Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
hackernews, odesk, programming
In Uncategorized on February 19, 2012 at 10:18 pm
Grabbed this from Hacker News:
oDesk recently introduced a controlled, centralized vocabulary of about 1,400 skills for buyers and contractors to use when posting jobs and creating profiles. The primary motivation for the change was to make it easier for buyers and sellers to find each other: without a standardized vocabulary, would-be traders can fail to match simply because they use different terms for the same skill.
A side effect of this transition is that high quality data on the relationships between skills and wages are now available. (more…)
php, regex, regular expressions
In Uncategorized on February 1, 2012 at 5:55 pm
Found this little Regex pattern which is an improved version of Daring Fireball’s (found here). Throw whatever string of various mixed up URLs you can at it, and this will return an array of them.
$regexp = '/\b((?:[a-z][\w-]+:(?:\/{1,3}|[a-z0-9%])|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}\/)(?:(?:[^\s()<>.]+[.]?)+|\((?:[^\s()<>]+|(?:\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\((?:[^\s()<>]+|(?:\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:\'".,<>?«»“”‘’]))/i';
preg_match_all($regexp, $message, $matches);
return $matches[0];
diabetes, pollution
In Uncategorized on December 20, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Of all the myriad variables that increase one’s risk for developing type 2 (adult onset) diabetes — smoking, being overweight, having a larger waistline — air pollution is not one we usually think of. But newer studies are suggesting environmental risk factors for diabetes: A new one finds that living in an area with more traffic pollution could increase one’s risk, particularly in people who are healthier to begin with. [...]
The link was “borderline significant,” according to the researchers. It was, however, stronger for people who were in better overall health, and for women. For example, in non-smokers who lived in high pollution areas, the risk for diabetes rose to 12 percent. A 10 percent increase in risk was found for physically active people. (via.)
asus pce-n13, linux, natty narwhal, rt2800, rt2860sta, ubuntu, ubuntu 11.04
In Uncategorized on December 15, 2011 at 2:04 pm
I needed to buy a Wireless card for my desktop computer, and unfortunately… much to my dismay… despite there being *very* large lists out there on cards that more or less work with my version of linux (Ubuntu Natty Narwhal 11.04), there really wasn’t a list of *detailed reviews* as to indicate how well any given card works with linux.
Seems like an opportunity waiting to happen for someone that wants to put together a review site and curate what’s already kind of somewhat out there.
I went ahead and grabbed the asus CPE-N13. It was cheap, a brand name I recognized, and Wireless N (multiple antennas!).
Much to my dismay, the card did *not* work right out of the box. First, I had to blacklist some default but immature drivers that comes with ubuntu 11.04:
# Add these to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
blacklist rt2800pci
blacklist rt2800usb
blacklist rt2x00lib
blacklist rt2x00pci
blacklist rt2x00usb
Pulled out the patch cable, rebooted for good measure… and voila we have wireless. 
battery, iphone, iphone4, nucharge
In Uncategorized on November 13, 2011 at 6:44 pm
iPhone 4 case doubles battery life, and is surprisingly sleek.
iPhone4 NuCharge from iKit ($64.95).
“It gives you 1400 mAh of power that can be switched on when needed. LED lights on the front show you how much power is left too.”
wordpress, wordpress plugins
In Uncategorized on November 13, 2011 at 5:56 pm
Saw this post on Reddit entitled Anyone on r/WordPress interested in buying a Premium Plugin business?:
Throwaway account here for discretion.
I’m exploring selling the rights to one of my premium plugins, and thought r/wordpress would be a good place to gauge interest and possibly find a buyer in my favoritest of favorite communities. Also, because of the nature of the business, it really needs to be taken on by someone who is already proficient at WordPress development.
This plugin was launched in August of 2010, and since then has generated approximately $44,000 in sales, with around $36,000 profit remaining after paying affiliate commissions.
When it first launched, I was actively promoting the plugin and sales were steady around $3,000 – $5,000 per month. However, my attention got pulled into other projects and with only minimal marketing and updates, sales have been stable at around $1,500 per month for most of this year. I spend an average of 1-3 hours per week handling tech support and email inquiries…not too shabby.
I’m selling because I have too many other items on my plate to be able to give the plugin the attention it needs, both in general improvements to the codebase and in marketing.
What’s included:
- All rights to the plugin itself. It is currently released under a split GPL/Proprietary License
- The Domain & Sales Website
- The vBulletin-powered Support Forum & vBulletin License
- The E-Junkie account to manage transactions & affiliates ( 250 registered affiliates )
- My availability & assistance during the transitional period.
Asking Price: $25,000 USD
If you have any questions, either about the sale of this business or general questions about how to earn a living selling premium plugins, please post them here. I will do my best to answer without publicly revealing the plugin or any other potentially sensitive information.
If you’re a genuinely interested potential buyer, please PM me so we can further discuss.
Thanks!
Well, he posted it on a public, popular site so how discrete is that? Since there are 60 million WordPress blogs out there, some 30 of which are self-hosted (or something like that) it’s quite possible.
Maybe I should find a way to offer some cool functionality with upgrade of either PMID Citation Plus or Facebook Simple Like.
I should go through my list of top WordPress plugins and see how many of them offer pay upgrades.
dubstep, music, youtube
In Uncategorized on November 12, 2011 at 4:02 am
Just got done putting together what I think is a pretty awesome YouTube playlist… if you happen to like the type of music I do. Forewarning: there is a healthy helping of dubstep.
Here’s a link to the YouTube playlist.
Or you can click through one song at a time below…
8. Foreign Beggars & Chasing Shadows -
Typhoon
php, symfony, symfony2, twig
In Uncategorized on November 6, 2011 at 6:22 pm
This code was floating around in a pastebin, and was linked to me from IRC. I’m not sure who originally wrote it, but it’s useful and I wanted to make sure it gets saved so that it can eventually be the basis of a Symfony2 cookbook article.
{% block collection_widget %}
{% spaceless %}
<div class="collection">
{% if prototype is defined %}
{% set attr = attr|merge({'data-prototype': block('collection_item_widget') }) %}
{% endif %}
<div {{ block('widget_container_attributes') }}>
{{ form_errors(form) }}
<ul>
{% for rows in form %}
<li>
{% set fieldNum = 1 %}
{% for row in rows %}
<div class="field{{ fieldNum }}">
{{ form_label(row) }}
{{ form_widget(row, { 'attr': { 'class': 'test' }}) }}
</div>
{% set fieldNum = fieldNum + 1 %}
{% endfor %}
<a class="remove" title="Remove" href="javascript:void()">
<span>Delete</span>
</a>
<div class="clear"></div>
</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{{ form_rest(form) }}
</div>
<div class="clear"></div>
<a class="add" title="Add" href="javascript:void()">
<div style="display: none;"></div>
<span>Add</span>
</a>
</div>
<div class="clear"></div>
{% endspaceless %}
{% endblock collection_widget %}
{% block collection_item_widget %}
{% spaceless %}
<li>
{% set fieldNum = 1 %}
{% for row in prototype %}
<div class="field{{ fieldNum }}">
{{ form_label(row) }}
{{ form_widget(row, { 'attr': { 'class': 'test' }}) }}
</div>
{% set fieldNum = fieldNum + 1 %}
{% endfor %}
<a class="remove" title="Remove" href="javascript:void()">
<span>Delete</span>
</a>
<div class="clear"></div>
</li>
{% endspaceless %}
{% endblock collection_item_widget %}
Also, here’s a github gist link to the same code.
capistrano, mac, os x, os x leopard, ruby, rubygems, symfony, symfony2
In Uncategorized on November 4, 2011 at 1:21 am
Sorry for the long hiatus from the blog, I’ve recently been quite busy at work with one particularly important project scheduled for an early December launch.
More than one of these projects now utilizes the Symfony2 PHP framework, and in addition to that we’ve been using “Capifony”, a deployment recipe which Capistrano utilizes to deploy Symfony or Symfony2 sites.
Usually, on my home machines I use Ubuntu linux, which I’m pretty happy with. Setting up an up-to-date version of Apache, MySQL, Ruby, Capistrano and PHP (with the intl module, importantly, since this is required by Symfony) is made very easy with the use of the apt-get or aptitude package managers.
Unfortunately, my experience with OS X (which I nevertheless like as an operating system) has not been as much of a smooth sailing kind of thing.
One recent issue I’ve run into is that when setting up capistrano to deploy our Symfony app on this older version of OS X, the gem app is too out of date to even know where to get the update package from to update itself (v1.0.1).
Figuring out how to update RubyGems was quick and relatively painless, but the instructions given by multiple sites that popped up on Google were flat out wrong. So… I’m taking the opportunity to document it here.
Updating RubyGems from Version 1.0.1 On OS X Leopard
The first step I tried was…
$ sudo gem update --system
This is what you would normally use, however, v1.0.1 attempts to fetch from the wrong source.
This was the error returned:
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::RemoteSourceException)
HTTP Response 302 fetching http://gems.rubyforge.org/yaml
What finally worked was this:
$ sudo gem update --system --source http://production.s3.rubygems.org/
We’re at 1.3.6. As simple as that.
The following was the first result on Google and did not work for whatever reason…
gem install rubygems-update --source http://production.s3.rubygems.org/
update_rubygems
In Uncategorized on September 4, 2011 at 5:56 pm
My mom writes letters-to-the-editor talking about the Ron Paul campaign pretty often, so I wasn’t too surprised that she’d kicked it up a notch and had a family friend produce these massive banners.
anki, cheatsheet, git, web development
In Uncategorized on July 8, 2011 at 4:51 pm
I’ve been piling up flash cards for common use cases with git. I have them packed into my iPhone with the Anki program, and when I have some downtime (I.e. I’m waiting on someone or something) I flip through them. Actually, git is just one of my many decks on there.
I’ve found this really helpful personally, and in fact, I’ll probably release this deck to the public sometime soon. I’m always on the lookout when I’m learning things for little nuggets of syntax that would best be tucked away for rote memorization to make my life easier.
Enough of my meandering, the point I’m getting at is, if I find some common-use things that I hadn’t found in other tutorials that would make good flash cards I’ll note that as high value material to share with others. This is one of those examples. I found quite a few little “nuggets of syntax” here that I should have rote.
So without further ado…
dkms, linux, virtualbox
In Uncategorized on June 12, 2011 at 5:05 pm
I use VirtualBox from inside of Ubuntu to run Windows XP. After running an Ubuntu update I started getting this error:
* Look at /var/log/vbox-install.log to find out what went wrong
In the end the fix ended up being as simple as running sudo aptitude install dkms and then sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup
… but you wouldn’t have guessed that from some of the stuff popping up on Google. People were talking about reinstallation and all kinds of over-the-top “fixes.” That’s one thing I’ve noticed about linux is sometimes the solution can be really simple, but the signal to noise ratio on Google will be just awful.
JavaScript, web design, web development
In Uncategorized on June 3, 2011 at 8:49 pm
I’ve been brushing up on JavaScript a little bit, and wanted to take a moment to share a few links. Mostly to refer back to. This blog also serves as a scratchpad.
I particularly like DevGuru’s page. I found it helpful to search it via Google using this query:
site:http://www.devguru.com/technologies/ecmascript/quickref/ whatimlookingfor
facebook, Facebook Connect, Facebook Platform, social media, wordpress
In Uncategorized on May 31, 2011 at 8:40 pm
I did a little bit of reading today on Facebook connect when someone asked me some questions about it.
Their question:
when you register and sign on to something by just entering you facebook details do you get all the info? How does facebook share this stuff?
And my response…
You are given some of the information they’ve provided facebook when they login through that route.
Took me a few minutes to find it, but here’s the complete list of information that is made available through ‘facebook connect’:
Things on this list that say “no access_token required” means that anyone can access this information (the person doesn’t even have to click your facebook connect button), while things that say “no access_token required” means that if they click facebook connect on your website you’ll have access to that info. Other things like email require a special level of permission.
If you want their email and request that permission, it’ll show a large permission request blurb when they click facebook connect that looks like this…
If you read over that User Graph object link, you’ll notice address isn’t a part of it, so those fields will have to be entered manually by your visitors, of course, if you’re planning some kind of e-commerce app. They have a nice little setup for grabbing that info too.
If you’re interested in Facebook Connect… and WordPress… make sure to check out Otto’s Simple Facebook Connect plugin.
facebook, php, wordpress, wordpress plugins
In Uncategorized on May 24, 2011 at 9:48 pm
Want to boost your Facebook fan page subscription rate? This WordPress plugin makes what should be an easy task, but isn’t, an easy one. It enables you to use a shortcode to place a small like button where ever you like without the ordinary clutter: stream, faces, count, and all of the other junk that comes with the “fan page like box” ordinarily. Basically, it generates a fan page subscription button that looks *identical* to the one ordinarily only for *sharing* a page (as opposed to actually subscribing).
