Website Design | Search Optimization | Social Media | Benzing Technologies

My Top 5 eCommerce Platforms

Rusty — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:19:44 +0000

It’s definitly been a while since I posted my last blog post and the reason is because of eCommerce. Online Shopping Carts have been running wild in my mind and a few recent clients have been keeping me busy designing and developing them.

In this post I’ll go over the different eCommerce platforms I have used and will give my opinions on ease of use and management. These are simply my persoal choices for clients when they come to me wanting to sell something online. So let’s jump right in.

1. VirtueMart – I found VirtueMart to be very simple to use and maintain, plus it’s FREE. Importing and exporting products can be a problem since that’s an additional plugin which I find tiedous and that isnt very user friendly. As far as setup goes I found it easy to configure and add taxes, shipping details, payment processors. Good templates can be hard to find and alot of the better ones are for sale. There are tons of addons, plugins, etc. The only downfall is you need “Joomla” which isn’t as easy to manage, for all of you non-joomla users, Joomla is a content management system to control your website. But if you have a Joomla website already getting VirtueMart installed and working isn’t a daunting experience.

Themes: Download Themes
Download: Dowload

2. Prestashop – Prestashop is an Open Source all in one eCommerce solution from the get go. Providing a very basic Content Management System built in, Newsletters, and Ajax functionality to add Products and Categories. The import and export abilities function pretty well (in the newer versions) and I was able to get categories and products added to the cart immeditely. Prestashop The only downfall to this software solution is the lack of free modules and themes, I also feel the admin interface still reminds me of osCommerce which I hate.

Themes: Download Themes
Download: Download

5. Magento – You can’t mention eCommerce without supporting Magento. Magento is a full Open Source eCommerce solution. It is very well coded and recommeded for advanced users only. This is in my top five because of the quality they put into the programming and design of the shopping cart software. The downfall to it is the complexity in configuration and adjustment. It’s totally different than any of the other shopping carts I’ve worked with. Adding products and categories isnt too hard but when you want to change themes or move blocks around it can be quite tricky. Magento features builtin SEO, Content Management, Mobile Browsing, International Support and more.

Themes: Download Themes
Download: Download

4. Zen-Cart – Zen-Cart is an Open Source shopping cart system that has been around for a while now since 2003. Zen-Cart offers similar features to Prestashop however it is even more basic and the interface reminds me of osCommerce. Besides that their import/export feature is a good one and I was able to get a basic store up in minutes with minimal effort. They list a huge database of websites using Zen-Cart for every category, so it’s easy to find a site similar to what your looking to create.

Themes: Download Themes
Download: Download

5. Drupal e-Commerce – For those of you who are not familiar with Drupal it is a Open Source Content Management System similar to Joomla in features but with a totally different interface. This is the shopping cart system I have the least experience in but it still goes down as my top 5 because of it’s versility and resources that are provided for it. Drupal has a huge community following them with a huge database of plugins and themes to follow suit. Drupal eCommerce is similar to other CMS eCommerce plugins it integates easily. I was able to setup a basic cart with categories and products in around 30-45 minutes. It’s simple to configure and easy to manage I did not test the import and export functions.

Themes: Download Themes
Download: Download

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Laptop College

WordPress 3.0 Countdown to New Features

Rusty — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 18:03:42 +0000

With the recent release candidate of WordPress 3.0, the latest version in the most popular blogging platform online, the blogging team readies the new version with some seriously cool features. WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

WordPress 3.0 RC is their latest version of blogging software that has already changed the typography world. So…what’s an RC? An RC comes after beta and before the final launch. It means we think we’ve got everything done: all features finished, all bugs squashed, and all potential issues addressed. But, then, with over 20 million people using WordPress with a wide variety of configurations and hosting setups, it’s entirely possible that they’ve missed something.

So what’s new? well…

1. Wordpress Merged with WordPress-MU
For all of you who don’t know what WordPress MU is. It’s a multi-user edition of WordPress. But wait…doesn’t WordPress already come with multi-user support? sort of. It does allow for multiple users but not multiple installations with multiple users which is what WordPress MU does very well. In the upcoming 3.0 release, WordPress MU will be merged into the WordPress Core. So, from now on, you will be able to run more than one site/blog from a single installation of WordPress.

2. Choose your own Username/Password
This is a feature that I have always wanted from WordPress. From version 3.0, whenever you install WordPress, you will be able to choose your own username and password. You will no longer have to accept “admin” for the username and a randomly generated password.

3. Custom Post Types
Until now, you could only add posts or pages to your WordPress blog. This feature will give you power to create content of any type that you want. For example, you can have Portfolio listings, Products, Catalogs, Library etc. This feature is not going to replace categories or Tags. You will still be able to use categories. Custom Post Types will allow a different way of sorting/displaying your content.

4. Better Menu Management
Another well thought out improvement is better menu management. The new menu system will have a drag and drop functionality that will combine Pages, Categories, and Links. It will also allow the ability of re-ordering, along with sub-menus, and hiding specific Pages or Categories from the menu altogether.

5. Custom Background Image Support
In Version 3.0, you will be able to manage your background image for the themes. You will be allowed to upload a background image and change its settings (positioning, repeat, attachment). I know for sure this will save some time for the theme designers.

6. A New Default Theme called 2010
Well this is a blessing and I am glad to say good riddance to the existing WordPress default theme. WordPress 3.0 will be packed with a brand new default theme called 2010. This theme will include Custom header, Custom Background, Clean Design, Multiple Widget Areas, Cascading Menus and a lot more. Overall, it will be a good base to build on for custom themes.

7. Custom Author Templates
Now you can create specific templates for every author of your blog. For example, you will be able to create a author-benzing.php or author-123.php, which will be called via the WordPress Template Hierarchy in connection to the author with their nicknames benzing or ID 123. Now it will be easy for an author to mark his/her own post or entry with his/her signature.

If you are interested in testing the newest version head on over to www.WordPress.org and download the Release Candidate and see for yourself. You can also view all of the new features here at their codex website.

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.COM & .NET Domain Name Price Increases

Rusty — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:43:04 +0000

Starting July 1st, 2010 Verisign®, the registry for .COM and .NET domain extensions, will increase prices. The fees are charged to domain registrars such as GoDaddy and Tucows, which typically handle domain registration for customers.

ICANN has an agreement that VeriSign is allowed to raise their .COM fees by up to 7% per year. This added $27 million dollars per year to their bottom line. VeriSign took advantage of this in the first two years of its contract, raising .COM registration from $6.00 to $6.86. It was assumed that VeriSign would increase its prices every year to maximize profits, but it did not in 2009.

So now in 2010 they are taking action and rasing fees. The registration fee for .COM’s will increase from $6.86 to $7.34 and .NET’s from $4.23 to $4.65. The current wholesale price of .com domains is $7.04 including an 18 cent ICANN fee (some registrars pay a 20 cent ICANN fee). The new price will be $7.52 including the ICANN fee (or $7.54 for registrars on the 20 cent ICANN fee structure).

This increase will affect domainers with large portfolios, more than any other businesses or consumers. Verisign® stock is currently at 28.89 and has been on the incline since Jun 2009.

So make sure you buy your domains names before the price hike even though it isnt a huge increase expect to see more increases over the years to come. If you want to purchase domain names at an affordable rate Benzing Technologies is offering .COM’s for $7.49 and .NET’s for $6.14.

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Your Indoor Environment

Rusty — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:13:15 +0000

your indoor environment, llc. provides safe, healthy products that enhance the quality of life both at home and in the work place. Our team of experienced indoor environmental specialists and consultants enjoy international business relations in the commercial industry.

5 Ways To Drive Traffic Through Social Media

Rusty — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:04:36 +0000

It’s been a while since I released a blog post and have been tinkering with ways to drive more traffic to our client websites through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Social websites are major tools in today’s online realm so knowing how you can utilize and track them becomes very important. This blog post will go over 5 ways you can drive traffic through social media.

So let’s start with some questions…Do you know how your social media activities are driving offline sales? How many customers came into your store or called for more information after viewing your social media profiles? Will the time they spend interacting on Facebook and Twitter affect your sales? more than likely Yes.

With that said what are ways we can improve our sales through social media? Let’s identify some:

1. Place Your Phone Number on All Social Media Accounts
Now I know what your thinking…I already have my phone on my social sites duh! well yes you do but not your Google Voice number. Not sure what a Google Voice number is? read more here. Currently Google Voice is invite only but you can find invites online or through eBay for $1. I have 1 invite left so first come first serve. Use Google Voice to track incoming calls from your social media profiles if your business has a more consultative sales process or you run a conversational blog or use social networks to generate leads. A natural extension is to place your Google phone number on all of your social media presences and on each blog page for the customers who find you via search. The best part about Google Voice is the ability to have a separate number that forwards to your main number. This also lets you track the number of inbound calls you receive from your Google Voice dashboard.

2. Promote Offline Events on Social Media
This is another no brainier and you are probably already doing this. But how you are doing it matters. Facebook has an especially robust function for creating events and promoting them. Facebook events allow you to post pictures and event location information, while also inviting your fan base to participate. You also can message all attendees to remind them about the event or give special instructions. Creating a Facebook event page then gives you a landing page that will direct visitors to your blog and Twitter followers too. Make sure you take advantage of all the aspects of the tools provided. Twitter also allows for events using hashtags or establishing Tweetups.

