So we submitted the applications and soon we’ve received a negative response message from Apple. Unfortunately, lite application didn’t pass revision because it contained a word “Demo”, which in Apple terms is not acceptable from the marketing point of view. Well, it would be funny if it wasn’t sad. What to say on fact that one insignificant word like “Demo” is key point to reject app? Who knows what else is prohibited… Maybe this kind of strictness is crucial to make corporation like Apple. I just hope that this small stain passes as time passes these days (very fast) because there are also many good platforms on the market that don’t have stain like this small one. No anarchy at Apple!

Google’s ranking algorithm has changed so much in the past few years that SEOs that have been living under the rock for the past few years can’t optimize your site anymore. It is now a common knowledge among the real SEO professionals that ranking has been dead for a long time. Problem is, most of the clients don’t realize that and they demand a little piece of information we like to call “ranking reports“.

What client thinks when SEO gives him a ranking report:

• I am ranking number X for keyword “XYZ” on Google.

What is the actual truth:

• I am ranking number X for a keyword “XYZ” on Google when searched by “A” located in “B” with previous search history of “C” loged-in / loged-out of his / its Google account at “X” AM / PM with IP address “XXX.XXX.X.X”.
• Even in this case, a simple refresh could bring completely different set of results. If any of the parameters above change, the entire SERP can change. This brings us to conclusion that there is no such thing as ranking position nowadays.

You can be number one to some people, but when searched from a different PC in the same room you could be somewhere else. You could even be number one to someone, and after a refresh, results could change.

Ranking reports make no sense. Concentrate on your traffic reports and overall amount of traffic you receive from search engines and how well that traffic converts instead of obsessing about a nonexistent metric – ranking position.

I will not write too much about this modules because there are too much files and it will take too much time to describe.
Most of things used in this modules are already described by my working colleagues.

Backend module is based on interface for adding images of products in magento shop.
When you integrate it into your shop it will install two additional custom tables in database which will store data of your gallery (categories and images)

Images on frontend handles Inchoo_GallFront module.
To see changes on frontend enter link http://www.your-web-shop.com/index.php/inchoogallery/, this is handled in config file of Inchoo_GallFront at:

   <frontend>
        <routers>
            <inchoogallery>
                <use>standard</use>
                <args>
                    <module>Inchoo_GallFront</module>
                    <frontname>inchoogallery</frontname>
                </args>
            </inchoogallery>
        </routers>
    </frontend>

In Inchoo_GallFront_IndexController find indexAction(), and you will see that there is custom template file ‘gallery/demo.phtml’
(rememer that this is based on default frontend theme so do not forget to copy this files/folder if you use another theme).

All you need to do is rearange categories and images on frontend.
In ‘gallery/demo.phtml’ file you have two arrays which you have to modify and display pictures from categories as you wish.

Here is set of files you can download and install: Magento custom designed gallery
Enjoy coding.

The slider offers some great features like:
it’s FREE, very EASY to set up, ridiculously easy CUSTOMIZABLE via XML,TAILORED to provide a UNIQUE look & feel, INSPIRING,FUN-to-USE.

Seriously, the slider looks awesome the first you see it and the feeling doesn’t wear off as time passes by.
The ease of configuration via XML, provided abundant documentaiton makes the implementation of the slider a breeze and especially if you use it with an iFrame just to fit it on your web-page for a quick look makes this an instant success.

The best visual features are the 3D Image Transitions:

• real 3D Transitions
• flat & phong shading
• horizontal or vertical cubing
• transition direction – left, right, up, down
• duration & delay
• z-multiplier
• cube color
• automatic forward-backward transition direction manager
• to override global settings for each transition …

Without going on with this Cu3erfilia I invite you to see it for yourself:

Cu3er demo: http://www.progressivered.com/cu3er/

Stefan kovac’s info: http://www.progressivered.com/info.htm

Cheers and let’s use the best of the web we can

Hrvoje, we wish you welcome and I hope our readers will do the same.

http://www.hjurisic.com/

Btw. Hrvoje lives in a village called Cerna which is 50 km away from Osijek where the office is. He is fine with the daily drive.

The site is developed with the Weld team who has direct contact with the actual client.  First (Magento) phase of the project is completed where the goal was to launch an online store with unique design and standard online store functionality. However, the project is not yet complete. We are working on boosting the community goals of the site, especially the interaction between visitors and artists.

So, it the next few weeks you will notice how this website grows from classic online store to the interactive web portal that connects craftsmen from West Virginia mountains with the world.

I started creating two lists with our Inchoo twitter account: Magento twitter List and Inbound Marketing Twitter list. I’m accepting recommendations on which accounts should I add to the lists, please comment if you know I’m missing someone who really deserves to be there.