Installation Instructions
All you need to do is unzip it in your wp-content/plugins folder and then activate it in the wp-admin area of your blog.
Like this plugin? Want to contribute?
If you like this plugin there’s a few different ways you can contribute.
Screenshots!
The Facebook fan page like button with the default white (#FFFFFF) iframe background (generated with the shortcode), contrasting with the ordinary look of the Facebook "like box."
The settings/configuration page for Facebook Simple Like.
The profile pictures section of your facebook fan page, which is where you find the requisite "profile id" of your fan page.
academia, plugins, science, wordpress
In Uncategorized on May 5, 2011 at 6:41 pm
PMID Citation Plus for WordPress is here! This plugin fills a very unique need that I’ve observed in the WordPress community. It allows you to input PMID numbers listed on abstracts at PubMed and have a Wikipedia-styled references section at the bottom of your post built for you.
Installation Instructions
All you need to do is unzip it in your wp-content/plugins folder and then activate it in the wp-admin area of your blog.
Like this plugin? Want to contribute?
If you like this plugin there’s a few different ways you can contribute.
Screenshots!
The references block at the bottom of a blog post.
The PMID Citation Plus entry field above the update/publish button.
and the place you get this PMID from, of course….
php, wordpress
In Uncategorized on May 3, 2011 at 1:00 am
From wordpress 3.0 version wordpress introduced the custom_post_type function. Many people want to attach the file field with add_meta_box function. In this tutorial I will tell you how to upload file with custom meta box and post type.
In this tutorial I will show you how to create the custom post type and add custom meta boxes to that post type and upload file with custom meta box.
See full tutorial at: File upload with add_meta_box or custom_post_type in wordpress
alcohol, videos, youtube
In Uncategorized on April 27, 2011 at 12:26 am
Check out these monkeys stealing alcohol on the beach.
Read the rest of this entry »
optincrusher, wordpress plugins
In Uncategorized on April 26, 2011 at 12:31 am
I’m not sure about how courteous it is to do this, but nevertheless I found the comprehensiveness of this post really compelling. Basically, when setting up a client’s website he rebrands their admin panel, and even gives them an invoice pay area (via freshbooks) in the administration area. Really pretty neat. Check it out here.
Also, this WordPress plugin called optincrusher is pretty neat for newsletter building.
git, subversion, svn, version control, web development
In Uncategorized on April 20, 2011 at 9:17 pm
I’m having to touch up on some subversion skills. I’m already somewhat familiar with git (you can read about dreamweaver git for windows, and some other things here).
I’ve compiled a list of most of the basic commands from various sources for easy review:
svnadmin create –fs-type fsfs /home/svn
For setting up a svn database using the fsfs format, which is better at resisting corruption on shared drives, or something like that. Probably not necessary to use if database is setup elsewhere, as it most likely is if you’re reading this.
svn import /path/to/my/desired/working/directory file://home/svn/proj/trunk
Pulls your working directory into the subversion database, thereby creating a project/trunk
svn checkout file:///home/user/proj/trunk /path/to/my/desired/working/directory
Downloads the trunk into your desired working directory. Can also use svn+ssh:// instead of file:// if file is on another system and you’d like to use ssh. Same is true of any command using file:// in these examples. If you leave the second path off it will create directory named trunk folder relative to where you’re located if you type in ‘pwd.’ Checkout can be abbreviated to ‘co’. This command does not get used to update a current directory. If you want to grab a specific revision use <strong>svn co -r rev#</strong>, but be forewarned if you use this when checking out you will not see subsequent log entries unless you run update to switch to the most recent version on the server. Likewise, if you use update to go backwards to an older revision and use svn log you won’t see any of the subsequent commits.
If you use update to switch to an older revision, make a change, and then commit it the log will still only show the older commit on the log until update is run.
svn log
svn log file:///home/svn/myrepo/trunk
Can be used on working folder as in the first example or on a repository as in the second. The first example will lag behind on showing all of the commits unless svn checkout or svn update has been run.
svn status
Shows files in your current working directory’s status relative to what’s currently placed on the server folder (matching the sever address you downloaded with checkout)
svn info
svn info file.txt
Shows things like current revision number, and who the last person to modify a file was, and when the last time the file was modified in some fashion. Useful for also checking to see where on the repository tree your branch is going to land if you run a commit.
svn update
Update working directory to latest revision, meaning all files that have not been modified locally and tracked will be overwritten with the most up-to-date version. svn update -r rev# can be used on the end of svn update to raise (or lower) a checkout folder (working directory) to a certain specific revision number. If you have specifically modified a file, or induced an intentionally tracked change (i.e. using svn rm) then all files *except those files* will be changed to what is available from the server on that specific revision number. If you run svn status after using update, the files which you’ve changed that have not yet made it in a commit to the server will still show up regardless of whether or not you run update to any revision whatsoever, because those are files that have been worked on. In this way, subversion makes it unlikely you’re going to overwrite something you’ve been tracking the changes on with update.
Tracking of changes is done automatically when a file has been modified directly, but must be removed using svn rm, or renamed using svn mv in order to have those kinds of changes appropriately tracked. There is almost no reason that I can think of to use mv or rm without it’s svn prefix when working on any code at all.
svn mv oldname newname
svn rm filename
Self explanatory. If you use “rm” or “mv” directly on the working directory contents the changes won’t be tracked. Instead use these commands which will make the changes and track them for the next commit.
svn add filename
Start tracking filename recently created in your current local working directory.
svnadmin dump /home/usr/svn > /home/mdpatrick/mysvndumpfile.db
Make a dumpfile of the database.
svn commit -m ‘Your commit message here’
Commits will not occur unless a change has been tracked. If you’d like to bring back an old revision, you may run checkout to that revision, and run commit.
sudo svn merge –ignore-ancestry file:///home/svn/mdpatrick.com/somecrazybranch
Assuming you’re currently in working directory of the checkedout trunk, you can run this to merge somecrazybranch into the trunk, and then commit the trunk. Brings up editor showing you files with changes made in them and lets you resolve it.
svn revert -R .
Reverts all files in the current folder and subfolders to the state they were in when they were retrieved from the server via checkout or update. The recursive option must be capitalized to use.
svn diff -c 13
Shows all of that code that’s were modified in the r13 commit.
What a brand new file looks like in a diff -c patch
— blah.txt (revision 0)
+++ blah.txt (revision 13)
It says revision 0, which implies that blah.txt didn’t exist all the way back at revision 0, which of course, represents the first commit. (Implying it’s a brand new file).
Using diff’s to create patches
Patches can be made from diffs of any shape form or fashion (probably done similarly with git, of course). These are useful for sharing code changes if you don’t have write access to the repository itself.
Create any kind of diff using:
svn diff > ~/mypatch.diff
or if you’re just wanting to share the changes made to a single file in revision 13…
svn diff -c 13 blah.txt > ~/mypatch.diff
To apply this patch use:
patch -p0 -i ~/mypatch.diff
This will only work if the revision changes of the file in the .diff match blah.txt exactly as found in revision 12.
Outside links I found helpful:
aaltsys, meetup, memphis, programming, reddit, ruby on rails, web design, web development
In Uncategorized on April 16, 2011 at 9:06 pm
Today for the second time I attended the Ruby On Rails meetup at the AAltSys Technology Center.
Michael Cochran, an AAltSys technologist and resident guru, walked me through a bunch of the cool things built into Ruby on Rails, and even setup a little application featuring some basic database interactivity.
Ruby on Rails / Midsouth Tech Corner Meetup @ AAltSys Technology. Left-to-Right: Mike Cochran, Ben Hamilton (back), Julia Lovel, Jonathan Beatty
Thanks to AAltSys for hosting the event with delicious meat-free snacks, and anyone interested in RoR development in Memphis should definitely drop by. The Midsouth Tech Corner meetup page has the schedule.
Useful links Michael shared with me in the context of Ruby on Rails:
I… may or may not have seen some glimpses of rapid Reddit tabbing from Jonathon’s screen. I’ll have to remember to drop him an invite to the Redditors of Memphis group.
certification, database administration, mysql, mysql certification, oracle
In Uncategorized on April 13, 2011 at 10:02 pm
As I mentioned in previous posts, I’m going to take a shot at one of the MySQL certifications offered. I ran across a post on the net from a guy that confirmed that the study guide available at amazon did cover the DBA level of certification.
The aforementioned post on passing the Database Administrator cert recommended focusing on:
* Definitions
* Examples
* Functions
* Command Options
* Gotchas
* Anything bulleted in the guide.
* Best Practices
Interesting to note, there’s also apparently a cluster database administrator certification that relies on its own study guide. It is the final level of MySQL certification exists and has the database administrator certification as a pre-requisite… which is actually nice, because it means that if you’ve already got one of the certifications getting this one costs half as much, since the other tests are two part. I guess they had to throw us a bone somewhere.
By the way, the official page for Oracle’s MySQL certification page is right here, since it was so darned hard to find.
In Uncategorized on April 11, 2011 at 7:28 pm
One time I was in an elevator at University of Memphis wearing a hat, and I saw another older fellow wearing a hat in much the same style as mine (though obviously a nicer, more expensive one which isn’t to be of surprise, of course)…
He commented “nice hat” and went on to tell me about a hat store called Mister Hats. He said that the guy was selling hats when Elvis was still alive, and when he, himself, was a rock star. He said he was a musician and played in The Box Tops when he was younger. I looked up his Wikipedia, and it said they weren’t sure if he was alive or not. That amused me.
funny, humor, videos
In Uncategorized on April 10, 2011 at 8:46 pm
facebook, social media, social media marketing, social media strategy
In Uncategorized on April 8, 2011 at 4:11 pm
The other day I saw something that came as kind of a surprise. Someone who I was at one time facebook “friends” with had converted me into a fan of their fan page and in one fell swoop removed me from their personal profile. Though I hadn’t heard an announcement of such a tool, I knew it had not been done by magic so I did some researching and figured out how they did it through a little post published in March at insidefacebook.com:
For the first time, Facebook now allows personal user profiles to be converted into official business Pages, turning all their friends into fans. The “Profile To Business Page Migration” tool will help people who either created a personal profile for a business before Pages existed, or accidentally started accumulating fans as friends instead of Likes. (via.)
I guess I kind of wonder how long this tool will stay around. It seems like it would be easier to accumulate facebook “friends” than fans, and using a tool like this could be one way of amassing a big fan page quickly. Not that I think that would be a particularly polite tactic, but it certainly seems plausible.
It appears that they’ve also created a merge appeal tool for those that have changed their mind about the conversion. For more information on the whole process view their help center page on the conversion process, and make sure to backup your profile before doing anything first.
design, graphics, tutorials, typography
In Uncategorized on April 3, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Every now and then some incredibly useful nuggets of information pop up in the COMMENTS section of Reddit. One guy posted recently in the web_design subreddit about his desire to improve his design skills, and one of the members followed up with an awesomely exhaustive list of links for improving graphical and web design skills. I’m mirroring it here so it doesn’t get lost in the noise:
materialdesigner 229 points 8 days ago
Thanks for sharing, materialdesigner!
certification, mysql, oracle, php, zend, zend certified engineer
In Uncategorized on April 1, 2011 at 9:55 pm
I have to admit, I am a bit pleased with myself. I’m usually not the bragging type, I swear.
However, if any of you follow some of my previous blog posts you might recall my mentioning that I had bought the Zend PHP 5.3 certification exam. I gave myself a relatively short timeline to study for it (~2 weeks) and take it, and for the most part just studied the PHP.net manual focusing in on what was mentioned in the study guide, as well as those blurbs I mentioned in my previous post that I’d run across (which mostly just re-iterated what was said in the free study guide on Zend’s site).
I have played around with PHP for a number of years, but not really ever sat down and focused on the fundamentals like I knew I should have, so putting a little cash on the line helped me really push myself on this.
I used a spaced repetition program called Anki, on my iphone, to memorize the syntax to a lot of the common functions in PHP. If you haven’t heard of Anki before, make sure to check it out. It seems like one of the best techniques a person could leverage to really grow fluency in any language — whether programming or otherwise, short of just constant application.
So what’s next? Hmm… I could take a shot at Zend framework (which I would need to learn from scratch), but… Instead, I have to admit I’m eying some of Oracle’s MySQL certifications with envy. Like PHP itself, I have some previous experience and can use this as an opportunity to again focus down on the fundamentals.
Also, here’s a really cool tidbit: the official MySQL certification study guide comes with a 25% off voucher for the test itself, essentially making the study guide… free!
