Exhibit A

Creating Or Using a Google Account

mjg — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:34:51 -1600

Have you lately been asked to log into your Google account to access a calendar, site, Google Analytics, Google Adword, Google webmaster tools or other Google service but didn't know how or what your Google Account was?

Well, this is simple if you have an email address that ends in @gmail.com as your email address is the key to your account. To utilize any of the other services available from Google including iGoogle, Web History, Google Checkout or Google Docs you would just sign in using your email address and the associated password.

However, it is more likely that confusion is caused when someone (a consultant or web geek or friend) sends you an email saying "I've set you up with access to Google Analytics for your site. Go ahead and use your Google Account with an email address of yourname@domainname.com" and you have no idea what they are talking about.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to do this is to go to https://www.google.com/accounts/Login and clicking on "Create an account now" link at lower right.

From the following screen, you'll be asked to fill out a number of fields before your Google Account is created. Among them are your email address, your new password (twice), what country you are from, a CAPTCHA to prove you are a human being and accepting their Terms of Service.

From that point on, you will be able to log in and take advantage of all the Google-y Goodness from the big G.

An interesting side note for Google Apps customers: While yes, your Google Apps email is technically a Google account, not all Google services will identify it as a Google Account RIGHT NOW. This is changing over time and more and more services seem to be honoring the Google Apps accounts as legit but for now, you'll probably still need to create a standard Google Account using your email address. For the sake of consistency, most of our customers will keep the passwords the same on these two different accounts just so they don't get confused when trying to log into any Google property.

Thoughts or comments? Please use the comment section below for LEGITIMATE comments on this subject!

New Customer Site Launched

mjg — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:23:52 -1600

ShopSasha.com, a retail boutique based in Laguna Beach, CA has gone live today. This AspDotNetStorefront website's unique features are detailed in this ecommerce case study. This site was built in conjunction with killer website design and SEO work by Over The Top Marketing.

Naddour Iron Website Launched

mjg — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:29:00 -1600

Our customer Naddour Iron, in conjunction with our partners Over The Top Marketing, have launched their new site at http://www.naddouriron.com/. This site incorporates a number of neat features a great design and SEO by Over The Top in addition to some neat functionality that we've provided.

This site, written in PHP, utilizes our form to Google Spreadsheet technology for managing their Free eBook and Contact us form. This technology allows a form hosted on just about any platform to take the form input, send emails as appropriate to the site owner and the person submitting the form as well as store the submitted data into a Google Spreadsheet that the site owner's sales folk can use for tracking and managing this new customer relationship management (CRM).

Any thoughts on this site or the technology powering it? Please use the comments below to let us know what you think!

Backup Your Google Apps Data

mjg — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:31:36 -1600

One of the concerns we hear from people is "How do we backup our data when it lives in the cloud?" Well, if you are using Google Apps, or even just plain old Google Docs, the option is there to do this.

The first thing you'll need to do is to select all of your documents. Because Google uses an "infiinite scrolling" technique to display your documents, you may need to select "All Items" in the left menu and then scroll all the way to the bottom of your list of items; ensuring that Google has loaded all the documents on the screen. Then you can pull down checkbox selector and choose "Select all visible". This will put a checkbox next to each item on the list.

Next you'll either right click on the listed items and select "Export" or pull down the "More Actions" menu item and select "Export".

Next you'll be presented with a dialog box where you can, based on a document type, determine how (or if) you want them exported.

For each of the following document types, you can choose from the following formats:

Document
- HTML
- Microsoft Word
- Open Office Document
- Plain Text
- PDF
- Rich Text Format (RTF)
Spreadsheet
- Microsoft Excel
- Open Office Spreadsheet
- PDF
Form
- Microsoft Excel
- Open Office Spreadsheet
- PDF
PDF
- PDF

Once you click the "Continue" button, the system will start converting and compressing all of your documents. You will get an estimate of the time required to convert and compress them and give you the option to have them emailed to you when complete, cancel the archive job or "Start Over".

