Mid year, 2005 I was introduced to Joomla, then Mambo by my good friend Pat.  I was in need of an easier way to build multiple sites with user profiles and managed content among other things.  Rather than go to code school, spend 10 years practicing, then reinvent the wheel Pat suggested I try out Mambo.  The system was fairly simple to set up and use.  The bugs where well documented and the fixes weren’t typically that difficult.

To make things even better, there were thousands of developers world-wide that were active on forums for when you really hit a wall.  I took up my post in the open source world contributing to front-end development and posting fix reports to the forums I came across.  Spring turned to summer, Mambo to Joomla and tonight, almost five years later, I find myself setting up and modifying the latest version of Joomla to build a community.

I won’t bore with the technical details but I will give kudos to the developers for making the transition to Joomla 1.5 relatively intuitive and keeping the overall user experience decent.  To this point it seems that the latest versions of several of my old friends (Community Builder & Fireboard to name a few) are more stable and harder to break than previous versions.  Overall I’m pleased.

Next steps include full integration, custom user profile setup, and social media integration.  I’m also bug-checking a Facebook connect plugin that I think will complete the overnight masterpiece.  So to this point, that’s all I’ve got.  Anyone have any recent experience with these systems?

The latest round of upgrades to the system involve some user experience changes and more importantly, spam filtering upgrades allowing you to filter out posts from newly created accounts as well as those using multiple trending terms in a single post. I liked that these filters can be adjusted on a sliding scale.

Tie these filters to previously available filters for usernames and available moderation of feeds and you can make any feed suitable for the church bulletin. They’ve got more upgrades on route and Michael has even suggested customizable feed views so that when I post a link like this:

http://jaythornton000.tidytweet.com/CollectiveBias.atom

It could formatted to match my site, very cool concept, especially for setting up third party feed sites.

The long and short of TidyTweet is that it’s a powerful tool that is going to keep improving. If you have need for twitter feeds, take a look at their site. The product is great and the guys behind it are second to none.

For those asking themselves what it is, a Poken is a handy-dandy little networking tool that effectively swaps digital business cards with anyone else that has one.  When they come within a certain radius of another one, they light up.  This tells you to wander the room, meet, greet, and chat, all the while scanning those people head-to-toe for a little device that’s about 2 inches long that can be concealed as one of many pseudo Japanese figures.  Mine’s a ninja for example.

Once located you need only hold them together and your pre-determined contact information is transferred to theirs and vice-versa.  When you get home, simply plug your Poken into a USB port and all the contact info you can into contact with is transferred to your account.  This info can then be downloaded as a vCard, nice, or kept on their server… handy.  Set up is simple and cost is minimal at around $20.  You can pick one up here. http://www.pokenplace.com/shop/

So you’ve bought your Poken and you’re ready to set it up.  Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Open the box, pull the figure off the hand and pull the little paper tab out to activate your Poken.

Step 2: Plug your Poken into your computer’s USB port and wait.  Most of the time, your computer will recognize what’s been plugged in and auto-launch the website.  If not, open the new folder and double-click on Start_Poken.html

Step 3: Set up your account with a username, email address and password, then enter your contact info, picture, and any Social Media networks you’d like included.  You get a sample view of what your new friends waiting to be met will see.  Once you get that looking the way you like, save and you’re all set.

Step 4: Go out and start Poken.

Cnet

Is the market ready for the disappearance of the disc? CD’s are gradually being replaced in the music world by the MP3 and its player of choice, the iPod. In the data world you’re seeing a gradual move to the DVD due to higher storage capacity but still a disc, nonetheless.

Microsoft moving what was once on 25 floppy discs, turned 3 CD’s, turned 1 DVD to a USB drive might, in fact, shift the market… or it could blow up in their faces ala Betamax. Early adopters will be all over this without a doubt but the salty old creatures of habit? I’ll let Microsoft and their marketers make this call.

In effort not to be the nay-sayer, I offer an alternative. Make this an upgrade available online. Automate the update process and let it run from there in a one-click user interface. Enter your credit card info, click upgrade, and let her cook. Finding a way to make that work well would save millions in product cost.

Thoughts?

Today’s Tweak is on setting up Analytics Filters to limit out traffic from your own IP Address. Read on and please don’t hesitate to ask any questions or make comments below.

Filters:
Yeah, big numbers look good but what if you develop/redesign/tweak regularly. You end up with blog stats through the roof on those days and craters on the rest. Let’s limit out any and all traffic from the places you do the most development work from. This provides for more accurate reporting on traffic, pages per visit and time on site.

Step 1 – Identify your IP address. I typically open a command prompt and drop an IPConfig. Fear not, non-techies, this is an easy one. Click Start, Run, and type “cmd” into the blank (with no quotes). Hit enter and you’ll see a little black window open. At that prompt type this: “ipconfig /all” again, without quotes, and hit enter. Look down the list for a line that says “IP Address” and write down the number to the right of it, possibly looking something like 192.168.0.1… type exit and hit enter and the window will close.

Step 2 – Setting up your filter. Open Google Analytics and click Analytics Settings in the upper left corner of the screen under the logo. Find your website profile and click Edit to the right of the name. Roll down to Filters Applied to Profile and click + Add Filter to the right. This is where we limit out any traffic coming from the IP Address that you just wrote down in Step 1. Make sure the radio button next to Add new Filter to Profile is clicked and give the filter a name. I called mine Local Traffic. Next to Filter Type use the drop-down box and select Exclude all traffic from an IP address then enter the IP Address you wrote down from Step 1. Click Save Changes and you’re all set.

As with all Google changes they disclaim suggesting that changes could take hours but you should see the effects take place on the next day’s report. Congrats! You are officially reporting accurately without your own interference!

