S.S. Intrepid

Search Plugin for Open Site Explorer

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:59:00 -0700

Yahoo has announced they are shutting down one of the old and beloved SEO tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, later this year.

Yahoo recommends that webmasters sign up with Bing Webmaster Tools and use that as Yahoo shuts off Site Explorer.

Yahoo makes it sound like that you won’t miss the old Site Explorer but I find it hard to believe that Microsoft will provide detailed link data for competitors. Of course there are plenty of third party tools to get at this data, such as Majestic SEO and SEOmoz but with the loss of Site Explorer, there will likely be no search engine-provided look at your back links.

source: Search Engine Land

I’m a fan of Yahoo Site Explorer and will miss it as a link intelligence tool. Back in 2006, I released a search plugin for Yahoo Site Explorer. With its demise just around the corner, I put together an OpenSearch plugin for Open Site Explorer (SEOmoz). You can install it from the Mycroft website or right here. Enjoy!

How to Create a Facebook Profile Picture That Automatically Crops for the Perfect Thumbnail

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 13:22:32 -0800

Have you ever provided a client with a graphic for their Facebook Profile Picture with the hope that they’d figure out how to crop it properly to create a nicely branded thumbnail? Well, if you create a graphic to the right specs, Facebook’s auto-cropping will create the perfect thumbnail image.

These two blog posts provide some good detail about creating Profile Pictures with thumbnails in mind, but through trial and error I found the information to be out of date:

If you’re creating a Profile Picture in the current maximum size of 180x540, then you can use this template. Simply ensure that your desired imagery for the thumbnail is included in the specified thumbnail area. When your client uploads the image to their Profile or Page, they won’t need to tweak the thumbnail in any way.

How to Post Daily Delicious Links to Tumblr

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:25:26 -0700

Importing a Delicious RSS feed to Tumblr will create a post for every new link you bookmark. To import those links in a single daily post, some extra steps are required.

Delicious > WordPress.com > Tumblr

Delicious Blog Posting

Delicious has an experimental feature called Blog Posting that creates a daily post of your latest bookmarks to your blog. It supports Movable Type, Typepad, Wordpress, and other kinds of blog software. Unfortunately, Tumblr is not one of them, so I’m using WordPress.com as an intermediary.

In Delicious, click Add a new blog posting job.

The out_url for WordPress.com is yourblogsubdomain.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php.

To locate your WordPress.com out_blog_id, click Users > Personal Settings. Look at the source code for the page and locate the Primary Blog drop down code. The option value is your out_blog_id.

<select name="primary_blog"><option value="your_out_blog_id_#" selected="selected">

Now your Delicious links will be published in a daily post to your WordPress.com blog. To publish the daily link posts to Tumblr, simply import your WordPress.com feed to Tumblr (via Customize > Services > Automatically import my… RSS Feed as Links with Summaries.)

Hopefully Delicious will allow for more customization with the Blog Posting feature. In particular, I’d like to be able to use wildcard tags to craft better titles and URLs for the daily posts.

Mobile Plugins for WordPress

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:09:00 -0700

I’m working on setting up a mobile edition of a WordPress site. The no frills approach would be to simply create a separate stylesheet for handheld devices, but I could probably spend days tweaking that. Surely a mobile plugin for WordPress would yield faster and more featured results.

WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it working with WP Super Cache.

WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin that shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device. Despite bundled support for WordPress Mobile Edition in WP Super Cache, I still had problems with compatibility: pages viewed on my Blackberry were getting cached and displayed to desk top users.

Wapple Architect for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to mobilize your blog in minutes. It has lots of great features that got me excited about using it. I requested a dev key but didn’t receive the automated email. However, after a couple of hours I was able to regenerate the dev key from the Wapple dashboard. With Wapple Architect and WP Super Cache both enabled though, I lost all caching. Apparently more cache support is on the way. Also, I learned through trial and error that Wapple Architect and Widon’t aren’t compatible.

WPtouch transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android or BlackBerry touch mobile device. The theme is quite beautiful, but I was turned off by the lack of native support for Blackberry Curve (and when I viewed the plugin author’s website on my Curve I got the desktop version.) At first, I couldn’t find any specific mention about whether or not WPtouch is compatible with WP Super Cache. Glancing through the forums though, I came across this video tutorial: Configuring WPtouch with WP Super Cache.

