Websitetology

Yousendit.com is a great service- they give you a free trial- but then they want you to pay. It allows you to send files to people that are too large for e-mail, and when you don’t want to set up and manage an FTP site.

Just discovered a free site that does the same thing, senduit.com it’s supposed to be ad supported, but, I just stared at a blank screen. It gives you options on how long you want your files to be shared until deleted and allows you to distribute the same file to as many people at once.

It’s a pain checking out every follower, but, generally, if no one is following them, or they don’t have tweets to match their followers, they’re a spammer.

Just followed a friend who was moving his account- and got this verification tweet: Joe X ” uses TrueTwit validation service. Please follow this link to validate your profile. ”

Heading over to TrueTwit there is this:

Twitter spam is a drag. What if you could know for sure that your followers are truly human, and not some cyborg? TrueTwit is designed to help you: Verify people from robots Avoid Twitter spam Save time managing your followersBy signing up now for free, all of your new followers will get a validation notice via direct message. If they too are TrueTwit users or pass the CAPTCHA test, you get an email indicating they are a TrueTwit validated human!

via TrueTwit Sign Up.

Granted a Captcha isn’t a guarantee it’s not a robot or spammer, but, it’s an extra obstacle.

Now to go check on all my new followers.

Websitetology  is a seminar about using the web for successfully making new business connections. We teach how the web works, how search works, and how to use open source content management systems like WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal to help you make a successful home on the web.

Conventional advertising and branding is suffering from the effects of over-exposure and fragmentation. The key is to find a community and build relationships. This story of how a small winery employed social media to grow their business is a perfect example of what we teach:

Stormhoek was a tiny South African winery when the company began working with UK blogger Hugh MacLeod to develop a social media strategy. MacLeod started working with Stormhoek in May of 2005, and by the end of the year, the winery’s sales had doubled. Besides dipping its toes in the blogging waters, in 2005, Stormhoek also launched an interesting campaign where it gave away 100 free bottles of wine to 100 bloggers in the UK, Ireland, and France. The bloggers were under no obligation to write about the wine or Stormhoek, but many did both, and the company’s awareness among bloggers skyrocketed.

In 2006, Stormhoek expanded on the ‘give wine away to bloggers’ idea, by setting up ‘Geek Dinners’, where bloggers around the United States throw their own parties, with Stormhoek providing the wine for free. This idea just further raised Stormhoek’s presence in the blogosphere.

So what’s the end result from all this for Stormhoek? Hugh MacLeod, speaking at last year’s South by Southwest festival, stated that before Stormhoek started blogging and involving bloggers in its marketing efforts, that the winery sold around 40,000 cases of wine a year. When MacLeod spoke at SXSW in March of 2007, he stated that the company was at that point selling 40,000 cases of wine a WEEK.

via So Does Blogging Really Work? Here’s the Proof. – Search Engine Guide Blog.

Although we still believe in empowering clients to do their own blogging (who knows your business better than you) we can help get you started.

We try to keep tabs on those who have taken the Seminar- mostly by reading their feeds. Some really get it- and make it work for them.

Take the case of a copywriter who used to work for a local ad agency, but left for Charleston SC:

Honestly, I am not a salesman, so I am not the best resource. I only know what has worked for me. And “worked” is a subjective, relative term. See if this makes any sense…

Blogging has elevated me from number 60 (or so) on Google for “copywriter+charleston+sc” to top-3 in six months. Correction: it took about a month to get there, where I have remained.

My blog’s back pages contain my value statement, resume, references and writing samples. It’s all in one location, and easier to access than tearing open the envelope, reading my cover letter, popping in my CDROM, etc.

I like to think that my blog posts make some kind of impression. They give a glimpse of my personality (lucky you.) And they can be a kind of soft sell. For instance, rehashing some humorous incident that happened to me while producing an industrial video in Germany is a subtle way to remind you that I have produced internationally… if that’s your bag, baby.

Finally, most importantly, by the time a client calls or emails, he or she has read the value statement, resume, etc., and is very nearly sold. They are calling to “talk about upcoming projects and look for the right fit.”

via Blogging about Blogging (oh, joy.) « A Lively Exchange.

Of course, his former employer, still has no clue about web 2.0. Their site has no search box, no RSS feed and makes noise when you land on it.

Too bad many of the people searching for them- end up on this page too: Agencies that aren’t The Next Wave. Learn the tricks of using the web to make up for your lack of sales skills, or to enhance the ones you have. Sign up for the seminar.

As professional web developers of both the Joomla! and Wordpress Content Management Systems (CMS) we come across many different surveys and comparisons of the two. Water and Stone poses the question “What is the most popular open source content management system?” and actually uses statistics to provide an unbiased report.