Read the rest of this entry »
facebook, funny, linkbait, Ron Paul
In Uncategorized on March 28, 2011 at 8:43 pm
This wasn’t actually linking to any website, but I thought the outlandishness of it is a really good example of entertaining content that can get some traction quickly.
I spotted this one in my Facebook feed. Good one, dude.
documentaries, videos
In Uncategorized on March 19, 2011 at 7:11 pm
Just got done watching a cool urban exploration documentary taking place in New York City. They explore old subways, and sewers, and other such things.
The video is actually in HD on documentary heaven:
http://documentaryheaven.com/undercity-an-ulnderground-expedition-through-new-york-city/
27 minutes.
I really enjoyed watching it. Most of the time they seem pretty tense about getting in trouble, which is presumably why everything took place in the early hours of the morning.
They find old graffiti, and run from passing trains. These guys were so hardcore they even wore lights on their heads.
They end up interviewing a guy that lives down there in the tunnels. He gets up and talks to them in a really animated way. He’s storytelling and stuff. Then another tunnel resident comes on, and gives a coherent story of how she found her way down into the sewer. It was cats. The cats showed her what was to be her new home.
certification, mysql, oracle, php, programming, zend
In Uncategorized on March 12, 2011 at 7:31 pm
I made the purchase. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while. I already know a little bit about PHP from having dabbled in it for a while, but have remained otherwise fairly mediocre with it. My logic is kind of like that of a gym membership: if you shovel out the cash to get one, you’ll probably make a point to show up at some point.
In this case, it gives me some motivation to get some broader aspects coded in my brain for the test. I’ve made a few useful things in PHP strictly for my own uses, but found it previously challenging to make much headway in a reasonable amount of time. Hopefully this should speed the process up by the time I’m done with it, and I happen to get a license for the PHP IDE Zend Studio, and a nice little certificate to go with it.
I managed to run across a few blurbs from people who have actually taken the test on what to focus on. Here’s one from an amazon review of php|Architect’s study guide:
Want to pass the exam? Know the following things:
1. What can and can’t go in a function/variable name.
2. What typehints are, how they work, and where they’re applied.
3. What all of the array_*() functions do. The more verbose array_*_*() functions which nobody uses can be safely skipped over.
4. How to use the SimpleXML library in a very general way i.e. access elements, attributes and convert to DOM.
5. Everything about the new object model, including abstract and final classes, the new constructor format, destructors, autoloaders and access specifiers (public, private, protected).
6. How and when to pass by reference.
7. When things go out of scope.
8. What the following php.ini directives do: allow_url_fopen, register_globals, enable_dl, disable_functions.
9. What goes in the superglobals and when ($_SERVER, $_GET, $_POST, $_REQUEST, $_ARGV).
10. What all of the bitwise operators do (you should also be able to convert numbers to and from decimal, octal, hexadecimal and binary notation with nothing but your brain and a piece of scratch paper).
Database topics are covered, but you generally don’t have to know any of the nonsense about mysqli or PDO–these things are all too buggy to actually use anyway, so learning about them is doubly pointless. If you can memorize function argument lists, do so with the preg_ and various string functions, because they like to throw some curveballs that use the optional args no one ever thinks about. If you can’t, then don’t bother because you can usually eliminate at least two of the choices they give you right off the bat and guess your way through the rest.
I found a few other pieces of advice at stackoverflow as well:
Areas of Focus: The main thing to focus on (ridiculous I know) are array and string functions. Believe it or not, a large portion of the exam will test you on knowing which functions do what and even what order the parameters are passed (this is particularly annoying because even among related functions, parameter order is not consistent). Also be aware of the functionality added to PHP 5 (SPL, PDO, object-oriented code, and the new XML functionality with SimpleXML and DOMDocument).
Assuming I dominate this test like I plan to, I might take a shot at one of the Oracle SQL certifications… but I may be getting ahead of myself. Wish me luck.
Oh, I forgot to mention. Part of this “experiment” is that I’m making a killer stack of Anki flash cards. So, in theory, if I continue to use Anki even after passing the test, I should be able to keep a near perfect recall of all of the information I’ve learned. For the uninitiated, Anki is a spaced repetition program much like Mnemosyne, but with the exception that it has a convenient iphone app available.
By (author) Zend Technologies
| List Price: |
$34.99 USD |
| New From: |
$17.11 In Stock |
| Used from: |
$10.22 In Stock |
|
|
|
facebook, firefox, flickr, https, packet sniffing, security, ssl, twitter
In Uncategorized on March 9, 2011 at 6:08 pm
Earlier today I was listening to the SitePoint podcast #87 when they started talking about a new Firefox extension called “firesheep.” Apparently this program makes use of packet sniffing to hijack open, insecure session over unprotected Wi-Fi access points.
In and of itself the threat of packet sniffing is nothing new, and really the only protection against this is to either never use open Wi-Fi points or only log into websites that use https and possess an SSL certificate. What is new, however, is that this program makes it far more easy to hijack open sessions than it was in the past so that almost anyone can do it.
Firesheep, I suppose, was released with the intent of forcing developers to make sessions more secure, but in doing so open the door to a much greater number of people being able to grab up people’s private accounts at least temporarily for nefarious purposes in public places like coffee shops. If you use FireSheep you’ll literally be able to see everyone on your open networking that’s logged into sites like Facebook, and by clicking on their name and picture log directly into their account.
In response to Firesheep’s release, however, another firefox addon has come out specifically for detecting when someone on the network is using Firesheep called BlackSheep. This gives you the opportunity to at least have a fair chance of catching, and smacking that nerdy kid looking kid across the room that’s messing around with your interwebs.
analytics, article marketing, backlinking, blogging, google, reviews, seo, traffic building, uniquearticlewizard
In Uncategorized on March 2, 2011 at 5:31 pm
Quick background: Unique Article Wizard, or UAW for short, is a monthly membership site that takes articles you create or pay someone to create (they now offer that service too) and distributes “unique” versions of that article to hundreds of websites based on the category of the given article.
Though some people claim to get traffic directly from the articles themselves I have seen no evidence of this in any substantial matter, certainly no more than what you would get from EzineArticles, which is meager fair enough. Instead, I have used UniqueArticleWizard as a strategy for building links to boost rank in Google’s search engine results pages (serps for short), thereby indirectly bringing in traffic.
Basically, you send out an article, and then immediately get an incoming link from every website that accepts your article, and since Google relies on link popularity it counts all of these new pages on tons of websites as “unique” pages that are linking to your content and thus indicating that it is more important for eyeballs on the web.
As I mentioned in briefly in my recent post entitled “Zeroing In On Backlinking with Unique Article Wizard,” I have recently really been going the extra mile to drop all other projects not consisting of using UAW and go “full-tilt” so to speak on backlinking with this tool to really get a feel for what kind of results can be achieved. If I’m going to pay the membership fee I might as well really get a feel for it, right?
I’ve established three different experimental backlinking scenarios, only one of which I’ll talk about in this post since I feel it is the most meaningful:
- Backlinking an older (years), established retail website that is already experiencing a significant degree of success.
- Backlinking a newish website that has an extraordinarily large number of pages, but very little search traffic.
- HEAVILY (and I do mean heavily) backlinking a brand new website receiving zero traffic that is in a challenging niche in an attempt to “break through.”
The website I’ve chosen to discuss in this post is several years old, has a couple of thousand pages, and I used UAW submissions to systematically backlink the top 100 of them with varying anchor text. In total, about 30 articles were submitted on a wide variety of subjects not necessarily pertaining to the actual subject matter of the retail website.
The annotations at the bottom of the graph denote the period of time I was still writing, and submitting new articles daily to UAW.
There’s a few interesting things to note here. The page that experienced this jump was already receiving well over 300 visits a day strictly from search engines. A nearly 40% change on a website receiving 10 visits a day is not that notable, however, a jump of this magnitude on a website that’s well established is.
The other experimental scenarios did reveal some interesting things as well, however, I will save that discussion for a future post. If you enjoyed this post, or are looking to use UniqueArticleWizard.com, I would like to take a moment to point out that the links in the preceding paragraphs to the UAW website are, in fact, affiliate. Despite this, I can assure you that the results in this review on uniquearticlewizard’s effectiveness are in fact, genuine, and I believe show that this service is worthwhile as a tool for traffic building via article marketing.
analytics, backlinking, blogging, google, seo, traffic building, uniquearticlewizard
In Uncategorized on February 12, 2011 at 9:28 pm
Recently I’ve been really cutting out a lot of the noise. I took about a month off from facebook with a few small exceptions, completely dropped all Reddit browsing, and pretty much scaled back a lot of my normal leisure activities. I included ordinary blogging as one of those activities to be scaled back.
Despite the fact that daily blogging recently had showed me some really great results (read 1 Post A Day For 61 Days), as much as it pained me to do this, I abruptly stopped posting in preference for generating articles, and posting them on numerous article directories.
I used Unique Article Wizard, which is a monthly subscription service, to also distribute them more widely than just Ezinearticles.
I’ve had success on most sites I’ve worked with in local niches just submitting 2 or 3, but I really wanted to go full tilt on this one and submitted around 30 articles for one successful website I haven’t done any backlinking on in a few years, as well as another which is brand new and I’m trying to break into an already competitive niche.
So far I’ve seen a 15% increase in traffic on the established site (it’s been less than a month since my last article went out, and the traffic was originally pulling about 400-500 qualified visitors a day), and a larger increase with the new site (proportionally).
The cool thing is, actually, since every article I submitted could have two links, I slipped in links to every site in my possession. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve seen an increase across the board on every single site I own.
I expect to see some really compelling results in the coming months, which I’ll report back here.
Maybe.
I might just post travel pictures, instead, and leave you to infer things. By the way, that Unique Article Wizard I posted is affiliate. If you’re thinking of signing up… Give me some love.
k9copy, libdvdcss2, libdvdread4, linux, medibuntu, ubuntu
In Uncategorized on January 21, 2011 at 3:53 pm
K9copy is a utility to copy dvd media on linux. This is particularly convenient if you have a habit of inadvertently destroying every single CD or DVD you own.
After install k9copy on someones suggestion I was repeatedly crashing out with a “segment 11″ error whenever I attempted to use the wizard in the application. Apparently I was just missing a few packages.
The first step to fixing this problem is to first install medibuntu (from the documentation):
First add the medibuntu repository:
sudo wget –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get –quiet update && sudo apt-get –yes –quiet –allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get –quiet update
Then if you want to add the medibuntu packages to the Ubuntu Software Center (optional) run this:
sudo apt-get –yes install app-install-data-medibuntu apport-hooks-medibuntu
Then, assuming you’re running Ubuntu 9.04 or later (you can check with lsb_release -a) install libdvdread4 and libdvdcss2 (also from documentation):
sudo apt-get install libdvdread4
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh
After doing this k9copy stopped crashing for me with the segment 11 error. It would’ve been nice to have just been told which packages I was missing… Thank you power of Google, anyhoo!
embryos, evolution, gills, human development, recapitulation theory
In Uncategorized on December 26, 2010 at 9:22 pm
I’ve been reading Microcosmos, and it mentioned briefly that during development human embryos have what appear to be “gill arches” that later become things quite different from gills, of course. It was hard to find a singular page that show examples of this but I found an “embryo comparison” page with some drawings showing the similarity in features in such a way that is pretty neat. Do, however, read the bold beneath the image below.
Read the rest of this entry »
blogging, facebook, facebook shares, retweets, search engine optimization, seo, social media, social media strategy, twitter, writing
In Uncategorized on December 16, 2010 at 7:32 pm
Perhaps I should become a Problogger reader, because this post a friend of mine shared with me is pretty much pure dynamite: When’s the Best Time to Publish Blog Posts?
In this post Dan Zarella comes to a few conclusions which I will simply summarize:
- The greatest amount of re-tweet activity occurs around 4pm EST each day. This is, perhaps the best time for you to tweet your new posts.
- Articles get shared more on Facebook when published on Saturdays and Sundays — this is probably because many workplaces have Facebook blocked.
- Articles tend to get shared more on Facebook when published around 9AM. (So publish at 9am, and tweet at 4pm.)
And his last point… which I think struck a a little closer to home (based on my own tests) and seemingly over-shadowed the rest in terms of things to tuck away and make a rule of thumb:
- Frequency of publishing posts seems to be the largest predictor of blogging success.
Read up on my own experiment involving posting frequency at: 61 posts in 61 days.
anki, cascading style sheets, css, web design
In Uncategorized on December 15, 2010 at 7:04 pm
Despite being simple I still haven’t got this burned into my memory and end up googling it more often than I should. I’ll be adding this to my anki deck later. These seem to be some good default menu styling and can serve as a nice starting point when creating a layout from scratch.
div#navbar ul {
list-style: none;
display: block;
margin: 0 10px;
}
div#navbar ul li {
float: left;
margin: 0 1.5em;
font: bold 1em Arial;
}
via.
music, youtube
In Uncategorized on December 13, 2010 at 6:48 pm
I absolutely love Beba by Pantyraid. Some fine dubstep right there. Throw pantyraid in Pandora if you’re a fan of electronic music.