The WPtouch video provided me with two helpful tips that I used to enable WordPress Mobile Edition alongside WP Super Cache:

Use WP Super Cache in Half On mode only;
Add list of handheld devices to WP Super Cache’s list of Rejected User Agents.

I found this forum thread that suggests that WP Super Cache’s Rejected User Agent parsing is flawed, specifically when the user agent has a space in it. So, I used this list:

MMP 240x320 400X240 AvantGo BlackBerry Blazer Cellphone Danger DoCoMo EudoraWeb Googlebot-Mobile hiptop IEMobile MIDP-2 MMEF20 MOT-V NetFront Newt Nitro Nokia Palm portalmmm Proxinet ProxiNet SHARP-TQ-GX10 SHG-i900 Small SonyEricsson SymbianOS TS21i-10 UP.Browser UP.Link webOS WinWAP iPhone iPod Android BlackBerry9530 webOS Nokia5800

I’d prefer to use the Super Cache mode, but at least this gives me a mobile edition plus caching for desktop users.

Unfortunately, I ran a test of my new mobile edition over at ready.mobi and scored a miserable 2/Bad! Apparently I have more work to do to provide a decent mobile experience.

4 Truths About Social Media That You Don't Want to Forget

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:31:00 -0800

Cleaning off my desk today, I came across a page of notes from last month’s Awareness webinar with David Alston of Radian6, Are you answering the “social phone”? Here are some of my favorite scrawls:

a brand is the sum of all conversations

with traditional media, you’re just renting eyeballs

community = asset

it’s not eyes and ears, it’s hearts and minds

Marketing wisdom indeed. This is the kind of stuff that you put on your fridge with magnets, or on Post-Its around the office. It’s the kind of stuff you don’t want to forget.

CommentLuv Blogs Are Doomed

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:12:00 -0800

Am I the only one who thinks the CommentLuv plugin for WordPress is nothing more than glorified link building with major potential for abuse and spam?

CommentLuv provides additional functionality to the comment system on your WordPress blog. More specifically, CommentLuv automatically fetches a selection of a commentator’s latest blog posts, tweets or diggs that they can choose from to include at the end of their comment as a link. This provides backlinks to the commentator’s content.

I’ve read a lot of blog posts that sing the praises of CommentLuv but I don’t believe it’s a smart plugin for the long haul because of the potential for Google penalties.

Used ethically, CommentLuv is benign and the plugin “has been found to increase comments and the community spirit” on the blogs that use it. By default however, the links added by CommentLuv are nofollow, so unless the CommentLuv-enabled blog is also using the DoFollow plugin, I fail to see how this automated functionality is any more useful than commentators simply posting a (highly relevant) link within their comment—the old fashioned way.

From what I gather, most CommentLuv blogs also use the DoFollow plugin, making all CommentLuv-added links dofollow links, and here’s where the potential for spam soars. I surfed through a ton of CommentLuv-enabled blogs and found the spam to be rampant. All too often, commentators added a link via CommentLuv that was totally unrelated to the post they were commenting on. These commentators weren’t the obvious type of spammers peddling viagra, porn, etc. though. These were bloggers who have simply forgotten (or don’t know) about comment etiquette and the concept of relevance. How does an unrelated link add value to their comment, and in turn the post they are commenting on? It doesn’t. It’s a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” form of endorsement swapping, somewhat reminiscent of reciprocal linking. It’s spam masquerading as “community spirit.”

Used together, CommentLuv and DoFollow prioritize link building over offering relevant commentary first and foremost. Outside the world of all the “bloggers-blogging-for-bloggers” and “make-money-blogging” blogs, these aren’t the kinds of commentators I want.

Obviously, spammers are well acquainted with CommentLuv already: a post last month from the ComLuv blog confirmed that fighting spam is now a “full time job.” (I find this somewhat humorous given the spammy text links on the ComLuv home page. If you serve spam, be prepared to eat it too.)

Technically speaking, the issue I’ve highlighted isn’t CommentLuv’s fault; CommentLuv is simply the vehicle for abuse. Additionally, these lightweight spammers may not even be conscious of their offense, but that becomes your problem when your blog is handing out endorsements in the way of DoFollow links—-endorsements that should be earned, not swapped.