Here are the Magento related Twitter lists you can follow:

• highrockmedia/magento
• anderstr/magento
• iniplanet/magento
• thomas_schmidt/magento
• inchoo/Magento

Here are Inbound Marketing (SEO, SEM, SMM) Twitter lists you can follow:

• inchoo/Inbound-Marketing
• Mr603/seo-copywriting
• riksharr/social-media
• WholeMind/marketing

Now lets get back on memory leak issue created by CFNetwork class. If you create NSURLConnection object you will get this memory leak. First time I meet with this issue I was thinking it was my fault as developer, but when I tracked leak I realized that memory leak is created by framework internally. Instruments tool says clearly – “Responsible caller – CFNetwork”.

Well, this is my own conclusion and I might not be right but considering all given facts the leak is created by CFNetwork class. Also, I am not only one developer that has same issue. Many of iPhone developers has complain on same memory leak created by CFNetwork class. To solve this issue I try to put autoreleas pool like code below but no luck.

NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
…
[pool release];

Also I tried to create NSURLCache object like code below but no luck.

NSURLCache *sharedCache = [[NSURLCache alloc] initWithMemoryCapacity:0 diskCapacity:0 diskPath:nil];
[NSURLCache setSharedURLCache:sharedCache];
[sharedCache release];

If any of you has meet similar issue or maybe has solution for this memory leak please leave comment bellow. Thanks!

I downloaded Alexa’s top one million websites raw data and started analyzing it from a marketing perspective to draw some constructive conclusions.

As expected, DOT COMs are still kings of the world wide web dominating the top million list by more then half. Here are the results of research:

• com – 578 717
• net – 66 783
• org – 48 253
• info – 14 647
• biz – 3 888
• other – 287 712

For you visual guys, here are the graphs presenting this data:

Since some controllers in Magento likes to force page titles like

$this->loadLayout();
...
$this->getLayout()->getBlock('head')->setTitle($this->__('My Account'));
$this->renderLayout();

we can’t go with setTitle through layout, since controller is setting title right before rendering.

There is a simple solution for this, use another variable for title display

In page/html/head.phtml template replace default

<title>< ?php echo $this->getTitle() ?></title>

with

<title>
< ?php echo ($this->getForcedTitle()) ? Mage::getStoreConfig('design/head/title_prefix').' '.$this->getForcedTitle().' '.Mage::getStoreConfig('design/head/title_suffix') : $this->getTitle() ?>
</title>

or if you don’t wish to use title prefix/sufix added from Magento admin, simply with

<title>
< ?php echo ($this->getForcedTitle()) ? $this->getForcedTitle() : $this->getTitle() ?>
</title>

and now just set “forced” title for pages through layout files

<reference name="head">
<action method="setForcedTitle"><title>Account Dashboard</title></action>
</reference>

Example for My Account page in layout/customer.xml:
<customer_account>
<reference name="head">
<action method=”setForcedTitle”><title>Account Dashboard</title></action>
</reference>
…
</customer_account>

View more images on Surgeworks website.

P.S.
Remember: Not subscribing to our YouTube channel causes death of cute puppies.

We’ll continue doing videos so you should subscribe to our YouTube channel (InchooTV) as there will be lots of useful and interesting content up there.

Easy Chart Builder for WordPress supports 3 different chart types: horizontal, vertical and a pie chart. You can choose any color you want to represent any group compared in the chart.

This should be extremely cool and useful tool for all of the marketers using wordpress out there as we do use lots of data that could be showed in form of a chart.

This is what you can edit in your WordPress charts:

• Chart type (horizontal, vertical or pie)
• Chart’s height and width (in pixels)
• Title of your chart
• Names of groups compared in chart
• Color of groups compared in chart (FF00FF, 482293, 444822 for example)
• Names of values assigned to comparing groups
• You can assign values to the group

This is just a first release, it is expected that in future updates we will have an editor so there will be no need for entering any code manually.

Here is a sample chart made with Easy Chart Builder for WordPress:

[easychart type="pie" height="300" width="620" title="Sample pie chart" groupnames="Group 1, Second group, Group 3" groupcolors="FF00FF, 005599, 229944" valuenames="Value 1, Value 2, Value 3, Value 4" group4values="22, 41, 15, 133"]

This year’s topic is climate change. It’s still not late for you to participate, go to Blog Action Day 2009 website and register your blog, join the conversation, and help raise awareness of human impact on climate change!

Since I’m not really an expert on the topic of climate change and non of my colleagues here in office are, I’m not gonna lecture you about it. However, our colleagues over at Surgeworks Blog will deliver an expert article on the topic of climate change today.

