Blogging

SEO: Copywriting made simple – Scribe optimizes your posts

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Scribe SEO

Do you sometimes wonder if there is still some tweak which needs to be done to your post to optimize your content for search engines?

If you don’t than you might miss out on a lot of organic traffic from search engines. There are many rules to follow to make your content perform best and to appear at the top of search results. It starts with the content you create, but it is important to come up with an optimal headline (and length), keywords you place at the right positions of you text, meta description & keywords, etc. etc.

If you want to optimize the SEO process than you should check out the new service is called Scribe SEO. It’s available as a WordPress plugin and web/stand alone version. You have the choice between 3 subscription levels:

  • Starter (30 evaluations, $27/m.)
  • Publisher (120 evaluations, $47/m.)
  • Advanced (300 evaluations, $97/m.)

After you completed your post than you run Scribe (counts as 1 evaluation) and it produces a report with scores and suggestions to further optimize your content, keywords, headline, etc. The tool is available here: Scribe SEO

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WordPress Updates in Seconds – Via SVN or Auto-Update

marco Leave a comment

Wordpress LogoWordPress is getting a lot of updates lately and it is important to stay up to date with your installation. Even more important if its “only” a minor update, but a security update!

WordPress introduced a very simple way in the current version (v2.8) called auto-upgrade. See Upgrading WordPress:

Recent versions of WordPress feature an Automatic Upgrade. You can launch the automatic upgrade by clicking the link in the new version banner (if it’s there) or by going to the Tools -> Upgrade menu. After that it should be straightforward.

Automatic Upgrades do fail sometimes, though, so remember to backup your database first, and deactivate your plugins before starting the upgrade.

Note that your files all need to be owned by the user under which your Apache server executes, or you will receive a dialog box asking for “connection information,” and you will find that no matter what you enter, it won’t work.

If this doesn’t work for you there is always the good old way of doing a manual update:

  • downloading the latest zip archive, unzip it
  • copy over all of your files (wp-content folder, wp-config, .htaccess, all other custom folder/files you added to wordpress)
  • move the current installation to another folder
  • move the new version + your files back to the web folder

But, there is another way to keep WP up-to-date:

SVN or Subversion

First you need to be able to login to your server via SSH / Shell. Next, you need to check if you have Subversion installed (just type “svn” in the shell of your server). If this is all working than you’re good to go, otherwise you need to look into how to install subversion on your server.

There is a detailed description of how to update WP on the codex. All you have to do is:

$ mkdir blog
$ cd blog
$ svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8.4 .

WPMU users (codex page):

$ svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-mu/tags/2.8.4a/ .

If you’ve already installed WP and want to switch to updating via SVN:

$ cd ../blog
$ cp -p wp-config.php .htaccess ../blog-new
$ cp -rpfu wp-content/* ../blog-new/wp-content

Make sure to copy over all other custom files/folders and you should have a directory with the latest version of wordpress, running on your configuration. You’re ready for SVN 🙂

All is left now is to switch this new directory with your old blog directory:

$ mv blog blog-old; mv blog-new blog

… and to test your new installation by browsing your blog. Don;t forget to update your blog, if you

Updating your blog is now as easy as (always remember to replace [blog dir] with the correct directory of your blog installation):

$ svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8.4 [blog dir]

Enjoy!

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Error 999: Using Feedburner RSS Feeds for your Yahoo Pipes

marco Leave a comment

I have a couple of RSS feeds which are a mashup of multiple RSS feeds using Yahoo Pipes, and to be able to track their usage I utilize Feedburner. But lately all of these Feedburner feeds were not updating.  Feedburner returned “Error getting URL: 999 – Unknown” with HTTP Error code 502, though the Yahoo! pipes source feed was valid RSS (even using the recommended services listed over on the pages of feedburner).

This happened after the migration of Feedburner accounts to Google accounts and the recent redirects to feeds2.feedburner.com urls.

All attempts troubleshooting feedburner failed (incl. to resync the feed). In case you recently created a Feedburner feed which sources Yahoo Pipes -> check if it is working.

Update: DON’T move your Feedburner feeds to Google accounts if the original source is Yahoo Pipes:

If you use Yahoo! Pipes as the “Original Feed,” or content source, for one or more FeedBurner feeds, and you haven’t already moved over to a Google Account, please postpone moving it (for now).

