Adam Howitt's Blog

WalkJogRun TV Interview

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:42:00 -0400

I'm thrilled to announce that I recorded a TV interview in New York last weekend for Better TV and a sneak peak has appeared on YouTube. I was interviewed by Ereka Vetrini who you may remember from season 1 of the Apprentice.

No more taboo

Thu, 21 May 2009 14:54:00 -0400

Did you ever play the boardgame taboo? You try to get your partner to say the word on the card without actually mentioning the word. Google AdWords is finally breaking the seal on trademarks. I just got off a call with a member of the Google AdWords team and he told me that come June 15th I'll actually be able to use the phrase "iPhone app" in my ads to sell our WalkJogRun Routes iPhone app. Until then my ads will be rejected if I say iPhone anywhere in the copy. This is a huge PITA for anyone who understands how Google AdWords actually work. The performance of an ad in Google AdWords drastically improves if you use the term someone actually searched for in your ad copy and on the page they end up. If you search for Guinness and see an ad for spaghetti you'd be confused. What most people don't realize is that the distinction is far narrower than you'd expect. The time people spend skimming the ads limits the ability to decode your copy and recognize it as a match for their search. In this case if you searched for Guinness and saw and ad mentioning porter (the style of beer guinness is based on), most people would ignore it and skip on. If you searched for Illinois and saw IL (the two letter abbreviation) you'll still see less clicks than an ad using Illinois instead. This means that if I'm trying to sell an iPhone application by playing a game of taboo I've got no chance of getting a sustainable clickthru rate. It also means I am forced to pay a premium cost-per-click to get my ad in front of my prospective customers. Roll on June 15th.

4 hours to the unthinkable

Fri, 08 May 2009 15:27:00 -0400

I'm finally caving in and buying a mac 4 hours from now. It won't be a clean switch I know, even running bootcamp or parallels. How do I know? I ran Ubuntu linux for 2 years and came back to Windows for the sheer range of business apps targeting Windows only. I'm moving to mac to support my iPhone development projects more easily since Mr Jobs hasn't made it possible to develop for the iPhone yet on anything else. I also don't want to be the only guy in the "I'm a PC" t-shirt at Apple's worldwide developer conference next month. I'm prepared for ramp up but there are things I'm going to miss. If you see some app here you have converted from in your move to a Mac, let me know.

Beyond Compare: Singularly the most useful FTP program I've ever seen. I've tried many, many more and none have the ease of use. Fire it up, select a left side and a right side to compare and hit go. It compares single files on your PC, PC to FTP, FTP to FTP and many other configurations. It can handle folder comparisons and file comparisons. It highlights files that have changed (based on your definition of what a change is) then double click the file to see the changes and push changes line by line if need be or wholesale. This comes up often when working on client sites where someone else isn't used to working in a team. In this situation I pull in the client's changes to my machine, test my changes still work then push up a merged version. Of course some will say software can't fix a process, but it's not practical to turn around a client's development team on a dime so this is a good interim.
Google Chrome. I know it's coming but so is Christmas, doesn't make my transition to a mac any easier. Incognito windows are the solution to one of the biggest problems for developers - opening mulitple sessions to the same site with different user accounts and sessions. For example, all of Google's tools using a unified login don't play well if you open a new window and login to another tool with a different login. It typically affects every session you have open. Chrome's incognito lets me keep Google Analytics open in one window then login to Google AdWords MCC account with the incognito window and neither window is affected by the other. Brilliant.
Assorted others I haven't looked into (that may have a Mac version) include SQLYog, SQL Server Management Studio, Picasa, Flex Builder, SonicWall VPN, Microsoft Office and Google AdWords Editor.

That's it for now. If you have any suggestions for tools to try feel free to chime in. No fighting either. We can all co-exist in this world and Mac v PC interests no-one but Messrs. Gates and Jobs.

WalkJogRun iPhone Application v1 is live!

