Social networking just keeps on growing. It seems every major public business wants a Facebook application, corporations are adding social features to their websites, and organisations are bringing social networking into their intranets. Previously, building your own social networking applications involved some serious engineering challenges. Thanks to Ringside Networks, that just got a lot easier, with an open source (LGPL) social networking server built entirely on LAMP.
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Akash Mehta in Web | No Comments »
Every blogger dreams about creating viral content, infecting people with your ideas and being the talk of the town. But how exactly does one go about it? Unfortunately, there really aren’t hard and fast rules. Even experienced bloggers will tell you that luck has a lot to do with it. It’s a matter of great timing and having the right people spread your post, creating that domino effect.
There are, however, some pointers you can follow, and if lady luck should smile upon you, your content may just spread like wildfire. So before you click that “Publish” button, check if you have done your due diligence on the following:
Quality Content will not go viral if it isn’t special. Your topic should be unique, and your grammar near flawless. If it has pictures or videos included, a bit of polishing may be in order. Also, make sure you do thorough research on the subject, which should be relevant to your niche.
Quantity Lists are some of the perennial fixtures in the viral content sphere. It’s been proven that people love “Top 10” and “Best of” listings. If you can extend that to “Top 100”, better - as long as you don’t sacrifice the overall quality of the article, of course.
Originality With the sheer volume of content flying around, you’ve got be quite unusual to get noticed. Either that, or you’re the first to announce something huge that will blow people away. The point is, viral content must be something that jolts people and makes them go, “OMG!”
Controversy It’s true what they say: “Bad publicity is still publicity.” Don’t be afraid to publish unpopular opinions. Debate and controversy make people engaged in a discussion. If they get emotionally invested in your story, they’ll be more likely to tell other people about it.
Study Learn what other people are doing. Go to Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, and all the other leading social bookmarking sites. Find out what’s hot and analyze what makes them click. Get some tips on how to write a proper viral headline, and see if there’s a common denominator in terms of writing styles.
Scout in Content & Blogging, Website Promotion | No Comments »
In part 1 of this series, I looked at the web browsers and (Windows) IDEs. Today I’m going to look at a local development server and its PHP configuration, as well as some of the IDEs/editors available for Linux, especially the cross-platform options.
Akash Mehta in PHP | 4 Comments »
Over the last few years, there’s been much talk about how social media releases are replacing traditional press releases. True, the old method has its flaws. Tom Foremski called it too “spintastic” – full of gravy, not much meat. So are traditional press releases going in the way of the dinosaurs? The answer is no - at least not yet.
Hard habit to break. Not everyone is clamoring for change. Some news people are content with traditional press releases. It’s an art that’s over 100 years old. Change will take some getting used to. As for how long, that remains to be seen. The format of traditional PRs is easily adaptable for publishing. Just a few tweaks here and there, and it’s ready, if you don’t mind all the embellishments. It’s a convenience more than a few will miss.
Bend it as you please. Social media releases are being shaped to be more factual and straight-forward than traditional press releases. For the companies and other agencies, this severely limits their influence on how the news will be delivered to the readers. The journalists/bloggers will have to interpret the data for themselves. They may neglect parts which companies want to highlight, or focus on things that are not very flattering.
Best of both worlds. Most PR outfits nowadays distribute both kinds of releases. Though SMRs have its advantages, there are still a lot to learn, and there’s also the distribution factor to be considered (the Internet is not the primary news source for everyone). A working group has been formed to create a standard for social media releases, but until that’s finished, approved, and tested, it’s best to be on the safe side. For now, both ships still sail.
Scout in Website Promotion | No Comments »
Podcasting makes sense. By adding premium audio content on your blog, you become more than just another site on your niche. Since blogging has exploded like crazy, you need all the edge you could get. However, because podcasts are usually audio content, search engine spiders can’t crawl them as easily as they do blogs. Is it even possible to make your podcasts search engine friendly?
Fortunately, the answer is yes, and here’s how: 1. Name that tune – Think of a good keyword-rich title for your show.
2. Future-proof today - MP3 files have ID3 tags which you can embed with relevant keywords. These include title, artist/author, comments and URL fields. Only a few search engines can read the ID3 tags now, but in the future, this will likely be a standard search parameter.
3. Summarize – Write a synopsis of each podcast show and blog about it. As with basic SEO practice, important keywords should be as high up in the blog post as possible.
4. Transcribe – While we wait for the ideal future when search engines can understand audio, right now the work has to be done manually. Find a good transcription service provider. Divide the transcript up into sections, and give each of them related keyword-rich titles. If it’s a long interview, you can put each section on a separate page.
5. Directories - Submit your podcast site to specialized podcast directories and search engines such as audio.weblogs.com.
6. Publicize – Be sure to let people know that you have a podcast. Not everybody has one, which makes you especially linkworthy than a run-of-the-mill blog.