Read the rest of this entry »
documentaries, videos, wikileaks
In Uncategorized on December 13, 2010 at 5:40 pm
I just got done watching the WikiRebels hour long documentary about Wikileaks available free online. This documentary is made particularly relevant with the recent news about Wikileaks continued releases of diplomatic cables.
Read the rest of this entry »
.bashrc, bash, iphone, linux, ubuntu
In Uncategorized on December 7, 2010 at 3:00 am
I’ve been using my iPhone to do things on my desktop PC at home recently, mostly with the intent of actually being able to do web design/coding while on the run via my iphone.
One problem I’ve been running into is the default command prompt contains the current directory, as well as username by default on the Ubuntu distribution. While ordinarily this works just fine when you’ve got a nice big desktop monitor, on the iphone it takes up valuable screen space and tends to cause lines to double up unnecessarily when you’re deep in some subfolders.
So I decided I wanted to shorten it to a simple dollar sign ($), instead of the normal daniel@mdpatrick-desktop:/etc/sv/git-daemon$. (Mouthful, isn’t it?)
There’s two ways to go about this. The “normal” way is to just edit your local .bashrc file. You can do this by typing vi ~/.bashrc (or if you’re not sure what vi is use nano .bashrc). You’ll want to add something along the lines of PS1=’$ ‘ to the end of this file.
delicious, plugins, seo, social bookmarking, wordpress, wordpress plugins
In Uncategorized on December 6, 2010 at 5:01 pm
I’ve stopped using categories for the most part, at least temporarily, as I’ve started to adopt tagging more. This is a more intuitive way of organizing my posts, I think. I used to use delicious a lot, but since I realized I could use my blog for almost all of the exact same purposes by making better use of the WordPress tagging feature, I’ve transmuted that same energy into blog posts. Suddenly I’ve realized I actually have a lot of blogging material.
So when I first started doing this I asked myself the obvious question: OK, these tags are great, but is there a way to make them awesome? So I started looking around for plugins that augment the behavior of WordPress’ tags just to see what is available. What I found is that, seemingly, SimpleTags is the undisputed heavy-weight.
SimpleTags Features:
- Allows pages to be tagged.
- Suggests tags via: Yahoo! Term Extraction API, OpenCalais, Alchemy, Zemanta, Tag The Net, Local DB. (All of which I know nothing about)
- Allows you to auto link tags into post content. This means if you tag “WordPress” on a post, every time you mention “WordPress” within the post it will become a link to all the other posts with the wordpress tag in them.
- Allows you to automatically include tags in your meta keywords.
- Allows a related posts section to posts, and optionally, the feed as well. Usually I use contextual related posts, but this is pretty cool and seems functional.
- Gives you access to a customizable tag cloud that can be inserted into the template, or within posts and pages.
This plugin is very customizable, and might be a keeper: Get SimpleTags
hackerspaces, iphone, memphis, midsouth makers, republic coffee, square, ssh
In Uncategorized on December 5, 2010 at 5:34 am
Yesterday I was sitting at Republic Coffee with Rhonda and David Sandy. We were enjoying each others quiet presence when I realized I recognized someone that walked past for the second or third time in a row.
Deja Vu: A Glitch in the Republic Coffee Matrix?
I mentioned it to Rhonda, and she said she thought she may have saw some people out of the corner of her eye that she recognized as well.
A Treat! MidSouth Makers!
At this point I ran a mental checklist and I realized that it was the time of week that the MidSouth Makers (our local hackerspace) meets! Joy of joys! While I’ve had the opportunity to meet with some of the guys over a lunch, and had a few other interesting social connections to the group (small town) I hadn’t yet made it to an official meeting.
As luck would have it, despite being in Republic Coffee at the same time as me, I’d already missed most of the meeting already — drat! However, with the mere 10 minutes I did get to interact with the group I saw Daniel Hess (@dan9186) passing around an iphone with a funny looking square thing on it. Apparently this little device, called a “Square” is actually to charge credit cards on the spot using an iphone! awesome? awesome.
SquareUp on an iPhone
Squareup.com: How It Works
So apparently the way it works is this: So long as you have the square you can accept card payments with no contract or monthly fees. You just plug the free card reader into your mobile device and start swiping. If you *swipe* the card the fee is 2.75% of the transaction + $0.15. If you hand-key the card the cost for using the service is 3.5% of the transaction + $0.15.
Square is available for the following devices: iPhone, iPod touch (2G+), iPad, Nexus One, Motorola Droid, Motorola Droid X, HTC Droid Incredible, HTC Evo, HTC Hero, HTC Desire, Samsung Galaxy S series, and the LG Ally.
Squareup.com service is only available within the United States. If you’re interested in learning more go ahead and read their frequently asked questions.
backlinking, experiments, google, google analytics, search engine optimization, seo, statistics, traffic
In Uncategorized on December 5, 2010 at 2:39 am
I’ve had a blog (not referring to this one) that’s been floating around for years. I’ve backlinked it previously to some degree, and it’s had a steady flow of traffic probably floating around 80 visitors a day for several years. Up until recently I had neglected it, mostly because I didn’t have time for it.
But recently I’ve taken to updating it again. Instead of necessarily posting very large articles, I mostly took snippets from interesting articles I had read, shove them in a blockquote, throw a “via” link on the end, and maybe a few sentences of commentary.
61 Days. 61 Posts.
Nothing big, but I basically went from posting virtually nothing on the blog and letting it coast off of it’s own steam, to suddenly a flurry of virtually daily blog posts since October 2nd. Today is December 4th, and since October 2nd I’ve posted approximately 61 short blog posts. Incidentally, it’s been 61 days (unless I miss counted). The fact that the numbers come out at exactly 1 blog post per day is simply a strange, cool coincidence that occurred entirely by accident.
In the several months prior to this 61 days I posted roughly once per month, and in the middle of the 61 day period I bumped a single, spun article out to a mass article distribution service for backlinks.
Results: A 35.86% Traffic Jump
The results are in. Basically, I compared the last week’s worth of traffic — starting at December 4th backward — (a total of 846 visits) to the traffic that was flowing in during the week prior to the beginning of the blog binge (a total of 608 visits). That’s a 35.86% increase.
It’s important to note that this traffic is traffic *exclusively* from search engines. On Google Analytics that report can be accessed via Traffic Sources > Search Engines. The reason I used this report, obviously, as opposed to the general traffic is it removes other variables like the absence or presence of a few facebook share visits. The only thing I’m interested in is what the *search engine* effects were from this result. Not unrelated viral traffic.
One of the other really cool elements of this experiment is ultimately I was really only taking a previous behavior I had — obsessively social bookmarking — and instead channeling that same energy into simply publishing it on my blog instead of delicious. So we’re not talking a lot of extra energy here: I’d definitely put this in the behavioral hack department.
linux, software, text editors, vi, vim
In Uncategorized on December 4, 2010 at 5:53 am
As I mentioned in a previous post about using SSH to edit websites, while ordinarily I use “nano” for all of my text editing I feel confident from the feedback of friends that vi is actually the better choice of editors. It requires a little more of a learning curve, but allows you to do ordinarily complicated things a little bit more rapidly.
To edit a file with the vi text editor ordinarily at a command prompt you would type vi filename.php or some permutation there of. If you start a new file then on the far left hand side of the screen it will show a series of tildes. These are placeholders and indicate an empty buffer.
When you first start the vi editor you will enter the text editor in “command mode.” This is the mode that makes vi quite special. Vi’s useful commands increase the number of things you can do from such an bland looking screen with efficiency.
In the videos from YouTube below, starting with lesson 1, the first command mentioned is called last-line mode. While in command mode, to enter last-line mode you press a :. The colon then appears at the bottom of the screen with your focus indicated by a blinking cursor (on the last-line).
A simple command to enter using last-line mode would be :q. This colon followed by a q, and then subsequently an enter key will exit from the program so long as there has been no actual changes to the file. If there have been, and you’d like to abandon the changes you will need to enter :q!.
Insert Mode
Insert mode is the alternative to the default mode, which is “command mode.” Insert mode allows you to insert text. As mentioned earlier, when you first enter vi you will default to command mode. In order to proceed to insert mode from which you can actually add text to that empty buffer of a new file, you must enter the insert mode command.
To do this, while in command mode you press the letter i. At this point, on the last-line the phrase “– INSERT –” will appear at the bottom of the screen.
Returning to Command Mode
After you’ve inserted the text of your choice, you may return to command mode via the esc button.
Interestingly, if you hit the esc button a few times your PC will make a tone to alert you that you’re already in command mode, and that pressing it a few more times doesn’t do any good! Kind of a neat audible feedback you can rely on even from most ssh clients.
Navigating Text in Vim
Basic navigation of text can be done using arrows keys to move up and down or left in right while in command mode. You may also use page up or page down (if you have those keys) to traverse text rapidly. Home or end will take you to either the beginning or end of a line, as in most text editors as well.
Traversing One Word at a Time
If you want to step forward in a text one word at a time you can press the w button (while in command mode). To move backwards one word at a time you just press the b button while in command mode. If you press b while on the first word of a line, then it will take you to the last word at the end of the preceding line.
No Home and End Keys? No Problem.
If you happen to be on a keyboard without home or end keys (if you’re editing from a smartphone, for example), or find them somewhat inconveniently out of reach you can press the $ button while in command mode to jump to the end of the line, and press 0 to jump to the beginning of the line.
To move the cursor to the top of the screen press H (as in high) while in command mode, to move to the middle press M, and to move to the lower part of the screen press L.
To move forward one full screen of text press control and the letter f. To move backward one full screen of text press control and b.
Navigating by Line Numbers in Vi
While in command mode (remember, press the esc button to enter command mode at any time) you can access the “GO command” to take you to any given line number… all you have to do is type in the number of the line you want to jump to followed by the capital letter G. So line 35, for example, you would jump to by typing 35G while in command mode.
A lot of useful tools on linux provide exact line numbers, so if for example, I use “git diff” from shell to see the difference between files staged for a commit, and files in a current working directory this will give me feedback involving exact line numbers. Using these numbers, in even large and confusing files, I can jump to exactly where I need to be using the “go command” in vi.
Deleting Characters on Vim
To delete characters to the right of the cursor while in command mode press x. In many windows text editors this would be roughly the equivalent to pressing the delete key.
To delete characters to the left of the cursor use a capital x. (So while in command mode, hold shift and press x).
Deleting Chunks of Text
If for some reason you happen to know the approximate length of the text chunk you want to delete that happens to be to the right of your cursor, while in command mode, and that number you’d like to delete is 45, then you can type 45x. Likewise, to delete 45 characters to the left of the current cursor then you’d type 45X (with a capital X again, to go to the left of the cursor).
Using the dw command to Delete Words
While in command mode to delete the word you’re currently on (beginning on and going to the right of your cursor) type dw.
Repeating Previous Commands Rapidly
Additionally, if you want to delete multiple words, instead of repeatedly typing dw you can then press .. The ., while in command mode, repeats your previous command as many times as you press it.
To delete from your current cursor position to the beginning of the line you’re currently on, you can press d0. Pressing d$, however, deletes from your current position ot the end of the line.
To delete the entire line you’re currently on, while in command mode, press dd. Yet again, to repeat the dd command, after issuing it once you can simply press the . button to repeat your last entered command.
Also, if you know the exact number of lines you want to delete, for this example we’ll say 15 lines… you could press 15dd, at which point the 15 lines following your current cursor downward would be removed from the buffer.
Read the rest of this entry »
dns, dropbox, iphone, issh, linux, ubuntu, vi, vim, vnc, web design
In Uncategorized on December 4, 2010 at 4:24 am
Now that I’ve got a smartphone I’d like to actually be able to use it to edit websites. I’ve gotten to where I can SSH my main machine (which is running Ubuntu) at home as well as my webhost’s servers to edit my websites. Access to SSH is ubiquitous among most webhost providers’ servers.
iSSH for the iPhone Rules: It Has Alt, Ctrl, Del, and Arrow Keys (Important!)
I’ve got a cool SSH client on my iphone called iSSH — only a few bucks — that will also connect up to my desktop if I want to do something that requires a little more than the bash commandline. (Which, by the way, you can check what shell you’re using at any time by typing echo $bash).
