EP:001 – The Cotton Club Podcast
I finally got around to recording my first installment of The Cotton Club Podcast this evening. My guest co-host for the show this evening was Keith Crawford, you may know him as @tsudo on Twitter. This initial podcast was just a test run to see how things work so that when Keith and I get ready to launch another sideline project called The Social Radar in the very near future we can hit the ground running.
Please keep in mind that this is my first go at podcasting, the quality and content should get better over time. Despite the fact that I have invested in an awesome setup from software to microphones, the audio of me talking didn’t turn out very well at all. You can hear Keith great, and that’s probably a good thing since he is a lot cooler to listen to.
The topics we covered on Episode 001 of The Cotton Club were as follows:
- Geosocial Applications (Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, Loopt)
- iPhone Applications (Dragon Dictate, Where R U?, Evernote, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Mytown)
- Social Media Predictions for 2010 (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed)
- Methods for Archiving Thoughts for Blog Posts (Friendfeed, Wordpress, etc.)
- Crazy Story of The Week from Hell
- NASCAR Withdrawels
- Central Arkansas Refresh Meeting – January 26th (Nick Brewer presenting on PODSCMS for Wordpress)
Thanks for tuning into my first show, I promise it’s going to get better over time, so please bear with me. If you want to subscribe to The Cotton Club Podcast, you can do so on iTunes.
Production Note: The audio at the beginning of the recording isn’t very loud, a few minutes into the recording I finally managed to get it adjusted to where you could hear me a little bit better. Please bear w/ me, this is a work in progress.
#RefreshCA Jan. 26th: Nick Brewer on Pods CMS for WP
We are going to be having our first Central Arkansas Refresh meeting of the new year on Tuesday, January 26th at the Flying Saucer in downtown Little Rock. The #RefreshCA group is a group of web developers, bloggers, IT people, and agency personnel that gathers on the last Tuesday of each month to discuss topics of interest within our industry.
This month Nick Brewer from CJRW is going to be presenting on Pods CMS for Wordpress. For those of you not familiar w/ Pods CMS, it’s a CMS framework that sits on top of Wordpress, allowing you to add and display your own content types. Here’s a brief description:
As it is defined, Pods is a content management plugin for WordPress. Many people may wonder why a plugin is needed to make WordPress a content management system, doesn’t it do that already? Absolutely, but out of the box, WordPress specifically caters to a few types of content; Posts, Pages, Media, Comments, and Links. WordPress does a ton more (such as categories, tags, users, etc.), but as far as the average user is concerned, those are the major content types you’re able to work with. Themes bring all that managed content together to share with the world, and plugins build on top of that even more.
Many plugins exist to provide you with a new type of content to manage, most often a specific type of content aimed at achieving a specific goal. That’s awesome, and helps tons of people to make that change they’re looking to update on their site. Pods, however, thinks about things in a different way.
Pods provides a platform on which to build your own content types to manage, all the while providing some really advanced functionality having to do with that content. From the User Guide, a Pod is a group of input fields. You can add and arrange any number of the various available input fields to any number of Pods, essentially creating your own custom CMS for each website you build in WordPress.
The meeting should get started around 6pm and is open to the public. We meet in the basement area of the saucer, just walk into the bar area and then take the stairway down to the basement. For more information about the Central Arkansas Refresh Group, please visit our website: http://refreshcentralarkansas.org or join our group on Facebook. You may also follow the group on Twitter at @RefreshCA.
For directions to the Flying Saucer, see the map below:
View Larger Map
Some Personal, Business, & Development Goals for 2010
The other day I was looking over my personal goals that I had set going into 2009. I feel really good about what I was able to accomplish in 2009 but unfortunately there are still a few things that I am going to carry over into 2010.
This is not to say that 2009 was a bad year, in fact I would say that 2009 was probably one of the best years I have had in a long time, especially in terms of business and personal development.
Personal Goals for 2010
I have set some pretty high goals for myself personally going into 2010 as compared to what I set for 2009. I have learned that I respond well when I put pressure on myself. Hopefully by setting the bar high I will be able to motivate myself to another level personally.
- Private Pilots License: One of the goals that I had for myself coming into 2009 was to get my pilots license. While I did manage to get a few lessons in I didn’t really devote a lot of time to accomplishing this goal. I am going to try to put forth a little more effort this year to get my license. I have checked into some classes offered by UCA for private pilot certification.