3. Offer Coupons Exclusive to Social Media Channels
This is an easy way to generate fans and followers. People love getting things for free or winning things. Not only will this drive more traffic online but also offline at your place of business. Make specific offers through each social media channel you use, like 10% off a purchase if you print a coupon from Facebook, or “buy one get one free” if you use a code sent out in a Tweet. Keep a spreadsheet of the different offers and the response rate, and you’ll begin to generate really useful data about the best way to optimize your marketing campaigns for each channel. Incentives are a great way to build the size of your social media communities. Also, giving fans and followers an incentive to follow you shows the importance you place on social media outreach.

4. Host a Tweet Up or Facebook Party
Creating fun meet ups for your online followers can be a great way to introduce the atmosphere of your business. Charity events and cocktail hours work especially well for drawing attendees to TweetUps. The best way to cement interactions online is to meet your contacts face to face, and there is no better way to do this than to host a party. While you probably won’t bring 1,000+ members to your event like Ford did in the largest TweetUp ever, TweetUps let you form more personal relationships with your local followers. Here’s a great in-depth resource on how to host a successful TweetUp.

5. Connect Social Media and Email Campaigns
This is hugely important and helps retain the interest in your products or service. Many businesses have established email lists they use to stay in touch with customers. Drive visitors on your social media accounts to sign up for your email list to receive more information about your business. Getting social media visitors on your email list can connect you with people you might not otherwise reach through social media. This also keeps things consistent.

So with these 5 tips you can start creating more exposure to your place of business. Now the best way to close the loop between social media and offline action is to promote your social media channels offline as well—adding another way for you to stay in touch with your customers in between purchases or research. I hope these suggestions help you start thinking about ways to convert your social media fans and followers into loyal customers. There are many other suggestions but you will have to wait for our next blog post to find out.

April Levi Designs

Rusty — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:23:40 +0000

April Levi Designs was created by a close nit family with 45 years of experience in the seamstress business. April Levi Designs is a family run and operated business, everything we design is done in house. All materials used are hand picked so that every dress we create is one of a kind and that means each one is unique. We take into consideration every detail when creating one of our dresses. Every dress is handmade. We strive to create quality products, as you can see, on our descriptions you will notice words like piping, underneath lining, and many more detailed descriptions. We take our time and give all of our attention to each and every individual dress we design, so we can provide our customers with the finest quality and craftsmanship possible.

Key Tags Online

Rusty — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 04:06:16 +0000

Keytags Online makes plastic key tags that are the perfect alternative to conventional cards. Custom printed in vibrant full color, your company logo will be highly visible on your customer’s key rings. We are your Key Tag Printer!

Key tags can include a barcode, sequential numbering or other variable data for membership tracking purposes and can be formatted to work with your existing software or POS system. The imprint surface is a water resistant polyester core with a protective, durable, high gloss over-laminate. KeyTags Online offers many unique keytag shapes and sizes or request a custom shape for your individual needs.

The Pewter Mug

Rusty — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:12:00 +0000

The Pewter Mug needed a presence to bring back the old time brand of the landmark Naples restaurant. We decided to set them up on WordPress so they could easily update their events and gallery. We couldn’t be happier with the final design and functionality of the website.

What is The Pewter Mug?
It took hard work and ‘hometown’ passion to save a North Naples landmark like the Pewter Mug Restaurant. We proudly welcome back all the great friends that remember ‘the Mug’ as one of Southwest Florida’s legendary restaurants. Always known for its great steaks, seafood and salad bar, we assure a return to the tradition of quality, service and value, along with a new commitment to making it fun to get out for a little music, dancing and entertainment.

The Keys Bar & Grille

Rusty — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 06:26:04 +0000

Where the intoxicating thrill of Duval Street meets the heart-pounding rhythm of dynamic dueling pianos. Nestled in beautiful Naples, Florida, The Keys is your neighborhood destination for a truly unique and memorable dining and entertainment experience. Walk in the doors and walk into paradise – take pleasure in casual grub done island style, watch renowned entertainers tickle the ivories, and become a star when you join the fun and sing along piano-side. Sip a drink, enjoy the party, and stay where the fun never ends.

Rushin Realty

Rusty — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 02:48:57 +0000

Rushin Realty needed a presence online and we were there to deliver it. Using a unique custom template design we immediately came up with an idea to display minimal content while delivering a big message. We decided to use jQuery to create a live Florida Beach atmosphere where people felt welcomed and invited to visit RushinRealty.com.

SPAM: Where did it come from? and how to escape it.

Rusty — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:45:31 +0000

This is a repost to AWeber’s Tom Kulzer’s (CEO) blog post. I found it very educational.

In 1936, long before the rise of the personal computer, Hormel Foods created SPAM. In 2002, the company will produce it’s six billionth can of the processed food product. But that mark was passed long ago in the world of Internet spam.

Who Cooked This!? (How did it all start?)

The modern meaning of the word “spam” has nothing to do with spiced ham. In the early 1990’s, a skit by British comedy group Monty Python led to the word’s common usage. “The SPAM Skit” follows a couple struggling to order dinner from a menu consisting entirely of Hormel’s canned ham.

Repetition is key to the skit’s hilarity. The actors cram the word “SPAM” into the 2.5 minute skit more than 104 times! This flood prompted Usenet readers to call unwanted newsgroup postings “spam.” The name stuck.

Spammers soon focused on e-mail, and the terminology moved with them. Today, the word has come out of technical obscurity. Now, “spam” is the common term for “Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail”, or “UCE.”

Why Does Bad Spam Happen to Good People?

Chances are, you’ve been spammed before. Somehow, your e-mail address has found it’s way into the hands of a spammer, and your inbox is suffering the consequences. How does this happen? There are several possibilities.

Backstabbing Businesses
Businesses often keep lists of their customers’ e-mail addresses. This is a completely legitimate practice and, usually, nothing bad comes of it. Sometimes though, the temptation to make a quick buck is too great, and these lists are sold or rented to outside advertisers. The result? A lot of unsolicited e-mail, and a serious breach of trust.

Random Address Generation

Computer programs called random address generators simply “guess” e-mail addresses. Over 100 million hotmail addresses exist – howhard could it be to guess some of them? Unfortunately for many unsuspecting netizens – not too hard. Many spammers also guess at

“standard” addresses, like “support@yourdomain.com”,

“info@yourdomain.com”, and “billing@yourdomain.com.”

Web Spiders

Today’s most insidious list-gathering tools are web spiders. All of the major search engines spider the web, saving information about each page. Spammers use tools that also spider the web, but save any e-mail address they come across. Your personal web page lists your e-mail address? Prepare for an onslaught!

Chat Room Harvesting

ISP’s offer vastly popular chat rooms where users are known only by their screen names. Of course, spammers know that your screen name is the first part of your e-mail address. Why waste time guessing e-mail addresses when a few hours of lurking in a chat room can net a list of actively-used addresses?

The Poor Man’s Bad Marketing Idea

It didn’t work for the phone companies, and it won’t work for e-mail marketers. But, some spammers still keep their own friends-and-family-style e-mail lists. Compiled from the addresses of other known spammers, and people or businesses that the owner has come across in the past, these lists are still illegitimate. Why? Only you can give someone permission to send you e-mail. A friend-of-a-friend’s permission won’t cut it.

Stop The Flood to Your Inbox

Already drowning in spam? Try using your e-mail client’s filters – many provide a way to block specific e-mail addresses. Each time you’re spammed, block the sender’s address. Spammers skip from address to address, and you may be on many lists, but this method will at least slow the flow.

Also, use more than one e-mail address, and keep one “clean.” Many netizens find that this technique turns the spam flood into a trickle. Use one address for only spam-safe activities like e-mailing your friends, or signing on with trustworthy businesses. Never use your clean address on the web! Get a free address to use on the web and in chat rooms.

If nothing else helps, consider changing screen names, or opening an entirely new e-mail account. When you do, you’ll start with a clean, spam-free slate. This time, protect your e-mail address!

Stay Off Spammed Lists in the Future

Want to surf the web without getting sucked into the spam-flood? Prevention is your best policy. Don’t use an easy-to-guess e-mail address. Keep your address clean by not using it for spam-centric activities. Don’t post it on any web pages, and don’t use it in chat rooms or newsgroups.

Before giving your clean e-mail address to a business, check the company out. Are sections of its user agreement dedicated to anti-spam rules? Does a privacy policy explain exactly what will be done with your address? The most considerate companies also post an anti-spam policy written in plain English, so you can be absolutely sure of what you’re getting into.

Think You’re Not a Spammer? Be Sure.

Many a first-time marketer has inadvertently spammed his audience. The first several hundred complaints and some nasty phone messages usually stop him in his tracks. But by then, the spammer may be faced with cleanup bills from his ISP, and a bad reputation that it’s not easy to overcome.

The best way to avoid this situation is to have a clear understanding of what spam is: If anyone who receives your mass e-mails did not specifically ask to hear from you, then you are spamming them.

Stick with your gut. Don’t buy a million addresses for $10, no matter how much the seller swears by them! If something sounds fishy, just say no. You’ll save yourself a lot in the end.

The Final Blow

The online world is turning the tide on spam. In the end, people will stop sending spam because it stops working. Do your part: never buy from a spammer. When your business seeks out technology companies with which to work, only choose those with a staunch anti-spam stance.

Spam has a long history in both the food and e-mail sectors. This year, Hormel Foods opened a real-world museum dedicated to SPAM. While the museum does feature the Monty Python SPAM Skit, there’s no word yet on an unsolicited commercial e-mail exhibit. But, if all upstanding netizens work together, Hormel’s ham in a can will far outlive the Internet plague that is UCE.

What does your website SOUND like?

Rusty — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:25:49 +0000

Thanks goes out to some geniuses over at DLKU for creating the best way to listen to your website. Taking your source code and turning it into music. I must say that BenzingTech.com beat is pretty slick. The interface is really simple to use and the music can be interesting.