Though, to be honest, using vnc for a view of the desktop tends to be slow and barebones. It’s way faster if I can get a good grasp of doing the things I need to do from the actual commandline since it boils down to only transmitting text. iSSH has the benefit of supporting important characters like the alt key, among other things, which is very useful for certain unix commandline — particularly the text editors, which are primarily used for direct editing of files such as css stylesheets, pdf, html, etc.
Logging Into a Linux Box with Dynamic DNS
My home IP address changes occasionally — though, not often. To make it so I could consistently find my home “box” I signed up for a DynDNS.org address which will allow you to login with yourownaddress.dyndns.org, which an app on your box can update automatically periodically ensuring that if your IP address changes you’re still available through the DynDNS address.
File & Directory Lists: Assessing Folder Size, Listing Files
Recently, when logging into my PC I realized I needed to liberate some space on my dropbox. I had to determine which folders. Ordinarily to list files I use this command: ls -alhF. This shows most of the information you’d ordinarily need, and includes options to make folders stand-out (-F), show normal file sizes (-h), show hidden files beginning with a . such as .htaccess (-a), and -L for longer listing.
However, even this well adapted version of ls I find that when working with the commandline in the unusual circumstance that I need to liberate space rapidly from a dropbox folder with many sub-folders, for example, ls does not show the file size of folders *beneath the current folder*, but instead only of the immediate files within the current directory. In order to see the space amount of space all of the directories take up counting all sub-folders and files it is necessary to use the following: du -h -c .
In this case, the . in du -h -c represents the current directory.
Commandline Text Editors: Vi, Vim, Nano
Though, I’ve been told by friends I really should learn vi or vim if I want to speed things up, I mostly just use nano. I’ll have to memorize some of the whiz-bang tricks for using vi to make it worth the switch. (See the vi cheatsheat) For the time being, however, nano is very intuitive, with it’s on-screen directions for basic commands. Vim, by the way, is just a sort of improved version of vi. For the most part the fundamentals are the same with either one.
Git is Awesome
One cool thing about using an iphone and SSH to edit pages, is almost every webhost, as well as my desktop PC has git on it. Which means that even as I edit the web page, whether I’m logged into my desktop or another server I can keep track of my changes, and if I make an accident which I may be a little more prone to use typing on the iphone’s capacitative screen, I can always roll back safely to the previous version.
This is really important because it eliminates the possibility of disaster and really makes doing editing from a smartphone a more viable option.
Other useful links:
amatuer radio, continuous wave, cw, ham radio, hobby radio, morse code
In Uncategorized on November 30, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Stop trying to visualize the letters. That will always set you up for failure. The CW bands are audio; therefore, if you learn to visualize the code, your brain has to translate between audio and visual representations of the code to understand it. It is inefficient. Learning the code must be purely auditory. Once that’s done, it’s easy enough to translate the code into visual markings, if that’s what you want to do, but you must learn to recognize the sound of the code first.
Use the Koch method, named after German psychologist Ludwig Koch. Start by learning to recognize two Morse characters, at your full target speed. If you want to get your ARRL certificate for 25 WPM, then you start learning code at full 25 WPM speed, but only for two letters. Once you reach 90% proficiency, add a third letter. Work your way up to 90% proficiency again. Repeat until you’ve learned everything.
Here is a free Koch method training application: http://www.g4fon.net/CW%20Trainer.htm
The downside to that application is that you much type what you hear into another document. This limitation is mitigated somewhat if you also use “KochRX”, also listed on that page. You type your copy into it, and it will automatically check for mistakes. (via.)
Also check out:
dreamweaver, git, gitweaver, linux, programming, tortoisegit, ubuntu, version control, windows, wysiwyg
In Uncategorized on November 27, 2010 at 5:02 am
I’ve been doing some reading on version control, and had to make the choice: git… or subversion? Git…. or subversion. After reading subversion was supposedly “easier,” and find it not quite easy at all I decided to make the jump to git. I’m not quite there.. yet. However, gitref.org has been a big help. Read more about git at the wikipedia page if you’re unfamiliar.
Thus far I’ve been learning the commandline elements, which I’m comfortable with because most of the editing I do no longer involves any form of a wysiwyg (like Dreamweaver), and can in fact, be done from the commandline… Which is convenient, because I can access the commandline of my ubuntu desktop via my cell phone.
However, I realize that there may be times in which I may be working with people who I may need to share some form of version control with that do, in fact, use the Windows operating system regularly. (Admission of guilt: I still use Windows on my laptop too, so no false claims of being a total purist myself either.)
So, without further ado, enjoy a few relevant windows & git links:
- TortoiseGit
- GitWeaver – TortoiseGit… but from inside dreamweaver. Extension works with CS/CS2/CS3/CS4/CS5 (I think).
- GitRef.org – Awesome git guide.
- “git checkout” man(ual) page – I found this necessary because gitref didn’t cover checkout as well as some of the other stuff (which it did quite well).
Okay… Back to gitref for me…
advertising, analytics, marketing, seo, social media, socialblade, statistics, video, youtube
In Uncategorized on November 25, 2010 at 12:42 am
SocialBlade just released a freaking AWESOME YouTube tool. Check it:
Do you have a YouTube channel and want to see how it ranks with 15,000+ other channels in the database that are tracked every day? Do you want to easily see how many subscribers you gain hourly or daily? Do you want to see how much you could potentially* make as a partner or how any other YouTuber compares on any of these items as well? If you answered yes to any of those you have come to the right place!
http://socialblade.com/youtube/
In Uncategorized on November 23, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Sometimes, when browsing Reddit, I’ll see some really great commentary that deserves to be mirrored and shared with others. Whether a person wants to abide by this little ruleset, or whether it’s the end-all be-all of rules is another story… but, it was still some interesting dialogue and I thought I’d take a moment to share it:
- You need to act like a 100k+ person. Do you have a fancy suit and a nice watch? No? Get some. I’d recommend a nice ostentatious Tag watch. If you walk into that room and it seems like nobody has ever paid you $100k+ before then I’m sure as hell not going to be the first person to do it.
- You need to convince me that you’re going to add more than $100k+ value to my company. If you’re in a passive, non-revenue driving position like community manager I need you to do that more than ever. You need to give me the impression that you’re going to be a fun guy who can be depended on and someone who is totally across their field.
- To that end you need to show an appreciation of what my business goals are, what my business pressures are, and what you can be doing to help. I want you to tell me about your field in an easy but knowledgable manner and I want you to show an awareness of where your field is going in the next five years. I don’t want to skate to where the puck is, I want to hire someone who can take me to where it’s going.
- I want you to hit me with some impressive numbers. You want to be a community manager? I want you to tell me about a community you’ve grown or built from scratch. I want to know how long these people spent interacting with my brand. I want to know what the ROI was. I want to know what you’d like to do given carte blanche, but for you to show an understanding of how business works.
- What has your previous experience taught you which will be applicable to my business? Because really if I’m interviewing you I’ve already seen your CV and I know that you’re qualified for the job. I just need you to convince me that you’re the kind of person I want to hire, and that you’re able to transfer your knowledge and skills from one silo to another.
- You need to make me feel like I’m the one wearing the trousers, but that if I hired you we could conceivably be friends. Don’t underestimate that.
- Ask some questions about the company and my role. People fucking love to talk about themselves. In an interview I have to sit quietly listening to you for inordinately long periods of time.
(via.)
If you enjoyed this, you might also be interested in checking out:
chicago, megabus, personal, rhonda
In Uncategorized on November 18, 2010 at 5:45 am
Well, Champaigne and then Chicago.
Today’s blog post, instead of being more technical in creative origin will actually be… somewhat meandering, and, indeed, bloggish in nature!
Rhonda has a sciencey-grad-studenty thing going on and instead of paying the premium to catch the flight with her I decided to opt for the extremely economical MegaBus bus ride per my Uncle’s suggestion.
The MegaBus was both affordable and nicer than Greyhound, he said. He was right!
I’m on the top of this doubledecker wi-fi equipped bus in the very front watching the road whiz by and feeling the odd sensation that, being this close to the windshield, I should be driving.
I’ll actually be in Chicago a few hours before Rhonda… I may or may not have orchestrated that so I could wander around the streets aimlessly before she arrives… I admit to nothing!!
Okay, I admit it.
MegaBus also happens to disembark less than a mile from the hotel… while Rhonda has the privilege of an extra thirty minute cab ride.
In Uncategorized on October 11, 2010 at 12:55 am
I got wrapped up in some dialogue on Dave Barger’s (@lalunablanca) facebook wall, and since my comment was of epic length I decided to just go ahead and blog it.
Thom Rigsby asked this:
Do you think the challenge Google faces is that what’s important you you is (ever so slightly) different from what’s important to me about any given topic? To use a grossly over used term, they’ve done a pretty good job of curating the content on the web, now we need *personal* curation to focus it even more.
Thoughts?
My response:
Not sure if that “you” is referring to Dave or myself, but I’ll drop my 0.02 in (hope Dave does too) –
I’m not sure it’s simply a matter of personalization. I think there’s some pretty big fundamental flaws in the way Google derives value in their index in the first place, and to some degree they’ve compensated for the problem by adding more variety: google local, a dab of social media connection results, etc.
But the flaw is ultimately this: ranking is based on an indirect metric of popularity that is easily falsifiable. How many links have you got? Who are they coming from? What’s the anchor text in the link? What’s the title and keyword density of the page giving the link?
Some SEO-types believe you can get “black listed” by getting too many links from the wrong place. There may be some truth to this, but by and large I believe it’s false — otherwise it would be perfectly reasonable to think that the best investment any ethically bankrupt business could make would be to buy a former “adult” domain and backlink every single one of their competitors. In short: weaponized links.
I think on some level Google has perpetuated this myth to their advantage to keep the index clean. A personal friend of mine with a secret SEO alter-ego, David Sandy, made the observation that right before a dramatic rank increase on any given keyword on his website he would usually see his website at least temporarily “punished.” I’ve come to believe that this is an intentional deception on their part to frustrate, and stem the dilution of quality their index experiences due to the fact that, in reality, for the most part, weaponized links and blacklisting doesn’t exist.
To some extent “blacklisting” may really occur in rare circumstances, but I think most of the time this is probably done by human editing rather than automation. (Last I checked you can still “report” domains on some level.)
All of that being said… There’s also a creepy social engineering aspect to search personalization. If a person is repeatedly searching for “heroine” do you deliver to them information on how to inject it, or information on how to treat it? Right now google doesn’t really face that conundrum, because it mostly just runs off of a manipulatable metric. In other words, they don’t decide it… They largely let the links do it, whether or not those have been stacked up in a contrived way to the commercial advantage of the syringe sales startup.
In Uncategorized on September 16, 2010 at 8:00 pm
I recently became a mod in the /r/Freelance Subreddit.
Consequently, I’ve been keeping my eye open for illuminating content that fits that niche area. Robert Dempsey of Life of the Freelancer fame was gracious enough to share with me a few sources that he recommends, so I’ll be watching content from these for a while:
In Uncategorized on August 24, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Amy Vernon, social media guru and top 15 digg user, recently shared via facebook her Affiliate Summit East presentation on creating content for social media. She gives excellent rules of thumb, and demonstrates specific examples in which content matching said rules-of-thumb criteria blew the freak up.
Check it out if you’re interested in learning something:
If this subject interests you, make sure to read my own compilation of examples of infographics utilizing viral strategy effectively.
In Uncategorized on August 16, 2010 at 3:43 pm
I’m currently converting a strictly HTML template into a WordPress theme. In the process, I’ve run across a ton of really useful items that I thought many of you might find useful!
Take a peek. In no particular order:
- WordPress Cheetsheat [pdf] by Ekin Ertac
- Ultimate WordPress Dev Toolbox. This page contains an awesome list of tools worth implementing immediately. A few of my personal favorites from the list are: WP Advanced Code Editor Plugin (for syntax highlighting while creating posts), Preserve Code Formatting Plugin, SQL Executioner Plugin (gives you a MySQL commandline in wp-admin panel), WordPress Console Plugin (allows for testing and instant execution of WordPress php functions!), as well as instructions on theme design and creating a control panel for your theme to place in the wp-admin panel. This post has everything.
- WordPress.org’s Theme Development Page. Really breaks down the nuts and bolts, including what each theme files does etc.
- WordPress.org’s Site Design and Layout page. Surprisingly non-technical, with lots of example code.
- WordPress 2.x Hooks/”Action References” Comprehensive List. Useful for plugin development, as well as the functions.php in theme folders. Used as the $tag argument with the add_action(); function to define when a custom function is run (“hooked”).
- WordPress.org’s Action Reference/”Hook” List
- WordPress.org’s Full List of Template Tags. Used to tell a theme where to put dynamically generated content. Different than the $tags argument specified by add_action.