Wed, 06 May 2009 01:41:00 -0400

After over 200 hours of development, sweat, tears and late nights after work, Apple finally approved our app. It's available in the App Store today and I'd love to hear your feedback. Under the hood it connects to WalkJogRun.net built on ColdFusion and MySQL, hosted at Amazon, to pull routes from our database. We've grown to over 400,000 routes in over 200 countries and growing every day. Learn more here or download a copy here.

Google Chrome Bookmark Checker

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:51:00 -0400

I've been using Google Chrome since shortly after the release and I've been hooked. It's a rare day when I need to dip into Internet Explorer or Firefox. I use Firefox when I need to use some of the browser plugins like LiveHTTPHeaders, Web Developer or WASP. Internet Explorer only gets play when I need to access Quickbooks Online. In a massive oversight, the Intuit folks thought designing and delivering an iPhone application was more important than a Firefox version. I spoke with their support staff over e-mail and was told that separate teams work on the iPhone product than the web version so the iPhone version was ready first. I've still not seen the Firefox version in the last 6 months since I asked and, last I checked, most of my clients see about 20% of visits from Firefox compared with less than 2% from the iPhone. If you've not tried Google Chrome, there is a compelling use case I've not seen mentioned elsewhere. Specifically, when I need to login to some websites with different accounts simultaneously, like Google Analytics or AdWords. Chrome's incognito feature allows me to open a browser window with a unique datastore for session and cookie data, making it easy to tab between windows. It's an attractive alternative to popping open Firefox or IE. Another fave feature is "application shortcuts". If you frequently visit a site or web application like Google Analytics you can create a special bookmark called an application shortcut. You can choose to save this to your desktop or quick launch bar for one click access to the app. It opens chromeless so you get a full screen experience. I have about 12 of these in my quick launch bar including GMail, Google Mail for my Domain, Analytics, Website Optimizer, Facebook and Flickr, to name a few. One feature request that struck me this morning would be to build in a bookmark update checker. Since Google knows when pages get updated, it would be nice to see an indication in my bookmarks list or a list in the new tab dashboard of recently updated bookmarked pages. For example, this morning I discovered the Google Website Optimizer overview documentation has been updated, but I found this by chance since I've read it before. Delicious could of course implement this kind of feature too to make it browser independent, as could Google by adding it to their web history results. I did a cursory search online but couldn't find a browser based version. There are a few tools to download but I'd rather have something web based. Anyone got any recommendations of websites that do this?

BlogCFC 5.9.2.002 Live and Kicking

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:15:00 -0400

I've finally upgraded WebDevRef to use BlogCFC 5.9.2.002 so hopefully any commenters or readers who have suffered from the spammers attacking my blog lately will have an extra line of defense. This was quite painful as a move because I've skipped about 3 major versions and 6 point releases and the database changed drastically. Not to mention the fact that I have a custom design from Jeff that took the best part of today to reintegrate. I hope this is as much use to everyone else as it will be to me. I've also decided to remove the $5 archive fee - it was a useful experiment and drew some very passionate responses. In 3 months I sold 3 blog entries but it wasn't really about that. As I've been working for myself this past year I've been struggling to make the time to blog about my CF adventures and justify the time. I felt like I needed a sign that someone thought it was worth the effort I put in. I thought $5 per article would give me that validation but it seems I was a little misguided :-) I've spent a lot of time soul searching and realized that I get a lot of satisfaction just from taking the time to write. So I'm back and ready to blog with some brand spanking new blog features. Thanks to Ray Camden as ever for continuing to lead the development of BlogCFC.

Turn your sales and lead forms into Goldmines

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:33:00 -0400

A recent form analytics project with Auto-Transporter made me into a rockstar with their CEO and drastically increased the number of leads they get.

Read "Double your conversion rate quadruple your sales" for more details.

