Lost Twitter Ettiquette: DOs

In the prehistoric days of Twitter, tweets were not searchable by search engines like Google and Bing. The marketing potential of 140 character microblog postings had not been realized.  Initially, Twitter was seen as a tool that allowed friends and family to keep up with each other, a new way to send text messages. There was much more conversation going on. Since its inception in 2006, Twitter has grown to over 200,000,000 users. At one time it seemed like there was an unspoken understanding of how to interact in Twitter. Now some of these “DOs and DON’Ts” seem to have been forgotten. Read the rest of this entry »

Lost Twitter Ettiquette: DON’Ts

You may have read the DOs of Twitter ettiquette in my previous post.  To continue on the thought, here is a list of DON’Ts: Read the rest of this entry »

Researching

I’ve been involved in  a research project based on  web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise.  I recently came across an interesting interactive tool by McKinsey Quarterly that gives an interactive comparison of trends.

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_and_Web_20_An_interactive_feature_2431?pagenum=1#interactive

Plugins WordPress Forum Server

There are a number of forums that are easy to implement within WordPress. I have installed WordPress Forum Server, which is easy to implement. The process is simple:

1. Download the plugin
2. Activate
3. Configure the settings with categories and groups.
4. Create a page to display the forum on your site
5. Add the following code to the top of the page in the html code:

You can add a widget to the sidebar for the forum. When you go to the page that was set up for the forums, you have a tool that allows you to click on the category and add new posts. I always find how technology has evolved, amazing.pl

Google Analytics

If  you really want to improve your site’s ranking, it is important to understand the behavior visitors to your site follow. A perfect tool for this is Google Analytics. Simple to use, you create a unique code for the site that you are adding the analytics to. Add the script into the end of your html file, or into a plugin tool if your site is built on WordPress, and you will start seeing information usually within  2 days.

Once you install Google Analytics, it is fairly easy to allow access to others. I do this all the time for my clients, so that I can manage the technical aspects, but they can still see the results.  The breadth of the information goes fairly deep and gives many views, geolocation information, an more.

Check it out:   http://google.com/analytics

Converting PDF Files To HTML

When you have PDF files that you need to display on a website, you need to convert the file to HTML. An easy freeware utility to do this is pdftohtml. The source code is available on sourceforge.net.

pdftohtml is a command line piece of software, which you operate from the command console.  Type in the name of the program the pdf file to read and the name of the html file to save. It will create the necessary files and links for you.

Easy as 1, 2, 3.

A Tool To Check If Your Website Has Been Copied

I recently was researching copy writing, and came across Copyscape, an interesting and very useful web tool.  What Copyscape does is allows you to check if the content on your website has been plagiarized.

Since I write for CoastViews Magazine, The Stable S and for a number

Portwiture

Here is a recent portwiture. It is fun to see how these change depending on what you tweet.

Compatibility Testing

When testing, it is important to test on multiple browsers and versions of browsers. Internet Explorer has incredible inconsistencies between versions of the browser. Since IE is the most widely used browser, it is important to test between different versions.

Some tools for testing your web design on different browsers:

Browser Shots   http://browsershots.org/

Netrenderer  http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php

Adobe’s Browser Lab  http://browserlab.adobe.com

Wild Pockets – A 3D engine built for browsers

I’ve just downloaded the Wild Pockets 3D engine for Firefox.  This is a huge advancement. I came out of the 3D modeling and animation world back when a lot of custom/proprietary code was being written and the software only ran on high end Unix workstations.  It is amazing to me to see how the industry has evolved.  I’m including this fun demo from the Wild Pockets website to show the capabilities of the 3D engine.

I believe this will totally change many online applications, much the way computer games went from InfoComm text only games to the incredible visuals available now in games like World of Warcraft.

This demo requires an ActiveX or Firefox plugin in order to work. I tested it in Google Chrome, but no happiness there. No plugin for Chrome at this time.