EP:000 – The Cotton Club – Test
In the next couple of days I will be launching the first installment of The Cotton Club Podcast. The Cotton Club is one of two podcasts that I am going to be a part of this year, the other is a project that I am going to be working w/ Keith Crawford on called The Social Radar, stay tuned for details on that podcast in the very near future.
Unlike The Social Radar Podcast project, The Cotton Club is going to be a lot less focused and a lot more laid back. The Social Radar will deal mostly with the topic of Social Media and Marketing as to where The Cotton Club could end up being a free for all! I am pretty passionate about what I do so it’s probably a safe bet that a large portion of each show will be dedicated to the web in general, including development, blogging, social media, seo, etc., but since I am also passionate about things such as NASCAR and Football, there is a high probability that there will be a certain amount of trash talking as well.
If you know me very well, you will probably know that I am also somewhat of a joker, and no matter how hard I try, weird occurrences seem to find me. Highlights from these occurrences as well as some older stories will also be a big part of this project.
If you have iTunes and would like to subscribe to The Cotton Club, you may do so by clicking here (iTunes will open in a new window, just hit the subscribe button).
Feedburner Socialize Service (Push RSS to Twitter)
Lately I have had a lot of frustrations regarding Feedburner regarding the way they randomly drop my subscription counts. On any given day my subscription counts can drop from somewhere in the 900’s to the 300’s for no apparent reason.
Most of the lost subscriptions can usually be tracked back to FriendFeed but after going back and forth w/ Google (Feedburner) about this issue, I am confident the problem itself doesn’t lie w/ FriendFeed, instead I think it’s something Feedburner has an issue with. Also, I am not alone w/ this issue, I have had several people contact me stating the exact same thing. Hopefully one day soon Feedburner will get this worked out.
Now that I have bashed Feedburner, I am going to go ahead and go on record and give them credit for doing something pretty cool. They have a new service for Feedburner users called Socialize that allows you to input your burned feeds into Twitter. Previously if you wanted to do this you had a wide variety of plugins to chose from, some of which like Twitme are somewhat problematic (especially since wordpress 2.9 was released).
With the Socialize service inside of Feedburner, you can configure your settings to push your RSS feed onto Twitter, which eliminates the need for additional plugins. Here’s some more information about the settings you can control w/ Socialize if you are interested:
Select Account (Handles Multiple Accounts)
At this time, the Socialize service only supports Twitter. You may have one or several Twitter accounts associated with your Google account (which is shared by FeedBurner and other Google products), but each feed may only post to one Twitter account at a time. If for some reason you need the same feed to post to multiple Twitter accounts, you may create a copy of your feed and have that version post to a separate Twitter account.
Formatting OptionsYou may format your feed for Twitter with a number of options. In all cases, the formatting must fit within the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter. If the options you choose create messages longer than 140 characters, FeedBurner will automatically truncate your messages into 140 character tweets.
Post Content Options for Your Tweets
You may post the feed title, title and body, or just the body as the tweet. If you choose to include a link to the feed item, your feed item permalinks will be rewritten as a shortened URL by Google on the goo.gl domain. These links redirect to your normal FeedBurner URLs so that analytics tracking will not be affected. If you select "Leave room for retweets" we will truncate the message to leave room for rewteeting using the many Twitter clients that support this function.
Hash Tags for Your Tweets
Hash tags are the way that Twitter supports tagging or labeling tweets so that they can easily be grouped by Twitter clients that allow sorting and filtering by these tags. By default, the Socialize service does not add any hash tags to your tweets, however if you select "Create hash tags from item categories" we will automatically create hash tags in the tweet according to any <category> elements attached to the feed item. These categories may be added by your blogging platform or CMS publishing system. In Blogger, these are called "Labels" so if you label your posts in Blogger, these labels will get added as hash tags in Twitter.
Additional Text for Your Tweets
You may choose to add a custom message preceding or following the message that is created from your feed item to add more context. As an example you may choose to prepend "From my blog:" to the beginning of the tweet so that Twitter followers can see which messages you are tweeting directly versus posting links from your long form blog.