- WordPress.org’s Function Reference Page. Contains a list of functions with some overlap with the “template tags” page (which, in actuality, is also a list of php functions defined by wordpress.
- WordPress.org’s Description of “The Loop” Used to Retrieve WordPress Posts from the DB. Integral to all templates that display posts.
- WordPress.org’s Description of “Child Themes.” This is the simplest a theme gets, essentially a child theme at bare minimum is only a style.css file in a folder of its own. Useful for creating themes that are only a small variations of a larger, more comprehensive theme.
- Using the “Custom Menu” Functionality Added in WordPress 3.0. This feature allows people to add any link they want to their wordpress menus, and display them using the wp_nav_menu(); function. This function will create an unordered list which will require styling to actually be a “menu.” Also learn how to use custom css classes for extra styling with this feature… here.
- WordPress Codex Adding an Administration Menu into WP-Admin for a Plugin
- Full list of “named” colors. Easier than remembering hex codes, though probably not as widely supported?
- Kuler (by adobe) color scheme sharer. Useful if you don’t have an eye for color patterns, like me.
- ColourLovers.com. Very similar to Kuler but doesn’t require an annoying registration just to get a few hex codes.
- ColorSchemer. A useful tool for finding the exact hex code of obscure colors rapidly. Powerful.
- 0to255. One more color tool… probably my favorite yet because it also gives the “dark” or “light” accents of a given color, which are useful for contrasting borders, link hovers, etc.
- WhatTheHex – A game engineered to get you better at guessing hex color codes!
San Diego
In Uncategorized on August 2, 2010 at 7:33 pm
My fiancee’s grandmother is a little “different,” but never the less an often genuinely sweet older woman. While we were at her home visiting her she began to rave about how her elderly neighbor Bea was her best friend, how they were sisters, in fact. She went on to tell us about how during her recent stint in the hospital her neighbor Bea got on her motorized cart and road up to the bus stop, got on the bus, and came out to visit her and play cards for hours every single day she was there. Bea showed true dedication as a friend, she insisted.
Right after she finishes telling us all of this we hear a knock at the door. She’d forgotten that she invited Bea over just an hour prior. She immediately yells “dont open it!! Im going to sleep!!”
My fiancee, her brother, and myself are standing there, jaws agape, truly aghast. At which point she tries to fake it off and displace the tension on us as she pipes up “Oh, it’s Bea?! WELL LET HER IN!!!!!!!”
Hilarious but true. In her defense, I think she might have actually opened the door even if we weren’t there causing the social pressure. I think she was just speaking every thought that crossed her mind.
analytics, article marketing, backlinking, google, kpmrs, search engine optimization, seo
In Uncategorized on July 24, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Whenever I start doing search engine optimization work on any new website I try my best to get a few different forms of analytics setup (such as Google Analytics, and the awesome KPMRS) and start making good notes early on. This can help me refine and narrow down what techniques yield the most quickly.
Today I checked on a website I had started a drip distribution of spun articles on ~24 days ago and was surprised at the robustness of the results. Not so much that the website is pulling heavy traffic — it’s not. More so that the articles so rapidly helped the site go from getting virtually zero traffic from search engines, to at least getting some minor traffic. The graph really shows the difference! See below:
backlinking, digg, linkbait, reddit, seo, social bookmarking, social media, stumbleupon, traffic
In Uncategorized on July 16, 2010 at 1:12 am
An interesting phenomenon in some of the popular social news aggregators like Reddit, and Digg is the appearance of infographics. Well-designed infographics are like crack to Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon users. (Actually, while StumbleUpon is not my expertise — perhaps this is even more true of StumbleUpon since pictures do well over there). Basically the formula is interesting facts + visually stunning digital art = viral insanity.
To illustrate this point I’m going to share a number of infographics, which also serves to familiarize you in the overall format and common themes.
- A friend of mine put this infographic together – 12 facts about bottled water (PIC) – 2,190 Reddit votes. Bonus: This one has very thorough criticism by the Reddit community, despite being so successful.
- Striking Infographic: Tallest Mountains to Deepest Trench (Gives good sense of Deepwater Horizon drilling depth) – 1,618 Reddit votes. This one got posted and was successful, twice (with the second post getting ~280 votes)
- how to spot a concealed weapon. Infographic – 710 Reddit Votes.
- Which Health Supplements Are Backed by Science?[Infographic] – 1078 Reddit Votes. This one also, interestingly enough, had another interactive, presumably flash based version which I didn’t see on the front page — though it may have also hit. It occurs to me that the links in the comments to the other versions may have also been placed there by someone who knew the content producer.
- 1 Pixel = 1 Million Dollars. [Infographic] – 811 Reddit Votes.
- Music sales on different media types. [Infographic] – 322 Reddit Votes. This one was produced by the New York Times. Cool.
- Europes Web of Debt [Infographic] – 325 Reddit Votes
-
How to predict the weather (Infographic) – 434 Reddit Votes
One of the more salient features that seem to be important that I notice is that data is represented graphically to scale at every opportunity. Another is that on many sites (the smart ones) they offer the opportunity to put the infographic on your own site, so long as you use the code they provide you, which then links to their site — hence, the term linkbait.
Anything with more than 600 votes is like… insane on fire, and almost certainly means it exploded on at least one other major site. Above 1,000 is beyond my knowledge with the exception of rumored sick level of virality (i.e. 100,000+ unique visitors — never seen this level personally). Often times things pertaining to important global events is what can rock these huge numbers. I’ve heard Twitter trending topics is another good place for ideas.
Make sure to also read my post describing the aftermath of a Digg front page hit. … and also check out The Oatmeal — a popular webcomic that launched his career largely via websites like Digg and Reddit. He’s since gone on national TV, published a comic book, and also been hired by Reddit for illustrations.
Update: I ran across this page giving infographic design tips and examples! Check it out!
autoresponders, facebook, social media
In Uncategorized on July 11, 2010 at 2:02 am
My brother (who recently launched his own ecigarette kit business) and I worked together on introducing my parents’ business to facebook and social media. So, he made the following graphic, which we sent to their 14,000 members strong newsletter:
Image We Sent To 14,000 Subscriber Newsletter
The whole graphic was a link to the newly made facebook fan page, which, at this point, had zero fans. The email subject was, aptly, “Budget Billiards is on Facebook!”
The email was sent using Aweber, which, thankfully keeps track of email opens and clicks through! It was set up as an autoresponder at the end of the sequence, which means it actually didn’t hit the entire list, and as a consequence it was only sent to 10,000. I might move it up in the sequence to hit the rest of the list in a few days but here’s the results so far on the click through and open rate:
Woah! What happened to that open rate?
At around the exact same period of time these statistics were gathered from Aweber — ~48 hours after the initial emailing — I also grabbed this snapshot of the number of people who had signed up on the facebook page:
So ~246 clicks with an open rate of 14% looks like 99 people on Facebook.
Not bad for a brand new page. It hasn’t finished bringing in people just yet for two reasons: Several people have joined in the last few hours even now, and also because there’s still another 4,000 or so that haven’t received the email just yet.
However! There were…
Possible Tweaks
In retrospect, the subject and email itself could have had better incentive of some kind for opening. The mere thought of interacting with a company on a new medium may not be enough to get them to even open the email. “We’re on facebook!” … and the recipient thinks: “Go you? Have a cookie?”
Of course, I typed the title. So. Yeah. Go me.
Additionally, the newsletter itself hasn’t been regularly updated. There has been a significant length of time between the creation of those first three autoresponders and this recent forth. Meaning, many of the subscribers currently on there may not have received any correspondence for some time. So, at this point, they may not even recall ever having interacted with the website at all. This is problematic, too, because they may report them for spam thereby hurting deliverability and seriously pissing off Aweber.
Feel free to drop in and become a fan of Budget Billiards on Facebook!
In Uncategorized on July 10, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Rhonda and I (who has spent the day working on her infrared saunas page) were looking at pictures on Reddit, or rather, I was looking at pictures on Reddit and sharing them with her… of other people’s vacations. So, I think, I’m going to start compiling an arbitrary list of places to visit with her, and anyone else that wants to contribute drop a comment!
Most of the choices will be based off of interesting pictures I find online. Not scientific, by any means! And here we go:
Cinque Terre, Italy (Wikipedia)
Fiji (apparently) (Imgur)
firefox, search engine optimization, seo, stumbleupon, wordpress
In Uncategorized on July 5, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Just starting a post to compile useful tools, with a short description of why they’re useful. Most of these were compiled by going on a huge stumbleupon spree using very specific tags (in this case “seo”). I would say this experiment was very successful, and I’ll be using StumbleUpon in this manner in the future.
Scripts, WordPress Plugins, Firefox Plugins, etc.
- “Link Building Pro” (seox.com) – A javascript for automatically inserting a source link with keyword rich anchor text to the clipboard if someone copies ANYTHING from your page. Good for SEO, and encourages people to list you as a source. Discovered from the SEO tag on stumbleupon.
- Cross-linker – WordPress plugin that may no longer be functional, worth a shot however. Turns all instances of a phrase throughout a blog as a link to a pre-defined URL.
- wp db backup – A plugin that automatically backs up a wordpress database.
- Breadcrumb NavXT – A wordpress plugin that adds some nifty navigation/link hierarchy thats useful for SEO and usability.
- Intense Debate – A wordpress plugin that alters the commenting system, allows comment email subscription, reply by email, and comment threading. Increases reader engagement. View the features page here.
- Digg Digg – A wordpress plugin that immediately inserts all the share/bookmarking buttons on your posts and pages, and allows custom formatting options. Very useful. Not restricted to digg as name might imply.
- Better Google Analytics Firefox Plugin – Will take a snap shot of a report and export it to google docs.
- Firefox addon to turn off google personalized search.
- Seoaddons.com – A long list of firefox addons, cms mods, and other SEO-related goodies. My personal favorite found from here was a firefox addon called KGen which shows you the keyword composition of pages you’re viewing so you can scope out the competition.
- Google chrome plugins for SEO
Informational Articles
Keyword Analysis
- Spyfu.com – Keyword that gives approximate traffic to website/keywords, and adwords price range for hits. Pretty cool.
- Google Alerts – A useful tool that allows you to setup emails watching for keywords. Sets up an RSS feed for your use OR sends you daily/weekly emails. Can use advanced google search operators (big key to success there).
- Nichebot.com – A pay membership service that helps with appropriate keyword targetting.
- Keyword Discovery (Trellian) – Another membership site, similar to wordtracker or nichebot, but surprisingly expensive. $200/month.
- Google Keyword Research Tool – Gives approximate amount of monthly trafic, as well as average cost per click rate. In order to see the CPC information click the “Choose columns to display” drop down, and click show all.
- Google Trends – Information on keywords that are hot right now.
Video Sites
- blip.tv – Video hosting website. Allows clickable links to be placed within the videos.
Useful Pay Services
digg, facebook, reddit, social media
In Uncategorized on July 3, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Reddit worships Stephen Colbert, and he recently announced on his show that he uses reddit.com. So yesterday I was on facebook and noticed that @kn0thing (Alexis Ohanian), one of the founders of Reddit, posted this picture to his blog: http://digg.com/d31VjIK
So I submitted Alexis Ohanian’s blog post showing a picture of Stephen Colbert groovin’ on Reddit shwag to digg, posted the link to Alexis Ohanian’s facebook status, and he dugg it and reposted it for others. Awesome.
In Uncategorized on June 30, 2010 at 10:03 pm
There’s plenty of individuals and companies that are very talented in web design.
I thought I’d take a moment and plug a few worth checking out! In no particular order:
- Lunaweb – Owned by, appropriately, @lalunablanca (Dave Barger). These guys make some good looking pages, check out their portfolio here. Check them out on Facebook too.
- Terry L. Griffin – Also available via twitter @TerryGriffin and Linkedin. I actually just recently met Terry while hanging out at the @LaunchMemphis Launchpad. Terry has some great taste, particularly in graphics, and you can observe his fantastic work at his portfolio. You can reach Terry Griffin Design via his email at terry@terrygriffindesign.com or phone at (901)230-2199.
In Uncategorized on June 18, 2010 at 3:11 am
Organizations of a sort:
- @MemphisZombies
- @MemphisZoo
- @OperaMemphis
- @MemphisConnect
- @LaunchMemphis
- @MPACTMemphis
- @PeabodyMemphis
- @thepinkpalace
- @UrbnChild – The Urban Child Institute
- @memphischamber – Greater Memphis Chamber
- @leadershipacad – Leadership Academy
- @FilmMemphis – Film and television commission
Memphis Weather Twitterers:
- @MemphisWx
- @MemphTNWeather
- @Memp_Weather
- …make sure to also check out the Memphis weather page.