- Business Networking: One of the things I am most proud of in 2009 was helping to organize the Central Arkansas Refresh user group. I reflected on the #Refresh group a few weeks ago and gave some insight into how it all came together. Basically social media powered the group, but the group itself and our monthly meetings allowed me to make some awesome business contacts in the Central Arkansas area. I hope to continue growing my personal network in 2010 through outlets like the #RefreshCA group as well as attending various conferences.
- Speaking: I was fortunate enough to have been asked to speak at couple of events this past year on a variety of topics, primarily interactive marketing and social media. I really enjoyed being a part of these events and I hope to continue to take advantage of these opportunities when they present themselves.
- Diversify: While my passion is, and always will be, the internet, I plan on becoming involved in a few areas outside the web in 2010 as well. I have a lot of irons in the fire right now and I am not ready to make any announcements regarding any projects or anything just yet but I can assure you this, whatever business deals I get involved in 2010, they will strictly be sideline projects. I plan on staying actively involved doing what I am doing until I retire, these side projects will just hopefully help me retire a little bit sooner.
- Run in a 5k: Another one of my goals coming into 2009 was to become more healthy but I obviously didn’t do as well in that department as I would have liked. Hopefully I can do a lot better job in 2010. In order to push myself toward this goal I am going to try to run in at least one 5k this year. I haven’t decided on where or when yet, but after the first of the year I am going to start running and try to make this happen by at least the end of the summer.
- Build my Personal Brand: In a lot of ways I have already been building my personal brand by blogging here at The Cotton Club and by staying pretty active on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but I am going to try to take things to another level in 2010 by adding some exciting new things. One of the things that I will be adding is a podcast. I haven’t worked on the specifics just yet as to how often it’s going to be released or even when the first episode will air but I can assure you that it will happen in the first quarter of 2010.
Business Goals for 2010
My partners and I had a great year in 2009 despite the economic downturn that plagued the nation. We managed to pick up some great new accounts as well as further refine the focus of our business. I would like to build upon some of the products and services that we had a lot of success with this past year. Here’s the list of business goals I have put together so far…
- Email Outsourcing / Archiving: I have blogged a lot the past few months about our premium email products and archival solutions because a lot of attention has been placed on regulatory compliance in a lot of industries. I think that we have a very competitive solution that will continue to do well for us in 2010.
- Shared & VPS Solutions: Over the years my partners and I have made a tremendous investment in our hosting infrastructure. Today, thanks to virtualization, we are able to provide VPS, or virtual private server, solutions to development firms for a very competitive rate, even on a national scale. I am going to try to make an effort to promote our hosting solutions a lot more in 2010 than I did in 2009.
- Ministry Web Solutions: This past year we launched Powersite ministry solutions to showcase our web design and development packages geared toward churches or non-profit organizations. We have had a great response so far from the Powersite launch and I hope to continue that momentum going into 2010.
- Social Media / Interactive Marketing: My partners and I had a lot of success this year steering a lot of our clients into the realm of social media. We also saw some tremendous results from our efforts. I hope to make social media an even-more integral part of what we provide for our clients in 2010.
Development Goals for 2010
I didn’t do a lot of custom application development this past year so I have come up with some goals for the upcoming year to get me back into the development mindset. Here’s what I have come up with so far…
- Develop 2 iPhone Apps: I have two ideas that I think could be profitable, I just have to finalize my project parameters and complete the markup models for each project, which I should be able to do by the first quarter of next year, then I have the rest of the year to familiarize myself with Objective C programming and knock these projects out.
- Develop 2 Wordpress Plugins: I also have two ideas for Wordpress plugins that I want to release in 2010. I already have started coding on both of these projects but haven’t had the spare time to devote to wrapping them up. I typically code on these types of projects after hours in between client projects. Hopefully I will find the time in 2010, stay tuned to this blog for info on both of these plugins.
- Develop 2 Web Applications: I also have two web applications, both geared toward the agriculture industry, that I should be able to launch in 2010. Both applications are 75% complete, I am just waiting on some regulatory guidelines to be handed down by a few more states and then I can wrap everything up. I won’t go into a lot of detail about these apps right now but will when we finally roll them out.
