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Introduction

OmniNerd has been online for nearly two years now and, like all great organizations, we thought we would take a little time to outline what we've accomplished here at OmniNerd, offer some insight into why we did those things, and provide an ever so brief glimpse of what's to come. Initially, we were uncertain how we would present this information to our readers, but we concluded that if the President can give a State of the Union speech that gets people clapping about most anything, OmniNerd can do the same. So, we hope that you enjoy this, our State of the Nerd, and, if you're not already, please stand up and prepare to applaud at every inter-sentence space.

I. Content

OmniNerd distinguishes itself from its competition on the net because of one simple factor: content. There are innumerable sites on the Web that offer opportunities to discuss issues and even some that sport a flashy exterior, but very few make a serious effort to foster free, organized, and thoughtful content. O-Nerd's three-tiered system of comments, news, and articles allows for an impressive degree of content covering a wide-range of topics.

Articles

OmniNerd began as a venue for academic articles, and that portion of the content remains the the facet that truly places OmniNerd a cut above the rest. Even though news posts are great for sparking interesting and heated discussion, our real pride is the articles, the surest way to ascend the vaunted OmniFlow.1 We have labored mightily to find authors, provide them with an effective article draft tool, and help them make their work something presentable for a diverse and discriminating audience. Though slow at first, articles have taken off over the last year and constitute the primary impetus in OmniNerd's growing popularity. Now when users come to OmniNerd, they are not just presented with a dry rehash of yesterday's news or a trite blog, but a valuable source for original and excellent academic thought.

Articles are also the main effort of the administrative team. In April, OmniNerd saw it's 50th article and quickest success with Beating Traffic. In only a few days our server saw around 77,000 requests for that article alone. As people browsed the site after checking out the traffic article, a new record was achieved; the article Is a Hybrid Worth It? recorded its 101,000th request. It seems like just yesterday that the administration team was getting excited when there were 100 requests for an article. Those days have passed.

For those unfamiliar with the process, articles come about only after a lengthy process. We usually initiate contact with prospective authors and ask if they'd be interested in contributing to the site. Once a writer commits, the admin/moderator team is constantly on standby to review, critique, or edit a draft at an author's request. Most articles undergo dozens of rounds of edits before they ever make it to the front page, and when they do, the process doesn't end. From there, we do our best to make sure the world knows about articles. This is often difficult as the line between "letting people know" and "spamming" is a fine one that ought to be tread on lightly. We think we now have a graceful way of promoting our content without annoying anyone else not interested.

The time we have spent reviewing, editing, formatting, and promoting our articles has not gone unnoticed. We've had numerous articles featured on Digg, Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Plastic, MathForge, and other high volume sites. While braggable, one could argue that none of these sites are credible mentions, and that's probably true. For this reason, we're far more proud of the fact that we've been contacted for citation on PBS television,2 Wired Magazine,3 and O'Reilly books.4 Given a registered user base of less than 500, we think that's fairly impressive.

News and Polls

News posts form the staple of the O-Nerd diet, but only came into existence during this last year of OmniNerd's tenure. For quite a while, updates to the page only came with new articles, which were few and far between. We realized that our readers wanted content on a more frequent basis, and the news system was born. Now OmniNerds can count on a steady stream of nerdy news to keep them sated while they wait for the beefier articles.

There are, however, still problems with the news system. As of this State of the Nerd, non-admin/moderator created news submissions account for only 24% of the total news content on the site. This is not what we are looking for and we eagerly anticipate a new O-Nerd in which non-admin/mods submit most of the news. Over the next year we look to totally invert this ratio, as well as revamp the news system with a variety of new features to make it more integrated and more easily up-datable.

User created polls are a more recent addition to OmniNerd, giving the O-Nerd patron the ability to decide which crucial issues facing mankind need some democratic analysis. Already we have tackled the hard questions like: Worst Movie Sequels?; Science Fiction/Fantasy Obsessions?; Ghosts? Obviously, most of our polls are less than serious, but quite a few have spawned good conversations and, at the very least, allow our users yet another outlet for their nerdocity.