We are working directly with Yahoo! to restore Google-hosted feeds’ access to Pipes as soon as possible, but until this fix is in place, FeedBurner feeds with Pipes sources moved to Google will stop working properly.

Update 2: As of today (Feb. 1, 2009 – Sun.) the feeds seem to have re-started to work as normal. No post/news yet on the official Feedburner Blog.

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MyBlogLog releases JustForYou – Personalizes Your WordPress Blog

marco 5 Comments

Today I installed a new WordPress plugin from MyBlogLog called JusrForYou.
You see an example set of recommendations to the left (taken from the quoted blog post below).

Here is the blog post explaining a little more about it “Just for You Personalizes Your WordPress Blog“:

Yet, none of these add-ons look at the stated interests of the individual reader, mostly because this data is closed off, hidden inside social networks and closed off to the open internet.

Just for You, released today as a WordPress plug-in, builds a list of headlines based on the expressed interests of the reader. The plug-in looks at each visitor to your blog and, if they are a cookied MyBlogLog member, looks up the tags attached to that user’s profile. Using these tags, Just for You looks into the blog’s archive for posts with matching tags or categories and shows a list of matching headlines in a sidebar widget.

A very interesting way of making suggestions for your blog visitors. In the comments you wil find some people complaining about some missing php extensions:

It seems your host is not supporting json data format. Please ask your hosting provider to enable json extension for php.

So, it remains to be seen if this plugin will work here on my blog or not. What do you think about this idea to provide recommendations to site visitors?

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Twitter: Do you have a Twitter counter on your website?

marco Leave a comment

Everybody knows the famous counter from feedburner.com to show (off) how many people are (approximately) reading your blog. Based on the idea of counter and stats is a new tool called “twittercounter”, doing the same kind of counter for the advanced micro-blogger, or twitterer. The service is providing not only an embeddable counter for your homepage, but also some stats. Here are their current stats, about their own account on twitter.com:

We now track 277,753 unique Twitter accounts.

Yesterday we generated 284,821 counters.

In total we generated 16,524,230 counters since we started tracking.

And below you’ll see the counter preview (several display options exist) of the embadable counter for your webpage or maybe your Online community page:

And a little history of their followers of the last time:

Are you already the proude owner of a Twitter counter for your homepage? I am working on mine, mostly I still need 100000 of people following me to make it worth displaying on my site:)

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Software development: Sooo many methodologies

marco Leave a comment
Dev Process
Dev Process, from Chet Haase's Blog

A friend just pointed me to this older blog post by Chet Haase (his blog), titled Crystal Methodology. He is describing different methodologies of how to develop software and has some interesting twists added to every single one.

One example excerpt:

Scum

In the Scrum development model, the focus is on short iterations and constant communication. The Scum model, however, focuses on the individual. In particular, each engineer works completely on his or her own, producing code at an alarming rate. Changes are integrated and merged willy-nilly, causing untold breakage due to the complete lack of communication. At each fault, the offending code, putback, and engineer are indentified as scum and are tossed out of the project (this step is called “Hack-n-rack”). The resulting code and team are thereby better over time, having weaned out the weak members through natural selection. As it’s inventor, Dr. Feen Bookle, PhD, Mrs, QED, JRE, said at its unveiling at the Conference On Terribly Important Academic Philosophies and Theories on Software Process Methodology Discoveries (CTEAPTSPMD), “Scum will always float to the top. Skim it off and you’ve got just the juicy bits left. Plus the bottom-feeders.”

If you spent hours, days, week or years in the field of software development, so basically spent your life with developing software, you will really enjoy this read! 🙂

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feedalizr: micro-blogging & read updates from friends – Adobe Air app

marco Leave a comment

In my previous post I wrote about ping.fm and their service to send notifications out to many social and business network/apps.

Feedalizr Screenshot A different approach is used by the Adobe Air based app called Feedalizr. It lets you share your texts, photos, videos, etc. as well, but also allows to read and interact with posts from friends. All of this on your local desktop, no web browser required (although you need to have Adobe Air installed on yout computer.)

This is a very interesting approach and they try to be your central application to post AND read (and interact), resulting in less application switching between your different websites and services. They currently support Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr and Jaiku.