CHECK IT OUT www.codeorgan.com

Check out some cool sounding websites:

www.beverageunderground.com
www.outrageouscocktails.com

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Clarify Your Website Content In Search Engines with URL Normalization

Rusty — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:26:06 +0000

In this post, we will learn more about the aspect of a search engine optimization technique, called URL Canonicalization or URL Normalization. We will see why it is important and why being knowledgeable about it will reduce duplicate content issues.

Do you have the right content on the web, but have four different ways to access it? if you do, it could affect your search engine rankings. If your still confused let me explain. The web is compromised of billions of URL’s or Uniform Resource Locator’s. A URL is part of the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that specifies where an identified resource (website) is available and the mechanism for retrieving it (http://,https://,smtp://,ftp://,etc.).

Now every URL has a structure when it is read by the web server. Let me show you an example below:

http://www.blogsite.com/index.html
http://www.blogsite.com/
http://blogsite.com/

Each of these locations will go to the same page. This is due to improper canonicalization which is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard”, “normal”, or canonical form. Improper canonicalization can cause duplicate content and can affect your search engine rankings. This happens when the search engines index multiple versions of the same page and effectively divide the attributed link equity among the duplicates. Consolidating the worth of your pages by serving only a singular instance of each of them. Having the proper canonicalization is beneficial to you, your visitors, and your search engine rankings.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing all support canonicalization so why not provide it to them. There are several ways to do this but what I find the simplest is using htaccess files. However these only work on apache web servers. If you are unfamiliar with what web server you are using ask your web host provider. To first use htaccess files create one in the root of your website directory and name it exactly .htaccess do not forget the period (.) in the beginning and do not add any extensions to the end of it.

Before presenting a generalized, copy-&-paste version of this htaccess canonicalization solution, let’s examine the functionality involved with various directives.

Choose WWW or Non-WWW form
Use the Canonical URL Everywhere in the Domain
Remove Default File Names From URLs
Ensure a trailing slash at the end of all URLs

Now using your favorite text editor of choice edit the file and put the following code:

RewriteEngine On
# Remove index.php from root URL
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php [NC]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://domain.tld/ [R=301,L]
# Permanently redirect from www domain to non-www domain
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.tld/$1 [R=301,L]

Of course you will need to replace “domain.tld” in the above example to your website domain. This will prevent search engines and visitors from linking to duplicate content since it will be automatically redirected to the proper structure. If you are using WordPress there is an even better way to do the same result while delivering dynamic content from your WordPress Blog. However, WordPress 2.3+ does provide a built-in URL canonicalization technique via PHP. Thus, if you are using WP 2.3+, you technically don’t need to use this method, though, if you prefer to handle URL rewriting at the server level, then you may indeed benefit from its use.

# Comprehensive URL Canonicalization for WordPress in Root
RedirectMatch permanent index.php/(.*) http://domain.tld/$1
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.tld%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.(html|php)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.(html|php)$ http://domain.tld/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^\.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

If your WordPress blog is setup in the root directory then use the above example. If you have your blog in a subdirectory (www.domain.com/blog/) then see the code below.

# Comprehensive URL Canonicalization for WordPress in Subdirectory
RedirectMatch permanent index.php/(.*) http://domain.tld/subdirectory/$1
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.tld$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.tld%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
RewriteBase /subdirectory/
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.(html|php)\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.(html|php)$ http://domain.tld/subdirectory/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^\.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /subdirectory/index.php [L]

So now you save and upload the htaccess file and it will help prevent duplicate content and provide search engines with better URL normalization. The canonicalization solution presented in this article is both comprehensive and effective. I have been using this technique on client websites since 2008 with great success. Since employing this method, I have virtually eliminated all opportunity for duplicate content to be served from my site and my clients websites. Of course, there are other duplicate content issues not associated with canonical URLs, but we will save that for another article.

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Remember Anything 30 Minutes Per Day

Rusty — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:08:07 +0000

We all have our own perception of time. We count hours but discount how they are spread out. It’s called binge learning and you’ll probably forget everything.

If your like me, there are times when you get excited about learning something new that you spend a day or two non-stop on getting it mastered, only to get tired of it and move on to something else. When mastery is the goal, spending an exorbitant amount of time in one sitting will more than likely burn you out. For example when we work out at the gym we are not expecting to loose 20 pounds of fat or gain 10 pounds of muscle in a single work-out, likewise for learning and remembering information. Our bodies need time to heal; our muscles need time to grow. And the same goes for that muscle we call our brain. When trying to develop a new skill, the important thing to remember isn’t how much you do; it’s how often you do it.

Say your trying to memorize your HTML tags for a quiz your taking in web design class. You’d probably go with one of two familiar strategies. The first approach is spaced presentation and it just means spreading out the studying over time. The other is massed presentation (i.e. cramming) which helps keep the words in your short-term memory, and is actually more effective if you have an exam the next day – just as working out right before you hit the beach makes a noticeable, but temporary, difference. In psychology, this is known as the spacing effect, and it explains why you can’t seem to remember anything you learned in college. I doubt it was the gallons of beer drinking and frat parties…

There is a third approach and is probably one of the more interesting ways to remember. Developed by a man named Paul Pimsleur. Which you have probably heard his name on learning a new language audio books. Pimsleur dedicated his life to understanding and improving language learning process. He observed that the first time you learned a new word, you’d forget it almost immediately. But if you reviewed it again as you were about to forget it, each subsequent review would exponentially increase the staying power of the word. So if you could only remember the word for 5 seconds at first, coming back to it after those 5 seconds would boost your retention time to 25 seconds, then 2 minutes, 10 minutes and so on. At this rate, the tenth review wouldn’t have to take place until about four months after the first.

cramming vs. spaced presentation

The instant you learn something new your mind begins the process of forgetting it. That means cramming works if you need to remember it in a few hours and don’t plan on using it again. Spaced repetition is ideal for long-term retention, but is more time consuming. But graduated interval recall (Pimsleur’s method) relies on fewer, well timed repitions to make sure the word never fades away drastically. See the diagram below for an example.

Although there are factors that affect the schedule of learning and remembering like the difficult of the word and the background of the speaker, but even a rough time-line would be invaluable for teachers who sometimes need to review old material. This provides a maximum retention with minimum repetition. Now don’t make mistakes, the goal is not to avoid studying every day; it’s to make the repetition manageable so new material can be introduced daily. The most important factor is staying interested and excited about what your learning.

Pimsleur shows us that memory isn’t linear; that even if you spend the same total amount of time studying, the time you spend in between significantly affects what your brain does with the information. Learning is the space between the doing.

Creating a Daily Practice

When software developer Brad Isaac asked Jerry Seinfeld, who in those days was still a touring comic, what his secret was, he advised Isaac to pick up one of those wall calendars that had the entire year on a single page. To Seinfeld, becoming a better comedian meant writing every day, so each day Jerry worked on his writing, he would put a big red X in the box for that day. Pretty soon, there’d be a chain of red X’s and not breaking the chain became his own motivation.

There will definitely be moments when your caught up in the mental resistance that keeps you and I from getting started, we seem to forget how enjoyable the act of doing really is. When you’ve finally started and engaged into your work, you start thinking how much fun it really is. What I love about Seinfeld’s calendar is that it let’s you visually channel your stubbornness and redirect it from being lazy to not missing your mark. Setup goals and keep to them.

If you reading this and find it interesting I would like to test your abilities by picking one long-term goal and commit to it right now. Make a conscious decision to pursue what used to be “I want” or “I should”. Now is the time to start learning that new language or finally learning WordPress (you know who you are). Your going to accomplish this goal by limiting the amount of time you spend on it to no more than 30 minutes a day. You will learn more by working with your long-term memory rather than against it. if you have trouble finding 30 minutes start with 15. Keep doing it over time, you’ll be surprised at how much you’re able to accomplish.

Ways to reduce Bounce Rate on your Website

Rusty — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:05:16 +0000

When you start to follow your website analytics you start to notice a percent of people identified as Bounce Rate. Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate) is a term used in web site traffic analysis. It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

I recently had the task of lowering bounce rate on a few of our clients websites. And it made me want to learn more about it. I did some research and I wanted to discuss with the world how bounce rate works and a few ways that worked really well for our bounce rate.

Let’s start with continuing education. There is no such thing as a single identified bounce rate. Yes you may see it on your analytics labeled right before your eyes but it has a deeper meaning. There are 4 different types of bounce rate.

The first is called Low-value referrers which are visitors like those say, visiting from Digg.com, or StumbleUpon.com. These people are probably not in your target audience. You should expect most of them to leave immediately, once they’ve satisfied their idle curiosity. Consider any value derived from sites like those as pure gravy; don’t worry if this traffic source has a sky-high bounce rate.

The second type of bounce rate is Direct links from other websites. These links are the equivalent of a vague recommendation: “You might want to check out this site.” People who click such links haven’t expressed a direct intent to engage with your topic to the same degree as someone who actively enters a search engine query. These visitors do have some degree of interest, however, a high bounce rate at this point is a symptom of a user experience problem.

The third type of bounce rate is Search engine traffic, whether from organic SEO or paid links. By clicking your link, these users have actively indicated an acute interest in the topic and should engage intensely with your content. If they leave immediately, it’s a sign that something is seriously wrong with your landing pages. These issues can be 404 errors, navigation issues, slow load time, etc.

The final type of bounce rate is Loyal users. These are the people that want your product or service and make the effort to browse through your website and who return repeatedly to your site. On the one hand, you’d expect the highest engagement from your biggest fans. On the other hand, this engagement might not show up on every visit if they visit often. As long as people keep coming back, there’s nothing wrong with having them sometimes leave after a page view or two.