II. Development

With content at the pinnacle of OmniNerd, we next hold site development in high regard. We acknowledge that the best thought can be lost in a poor medium and strive to provide something that offers a simple yet complete user experience. The administrators earn their keep behind the scenes ensuring that OmniNerd isn't just another chat forum - we want it to be the best in its class.

In keeping with the true essence of what it means to be an OmniNerd, the site is built on original, standards-based code. Many sites rely on prefabricated web code to keep their site going, but not OmniNerd. Our original code means maximum flexibility for the future. When we have an idea, it's just a matter of time before it becomes a reality. On top of that, we don't just write code, we write standards-based code. This means that our site works just as well on Konquerer for KDE on Linux as it does on Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In short, our nerdness is far more than something we claim in our title, it's embedded in every pixel that renders on your browser.

Since last year's addition of database support, the development additions are almost too numerous to list. This is just a brief overview, by month, of some of our major additions:

1. February - March 2005: The new beginning

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1. MySQL database employed. This is the beginning of what would be a complete re-structuring of OmniNerd's back end over the next year.
2. Triumvirate formed. Will and Mark added Brandon as the third administrator. His addition would prove critical to moving the site forward at a steady pace.

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1. April - July 2005: Enhancing user interaction

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1. Newsletter. We sent out our first newsletter as a reminder to those who wanted it that they need to come back to the site and check it out ... at least once a month.
2. User preferences. Allowed users to adjust the page to their liking for the first time.
3. New news submission system. Implemented a better way to accept news submissions from readers.
4. NerdRank. Provided users a way to compare their level of nerdy interaction with other users on the site. The exact computation of NerdRank remains a secret.
5. Welcomed our 100th registered user. Crossed a landmark that showed the admins that we need to be ready for a large user base.
6. Content search. Employed a search tool to find old site content.

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1. August - December 2005: Addition of advanced site functionality

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1. Article draft system. Still the focus of much development, this system allowed users the ability for the first time to draft articles on the site, and collaborate with other users in the process.
2. Collapsable comments. Using "AJAX," we added arrows that allowed users to collapse/expand comments without reloading the page, a much needed addition for long threads.
3. OmniNerd markup. A simple system of characters to allow users to add links and various style elements to their text.
4. XHTML 1.0 Strict compliance. We cleaned up our code and URLs to make the site much more appealing to our non-organic friends like Google, Yahoo!, etc.
5. New news submission system upgrade. Added the on-site messaging system between authors and moderators to speed up the posting of news and allow authors the ability to deny edit access to their submission.

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1. January - May 2006: Transition to a high-traffic site

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1. Upgrade to PHP5. Transitioned all procedural PHP4 code to object-oriented PHP5 code.
2. Algorithm redesign. Many back end algorithms redesigned to better handle large traffic loads caused by articles posted on sites like Slashdot and Digg.
3. Legal documentation. Added to ensure no legal foul play by any of our users.
4. Book lists. Allowed users to list books they are reading.
5. Poll submissions. Allowed users to suggest polls.
6. Administrative tools. Developed many adminstrative tools to allow the non-tech admins the ability to better control the site.

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Even with all of the new additions, our development pipeline is forever getting larger. We've got big plans to continue making the article draft system better, to make old content more visible with the addition of similar new content, and allow for the discussion of topics outside the realm of news and articles. The next year is going to be a big one for OmniNerd. We think our foundation is solid, now it's time to climb to the next level. As always, we welcome any and all ideas from the O-Nerds.

III. Growth

We've been pleased with our slow, but steady growth. Our nightmare scenario was that we'd be flooded with users before we had a content base to set the standard for newcomers and that OmniNerd would become just another forum for over-opinionated web zealots. This has not been the case.

Traffic

In terms of traffic, we've been doing well. A search engine called Alexa provides decent insight into our visibility on the net. A search for "OmniNerd" on Alexa will not only result in a link to OmniNerd, but all sorts of information about the site to include traffic. You can use their charts to see how we're doing against sites like Plastic.com and Kuro5hin.org that have similar content and audience size. We're no giant, but that's alright. If you look back a year on the Alexa charts, we don't even have a pulse (see figure 1). Now we're showing signs of steady visitation, higher comments-per-day rates, and new user names popping up weekly on the site. Things are definitely on the rise for OmniNerd.