The software just came out off public alpha and is now available as a beta version. Go, check it out and respond in the comments if you use the app or know of other cool apps helping you with keeping up with your social network buzz.

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Ping.fm: Keeping your social networks in sync

marco 3 Comments

Ping.fm Logo Ping.fm is currenly in beta and trying to help you with kepping ALL your friends, followers, business contact (etc., etc.,…) up-to-date!
On the website the services describes itself as:

Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.

Use AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS or E-mail and let Ping.fm relay your message to a multitude of social networking sites.

Available social networks and services are: Twitter, jaiku, Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Tumblr, Pownce, Brightkite, Xanga, Plurk, Plaxo, Linkedin, Mashable, identi.ca, more coming…

The latest additions of supported services and functionality are mentioned in their recent blog entry entitled More Features, More Awesomeness:

Alas, we bring more gifts from the Ping.fm laboratory. We have added a Yahoo! Messenger bot to our bot arsenal. So, for those Yahoo! users who were without GTalk and AIM, you now have the power of Ping!

Also, we’re proud to announce our custom URL posting capability. Now you can have ping messages delivered directly to your website! This will encourage developers to write incoming-bound scripts that will do cool stuff with your Ping messages. Just another way we’ve put the power in your hands.

Last but not least, we’ve enabled support for picture uploading.

Check them out! Use this beta code to get in: pingbewithyou
Leave a comment if you need a (current) beta code and I will update the post with the latest one.

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Video blogging: Kyte vs Qik vs Flixwagon and Viif

marco 1 Comment

Kyte screenshotThere are many posts out the in the blogosphere talking about the superior service/application from kyte.tv, comparing them to Qik.com or Flixwagon.com. See the Techcrunch post from Robert Scoble: why-kytetv-will-kill-qik-and-flixwagon-in-cell-phone-video-space

That led me to this post. Here’s why I think Kyte will dominate over Qik and Flixwagon:

  1. The distribution system that Kyte has built is much better than either Qik or Flixwagon. Translation: the embeddable player that Kyte.tv has is much better than Qik or Flixwagon, more on that in a second.
  2. The chat room that Kyte has built is much better than Qik or Flixwagon and can be participated in from other cell phones, something that Qik and Flixwagon can’t do.
  3. The ability to mix videos from your webcam, live videos streaming from your web cam, recorded videos from camcorders, or from places like YouTube, along with both recorded and streamed videos from your cell phone goes way beyond what Qik and Flixwagon have done today.
  4. Kyte.tv can play videos on an iPhone today. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.
  5. Kyte.tv can play videos on a Nokia today. Both from your recordings and other people’s. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.
  6. Kyte.tv is partially funded and supported by Nokia. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Nokia is using Kyte’s service internally too, and I’m sure Nokia is giving Kyte better engineering support than it’s giving Qik or Flixwagon.
  7. Kyte.tv is way ahead of Qik and Kyte in getting real mainstream celebrities like 50 cent on its service, which means its growth is way stronger.

and Oliver wrote about them, too:

The only thing we need are mobile phone internet flatrates and I hope that the carriers are seeing in the iPhone that a flatrate helps. I don’t believe the increased usage comes form the iPhone only, but for a large part from not having to think about being online or not. When you have to think in terms of MB used or something, you do start to think and you use stuff less.

All services have in common that you have to download an application to your phone to use either service. This is a big advantage in terms of control and usability of the app. But still you need to download an application in the first place. The iPhone might leed the way as people are used to buy (select) e.g. mp3’s from iTunes and have them transfered (downloaded) onto their device. We will see if Apple is leading the way, once more.

Wanted to add my 2 cents to this discussion and throw in an approach which is a little different than the one taken by the previously mentioned companies:

Viif phoneWhat do you think about the German start-up in Berlin called Viif (site mostly available in German only, sorry)? Their application enables every 3G cell phone (with video call capability) to record live video, which gets recorded from the Viif video server and than publish to your blog. The service is not allowing love video blogging for now but they could very easily make this into one without the need to download an application!
I don’t want to keep quiet about the little disadvantage you have: No 3G signal = no video call. A local application might be able to record on the internal memory of your phone and upload the content after your signal gets better (is back at full 3G).

Leave a comment if you know of other mobile video applications out there or want to chip in with your commentary! Thanks!

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