by Cord Blomquist on January 31, 2010 · View Comments
Unlike Google Analytics or other analytics packages, Quantcast combines direct measurement of your site’s traffic with what’s known as “panel data,” which is data collected from surveys of Internet users. By combining these two data sets Quantcast is able to tell you not only how many people are visiting your site, but also things about those visitors like their income level, age, sex, educational attainment and other useful info. This information is useful to you if you want to sell advertising space on your site, buy ad space from others, or just learn more about the folks visiting your site.
To install the tracking code, just follow along with this video:
Because PHP Code Widget has some security risks and isn’t the ideal solution for using Monday’s plugins as widgets, I decided to create a couple of very simple plugins that will create widgets for both mutli-column category lists and multi-column link lists. Check them out on our new Plugins page.
If you have additional ideas for plugins, please drop us a note in the comments section.
Yesterday I was involved in publishing a video a to YouTube that had some major PR power behind it—outreach to top bloggers as well as radio and TV exposure—so the video got a ton of views. While the traffic to the video’s landing page skyrocketed, the view count of the video stayed stuck at somewhere just above 300 views for several hours. Comments kept pouring in, the ratings number climbed, but the views stayed stuck.
Late today the number finally adjusted itself to a bit over 27,000 views. A great number for the first day, but one that the users who helped make it happen couldn’t see—very frustrating.
After doing some searching I found this bit of unhelpful advice on the subject at the YouTube blog:
Video view counts reflect the YouTube community’s interests and the grassroots popularity of videos. We periodically make changes that allow us to display consistent view counts and accurately reflect a “real” view based on video consumption, video streaming and spam filtering. Unfortunately, a few people still try to artificially manipulate their video’s view counts. Some people game third-party view counts as well. That can make things unfair for everyone.
Recently, we found spamming issues associated with the view counts on a small number of videos. The inflated view count number on these videos will be frozen until actual views catch up to the published, artificial, view count. Also, a few people have commented that their view counts are updating more slowly. Occasionally the speed with which views update changes — sometimes it’s faster and sometimes it’s slower. But we are always working to make sure that the final view count numbers are an accurate reflection of the community’s interest.
In short, in the name of accuracy and fighting the dreaded video spammer, YouTube has departed from Google’s speed-first policy and slowed down the updating of view counts to allow for a thorough vetting of the numbers.
But, when technological fixes don’t exist, that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be done. Managing expectations and preparing your boss or client for this phenomenon well ahead of a launch can do wonders to keep folks from getting agitated or asking you to “fix the YouTube.”
If you’re in need of a positive spin, you may mention that many users speculate that long periods of stagnant video counts typically indicate that a video is quite popular and that its page has essentially been cached—served up without updates to save on processing power and load time. This is a great way to take a technological bummer and turn it into reason to celebrate.
As I explained in my last post, Tumblr is a light-weight hosted blogging platform that can be more than enough for many web projects. One thing that users accustomed to more full-featured content management systems miss when they use Tumblr is the ability to create static pages–for example, for an About page or a FAQs page. Luckily, there’s an easy way around that.
The trick I’ve used is to create subdomains for each static page. My personal blog is at jerrybrito.org, but my about page is at about.jerrybrito.org. That “about” subdomain is not hosted by Tumblr; it’s hosted on my own server. I simply took the HTML for my Tumblr template and replaced the dynamic content (the code that calls for the blog posts) with the static text of my about page. Voila, a static page for Tumblr.
Admittedly, this is a bit of a hack. If you need more than one or two static pages for your project, you’re probably better off choosing another CMS. A more likely scenario that would call for Tumblr, though, is if you have a website composed mostly of static pages or pages generated by some application that does not include blogging capability and you want to add a simple blog for your site. In that case, you can do the reverse of what I just described an put your Tumblr blog on a subdomain.
For example, I run a site called OpenRegs.com, which is an easier-to-use alternative to the federal government’s official regulatory portal, Regulations.gov. All of the pages on the openregs.com domain are generated by a custom-built application hosted on my own server. When I needed a blog to add the latest news and announcements about the site, I created a new subdomain at blog.openregs.com. That’s where the Tumblr blog resides and all the pages of that subdomain are hosted by Tumblr. The subdomain’s look is the same as the main site because I took the main template and simply added Tumblr code to pull in the dynamic blog content.
As a follow-up to my post about the iSite’s iPhone and Android app-building service, I wanted to cover an alternative way to bring your WordPress-based site to mobile devices. WordPress Mobile Edition by Crowd Favorite is very quick and easy way to create a very stripped-down, simplified version of your site for mobile devices.
This plugin is actually a plugin/theme combo pack, which adds a few steps to the plugin installation processs. After you download and unzip the files using the link above, you’ll find both the plugin file, wp-mobile.php, and a folder called “carrington-mobile-1.0.2.” Place the plugin file in the wp-content/plugins directory and the Carrington theme in the wp-content/theme directory. After you activate the plugin, visitors using mobile devices will be redirect to the new minimalist, gray theme.
