I was tinkering around in PHP for hours until I stumbled upon this perfect post for editing your WordPress theme to ignore certain pages. Great time saving tip!
http://www.deauxmaingroup.com/hide-a-page-or-post-from-navigation-in-wordpress/
How To Convert An Excel List Of Keywords To A Comma Separated List
May 25th, 2010
4 Comments
Let’s say you’ve got your master list of keywords, for SEO or Adwords all ready to go. If you’ve done your homework, and read the Long Tail, you know that you should have a few thousand keywords. They’re primed, relevant and sure to please the Adwords Quality Score and you need to copy these in a more text friendly manner for say, meta keywords tag. This is something so small, but can take up so much time if you don’t know how to do it.
Converting Excel lists, to comma lists can be time consuming without such a simple trick
- Take your long list, and copy it into a blank Notepad document.
- Select All and copy it again into a Word document.
- Use Find and Replace to find “^p” without the quotes, and replace with “, ” without the quotes. I suggest putting a space after the comma to separate the values.
- Hit Replace All.
Now you have the Excel list, converted to a more user friendly view that is more helpful for meta keywords and backing up long lists. Want to convert back? Just switch the two values in Find and Replace.
Motorola Droid or Milestone Multimedia Dock Crashing After Android 2.1 Update?
May 15th, 2010
12 Comments
I just got the Android 2.1 update on my UK Motorola Milestone (identical to the
- Motorola Droid Milestone 2.1 Update Multimedia Station Crash Fixed
Motorola Droid, aside from some loaded software, and being GSM) and it fixes a ton of little things and add some nice new features that users have been requesting. But the moment I put it into my Droid dock (which is awesome for space savers like myself) it immediately crashed the dock/station application. Here’s the fix, which for some reason is nearly impossible to find in English. If for some reason you would rather read it in Portuguese, it is available here.
From the Home Screen go to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications
Select Menu Button > Filter -> All
Select “Base Multimedia” or “Multimedia Station” and select Clear Data.
Go back to the Home Screen and insert the handset into the dock.
Voila, no crash!
Solution by Danilo Araujo (http://www.vivoblog.com.br/dia-21-para-os-stones.html/comment-page-2#comment-17535) Users, also had the same problem with the dock. To resolve follow these steps. 1) Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications 2) Button Menu -> Filter -> All 3) Find the application "Base Multimedia" and find the Clear Data option.
What The Hell Is Apple Doing Lately?
April 28th, 2010
No Comments
Honestly, Steve Jobs losing his mind. All this has happened in the last month or so:
1) Apple puts ridiculous restrictions in section 3.3.1 on what platform iPhone apps can be written on. This isn’t a platform killer, but it sure is asking for platform cancer. Sure, the best apps usually aren’t written on the native platform, but this is really a high stakes move.
2) A college age guy finds the prototype for the next gen iPhone (left by Apple engineer Gray Powell) on the floor of a bar in Redwood City, CA, and sells it to Gizmodo (awesome tech blog) for $5,000. Not more than a week later after they post the pics, representatives from Apple show up at the house and get stopped by a room mate. Two days later, the top editor at Gizmodo Jason Chen gets his house searched and computers, cameras, mobile phones, American Express bill, bank checks and the iPhone prototype (assumed) raided by a combination of law enforcement agencies.
3) Apple bans apps that make fun of public figures. Are you kidding me? If the App Store was a news paper, there would be no political cartoons, no op eds of sarcasm and only information you were supposed to see. Wow.
4) Steve Jobs, the CEO who is known for personally emailing customers, told one person that if they wanted porn on their phone, they should get an Android phone. Well Steve, I have an Android phone and it turns out that it does have porn available. It also has EVERYTHING AN IPHONE HAS. Here’s the kicker though, Apple’s App Store is considered way to raunchy by the Parents Television Council to be for kids. Of all networks, Fox News gives you the dirt on what’s still available.
Wow, what a rough month for Apple.
New Rules for Foursquare
April 7th, 2010
No Comments
Foursquare is loading up on their rules to prevent you Foursquare cheaters (you know who you are!) Great piece on Mashable about how they won’t prevent you from checking in anywhere, but the points associated are another story.
Details here: http://mashable.com/2010/04/07/foursquare-cheaters/
The Last Advertising Agency On Earth [VIDEO]
March 21st, 2010
No Comments
To follow up on my previous post about The End Of Advertising Agencies and The Beginning of the DIY Small Business Owner….
I couldn’t agree more:
The Last Advertising Agency On Earth from FITC on Vimeo
.
Cadbury Ireland Facebook Contest Shows Crowdsourcing Drawback: Plagiarized Works
February 26th, 2010
18 Comments
A week ago Cadbury Chocolates Ireland announced the winner of their Cadbury Apprentice Contest to design a new Cadbury Milk Bar wrapper. All was well and the two top designers got well over 25,000 votes each. On Feb 15, 2010 they picked the winner, Sinead Costello. A lot of people voted for the design, but by the end of the day though, comments like this were appearing on the Facebook page: 
It appeared that the entry was pretty blatantly copied from a piece called Waterfall Transforming Into White Hooded Monks.
Here are the two pieces below:
Needless to say there are some striking similarities in the waterfall section. Similar direction and an almost identical pattern.