Three finds

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:22:05 -0400

I was waiting for a server to reboot earlier today and grabbed my copy of CF8 WACK Volume 2 to read Chapter 31 on improving performance and was glad to find two new tips. CFCache helps you serve popular pages faster and blockfactor on queries is supposed to make your queries return data faster.

CFCache

I'm not sure how I missed this tag in 9 years of CF usage but it rocks. Add it to a page bfore anything is outputted to the screen and CF adds both client and server side caching mechanisms!

Using "Cache" as the action attribute turns on both server and client side caching or you can turn on just one or the other.

In the example above CF saves the output to your server in the cache directory under your CF installation as an MD5 hash of the script name and query parameters. Subsequent requests within the hour will be served from this file.

The client side portion tells the visitor browser the update time of the page such that when a subsequent request is sent, the browser passes that date for CF to compare against it's timespan. If it has expired, it sends a new copy, otherwise it tells the browser to serve the copy it has.

The book points out that pages using session, client or cookie scopes shouldn't use cfcache because the browser won't cache a copy for each session and your cache will contain data tied to just one session - leading to the wrong info being served to different visitors.

Blockfactor

The second find was the blockfactor attribute for CFQUERY. The theory is that adding blockfactor to queries returning over 100 rows at a time will be improved but from my tests, I found very little improvement, if any. I'm connecting CF8 to a remote MySQL 5.1 server. A little googling revealed Ben Nadel's post from 2006 showing similar results. One commenter pointed out that Oracle is really the only DBMS that can really use this instruction whereas another poster said that it depends on the datasize of the rows you work with. If anyone has an update on this, I'd love to get some additional perspective.

CFCache revisited

Just for the sake of committing this to memory, I ran into trouble with CFCache returning Connection failure. CFCache uses CFHTTP under the hood so a little googling took me to a technote about troubleshooting cfhttp. I vaguely recalled looking at this before on the server and came across Stephen Erat's post on compression. If you are running CF7 on Windows 2003 and IIS with compression turned on, chances are your CF Scheduled Tasks appear to be failing when you try to run them in a browser and CFHTTP calls against the box fail. To fix it, I disabled DEFLATE as a compression option, leaving GZIP and everything started working again. For a guide on how to enable compression on IIS see AhpHosting's guide or look at your IIS documentation.

My change based on the AHP Hosting guide was to remove CF from the scriptfileextensions list:

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set W3Svc/Filters/Compression/DEFLATE/HcScriptFileExtensions "asp""dll""exe""aspx"
iisreset.exe /restart

Seth Godin says my seminar is a lost cause

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:44:36 -0400

Well, close. Jeff just sent me an article from Seth's blog pointing out that marketing evolution is much harder than marketing gravity because gravity is something people already believe in.

I'm banking on people believing that evolving your website is cheaper and more productive than starting from scratch or paying for AdWords campaigns.

The seminar follows a logical flow from fixing the problems for the visitors you get before chasing new visitors with SEO and AdWords campaigns.

The morning shows you how to use Google Analytics to analyze the traffic you get to find the problems on your website. Next I'll cover Google Website Optimizer to help you split test a theory without fighting with the CEO over what goes on the home page.

The afternoon starts with Search Engine Optimization basics to make sure you're getting the best free traffic possible before you invest in pay-per-click, the focus of the last session of the day. Google AdWords can be expensive if the material covered in the first 3 sessions isn't addressed and I'll teach you how to change the way you buy your campaigns to get the most for your dollar.

The first one day seminar is December 17th in Chicago and space is restricted to a cozy crowd of 10 to promote interaction and make sure everyone goes home with a personal action plan. If you can't make it to Chicago for the day, let me know if you think there is a demand for the seminar in your city.

Website Evolution Seminar

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:39:14 -0400

Up the expertise you bring to the table. One-day intensive covers designing for search engine results, split testing of Web pages, using Analytics to arrive at a best design. Google tools provide you with a slam-dunk answers to every client design request.

