives for different OS’s are great. Having acquired a Thrive a few months ago, I’ve been going through the apps of the day for Android from the early posts and finding a few gems I didn’t know about since I wasn’t paying attention to Android back then. Wonderful!
Thanks for all your hard work, Ashraf and crew! Much appreciated! I look here at Dot-Tech first for real nuggets before reading the newsletters from all the others (I also don’t care about the latest Apple wallet-grabber or what color the latest laptop is that much).
I read thru a number of comments at the top, and my viewpoint is similar to so many others. I love dotTech and love the direction. I prefer s/w reviews over tech news. Although I must say, I have prefered your approach/angle to the news much more than most others. I do agree with one commenter, it’s a lot of reviews, more than I have time to read which is a bummer. But I suppose it’s there if I want to search for something specific.
All the best!!
Your page that is supposed to allow one to choose what one wants and doesn’t want does not include the options of NOT wanting comics, jokes, and pictures. Add these opt-out options.
I prefer the old version.
Also, include in your opt-out choices the ability to opt out of posts that only cover smart phones, pads, and Windows 8 topics.
Been a happy customer of DotTech for several years now. I feel all the changes in the last months have kept a good balance. There’s far more than I would ever read, but I can still find the articles that are interesting to me… and there are more of those than before. You’re making it easier all the time for me to skip anything related to iOS and other platforms I don’t care about. If there are too many articles in a day I can prioritize, skim, come back later. As long as the quality is there (and it is!) I’ll keep coming back.
Specifics:
The black bar is great. I usually just click on Windows and then I can see everything as far back as I want to look. Great for when I miss a day or two.
Article lengths are just right. They’re enough to raise or lower my interest in a program or issue. I can easily learn more other places (I discovered there are other sites on the web besides DotTech, and these tools called “search engines”. Amazing what’s out there ;-)
It might help navigation to add tags. There could be many tags per article, from a list of maybe 30 to 50. There could be a selection list pop-up, or we could type them directly into the search box. Tags like vista, security, free, news, updates, photo, file manager, password, convert, game, OCR, web development, editor, etc., would be pretty helpful.
A “more” button below Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Recent Forum Posts would be nice, maybe go back as for as a week.
Appearance is not a big driver for me, but I’ve grown to really like the new look. I have a wide monitor and your site only uses about half the available space, but even there I think you’ve made a wise choice using only what’s needed. Not busy, no very wide lines to read. Simple. I like it.
You have a great, supportive community here. Many interests and levels of skill, and we all seem to play well together. I think that’s the best indicator you’re doing the right things with this site.
And once more, thank you for the hard work, care and thinking you and your helpers pour into this site!
I agree that too many articles for each day. Information overload. This being that there is far too much new info every day, and it continues to increase. Hard to keep up.
Miss the reviews.
I also have the image issue on my Chrome/Firefox… Some images just wont render. For example the picture photo of the day picture wouldn’t render, and just some thumbnails at the end of the article won’t render…
But i love dottech and how it’s grown. I also like how it expanded itself from just GAOTD reviews and other software reviews to encompass a large variety of topics. It makes Dottech that much better and exciting. To be honest, yes it is a lot of articles each day, but i usually select the ones that appeal to me the most, but it’s always nice to have some extras just in case.
I was getting quite irritated with the flood of emails till I switched to the 1 email a day.
I was then driving myself nuts trying to figure out how to trim the 1 email to eliminate what wasn’t interesting–then you told me that I couldn’t–whew! Thanks!
Now you’ve moved the OS designation to the beginning of each topic–this is the next best thing to being able to trim, I suppose–thanks.
So far so good–keep up the good work, but take some time to chill, you deserve it!
I really enjoy reading your news articles, it helps keep me a bit updated in my small world of technology.
Honestly, I rarely, if at all, read the review articles, its not because i dislike them, i just am not interested in that particlualr software/app/platform, etc. Still, i am sure others enjoy reading them. Only reviews i read are usually the comparison of a software over others.
What i do miss are the freebies that were posted, and again the comparison artciles of softwares.
With that said, Dottech.org has been my home page for over a year now. Keep doing what it is youre doing, it seems to work.
Love all the changes, enjoy getting the emails and have been sharing most of the articles on Pinterest on a daily basis for a couple of months now and I can tell you that there has been alot of interest so I hope that not only gets good info out there but exposure to DotTech which has served me well for a couple of years now.
Thank you Ashraf, you are an inspiration
Ron
@BuddahBoy:
Sorry, forgot to mention a request: MORE comics please, they really rock!