Perhaps this is a myopic view of how Google tinkers with their algorithm, but it seems to me that it would be simple for Google to add a penalty for sites using CommentLuv, since it’s so easy to detect in the code. And this is my prediction: Google will eventually hand out penalties to CommentLuv-enabled blogs. Watch for it.

Disagree with this post? Set me straight then: What am I missing about CommentLuv?

Annotating Items in Google Reader

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:34:00 -0800

While doing some reading/listening for a social media marketing campaign yesterday, I thought to myself:

Wouldn’t it be nice if… Google Reader enabled private notes on items?

Often, I find myself wanting to add comments to items in Reader for later actions but I don’t necessarily want to “Share with note.” Starring is not enough—-I need to be able to remind myself of why I starred the item. Opening items in my browser and then bookmarking and annotating works but it’s too many clicks.

Annotating items is reminiscent of bookmarking. Does anyone still use Google Bookmarks? Maybe it could be integrated into Reader to provide this functionality.

3 Reasons why publishing your Facebook status to Twitter is problematic

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:48:00 -0800

Social media marketing can be very time consuming, and automated tools are welcome in just about any marketer’s toolbox. It’s very crucial however to select the right tasks to automate. Twitter automated DMs are an example of problematic automation. So is publishing your Facebook status updates to Twitter.

Back in August, Facebook announced on their blog the release of a feature that allows administrators of Facebook Pages to publish their Facebook status updates to their Twitter accounts automatically, enabling sharing with as many supporters as possible. Automating communications to your Twitter followers is problematic though because you can’t properly target your messages, you miss out on split testing opportunities, and you fail to engage with your Twitter followers.

Facebook and Twitter audiences are different. As a platform, Facebook has better retention and is more personal. Facebook centers on real-world relationships; friends must be authorized before they have access to your profile. Twitter users on the other hand are often a little more tech savvy. They’re not only following personal friends on Twitter, but they’re also following keywords and hashtags.

Take a close look at your Facebook and Twitter audiences. What differences can you identify?

When you publish your Facebook status to Twitter, you’re blanketing two different audiences with the same message. It’s very likely that your targeting is going to suffer.

If you still want to blast both the Facebook and Twitter landscapes with the same message, why not use this as an opportunity to split test? This could provide you with important information about what kinds of messages and promotions work best with your audiences.

The lack of engagement has to be the single most important issue on this subject though. Twitter is supposed to be about conversations—it’s not just a for broadcasting sales promotions. When I see a Twitter page full of one-way messages pushed from Facebook, I can’t help but think that this person doesn’t really care about engaging me. So, why would I care about engaging with them?

Facebook and Twitter are different animals and deserve distinct strategies. The major benefit of publishing Facebook status updates to Twitter is that it saves time. Therefore, only if saving time outweighs the issues highlighted above should you take advantage of this feature. Still, I wonder: if you don’t have time for Twitter, why are you involved in social media marketing?

One-click bulk follow for Twitter Lists

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:06:00 -0800

The new Twitter Lists feature has probably been rolled out to everyone by now. More than just another social media popularity contest, Twitter Lists reveal topic-based influence, pointing you in the direction of the best people to follow for a given topic.

Lists function slightly differently from what I was expecting. They’re more like groups: tweets made by list members are not displayed in your home feed. Instead they’re grouped together and made accessible via the list link in the sidebar. You can follow a List without actually following its members.

A feature I was hoping for with Twitter Lists was the ability to bulk-follow list members with a single click. While this isn’t available via Twitter, it is through TweepML.

Create a List as usual with Twitter.
Login to TweepML and create a list.
On the resulting page, paste the URL to your Twitter List members page; TweepML will import the users from your list.
Now you can share your TweepML list URL and users can bulk-follow the list members with a single click.

It’s an extra step for you, but fewer for your followers!

TweepML also acts as a directory, but it’s Listorious that will probably emerge as the defacto Twitter Lists directory. Listorious makes it easy to find the best lists of Twitter users on any given topic, and for list creator to publicize their lists, but it doesn’t provide one-click bulk-following like TweepML does.

Like any new Twitter feature that’s rolled out, it’s been fun playing with Lists and I find them mildly useful. I wonder if Twitter Lists will change the way we currently do FollowFriday and other hashtag days? Instead of cramming a bunch of usernames into a 140 character #ff tweet, we could just share a link to a List of worthy Twitter users to follow. (Though I realize this takes half the ego stroke out of #ff!)