Memphis News:
- @myfoxmemphis
- @actionnews5
- @3onyourside
- @ABC24
- @memphisnews – Commercial Appeal
- @wregmemphis
- …and also make sure to check out the Memphis News page.
Memphis People:
- @MayorACWharton
- @ilovememphis
- @ECMathews
- @LoriTurner
- @elizlemmonds
- @LaLunaBlanca
- @Perciavalle
- @unseenthings
- @Durden76
- @marcdiaz
- @reubenrock
- …and many more on this list.
Suggestions for users to add to this list? Mention them in the comments!
chess, comedy, entertainment, events, hackerspace, improv, karaoke, memphis
In Uncategorized on June 17, 2010 at 9:24 pm
New to Memphis, or just decide you need a little more variety in your routine? Well, I’m here to help you out. I’m going to compile a list of fun stuff that’s happening at regular intervals in Memphis, Tennessee.
Read the rest of this entry »
backlinking, forums, google, seo
In Uncategorized on June 17, 2010 at 5:48 pm
I’ve been reading WarriorForum posts and started noticing a common theme for suggestions on how to penetrate the top “Google Places” spots in relevant searches.
Most of them center around three main points:
- Getting them more customer reviews by asking customers for reviews.
- Adding multiple forms of media to them (videos, pictures, etc.)
- Backlinking them with appropriate keyword specific anchor text.
I have not attempted to boost a Google Places ranking before, but I bet that most people do well without getting them thoroughly backlinked — but I bet it couldn’t hurt! All three ideas sound on target, because there really aren’t many more variables to manipulate other than those, to be honest.
By the way, if you’re interested in searching internet marketing forum posts I’ve setup a special google configured to just such a task! We’ll call this the SEO Search Engine. These forums are where I go to feel out new areas of theory for SEO, and I find the best way to navigate them is by using google to search through them!
thesis, thesis openhook, wordpress
In Uncategorized on June 10, 2010 at 1:10 am
The thesis menu is relatively easy to customize. One issue that I ran into with it, however, is listing POSTS in the drop down proves itself relatively difficult by default. In fact, my impression so far is that by default you’d have to manually convert pre-existing posts into pages to get them in the drop down causing you to lose all your comments! Forget that.
I — thankfully! — ran across a really useful post from beingruth.com that makes creating a custom menu relatively simple, so long as you don’t mind editing the most basic of html code, and installing a wordpress plugin called thesis openhook (which you should do anyway, if you’re a thesis theme user).
Thesis Openhook, which I mentioned briefly in my list of the best wordpress plugins, adds a nifty menu to your WordPress administration panel that allows you to drop code into thesis hooks very rapidly — allowing you to completely avoid having to edit any of the themes files manually.
Basically, what you’ll need to do is disable the default menu generated by thesis, and then plug in a replacement using the thesis_hook_before_header hook. All of this can be done in thesis openhook.
Here’s a sample menu code you can modify to suit your tastes (thanks Ruth!)
<ul class="menu">
<li class="tab"><a href="">Item 1</a></li>
<li class="tab"><a href="">Item 2</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="">Item 2, Child 1</a></li>
<li><a href="">Item 2, Child 2</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="tab"><a href="">Item 3</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="">Item 3, Child 1</a></li>
<li><a href="">Item 3, Child 2</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="tab"><a href="">Item 4</a></li>
</ul>
Meanwhile, Inside Thesis Openhook…
If you were to do something silly and not actually edit the sample code you’d end up with something that looked rather much like…
Clearly manually inserting your menu like this using thesis’ hooks means that you can put any links in your menu that you darned well please without dilly dallying with page parent-child relationships, or having to convert your posts into pages (what a pain!). If you’re interested in exploring customizing other aspects of Thesis you’ll probably find the Thesis Hook Map *very useful, so make sure to check that out.
Oh, one last thing… If you’re real new to wordpress and haven’t got a clue how to add plugins like thesis openhook make sure to check out this video.
backlinking, google, seo
In Uncategorized on June 5, 2010 at 6:48 am
Google Pagerank is a score ranging from 0 to 10 given by Google and can be viewed from their toolbar, or my personal favorite, with a Firefox Plugin called Quirk SearchStatus. In addition to showing Google Pagerank Quirk SearchStatus also shows Alexa rank (not that useful) and highlights nofollow links (very useful – see my backlinking tips post). Alternatively, if you’re wanting to do a quick check you can also find out Google Pagerank via this website.
Using Paid Links for PageRank Score Boosting
Some people will sell links from high Google Pagerank pages, and this can boost pagerank, but I would strongly discourage this practice. In my personal experience artificially propping up a websites google pagerank score by what is often a link derived from an otherwise unrelated webpage does not seem to offer significant advantages in search engine results pages (serps). Not only that, but it’s also inviting trouble from Google if you get caught purchasing links.
Google PageRank Score Correlative with Good Serp Listings, but Often Not Causal
That being said, I have noticed pagerank often being correlated with a sites overall health and visibility in search engines. I believe it is actually MORE valuable to have a large number of pages with a decent pagerank than a few with a very large Google Pagerank score and many with a significant drop off.
“Deep-linking” Subpages Is Key
This former configuration appears to ultimately result in more organic search rankings and ultimately traffic as a whole, and is a product of good off-site SEO or backlink building practices. This can be achieved by getting links from a number of means such as: directory submissions of various types, so-called “social bookmarking”, and going to the hot or popular section frequently on popular web2.0 social media destinations with a high pagerank.
The key here is that more than just your website’s homepage is being backlinked, but that there are many subpages, ideally each focused on their own niche keywords which they are each individually well backlinked for. This style of linking reflects what would often occur entirely “organically” or naturally on each new post on a popular site which has visitors that read, value and enjoy the content, and then link to each post as its presented to the public. If you don’t already have a popular enough blog that your visitors give your high quality posts (“linkbait”) automatically, then you can also simulate the same experience for search engines in a true fake it until you make it fashion by ensuring that each and every “linkbait” post you produce are targetted for appropriate keywords and then backlinked. I have several good backlinking rules of thumb that can be used consistently to produce good results, and increase your Google Pagerank, and consequently actual rank in search engine results pages (serps) as well.
Read more about the Google PageRank algorithm on Wikipedia.
In Uncategorized on June 5, 2010 at 2:55 am
Off-site SEO development (or “backlinking”) involves conscientiously applying certain good rules of thumb with consistency.
What is a backlink and why does my website need them?
Backlinking plays a huge role in determining where pages rank in search engines like Google. In addition to affecting your google pagerank — which is a score generated by Google’s rating system based on their proprietary algorithm that may or may not reflect actual ranking quality — backlinks will actually affect your specific position for any given keyword. Ideally backlinks will come from pages that have similar keyword composition to your target keyword or niche, and will contain the keywords that you want your website to rank for, which ideally will also exist in some form in the title.
It’s my opinion that the best links are the ones that come from various readers that find your site via social media means such as facebook or digg, or other high quality websites I’ll get to in a moment.
Where can you get backlinks from?
Other websites, of course! But to be more specific… Great sources of backlinks include:
- Guest blogging with a link back in the biographical section.. This is best when done within your niche. Check out myblogguest.com and other communities dedicated to this.
- High-quality link directories with appropriate categorization, and demonstrating proper indexing in subcategories. Find some of these from one of my personal favorites, VileSilencer.
- Dmoz.org. The king of directories. Period. The catch to this is, generally you MUST provide them with the actual title of your business, and if it doesn’t contain the anchor text keyword you wanted, you’re out of luck.
- HARO – Help A Reporter Out. I’ve not personally gotten links or interviewed from this, but I could see it being useful for the patient. Also check out their twitter.
- Biography links obtained via distribution of articles that provide information of value to the reader, and hosted on high-quality article directories, ezines or blogs. Similar to guestblogging.
- High profile web2.0 sites with a high pagerank. Just a few examples of these: Digg.com, Reddit.com, and a large number of others. Often it is best if your readers submit your content to these sites. Incidentall, Digg and Reddit both have advertising programs if you’d like to take advantage of building a relationship with those kinds of readers. These sites are often targeted by spammers and do a fairly good job of catching overly commercial content with little community value.
- Article directories. These accept content which they display on their site, and in turn give authors backlinks. There’s a very, very large number of these. See this ranked list of the top ones out there.
Awful sources of backlinks include:
- While there may be (debatable) value of certain nofollow links, for all intents and purposes if it is nofollow it is far, far less likely to be valuable for indexing in organic search results. To be able to view which links are nofollow get the Quirk SearchStatus plugin for Firefox. (Also mentioned in my Google Pagerank post).
- Likewise, commenting on unrelated or spammy blogs which only provide a nofollow link is also not advised.
Not following these basic rules of thumb will lead to either making very slow progress/market penetration, or worse being penalized for associating yourself with the wrong crowd to begin with.
So how can you differentiate between a good site to attempt to get a link from, and one to avoid altogether? The “Google pagerank” is one metric that may at least be somewhat correlative of a higher quality website (though, manipulating pagerank may not be that useful).. However, one other simple method is to simple try a few longtail keyword searches copied from the title or one of the first uses of text encapsulated by the <h1> tag or header text of a section of one of the more prominent pages of a website you’re hoping to get a link from. If it’s nowhere to be found, that might be telling.
Often the best way to get links directly related to your niche is to directly submit your posts to sites that will accept them, or even personally write a note to other webmasters, or better still link to content on other sites that have some value. Then wait. Some of them will notice from their statistics showing referrers and do you a good turn. We’ll call this one the karmic approach.
digg, plugins, reddit, social bookmarking, stumbleupon, twitter, wordpress
In Uncategorized on June 4, 2010 at 11:21 pm
The “Digg Effect” has been something of legends among some web development communities. It’s been known to crash websites, and this is what the term actually specifically refers to usually.
Speaking first hand (as of approximately a month ago at the time of this post) I can say with certainty now that a website on shared hosting, and the wp-supercache plugin installed for wordpress (which I mentioned in my top plugins for wordpress post) can survive it. I was very pleased with how wordpress held up under the stress in this arrangement.
Actual Traffic Screenshot (from Google Analytics)
As can be seen in the image just two days before the website had 0 visits, and then shortly after an initial surge which ended up totaling about 34,000 visits over the stretch! Pretty good! Not so impressive is the attention span of the average visit — the traffic only stayed for an average of fourteen seconds. Not very long. What is notable, however, is the traffic does continue for a long number of days after that having a steady slow stream which is far better than baseline was with the very last day totalling about 34 unique visits. This probably had much to do with the enormous number of facebook shares, reblogs, etc., and a general slight SEO/boost in the search engines, which I briefly mentioned in my backlinking tips post.
Viral Side Effects from Digg
This was some of my favorite parts of the traffic. Many of these visits were strictly side effects from people viewing the site from Digg, then immediately sharing it on facebook or twitter. This was made particularly easy for them by intelligent placement of share buttons.
Interesting to note that while Reddit was responsible for more than 20% of the traffic, pulling in over 7,000 visits, you can see the actual vote count on the post from Reddit is relatively low at 33 upvotes. The amount of traffic Reddit delivers is very specific to the actual subreddit submitted to (in this case reddit.com/r/pics). Having seen the amount of traffic just 33 votes can get you on Reddit, if you use a little imagination you might be able to come up with your own numbers on what kind of traffic infographics that get several hundred votes get.
The only two sites that did not pull in a lot of traffic was StumbleUpon and Google Buzz. StumbleUpon is notorious for being unpredictable and in some circumstances dumping far more traffic than even Digg and all of the others.
google, marketing, seo, wordpress split testing plugin
In Uncategorized on May 31, 2010 at 3:24 am
Today I’ve made it one of my goals to tackle using the “Google Website Optimizer” to split test something. Split testing is a way of experimenting of delivering alternative forms of the same page to assess which variant leads to more conversions. What a conversion is can vary: it could be clicking a specific link (even one that leads offsite), or the visitor landing on a thank you page for a product sale/ebook download/newsletter sign-up. The page that is responsible for registering the conversion gets the conversion script.
Choosing a test type: a/b versus multivariate
a/b versus multivariate
So there’s two types of split tests you can perform with website optimizer: A/B or multivariate. The A/B variety involves making up multiple version of the same page and saving them as a separate file. Then, by inserting a code in to the original it will sometimes redirect people to the other, alternative page. Multivariate, however, allows people to stay on the same page but instead uses javascript to switch out certain sections of the post with other variants. Multivariate certainly appears to be more powerful, and for the most part probably the only real tool I’ll need — one article I was reading suggested that they were able to effectively use multivariate exclusively for all of their purposes.
In fact, now several hours into tinkering with Google Website Optimizer I’d even suggest that the a/b split testing is a needless complication, and that multivariate can do everything you could possibly want to accomplish with a/b but better. Save yourself some trouble and stick with multivariate.