- Develop a MODx Project: My business partner Greg primarily works in MODx while I develop most of my projects in Wordpress. While both solutions are great for content management, they are both very different in terms of their core foundation. I would like to develop a project this next year in MODx so I can become more familiar with it’s operation and functionality.
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.
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/
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.
Theme Issues w/ IE + DISQUS
This past week at the Central Arkansas Refresh I got to talking to Keith Crawford about Disqus commenting platform and I was telling him that I felt like commenting platforms were going to be extremely competitive in the future. Out of the box Wordpress commenting platform works well but it leaves a lot to be desired, especially on blogs that get a lot of comments. I feel like the entire future of the web is going to continue to evolve toward user generated content and one day users will be able to pretty much comment on any content they find. When this day comes, commenting platforms will be all the rage.
As it is now, probably the biggest advantage to running commenting platforms like Disqus or IntenseDebate for my clients would be that they get multiple options for their site visitors to authenticate and leave comments. Disqus offers Twitter, Facebook, as well as their own system. We all know that the easier it is for a web user to do something, the more likely they are to do it. This holds true for just about everything whether it’s email, a social application, or commenting.
Well, yesterday I decided to install Disqus on this blog and move over to their platform. I had already installed Disqus a few times in the past for a few of my clients sites and had no issue to date. Of course the minute I start working on something of my own things break down!
I was able to get it installed just fine, and inside of Firefox everything appears to be functioning correctly, but when I pulled my site up in IE to make sure that things rendered correctly, that’s when I found this: (Firefox on the left and IE on the right…)

I have no idea why this is breaking in IE and not in Firefox so I decided to just put off the upgrade until I had some time to devote to troubleshooting the issue a little bit closer. I posted my frustration in a tweet and then moved onto another project. Just a few minutes later I got a response back from @Disqus aka Giannii who is their community manager. He asked me to send him some screenshots and links to the blog so he could take a look. I decided to just leave the site broken in IE for now just so he could see exactly what it was doing. (so, if you are reading this in IE, switch to Firefox until we get this figured out).
Once I find out what’s breaking the issue I will likely post a follow up w/ an explanation of the issue but for now it beats me…
#RefreshCA Wordpress Code Camp Brainstorm
It’s impossible to attend a meeting of the Central Arkansas Refresh Group and not have someone bring up the topic of Wordpress. I just thought that I was the head cheerleader for wordpress in this area until I started hanging around with some of the #RefreshCA guys, they love it just about as much as I do. A few months back we had Daniel Spillers from UALR’s web team do a presentation on wordpress and it was probably one of our most popular meetings since the group formed. You can see my blog post about Daniel’s presentation here.
Given my fascination with Wordpress and my desire to learn even more about it, I posed a question to the group today on Twitter to see if there was any interest in having some sort of Saturday Code Camp of sorts dedicated only to Wordpress. I am not even quite sure in my head what such an event would look like, but I think it would be an awesome experience if we could pull something like this off.
I know that personally I have already picked up a lot of things from the group by just hanging out with them for an hour or two each month, and I can only imagine how cool it would be to have a code camp type setting where there wasn’t a speaker or presentation type of thing going on, instead it would be more interactive.
Here’s kind of what I was thinking, please add to the list…
- Plugin Discussions: we could each discuss what plugins we actively use on projects and learn ways to tweak or better utilize their functionality.
- Plugin Development: We could also discuss plugin development and what all is involved with authoring your own plugin, more here on plugin development. I have had a small role in a few plugin projects in the past and I know that there are probably a few others and we can probably dive pretty deep into this topic.
- Core Hacking: we could discuss ways to further extend wordpress beyond what’s available through the use of plugins, etc. Here’s an example of a recent hack that I had to implement for a client.
- Theme Development: we could also discuss theme development, and what goes into designing a theme for wordpress. We could also touch on some of the design generation tools that are on the market as well, such as Artisteer.
- Performance: another good topic of discussion could revolve around performance related issues with wordpress such as caching.
- Enterprise / Multi-User Applications: possibly a member of our group has some experience with wordpress MU or enterprise and can give us some input on that end of the spectrum.
These are just a few areas that I am throwing out there, if you have some additional wordpress related topics you think would be interesting, please feel free to comment them out so we can have a list to work from when we are finally able to put something like this together.