The plugin’s settings page, which can be found other the Settings menu in the backend of WordPress, allows you to edit lists of mobile and touch device browsers that will be redirected to the mobile theme. I’ve removed the iPhone and Android from our list as I find the full site more usable and better-looking on my iPhone than the alternative theme. You should consider doing similar testing with your site and soliciting customer feedback to determine what platforms really need a specialized mobile theme and which should continue to see your standard design.
Speaking of feedback, if you’re using a mobile device to access ReadyMadeWeb, please leave a comment below and let us know how the site looks and performs on your device.
Overall, this plugin is great—it provides a very easy-to-navigate alternative to a standard theme. But, it would be nice to have some basic customization of the theme—like choosing a new color palette—built into the plugin’s settings menu. Additionally, building-in or at least linking to a mobile phone emulation/testing website would be helpful. That said, none of this takles away from the fact that this plugin is a great alternative to creating multiple website-as-app solutions for individual platforms like the iPhone or Android.
For more on mobile plugins for WordPress, check out the list of top WordPress mobile plugins at WordPress feed.
by Cord Blomquist on January 25, 2010 · View Comments
While ReadyMadeWeb works hard to provide you with a knowledge of best practices for SEO, the folks at Google are a bit better equipped to tell you how to best interact with their own search engine. Check out the SEO for Beginners Guide at the Google Webmaster blog or watch the very comprehensive video below on search-friendly web devlopment to get the real insider perspective on SEO.
Today’s Plugin Monday is focused on sidebar widgets. A plain vanilla WordPress install has a nice set of widgets for the sidebar, but they are fairly limited in how they present information to the user. Here are three plugins to help you with both the form and function of your sidebars:
PHP Code Widget – This plugin is exceptionally handy as it allows PHP code to be executed within sidebar widgets. Normally WordPress only allows HTML within the sidebars. This plugins open widgets up to the addition of PHP functionality, creating a new type of widget called simply “PHP Code” which can be used multiple times just like the “Text” widget. This added PHP functionality compliments other plugins that create new PHP functions which can then be called into the widgets. Both plugins below are great examples of this.
Update: Because of security concerns with plugins like PHP Code Widget, we recommend using the plugin with caution. Though many WordPress users are actively employing this plugin, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s safe or secure. This plugin allows PHP to be written directly to the MySQL database, meaning that any user that has access to this plugin would essentially have access to the whole site as they could insert code to give themselves such rights. So, only use this plugin on sites that are already well-secured and are being used by a small number of trusted users. When possible, use the standard method of widgetizing code rather than using PHP Code Widget.
If you have any information about other security risks associated with this plugin, please post a comment.
Multi Column Category List – Save space on your site while leaving all of your categories visible (not hidden in a drop-down menu) by using this handy plugin from Dagon Design. The plugin uses a bit of PHP magic to split your list of categories into columns. The number of columns can be changed in the plugin’s settings screen. The category list can be added to any page or post using trigger text (<!-- multicollinks -->), or called directly from a template file by using <?php echo ddmcl_generate(); ?>.
The plugin also has the option of splitting the list up into blocks based on letter. For example, links to Amazon.com and Ask.com would appear under the “A” heading. This could be useful if you have an especially lengthy blogroll.
The one tricky part of using this plugin is properly configuring the CSS file. Make sure to place the CSS file included in the root folder of your current theme. This applies to theme frameworks like Thesis as well—don’t place the CSS file within a “custom” folder or other framework mechanism.
Within the plugin’s CSS file, you’ll find these lines of code, defining the basic column style:
Be sure to set the width of this style small enough to allow for two columns of that size to fit into wherever you’re placing the trigger text or template call. If you set the width too wide, you’ll be left what appears to be the same, single-column list you’re used to. This is caused by the second column being bushed below the first, which will look no different than what you started with.
Multi Column Link List – This plugin gives you the same functionality as the plugin above, but with links rather than categories. The CSS file placement and customization for the category plugin also applies to this links plugin.
You can see the PHP Code Widget and Multi Column Category List in action in our sidebar here at ReadyMadeWeb.
WordPress’s extensibility, its very expandable model that allows for this sort of customization, is powered by its huge developer community. So, if you use these plugins, please consider donating to their developers. Your donation compensates them for a little bit of their time and can provide a lot of encouragement to keep them working for the betterment of the WordPress community.
As always, if you have any questions about about using these plugins or anything else we’ve blogged about at ReadyMadeWeb, please email us at info@readymadeweb.com.
by Cord Blomquist on January 24, 2010 · View Comments
iPhone and Android apps are no longer the domain of developers now that tools like iSites.us by GenWi. This tool makes creating a mobile app version of your website as easy as clicking through a series of menus and forking over a modest $25.
Because I can’t resist fiddling around with easy-to-use webware, I’ve begun the process of creating an iPhone version of ReadyMadeWeb in order to review iSites’s service and to give everyone another way to see what we’re up to.