If you do nothing, when the progress bar winds down to 0:00 the system will notify you that "Zipping Complete" and a file "Save As" dialog box will pop up if your browser isn't configured to save all downloads to a specific location. If it is, you'll find the file naming convention will be "documents-export-YYYY-MM-DD.zip" where YYYY is the year, MM is the numerical representation of the month and DD is the numeric representation of the day of the month.

This is one more reason why you should outsource your data headaches to Google Apps: data portability! You can always and easily export or backup that data offline if you feel the need to.

Create QR Code On the Fly

mjg — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:37:19 -1600

Ever seen those cool 2d Bar Codes (also called QR codes) and wondered how you could easily and quickly create these to point mobile phone users to a URL quickly?

Well, Google Charts API comes to the rescue. By appending the URL into call to the API, you can change at text URL like http://exhibita.com/blog into the following image:

All you need to do is anyplace that takes a URL to an image (an IMG tag in HTML, an Insert Image dialog from most editing tools, in your browser’s address bar, etc) just enter the following code:

        1: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=135x135&chl=http://exhibita.com/blog/

And that is our quick tip of the day!

How NOT to Offers Support Videos

mjg — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:00:37 -1600

I was signing up for a new YouTube account to support a forthcoming video/blog project (we’ll have announcements about it soon) when I stumbled on the following page in Google’s YouTube support pages:

I was interested in learning more about desired video formats and, in particular HD video formats. So, I clicked on the video at right labelled “How to make HD videos for YouTube” only to be greeted by the following message in the video:

Now that is what I call the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. I suppose you could label this as a FAIL.

Calculating Value of Google Apps In Your Business

mjg — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:30:38 -1600

Did you know that Google provides a TCO calculator to determine how much Google Apps can save your business over your current messaging solution? While it does a head to head comparison between Google Apps Premier Edition vs. Microsoft Exchange server, the concept and pricing should be similar for Notes or other messaging systems.

With no up-front costs other than configuration labor, you can save $14,000 right up front over the cost of purchasing hardware and software licensing for an Exchange server as well as the configuration labor cost (assuming your IT manager’s time is worth $69/hour).

On an annual basis they assume that you’ll save over $620 per user! Punch in the numbers for yourself and see how much money (and headache) you can save by moving your business Into The Cloud!

What has your experience been? Have you seen these types of savings or do you feel the numbers are wrong? Let us know your thoughts using the comments below…

Moving From One Google Apps Account To Another

mjg — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:15:36 -1600

I’ve had a number of customers who’ve moved from one Google Apps account to another recently and thought I’d write down the steps on how to do this for use by others in the same situation. This seems to happen regularly with startups who change their business model (along with their domain name) mid-stream.

Some people just might add the new domain name to their existing Google Apps account but this means they can’t send AS the new domain unless they set up “Send Mail As” and set the new account as their default, but more importantly, the other elements of their Google Apps suite (like docs, calendar, etc) will be in the old domain.

So, once you have accounts in both domains you will go into your OLD account and set up forwarding. This is done by going into the “Settings” section of your website and selecting the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.

In the Forwarding section of this tab, you will want to check the “Forward a copy…” radio button and fill in the destination email address in the text box and select how you want mail forwarded mail to be handled on the old domain. For most of my clients, they would be selecting the “Delete” option.

If you still need to send email using the old email address from time to time, you can follow the steps below. If you are needing to make a clean break and encourage people who contact you to ONLY use the new address, there is no need to do the following steps.

On your NEW domain, you’ll go into “Settings” as shown above only this time you’ll select the “Accounts” tab. On this tab, select the “Add an(other) email address…” link found in the “Send mail as:” section.

In the pop-up window that comes up you’ll want to set your Name and the new email address and then move on to the Next Step. In most cases, you can just go ahead and accept the default option on the next screen but you will need to Verify your email address on the subsequent screen.