If you’ve ever wondered if Wordpress and Joomla! truly are the best pieces of software that we could be using, then take a look at this survey. In the first few pages you’ll read “that three systems have come to dominate the present market: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.” But don’t just take that as proof, look at some of the stats that are given throughout the 51 page paper.

Search Engine Visibility

The Next Wave’s core competency compared to other web hosting and design firms in the Dayton area is that we focus on getting our clients on the front page of Google. Sure, you can have a great looking website, but if no one can see it what’s the point? So, one of the first thing we looked for in this survey was any information on search engine ranking for Wordpress and Joomla!.

Joomla! comes out on top with more than 1 million inbound searched links at the time of the survey, with Wordpress right behind with 403,000. Notice phpnuke and MediaWiki with more than a million links as well, however these are “black hat” search engine optimization techniques that were implemented to create and keep inbound links permanent to skew search.

Do a search for “Content Management System”, and Joomla! comes up second in Google. A search for “Blog Software” (or a variant of that) and Wordpress is right up there on top. This just shows that the websites that provide these two are strong in search engine optimization and Google loves to read from them. If you have a website powered by them, Google will love your site too (provided you continually update).

You can also see what people are searching for on Google, and the results that turn up for those searches. The top two systems? You guessed it, Wordpress and Joomla! with a huge margin of difference from the third CMS on the list Drupal.

Ratings

OpenSourceCMS.com has a list of all of these and allows visitors to rate and comment on the various ones that are in use. For ratings, Wordpress comes out on top with a rating of 4.4 out of 5. Joomla!’s up there too, with 4.2 out of 5.

Brand Strategy

“The open source CMS market is maturing and, with the increase in competition, the competitive landscape is changing. The historical leaders have been supplanted by new names. The data collected in this portion of the survey shows that in almost every way the mind share in today’s market is dominated by just three brands: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.”

Wordpress and Joomla! are at the top of everything in this survey. Their branding is superb and still growing, their ranks and ratings are high above the rest of the pack, and both have HUGE community groups that help to make the two CMS’s more stable, more flexible, and even better for web development than other systems. The next time someone says that Joomla! and Wordpress aren’t good for web design, tell them otherwise. The facts are there, leading edge developers realize these systemsenable amazing work for clients in at minimum- half the time as building a website from scratch.

Read this, read it again if you want to. Print it out and pass it to your co-workers or show it to your boss so that he/she will let you start using Wordpress or Joomla!. And if you’re interested in learning more about the systems, come to our next Websitetology seminar and we’ll give you the crash course that will set your business on top.

Download: Open Source CMS Survey

We just found the new WordPress statistics plugin Cystats, and have fallen in love with it. This is a powerful little tool that we found  searching through the 83  statistics plugins listed in the Wordpress directory. It’s so powerful that it even has stuff that Google Web Analytics doesn’t have- and displays it all, in your dashboard to help you analyze your Wordpress site.

Cystats plugin is easy to install and set up;upload the files to your wp-content/plugins directory, and then activate it in the backend. You’ll immediately be able to see the most commented and visited pages and posts, as well as start recording visitor trending, searchbot visits, search strings, top referrers and more. There’s even a way to see the screen resolution and web browser that your visitors are using to view your website (mobile views should be going up too).

You can download Cystats by clicking the link below. Here’s a screenshot :

Cystats Plugin Download

We tell people to check their own site by going to Google and searching for site:yourdomainname.tld to see how many pages Google sees and how it sees them. Now, Wired shows us how to go scan all the Craigslist sites for a certain item- using the same trick.

Go to Google, type in site:craigslist.com “search term” and you’ll find ever P150 Vespa across the country.

If you’re a Craigslist addict, you know the Holy Grail of the online classified site would be a way to search the entire site at the same time.

For whatever reason, Craigslist does not want you to do this. When the question of searching the whole site at once is posed to Craigslist discussion forums, the response is always “you can’t,” and the civility of responses goes downhill from there. It should be noted that searching the entire site goes against the culture that Craigslist attempts to engender. It was never meant to be an alternative to Ebay, a global online forum for trade, but rather a community-based forum for trade. Do not be surprised if your communications with people outside your area are ignored or you are treated as a scam artist.

So if you want to buy a car, find a job or trade antique fly fishing lures, and you’re not having luck in your specific locale, you would search the San Francisco Bay Area region landing page, then New York, Great Britain or any other city, state, or country where cars, jobs and fly fishing lures are found.

read the step-by-step by following this link: Search Every Craigslist Site at Once – Wired How-To Wiki

You can also find out how many places your competitor has your product name on their site using the same logic site:yourcompetitionsurl.tld “your product name” etc. etc.

