At the South by Southwest conference this week, a PR firm is working with local homeless advocates to help homeless people in Austin make some money by carrying around their own personal mi-fi boxes that they use to sell a few minutes of wireless access to people on the street.  Mi-fi is a kind of portable wi-fi emitter that creates a small bubble of wi-fi that you can use on the go (basically the same way that people can use their cell phones to create a small bubble of wifi for their ipads or their laptops).  It’s a small electronic box, maybe the size of a cigarette box but thinner, and it can pick up an Internet signal via the air and emit it as wi-fi for up to 20 or 30 feet or something.  A number of the homeless are walking around Austin with these emitters, and charging people to get the password for 15 minutes or whatever. Read more here.

A proprietary CMS is a database driven, content management system website that the website owner can login to and make changes. Yahoo Store, many automotive dealer and real estate websites are a good example of this. A good CMS is easy for the novice to use and offers all the flexibility they need. The problem with a proprietary CMS is that development costs and monthly fees are much higher than an open source solution. Features may be outdated or a company may be slow to add the latest, greatest functionality (ie. “bells & whistles”). Even small changes to a proprietary CMS can be quite costly or require you to sign up for a “maintenance contract” or require a minimum hours of project work before the company will even begin to assist you. Many people who often find this out later feel locked into something that is costly and inflexible. Unfortunately, they have invested thousands of dollars and if they are not satisfied with their proprietary CMS, they lose everything when they discontinue services and must start again from scratch.

On the other hand, open source content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal (and many others) are free to download and upgrade costing you only the development costs. Because they are open source code, you have the advantage of backing up and saving your website database and files. If you’re not happy with your web design company or they should go out of business, etc. you can simply take your database and files to another company. You cannot do this with a proprietary CMS so if you don’t use it…you lose it. Another advantage to the open source CMS is constant development and new widgets or features that are often free, very low cost and take only minutes to install. A fraction of the cost that a company offering a proprietary CMS would charge. These are the reasons that Alpine Web Media works with the open source CMS model.

To be fair, the companies who offer proprietary CMS’ will say that open source solutions are more vulnerable to viruses and hackers. Like any other popular software, that is true. However, nothing on the web is 100% safe from hackers, not even a proprietary CMS. There are a number of debates on the web about “open source vs. proprietary CMS” and it’s easy to see that the “proprietary” crowd are fighting to retain their high profits and 100% control over their customer’s websites. Their primary argument is that their systems are safer from hackers. If your open source CMS is developed properly with the correct file permission, strong passwords, file backups and vigilant updates, you really don’t have much to worry about, proprietary or not.

A number of large corporations and government organizations utilize open source content management systems. For instance, the White House website is based on Drupal. I think open source is a pretty safe bet and certainly far more flexible and cost efficient. Ultimately, the decision is up to you and your budget.

I did find a post here that provides a roundabout inkling that it may be possible to integrate the two technologies, but there is nothing forthcoming or any new ideas posted to the website.  I have contacted several of the top ColdFusion experts about this but even they are not sure because they’re not attuned to the WordPress coding side of things. So, if anyone has any ideas, please let me know so I can either keep digging around or put this beast to rest once and for all.

From Website Magazine:

Technologies change so rapidly that they create the need for new ideas and improved strategies virtually overnight. You may be tired of hearing about social media, for instance, and you hardly consider it a new development. But if you employ the same social strategies in 2012 as you did in 2010, and fail to account for the changes coming in the next year, your business will suffer the consequences. To ensure that your website stays ahead of this trend, direct your focus on providing continually fresh and useful content that matters in real time — content that addresses the current needs of your audience. There is no better way to achieve this than by engaging with your customers on social networks.
Create and distribute helpful blog posts and informational videos on which users can comment and share with one another, and invite them to write reviews about your products, services and business. Build an application or optimize your website to ensure that users can access your business on their mobile devices and get the information they need right away.
To monitor the engagement, explore some real-time analytics solutions to determine how visitors are interacting with your site — while they are on-site. Optify provides just one of the solutions in this rapidly growing space, giving website owners instant analysis that allows them to immediately address the needs of their visitors.

From a mathematician’s perspective it’s not that good at all. All professional web analysts know that Google Analytics significantly underestimates traffic in the overwhelming majority of cases. Anyone who has ever compared the stats from their web server with the stats from Google Analytics knows that the two sets of numbers rarely match up.

There are several reasons why, but the most significant factor is that the GA tracking code only fires if the person loading the page has Javascript enabled. That means that search engine crawlers and other automated web crawlers don’t get picked up, which is great- for the most part, web analytics is only concerned with the activities of real people- but it also means that anyone browsing with Javascript disabled will be completely invisible.

After my own research into this, I have come to the conclusion that although Google Analytics is still a useful tool, I would not rely on it entirely for accuracy. I would, as always, tend to believe my actual website server log statistics first. Any good web hosting company will provide access to your website server statistics so why not play it safe and compare your actual server statistics with what Google provides?

The following is what Google itself had to say about all of the above. SEO isn’t all that difficult. Google provides a great SEO document here that explains the core process.

While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site’s presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index. Here are some things to consider:

• Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:
  

  “Dear google.com,
  I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”

  Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for “burn fat at night” diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

• No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.

When you create a web page or image, you need to save that page as a file within your file system. And for that you need a properly constructed name. While you can name your file nearly anything you choose, there are some rules that do apply to ensure that the page or image displays correctly in the most situations.

Do not use any spaces in your file names
Most operating systems can handle documents with spaces in the file name without a problem, but that is definitely not a good idea for Web page documents. The problem is that when a web address is displayed it is usually shown with an underline. Vistors to your web page may interpret a space as being the underscore character instead, and will not be able to get to your page.

Do not use special characters
For safest results you should only use the letters a-z, A-Z, the numbers 0-9, hyphens (-), underscores (_) and periods (.). Any other character could cause problems, resulting in the file not loading or the page loading incorrectly.

Other tips for naming files
Keep the file names as short as possible for your own convenience and your web visitors too.
Use all lower case to keep things easy. It’s ok to use upper case to help distinguish files such as autosNissan.jpg, etc.
Develop a convention for naming your image files and get organized. This will help you to easily identify your images and web pages. For instance apple001.jpg, apple001a.jpg, etc. could be an easy way to identify images of different types of apples and their sizes or variations.

The end of the file names are important too
When you save a web page the most common choices are .htm or .html. Eitther choice is fine and will dsiplay properly. Other dynamically generated web pages will use file extensions such as .php, .asp, .jsp but for the web novice these will probably not be a concern.
When naming images, the file name extensions are VERY important. An image ending in .jpg should be used for photographs, .gif for illustrations like cartoon graphics or logos (without shading variations). A newcomer in recent years is the .png file which most browsers can now display properly. Under no circumstances should you use .psd or .tif files in web pages as they willl take forever to load and in most cases will prompt the visitor to save the file rather than allowing them to display it.

One final word on photos, especially related to digital camera images
You MUST reduce them to web sizes before adding the photos to a web page and uploading them. Web standards for images are only 72 dpi, which means the images will look good and load quickly. Digital cameras can take and save photos by default in 360 dpi, 720 and much higher. These will load up quickly on your home computer but will take forever on the web. Download a free graphics utility such as Picasa to properly resize your images before uploading to your web page.