THE GREAT WALL OF OAKLAND

On the first Friday night of each month, a large wall of an Oakland office complex morphs into an outdoor theater. A projector on a nearby rooftop shows videos a hundred feet tall on the exterior of a building at the corner of West Grand and Valley Street. The spectators — most of whom also attend the monthly event called Art Murmur in nearby galleries — stand or perch on the curb to watch the show.

via The Great Wall – NYTimes.com.

SORA AND THE CLOUD

goPano

I see complains about fuzzy videos and an explanation that teaches alot about how it works.

But my main issue with this is that it wont shoot stills – that might be more fun for me to play with actually. I think it’s got a wider angle of view than the Kogeto. It’s also slightly bulky – at least compared with the competition…

kogeto

Kogeto

I  was at first surprised to find a competitor. Very similar but physically smaller and i think that’s a big plus.

• their kickstarter comments
• they say “The 4s is going to vastly improve the quality of Dot videos due to the 1080p resolution so we’re really excited”
• The Dot let’s you view the full 360 in their player – i like that better than dragging around a video to see the whole thing. But you can’t see the screen while sooting and you can’t see as much vertically (gopano sees 90 degrees)

other comparisons:

• http://www.johnmason.me
• http://www.iphoneproguide.com
• http://answers.yahoo.com

BubbleScope

wait, there is a 3rd option: BubbleScope
360x120degrees in a package that looks smaller than goPano. But you can’t buy it yet.

Web-based tools

Google AdWords Keyword Tool
This tool helps you evaluate the usefulness of keywords and helps you find related terms for your WordPress based site.  Just input a series of search terms and the Keyword tool tells you how many people searched for those terms, and  related terms, (globally and locally).  Sort by keyword, number of searches or competition. searches measures Competition measures how many people are actively marketing on that term through Google Adwords. It gives you an idea of how difficult it might be to rank for that particular term. Try out the  exact match and phrase match features also, as it can increase / decrease the search volume dramatically.

Google Insights for Search
Rank keywords against one another and lets you see their performance over time: Some search terms are more useful to your business than others, and search term values can change over time.  In terms of SEO marketing,  it can be a great strategy to rank for a keyword which is starting a meteoric rise – but only if it’s relevant to your content of course.

For example, if you are the only cell phone accessory store with content about the iPhone the week the iPhone is announced, and your site is equipped to close sales, you’ll likely draw a lot of traffic and sell a lot of product.

read about more Tools To Improve Your Online Marketing Campaign by Yoast

WordPress SEO Plugins

• WordPress SEO Plugin: this revolutionary plugin has a variety of tools to help you analyse your pages and posts as you build them. The powerful SEO tools are right there in the editor and they include many educational tips as well.
• Redirection: This one lets you add redirections manually – from an old url to a new one. Avoiding broken links and properly setting up 301 redirects is important to keeping your SEO rank when changing your site’s link structure.
• Permalink Finder: This clenver plugin automatically redirects your old urls to your new ones based on keywords in the url. For the right situations this could save you many hours of rebuilding links manually.

Hanging out with Matt at the end of WordCampSF 2011

One framework to rule them…

One idea I had recently (and discussed with Ryan of WPCandy and others at WordCampsf2011) was to create a WordPress theme framework review site. I’d like to present this idea here and see if anyone is interested in pursuing this idea with me.

Some final notes on WordCamp

• When you need custom bits of data to be attached to a post or any custom content type:  magic fields or Custom field template
• Both feature duplicatable fields – so users can add more and more of the stuff they want.
• Ajax Force Comment Preview: also helps prevents spam
• Every month, THINKademic will develop a free brochure type web site for a deserving non profit that is trying do something good in the world.
• User management: Role Scoper , Extended Super Admin and Members plugins (managing roles and users)
• Basetrack theme: posts are geotagged and displayed on a timeline. alot of “wow” features in this one and a powerful social message behind its development.
• 2011 (the theme and I suppose also the year itself) surprised me with its responsive web design
• Slides on WordPress as a CMS with great plugin tips:
• Pressfs: a file system for WordPress
• Document revisions (beta)
• Interesting test case: globalshakespeares.org

Lots of great conversations and presentations. Here’s some notes and links…

2 apps for converting a WordPress site to a mobile app. Curiously, they both seem to come from Israeli startups. There’s an entrepreneurial flavor to the fallafel I suppose.