The process of building out the applications was relatively simple as this app has only a few, basic options. The first step in the process is identifying your RSS feeds and your accounts at (micro)blogging, photo sharing, and video sites. Currently iSites supports Twitter, Wordpress.com, Tumblr, and Posterous on the blogging side of things; YouTube and Qik for video; and Flickr, Webshots, Smugmug, and Zooomr for photos. But, this “support” is really just a quick way of grabbing RSS feeds—in fact, there is no verification of ownership of any of these accounts—so the RSS feature really covers your bases.
I was impressed that the RSS function was able to grab the thumbnail images from the feed and turn them into great-looking icons for each post. This made the preview of the finished product look very professional—a lot like the New York Times mobile reader.
From the feeds screen you move on to the design and creative phases of the process. Have your site’s color palette handy for this as you’ll need to plug in some hexadecimal color values. You’ll also need a capable designer ready to crop, stretch and resize your logo into the rigidly defined dimensions required by the iPhone and the iTunes store.
Be sure to play close attention to the Menu section under the Design tab as your menu order will match the order in which you add your feeds to the menu. Hopefully GenWi updates this feature to allow users to drag and drop menu items around as I found myself having to delete items and re-enter them after seeing that the order couldn’t be changed post-entry.
Unfortunately, our app won’t be coming out very soon due to the incredible demand for these iSites-powered apps. A message at the publication screen as well as the front page of their site reads:
Currently we have been inundated with new app requests. Hence we have decided to temporarily stop activating and accepting payments for new apps until all currently paid apps are submitted to Apple for final review. Please note that you can continue to create new apps and publish – but will not be able to activate and submit it for review.
It’s not clear how long this embargo on new apps publication will last, which also makes the pricing scheme a bit murky. Because the publishing option is shutdown, I remain unclear if the $25 price tag will nab you an iPhone app or an Android app or if you get both as a package deal. Ben Parr of Mashable says that the Android apps won’t be available for publication until February, adding to the confusion.
Once the publication embargo is lifted and our app has made its way to the iTunes Stores, I’ll update this review. Until then I’ll just say so far, so good.
To barrow a line from Mark Twain, the reports of RSS’s death have been greatly exaggertated. Okay, so RSS readers aren’t used by a lot of people, but they really should be.
Products like Google Reader allow you to keep everything you love online organized, categorized and quickly viewable in one place. Google Reader specifically allows you to take your reading with you and share it with others.
Google Reader can also make your web-reading work flow a lot more organized and streamlined. If you’re regularly blogging about topics in the news, Reader will allow you peruse headlines, highlight the items you want to look into further using the “star” feature, and thereby quickly create a reading list for your daily blogging.
This isn’t just limited to your PC or Mac, you can take reader with you and use it fill many of the otherwise unproductive parts of your day. My favorite mobile reader app is Byline for the iPhone, a great interface that allow for quick reading, starring, sharing, and has nice little features like “Mail Link to this Page” which makes for quick sharing with non-users of Google Reader.
If you’re using an Android-based phone, Google Reader is, of course, supported and several alternative interfaces to Google’s own can be found in the app store. If you’re using a BlackBerry or another mobile device, you can check out google.com/mobile/more to see what applications are available for your phone.
For people working in groups, Google Reader can be an incredible resource. The sharing feature allows group blogs and other writers working in teams to quickly move good stories in front of other writes on their team. Just be sure to be following the shared items of the other writes in your group and you’ll make the discovery process for good fodder for stories take much less time.
Whether you’re a blogger or just a regular reader of more than one blog, by investing the short amount of time to setup and get into the rhythm of using Google Reader, you’ll save time and give yourself a bunch of tools to do more with what you’re reading.
Check out this video by the folks behind Google Reader to get familiar with the basics:
by Cord Blomquist on January 23, 2010 · View Comments
WeFollow.com is a directory of Twitter users created by Digg founder, Kevin Rose. When the site launched early last year, Ben Parr of Mashable covered the story and explained how WeFollow.com works:
The premise is simple: anyone can tweet to @wefollow hashtags that represent what categories they would like to be listed under. WeFollow sees these @replies and then organizes users based on those hashtags. Common hashtags include #blogger, #entrepreneur, and #socialmedia. WeFollow only allows for three hashtags per person, assuring the directory does not become overly cluttered.
That restriction on tagging is a key component to WeFollow. It prevents the sort of keyword gaming and spamming that makes many other directories unusable.
WeFollow.com is an excellent resource for finding people who generate and promote great content, but it can also be a great resource for finding people who you can to make aware of your presence of Twitter. By following top twitterers talking about your areas of interest, you may make them aware of your tweets.
Remember, Twitter sends an email notification to folks you follow—this is the default setting, but can be turned off—a follow is also a sort of message. So, people you follow will be made aware of you, check out your tweets and profile, and may follow you back. This is how mass-follow tools like TwitterMass can help to gain you followers as well.
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Unlike Google Analytics or other analytics packages, Quantcast combines direct measurement of your site’s traffic with what’s known as “panel data,” which is data collected from surveys of Internet users. By combining these two data sets Quantcast is able to tell you not only how many people are visiting your site, but also things about those visitors like their income level, age, sex, educational attainment and other useful info. This information is useful to you if you want to sell advertising space on your site, buy ad space from others, or just learn more about the folks visiting your site.