As the screen indicates, an email will be sent to your old email address (and in this case forwarded to your new one) that will require you to click on a link to verify ownership.

The screen after you click “Send Verification” button asks you to click on the confirmation link or to enter the code from the email in the screen. In most cases you can just close the window and go search for the link in your email.

One last step that CAN BE important is to set Gmail’s default behavior in regards to your reply from address. By default, it will Always reply from the default address. If you have other accounts that you need to “Send As” (like email aliases or if you need to reply to emails from your old account AS your old account) you should select “Reply from the same address.

As always, pertinent comments and questions about this topic are welcomed in the comment section below. If you’ve found this article of use, let us know!

Microsoft Courier - Is it Real?

mjg — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 03:48:00 -1600

Ooooh, the Ultimate Tablet perhaps? If so, and it is real, I LIKE it!

Google Sites API Released

mjg — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:02:00 -1600

The Data Liberation Front strikes again!

Google announced Friday that their is now a Google Data API for Google Sites. With this API, site administrators can now programatically:

Retrieve, create, modify, move, and delete pages, comments, attachments and other content.
Review the revision history across the Site.
Monitor all, add, modify and delete activity for a Site.
Upload/download attachments and files.
Create customized gadgets for your users.

All editions of Google Apps are supported by this new data api including the Standard, Premier, Team, Education and Partner Editions.

You'll find the official announcement here: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/09/import-export-and-more-with-new-google_24.html

Finding BlogEngine.Net Themes

mjg — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:58:00 -1600

When I’m looking for a new theme (outside of the ones available from the http://dotnetblogengine.net site), these are the places I go look:

Of course if one wants to make your own, the best source is http://www.nyveldt.com/blog/post/BlogEngineNET-Creating-Themes-Webcast.aspx

Where do YOU find your favorite BE.Net themes?

Launching Your eCommerce Store

mjg — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 01:00:18 -1600

So you’ve gotten the keys to your eCommerce storefront from your designers and developers, but what comes next? Well, this question will depend largely upon how much work was done by the aforementioned boffins and artists but we’ll take a stab at outlining the required steps before you go live.

Just keep in mind that if you’ve found that some of this has already been taken care of for you, all the better. We will also be talking specifically about AspDotNetStorefront-based eCommerce sites but the principals are the same across just about any eCommerce storefront.