There is another type of bounce rate but it can be prevented by making sure your IP Address is not being recorded on your analytics. I can’t say how many times I thought my bounce rate was high but it was just me looking at the front page of my website time and time again. Google Analytics provides the option to remove your IP Address from their settings and if you don’t know your IP Address a great website to get it is http://whatismyipaddress.com.

So now that you understand the different types of bounce rates there are some ways to reduce it using a couple methods I outlined below. These method will work with all websites on any platform.

1. Invite users to click on related posts and topics within your blog or website.

There are several ways to accomplish this even on your static websites. If you have WordPress there are a few different plug-ins. the one I use is Related Posts. It displays 5-10 related links using tags. If you have a static website pick a few site links you have related and post them at the bottom of your content. This makes it easy for visitors to view more content throughout your website.

2. Add More Call To Action

Sometimes your website design just isn’t enough to capture your audience. Build more call to action on your website with a box for newsletter sign-ups or even a poll. Drive people throughout your website and make it easy to navigate. Page Peel Banners (PPB) are a great way to reduce the bounce rate. Here is a Free PPB for WordPress. Here is a demo of a PPB, look into the right top corner of the website.

3. Visual Site Maps

Most visitors love a beautiful design with easy navigation so why not make your sitemaps the same way using visual sitemaps. I recently posted here about SlickMap CSS which is a really neat interactive way to display your sitemaps.

I hope by now you know more about bounce rate and how a few tweaks and adjustments to your website can significantly reduce it. If anyone has any other methods of reducing bounce rate please feel free to share in the comments. Thanks.

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Aries Resources Group

Rusty — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:16:53 +0000

Aries interim executive management consultants are substantially different than your typical business consultant who identify problems and then leave a “white paper” for you to implement. Aries business consultants not only measure, analyze, and develop a plan to solve your business problems, they remain on board to provide the leadership to implement the changes, innovations, and solutions.

Your Menu Maker

Rusty — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:26:38 +0000

Suncoast Identification Solutions choose us to design a landing page for their menu line. We immediately had some fun ideas running around our heads. We decided on a warm color scheme with a background that defines wow. Adding some rotating galleries for dynamics and our search engine optimization package and they are ready to sell. Your Menu Maker prints washable restaurant or bar menus. They can be laminated, covered, folded, or spiral bound.

10 Essential WordPress SEO Plugins

Rusty — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:53:17 +0000

When it comes to web design management and blogging systems, WordPress wins my heart. In my last WordPress SEO post I noted the 12 Best SEO Plugins. Now I want to identify the 10 essential plugins you can’t be without if your running a WordPress Blog. We have done ton’s of research in finding these plugins and hope you find them as useful as we do every day.

1. Nofollow Case by Case – Nofollow Case by Case is a follow plugin for WordPress but allows you to selectively apply rel=”nofollow” to comment links and comment author links.
Download: Here

2. Ping Crawl – Every time you make a post on your blog it grabs similar posts from other blogs that allow pingbacks using the post tags. It then links to them at the bottom of the post as similar posts. It then executes the pingback on all the posts. You can specify how many posts to do per tag and that many will be done for each tag you use in your posts. Typically it has about an 80% success rate with each pingback and they are legit so the ones that fall into moderation tend to get approved. This creates quite a few deep links for each blog post you make and through time really helps with your link building. Especially for new blogs.
Download: Here

3. Redirection – Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors. This is very important to make sure your not loosing traffic due to 404 errors.
Download: Here

4. SEO Slugs -Removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve your url SEO performance.
Download: Here

5. SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
Download: Here

6. SEO Ultimate – This all-in-one SEO plugin gives you control over titles, noindex, meta data, slugs, canonical tags, “more” links, 404 error tracking, and more. An all-in-one solution.
Download: Here

7. Smart 404 – Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.
Download: Here

8. WP No Category Base – Removes ‘/category’ from your category permalinks.
Download: Here

9. Only Wire Autosubmitter – Autosubmits a excerpt of a posts to Onlywire when published. Only Wire is the best way to submit your blog to social bookmarking and social media websites. They currently support over 30 different social sites. Check them out http://www.onlywire.com.
Download: Here

10. Sitemap Generator – This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.
Download: Here

If you have any suggestions to other essential seo plugins please feel free to comment on this post or contact us. Thanks.

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American Advertising Federation SWFL

Rusty — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:53:00 +0000

AAF-SWFL came to us with a previous website that needed a major overhaul. They were looking for something that would catch existing and potential members eyes and ears. We decided to play off the logo colors and build a bold experience.

5 Successful Link Building Techniques

Rusty — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:56:03 +0000

One of the most difficult, or rather tedious jobs when running a website is getting reciprocal links. It really matters to search engines…a lot. Link building is getting your website address, be it any link from your site, placed on a remote website. Now there are probably several more ways to build links I am not discussing in this post because I have found these five to be the most successful.

So lets go over a few of my link building strategies.

1. Submitting to Design Gallery Websites
If you have a beautiful website why not express how you feel to the design community by submitting it to hundreds of them. And you will be surprised how many accept if your site looks nice and you don’t write a bunch of spammy text about it. One of my favorite submission services is The CSS Gallery List (http://www.thecssgallerylist.com/). They also provide a submission service for $20 which is in my opinion a great deal.

2. Blogging for Trackbacks and Pingbacks
Woah. I may have confused some people. What are Trackbacks and Pings? A trackback is one of three types of linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to their website. Pingbacks are similar to trackbacks. They use a XML-RPC request to send a link from one website to another and are less spam prone than trackbacks due to their specifications. They are both essentially for peer-to-peer communication and notifications between websites. Lot’s of current blogging and cms systems already use them: WordPress, MovableType, and Drupal. Know who and where to ping is important. There are millions of websites with the ability to send and receive pings or trackbacks. And there are even website services which help ping your website for example Pingomatic.com which pings search engines to crawl your website when you submit new content. (Wordpress users can modify their ping list on the Control Panel, then Options, then Writing). Pinging a few sites will benefit heavily. Here is a good list of ping servers to get you started.

3. Get Active In Your Niche
Whether you are a gamer, business consultant, or selling ebay items you have a niche online. And a following of people who are looking for your services or products. If you have a blog with content and your getting trackbacks and people commenting on your posts. Now it’s your turn GET ACTIVE! responding to your comments and visiting other websites in your niche commenting on their posts. This is simple but tedious unless you are a fanatic of reading, writing, and commenting. Make sure you look for those high page ranking websites when reaching out. A great tool we use to check Page Rank is GetRanking.info. They provide a simple way to place your website address in a box and poof your page rank is revealed.

4. Directory Submissions
This I’m sure most of you already have done or at least heard of. Submitting to directories is one of the oldest methods of building links. And can still have some great benefit if you submit to the right ones and use optimized descriptions. Ultimately the most important directories are ones with high Page Rank. I would recommend submitting to Google’s Directory www.dmoz.org, and if your willing to pay for submission Yahoo’s Directory offers a great search return for $299 a year. There are thousands of directories online so submitting to all of them would get boring after say 50. But we are in a technology information age and people created programs to do this for us. Although submitting to 10,000 directories with the same description and information might affect the way search engines judge your page rank.

5. Social Media and PR Articles
This is becoming a strong way to build some links pretty fast. Search Engines are crawling more links every year from thousands of social media and article websites across the internet. Some with high page rank and some with DoFollow links compared to NoFollow. A dofollow link is a method some search engines use to determine if they are allowed to follow a link or not which in turn allows page rank to follow. Most websites like Twitter and Facebook not not allow following of links but there are a bunch of others that do: www.rateitall.com, www.xanga.com, www.yedda.com, www.reddit.com, www.dzone.com, www.killerstartups.com, www.ezinearticles.com. If you search google for ‘dofollow sites’ you should be able to get a few hundred results. Find the websites your topic appeals to most and submit them. Become active in these communities and watch the links for your website sky rocket.

So now that you have five ways to start building links get to it. Or you can always contact us and we will help you plan a link building strategy with some other methods as well as those described above. Benzing Technologies – Your Technology Partner

Account Created Successfully – Titanium Hosting

Rusty — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:43:59 +0000

Your Iron Hosting account was submitted successfully.

We will setup your account within 24 hours and will contact you via the e-mail address you submitted.

Thanks For Your Business!

Account Created Successfully – Iron Hosting

Rusty — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:42:35 +0000

Your Iron Hosting account was submitted successfully.

We will setup your account within 24 hours and will contact you via the e-mail address you submitted.

Thanks For Your Business!

Account Created Successfully – Copper Hosting

Rusty — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:20:08 +0000

Your Copper Hosting account was submitted successfully.

We will setup your account within 24 hours and will contact you via the e-mail address you submitted.

Thanks For Your Business!

Are you using Social Media effectively?

Rusty — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:49:13 +0000

As if this hasn’t already been talked about by hundreds of people… Social Media is a successful way to market your business. In this post I will discuss several ways to effectively use social media to make it successful for your business.

Being in the web design industry almost every client in our network is now using Twitter. We use it too, for expanding our blogging efforts and gaining more exposure to our products, services, and outstanding eye for design. But are we using Twitter effectively? How about Facebook, Digg, PR Newswire, or any of the thousands of social sites? We are just reaching around 1400 followers from Twitter, 300 from Facebook and some from social bookmarking sites like Digg which really isn’t that impressive.

So wanting to learn more and find out how effective we are, I did some research and found some interesting results/questions.