The possibility that something specialized like this could spawn from our Central Arkansas Refresh group is kind of cool to think about because there are potentially several other specialized applications like Drupal, Joomla and MODx that could spawn out of it as well. Darren Huckey is currently working on setting up a Drupal user group for Central Arkansas right now and as soon as he has the details on that I will be sure to share that on here as well.
Not that there is anything wrong with our existing format for the Central Arkansas Refresh Group meetings, I love the presentation / question and answer format and really enjoy the fellowship, but I think a specialized code camp type of setting could really be awesome.
Another thought, for this meeting we would probably need to find a good location that’s free from distractions and has a strong enough signal for all of us to be online at the same time. Since this is a specialized type meeting, different from the broader scoped Refresh meetings, we will likely have a smaller turnout so a smaller venue might work well. Thought’s, anyone?? Hit me back and let me know what you think…
My Top 10 MVP’s (Most Valuable Wordpress Plugins)
One of the best things about wordpress, in my opinion, is the volume of plugins that are readily available for developers to deploy without having to recreate the wheel. I was at the Central Arkansas Refresh meeting the other night talking w/ Rob McBryde about how I deploy Wordpress. He has recently started working w/ wordpress and was wondering which plugins I deployed on the front end.
So, here’s my list of plugins that are deployed on the front end when I do a client installation. Keep in mind that these are only the basics that apply to pretty much any client. For a listing of the more specialized tools and plugin that I use, I recommend checking out my delicious bookmarks, specifically the ones tagged wordpress-plugins.
Granted, this one is already part of the wordpress package itself but it’s not configured or turned on. To get Akismet to work you need to put in your Wordpress API key. If you are hosting your own wordpress installation or it is hosted outside of wordpress.com, you will need to go onto wordpress.com and setup an account to get a key. It only takes a few minutes to do and it can be reused every time you do a new installation.
Contact Form 7 for Adding Feedback Forms
Rarely do I ever work on a client project that doesn’t require a form to collect information. Web forms are an excellent way to gather information from site visitors. I know that there are several plugins on the market for doing this but I prefer the Contact Form 7 because it has always been reliable. Admittedly I haven’t tested many of the other form plugins that are out there so they might be just as reliable. One other thing that I like about Contact Form 7 is that it allows you to deploy multiple forms. The only drawback to this plugin I would have to say is that you have to sometimes spend 20 minutes with the client showing them how to use it. Currently this plugin is on version 2, and it was written by: Takayuki Miyoshi
I am a Picasa fan from way back, I know some that prefer Flickr over Picasa but I always recommend Picasa to my clients for storing and sharing photos. The Kpicasa plugin works great inside of wordpress and brings in all of your galleries onto your site as if you were hosting them there yourself. I have this plugin running on my site right now, just click on the photos tab and see for yourself. Very transparent plugin. The reason this plugin is part of my core installation is because 9 times out of 10 the client is going to want some sort of photo gallery on their site, never fails. (note, there are several plugins out there that will do the whole picasa integration like this but they require some additional coding, this one written by: Guillaume Hébert doesn’t, so that it why I use it, and it does a great job).
Wicket Twitter Widget for Displaying Most Recent Tweets
I have found that sometimes just inserting the javascript from Twitter to display your recent tweets can be problematic, and I have never been able to figure out why this is. Instead I found an alternative to just hand coding the JavaScript in and use this plug-in instead. The plugin is also put out by Automattic, the same company behind the scenes with wordpress so I feel pretty comfortable with it’s reliability and for the most part I have been able to use this one w/out incident.
I throw out the term social saturation a lot because it’s huge! For those of you who check your log files you might have noticed that the top referrers to your site have changed dramatically over the past year or so. Granted, a fair number of people still find you through Google, but the leading referrers for me these days are Facebook and Twitter. I always recommend that my clients setup a Twitter account and use it if for pushing their content out onto Twitter and Facebook. This plugin does just that, it pushes blog posts and updates onto Twitter, which in turn is setup to change my Facebook status. This is all handled automatically and behind the scenes. I know that there are other ways to incorporate your feeds into Twitter but this plugin has always been very reliable for me and it posts instantly. For a while I was using a twitterfeed solution and it worked well, but I couldn’t ever time when it was going to update.