7. Reach out – You may love hearing your voice, but it’s always best to give your show some variety. From time to time, it wouldn’t hurt to do an interview, particularly if you can convince people who already some street cred in your niche. Don’t worry, though, they would usually jump at the opportunity to be featured. It’s mutually beneficial.
Try these out. Once you get going, I’m sure you’ll come up with your own creative strategies.
IT projects are, by their nature, destined to fail. When you plan for a new project, you’ll probably realise that while what you’re bui/lding isn’t new, it ts new to you, and you’re bound to encounter some surprises along the way. Maybe you haven’t quite thought out how you’re going to build a specific feature - and when you get to actually building the application, it takes a lot longer than you expect. Or maybe your client decides to change the project requirements half way through when he sees your beta. Here are five ways to avoid cost and timeframe blowouts in your freelance project.
Akash Mehta in General, Web | No Comments »
I was stunned when I first saw this open source version of extremely popular web based Instant Messenger service, Meebo. I was planning for a long time to develop such a clone and already collected necessary tools. But now, the wait is really over. These cool guys at soashable make a clone of Meebo where you can log into your favorite IM service (Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, AOL) and start chatting with your IM buddies from web. No installation - no hassle. Only for this instant get-set-go feature, meebo got this extreme popularity.
Now you can make your Meebo using the code of soashable. You can download the source code of soashable fom it’s project page on google code, by clicking here
Hasin Hayder in Web | 1 Comment »
If you are a Facebook application developer, you are certainly familiar with the dialog tool they provide for you. You can display HTML contents, a HTML block and set callback functions for default buttons. It is really very easy and enjoying to use the dialog component. But what if you want to use it in your local web application? There is no way you can import that component for your web app. So all you have to do is to create one from scratch.
But wait, there are some good people over there who already feel the pain and developed a facebook like dialog component for you. This component comes as a plugin of jQuery and works really cool. You can display static HTML contents as well as load external content via AJAX. You can find this component named “Facebox” by clicking here
Integrating Facebox with your site is easy. Just include the javascript file of jquery and facebox. And add the following script at the end of your page. <script> $(document).ready(function(){ $('a[@rel*=facebox]').facebox(); }); </script>
<script> $(document).ready(function(){ $('a[@rel*=facebox]').facebox(); }); </script>
Lets have a look at the following example
1. To load an external page <a href="http://www.google.com/logos/spring08.gif" rel="facebox">text</a>
<a href="http://www.google.com/logos/spring08.gif" rel="facebox">text</a>
2. To display static content jquery.facebox("Here is some <b>static content</b>");
jquery.facebox("Here is some <b>static content</b>");
or
$.facebox("Here is some <b>static content</b>");
Thats it! you got a nice dialog component for your web application.
Hasin Hayder in JavaScript | No Comments »
PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository, contains hundreds of freely available packages that can be reused in your application. Packages usually come with various functionality within one or more classes, and the PEAR coding standards make sure packages follow the same general style for ease of implementation. Best of all; they’re all entirely open source, from MIT to GPL.
However, many of these packages are bloated, slow and full of specialised features that you may never want to use. Sifting through the repository is also a challenge; a basic category system is in place, but it’s hard to tell what you want when you don’t know what’s available. Here are some gems from the PEAR repository that you could really find useful. (more…)
Akash Mehta in PHP | No Comments »
This is part 2 of our series on “How to Sell SEO to the Web Challenged”.
3) Expect comparisons with traditional advertising “So why should we avail of SEO services when we have ______ advertising? What would this increase in traffic do to us?” Now here is where it gets tricky. When we asked you earlier to dispel the wrong notions about SEO, it’s because SEO isn’t really an exact science. No SEO expert can really predict the increase in sales being on the top of search engines bring. So how is SEO different from the traditional advertising? With traditional advertising, the potential for generating revenue lasts only as long as the advertising does. In SEO, the effect on revenues goes on and on.
4) Know your audience Your audience may not be knowledgeable about SEO, but they may be an expert on another field. The key here is to understand that SEO may be filled with jargons and terms, but at its core, it relies on tried and tested principles, the same principles used by traditional marketing. So research and find out what language they use. Try to find out how you can explain SEO using their language and before long, you’d be seeing them bobbing their heads, understanding the things you are talking about. And once they do understand what you are talking about, you are now ready to start talking about the services that you offer.
5) Provide Additional Resources Create an SEO 101 primer that you’ll give out to new clients. It could be an ebook, video, or printed pamphlet. Make sure to include the following: what the clients should expect, a simplified overview of the working process, as well as additional services you provide. It also helps to provide the client with progress reports throughout the course of the SEO work as this lets them know how far the project has come. When presenting information, try to use easy-to-understand visuals rather than numbers. If you can, present case studies of previous work so that the client has a better idea of what to expect.