1. Your a Marketer, Not a User
Marketers can certainly have success with social media, but the key is to be an active user who contributes to the community of the site. Be a user first and a marketer second. If other users feel that you are only there to market, they will not be as receptive to your submissions, votes, or suggestions. This is why companies usually have a social media person on staff to handle this.

2. Am I Creating Content Specifically for Social Media Audiences?
Effective social media marketing involves creating content that will pique the interest of social media users. Once you are familiar with the community at your targeted social media sites, take some time to brainstorm article ideas that may appeal to them. Hence this is why I follow industry users and not just anyone.

3. Are My Followers Social Media Users?
Many sites and blogs, especially those with large audiences, benefit from having readers who are social media users. This makes it more likely that your content will be submitted without you initiating it, and it will make it easier to get votes. If your blog has a low number of social media users you may want to consider introducing them to specific social media sites in your posts.

4. You’re Posting Commercial Content
Social media users do not like to feel like they are being marketed too, and many social media sites even prohibit commercial content. If you are trying to promote your company with social media you will need to do it passively in order to have any success. The best approach is to use social media to build links and exposure to your site, and leave the marketing to other times and situations.

5. You Need To Build a Network
This is a very important point when using social media as a whole. The most successful social media marketers are very well connected. Having a network of friends and fellow social media users allows you to help each other with votes and submissions when needed. Many social media marketers share voting requests with their friends via email or IM, and sometimes even via Twitter.

6. You’re Only Focusing On One Method
Another common mistake is only focusing on the major social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, or Digg. While the major sites are the ones that will send the most traffic, they also have far more users who are competing with you and have more spam/hacked user accounts. If you focus on smaller sites or niche social media sites you may be able to get a “popular” submission with only a few votes. This traffic is much easier to come by and at least you will have something to show for your efforts. A very small percentage of Digg users will ever get results with their submissions. Why? because your a needle in a haystack. Same with StumbleUpon.

7. Your Not Engaging Your Followers
I’m sure you’ve seen voting buttons and widgets on blogs, like buttons, share this, and more. They are there for a reason. Use them and people will do the same for your content the objective with social media is to be social and engage your potential clients just as if you are going to a networking meeting. Plus the more content you share and contribute the more people will engage you and become positive social media followers.

8. Promote Your Social Media Accounts
One important thing with social media is sharing. Promote the fact you have a Facebook or Twitter account and make it easy to become a friend or fan you will be surprised who is already a fan or your work or product and doesn’t mind keeping up to date. The easiest way for you to share your website is with Share This widget. Which makes it easy to share your website or individual pages amongst the internet social sites.

9. Know The Tools
Social sites such as Twitter have tools which you can use to track and manage yours and others tweet activity through their website. Make sure you know what these tools do. Here are a couple social media cheat sheets:
Twitter Cheat Sheet
Facebook Getting Started Guide
Digg Cheat Sheet

10. You’re Only Submitting/Voting for Your Own Content
Don’t be selfish. Social Media needs to have involvement of others and your own content. Read other peoples articles, comment on other blogs, and share other content besides your own. You will not only gain followers but backlinks to your website it’s a win/win.

So What’s Your Experience?
Do you have another important tip to help manage social media effectively? share it with us.

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A new way to display sitemaps using SlickMap CSS

Rusty — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:02:14 +0000

I am always inspired with new ways to display website content. And today I found an interesting and creative way to display sitemaps created by Matt Everson of Astuteo. I am talking about those lovely hierarchical pages of links we mostly find at the footer of our websites. A sitemap is used to display the entire website link structure showing the homepage then drilling into other pages and so on. Most sitemaps on websites are rather dull and simple which is good for the search engines but not on the eye. The better sitemap is using SlickMap CSS, whcih is a simple stylesheet for displaying finished sitemaps directly from HTML unordered list navigation. It’s suitable for most web sites – accommodating up to three levels of page navigation and additional utility links – and can easily be customized to meet your own individual needs, branding, or style preferences. Download it or view the demo below.

Download it Now | View Demo

Features and Benefits
-Eliminates the need for additional software
-Easily revised with clients on-the-fly
-Clickable anchors with visible URLs
-Design process results in working HTML code

Have An Efficient Plan For The Holidays

Rusty — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:39:33 +0000

Realizing the holidays are on my back, it made me think how efficient we can be to make our seasonal holidays better. I did some research and found a few things we can do to improve holiday efficiency.

So let’s begin…

The Turkey Dinner Calculator – Folks, do not eat Thanksgiving without calculating your dinner. This is a super efficient calculator that can tell you what time to defrost the turkey to how many pounds of turkey you actually need. It’s pretty cool!

Kraft Foods Desktop Widget – Yet another tool to help you eat. The Kraft Widget sets up the Dinner Bell to provide daily reminders, search and view Kraft recipes without having to launch your internet browser, and get continually updated fresh facts, tasty tips and how-to-videos about your favorite in-season produce.

The Food Channel Widget – Being a food lover myself this is a must have for any recipe hunter or food devastator. Now you can get the hottest food trends delivered daily to your web site straight from The Food Channel. It’s Free!

The Food Dictionary – Do you know what a dacquoise is? or what is actually in ranchero sauce? Now the world’s in your hands for dictionary terms on food. Bam!

Halmark E-Cards – Parents! now is your chance to actually save money and have a better chance at the kids retaining them. Think about all the $50 dollar bills you will be saving on those birthday cards.

Make Your Gloves Work With Any Touchscreen Device – This is a super cool way to improve your efficiency by keeping your hands warm and still working on your iPhone.

The Institute of Food Technologist – If you are an avid food enthusiast then perhaps you should join the Institute of Food Technologist. They work with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and have research in Food Nanoscience. This of course is a very brief description of their vast knowledge in food technology.

As to end this post I hope these few places of interest make your holidays an efficient one. Happy Thanksgiving from Benzing Technologies!

Customizing Facebook using MyFanSite Tutorial

Rusty — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 06:07:22 +0000

Customizing Facebook has always been a drag because of the unified styles they insist on holding. Limited customization is however available. This is why we created MyFanSite application for Facebook. It’s provides an easy interface for web designers to customize a tab on their profile or fan page and give it a little more edge.

So let’s get started.
If you want to add it to your personal profile you must approve the application by visiting http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=105603572335 and click on ‘Go To Application’ it will require you to login and allow the application to be added. If you want to place it on your fan page click in the top left menu where is says ‘Add To My Page’ then add it to your fan page from the popup box.

Once you approved it then it will bring you to a screen like so:

On this screen we see our details and a bunch of different boxes. The only fields you need to pay attention to are ‘Background’,'Font Color’,'Background Color’,'Stylesheet’, and ‘Content Box’.

Now to customize your page you need to first design a cool custom background. The size is 760px W x 775px H once you have your background design go ahead and upload it. My example background is below:

Ok so we have our background and it’s uploaded lets test it out. The first thing you need to do is edit the application settings to show the tab on your profile or fan page. This is done very easily two ways depending on how your setting it up. Goto ‘Applications->Edit Applications’ from your facebook toolbar if your placing it on your profile or if you are using it on a fan page you will need to click ‘Edit Page’ from your fan site then scroll down to find My Fan Site and click on ‘Application Settings’. Once clicked it will popup a box which will allow you to add the tab to your page. It should look something like below:

I must also mention this page above is also where you will ‘Edit’ the Fan Site as well. Now that we have it approved a tab on your page should appear which says ‘Fan Site’ and the page should load your custom background cool!. Now comes the fun part…More Customization!

So as I mentioned before the Stylesheet box and Content Box being important, are next.

Make sure you DO NOT add to the Stylesheet Box it will automatically add them. Let’s start with some simple code place this in your ‘Stylesheet’ Box:

1	#content-box{position:absolute;width:200px;margin-top:343px;margin-left:66px;}

This code above will position our ‘content-box’ 343 pixels from the top of our uploaded design and 66 pixels from the left of it. So if you have certain areas you want to feature text you can do so by positioning them around your background design.

Make sure your css is all one line of code for optimum performance of your fan site. Sometimes I notices issues with link breaks. Now let’s add our content. In the ‘Content Box’ we add the following code:

1	<div id="content-box"><h1>Test Title</h1><p>Testing some content</p></div>

Then click ‘Save Settings’ or ‘Create Fan Site’ if you just added the application. Your settings will be saved and your fan page will be customized with some text positioned over your design. This is however very basic usage of this application and as we grow it into something even more special this tutorial should get you on the right track.

Check out our Facebook Site and Become a Fan: http://www.facebook.com/benzingtech

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Tony Sacco’s Coal Oven Pizza

Rusty — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:23:30 +0000

Tony Sacco’s was franchising across the nation and needed a solid branded website to complete their presence. They came to us with a previous design and wordpress installation and we created a masterpiece of design and functionality.

5 Tips to Enhancing Your Intelligence

Rusty — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:22:34 +0000

Technology is degrading our intelligence. By this I mean technology is taking away from our learning capabilities. But I am learning so much with technology you say, not exactly. We developed technology to make our life simpler not more difficult which in turn without learning new ways to stimulate our minds is degrading our intelligence. Yes there are ways that technology can improve our mental capabilities but Facebook and Twitter aren’t cutting it. I am the type of person who has always been intrigued with technology and ways to improve myself overall.

Your brain is very similar to a muscle. Like muscles, your brain also needs the right kind of exercise and nutrition. The more you use your brain correctly, the more you will enhance your ability to focus and think sharply. On the contrary, if you feed your brain the wrong nutrition you can harm its functioning and thinking capabilities.

Listed below are 5 tips to improve your thought processes.