Tips for running Twitter contests

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:08:00 -0700

Twitter contests can offer numerous benefits including increased exposure through tweets and retweets (viral), and demonstrating a fun side of your brand (ex. scavenger hunts, uniquely interactive contests.)

Designing an effective Twitter contest is not without its challenges. Consider this: If you’re running a “1st person to answer” type of contest, how will you judge when the tweets actually arrived, by timestamp? How will you track responses and pick a winner?Perhaps the most important element of a Twitter contest is the phrase used for the contest tweet. It needs to be short enough to RT, include a URL, plus include convincing marketing language to entice people to click and enter.

Another element of a successful Twitter contest is being able to keep people interested. Consider running the contest for only a few days to avoid losing momentum (longer if you don’t have a large base of followers to tap into.)

Limit entries or not? Colorburned recommends this, but Heather DePiano wisely points out: “…the more often they tweet your link, the more marketing power it gives you.”

Three important things to remember when running a Twitter contest are to 1) pick a prize that’s highly desirable, 2) establish clear contest rules, and 3) keep it simple!

Twitter Contest Tools:

Tweetaways.com is a service that picks a random winner for your next twitter contest or giveaway.
itweet2win is a permission based contest platform based on twitter APIs.
retweetradar finds trends in the mountains of information retweeted on Twitter.
Tweets Win, enables you to post a contest, gather statistics, and have the winner automatically chosen.
search.twitter.com is the old skool tool for manually tracking contest responses.

Read more about running Twitter contests:

Social media profile organizers

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:03:30 -0700

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but here are the services I checked out when looking to create a central social media profile. Initially, I was only looking for a static profile page, but I ended up wanting some lifestreaming capabilities as well.

DandyID is a nice service that produces a clean-looking profile page, albeit a little flat. I’m not fond of the domain name (and resulting vanity URL.)

FriendsCall.Me has a very nice interface and produces a rich profile page/lifestream. Unfortunately, that layout is killed by the presence of a Google AdSense block. FCM is also currently missing support for TwitPic and BackType.

Google Profile is overly utilitarian, lacking lifestreaming support aside from a photo block you can configure. (I tried importing a TwitPic feed into that space and GP choked.) Presumably, Google will integrate Blogger-style widgets into GP in the future.

Profilactic has been around since ‘06 and provides support for over 190 social sites. Profiles contain links to social sites plus a lifestream, but the design is uninspired. The vanity URLs are too long as well. Friends functionality sets Profilactic apart though. It’s closer to FriendFeed than Google Profile.

In the end, none of these satisfied my exact needs and I wound up downloading Sweetcron, the open source lifestreaming application built on CodeIgniter. It installed easily and was a snap to customize.

Blog migration

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:15:00 -0700

I don’t blog enough to warrant a self-hosted install of WordPress and the regular maintenance and security upgrades that requires. At the same time, I don’t want to lose my place on the web to share web development and SEO related information and resources.

The solution? Tumblr. Without the need to tend to the application, I can focus more on sharing content. Tumblr’s custom domain feature also allows me to integrate this into my website pretty seamlessly, almost like my old WordPress blog. It won’t be the same, but that’s kind of the point. Change is good.

Today I’ll be posting some of the content from my old blog, but only posts that are still relevant. Everything else will just fade away.

A redesign of this space is forthcoming, along with an overhaul of stevensmedia.com.

PHP Anaconda: Amazon AWS 4.0 keyword search script

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:56:00 -0800

UPDATE, 10/24/09: PHP Anaconda has served its purpose but in August of this year Amazon started requiring that all API requests be signed, rendering the Amazon e-commerce script useless. While it no longer works right out of the box, you can try integrating mierendo.com’s Amazon® AWS HMAC signed request script to retain the simplicity and easy deployment of PHP Anaconda.

If you’re looking for a quick and simple implementation of the Amazon Associates Web Service for your website, stick around and learn about how PHP Anaconda came to be.

On a number of my websites, I was using the old Amazon ECS web service to pull in a handful a related products based on a keyword search. I used a hacked up version of the Filzhut.de amazon_functions scripts. When March 31st of this year rolled around however, Amazon shut down the ECS service in favor the newer Associates Web Service (AWS). This was no surprise: Amazon AWS 4.0 was released back in mid-2005 (if memory serves me correctly), though it was a little buggy at first. Flash forward to 2008 and it was clear that I would have to come up with a new way to display Amazon products on my websites.