I'm running a one-day four session seminar from the offices of Adam Howitt Consulting in Chicago on Wednesday, December 17th 2008.

Find out more about Website Evolution!

CFHttp Connection Failure on IIS compressed content

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:29:01 -0400

I was having trouble calling CFHTTP against one of my CF Servers with a cfhttp connection failure. It has been causing my scheduled tasks to fail in a peculiar way too. Whenever you manually click to execute a scheduled task it would report a failure but the task still runs. For my cfhttp call, I kept getting connection failure status code unavailable.

A quick chat with Patrick at Webapper and a pointed question "is this Windows Server 2003" got me excited but he dashed away to take a call. I googled around and came across Mark Kruger's post about troubleshooting CFHTTP. As soon as I saw the word compression I sat upright in my seat. He provides two cfhttpparam lines to use to tell IIS not to compress the output and sure enough my problem went away. Nice post Mark.

Paid vs free archives

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:54:22 -0400

Around a month ago I made the controversial move to make articles over 90 days old available for a $5 fee and boy has it whipped up a storm in several tea cups. I'm curious to start a discussion about the concept to get a read from the people who read this blog.

Justification

My rationale for the $5 archive fee is that most of the content you find on my site is solving a specific problem that isn't found easily elsewhere online. Typically I start writing a blog entry when I've spent a few hours troubleshooting, googling, pulling out my hair and then finally having a breakthrough. Let's say it takes 5 hours to piece everything together, then another 2 hours to write it up. I publish it and for 90 days it's free to the world.

Fast forward to the troubled developer or marketer who finds one of my archived blog entries in Google and clicks through to the site. They might have spent 15 minutes searching for an answer which, at $20 per hour equates to $5. They can spend another 15 minutes searching or pay just over the price of a venti latte at Starbucks or a pint of beer and get the answer to their problem. If they pay and my blog entry isn't what they needed, then by all means, let me know and I'll refund you the $5, heck, I may even offer some suggestions on how to fix it that weren't covered in the blog post.

Why blog at all?

This is an obvious answer but it connects me with solutions to complex problems and it gives back to the community that has allowed me to be successful, but ultimately it translates into reputation and consulting dollars.

Entitlement

The idea for this post came from one anonymous comment and one where the author was outraged enough to leave a note, both suggesting some level of entitlement to access to my archives. If I write something online and take it down are you entitled to the content? If I don't write about it, you may struggle to find an answer to your question and not know that I solved this problem. There are thousands of problems solved every day where the author never shares their findings publicly. The named commenter even went as far to suggest it affects ColdFusion's reputation if I charge for my archives!

What do YOU think?

I really do want to know what people think. Should information be free? Are you entitled to everything I've ever published for free? Is $5 too much? Is it too little?

Now for the Freebie

This article will be available for 90 days, after which if you want to find it again it will be $5. Unless you're aware of the backdoors. Some of my former coworkers thought they had found a chink in my armour using the wayback machine or Google's cached version of the page but in all honesty, it was deliberate. I like smart people and if you know anything about user agents you too can roam freely through my archives. If you're desperate though, just shoot me an email and I'll grant you access to an article. I just want you to stop and think "is this worth the price of a cup of coffee to solve my problem?"

TinyMCE ColdFusion Image Browser

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:58:05 -0400

I love tinyMCE but because I use ColdFusion I've not been able to use the built image browser. The API provides the hooks required to roll your own so I figured someone else might have done the heavy lifting and sure enough, I found a CF based image browser plugin.