1. Avoid Watching Television : This is perhaps one of the toughest tips to convince anyone. Many people including myself love to sit in front of the TV. Watching TV is not at all that productive. It neither enhances your mental capability nor recharges your brain. It is very similar to having all energy drained out of your brain without reaping the benefits of exercise. Sure there are some educational channels but are you really retaining that information?

2. Work Out : This improves your psychological well-being as well as reducing depression, anxiety, stress, and helps loose weight which makes you feel better overall. Physical activity stimulates various brain chemicals that may leave you feeling happier and more relaxed than you were before you worked out.

3. Read books that stimulate thought : This doesn’t mean you have to read novels. Read a book that your interested in and will learn something from. This way you will have a better chance at retaining that knowledge and increasing your intelligence.

4. Sleep Early, Rise Early : This was a hard one for me to learn being that I was always such a night owl. But now I normally goto sleep around 11 – 12 pm and rise around 7 – 8 am giving myself between 6-8 hours of sleep. Now the amount of sleep required varies with age. Test yourself for a few nights and find out how many hours of sleep makes you feel rested and not over tired or deprived. A restful sleep will improve your ability to focus and waking up early in the morning enhances your productivity and keeps you alert throughout the day.

5. Find Time to Introspect : Find time for yourself. This is very important and I take this tip very seriously every day. This not only helps improve my productivity but enhances my personal development. Find time where you can be alone and think about things. This will help organize your thoughts and can prioritize your tasks and duties. You will be able to make clear cut decisions and focus on the most important ones. All said and done, I am not advising that you do yoga or chant some mantra. Any technique that allows you to sit alone and think is good. Personally, I prefer talking a long walk alone. Experiment and try out new methods to find out which one suits you the best.

There are many other ways to help improve your intelligence but these 5 tips will get you on the right track. I could also recommend making friends with people who think around your thoughts or setting a time everyday to stop using technology (cellphones, email, etc.). Traveling is also another good way to introduce education into your mind and no I am not talking about going to Africa and staying in a Holiday Inn. Explore your avenues and remember to just think!

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Social Media and Reputation Management

Rusty — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:54:01 +0000

The boom of social media is here and more and more businesses are jumping on board. But can we manage our reputations? With Facebook gaining over 300 million users and Twitter with about 50 million we know that consumers are looking more towards the net for information and purchases. Social media has added a new bump to the growing numbers with being able to comment and post what they want, when they want, and how they want it. This in turn makes it easy for them to say a product or service sucks and not to use it as well as how great it really is. Reviews aren’t new to the net and with more people buying online they depend on these reviews to buy their products.

So how do we manage our reputations in these times? does your company need to hire a staff member to manage social media and brand reputation? perhaps. But knowing a few tips can help without hiring additional staff.

1. Identify a strategy. Running blind you’ll run into trees. Make sure you know your plan of action. This is more of a general social media tip but is still valid in managing your business reputation.

2. Make sure you know your platforms security and privacy settings. For example Facebook has settings and options in your profile that allow you to limit people posting on your fan page or profile. Here’s 10 privacy settings for Facebook users

3. Limit your personal and business interaction together. Social media is about conversations but if you have a personal profile create a fan page for your business or on other networks create profiles for your business only. This will help eliminate those emotional moments in your personal life on your business name.

4. Always read the terms of service when joining a social network. Some social sites hold your information for whatever use or can resell your information to marketing companies.

5. Don’t just friend anyone and everyone. More numbers means better odds but identified numbers sell. Make sure you know their not going to just post a bunch of spam or become ineffective in your social media strategy.

6. Don’t fight fire with fire. Use water. Properly and humbly take care of outtakes or bad remarks with a way to improve their experience. This will ultimately add positive reputation and build great feedback around your brand.

7. Interact with your fans or friends respectfully. Leaving your ego at the door is recommended. You are basically creating a character online for your company to interact with your potential sales or customers. In other words don’t create a dick.

I hope these 7 tips help you as much as they do me. I keep finding news ways everyday to interact with my clients through social media. Now I just need to keep a solid strategy and stay respectful.

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10 WordPress Install Security Tips

Rusty — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:22:53 +0000

Now that WordPress has released its harding release 2.8.5 security is on my mind. I did some research to find 10 tips to secure WordPress and make it harder to break in. Below are some of the tips I found most useful.

1. Always change your WordPress database extension. Default is ‘wp_’ so change it to something like ‘gp_’ or ‘wordpress_’ on install.

2. Remove your admin user. By default the admin user is set to ‘admin’ changing this to another username makes it harder for hackers to guess your admin login.

3. Secure your .htaccess file. If you don’t know what a .htaccess file is click here. Use the code below to tighten security on your .htaccess file by limiting who can access it.


order allow,deny
deny from all
satisfy all

4. Secure your wp-config.php file. While not only setting permissions on this file to 444 using the following code in your .htaccess file can limit who accesses the file.


order allow,deny
deny from all

5. Set proper permissions. Different hosts will have different levels of security but for the most part the permissions should be:
Root install folder to read only (744)
Directories should have permissions of 755. NEVER 777
All files should have permissions of 644
If you do want to use the built-in editor, theme files should have permissions of 666. NEVER 777

6. Deny listing of your website directories in your .htaccess file. This will make sure no one can list all the files in your website folders. Adding the follow code below to your .htaccess file.

1	Options All -Indexes

7. Limit search engines to your ‘wp-’ directories in your robots.txt file. If you do not have a robots.txt file in your root folder create it with the following code below:

1 2	User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-*

8. Drop the version string in your Meta Tags. This is in your template files in the header.php it should look like the code below. Remove it completely if it exists.

1
2

9. Always use a secure password. This is mostly the main reason people get hacked. I use the follow to generate passwords for my users. Password Generator

10. Backup regularly! this is vital to you being able to recover your data regardless of being hacked or having your files corrupted. Luckily WordPress has a plugin to do this easily. WordPress Backup Plugin

Now with this list you should have a darn good secure WordPress install. Now there are other things you can do to increase security but for a small business or blog site not ran by the government these should get you on the right track. Now just stay up to date! make sure you update your wordpress as they release new versions and update your plugins as needed also.

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Google Analytics Just Became More Powerful!

Rusty — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:11:29 +0000

Yes its true, when you thought the good can’t get any better. Google rolled out some useful enhancements to its already useful and powerful Google Analytics tool. The new features gives the tool more flexibility and intelligence. Here are some highlights on some of the new features.

1. Addition of two new goal types for measuring user engagement and branding success that allows webmasters to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per visit. Up to 20 goals can now be defined.
2. Improved tracking of mobile websites and mobile apps on mobile devices even if the device is running Javascript or not. This was made possible through the addition of a server side code snippet on mobile websites using Google Analytics
3. Addition of Advanced Table Filtering feature for advance data analysis and for filtering rows in a table based on different metric conditions
4. Creation of Custom Report with the option to select Unique Visitors as a measurement against any Google Analytics dimension
5. Multiple custom variables, sharing segments and custom report templates for enterprise adaptation of Google Analytics. These tools provide customization options for enterprise Google Analytics usage

These are all great new features but one of the best is the Analytics Intelligence. This new feature provides automatic alerts when there are significant changes in the data patterns of your website metrics and dimensions on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Prompting you on significant marks you should pay attention to. This will give you more time on doing corrective actions to highlights by Google Analytics. Very Sweet!

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Diamond Limousine

Rusty — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:08:24 +0000

A project with class. They decided to go with our template package and also our Online Marketing Package later on. This website was highly improved from their last. Including a much more professional look and adding some ajax code for the gallery.

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Web Inspir

Rusty — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:08:01 +0000

Web Inspir was a project with a strategy in mind. We created Inspir to gather links for beautiful web designs, clean blog designs, and just gorgeous design. It serves as a link farm to help the design community create new creative web designs without copying existing material.

World Famous Cigar Bar

Rusty — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:06:23 +0000

The World Famous Cigar Bar came to us with a previous flash based website that needed to be able to update easily. We scrapped the flash design and created this beautiful piece of artwork for them to integrate their marketing and informational products into.

Beverage Underground

Rusty — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:05:59 +0000

The Beverage Underground was an intense project aiming at the world. Larry Genta Jr wanted a website that can be read easily and drive the traffic to make it the success it is today. We created this site in WordPress and used several of our online marketing techniques to create a dynamic and profitable website.

Luna Rossa

Rusty — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:04:35 +0000

Luna Rossa was in need of a more professional online presence and choose us for the design and hosting. We visited her restaurant and designed a theme similar to her experience and artistic location. We saw murals of Mediterranean valleys, columns, bricks, and delicious food. In the end their website matched the ambiance, professional and helps drive traffic to her restaurant.

Talent Ventures

Rusty — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:04:14 +0000

Talent! The Agency of Choice selected us to help improve their online presence and without a blink of an eye we agreed upon a professional yet fun look to the design that would really make it pop. With a few creative thoughts we came up with an eye catching and professional design that creates energy for their company.

Smith Family Law

Rusty — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:03:50 +0000

Smith Family Law came to use for a brand and a website to garnish his needs. We designed not just a website but a functional easy to use interface that site edits are done internally. The logo was design to show passion and friendliness. We accomplished and exceeded their expectations.

Blu Sushi

Rusty — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:03:27 +0000

Blu came to use in need of a better way to express their social media links and newsletter they send out frequently. We decided to go with a 3d effect that made their brand pop. The beautiful pictures and the overall feel came out exactly as they wanted.

City Mattress

Rusty — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:03:00 +0000

City Mattress was a joint project with another advertising firm where we programmed the functionality into the design. We took this project seriously and progressively. Then we added our SEO package to their existing beauty and they found their technical zen.

