While websites are great for gaining immediate global exposure (or notoriety, as the case may be), there are times when your product would benefit more from local search engine targeting. For example, you have a pizzeria in Trieste, Italy. A person in Hawaii may accidentally stumble on your site and get a craving for your [...]
When it comes to making your site important, platforms trounce software hands down. Facebook learned this the easy way; today, the myriad of Facebook applications available make the social networking site a typical destination for a significant proportion of internet users. Indeed, many users now browse new content on their favourite sites via their respective [...]
I recently came across the Mortgage Loan Calculator Widget, a simple widget that provides mortgage repayment calculations. With the credit crunch in recent times, keeping tabs on your mortgage is a highly topical issue, so why not let your users do some quick calculations directly from your website? With a WordPress plugin for blogs, and [...]
Do you have multiple WordPress self-hosted blogs? If so, you’ve likely run into a scenario where you just can’t remember your password. With WordPress 2.5 and 2.5.1 there’s an annoying bug that sometimes generates passwords that don’t work when you click the “Forgot Password” option. Usually that button generates a query that …
Google just launched a preview of their newest social networking effort called Friend Connect. In a nutshell, Google FC is a free service that allows owners to turn their sites into a community – without having to install any applications or perform programming. With a simple copy-and-paste of Google-generated code, one can have the ability [...]
FirePHP is a plugin for Firebug, the web development plugin for Firefox, that allows PHP scripts to talk to a Firebug panel. FirePHP installs alongside Firebug, and provides a simple PHP library to bridge the two. FirePHP provides a window of insight into your PHP applications, with a simple debugging interface that won’t interfere with [...]
So you’ve just built a fantastic processing routine for your application. You’ve checked and double checked the integrity of user input, and you’re doing some serious processing. There’s only one problem: it’s too slow. There’s a simple solution: forking your processing script, and running the code as a background process asynchronously. It can email your [...]
Small applications embedded in web pages called widgets are enjoying a huge amount of reach among the online community. ComScore’s Widget Metrix measured 20% penetration worldwide, and 40% penetration in the all-important US market. Universal McCann’s research showed roughly the same results. Penetration is defined as the number of unique widget viewers versus the number [...]
Personality is still the name of the game. A recent survey report gives us the latest figures on what kind of blogs people read, and Personal Blogs ruled the chart with a 63.5% reach. Second to that is a 38.9% reach for Family or Friend Blogs. Both suggest that to gain a wider audience, your [...]
If Abraham Maslow were alive, he’d tell us, “Told you so.” Social media’s rise to prominence in the Internet Age just confirms what the famous psychologist theorized in his Hierarchy of Needs many decades ago. Human beings have an overwhelming need to belong. Communities are popping up everywhere, and rapidly growing in numbers. People are [...]