Retweets are the new blog comments in my opinion. When I go and post something on my blog and it goes out to Twitter I will occasionally get comments on the blog but usually the best way to gauge the reception of your post is by how many people retweet your post. Tweetbacks goes out and looks for tweets and retweets that are related to that particular post and displays them on your blog just above the comments area. Granted, this plugin doesn’t add a lot of value to your site or your content but I think it’s a neat way to gauge your readers responses. I first learned about this plugin from Dan Zarella, who I follow pretty closely and it was written by Joost de Valk, another name you might have heard before if you follow Wordpress very closely.
Google XML Sitemap for Dynamic Sitemapping
This plugin is by Arne Brachhold and is a neccessity in my opinion. As a developer you already know the importance of having an xml sitemap on file w/ Yahoo and Google in their webmaster tools section. The problem with dynamic sites is that they will constantly be adding pages of content. This plugin magically (more php than magic) automatically updates itself when new content is added and it updates your sitemap. It’s one of those set it and forget it feeds that you never really have to worry about, it just works.
Google Analyticator for Analytics
This plugin was released by Spiral Web Consulting and it works very well. Another problem with tracking dynamic sites is that the tracking code for Google Analytics has to be in every page that is created for you to get an accurate account of your traffic. In the past we have manually coded in the tracking code in either the header or footer of a site, but with this plugin that doesn’t have to be the case. You simply enter in your UA-XX-XXXX number from Google Analytics and it will automatically insert this for you. It’s more or less a timesaver and one less thing you have to do during the development process.
Social Bookmarking Reloaded for Social Saturation
If you own or operate a website you want to make sure that it’s easy for your visitors to share your content with their friends, that’s just a given. Probably the best way to do this is by adding the social bookmarking reloaded plugin to your site. This plugin is responsible for the facebook, myspace, twitter, digger, and delicious icons you see below. All a user has to do is click on these icons and it immediately takes them to their account on these services. I only have a few services checked but this plugin allows you to have as many of these as you want listed. I do my best not to overwhelm people so I stick to the basics. This plugin was written by Pedana vibrante and has had a couple of updates over time so I know the project is still very active. Again, I know there are other plugins that are out there, and even some groups of plugins that can be used together to accomplish the same thing, I have just found this one to work well and be stable.
Feedburner Feedsmith for Feed Management / Tracking
I used to use the Feedburner Feedsmith on all of my sites that had feeds on them but recently I haven’t been doing this as much because I had some issues once with Feedburner. Those issues seem to have worked themselves out and I am back to using it. Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. Feedburner (now under the umbrella of Google) is a great tool for managing your feeds and tracking subscribers, etc. (note: out of all of the plugins I mentioned above, this is one that I might occasionally omit from activation.)
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If you a plugin that is not on this list that is part of every wordpress installation you do, I would love to hear what they are, please feel free to comment or send me a tweet…
Twitme, LiveWriter, WP 2.8 Bug – Workaround
The other day I posted an entry about a bug that I had ran into using the Twitme plugin for Wordpress, and as I mentioned in my post the only thing that had changed was that I had recently upgraded to 2.8.1 on Wordpress.
I also mentioned that I was getting this error when I used Windows Live Writer to publish my content, which I do a majority of the time. This is the error that we were getting back while troubleshooting:
PHP Fatal error: Cannot use object of type stdClass as array in /var/www/vhosts/cottonrohrscheib.com/httpxdocs/blog/wp-content/plugins/twitme/twitmeShortUrl.php on line 37
I use the Twitme plugin on my site and several other of my clients sites so I have been pretty persistent in trying to find a workaround for this. If you are not familiar with what Twitme does, it basically pushes your posts directly out to Twitter when they go online. Granted there are a lot of other solutions to accomplishing this, including the manual method that a lot of people like to use but I prefer the automation as do a lot of my clients.
If you have ran into this same issue, or seen this warning message after you publish a post with Live Writer:
The response to the metaWeblog.newPost method received from the blog server was invalid:
Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server
You will want to first make sure that you have RPC publishing enabled inside of Wordpress, this can be found under Settings >> Writing inside the dashboard. If you have this enabled then try going to the Twitme >> Settings page and unchecking the box that says Use Short URL’s, this fixed the issue for me and as you can see Twitter still managed to shorten the URL before it went out.