Item Selection / Item Limits for Updates
As your feed updates throughout the day, FeedBurner picks up your feed and looks for new items. The Socialize service will detect these new items and post up to 5 of them to twitter at a time. Note that the speed with which feed updates can get to FeedBurner will affect this service. To ensure your feed updates in near real time, make sure you ping us immediately after your feed updates and that your blog platform is configured to use PubSubHubub. If none of these options are used for making your feed near real time, the Socialize service will look for and update with any new feed items every 30 minutes.
Keyword Filters for Your Tweets
You may choose to only send certain feed items to Twitter, filtered either by the Category, or text in the title, body, or the entire item. To enable this filter enter text, with terms separated by commas, and then choose where you would like Socialize to look for these keywords. If this service is enabled, an item will only be tweeted if one of the filtered terms is found.
Preview Your Tweets
Preview lets you see how your tweets will look in your feed as you change Socialize options. If your feed content is not available, the preview uses its own sample text. Note that Preview uses the existing items in the feed, but only new feed items published after the service is activated will actually get posted to Twitter.
2009 Review: Open Source CMS Advancements (Poll)
Since CMS, or content management solutions, are a pivotal part of the web development industry, I thought that I would do a year-end review of the top open-source solutions that are on the market and try to highlight some areas of advancement that took place. One thing that was evident to me in 2009 was the core advancements that were made in many of the open-source content management community.
Not only did we see a lot of core improvements to established solutions like Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal, but we also saw some some emerging solutions make some big strides. One of these solutions that my partners and i utilized this past year was MODx.
Content Management Systems in 2009
In terms of market share Wordpress led the group of open-sourced content management solutions by a large margin (averaging 433,767 downloads per week). Second on the list was Joomla (averaging 189,429 weekly downloads). Drupal was the third most popular content management solution (averaging 62,500 weekly downloads). These figures are from CMS Wire’s 2009 report, a very interesting report if you are a web developer. In terms of installations and evaluations, Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal also topped the group. The rankings according to adoption were flip-flopped with Drupal gaining the most ground, followed closely by Joomla and Wordpress. In terms of brand recognition and overall perception, Wordpress led the pack by an impressive margin.
Advancements in Plugin Development (Wordpress)
Aside from the core advancements that were made in 2009 there were also a ton of plugins released by the development community. In the case of Wordpress, the CMS that I follow the closest, I was most impressed with some of the plugin releases that addressed common needs such as e-commerce, messaging, event management, and social media. There has also been a lot of talk about paid or premium plugins this past year. This idea was met w/ a lot of debate inside the wordpress community. For years everything wordpress has been readily available for free. Personally, I have no problem with paid or premium plugins. I think that if developers are able to actually put a price tag on their contributions that it will go a long way toward advancing the plugin options that we have available to us as developers.
Advancements in Theme Development (Wordpress)
There were also some major advancements in the wordpress theme community as well. Some leaders in that community like Brian Gardner and WooThemes really stepped up to the plate and delivered some nice foundations for us to design our client projects from. There were also some nice multi-purpose themes like Thesis and WP-Remix that gained a lot of traction. I reviewed the WP-Remix wordpress theme earlier this year here if you are interested. Another neat product for theme development that I stumbled upon this past year was a WYSIWYG theme generator called Artisteer, I also reviewed their product here if you are interested.
What advancements will we see in the wordpress theme community in 2010? Honestly I think we are going to see some major advancements, I know from following his tweets that Brian Gardner is working some pretty cool things at StudioPress. I also think that we are going to see more solutions become available like PSD2CSS that will convert PSD Photoshop Files to Wordpress themes. I have also heard of this being approached from a Photoshop plugin perspective as well, meaning that you could export wordpress themes from Wordpress. It’s just a matter of time if you ask me, this is where it’s at. Functionality for Wordpress is already there for Wordpress, design limitations are the only real constraints at this time.
Poll: What is Your Favorite CMS to Work With?
Please take a few seconds to complete the poll below and let us know what your favorite open-source content management solution is to work with.
Wordpress Plugin: Max Banner Ad Plugin
This past week I have been working on a project for a sports radio station in Wordpress. One of the requirements for the project was that they wanted to be able to run a lot of advertising rotations (banner ads) on the site. My partners and I have an ad server of our own that none of us are really that fond of but it gets the job done. I wasn’t looking forward to adding a lot of JavaScript’s to the theme I have been working on all week so I decided to see what Wordpress plugins might be available for serving ads.
