PHP Dinosaurs In The Wild

I was hired to create a custom WordPress Theme, which of course would take advantage of some of the latest WordPress  features. After final refinements, we were finally ready to take the theme live. The client, at our request, ensured us that the server provided would have PHP installed as well as MySQL (pretty much the backbone / central nervous system of WordPress).

Unfortunately, even the best laid plans go awry. So PHP was installed, but there was no MySQL. The internal tech guy managing the server, at our request, installed the service and started it. We were provided with the credentials, and installation was under way.

The first surprise? The PHP version installed was out of date. Yes,  out of date. The client , managing their own server, at our request, upgraded the server.  You would think this solved all the issues right? Wrong.  The wordpress installation kept requiring me to update the database, and after performing this routine, it went back into the same loop. I could only gather that   the version of MySQL was also out of date, and was the source of further complications.

Now, when moving a WordPress Install, there are several ways to do this. WordPress includes a great feature for exporting using XML. This is really convenient, and would be the suggested method for moving an installation.

This case was a little bit above and beyond the typical theme, and I decided to use a sql dump to transport the data. I won’t bother you with the countless roadblocks I ran into, but suffice it to say, I wound up creating a new database and new users rather than that provided by the internal guy. I was able to get MySQL to load the dump, and there was a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

The pages loaded…if you had 5 minutes or so to spare..

In order to convince the client  that his platform was the source of the conflicts as opposed to the custom theme. They never say it, but they always think it. My partner on this project offered her hosting website as a test case where we could install WordPress and the new theme, and the client could understand that the platform was the source of the difficulties.

So there is a little law called Murphy’s Law. Yes, can you believe that we ran into the same situation? My partner’s hosting company had to “escalate” the trouble ticket to find out what the issue was. This was on the second phone call to support. The first call was to update PHP.

There you have it. Two dinosaurs in the wild. What are the odds? I am not a betting man, so I really couldn’t tell you, but I can tell you that this is disappointing.

The first dinosaur belonged to a company who was leasing a server from another company..either of them are equally responsible for having the latest versions and patches. The primary provider is a major brand in the hosting game, and I was extremely surprised they were not up to date. The second provider was not a company I had heard of before, but they appeared to be a player in the space. Either way, perception means nothing when it comes to spending your hard earned money for a service that is not up to date.

I don’t want this to be an endorsement for one hosting company over the other, but when we moved the installation to a hosting company I suggested, the installation took 45 minutes.

I say this to say, my proposals now specify version numbers when it comes to platform requirements for new websites.

In all fairness, sales people are a different breed. The good ones, are always visible. That is the nature of sales, visibility, brand awareness. These guys are good at that, and they are also good at closing the deal. That is the most important part right? Right. This also takes a gift to be consistent. You either have it or you learn it, or both =). The point is that there is a certain skillset required regardless of the tools you use, new media old media.

The most common factor that I see being overlooked, is that simple fact. The skillset and drive to be successful is the main requirement to any success in business period.

It is very easy to be seduced by the large number of followers that “experts” have. This does have a great deal of value, but it is not unattainable. The object of me writing this article, is I was analyzing some rhetoric that I hear, and thinking about the common themes in the rhetoric. Vague direction without specifics, the latest trend right now is give, and you will get back, and a few other things I keep hearing.

Other than time (advertising time for them) and rhetoric (information you can google anywhere) what are they “giving”? Well, motivation for one. This is not to be discounted. There is a value in the snake oil salesman. If you get motivated to do more, and find out more, then they have truly given back. If they get you to call them for their services, even better for them.

Regardless of your perspective on the issue, bottom line is take the message, and don’t over analyze, worship, or fall in love with, the messenger.

B.

The most important thing that I have learned is that Twitter is becoming the resource. For years mobile businesses have thrived on Twitter, and now it seems that it is becoming the goto source for consumers. I don’t have any stats on this, I can only go by my experience.

Among my cool friends, and funny tweeters, I do follow some people who are, lets just say, people with the power to influence the market. On two occasions I have seen a multimillionaire request an item / service, using Twitter. The first responder? The first request posted was for a hotel room in NYC. The first Twitter account to respond was Waldorf – Chicago account. Time to respond, if memory serves, less than 8 minutes to fill a request for three rooms in Manhattan.

Not a bad sale to close in 10 minutes. No marketing campaign, no fancy ads ..just plain old customer awareness.

This my friends is part of the key to successful online marketing. Learn how to use the tools that you have available to you.

Twitter is more than just a timeline. Have you ever tried searching for the resource or product you provide? Why not?

There are several automated ways to stay on top of the Twittersphere without being tethered to your Twitter app. Do some research and see which is the best fit for your lifestyle.

Hope this helps some one.