@Leslie: Count me in for another “Thanks!” I hadn’t read to the end of the many daily emails, until one of today’s, and changed my preferences.
Ashraf (and your staff): keep up the great work! I’ve been a ‘follower’ of yours since the GotD days :)
I think any comments I wanted to express have been covered already in the many posts above..so I’ll just sum it up by saying I think the new format and changes are for the better.
I like the look of the new layout and the tag at the start of the mailings is a good idea and a helpful one, too!
Keep up the outstanding work!
I like it
I have the same reactions to each and every change:
#1 Oh no it’s changed!
#2 This is interesting/good!
#3 Actually this is very good!
#4 Don’t change a thing I like it!
At the next change, goto #1
I do like Bob Levy’s suggestion about separate topic emails (see comment #22).
Anyway, just keep doing a great job Ashraf.
Dear Ashraf
You asked so here is my answer!
Pretty much everything on your site now, and in the past, began with an idea that came from a certain person who had a lot of interest in one subject or another and who combined them all to produce a (in the beginning) relatively obscure site that is now one of the top tech sites in the world.!
And I like to think that over the years that guy and I have become online friends.
But as with all friendships each of us has our own particular brand of genius. Yours of course is you know tech inside out and if there is something you don’t know you’ll research it until you do. And me? Well I’m a survival instructor and that literally is my field, my backwoods, my desert , my mountains and my jungle out there. If I make a mistake and listen to my customers advice about which way to go someone could die, because quite literally they put their lives in my hands and they all trust me to take care of them in the best way I know how and to show them what ‘I’ feel inside will be of interest to them by taking them to places that I have been and found to b of interest to myself. I tell them what is available at certain times of the year and they make an informed selection and away we go.
I know that not everyone likes All the same stuff Stuff as me or each other so some people don’t choose a certain trip and that is their choice. I guess what I am saying is that I learned a long, long time ago you truly can not please everyone so I run my living outdoors with other people my way and if people don’t like it they don’t comeback but those that do more than make up for those losses.
So my answer to you is I stumbled upon dotTech by accident several years ago and for whatever reason this old enough to retire veteran liked the honesty and the straightforward shoot from the hip Take no prisoners its my blog not yours attitude I read in every line this guy wrote!
Now I do not come everyday to your Blog but when I do I don’t come to listen to wingers and whiners telling you what to do(which thank goodness there are none to speak of)! I come to listen to that good old buddy of mine called Ashraf who at times has me virtually peeing my pants with laughter over some of his sharp remarks that could not have come from anyone but him, except maybe from his handpicked team of coworkers who all have an equally as feisty and quick witted sense of humour as he does.
So to be truthfully blunt If you do it your way and actually continue to run this site as a perfect extension of the quickwitted, quirky and truly likeable character and individual you really are I for one will pretty much keep calling round to feast on and bathe in the glorious friendship I have found on the pages of dotTech.
But if you change things to get in line with the wants and wishes of your customers then I would pretty much say you’re doomed and so is dotTech!
The vast majority of your visitors only come back because they like YOU! Sure they also like the tech stuff too but the clincher is that they come back to spend time with their good mate and pal Ashraf and the kindred spirits that make up his team (Locutus and Kathryn to name but 2) and all the others.
Sure listen to what your visitors have to say but always, always let our friend Ashraf (Mr Boss) make the decisions to change something or keep things the same because that is what he, Ashraf, wants done! Otherwise you are going to be running around like a sociopath trying to do the things and be the person that best suits the wants and desires that you believe everyone of your Visitors has! And you know as well as I do once you start doing that….. Well that spells end of story for Ashraf’s dotTech……. Not ‘our’ dotTech but ASHRAF’s dotTech!
Thanks a million for all the help and all the fun and laughter but mostly just for being that weird guy I count as my friend Ashraf just being himself and running his site the way Ashraf wants it run!
IMO: Excellent coverage. I like all recent changes. It’s not just you, and this is not just empty praise; your site makes me more informed and my day more productive. Thanks much!
Hello,
I agree that too much article for 1 day, maybe you can add option that we can select topic (categories) for feed or email subscription..
Also, include in your opt-out choices the ability to opt out of posts that only cover smart phones, pads, and Windows 8 topics.
To much stuff in one email. It’s like the kitchen sink.
Thanks for listening……John A.
I swear your a mind reader, lol. Being on dial up I was wishing you would put the software titles in the emails and poof there they are. No more waiting 5 to 8 mins for dottech site to load to see whats there. Love the knowledge you share, its a Godsend. Thank you and God Bless your work and family!!