I found quite a few plugins out there but not a single one I installed on my sandbox machine worked the way that I thought it should until I ran across one called Max Banner Ads. This is a free plugin that is made available as “review-ware” to the Wordpress community. From the minute I activated this plugin it has worked exactly the way that I thought it should. One of the biggest considerations I have when using an unfamiliar plugin with Wordpress is how easy am I going to be able to demonstrate this to my clients so that they will be comfortable using it.
The beauty of this plugin as opposed to our internal ad server is that I didn’t have to go in and modify the theme at all. Basically the plugin allows you to add banners wherever you want them to go. There are 4 pre-defined positions already setup, you can add a new position if business picks up. The 4 predefined locations are 1) Top of the Posts 2) Bottom of the Last Post 3) Within a Post (usually under the page title) and 4) Show as a widget. I really like the ability of dropping in several widget ads and being able to move them around to accommodate for the other widgets the client has requested.
The Max Banner Ads plugin not only serves ads exactly where you want them but it also gives you some metrics for your ads so you can track how well they are doing. Granted, I have seen more elaborate traffic analytics but for most small business clients this should do the trick.
Some other things that I like about the plugin are that you have the option of loading a banner add by uploading it from your local machine, which is what a vast majority of my clients are going to want to do in the first place. It also allows you to display remotely hosted graphics if you run into a situation like that.
Again, I have been using the free version of this plugin, I noticed that there is a link located below the ads that you can remove if you decide you want to buy the pro version. I think the price for that plugin was in the neighborhood of $50, which isn’t half bad if you are looking for a solution to serve ads inside of Wordpress. The best part, it’s simple to manage.
Checkout the O’Reilly Answers Social Network
I am typically not one to recommend a social network to my clients w/ the exception, of course, of the already established networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc. My whole philosophy regarding social networking at this stage of the game is that if you want to build a community, build upon what’s already out there as much as possible (Facebook API, Twitter API) and don’t try to re-invent the wheel.
However, I have always felt that strong, reputable Niche networks could exist externally if they were packaged correctly. A good example of such a network that is currently in Beta right now is O’Reilly Answers. O’Reilly has a good vision with this network, and of course they have some really positive things in their favor already such as Awesome Reputation, an Established Following, and a Trusted Name, what more could you ask for?
You can also look at the Network and tell that there were some clear objectives put into place while developing this solution. They obviously wanted it to be user friendly, functional, and interactive. There are basically three ways you can interact inside O’Reilly Answers:
Share Your Knowledge
You can actually enter in blog posts and tag them according to your subject matter and other users can comment you on your posts. This is one area that I think they could have done a little differently. We all manage our own blogs externally, why would we want to post our content on their website as well and have 2 comment systems running at the same time to follow up w/ readers? My thoughts on this part are that they could have put into place some sort of RSS option where you could aggregate your content from your blog and have your friends inside the network click out to read your posts. Maybe I am not seeing the big picture on this, but as a workaround I posted about 3/4 of 2 blog posts into their network along w/ a link at the bottom to get to the remainder of my post on my blog.
Ask A Question
Since O’Reilly has been catering to the Technically Minded community for so long, you can rest assured that some pretty sharp folks are going to be hanging around in this community. Well, let’s say you have a question about a project you are working on, you can post that question to the community, tag it, and before you know it some of the sharpest minds in the world are answering your question. This is an area where I really see this network having value for a lot of us…
Answer a Question
Let’s say someone asks a question and you know the answer, you can provide them w/ your insight w/ ease. I think that this networking model is going to speed up the “obstacle to solution process” once the network get’s off the ground.
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Also, just a few notes regarding the Network as it is right now. There are obviously some bugs, I had a couple of errors pop up on me when I was setting up my profile, this is to be expected w/ a new release like this. Give them time, I am sure that O’Reilly will iron out all of the kinks very soon. Here’s some basic information that was forwarded to me today from our Account Rep at O’Reilly…
We’re launching the beta of O’Reilly Answers, and I’m inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O’Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O’Reilly).
Why Answers, and why now?