• wiziapp.com: not free and iOS only
• uppsite.com: Free and connects to Anroid as well as iOS. Windows coming soon.

A new plugin to show popular posts via Google Analytics

• pastebin.com/diff.php?i=ZhCja8Ga
• should be coming soon to WordPress repository
• Claims to work faster than existing plugins. I found this existing one: google-analytics-popular-posts but I hvae not tested it yet.

Themes for WPEC (comparative analytics coming soon): storefrontthemes.com

Project management and related tech tools: assembla.com

Tech support management: supportdetails.com

Site uptime test: downforeveryoneorjustme.com  (isup.me)
Note bad but I use  pingdom.com and www.site24x7.com

CSS framework: compass-style.org

CSS3 animations and other eye candy: iestelle.com/wordcampsf

Neat “zoomable” presentations: prezi.com

Tools for nonprofits:

• This is amazing: cure.org/curekids
  it connects “clients” of the nonprofit with donors. It’s just what a client of mine was recently asking for. It’s all built in WordPress but is not a pplugin that is ready to be easily put on other sites.
• And the same developers just releassed this great plugin: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/personal-fundraiser it’s about letting fundraisers make a personal page where they can attract and track donors from their personal circle. looks really great, can’t wait to try it. It is a plugin, ready to install although still kinda in beta.
• These guys soo great wed development for nonprofits: exygy.com
• I learned what a “Benefit” Corp is: wikipedia.org/wiki/B_corporation

If you want a fully integrated solution then a WordPress plugin might be a great option. You get all the power of a WordPress site without having to tack on the store with a separate software package (like Magento).

WP e-Commerce (WPEC)
This group is doing something great by offering the basic code as a free plugin. You’ll need to pay to have a fully featured store but by offering the free option they are sticking closer to the spirit of Open Source software and, most importantly, the plugin will get more community testing and input so that’s a good recipe to grow strong over time. I have

I have used WP e-Commerce for 3 projects. It’s far from perfect. There are bugs and the code is rapidly evolving so that takes time to keep up with. But to me it seems to be the platform with the most momentum behind it.

Some useful features I’ve come across:

• Different pricing (and stock control) for variations of one product
• Tax options are strong but do not support tax variations by city. That is a big issue here in California. there is a new paid subscription option to solve this issue offered by TaxNOW but it’s really expensive at $.50 per transaction – that is what they charge to calculate tax for you.
• there are 18 free plugins and more paid ones out there.
• Lots of shipping integration options
• Lots of gateway connection options

Other Options: 

Gravity Forms
If you just need an order form but not a whole shopping cart then this is a really simple solution that can easily accept and manipulate other kinds of non-purchase information since it’s got all the easy-to-use form building elements right there. You can even make ‘buy now” buttons that will prepopulate the form form other pages (although not like a cart where it will remember those settings from one page reload to the next). Gravity forms can do fancy things like connect to a MailChimp account so users can automatically sign up for a mailing list. Or even turn a purchase into a post – that would take lots of work to do in a real ecommerce system. This solution is limited to a fairly small number of products although if you can design a compact form or split the form into pages (a built in feature) then “small” could mean hundreds of products. Payment gets finalized at PayPal.

Examples of how I’ve used this tool:

• A simple Gravity Forms order form/store
• A donation form that allows for extra information to be captured

Shopp
Seems to be the main competition to WPEC. There is no free version. I see an equal number of complaints about bugs but I have never used it.

PHPurchase
This one lets you enter some products and easily add a “Buy Now” button you can put on any page. It doesn’t have category-based layouts so it’s not really for managing a full store. There are a few plugins out there that will automatically generate PayPal buttons also.

Jigo
This is a new offering. These folks were tired of working with Shopp so made their own system. Seems feature rich for a 1.0 version but I have no experience with it.

Some lists to learn more

• 10 best WordPress Plugin for ecommerce via Gaea
• Another top 10 list via speckboy
• 5 nicely detailed reviews via sixrevisions.com
• Compariosn notes on WP ecommerce plugins

I’ve had a couple clients recently who came to me with the issue of how to deal with negative reviews on Yelp. Yelp is such a powerful resource for consumers and can be a really great tool to build your business. It’s brought me alot of work and I appreciate that.

But negative reviews suck. We are are talking about small businesses—real people with real feelings who have alot of “skin” in this game.

I’ll briefly touch on 3 important points in dealing with negative reviews:

First important point is that no one trusts all positive reviews. So it’s ok to have some negative reviews in there.