We’ll assume that your selected design has been integrated and all of the cogs and gears (and databases) have been fitted together to make it operate.
In many cases, if the site is on a temporary or staging server, you will need to find a suitable hosting company. We recommend Applied Innovations for our AspDotNetStorefront customers. Once you’ve selected your host, communicate the necessary account information (site URL, SQL server address, site IP address, FTP address, login and password (for cpanel, ftp and SQL) to your developer so they can move the site from staging environment into what will shortly become the live site environment.
You’ll need to determine how you are going to accept payment on your website.
- For many customers, this will mean nothing more than a PayPal account. The best level of PayPal service is PayPal Pro which enables you to not only accept payment from a customer’s PayPal account (which many customers prefer since they don’t need to give the retailer any financial information) as well as accept credit cards within your website AND have a virtual terminal available as well.
- Another option to investigate is Google Checkout. This offers many of the same features as PayPal but with the exception of AspDotNetStorefront, most eCommerce websites don’t fully support Google Checkout. Google Checkout is a bit harder to implement into the website than PayPal but is not too hard once you’ve created your merchant account. One of the biggest problems with Google Checkouts comes when you don’t use an authorized/approved SSL Certificate on your website. Please see “API authentication and security : Accepted SSL certificates ...” for more information.
- You could also use a traditional payment gateway. Merchants with existing merchant credit card accounts, especially if they do higher volumes, may find this a better option on a pricing standpoint. It is best to talk with your developer to determine which gateways are supported by your site software.
I’ve touched briefly on SSL certificates above under Google Checkout. If you think you will ever want to offer Google Checkout (as a primary or a secondary payment option), you’ll want to ensure that your SSL certificate is up to snuff. See the link above and talk with your contact at your hosting provider about getting a certificate installed on your website. If your storefront uses standard PayPal and hands off to them to collect billing information, you won’t need an SSL certificate. However, the price paid for an SSL certificate to keep the transaction on your site is a small price to pay in comparison to the confidence that little lock in the browser window has for many consumers.
You’ll need to start thinking about how you want to handle shipping the items that you are going to sell. This can be as simple as setting a flat-rate or as complex as setting up zones for weight-based pricing or setting up RealTime Shipping which will do weight-based lookups against any number of shippers to come up with options for your customers. The latter is probably the most complex since it requires getting various licenses and keys from your shipping companies but will be most reliable. AspDotNetStorefront offers pretty comprehensive directions on how to set up RealTime Shipping but someone who’s experienced can help make this go quicker.
Lastly, you should be looking at content on your website. This includes “traditional” content (text on pages) as well as search engine settings like Keywords, Page Titles, Descriptions and such. Some areas to look for specifically are:
- Physical and Email Address needs to be updated on Contact and About pages as well as in outbound emails
- Descriptions and SE fields (Page Title, Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions) need to be set sitewide (in many eCommerce sites the default is applied to any page that doesn’t specifically define it’s own values) as well as for all Categories and Manufacturers (if any)
- Product names, images, descriptions, prices and inventory counts (if you are tracking inventory) will need to be added to the site and mapped to their appropriate categories. You will want to keep your Search Engine target keywords in mind as you craft the various parts of your product offerings.
- Content for the various topics used through out the site (primarily items found off the customer service menu link)
- If they will be doing drop shipping, distributors will need to be added to the system.

This may seem like a daunting task but it shouldn’t be. We are of the opinion that it is more important to get your site out there in a timely manner with a partial offering of your wares than to wait to launch while you meticulously craft every one of your product descriptions and other information. By launching early with a subset of your products and the bare minimum of content you

Start the clock on your domain aging. Research has shown that links and domains that have a greater age will outperform and outrank similar sites and terms that have a shorter “time in service” in search engine results page (SERP) rankings.
Condition the search engines to come back to your site regularly as you add items to your site over the coming weeks. The more frequently that the search engine spiders see changes to the content on your site, the more frequently they will come back and look for new content.The more new content they find, the more they will like you.
Launch your search engine optimization program. Sure you want to have the basics covered but you really can’t start your linking campaigns and advertising until you have something that you can direct traffic to.
Can start driving income through your site to help offset the time and effort involved to continue populating your site with product and information

So, if you have categories that you haven’t added any products to (provided they aren’t direct linked from a non-dynamic navigation structure, unpublish them until you have product underneath them. If they are linked from your primary navigation structure AND that navigation structure isn’t generated automatically from the data base (there are many reasons to do this but that is fodder for a different post) you should craft the description for that category quite well with your keyword strategy in mind and update the standard “No Products Found message” to be something more witty so you don’t upset your customers when they see the message too often.

Similarly if you have products that don’t have images attached yet or you haven’t had time to write a good description of the product that works well with your keyword strategy, unpublish them until you have the time to correct these items.

In the coming days/weeks, I hope to follow this blog posting up with screencasts that will address many of these points specifically for AspDotNetStorefront to help customers learn some of the tips and tricks for moving around in the admin interface and complete these goals so they can concentrate more on making money and less on being a “content monkey.”

As always, if you have any LEGITIMATE questions or comment, please feel free to use the comments section below.

Night Shuttle Family Portrait

mjg — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:13:00 -1600

In case some of you have wondered, I haven’t been talking much about photography lately in my blog. Even though I’ve been heads down in programming lately, I’ve still been trying to keep up to date with my photo-instructional surfing. With great blogs like Strobist combined with Google Reader, this is fairly easy.