I installed Doug Jones' CF_iBrowser v1.0.4 to work with TinyMCE 3.2.1 in BlogCFC. His instructions were excellent and you shouldn't have too many issues. Things to look out for:

At the time of writing the JavaScript function OpenFile in index.cfm doesn't trigger the onChange property for the imageURL field (at least in my browser) so I had to manually add the line
srcWin.ImageDialog.showPreviewImage(fileUrl);
before the
window.close()
line. This manually calls the showPreviewImage function that sets the image dimensions, otherwise your image will be added with a height and width of 0px!
If you are using BlogCFC v5.9.1.001, you'll need to manually comment out the image browser library since the setting for turning off the file browser didn't seem to work for me.
Check to see that you don't already have a an option specified in the tinyMCE.init() code block - mine was set to the PHP based plugin that comes bundled for advimage. Simply replace that value with the line in step 3 of Doug's instructions.

Overall, great experience with the plugin once I realized I was looking at the wrong tinyMCE.init block and kudos for Doug for a job well done!

Clickbank vs. Google AdWords Discrepancies

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:00:43 -0400

A client recently contacted me to ask why Google AdWords was reporting conversions but the clickbank affiliate account the Google AdWords ad linked to showed zero conversions. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. That includes the site - I have no idea about websites selling pipecleaners.

The "Basic" Process

Joe the plumber (just to be topical) searches in Google for a phrase that triggers my client's AdWords ad for bestpipecleaners.com.
If Joe clicks the link, Google AdWords places a cookie on his machine that lasts 30 days to record the Ad that drove him to the site
Google AdWords redirects Joe to the link in the Ad, in this case my client's clickbank affiliate link
Clickbank creates a clickbank cookie good for 60 days to record the affiliate ID responsible for taking Joe to the clickbank destination URL, in this case, my client's landing page finally.
Joe goes from the landing page to a few more pages and then hits the purchase button
The purchase button goes to the clickbank checkout process
Clickbank pulls the 60 day clickbank cookie from Joe's machine
When he completes the sale, the affiliate ID from his cookie is credited with the sale
Clickbank redirects Joe to the thank you page on my client's site
The thank you page is tagged with the affiliate tracking code and Joe closes his browser and goes to fix some pipes.

Simple huh? So in this case clickbank correctly accounts for one sale from my client's affiliate ID and Google AdWords records one conversion against the Ad that convinced Joe to purchase.

The Blockage in the Pipes
Josephine the plumber searches in Google for a phrase that triggers my client's ad and follows a similar path as Joe but when she gets to the landing pages, she doesn't trust the hype, leaves the website and goes to fix some pipes.

A week later she is still trying to solve her underlying problem so she goes back to her computer and finds another website on the topic, pipecleanerreviews.com. Unbeknownst to her, this site is also an affiliate of my client and after she sees a review of my client's product, she decides it might work after all and clicks the link to visit my client's landing page again at bestpipecleaners.com. Behind the scenes, the URL she clicked on is a clickbank link with pipecleanerreviews.com's clickbank id instead of my client's clickbank id.

Clickbank records the affiliate id as pipecleanerreviews.com in the cookie on Josephine's machine, replacing the original affiliate id of bestpipecleaners.com
Clickbank redirects her to bestpipecleaners.com and she completes the sale
Clickbank pulls the cookie from her machine (pipecleanerreviews.com's affiliate id) and so they get the credit for the sale
Clickbank redirects her to the thank you page which is also tracked with pipecleanerreviews.com's conversion tracking code (in addition to bestpipecleaners.com's code), and she goes off to fix some pipes.

The problem in this scenario, is that the thankyou page has both Google AdWords conversion codes and so both AdWords accounts (bestpipecleaners.com and pipecleanerreview.com) will record a conversion, when clickbank only credited a single affiliate with the conversion.

There are many other scenarios that play out in a similar way and she might have visited many sites. In fact some of the links from my client's site bestpipecleaners.com points to pipecleanerreviews.com because it's a good idea to let people get third party opinions of your products to help them decide if it's worth buying.

To accurately measure the AdWords campaign, the first search she did was not responsible wholly for the sale but since conversions are absolute we have to decide who gets the credit. Regardless of your opinion on this, clickbank believes the last affiliate ID used should get the credit since they ultimately generated the sale. Google AdWords however has split the credit because of the conversion code existing for both affiliates on the thank you page.