Suncoast ID

Rusty — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:02:38 +0000

Suncoast Identification Solutions choose us to help manage their online presence. Their website needed tweaks and we were the medicine. IDSource.com has increase business and improved their position in the market since their new design was launched. Continued marketing support continues today.

SWFaddress solves Flash SEO problems

Rusty — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:53:50 +0000

One of the biggest draw backs of flash is using back and forward buttons in the browser and Search Engine Optimization in the URL’s. Well now look no further. Introducing SWFaddress – a small JavaScript library that lets you create virtual URLs for Flash and Ajax. SWFaddress has been around since 2006, and surprisingly not all Flash sites are utilizing this tool.

However, SWFAddress is really only as good as your implementation of it. A sloppy implementation makes it more of a liability than a benefit. So let’s show you the right way to get it working.

SWFAddress can be quickly added to a Website that uses SWFObject only by inserting the JavaScript files into your header section like this:

<script src="swfobject/swfobject.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="swfaddress/swfaddress.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Now the internal implementation of SWFAddress is somewhat simple and straight forward. Once a Flash movie containing the library is embedded in an HTML page, it automatically initializes itself and provides the developer with notification of state changes that need to be implemented. This might not be the easiest task for everybody, but SWFAddress streamlines the process by fully supporting testing workflow inside the Flash Program and Standalone Player. URL changes can be invoked from mouse-click events, frame actions, or HTML links.

Here is sample code that can be added to a MovieClip button:

this.onRelease = function () {
 
      SWFAddress.setValue("/portfolio");
}

For links in HTML-formatted TextFields, the following approach should be used:

<a href="asfunction:SWFAddress.setValue,/portfolio/">Go to Portfolio</a>

SWFAddress has a single onChange event where the navigation logic needs to be coded. The complexity may vary depending on the Website, but if it’s planned from the beginning, it may improve maintainability by centralizing all the controller actions.

Here is an example of a running logic for the onChange event:

SWFAddress.onChange = function () {
 
      var navigation = new Object();
      navigation.home = {frame: 1, title: "Welcome"};
      navigation.about = {frame: 10, title: "About Us"};
      navigation.contact = {frame: 20, title: "Contact Us"};
 
      var value = SWFAddress.getValue();
 
      website_mc.gotoAndStop(navigation[value].frame);
 
      SWFAddress.setTitle(navigation[value].title);
}

The setTitle method allows you to add unique titles to every section of the Website and they will appear in the browser’s titlebar. It should be used inside the onChange event in order to correctly display the initial title value when the page loads.

With SEO in mind SWFaddress covers this flawlessly. It enables the generation of real links that expose the appropriate content to search engines. The magic happens with some interesting URL rewriting and some trivial server-side code. The following is an example how it works for a Website located at http://www.domain.com that contains a portfolio section.

SWFAddress uses http://www.domain.com/#/portfolio/. The URL that can get indexed is http://www.domain.com/portfolio/ and therefore it should exist as a link in the HTML code of the page. When someone visits the indexed address, the rewriting functionality makes a redirect to the URL that SWFAddress expects. Everything happens on the server side so no user interaction is required.

The situation is different when the same link is followed by a search engine bot (spider). In this case the address is rewritten without any redirection to http://www.domain.com/?swfaddress=/portfolio/. The page that handles all this should use a server-side technology in order to generate the appropriate content depending on the “swfaddress” parameter value.

Page requests containing GET parameters (?var=something) such as http://www.domain.com/#/portfolio/?desc=true&year=2001 are handled similarly. The search engines will index http://www.domain.com/portfolio/?desc=true&year=2001 and the script will expect http://www.domain.com/?swfaddress=/portfolio/&desc=true&year=2001.

The result is a fully indexed Flash Website with deep linking support. This works great and the result is even better. Now we can all have search engine friendly Flash sites. YAY!

While this approach improves the usability of Flash content over the Web, it also requires an additional effort, such as some manual work for static html websites and some smart code for dynamic ones. The best case will be a Flash Content Management System that automates the whole process.

SWFaddress promises to continue adding interesting functionality like AJAX support, transparent user tracking with Google Analytics, and enhanced event handling. It should definitely be considered for your next Flash project.

Download SWFaddress: HERE
View an Example Site: HERE

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Google Local Business Center Just Got Enhanced

Rusty — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:40:58 +0000

Looks like your favorite local search just got better. Google’s Local Business Center will be more versatile in the very near future. The local dashboard currently only shows impressions and view counts, and is very limited in keeping historical data or trends. It doesn’t show which search phrases are attracting local search traffic either, although you can view this information in the Webmaster Tools, but all of that is about to change. Check out the video to learn more:

New Features Include:

Graphical Impression and View Counts (similar to Google Analytics)
Driving direction requests by view count that tie back to the Zip Code or City, State driving traffic.
Top Search Queries triggering Local Maps

This is great news! I have been following my impressions and stats but these new features will break it down even further!

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11 Websites for Web Analysis

Rusty — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:33:00 +0000

As with every web design comes web analysis. Web analysis is important because you need to find out what areas of your website traffic is finding more interesting so you can continually tweak your site for optimum deliverability and monetization. Below I have listed 11 websites which I think are the best for Web Analysis.

1. Quantcast

Quantcast is one of the 3 major websites dedicated to website traffic and audience. Quantcast provides publishers, marketers and agencies unmatched capabilities to measure, organize, discover and transact based on directly-measured traffic and inferred audience data.

2. Alexa

Alexa is one of the first ranking websites with advanced data regarding target population, country rank and others. The problem with these statistics is that they are provided based on Alexa Toolbar. Again, this fact makes Alexa’s data inaccurate.

3. Compete

Compete is a site similar to Quantcast. Compete’s ranking is based on the stats of +2.000.000 US citizens – this means that Compete is not so accurate outside of US. Anyway – check out Compete for your ranking and compare your results with your competitors’.

4. Dataopedia

Dataopedia.com is a web service that provides comprehensive information (50 different sources) about websites available on the Internet.

5. BuiltWith

This tools is quite complex – it shows various information about your site or any particular site (technologies used, seo, etc.) and it helps you optimize your site. Very useful when you don’t know much about SEO. It has a paid version as well with a lot more tips and info.

6. BizShark

BizShark is a direct competitor to Dataopedia. Both sites share the same concept and have similar information. You will have to decide which one suits you.

7. Website Grader

In my opinion, this is one of the most useful analysis websites. It has a great composition of information: social, seo, general, etc. It even gives you hints and a grade – to compare and further optimize your site.

8. Quarkbase

Quarkbase is another site that gathers its info from multiple sources, but here is their definition: Quarkbase is the best way to find website information contributed by website owner, lover and the Internet Community.

9. Popuri.us

This tools is a lightweight tool that gives you the most common ranks available on the web: Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, Technorati Rank etc.

10. XinuReturns

XinuReturns is a tool that shows you pretty much everything – Google Page Rank, Yahoo Links, FeedBurner subscribers,Technorati, DMOZ etc. It is perfect for a fast small popularity analysis.

11. Feedcompare

This website is useful when you want to compare your number of feed subscribers with the number of subscribers. For this you must have a FeedBurner account.

There are plenty of other sites as well with interesting results, but I think these ones are the most important.

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24 Search Engine Ranking Factors That Matter

Rusty — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:50:41 +0000

While trying to increase my page ranking I was stumped as to why I still had no page rank and over 1500 backlinks. After some browsing on SEOMoz.org I found my factors and have since used these 24 search engine ranking factors in everything I design on the web. Let’s start in percentage of importance.

1. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance | 8% moderate consensus

2. Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
63% high importance | 11.3% light consensus

3. Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com)
60% high importance | 11.2% light consensus

4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag
49% moderate importance | 10.2% light consensus

5. Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page
47% moderate importance | 13% moderate contention

6. Keyword Use in External Link Anchor Text on the Page
46% moderate importance | 13.6% moderate contention

7. Keyword Use as the First Word(s) in the H1 Tag
45% moderate importance | 11.7% light consensus

8. Keyword Use in the First 50-100 Words in HTML on the Page
45% moderate importance | 9.9% light consensus

9. Keyword Use in the Subdomain Name (e.g. keyword.seomoz.org)
42% low importance | 9% light consensus

10. Keyword Use in the Page Name URL (e.g. seomoz.org/folder/keyword.html)
38% low importance | 9.1% light consensus

11. Keyword Use in the Page Folder URL (e.g. seomoz.org/keyword/page.html)
37% low importance | 8.6% light consensus

12. Keyword Use in other Headline Tags (

–
)
35% low importance | 8% light consensus

13. Keyword Use in Image Alt Text
33% minimal importance | 8.7% light consensus

14. Keyword Use / Number of Repetitions in the HTML Text on the Page
33% minimal importance | 10.3% light consensus

15. Keyword Use in Image Names Included on the Page (e.g. keyword.jpg)
33% minimal importance | 8.6% light consensus

16. Keyword Use in or Tags
26% minimal importance | 7.6% moderate consensus

17. Keyword Density Formula (# of Keyword Uses ÷ Total # of Terms on the Page)
25% minimal importance | 9.8% light consensus

18. Keyword Use in List Items
on the Page
23% very minimal importance | 9.5% light consensus

19. Keyword Use in the Page’s Query Parameters (e.g. seomoz.org/page.html?keyword)
22% very minimal importance | 7.6% moderate consensus

20. Keyword Use in or Tags
21% very minimal importance | 8.4% light consensus

21. Keyword Use in the Meta Description Tag
19% very minimal importance | 9.9% light consensus

22. Keyword Use in the Page’s File Extension (e.g. seomoz.org/page.keyword)
12% very minimal importance | 8.3% light consensus

23. Keyword Use in Comment Tags in the HTML
6% very minimal importance | 5.7% moderate consensus

24. Keyword Use in the Meta Keywords Tag
5% very minimal importance | 5.5% moderate consensus

Now keeping these in mind when you design your website will help give your website a better Page Rank in my next blog post we will go over some of the negative factors and what doesn’t work to get you ranking. I hope these help you as much as they did me.