The real give away is where the ‘milk’ breaks mid stream in some rocks, and the placement of the hoods and ‘monks’ is pretty much unforgivable. See close up below:
Plagiarizing works is nothing new, but in an almost admission of guilt, Sinead has apparently deactivated her Facebook page, probably due to the sheer amount of criticism she may have been receiving.
The real loser here is Cadbury though. Crowd sourcing is a great way to engage consumers for local markets and build a reputation, but crowd sourcing also involves the public and their apparently devilish ways.
Cadbury may have seen some advantage in the fact that any publicity is good publicity (hence this post) but it seems that the disheartened other designers who hopefully have not done such work, may have lost their enthusiasm for such a campaign.
Cadbury did respond with this though:
In Cadbury’s defence, they do have a rule that entrants “must ensure that: (a) The entry is the entrant’s original creation and has not been copied, adapted or amended.”
Is it plagiarism? And how does Cadbury come out of this?
UPDATE: The term that should be used is spec work, not crowd sourcing considering there was no intention of collaboration between designers. Credit to David Airey for catching my mistake.
UPDATE: Cadbury had this to say:
Congratulations Paul!
3 Buzz Phrases and Search Engine Myths That Need A Bazooka Reality Check
February 25th, 2010
No Comments
Adam Ostrow (@Adam Ostrow) said it best on Twitter:
You know how politicians often break out the “tax ax“?
I think I’m going to coin the “buzzword bazooka“
If ‘pride goes before the fall’, then buzzwords go before pride.
If you work with search engines, you should probably know a few languages including HTML (I know it’s only markup!), PHP and Javascript. You don’t need to be fluent in PHP or Javascript, but you should at least know how to order dinner and find the toilet.
The fact is that search engine theory is just that, theory. Only a very few number of people know exactly how Google, MSNbot and Yahoo (soon to be Bing/MSNbot) crawlers work in a scientific sense. They’re not going to tell us anytime soon, just like Coca-Cola isn’t going to be tweeting their famous recipe any time soon. You have a whole industry based on theory, and rarely is it scientific enough to pass any muster. Buzzwords and phrases thrive in such areas. So let’s break down some fallacies.
- Content is king: Flat out wrong. The conversion is king. How you define conversion is your own choice, such as a sale, a newsletter sign up, or a lead. What ever it is, if you have millions of visitors, and the site hasn’t generated anything for you but server load, you can talk about content all day and it won’t matter. The fact is that your website has a goal, perhaps monetary or just collecting data. Content is a part of getting conversions, and helps bring that data in, but if you have a store full of browsers and no buyers, you really can’t show that to an investor. New buzz phrase that won’t catch on, but should: Content is a high ranking military strategist.
- It’s all about links: Frustrating. This is like having 1,000 acquaintances and no real friends. For every link that you make a visitor/customer jump through you have a loss of about 9%. Considering all your customer has to do is literally lift a finger, that’s quite alarming.
Yes, link building is important. Content more so, but if you have a background in marketing, you probably know how to make content compelling, and conversion friendly already. In a world of exponential social media growth, why link to your twitter account when you can integrate live streams getting the content AND the link search engine credit? Why link, when you can INTEGRATE?
New buzz phrase that won’t catch on, but should: Linking is the poor man’s integrating. - We don’t have time for Social Media. Oh really? I suppose you don’t have a customer service phone either then. Customer service doesn’t generate much revenue, it prevents lost revenue. Business has made it so hard to get something fixed in the name of cost cutting that The Oatmeal sums it up best. If I have a product that doesn’t work as it is supposed to, I have a 50% chance that I will ebay it, just so I don’t have to deal with a non-tech savvy dotard reading from a HTML wizard.
Social media, when used socially and not a one way sales push pipe, can transform your target audience’s perception of you. Imagine actually being able to create a quick custom check list of things to check for on their own time for each person because you have a record of their issue and statements. Who would call then?
I know what you’re thinking. Ben we don’t have the resources for that. If I learned anything as a teenager, it was that I can have 5 simultaneous conversations online as opposed to 1 on the phone. By that measure, for every 5 of your phone reps I need one social rep. Sounds like a money saver down the road considering more than half the world population is under 30. Plus it is SEO friendly provided the link shorteners are 301 redirects.
New buzz phrase that won’t catch on, but should: Social is the new survey/customer service hybrid.
Yes these are all parts of the search engine system, but take a step back and realise that it is a dance. You can’t dance with one leg, and you can’t get to the top of the page rank with just links. Spending too much time on SEO and not on being better for your customer is only the marginal gain you could have from actually just being better than your competitor.
So, what other buzzwords and theories need a bazooka reality check?
E-retailers Showing Little Progress On Accessibility
February 25th, 2010
No Comments
E-retailers, still somewhat in their pre-teen years as an industry are behind on a small, but vocal market. The visually impaired. It seems that while commerce and the internet continue to mold into one another, retail is failing to keep up.
The famous case is National Federation for the Blind’s lawsuit against Target for failing to make their site accessible, mostly via images and the content that goes into the code to allow non-visual users (including search engine crawlers) to understand what the image might be.
More here: http://ow.ly/19qts
