ReadWriteWeb has a great write up on the new WordPress plugin from the good folks at SalesForce, which allows full integration between SalesForce and WordPress.
The setup is fairly simple—the WordPress plugin involves no complicated setup and the SalesForce side of the equation involves setting up a “receiver,” which is common practice for SalesForce veterans and one that is very well documented for noobs who may be stumbling through it for the first time.
While I’m glad to see SalesForce acknowledging the importance and lead generation potential of corporate blogging, I’m forced to wonder “What took you guys so long?”
Do you want to allow users to your website to email you without using an annoying contact form? Are you afraid of simply posting your email address on a page for fear of getting spammed into oblivion? Then Enkoder is the solution for you!
As Dan Benjamin, the genius behind Hivelogic.com and creator of Enkoder explains:
The Enkoder helps protect email addresses by converting them into encrypted JavaScript code so only real people using real browsers will see them.
Enkoder is also available as a Mac OS X download.
Finally no more “Email us at info AT readymadeweb DOT com.” Instead, just
If you watched the Superbowl back in February, then you likely caught Google “Parisian Love” ad. The ad tells the story of a young man who moves to Paris, meets a girl, falls in love, and eventually starts a family.
This otherwise cliche story was made into a very creative ad by telling the entire story through search queries. Using only video from a computer screen it shows searches like “how to impress a French girl” and “what are truffles” to guide the television audience through the story. The ad powerfully demonstrates how Google is a fixture in modern life, providing us with the information we need to do everything from the trivial to the deeply meaningful.
Now Google has released Search Story Creator, a tool that will allow you to tell your own “search story,” just like “Parisian Love.” Continue Reading →
With over 92,000 all-time downloads, Lightbox Plus is a very popular solution for displaying large images elegantly in a WordPress blog. Lightbox Plus displays images in a pop-up, framed box while darkening the rest of your site.
This is a much more elegant and user-friendly solution than either shrinking large images down to fit within the design of your site or leaving them to be displayed as an image-only page.
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Requests for proposal for websites—or RFPs as they’re often called—can be difficult to write, especially for non-technical customers.
So, I thought I’d draft a set of guidelines specifically geared toward non-profits working the public policy world—the core audience of ReadyMadeWeb.
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It can be easy to let security slip your mind when you’re building a website or blog with WordPress. Thankfully, there are some great tools out there that will let you easily check on the security status of your WordPress-based site and remind you of further steps you ought to be taking to protect yourself.
WP Security Scan can help keep your site secure by quickly displaying the folder permission settings critical to your site’s security, testing the strength of your passwords, hiding the version of WordPress you’re using from being displayed, hardening your database, keeping bad guys out of your admin panel, and obfuscating meta tag information in your site’s code. If some or all of this sounds a little bit above your expertise level, the plugin makes it easy and walks you through the steps necessary to turn your site into a virtual fortress.
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I’ve been touting the virtues of web-based software here on ReadyMadeWeb for quite some time, and recently I’ve talked a bit about how SalesForce is the ideal solution for non-profits looking for a comprehensive, easy, and worry-free database solution. Though I’ve worked with SalesForce, I’m not a day-to-day user, so I thought I ought to get someone on ReadyMadeWeb to talk to our audience about why SalesForce is so great.
Thankfully, I ended up talking to Nathan Spiwak of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation (and soon-to-be certified SalesForce consultant) when I recently spoke there on the subject of web traffic measurement. Spiwak was kind enough to answer a bunch of a questions I sent him via email.
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Check out this video from Seth Stevenson, the ad critic at Slate. He explains how Slate’s V—Slate’s video site—ran an ad campaign on Fox News for only $100.
This wasn’t prime-time ad real estate—it was re-runs of Glenn Beck shown at 3am—but it proves the point about how easy it can be to run a nation-wide TV campaign from your computer.
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A few of the folks who have contacted me about BoinxTV after reading a piece here at ReadyMadeWeb have complained about audio static or “popping” when they switch between cameras. I’ve found that this can be addressed in one of two ways.
First, by selecting the camera you’re going to switch to so that it appears in the preview window in the upper left corner of the BoinxTV window, you place this source in a sort of “on deck” position. This means that BoinxTV while BoinxTV will not be recording that source, it will be receiving a live feed of information from that source, so that a switch will be seamless.
Failing to place a source in the “on deck” position means that the switch will be abrupt, as the source will have to be initialized before BoinxTV can start recording from that source. That’s what accounts for the static or popping sound.
Being that live production is often limited by how much human processing bandwidth you have—how many buttons, audio sources, camera adjustments, and sound mixer sendings you can pay attention to—it’s best to try to simplify where possible. That’s why I find it helpful to have one constant audio audio source, rather than tying audio to cameras. To do this, select the audio feed of one of your cameras as separate Audio Source layer (see the example above). You can then select each of your video sources and remove the audio component from them entirely—failing to do this could result in reverb-like audio as you’ll be capturing the same audio twice.
By completely divorce audio and video, the issues of static and popping from source switching should be completely solved.
If you have questions about audio and video sources in BoinxTV, questions about live video production, or questions about anything else we’ve covered on ReadyMadeWeb.com, please email us at info@readymadeweb.com.
Ian Stewart of ThemeShaper fame has joined Automattic—the parents company of brands like WordPress, Intense Debate, Akismet, and Gravatar—founded by Matt Mullenweg. As a result, Stewart has decided to make his own “child themes” from the WordPress theme framework ThemeShaper available for download free of charge.
If you’re unfamiliar with ThemeShaper or theme frameworks in general, they work by creating a sort of generic template for a theme, on top of which different sub-themes or child themes can be applied. ThemeShaper is a little bit different from The Thesis Theme for WordPress, the framework we used here at ReadyMadeWeb and most strongly recommend to new bloggers, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth checking out, especially considering the price.
One interested aspect of Stewart being hired by Automattic is the distinct possibility that WordPress will begin to create house-brand themes or incorporate some of the ThemeShaper ideas into a baked-in framework for a future version of WordPress. While this could be seen as a good thing given that many WordPress sites needlessly suffer from bad SEO thanks to poorly coded themes, it may also hurt the theme and theme framework marketplace, which currently benefits from a huge amount of competition between fantastic designers.