Search Optimization is a tricky animal. While you can use your domain name to provide you with strong keyword relevancy, you really cannot rely on a keyword rich domain name to do all the work for you. I have noticed a trend in the marketplace, where my peers buy up the new “buzz” word in online marketing or seo, and convert the “buzz” word into a domain.

It does help in the early days of the new “buzz” word trend, and you can achieve good positioning in Organic results. My perspective on this approach is somewhat different. I believe that content is still king. The lovely thing about search engines is that they are constantly updating themselves. It is this process that helps to improve relevancy in search. So while they may reside at the top for a while, the ride could be short lived without the support it needs in the long term.

There are clever ways to use keywords in domains, and still communicate the brand awareness. I choose that to be my focus over a simple keyword rich domain. I have been watching the SEO game for a while, and I have seen many domain names push my results down, but waiting them out often proves fruitful.

If you are new to the search game, I can only suggest that you be careful. The same things that were true when I started, are still true today; no-one can gaurantee a first page position in Google (or at least no one should), and spend your money wisely. Many of these optimization companies use Google Adwords to help you gain traction, which is not cheap, even when you buy the less competitive keywords. Take baby steps, and listen carefully. Snake oil salesmen are in every profession.

Marketing online using social media.

Pretty broad statement yeh?

The crucial component to using the new and old social platforms, is being aware of where your market is. One of the most recent social platforms to gain major traction, especially among women, is Pintrest. Mashable recently wrote an article about the top 10 Pintrest users (they have the most followers).

The common element among them is design. Sure two of the most followed are connected to Pintrest, but what says more is the type of “boards” they create. If you don’t know what Pintrest is, simply put, it is a public bulletin board. Members create boards and organize them by category or not. Other members can view boards that you make public, and similar to Twitter, you can attract “followers”, or follow people who share your “pintrest”.

The pintrest home page is basically “organized chaos”. A slew of images that have been recently pinned, or most popular pins,  help new users dive right in.

Pintrest has gained a great deal of attention lately by increasing its membership at exponential rates. The majority of the users seem to be women, but this is gradually changing. Men, will be men.

At any rate, if you are marketing a product that relies heavily on design for creating interest, I would suggest using Pintrest as one of the social platforms to use. Graphic Designers, Interior Designers, would benefit highly from the heavy focus on graphics and visual stimulation that seems to be driving Pintrest.**read UPDATE below.

If you design anything for a living, you should try using Pintrest. Just saying.

While I still stand behind my support of Pintrest, it has been brought to my attention (via G+) that there may be some further considerations before uploading your original works.  After reading an article on bizjournals.com regarding this exact topic. Apparently Pintrest TOS (the fine print) allows Pintrest to sub license any material you upload. Naturally Pintrest assumes that whatever you are submitting to Pintrest, you own the rights and licenses to. Just another consideration before you go posting up something without a WATERMARK.

The only bad thing I have to say about HTML5, and not really that,  but many of the supporters of HTML5, is that I cannot condone the Flash bashing. I find it unfair and well, I love Flash, I said it !

Onward and upward.

The primary appeal for me is the coding structure. It more or less forces coders to look at content in an organized fashion (which should be standard practice). However, as more and more people become interested in managing their own websites, and many “new” coders, I must say that it is a logical progression of the technology.

There are many other interesting effects and cosmetics that come along with HTML5 and CSS3, but I feel the standardization of coding practices will go a long way to building a more stable internet.

I have come to accept that I will still have to make sure that the website is the same or as close to the same as humanly possible across all platforms. Conditional CSS plays a big part, as well as new coding elements specifically targeting mobile browsers, etc. I have come to use a javascript you can download from GoogleCode that will help older browsers understand HTML5 and CSS3. Typically it is called the shiv or shim. There really is no excuse to wait. Start building your websites using HTML5 and keep your clients / websites up to snuff.

I have only touched on a minute part of what HTML5 really has to offer. Follow the links below for more detailed information.

For Information on HTML5 – HTML5 Tutorial

For Information on CSS3 – CSS3 Tutorial

A Sample page I built using HTML5.

The most pressing thing on my mind is finding an effective way to manage a social media presence for my business. Typical scenario for most small business owners. I would not say that I am new to the social media platforms, I would say that my approach toward using them, has changed, matured, you understand.

I would honestly say that as the middle of the second month of the new year has passed, I am currently being followed by twice as many people as I follow, (not counting twitterbots..you know Kathy876, etc.) which I consider to be solid results for my new perspective on Twitter. I would like to add that over half of the people I follow, are also following me. Engage, Interact and be real.You can always buy a bunch of followers, or followers who want followers, or you can be yourself. Honesty is the best policy, be true to who you are in order to gain the most out of your experience.