O’Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation. We’ve created the usual means of facilitating communication between customers, O’Reilly folks, and the outside experts we call "alpha geeks" who contribute to O’Reilly books, conferences, and websites. We can connect through reader reviews, errata submissions, book forums, blog comments, Get Satisfaction, our customer service department, and more. But too much of this conversation is siloed, and not enough is public (e.g., discussions on our internal mailing list for editors, or personal responses to customer questions). O’Reilly Answers will be the place where much of that communication happens from this point forward.Why participate?
The lofty reason: Like O’Reilly, you want to "change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators." That’s our mission, and we’ve been fortunate enough to build a community of passionate, committed people who love to learn and share their knowledge as they work towards a better world for us all.The "nice, but what’s in it for me" reasons: reputation, recognition, and rewards.
Get Recognized: "Find interesting people" is a core activity at O’Reilly, and an important component of our success. We see Answers as an important way to discover and connect with our next authors, online instructors, videographers, and speakers.
Build Your Reputation: You’ve learned a lot, why not get credit for all that knowledge? As your submissions to Answers are voted up, your personal reputation on the site increases. At launch, your reputation will be based solely on your participation in O’Reilly Answers. Soon, we’re expanding across oreilly.com, so the book errata and book reviews you’ve submitted, books you’ve registered, and conferences you’ve attended, will add reputation points. You’ll also earn badges to mark accomplishments and milestones.
Earn Rewards: Glory is great, but discounts and deals are nice, too. We want to reward your contributions to the O’Reilly community. Shortly we’ll have a point-based system in place that you can redeem for books, training, courses, and conferences. Details soon, but in the meantime, any actions you take now will count towards your total points.
This is just v.1: The best part of any project on the web is watching it take on a life of its own. With that in mind, we’re looking forward to *your* suggestions about where O’Reilly Answers should go, what features should be added, and what benefits and rewards we can offer all of you.
I’d like to acknowledge the projects that have proceeded Answers and inspired us, such as SitePoint Forums (we distribute their books), StackOverflow, Yahoo! Answers, Knol, and many others. They’re great resources, and we think the O’Reilly community can create a useful site that’s, well, a different kind of animal.
One last thing: O’Reilly Answers is in beta and you may encounter bugs. We’re still working on many improvements to the site, such as feeds for each tag, but would love to hear your suggestions for features and improvements. Please send any suggestions/questions/bug reports to answers@oreilly.com.
Until next time–
Marsee Henon
Also, if you should signup, be sure to add me as a friend, http://people.oreilly.com/cotton
WordPress Exploit Scanner
If you are like me, you want to make sure that the software you run is as secure as possible. My partners and I even subscribe to several third party services that actually scan our servers looking for exploits that could be taken advantage of by hackers or script kiddies. Since one of the most frequent CMS solutions we use is WordPress, this plugin caught my attention.
The WordPress Exploit Scanner is a plugin that searches the files and database of your website for signs of suspicious activity. While it won’t stop someone hacking into your site, it may help you find any uploaded or compromised files left by the hacker on previous attempts. It can also help you identify any weaknesses that you might have so you can harden your installation.
Here’s a little bit more on the Exploit Scanner plugin if you are interested:
When a website is compromised, hackers leave behind scripts and modified content that can be found by manually searching through all the files on a site. Some of the methods used to hide their code or spam links are obvious, like using CSS to hide text, and we can search for those strings.
The database can also be used to hide content or be used to run code. Spam links are sometimes added to blog posts and comments. They’re hidden by CSS so visitors don’t see them, but search engines do. Recently, hackers took advantage of the WP plugin system to run their own malicious code. They uploaded files with the extensions of image files and added them to the list of active plugins. So, despite the fact that the file didn’t have a .php file extension, the code in them was still able to run!
You can download this plugin here: http://ocaoimh.ie/exploit-scanner/
I am Really Liking Disqus
I knew that I was going to like Disqus a lot before I installed it on my blog, but I don’t think that I realized just how much. My first observation after installing Disqus was that I immediately got about 3 or 4 comments on a few of my posts. One of the posts was several months old.