My needs were straightforward:

As simple as possible: not too many files, called with a simple include statement
Support for both PHP 4 and PHP 5
No dependencies on PEAR packages
Keyword search driven
Random results
Caching

I assumed it would be easy enough to hit up Google and find a prefab PHP microapp out there that would do the trick. Unfortunately, most of the stuff I found was not compatible with AWS 4.0 or was PHP 5 only.

No worries, I thought, I’ll just put Paul Reinheimer’s Professional Web APIs with PHP book to good use. Using his scripts and guidance, I pasted together some code that would satisfy my needs, tested it out, and started to deploy it. Then on March 31, I noticed none of it was working! As it turns out, the code in Paul’s book, published in July 2006—after Amazon AWS 4.0 had been released—was not AWS 4.0 compatible! After some forehead slapping, I leafed through the book and noticed that it didn’t say anywhere what version of Amazon’s web service the code was compatible with. Given Amazon’s multiple offerings, that seemed like an oversight. I visited Paul’s website, the Wrox forums, the author’s notes on Amazon.com, but nowhere was there any mention of AWS 4.0-compatible code available. It was starting to look like I’d have to put a little more elbow grease into this.

I’m not one to reinvent the wheel though, so I hit up my bookshelf again and grabbed some code from Brett O’Connor’s del.icio.us Mashups that would handle making the REST request to Amazon and process the results using the Snoopy library. Next, I pasted in Simon Willison’s simple Instant Caching with PHP code for the caching mechanism. I was still having trouble making sense of the very deeply nested arrays in Amazon’s response however, despite this using this handy function to make the output more manageable. In the end, I got some help from Christian Kamau, who created the code to output those tricky arrays into clean lists and randomize the output.

The result is PHP Anaconda, a simple Amazon AWS keyword search script that accesses the web service via REST and returns either three random results or the first ten results. There’s nothing mind blowing here, it just does the job I needed it to, and since I’m sure I’m not the only one who wants this functionality, I’ve made it available for download:

There’s a lot you can do with this code if you’re willing to dig a little deeper. For those adventures I recommend the Amazon AWS Developer Guide. Have fun navigating the Rio Amazon, and watch out for piranhas.

Get help with WordPress and French locale dates and times

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:44:00 -0700

Have you ever had to develop a WordPress-powered website in a language other than English?

WordPress has the capability to serve your pages in the language of your choice. The WordPress community has already translated it into many languages, and there are themes, translation files, and support also available in many other languages.

With a client project I’m just about to roll out, I had to present all the content in Canadian French but keep the administrative interface in English. The translation tasks mostly fell into the realms of content, interface and layout graphics, making it a fairly smooth process. However, I did come across one small hiccup regarding post meta data dates and times, and wanted to document and share the solutions here.

In particular, I needed to translate this meta data:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 5:37 pm and is filed under [category].

into French:

Cette entrée a été inscrite le mardi, 17 juin 2008 à 17 h 37 et elle est classée sous [category].

It’s simple enough to translate text in single.php, but what about the date and time which are generated using the WordPress function, the_time()?

First, the file wp-includes/locale.php needs to be translated to include the French names of the days of the week and months. Using the FR .po file available from the WordPress Subversion repository, I edited the locale file. This can be downloaded here, and is intended to be used with WordPress version 2.0.0.11.

Next, you’ll need to edit the two instances of the time function in single.php:

<?php the_time('l, j F, Y') ?>

<?php the_time('G \h i') ?>

Along with the translated text, you should now have this in your single.php template:

Cette entrée a été inscrite le <?php the_time('l, j F, Y') ?> à <?php the_time('G \h i') ?> et elle est classée sous <?php the_category(', ') ?>.

And there you have it!

tweeternet: An introduction to Twitter

Thu, 15 May 2008 14:22:00 -0700

Need to explain Twitter to a client, colleague, or friend?

tweeternet is a one page Twitter primer that I just put online in an effort to streamline my own efforts at describing the social networking and microblogging service.

I’ve linked to several blog posts about Twitter that I feel are best-of-breed. If you think I’ve missed one, just tweet me. Similarly, I’m pulling in my del.icio.us links tagged with “twitter” to provide a small directory of Twitter tools, applications and resources. If you’d like to suggest an addition to this, add me to your del.icio.us network and share the link.