Aside from honing my social media skills, I have been picking up some new API’s (Application Programming Interface). Simply put, the access point for developers onto some of the larger websites. They encourage developers to tap into their content, which ultimately increases their own presence on the web. Win Win. Honestly my focus has been the emerging platform called Tumblr. Tumblr is a microblogging platform. Typically shorter posts than an average WordPress blog, but too long for Twitter . I have not looked into stats on demographics, what I have looked into is interest. Genuine public interest. If you search Tumblr on a platform like Twitter for example, you will find a wide range of people driving Twitter and Facebook traffic to their Tumblr account. Very interesting shift happening right now.

You can have a look at a new addition to musicishare.com as we plan to extend the platform to include the multitude of API’s that artists use on the web to “share” their music. My first Tumblr App / Mashup includes the ability to pull all of the YouTube and Vimeo videos from your Tumblr posts. Create an playlist to allow you to listen / view all of the videos. If you would like to see it in action take a look over here: http://www.musicishare.com/tumblr/

The improvements I choose to address here are to the abilities of the browser being improved, which allows website developers to deliver content in a more innovative way.  The most notable recent evolution is to HTML 5.  HTML 5 promises to provide more feature rich website pages without the need for additional plugins, (Flash mainly).

Another development that has been crucial to developing websites for the web, and mobile, is the improvement of fluid technologies, thanks to some help from Javascript. There are also numerous CSS improvements to give developers more options to explore their creativity.

In my travels across the web, I came across a group of developers who have put together a feature rich HTML5 foundation (template) for developers to use as a starting point. The packages is called Initializr.

The reason I chose to share this awesome tool with you, is while viewing a news website via mobile. The news site I visited, did not code in the flexibility to view the content without having to move the content around. Needless to say, I opted to read the article later on the PC. The next site I viewed, obviously anticipated the mobile viewer, and I was able to read the content in its entirety. Sure, it is a personal preference, but,  if it doesn’t matter to you, great, I would also like the people it does matter to, to be able to enjoy the content as well.

Initializr does a great job of this by default by employing the fluid layout technology. Sweetness. So, while I do know how to code, it was quite a time saver, and a huge step forward.

Hope this story helps. I used this technology for the first time on a mashup on Musicishare.com(Tumblr + YouTube).

Thanks primarily to Facebook, only a few hundred million daily users, nothing much.

Want to know why your 50K tv ad did not generate twice that in revenue? Probably because your target audience is not even watching TV anymore.

Many large corporations are all trying to navigate the new medium and how to leverage it to their advantage. People are on the social platforms, so now we just need to push our ads to them. Wrong idea, right idea.

Social is more than just an appropriate moniker for these user driven platforms. Social is just that. Interaction and actual dialog with people, will develop into brand trust and recognition.

There are more websites than facebook, and twitter. Just about any niche has a social platform for like minds. Larger net, catches more. Find a platform dedicated to your niche and just be yourself. People should want to do business with you based on their interactions, or your interactions with others.

Welcome to the new era of online marketing. Find out who Zynga is, and you will get the idea. Zynga became a dominant force in social gaming by creating games that encourage and often require players to increase connections with other players. Social is a title given to just that being social. There really is no social media, the internet has become increasingly social.


Have fun!

I logged on to Tumblr and was greeted by a message from the staff letting me know that I had the option to highlight my posts, if I so choose. I was a little fuzzy, because, I thought all my posts were special. Why would I want to highlight one post over the other? According to Tumblr, I may have an “extra” special photo, or a special promotion for a product, etc. This started to make sense. Tumblr is stepping up the monetization game. I can’t hate on that!

For the small price of one dollar, you can customize a sticker that will follow your post, allowing it stand out among the stream of posts that users view when they log in to their Tumblr account. One Dollar? Smart move!

In my memory, CD Baby was my first encounter with micropayments. CD Baby was revolutionary a few years ago. This was before I had heard of iTunes, (if it was even invented yet).   CD Baby would allow independent artists or at least labels seeking online distribution to sell individual songs as well as an entire album of tracks for digital download. Brilliant. I no longer have to spend 12 to 15 bucks on a CD for the one song that I like. iTunes took this model and now dominate the digital download market. Since then, pretty much digital downloads are the new musical commodity. Micropayments!

Next spectacular encounter with micropayments was the recently public company called Zynga. Zynga managed to make a fortune selling virtual goods. Talk about disposable income. Fans of social media games like Farmville, and others spend plenty of money to decorate their playing environment with items that are much more spectacular than the items players can use their “credits/coins etc” to purchase.

Another recent example of the power of micropayments was done by a comedian by the name of  Louis C.K. The Comedian paid for the production costs to put on a show, taped it, and then distributed the show by himself for $5 . One million dollars in 12 days.

So if you are wondering which way the e-commerce trend is headed. You may want to hire a consultant. Call me