I decided a natural candidate to try this tool out would be a newsletter sign-up, in this case MailChimp autoresponders in particular since they offer a limited free trial. So I picked a popular page on my blog and decided I’d put insert points for my variations at the top and bottom of the post. At both the top and bottom I made a few different options available: no form at all, one with a persuasive call to action on the form, a LINK to a form (instead of the form itself, and perhaps a few others. In total I had about 20 different combinations — 5 different twists for the top, and 4 for the bottom. This is a bit excessive, and consequently I set it to aggressively disqualify non-performing ones to thin the stack a little sooner. As a consequence I will setup an additional experiment with fewer variations and easier to achieve goals. Twenty is too many combinations to expect results too rapidly. I will be using the information gleaned from this post to test the successfulness (read:clicks) of various social button styles in the near future. This should serve to speed up my results so I can get a grasp more quickly of the effectiveness of using this process.
Website Optimizer WordPress Plugin
Plugin adds places for code underneath wordpress posts
I was able to plug the appropriate code into the posts using a nifty wordpress plugin I found that’s specifically for adding website optimizer code to wordpress posts and pages. This plugin is very useful, but only if your split test only involves a single page or post per experiment. If your tests involve more pages and you happen to be a Thesis user, thesis openhook may accomplish the task sufficiently. (Unfortunately, I don’t know how you’d go about it with other themes.)
One issue I ran into repeatedly when trying out different code to use was formatting issues with wordpress. I kept noticing extra space between my form and surrounding content, and it turns out the WYSIWYG features was causing this in WordPress. I temporarily turned this off by visiting the users page for this administrative account, and unchecked it. The WordPress post editor is still surprisingly easy to use and effective with this feature off.
In the coming weeks or months (more likely for the newsletter split test) one combination will hopefully show itself to be the clear winner relative to the rest at getting people through that sign-up form and onto the thank you page which has been strapped with the “conversion code.” After this happened I will be able to end the experiment and run a follow up experiment, which allows me to run a new variation which I make on the spot against the winner of the last test. Additionally, data from the last experiment will remain available during the follow up experiment. This setup allows you to continually complete cycles of further refinement on your experiments.
While I didn’t think this was necessary for my current experiment… Anyone interested in google website optimizer might also benefit from these links:
Once you setup your OWN split tests you’ll have some waiting to do before the results roll in so you might as well check out this interesting book on Google Website Optimizer which I ran across on Amazon…
Expect a round 2 post with lessons learned from the results coming soon!
In Uncategorized on May 30, 2010 at 8:14 pm
About the guest blogger: David Fishman is a blogger, SEO strategist and employee at Response Mine Interactive, a mid-size digital marketing agency based in Atlanta, GA that offers services in new customer acquisition. For more information or to request a guest blog post, you can contact him at david.fishman@responsemine.com
Chances are, if you’re involved in the internet marketing arena, you know of an internet guru. He promotes half a dozen products a week, his pages are covered with banner ads to the latest money-snagging SEO tools and of course he’s got a book, promising to reveal all his secrets for the low low price of just $497.97 (The price is going up soon, I promise!)
And as annoying as it all is, you frustratedly acknowledge that it’s probably working. His 200,000 daily visitors ensure that enough people click on those crappy ads or buy those crappy affiliate products so that he probably DOES make 6 figures a year by sitting around and picking his nose. In between taking pictures of his Clickbank checks and posting them to his blog.
This is all well and good and not harmless in and of itself, until that nagging little voice in the back of your head starts going “hmm I wonder if there really IS something to his strategy”.
Then you shell out 500 bucks for a piece of crap eBook about how to do keyword research and how to start an article marketing business. 200 e-pages later, you realize that that this internet guru has really only taught you one thing: how to make money by telling other people how to make money.
Well, you know all those secrets now, so instead of taking them and applying them to some well-targeted niche and opening a niche product website, you decide “being an internet marketing guru is where it’s at!”.
So you head over to Namecheap and grab yourself a bulls**t domain like “supereasymoneymakinginfo.com” and fill it with the exact same crap you just read in your guru’s eBook. You spend days fervently posting on every guru’s posts, trying to attract some of their 200K visitors to your site. You publish your own eBook about how to make money online, you write long professional articles about how to make money online, and you generally try to convince anyone foolish enough to listen to you that your information is worthy payment.
The only problem is, you haven’t made a cent yet. In fact, by my calculations, your money-making endeavors have put you so far in the red, you might never net A SINGLE CENT from your website. How are you qualified to tell others how to make money?
It’s not entirely your fault, of course. You were tricked by an internet guru who told you about how to make money online. Unfortunately, the only thing he knows about how to make money online is to teach other people how to make money online, and all he’ll tell them is to teach other people about how to make money online.
Eventually, we will run out of suckers. The house of cards will come crumbling down and everyone who was associated with the guru will realize that his successful website is due to a stroke of luck 5-10 years ago when he started blogging for fun. A stroke of luck with such low odds, you’re betting off playing the lottery to make money.
This is right around the point where you realize that the people who are making money online the REAL WAY aren’t charging for their information. Indeed, there are many highly successful bloggers and niche marketers that tell their readers EXACTLY how to make money, exactly as they do, FOR FREE. They’re doing it the same way it’s always been done, by selling a product that has value.
If you want to make money online, find a product that has value, find the customer base that values that product, and bring them together. Supply and demand. Basic economics. There’s no magic program, no silver bullet. It’s always going to be supply and demand.
For me, the gurus have nothing I want. My demand is zero. Their products and their promotions are worthless. The information they purport to have is available for free.
The next time you start to feel the little twinges of idol worship for some internet marketing guru, squash them. Celebrate and acknowledge your own achievements and abilities and you can start making your own money.
video
In Uncategorized on May 29, 2010 at 3:27 am
I was just looking up various cameras on the net and ran across this site that had a number of interesting “spy” or disguised cameras! Some of the coolest included a coke can spy camera, a video camera hidden in sunglasses, and a video camera hidden in a baseball cap with a remote control button to begin recording!
Take a look at pictures to a few of them:
Hidden Soda Can Camcorder
Covert Hat Camcorder with Remote
Hidden Camera Neck Tie
Spy Camcorder Sunglasses
Hidden Camera MP3 Player
I think that most of these video cameras are pretty well hidden, don’t you?
database, disqus, facebook, google, plugins, seo, themes, thesis, twitter, wordpress
In Uncategorized on May 26, 2010 at 8:03 pm
This is my list of top wordpress plugins that are absolutely must have, and I generally install on every single blog I setup.
- Subscribe to Comments Reloaded – This plugin is excellent for boosting a blog’s stickiness. It lets readers subscribe to a comment thread.
- wp-db-backup – A plugin that automatically backs up a wordpress database.
- WPTouch – Instantly create a mobile version of your blog.
- Simple Tags –
- Breadcrumb NavXT – A wordpress plugin that adds some nifty navigation/link hierarchy thats useful for SEO and usability.
- WP-Cumulus – Not particularly SEO friendly since it’s flash based, but a truly visually stunning tag cloud.
- Subscribe2- An excellent email subscription plugin allowing people to get digest emails of your blog updates on a daily or weekly basis. See the guide for pictures and the other options I didn’t bother to mention.
- Topsy Retweet Button – This button retweets your post, much like the more common tweetmeme variety. This one, however, adds in a nifty post ranking (top 10k, top 5k, etc.) that is generated by topsy’s specialized algorithm. In all other respects functions identically to the tweetmeme retweet button.
- WP-to-Twitter – This plugin allows you to setup wordpress to tweet either a default or custom tweet to an account of your choice, complete with bit.ly shortening, at post time.
- TwiBadge – This plugin enables a widget that can be dropped onto a sidebar that shows a twitter stream. I like this particular one because it looks really cool, and has a few different color options. There’s a million different plugins that serve this same feature, however.
- Facebook Fan Box – This plugin adds a facebook fan box widget letting you advertise your facebook fanpage with ease.
- Share and Follow – Creates social media buttons both for sharing posts, and to allow users to follow you. Very customizable and has a level of functionality that is the equivalent to a combination of other plugins.
- Google XML Sitemaps – This outputs an xml file to be given to google to increase indexability of the website. Presumably a boon to SEO.
- Contextual Related Posts – This inserts a short bulleted link list of “related posts” to the end of every post. Good for SEO, and giving people more to read about automatically.
- DISQUS Comment System – This plugin integrates the Disqus comment system into the blog. Disqus adds really cool features like avatar import from and posting to facebook, and twitter. Additionally it allows for subscription to posts, and inserts the comments into the actual wordpress database for easy removal if you later decide Disqus isn’t for you.
- EzineArticles Plugin – This allows you to submit EzineArticles directly from your blog, as well as monitor their status from the administrative panel.
- WP Super Cache – This plugin is so important it’s actually automatically included in all wordpress blogs setup at my webhost provider, Dreamhost. It can prevent a website from crashing when suddenly receiving a large number of hits (like those sent from a story going popular on Digg).
In Uncategorized on May 25, 2010 at 2:02 am
This is a guest post by Brandon Connell who’s blog you can check out @ http://www.brandonconnell.com
Back in the days when search engines were wet behind the ears, webmasters were able to make due with tricks such as a quick meta tag tweak. Nowadays, you aren’t likely to get very far, even with a 100% optimized website. There are so many websites out there, and Google is in the business of finding and sorting through them. On top of that, every website is competiting for keywords and keyphrases, so how does one go about getting the magic optimization? One doesn’t.
Today, you need much more than search engine optimization in order to stand out; You need SEM (search engine marketing) as well. When I talk about seo or sem to clients, I often find myself discussing social media marketing too. Your ability to compete relies heavily on your ability to network. Inbound links are a must to generate traffic, and get top 10 results in search engines. On top of that, you really need to focus on building your Alexa traffic rank and your Technorati authority if you plan on having advertisers on your website.
The process starts with seo. You get your spankin’ new website, and now you have to make sure it is 100% optimized and ready to be read by search engine spiders. This involved page naming, meta tags, alt tags, video content, web 2.0 link navigation, content, etc. Without this, you can’t even say that you have done the basics. Once you are optimized, you have to move on because waiting for results is futile (like my nerd Borg reference?).
The next step in the game is blogging. Without a blog, you aren’t adding nearly enough fresh content to your website. If your new website is a blog, then you don’t have to worry. Using a standalone blog is best, and I recommend WordPress as it is very extensive and the functionality cannot be compared to anything out there (don’t try and argue with me about this). When you get your blog, make sure that you write something new and fresh daily, or at least schedule your posts to publish something daily. Utilize the free plugins out there that allow readers to share your articles on social networks and social bookmarking websites. This is a huge part of your marketing process, and you don’t even have to do the marketing!
Sign up for social networks, and import your rss feeds to the ones that allow it. An example would be Facebook and LiveJournal. This will bring in traffic, and help you build those much needed inbound links. On top of that, people who are already using those social networks but haven’t heard of you may end up being regulars on your blog and share the wealth with others. It is important that you actually take part in the activities of these social networks so that you can connect with people and not give off that spam smell.
Bookmark your own articles via social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Current.com, and others. These sites publish newly submitted items for readers to see, and they often bring in traffic to your site.
Release content on article websites, and make it exclusive content. There is no need to republish the same article across multiple publishing sites. This will only dilute the article’s effectiveness. Count it as a very healthy inbound link. Every article you publish establishes you as an expert and drives in that traffic, and inbound links to appreciative readers.
If you haven’t caught on yet, inbound links and outside traffic is the name of the game for the current seo industry. Without it, you have a highly optimized website with zero visitors.
In order to track your efforts, it is important to use tools like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, C-Panel’s Webalizer, C-Panel’s latest visitors, and additional stats tracking plugins within WordPress itself. Using statistics tools is vital to knowing how effective your marketing plan is.
Is your seo upgraded?
animals, cute, photos
In Uncategorized on May 21, 2010 at 6:14 pm
When they’re young they’re so tiny and vulnerable, in stark contrast to their more intimidating, mature form!
Image of a Baby Hippo
And for extra fun: Another creature with extremely vulnerable newborns — the kangaroo!
Cute Baby Kangaroo Image
and one last one… A Baby Aardvark!
Baby Aardvar
I lied… Here’s some more….
Kitten and young puppy
Baby Otters
Baby Pandas, for sure
Tazmanian Freaking Devils -- crowdsourced answer.
Hedgehog Babies
Ewok
![Which Health Supplements Are Backed by Science?[Infographic]](http://i.imgur.com/zzBMc.jpg){kind=link}
![1 Pixel = 1 Million Dollars. [Infographic]](http://i.imgur.com/C5hAo.gif){kind=link}