How to promote your business with YouTube

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:16:00 -0800

YouTube is a video sharing community website owned by Google that offers a unique (and free) avenue to promote your business on the web. Sure, you can put videos on your own website without using YouTube, but then you aren’t tapping into the huge and ever-growing YouTube community, which can virally spread the word about your products and services, ultimately driving traffic back to your website–if you know how to put this powerful tool to work for you.

Your Account

Not surprisingly, the first step to using YouTube is getting yourself a YouTube account. Note that you can use your Google account as your login if you already have one. Once you have an account, click “Account” at the top of the page to see what kinds of preferences you can setup, and to explore the tools available to you.

Your Profile

On the account page, there is a link for Personal Profile. Be sure to add some profile information to this form so that your users can “get to know you”. (Don’t forget that updates to your profile and channel customization can take up to 6 hrs to show up.)

Your Videos

Uploading Videos

YouTube has a comprehensive help section on how to upload videos. If you are uploading videos that are 100M or larger, you will need to use the YouTube Uploader. This is software that is installed on your computer. For additional information, please see this help topic. Be patient while your video is uploading–it can take 20 minutes to upload a 100+MB video! Also, your video will not appear immediately in your account.

Tagging and Categorizing

Tagging and categorizing your videos is an important step that’s often rushed, but if done right, will yield benefits you probably don’t want to miss out on. For ideas, check out popular videos in your niche and see how they have been tagged and categorized. Don’t overlook the fact that choosing less popular categories might reduce the competition your videos have, and may help launch your videos to the most popular or most viewed in your category. With tagging, add as many relevant keywords as you can, and again, see if you can match them to other existing video content. This will help gain additional exposure for your video content.

Your Playlists

See this documentation to learn about Playlists and how to create them. Playlists can contain your own videos and/or the videos of others. Either way, putting playlists together is easy: select clips from the My Videos section of your account and add them to a new playlist, or visit the video you are interested in and click “save to favorites”.

The benefit of playlists lies in providing videos that are organized into a niche-targeted context enabling your users to find related content quickly, without having to resort to using YouTube search. In providing this service, you can boost your web traffic without ever even recording a single video of your own! Look for quality videos with a low view count, and you’ll help users find content that hasn’t already “done the rounds”.

YouTube Email and Bulletins

It’s not too common for YouTube users to simply stumble across your channel. To help get the word out, YouTube provides you with a number of self-promotion tools, including email and bulletins. With YouTube email, you can reach out to other users who share similar interests and let them know about your videos, or send them thoughts about theirs. Bulletins allow you to create short messages that appear on your channel page, or leave messages on other users’ channel pages. Share information about your status, newest videos or anything else that you’d like to broadcast to the YouTube community.

Video Responses

Just like with blogs, you can leave comments on videos posted by others, but with YouTube you can also leave video responses. These can be chosen from your existing videos, or you can create new videos in response to another user’s video. Just remember to keep your response relevant, choose your target video well (preferably a high traffic video related to your niche), and respond early to get your video response noticed by others.

YouTube Groups

YouTube groups provide a way for users to discuss and share videos. You can browse groups by category, or create your own group from the YouTube Groups page. Contributing to YouTube groups provides you with a targeted audience to promote your videos to, hopefully attracting users to visit and subscribe to your channel. Joining an existing group provides you with a base of users to interact with immediately, while creating your own group requires you to wait for users to join before you have an audience to promote your work to.

Active Sharing

With Active Sharing enabled, your username and a link to your channel will be displayed next to videos you are watching for 30 minutes, and all of the videos you watch will be added to a “Videos I’m Watching” section in your Profile. This allows others users to discover you and your videos (and perhaps also your website), based on the fact that you share interests and watch the same videos.

YouTube and the YouTube community offers an effective method of online promotion, either through your own video content or the videos of other YouTube users. By putting YouTube’s community features to work for you and your business, you have the chance to develop a new and viable source of customer acquisition.

Easy lifestreaming with SimplePie

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:35:00 -0800

This easy lifestreaming script is handy but it lacks rich media features such as embedded video. If you want something less utilitarian with more wow factor, check out what you can do with Sweetcron.

Lifestreaming became a popular buzzword in 2007 and doesn’t show signs of letting up. While there are several hosted services that allow you to easily create a lifestream (as well as a myriad of WordPress plugins), you might prefer a quick and easy self-hosted solution (like Jeremy Keith’s). SimplePie’s got you covered!