For the longest time there haven’t been any justifiable alternatives to this set up. DSL was sketchy at best and didn’t deliver the same up speeds as cable, even after they matched the down speeds and Dish Network screwed up the Superbowl so they would never do.

Enter AT&T’s latest attempt at taking my paycheck, U-Verse. In researching I’ve noticed a lot of good in switching but also an obvious point of little or no savings versus a comparable package from Cox. They point out that for that matching price I get receivers for each of the three bedrooms but you must remember that you NEED the receiver to get any channels, unlike with Cox, where you get basic in the rooms in which you don’t have a receiver so I guess it’s a wash if you don’t go with all three receivers.

On a marketing note there was a good and bad in my research. Let’s lead with the good. They’ve got a website called UversUsers.com that has a full on forum and they direct most of their questions from the AT&T forums to that one to be answered by the masses. Very progressive for the big old phone company. Let the satisfied customers sell the product.

The bad news, you might ask? The site had to be moved to another server because of slow response due to heavy traffic. Do you really want the company that can’t keep their stuff working right handling your data? I would think that in selling technology and data such as they do, they might make sure to dot all t’s and cross their i’s before launch, but then, that’s why I’m a marketer now and no longer an IT guy.

Either way, I’m not convinced one way or the other and I’m out for your opinion. I’ve twittered the question as well and now I’m giving you a couple more options. You can leave a comment or vote in the poll below. Help me decide! U-Verse or Cox?

[polldaddy poll=1733542]

Granted, I am obsessed with twitter but I’m also not big on scrolling the standard interface. I’m more the “has it running in the background” guy that checks periodically for updates from groups, @’s, and DM’s. I see this as a viable option for the on the go time.

It will, in fact, make your brain sweat the first few times you use it but you learn quickly to turn on only what you need and keep the rest a click away. I keep mine plugged into several of my most favorite info sources but have yet to plug the thing completely in. As of right now, this is what Flock is running on my laptop:

• Twitter
• Digg
• Gmail
• Facebook
• Picasa
• Blogger
• WordPress
• Flickr
• Myspace
• Yahoo Mail
• YouTube

There’s room for several more connections but these are the ones I use the most. I like the sidebar for streaming my people comments from Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, and MySpace and the top media bar for the latest and greatest from either YouTube or flickr photostreams from my favorite people. Those running with my typical 3-5 tabs and I am a happy guy. Everything I need on a regular basis is visible and easy to reach.

Adversely, you can build most of this functionality into FireFox with their long list of add-ons and some people prefer that as it tends to eat a little less memory than Flock running wide open. I’m more of a turn-key kind of guy on browsers. Should I decide to expand though, most FireFox extensions work perfectly on Flock. I learned that from their support guys that camp out on Twitter, and I didn’t even seek them out.

So there you have it; fun product that’s expandable and comes free with great customer support. Sign me up! Try it out by downloading here: http://www.flock.com

Make your own!

For those of you in the dark on making your site more searchable, Franklin Bishop sums it up nicely.  It’s a detailed read but worth it.

by Franklin Bishop

Any discussion about SEO Fundamentals needs to start with Google. With over 75% of the world’s web searches now being conducted via Google, it’s safe to say that your potential customers will be starting their journey there as well.

Google is the gold standard of Search Engines in both overall search volume and search quality. I’ll save the rationale behind Google’s dominance for another day, but undoubtedly a large portion of their rise to the top of Search Engine excellence can be attributed to their proprietary algorithm, which is the set of calculations performed against the web’s content that decides which web sites they think their viewers will find most relevant for the entered keywords.

Google is the most difficult search engine to optimize against because it does the best job of filtering out all of the short-cuts marketers try to use to cheat the system. Google makes a company work to return high organically. At the most basic of Google’s (and hence, SEO’s) driving factors to page rank are:

How much relevant content does your site have, and
How highly the web community values your content (measured in number of links from other sites to your content).
This means that the early days of tweaking a few meta tag descriptions to fix your web site’s SEO are long, long gone. In today’s game, SEO cannot be thought of as a one-time expense. It requires a commitment. Based on your competition, your industry and your objectives, it may also require a good deal of time and money before you see results. There is no short-cut around satisfying these two criteria. If an SEO Consultant tells you there is, it’s likely either a scam or an activity that could get your site blacklisted.

So, how exactly does a company show Google great, relevant content that’s as popular and externally-validated as a southern Homecoming Queen? There’s no magic answer, and the rules are always changing, but….

Without further ado, and in no particular order,

Google’s 20 most important factors to better Google rankings

1.  Keyword Use in Title Tag – Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header.
2. Keyword Use in Body Text – Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page.
3. Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords – Topical relevance of text on the page compared to targeted keywords.
4. Keyword Use in a web page’s Headline (H1 Tag) – Creating an H1 tag with the targeted search term/phrase.
5. Keyword Use in Domain Name & Page URL
6. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure – Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page.
7. Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages – Do links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages?
8. Age of Document – Older pages may be perceived as more authoritative while newer pages may be more temporarily relevant.
9. Amount of Indexable Text Content – Refers to the literal quantity of visible HTML text on a page.
10. Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically) – Assuming search engines can use text, visual or other analysis methods to determine the validity and value of content, this metric would provide some level of rating.
11. Global Link Popularity of Site – The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web (both link quality and quantity).
12. Age of Site – Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines (note that this can change if a domain switches ownership).
13. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site – The subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword.
14. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world.
15. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site – The frequency and timing of external sites linking in to the given domain.
16. Anchor Text of Inbound Link.
17. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site.
18. Topical Relationship of Linking Page.
19. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world.
20. Age of Link.