Second important point to remember is that negative reviews won’t last forever. Reviews (both good and bad ones) filter on and off a Yelp business profile based on a secret formula. The formula is all about assuring  the authenticity of the reviewer and authenticity is what Yelp has built its entire business around. No one knows exactly what that formula is but here are some factors…

Yelp Filter Triggers – for removing reviews. Some of these are from my direct observations of my account (today I’m at 19 reviews with 22 filtered) and my clients accounts and other are from reading other postings

• Status of reviewer – The biggest reason a review will get filtered is if the reviewer is a new Yelp user and doesn’t have an account that has been around for a while. Related factors:
• Number of reviews (You don’t have to be an “Elite” with 1000s of reviews but that gives a sense of the scale)
• Timing of reviews (If there are 5 at once that is not as authentic as 1 per month for 5 months)
• Number of friends/followers
• Profile photo (did the reviewer upload a photo of themselves)
• Status of review — If a review is marked as “useful”, “funny” or “cool” by other authentic users it may stick around for longer.
• Time-distribution-based – If a business recently got a negative review and then starts quickly receiving positive reviews, these reviews may be filtered
• Location-based – A user’s location can trigger a filter. For example, if a business is located in San Francisco and received reviews from New York it is possible Yelp will filter this review
• Frequency – Yelp Businesses that receive small quantities of reviews and then have a quick increase in positive reviews may trigger the filter

It’s never easy to read negative things about your business on the Internet.

Third important point(s): some advice from the Official Yelp blog on how to respond when it happens:

• Step 1: Stay Calm. Give yourself a cooling down period.
• Step 2. Respond Privately If you haven’t already, unlock your business listing on Yelp.
• Optional Step 3. Respond Publicly

via Yelp Official Blog: Tactics for Responding to Online Critics.

The cache will still serve the old ip address of the site, even if the DNS server already has the new ip address in its configuration. To override the cache, and request the latest information with the authoritive DNS server, you can flush the DNS cache.It will quickly rebuild itself

To flush (or empty/delete) the DNS cache, open a Terminal window and enter the following command: sudo dscacheutil -flushdns

note that “sudo dscacheutil -flushdns” does not work.

the old mac os command was
sudo lookupd -flushcache

but you will get a response of:
sudo: lookupd: command not found
with any Tiger OS (or older).

In Leopard, dscacheutil replaces most of lookupd‘s functionality. It allows you to do many things: flush or view caches, view Directory Service configuration information, and evaluate cache statistics.

WPMU has an interesting article about how using Apple Mail (aka mail.app) can slow down your site since it keeps a connection to the server open all the time. It might be a hint at why my iPhone mail app only works on 3g and not on WiFi but that problem is still not resolved.

I’ve had lots of problems with Go Daddy and WordPress and I wonder if this issue of concurrent processes is part of that problem.

I called Go Daddy and found they offer 50-300 processes depending on what kind of account you have. Much better than the numbers mentioned in that article: “1&1 shared hosting packages allow for 16 simultaneous processes. BlueHost limits IMAP connections to 20 at a time. Site5 only allows for 5 processes at one time”

Go Daddy limit on concurrent processes (or “concurrent connections” aka “web processes”)

Linux Economy: 50 connections
Linux Deluxe: 100 connections
Linux Premium/Unlimited/Ultimate: 200 connections
Windows limits are similar

4GH (ALSO CALLED “GRID”) accounts allow many more connections. This number varies, but is at the following minimum amounts:

Linux 4GH limits:
Linux 4GH Economy: 150 connections or more
Linux 4GH Deluxe: 300 connections or more
Linux 4GH Premium/Unlimited/Ultimate: 600 connections or more

more details here

BTW I got a nice description of what their new 4gh “grid” hosting is about: it reads data from multiple sources at once kind of like a “Strip” configured RAID array. Also referred to as “multi source reading and redundancy”

Leave a comment and tell me your experience with Go Daddy in general, Go Daddy and WordPress and concurrent connections (vs concurrent processes vs  simultaneous processes).  If you are an elephant lover (or an elephant?) you should know about Go Daddy’s Bob Parsons infamous elephant hunt. It made me want to switch and I was recommended to try elephant-friendly namecheap. so far I like them – they have far fewer marketing annoyances when buying and managing domains.

also: a great post about GoDaddy and WordPress security