With just two short PHP files, a SimplePie installation, and a little RSS icon to pretty things up, you can create your own stand-alone lifestream, tying together all the content you’re publishing on the web into a single source, enabling your favorite contacts (or anyone else who happens to stumble across your stream) to stalk your every online move.

Install SimplePie. If you have any trouble with this step, check out their excellent documentation.
Next, download these files. (These files are a bleshing of Nat Welch’s source and Webmaster-Source.com’s merge code.) Change the extension on the .phps files to .php.
Open the files up in your favorite editor and configure as needed (they are commented so it should be fairly self-explanatory.)
Upload the .php files and the RSS icon to your web server.
Make it your own: add some CSS.
Presto chango, you’re lifestreaming!

Here’s my lifestream.

If you’d like to setup a lifestream blog, archiving everything in a database, check out Yongfook’s how-to, using the Tumblr API and the CodeIgniter framework.

I’d like to include my Amazon.ca Wish List to my lifestream, but had some trouble getting that up and running. (Why doesn’t Amazon provide Wish List RSS files?) I found a few sources that helped me generate an RSS feed of my Wish List:

However, I haven’t yet figured out how to pull the DateAdded into the feed, making it kind of lame in a lifestream. Andrea Mignolo has it going on though. I’ll have to dig a little deeper into Amazon’s Web Services documentation to get that sorted.

For more about lifestreaming, see lifestreamblog.com.

Book review: Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:03:00 -0800

Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP is another fine Programmer to Programmer book from Wrox Press, authored by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie. As a hybrid designer/developer/marketer, I had been waiting for a book just like this for some time, and the authors deliver with concise information, expert advice and plenty of ready-to-use code that helps put your new knowledge into action immediately.

After the introductory chapter (which helps you get a development environment setup), the book launches with a primer in search engine marketing. Experienced SEMs will already have this knowledge but it’s worth reading, even if it’s just to make sure that you are “on the same page” with the SEO lingo that Sirovich and Darie use throughout the rest of the book. The chapter concludes with a good sampling of available SEO tools, browser plugins, forums, blogs and other resources that are worth taking a look at.

SE-Friendly URLs, redirection and HTTP status codes, duplicate content and SE-friendly code are covered in the following chapters, each providing clear examples of pitfalls to avoid, complimented by code for best practices solutions.

Social media marketing is a newer form of SEO, and while this book doesn’t go into extreme depth on the subject (which is deep enough to warrant dedicated texts of its own), it does provide a solid foundation that will help you get up to speed on web feeds and social bookmarking for the purposes of promotion.

Chapter 8 covers black hat SEO—not how to do it, but how to protect against it. This thick chapter will help you learn about common black hat techniques, security best practices, dealing with comment spam, sanitizing input and CAPTCHA solutions, and how to protect your hard work from dreaded redirect attacks.

This book arrived in my hands at just the right time: I needed to create dynamic sitemaps for a static website I was optimizing. In chapter 9, the reader learns about traditional versus search engine sitemaps, and the Google, Yahoo! and the sitemaps.org sitemap standards. This isn’t a thick chapter, but it contains the complete code for dynamically creating both Google and Yahoo! sitemaps, which happened to be just what I had been looking for!

The concept of link bait isn’t new: create engaging, informative content and people will link to your website. With the growth of social networking however, the tools of the trade, and the nature of the game itself, have shifted somewhat. Social bookmarking (see chapter 7) via del.icio.us and digg.com is one way to promote content. Other types of link bait include informational hooks, news story hooks, humorous and fun hooks, and “evil” or controversial hooks.

The next section teaches the fundamentals of cloaking, geo-targeting, and IP delivery. Cloaking has earned a pretty nasty rap, and Google confirms that sites that use the technique may be removed from their index. There are however legitimate uses of cloaking—intent and implementation are key. Examples of legitimate use include:

Pushing subscription-based content to spiders
Disabling URL-based session handling for spiders

Chapter 13 covers foreign language SEO. The very thought of having to optimize a website for multiple languages can cause hair loss without the right knowledge at your disposal. But fear not though: Sirovich and Darie point the reader in the right direction with the basic tips and tricks of the trade.

The first part of the book closes with chapter 13, where you’ll learn to deal with various technical issues related to SEO, including: unreliable hosting, cross-linking, SEO-aware split testing (I was pleased to see this covered) and broken links.