In the moment I’m writing this, there are ~8000 blogs participating in over 140 countries with over 11 million RSS readers. Some of the biggest blogs of the world are participating in this event including: The Official Google Blog, Mashable, TMZ.com, and Global Voices.

I just hope I’ll get more bloggers involved. Here’s a touching video from YouTube – Stop Global Warming:

<ul id="nav">
        < ?php
        foreach ($this->getStoreCategories() as $_category): ?>
            < ?php
            echo $this->drawItem($_category);
            ?>
        < ?php endforeach ?>
</ul>

There we call the method from class Mage_Catalog_Block_Navigation $this->getStoreCategories(). This method returns the array $_nodes from object Varien_Data_Tree_Node_Collection.

This array contains objects of Varien_Data_Tree_Node.
Every node is object of Varien_Data_Tree_Node and it is extension from Varien_Object.

Example 1:

If we wish to see how much categories we have, we can do it with method showed below:

< ?php
echo $this->getStoreCategories()->count();
?>

We will get only number of categories from the first level.

Example 2: (only level 1):

< ?php
foreach ($this->getStoreCategories() as $categories)
{
// $categories is object Varien_Data_Tree_Node extendec Varien_Object

echo $categories->getData('entity_id')."\n";
echo $categories->getData('parent_id')."\n";
echo $categories->getData('level')."\n";
echo $categories->getData('children_count')."\n";
}
?>

Every Varien_Data_Tree_Node contains varible $_childNodes

/**
     * Child nodes
     *
     * @var Varien_Data_Tree_Node_Collection
     */
    protected $_childNodes;
**/

and $_childNodes is instance of Varien_Data_Tree_Node_Collection.

Varien_Data_Tree_Node_Collection contains variable $_nodes which is array with Varian_Data_Tree_Node.

All this “revolves” through recursion …

First thing you need to know is that meme is pronounced “meem” (/?mi?m/). Wikipedia’s definition of the term “meme” is pretty complicated so I’d define it with a bit less gobbledygook for the average Joe:

Internet meme is a piece of content that went extremely viral and is now commonly known by the vast majority of the internet population, often thanks to it’s comedic nature.

In order to understand what kind of content, how, and why creates viral success you should know bits of internet history that cover how these memes came to existence. Internet memes are the basics of viral marketing.

Thanks to Rocketboom, a widely known internet video podcast, we have detailed videos explaining some of the best known internet memes nowadays:

The Rickroll Internet Meme

All Your Base Internet Meme

Tay Zonday Internet Meme

For more internet meme explanations, visit Rocketboom’s YouTube channel.

• Modify the “app/design/frontend/default/my_custom_theme/layout/checkout.xml” file. Look for section

      <checkout_onepage_success>
          <reference name="root">
              <action method="setTemplate"><template>page/2columns-right.phtml</template></action>
          </reference>
          <reference name="content">
              <block name="checkout.success" template="checkout/success.phtml" type="checkout/onepage_success" />
          </reference>
      </checkout_onepage_success>
  

• And turn it into

      <checkout_onepage_success>
          <reference name="root">
              <action method="setTemplate"><template>page/2columns-right.phtml</template></action>
          </reference>
          <reference name="content">
              <block name="checkout.success" template="checkout/success.phtml" type="checkout/onepage_success" />
          </reference>
          <reference name="before_body_end">
              <block name="google_adwords_tracking" template="checkout/google_adwords_tracking.phtml" type="core/template" />
          </reference>
      </checkout_onepage_success>
  

• Create the “app/design/frontend/default/my_custom_theme/template/checkout/google_adwords_tracking.phtml” file and copy-paste the the Adwords tracking JavaScript code into it.

This code relies on

< ?php echo $this?>getChildHtml('before_body_end') ?>

block call from footer of each template (1column.phtml, 2columns-left.phtml, 2columns-right.phtml, 3columns.phtml). So, as long if haven’t removed this block call from mentioned templates, the above should work.

Thats it.

Over 90 different companies will be located in this virtual 3D mall that will be accessible via simple internet browser. The mall will be similar to the modern MMORPGs. Just like playing a 3D online game, shoppers will walk through the mall and explore different stores. Stores will have real people on the other side communicating with the customers as shopkeepers.

Other then being a 3D virtual marketplace, it will act like any ecommerce solution, where visitors will be able to buy products using their credit cards. Prepaid “cards” will also be available for those skeptical about online shopping security.

This new 3D mall will not only feature shops but also bars where visitors will be able to relax and chat. Visitors will be able to interact with each other and shopkeepers via text chat. Voice chat is on a to-do list and is expected to be implemented pretty soon.

Behind a project stands € 1 million funding and a famous Croatian angel investor Hrvoje Prpic. The project will first be lunched in Croatia but is expected to go international eventually.