The Strobist blog has a great analysis of how this Florida-based photographer got this one-shot family portrait in without losing his hair. Check out the Night Shuttle blog entry at Strobist for the details.

Using Google Spreadsheets to Collect Form Data

mjg — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 03:10:00 -1600

Google Spreadsheets recently offered the ability to create a form that will collect customer information into the spreadsheet. This is great for people that don’t have access to storing data in a traditional database (which is our preferred solution). They offer you the code to either link to for this form, email the code (great for emailed surveys) as well as code to embed (via IFrame) the form in your existing web page.

If you’d prefer to have FULL control over the display of the form and control the formatting and manipulation of data with your server-side code here is a handy little guide on how to do this using PHP.

Create Google Doc form with all the fields your form needs
Save the form
Email yourself a copy of the form
Pull the necessary fields out of the email to generate the form
URL for curl to post to

Names of the various input fields
Insert code below into PHP page
Test solution

//In order to post to Google Spreadsheet Form

//http://spreadsheets.google.com/formResponse?formkey=dFdYSTlzUVJsSomeReallyLongKeyGoesHereqemU2YUE6MA..

//Name "entry.0.single" 

//Email is "entry.1.single"

//Phone is "entry.2.single"

//Comment is "entry.3.single"

//IP address is "entry.4.single"

$url = 'http://spreadsheets.google.com/formResponse?formkey=dFdYSTlzUVJsSomeReallyLongKeyGoesHereqemU2YUE6MA..';

// Create post array to send results to Google Spreadsheets

$fields = array(

                        'entry.0.single'=>urlencode($name),

                        'entry.1.single'=>urlencode($email),

                        'entry.2.single'=>urlencode($phone),

                        'entry.3.single'=>urlencode($comments),

                        'entry.4.single'=>getRealIpAddr(),

                        'submit'=>'submit'

                );

  

// Begining of code for posting to Google Spreadsheet

$fields_string = '';

//url-ify the data for the POST

foreach($fields as $key=>$value) { $fields_string .= $key.'='.$value.'&'; }

//rtrim($fields_string,"& ");

$fields_string = substr($fields_string, 0, strlen($fields_string)-1); 

$result = "Fields_String: [" . $fields_string . "]
";

  

//set POST variables for Google Spreadsheets

//open connection

$ch = curl_init();

  

//set the url, number of POST vars, POST data

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,count($fields));

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$fields_string);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13');

  

//execute post

$result .= "Curl Results: [" . curl_exec($ch) . "]
";

  

//close connection

curl_close($ch);

Things to note about the above PHP code (gasp!) are that you need to define the proper URL to the spreadsheet and the correct number and names of fields (see step 4 above) . The only one that might be a little odd is getRealIpAddr() method. This is defined elsewhere in the page’s code as follows:

// Function to get real IP address in case visitor is behind a proxy server

function getRealIpAddr()

{

    if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'])) // Check IP from shared internet

    {

        $ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'];

    }

    elseif (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'])) // to check if ip is passed from proxy

    {

        $ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'];

    }

    else

    {

        $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

    }

    return $ip;

}

Have fun folks! If you want to rip into my code and/or have suggestions on better PHP coding styles, please use the comment section below…

Google Voice for Android Supports Non-Gmail Accounts!

mjg — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:09:54 -1600

The title says it all! Ever since I got my Google Voice account, I’ve not been able to use it with my Google ION phone (the latest developer platform phone) because I set up my phone using my Google Apps account rather than a Gmail account.

This presented a problem not only with Google Voice but also the Android Marketplace but that is a story for another day. Well, lo and behold, a new update notification showed up on my phone so I figured “why not?” After installing I noticed it now supports multiple addresses/accounts so I was able to put in the email address of my choice and Voila, it worked! Wooohooo….

Want to know more about Google Voice (sorry, still in invite mode and they don’t give us invites to hand out), watch this video…