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13 Essential Wordpress Plugins

Rusty — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:55:13 +0000

Here I’ve compiled a list of Wordpress plugins that I personally use and you should too, that is, if you want a spam-free, quick loading, easily manageable and search engine friendly web site. In my 3 years using Wordpress, I’ve found these to be the most essential plugins that I start every project with. I do, however, have a larger list for my personal site. Enjoy!

Akismet

Who can? You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

Automated Keyword Generator

The keywords tag itself will be your title, tags, and category, so you don’t have to worry about the density as long as your post is matched and about the tag and category you have inputed in. The keywords have semi-blackhat SEO order, so it may make easier to you to show on top queries.

Contact Form 7

You need a simple contact form for your site? Oh, you need 7 different contact forms? All with customizeable html and output ttemplates? And it has to be easy to use? I know, it sounds too good to be true, but it is. This plugin can simplify any of your form needs, easily.

DB Cache

The fastest cache engine for WordPress, that produces cache of database queries with easy configuration.

Efficient Related Posts

There is a problem with related posts plugins, and Efficient Related Posts is fixing that by approaching the problem from a different direction and offering a very different solution. Basically, current related post plugins build the list of related posts on the fly when the user needs to view it. Since blogs tend to be viewed far more often than they are updated (often hundreds of times more often), these queries are run way more times than they need to be. This not only wastes CPU cycles, but if the queries are slow (which they will be if you have 1000s of posts and tags) then the user gets a poor experience from slow page loads.

Feedburner FeedSmith

Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

Optimize DB

Let’s you optimize your WordPress database tables with one click. Click optimize on the right to start optimizing!

Post Gallery

Provides ability to add any number of additional images to each post

Related Websites

Add your posts to the Blog Traffic Exchange and add Links to related websites throughout the blogosphere.

Simple Submit SEO

Displays submit buttons to Digg, del.icio.us, stumble upon, and buzz. Clean and simple interface. Requires wp_head hook in template to insert stylesheet for plugin.

Wordpress 2 Ping.fm

Links and integrate your WordPress account to Ping.fm. Once linked, the plugin will update all your social networks every time you publish a post. You can customize the look of your pings, send custom pings, and set rules for which posts you want to notify your social networks about. This is la creme de la creme of social network plugins, created by people who just happen to specialize in communication and social networks. You will need a Ping.fm account and an application key to use this plugin, which you can get for free at http://ping.fm

WP Super Cache

Very fast caching plugin for Wordpress

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Use PHP to Ping Technorati on your blog updates

Rusty — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:15:21 +0000

If you are familiar with blogosphere you know what is Technorati.

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. You can submit your blog to Technorati and ping their servers when your blog site is updated. when you ping Technorati their web crawlers read the updated information on your site.

Technorati offers an XML-RPC ping web service to allow blogs to notify content changes.

In this article we discuss how to write a PHP script to programatically ping Technorati when there is new content in your site.

The URL to ping is rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping.

The method name to call is weblogUpdates.ping.

The request XML must contain two parameters – your blog site name the blog site URL.

From the API documentation of Technorati, the sample request XML is as below:

version="1.0"?> weblogUpdates.ping YOUR WEBLOG NAME HERE http://www.YOURWEBLOGURL.com/

Let’s start writing the XML-RPC client to ping Technorati.

Our first step is to generate the required XML request string.

$site_name = "YOUR WEBLOG NAME HERE"; $site_url = "http://www.YOURWEBLOGURL.com"; $request = xmlrpc_encode_request("weblogUpdates.ping", array($site_name, $site_url)); ?>

The function xmlrpc_encode_request as the name suggests, creates the request XML string. If you echo $request variable you will see output like below:

version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> weblogUpdates.ping Benzing Technologies http://benzingtech.com

The next step is to create the streams context.

$context = stream_context_create(array('http' => array( 'method' => "POST", 'header' => "Content-Type: text/xml\r\nUser-Agent: PHPRPC/1.0\r\nHost: rpc.technorati.com\r\n", 'content' => $request ))); ?>

The code snippet states that we are preparing to make an HTTP POST request to the server rpc.technorati.com.

The next step is to make the request.

$server = "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping"; $file = file_get_contents($server, false, $context); ?>

We now decode the response XML using the function xmlrpc_decode(). We determine whether the response XML contains a fault structure using the xmlrpc_is_fault() function.

$response = xmlrpc_decode($file); if (is_array($response) and xmlrpc_is_fault($response)){ echo "Failed to ping Technorati"; } else { echo "Successfully pinged Technorati"; } ?>

The entire script is pasted below.

$site_name = "Benzing Technologies"; /** * The URL of your site */ $site_url = "http://benzingtech.com"; $request = xmlrpc_encode_request("weblogUpdates.ping", array($site_name, $site_url)); #echo $request; $context = stream_context_create(array('http' => array( 'method' => "POST", 'header' => "Content-Type: text/xml\r\nUser-Agent: PHPRPC/1.0\r\nHost: rpc.technorati.com\r\n", 'content' => $request ))); $server = "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping"; $file = file_get_contents($server, false, $context); $response = xmlrpc_decode($file); if (is_array($response) and xmlrpc_is_fault($response)){ echo "Failed to ping Technorati"; } else { echo "Successfully pinged Technorati"; } ?>

The source code is available from the Code Album Github repository.

Tracking outgoing links with Google Analytics and jQuery

Rusty — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:13:28 +0000

When looking for an easy way to track outgoing links in Google Analytics with jQuery I came across this plugin. However, I needed a more flexible way of link tracking, with more control on which links to track and in what format.

For those reasons I use a small jQuery plugin written by Gerry Vandermaesen. Usage is simple:

$('a[rel=external]').gaLinkTrack();

Of course you can modify the selector to your needs, but (for now) you can only track links.

Inside Google Analytics, the tracked link takes the format “/{rel}/{domain}/{page}” by default. If no rel attribute is present, it defaults to “external”. You can change the format of the tracked links by passing the path option:

$('a[rel=download]').gaLinkTrack( { path: '/downloads/{page}' } );

When specifying the path format you can use any of the following placeholders: {rel}, {domain}, {page}. You can specify a default value for any of the placeholders (notably {rel}) as illustrated here:

$('a.download').gaLinkTrack( { path: '/{rel:download}/{page}' } );

This is a first version so feedback and suggestions are more than welcome. Things still to come: proper handling of email links, more options for customizing the tracked path, and more…

Download the full source code (jquery-galinktrack-1.0.js) or the minified version (jquery-galinktrack-1.0.min.js).

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jQuery with other frameworks without conflicts

Rusty — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:05:22 +0000

While jQuery is certainly a popular JavaScript framework, it’s by no means the only game in town. Other frameworks such as Prototype, MooTools, Dojo and many others all have their own strengths, weaknesses, and devoted groupies.

Generally speaking, these frameworks all play well together — you can mix and match framework functionality to your heart’s content, as long as you don’t mind the additional overhead of loading several libraries simultaneously. So you have a calendar widget in jQuery that you love, but you’re already using Prototype to animate your navigation bar? Don’t be shy… use both!

Of course, every once in a while you can run in to problems when combining JS frameworks — particularly (in my experience) when combining jQuery and Prototype. Luckily, jQuery was kind enough to provide us with a workaround.

The Problem: Sharing Syntax

The most common compatibility problem stems from both jQuery and Prototype using the same shortcut syntax: namely, the $().doSomething syntax. Here’s a sample line of code in jQuery:

$('#myelement').addClass('active');

And the same functionality in Prototype:

$('myelement').addClassName('active');

Note the basic similarity? Both frameworks claim the dollar sign notation for themselves, which can wreak havoc on snippets of code dropped willy-nilly into a website. If your jQuery code is grabbed up by Prototype, things will stop working fast. And similarly, if your Prototype code is snagged by jQuery, not even the awesome power of jQuery will be enough to overcome the code confusion.

The Solution: noConflict Mode

But not to worry! jQuery has provided us with a workaround called “noConflict mode.”

By default, there are two equally correct ways to call a jQuery function — the dollar sign notation, and “jQuery” notation:

$('#myelement').show(); jQuery('#myelement').show();

Both of the lines above do exactly the same thing. However, most people use and prefer the dollar sign notation. Why? Probably because it’s shorter, and if web developers didn’t care about brevity in their code, they probably wouldn’t have used a framework in the first place.

Of course, just using the longer jQuery notation isn’t enough. If jQuery has already claimed the dollar sign for itself, any Prototype functionality relying on that notation will still be grabbed by jQuery.

This is where the noConflict function comes in handy. Simply run the following line after both Prototype and jQuery have been loaded:

jQuery.noConflict();

This will cause jQuery to give up the dollar-sign notation, allowing the other library to take it over. And you can still use your jQuery snippet, provided you change all instances of $() to jQuery().
Keeping it Short

The noConflict mode does have one other bit of functionality that I’ve found useful in some of my projects: you can select a different variable to use instead of the standard “jQuery”. The usage looks like this:

var $j = jQuery.noConflict();

Now in addition to using the default jQuery() notation, I can also use the shorter $j() notation. This allows me to avoid running into problems with other frameworks, while still enjoying almost the same conciseness in my code.

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