Just another cool Google tool.

There are no guaranteed safe solutions for website security, other than constant vigilance. A recently announced exploit of some versions of the Flash player can cause problems.

MacNN | Symantec: Flash exploit in widespread use
Hundreds of thousands of webpages have been affected by a vulnerability in Adobe’s Flash Player, says security vendor Symantec. Since at least Monday, approximately 220,000 pages have been been hacked to add redirection scripts, which send Flash users to some 57 servers that attempt to deliver malware, including botnet code and apps that steal World of WarCraft identities and passwords. Only Flash Player versions 9.0.124.0 and 9.0.115.0 appear to be at risk; the attack also seems to be directed primarily at Windows, says Symantec, although problems may yet arise on other operating systems (including Mac OS X) unless Adobe can close the exploit.

Sites victimized by the redirection scripts are generally said to be those belonging to small towns, businesses and non-profit organizations, which may have been chosen through a tool that uses Google to trawl for pages with security holes. If an attack fails, Symantec notes that it may still crash a user’s browser.

Adobe has yet to confirm or deny the security issue. “We are working with Symantec to investigate the potential SWF vulnerability,” an official statement reads, “and will have an update once we get more information.”

Make sure you have backups of your data, and be aware, it’s affecting the latest version of the Flash player, so now may not be the best time to update.

Adobe hasn’t officially responded.

Due to the fact that Worpress decided to get rid of the “Press It” function until 2.6, I have recently had the need to post the code that will allow you to use the “Press It” feature on your own.

As it turns out, it is supposedly very hard to post code in Wordpress. If you just copy and paste your code in, Wordpress will turn your quote marks into “Smart Quotes”. They look pretty, but do not work with code. So I set about finding a plugin or some other method to correct this.

Everywhere I looked people were recommending different methods. From using plugins and custom fields, to manually editing, and to online converters. I tried them all, but they either didn’t display the code correctly, or messed up my formatting site wide.

So here is my solution, it may have been suggested before, but I sure couldn’t find it with hours of searching and testing. Simply insert this code into your style sheet:

pre {
width: 95%;
overflow: auto;
padding: 10px;
margin: 1em auto;
font-family: "Courier New", Courier, mono;
background-color: #ddd;
color: #555;
border: 1px dotted #999;
}

Now, when you paste your code into the Wordpress editor, highlight it, and select the preformatted option from the “Format” drop down menu.

The pre tag will preserve your quote marks, spacing, indenting, and other elements.

And thats all you have to do. Your code will work when copied and pasted from the browser. If you have a long line of code, instead of running over everything, this will make a horizontal scroll bar to contain it.

Note: Wordpress may apply separate <pre> tags to each line when you select it from the drop-down menu. (I have no idea why, it defeats the whole purpose of <pre> tags) To get around this, either manually add <pre> and </pre> before and after the text under the HTML tab in the edit screen, or apply the formatting with the code all as one line, and add the line breaks in afterward.

Oh Noooooo…..

My favorite function in WordPress seems to be missing from the admin pages of Word Press 2.5 rc1 (and from 2.5 after it’s been released) Might be because they claim to have removed javascript from the admin- as well as the AJAX functionality. It’s due to return in 2.6 (but, my students can’t wait!).

So, what to do? If you are upgrading- your old Word Press press it bookmark will still work. If you are doing a new install, you’ll have to make a book mark with the following as the url:

javascript:if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Safari') >= 0){Q=getSelection();}else{Q=document.selection?document.selection.createRange().text:document.getSelection();}location.href='http://www.YOURDOMAIN.tld/wp-admin/post-new.php?text='+encodeURIComponent(Q)+'&popupurl='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&popuptitle='+encodeURIComponent(document.title);

Make sure you copy the whole thing- and replace YOURDOMAIN.tld (top level domain) with your own domain name. ie. websitetology.com for this site.

Step by step on how to make a Pressit bookmark for Wordpress 2.5

1) use Firefox.

2) Bookmark any page (I prefer to save this in the “Bookmark Toolbar Folder” so it’s easily available

3) Go to “Organize Bookmarks” under “Bookmarks” and find the bookmark you just made

4) Right click on the bookmark and choose “Properties”

5) Change the name to “Press-it name of your site”

6) Copy the above code to the location field

7) Make sure you have your URL instead of “www.YOURDOMAIN.tld” ie www.websitetology.com for this site

Save the bookmark- and now- you are free to use the wonderful pressit- like this tutorial outlines.

Hope this helps- and that the code doesn’t get mangled by WordPress. works for you.