Occasionally I receive a client request to fix a design bug in a browser I don’t currently have access to. When this happens I turn to a site called Browsershots that lets you submit a URL and, after a short wait, get full-sized images of your URL running in a wide variety of browsers on multiple platforms.

Browsershots is an open source project started by Johann C. Rocholl that uses a distributed system of volunteer computers to open up sites in the different browsers, capture the screen and send the resulting image back to the requesting user.

The list of browsers includes:

Windows
Firefox 1.5
Firefox 2.0
MSIE 5.0
MSIE 5.5
MSIE 6.0
MSIE 7.0
Opera 9.24
Safari 3.0

Mac OS
Firefox 2.0
Safari 1.3
Safari 2.0
Safari 3.0

Linux
Epiphany 2.14
Firefox 1.5
Firefox 2.0
Galeon 2.0
Iceweasel 2.0
Konqueror 3.5
NetFront 3.2
Opera 9.24

As a Mac guy, I definitely find the different versions of Internet Explorer that Browsershots supports to be the most valuable. After you make your browser selections, you can optionally choose screen size, color depth, versions of Javascript and Flash and even whether or not Java is installed.

The site is genius and highly recommended.

I’m sure by now most of the readers of this site are familiar with the social bookmarking site called StumbleUpon. However, everyone might not be aware of their StumbleUpon Advertising program. When you sign up for the program, StumbleUpon allows you to have users driven to your site when they click the “Stumble!” button on their toolbar. Each visits costs $0.05. The best part is that you can pinpoint the type of users you want coming to your site with a great degree of specificity.

At the tail end of the summer, I decided to give StumbleUpon Advertising a shot with my golf stat tracking site. I chose men and women, ages 18-99 living in the United States with an interest in golf and drove them to the front page of Fore Score Golf Stats.

The Results

I ran a handful of campaigns over the course of three weeks with the same demographics that I mentioned above. The very first visit from my very first campaign resulted in a new account signup on Fore Score and I thought we were off to the races. Approximately 360 clicks later, that initial success was about as good as it was going to get for me with StumbleUpon.
The number of new accounts that signed up from StumbleUpon has been insignificant in comparison to the number of new users Fore Score has gained from every other traffic method known to modern man. Here are some of the really gory particulars from the three weeks:

Pages/Visit: 1.31
Avg. Time on Site: 00:00:16
Bounce Rate: 88.98%

My Conclusions

The bounce rate of StumbleUpon users is nasty. I had read around a bit before I got into this and most of the reports similar to this one had stats in line with what I received. The attention span of a StumbleUpon user is terrible and using their advertising to lead to direct conversions of traffic is probably not a very good strategy. My biggest mistake was pushing people straight to the front page of Fore Score instead of the page describing the site’s features or a page built specifically for StumbleUpon users to try and grab their attention better.

Would I ever use StumbleUpon Advertising again? Actually, maybe. There’s something to be said for the instant traffic gratification it gives you. In addition to that, the one main benefit I can see with StumbleUpon Advertising is that it increases the chance of more people marking your site as “I like It!” which, down the line, will bring in more natural traffic that you don’t need to pay for.

The XSPF Web Music Player is a Flash widget that lets you stream a single MP3 or a full playlist of songs on a website. There’s a really nice tutorial on Forever Geek that walks you through embedding the player.

The problem is that it doesn’t always work correctly in Internet Explorer. After a few minutes of going crazy and some trial and error, I figured out what you have to do to make the player work in both IE and Firefox. The trick is to make sure the value of your “movie” parameter equals the source of your “embed” tag. Like so:

<param name="movie" value="http://www.example.com/xspf_player_slim.swf?song_url=http://www.example.com/song.mp3 "/>

<embed src="http://www.example.com/xspf_player_slim.swf?song_url=http://www.example.com/song.mp3 "/>

There are additional options you can add to the “embed” query string, but those are covered thoroughly in the Forever Geek tutorial if you’re curious.

FeedCreator, by Kai Blankenhorn, is a great PHP class to use when you want to build RSS feeds from your own content. I use this class extensively on all of the sites that make up Jack’s Sports Report and have been really happy with it.

It’s painfully easy to use and it takes care of any caching requirements automatically for you. Here’s a list of FeedCreator’s main features:

• Creates valid feeds according to RSS 0.91, 1.0 or 2.0 as well as PIE 0.1 (deprecated), OPML 1.0, Unix mbox, ATOM 0.3, or customizable HTML or Javascript format
• Configurable feed caching
• Feed image
• Includes almost all RSS 0.91 attributes
• Intelligently truncates strings when needed

There’s a really good piece of example code on the FeedCreator site if you get stuck.

When I was building the signup process for Fore Score Golf Stats I was very concerned with making registration as simple as possible for the user. That’s why the site requires a very small amount of information from a new user. An email address is required for verification purposes but, otherwise, the only piece of required information for account registration is a password.

Another site that takes this same simple approach is Twitter. The Twitter signup page is pictured to the right. Twitter’s only real extra step is a CAPTCHA to make sure you’re a real breathing human being and not some lame robot signing up for a spam account.

A simple registration process for new accounts is critical for getting a visitor turned into a user. If your signup is quick and painless you have a much better chance of your new user jumping right into the system and using your site.