Prior to installing Disqus I had about 140+ registered users that had left comments on my blog, most using Facebook Connect and a few had registered via Wordpress. Well, just by giving my readers the ability to post using authentication from Twitter, Facebook, Disqus, and OpenID has dramatically improved the dialogue I have with my subscribers / readers. I strongly recommend Disqus to anyone looking for an enhanced commenting platform.
People Get Touchy When You Talk CMS
Recently Glen Stansberry did a post on the popular Nettuts website about the 10 most usable Content Management Solutions. In his post he chose Wordpress as the top CMS, which wasn’t a huge surprise to me because I love Wordpress already, but it wasn’t the CMS’s that he mentioned or how he ranked them in terms of usability that generated the most commentary, it was the CMS that he excluded that raised the biggest stink…
In case you didn’t see the post, you can read it here, be sure to checkout the comments below mentioning the exclusion of MODx. Also, here’s how the CMS’s were ranked according to usability:
There are plenty of options when it comes to picking a content management system for a development project. Depending on how advanced you need the CMS to be, what language it’s built in, and who is going to be using it, it can be a nightmare trying to find the "perfect" CMS for a project.
However, some CMSs have a slight edge over the rest of the competition because of the usability of the software. Some are just easier to install, use and extend, thanks to some thoughtful planning by the lead developers. Here are 10 of the most usable CMSs on the web to use in your next project.
- Wordpress
- Drupal
- Joomla
- ExpressionEngine
- TextPattern
- RadiantCMS
- CushyCMS
- SilverStripe
- Alfresco
- TYPOlight
Personally, I was surprised to see MODx excluded from this list as well, I don’t see it outranking Wordpress in terms of usability, I can walk a client through the management of their Wordpress site in a few minutes over the phone while watching a football game on television, but I do see MODx as being a more viable solution than some of the CMS’s mentioned.
In fact, there are a few solutions mentioned here that I have heard very little about. I hang out with a lot of developers at events like Central Arkansas Refresh and I can honestly say that no one has ever mentioned running some of these solutions.
One thing that I did like from this list was the dominance of PHP/MySQL based solutions.
Disqus & kPicasa Plugin Conflict Resolution
Okay so I had some issues the other day implementing Disqus commenting platform on my blog and I more or less threw my hands up in the air and contacted @disqus on Twitter about the situation. Well today my partner Greg and I, through a system of deactivation, finally came across the issue and I wanted to share this w/ the world in case any of you run into the situation where Disqus breaks your design in Internet Explorer…
The kPicasa plugin allows for you to use a couple of different engines to display your galleries. These options include Highslide, Lightbox, Slimbox 2, and Thickbox. I was using Highslide but when I changed over to Thickbox my worries were over. So, if you run into this dilemma be sure to give this a shot.
Manually Add Recent Comments to Sidebar (Wordpress)
On 90% of my clients projects that are running Wordpress I usually don’t run their Recent Comments anywhere on the site but in some rare cases they might actually want them. I was talking to my partner Greg today and he was wanting to do this on his site.
I had to stop and think what the calls were to do this since I rarely do this but I figured it might happen again someday so here is the code you can drop into your sidebar.php file on your theme to accomplish this.
<h2>Recent Comments</h2>
<?php
global $wpdb;
$sql = "SELECT DISTINCT ID, post_title, post_password, comment_ID,
comment_post_ID, comment_author, comment_date_gmt, comment_approved,
comment_type,comment_author_url,
SUBSTRING(comment_content,1,30) AS com_excerpt
FROM $wpdb->comments
LEFT OUTER JOIN $wpdb->posts ON ($wpdb->comments.comment_post_ID =
$wpdb->posts.ID)
WHERE comment_approved = '1' AND comment_type = '' AND
post_password = ''
ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC
LIMIT 10";
$comments = $wpdb->get_results($sql);
$output = $pre_HTML;
$output .= "\n<ul>";
foreach ($comments as $comment) {
$output .= "\n<li>".strip_tags($comment->comment_author)
.":" . "<a href=\"" . get_permalink($comment->ID) .
"#comment-" . $comment->comment_ID . "\" title=\"on " .
$comment->post_title . "\">" . strip_tags($comment->com_excerpt)
."</a></li>";
}
$output .= "\n</ul>";
$output .= $post_HTML;
echo $output;?>