^ shows OmniNerd slowly transitioning from a flat-liner to a site with a pulse. The big spikes represent periods when our articles became highly visible on sites other than OmniNerd.|border]]

Search engines are another metric we use to keep an eye on our net presence. If you search for key words like "hybrid worth," "beating traffic," "cheap sprinkler system," or "iTunes 5-star rating" you'll find OmniNerd articles in the top 3 matches. While obtaining high search engine rankings isn't our goal, it certainly gives us a good idea about the success of individual articles. In addition to the occasional searches for our own articles, we keep a running log of the results of various search engines' results on a search for "omninerd." Figure 2 shows the upward trend of matches for this term. All this really tells us is that OmniNerd is appearing on more external sites as the days go by. Obviously, this is a good thing as outside links to OmniNerd send new eyes our way.

PageRank

One last measure of our growth is Google's PageRank (which was the inspiration for NerdRank). Essentially, Google scours the net and through some unknown process determines every site's relative rank. Sites get a PageRank from 0 to 10 with 10 being the highest. The ranks are assigned logrithmically, which means that it is increasingly hard to achieve the next higher rank. When OmniNerd turned 1 on its first birthday last year, the site had just achieved its new PageRank of 4. Now, a year later, we've climbed two more rungs to a 6. From what we can tell, a 7 pretty much puts you in with some of the most popular sites on the net. So, while it'll be nice to achieve it we're not counting on it any time soon. We are however, very pleased with our success thus far.

Advertisements

We added advertisements to the site as a necessity. When we started the site the only financial demand was that of a shared server environment, which is an inexpensive, third-party that hosts OmniNerd on the same server with hundreds of other sites. While good for our pocket book, this poses a big problem when our articles get hit by high-volume sites like Slashdot, which can easily result in 3-4 hits per second. Any veteran OmniNerd can recount big article days when our site crawled or reported errors due to the massive load that bogged down our shared server. In addition to the load problem, as OmniNerd grows it consumes more server resources that simply aren't available in a shared environment.

In preparation for our much-needed upgrade to a dedicated server (i.e., we'll be the only site on the server), we have added various ads. A dedicated environment can easily run in excess of $200 per month, which is ten times the cost of some shared environments. The ads provide us with some income, but not enough to fully cover the cost of a dedicated server. Eventually, we think our growth will allow us to cover 100% of our costs through ad income, but until then we'll simply keep operating in the red. So, if by any chance you thought the administrators were getting greedy, it is certainly not the case.

IV. The Future

OmniNerd has grown from extremely humble beginnings to become a fairly reputable Internet discussion forum and academic repository. In the hopefully near future, we look to make the site into a more integrated nerd experience. You can see the beginnings of this with the book list and with our ever-growing toolset. We hope to create a site that allows the user to keep up with, interact with, and, most importantly, contribute to the world in the form of truly academic articles. To that end, we are endeavoring to build new research tools, new collaborative techniques, and ways to make all of these things conform to an easy-to-use "Nerd Desktop" theme. We are also researching and exploring how we might bring OmniNerd to a dedicated server over the next year. This will allow for more storage space on the site and, overall, a more fluid operating environment.

In the end, however, the admins can only plot the course. We cannot take OmniNerd down the path to greatness alone. As always we require the help and active interest of our user base. We firmly believe that our users have demonstrated the quality of intellect to take this page as far as they wish. Furthermore, we are always open to suggestions as to how we can make this site more functional and more attractive to those nerds who remain yet unconverted. Not meaning to wax sentimental, but OmniNerd has accomplished a great deal since its inception due to the free efforts of people from all over the world. With this in mind we feel confident that OmniNerd, as it progresses into the future, will continue to live up to its founding motto and remain "weird ... and awesome." You may now sit down and stop applauding.

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