The BestPipeCleaner for the job
If we want to change this behavior to make it match clickbank we have to show only the Google AdWords conversion code for the affiliate recorded by clickbank. Fortunately, Clickbank reports the affiliate ID (if there was one) in the URL as the variable cbaffi when the visitor is sent to the thank you page so it is a simple matter of detecting which affiliate ID was passed and showing the appropriate tracking code snippet. This could be a google snippet, a Yahoo PPC snippet or any other conversion code really, we just need to show one or none.

The URL will look something like this where zzzzzzz is the affiliate ID and ... means there is much more than I want to type out:
/common/thankyou.cfm?item=9&cbreceipt=xxxxxxx&time=1224443502&cbpop=yyyyyyy&cbaffi=zzzzzzz&cname=...

For my solution I propose a database table of unique affiliate IDs mapped to their tracking code snippet but if you are only dealing with a few affiliates you could manually write this out to a property list or structure if you can carefully escape any quotes or double quotes that might break your code.

If the affiliate ID is blank or isn't passed to the thank you page, do nothing and skip to the rest of the page
If the affiliate ID is not blank, look-up the affiliate ID in the database:
1. If there are no matches do nothing and skip to the rest of the page
2. If there is one result, display the conversion tracking code and then show the rest of the page
3. If there are mulitple results for the affiliate ID, loop over the rows and write each snippet out then show the rest of the page

Ideally, each affiliate would have only one snippet per ID but it is foreseeable that an affiliate might be promoting your site on Google, Yahoo and several other conversion tracking channels. If you don't give them a unique affiliate ID per channel, they will record a conversion against each in the unlikely event that someone saw an affiliates Google ad, then their Yahoo ad before making a purchase. It's a complex scenario but worth noting. If you can, give them a unique affiliate ID for each separate ad medium they use (Google, Yahoo) so they can see the stats they need.

For help with your Google AdWords issues take a look thru my consulting site and contact me. If you need help with Clickbank I have to confess it's not my specialty but I can try to help.

I've also worked extensively with third party e-commerce providers to configure Google Analytics to ensure revenue is recorded against the correct referral sources which is a related issue.

Back from the Dead with Eclipse

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:50:48 -0400

This Halloween inspired post explains how to bring a file back from the dead if you've ever looked at it in eclipse.

I have been playing with blueprintcss and pulled down source this morning. It's genius to a developer with my *ahem* design skills, so I was thrilled to get it installed and running. But I was having trouble with one of their examples.

The idea is that the page is divided into 24 columns so you can give a div a class of "span-24" and voila, you have a 24 column div. You can create subdivs so that if your container is 12 columns you should be able to have subdivs marked span-8 and span-4 - gettit? 8+4=12. But it didn't. Somehow I was seeing funky layout wrapping.

Turns out I had the bleeding edge broken version but since I knew it was a github repo file, I could try out Git for the first time to pull down the fix (fixed minutes after I downloaded apparently). I installed Msysgit and then went to my blueprint directory. Tried a git pull from the command line within the repo directory but it said my local repo wasn't a repo. Grabbed the git cheat sheet and decided to do a "git init" and "git add ." Looking good.

git pull git://github.com/joshuaclayton/blueprint-css.git

Seems to have grabbed latest... Switch to eclipse and refresh project. Crap! My extensive client blueprint example vanishes before my eyes.

Enter the Dragon

At this point I usually stare at the screen but since time is against me I recreate my lay_blueprint.cfm file and just as I right click for some reason I notice the "replace with" eclipse context menu item is there. Hmm. I had clearly edited the file earlier today in Eclipse. Could it be... Holy Stomping Mummys Batman - back from the dead. My empty lay_blueprint.cfm fills with the lost code as my eyes fill with tears of joy. Yay Eclipse!