The second part of the book includes a case study on e-commerce SEO, a complete site clinic that uses the techniques learned in the book to optimize a website, a how-to chapter on creating an SEO-friendly WordPress website, and finally, an appendix providing a foundation in regular expressions.

Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP is a book that filled an enormous void at the time of its release, and I strongly recommend it for PHP developers* who need to address search engine marketing in their projects (these days, who doesn’t?), as well as code-savvy marketers who would like to take their technical knowledge to the next level. I commend the authors for the obvious efforts they invested in this work, and am grateful to have such a complete guide to the technical side of SEO at my disposal.

*There is also an ASP-flavored version of this book.

Book review: Defensive Design for the Web

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:01:00 -0800

Any self-respective web developer is well-aware of the achievements of 37signals, creators of Basecamp and the extremely popular Ruby on Rails development framework. Having already read and thoroughly enjoyed their web application development manifesto, Getting Real, I was excited to get my hands on 37signalers Matthew Linderman’s and Jason Fried’s 2004 book on web usability, Defensive Design for the Web: How to Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms and Other Crisis Points. I’m also a big fan of New Riders books, so the bar was set high.

While this book contains excellent information about user-friendly design, I was disappointed when I finished it. Physically, the book itself is pleasing enough, clocking in at 236 pages with a nice, easy-to-flip-through binding, but Defensive Design for the Web could have been released as a PDF of about a quarter of the size. From an environmental point of view, the book is a bit of a waste of paper: many pages have content that only fills the top third of the page. (I guess this is good if you’re someone who likes to write notes right on the pages of your books.) Defensive Design for the Web is extremely repetitive, with an excessive number of real-world examples that simply repeat what the guidelines already stated.

The guidelines presented in this book (forty in all) are dead-on, and designers and developers should certainly heed Linderman’s and Fried’s sound advice, but if you can get your hands on the complete table of contents, I can’t see a real reason to buy this book. Seriously, just go to Amazon.com, print out the table of contents, and you have all you need to brush up on your web usability skills.

Book review: Pro Drupal Development

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:59:00 -0800

Apress is another publisher that has been putting out some excellent books focused on open source technologies in recent years. Last year’s much needed entry to the world of Drupal development is no exception. Pro Drupal Development by John K. VanDyk and Matt Westgate covers the popular open source content management framework with a depth that no previous book attempted, and is an essential guide for intermediate and advanced Drupal developers alike. At the time of this writing, I have yet to get through the entire book cover to cover. Simply put, I haven’t had the opportunity to put to use some of the more advanced concepts in my own work yet. I have the feeling that this will be one of those books in my development library that gets dog eared from frequent referencing.

In some ways, I found the ordering of chapters to be unorthodox. I don’t know that this takes anything away from the book overall, it was just presented in a way I didn’t expect. The book begins with a short chapter about how Drupal works, then dives right into custom module development in chapter 2. I might have preferred to review information about the menu system, users, taxonomy, etc. before getting into module development, that way I would have been primed on these most critical Drupal concepts before taking the dive. However, another way to look at this is that the introduction on module development prepares the reader for the later chapters where these critical concepts are tied to module development. I see the logic.

Chapter by chapter, Pro Drupal Development provides a solid foundation in all things Drupal: the menu system, databases, users, nodes, the theme system (an excellent chapter), blocks, the form API, manipulating user input via the filter system, searching and indexing content, working with files, taxonomy, caching and sessions. There’s also a useful chapter on using the newly integrated jQuery library, an excellent section on localization, and a chapter on sending and receiving XML-RPC calls. Finally, the book closes out with sections on security and best practices (these are a must for all Drupalers), optimizing Drupal for performance, and how to create your own installation profiles. The appendixes provide a handy database table reference and additional resources.

Before Pro Drupal Development hit the shelves, there were no advanced Drupal books available (though I did enjoy Drupal - Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites by David Mercer). For the developer who wanted to get under the hood and develop in depth, the most useful resources available were the Handbooks and support forums. Pro Drupal Development filled an enormous void and is an extremely useful guide book for Drupal 5. Drupal developers would be wise to access the authors’ deep expertise to leverage this powerful content management framework.

UPDATE, 02/01/08: Michael J. Ross penned a fine review of this book that’s worth checking out (via Slashdot.)