Let’s say you want to cross post to a Facebook fan page rather than a profile. Sounds easy, right? After all, it’s fairly trivial to post to a profile. Far from it.As it turns out, the path to Facebook fan page integration is a bit more complex. Here’s what we used for Bold.

Read the whole article on BoldInteractive.com

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Casual web users probably find this chart amusing, but my fellow web professionals know how close it comes to the truth. Today, I’d like you to take note of the giant yellow section in the top, right-hand corner that indicates, “Time spent trying to get the bastard to work in Internet fucking Explorer.”

In case you don’t already know, Internet Explorer is an abyssmal web browser. Here are just a few reasons why.

• It’s insecure. Due in part to its popularity and in part to its security vulnerabilities, Internet Explorer is frequently targeted by hackers as an easy way to spread viruses. I’m not a desktop support specialist, but every time I help someone out with their computer, I advise them to download something else for their web browsing, if only out of security concerns.
• It creates more work for web developers. CSS is the language that controls how websites are supposed to display. On almost every website I build, I have to make special CSS to deal with improper implementation in the three most popular versions of Internet Explorer. Yes, that’s custom styling for each of them individually. Internet Explorer is the only browser that needs such special handling. Multiply this by the number of websites being created by web developers every day and we’re talking about centuries of wasted man hours.
• It doesn’t automatically update. Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox both update automatically. Thus, if security vulnerabilities or bugs ever crop up, they’re patched rapidly in every distribution of the software connected to the internet. This is how it should work. Internet Explorer doesn’t do this; if you get an update, it only comes as an update to your core Windows installation. As proof, look at the larger percentage of users still using Internet Explorer 6, now two full versions behind the main software. If anything has lead to Internet Explorer’s pervasive security and compatibility problems, it’s this.
• It’s always playing catch-up. Tabbed browsing, for example, really came into vogue in the past few years, but for the longest time, Internet Explorer has refused to embrace it like its competitors. Sure, it’s got tabs now, but its implementation of tabs is terrible compared to Chrome or Firefox. One gets the sense that Microsoft wants to dictate what users want rather than listen and truly innovate.
• It’s only popular because it is the default on computers running Windows. Period. If people were given the choice right from the start, Internet Explorer would have lost the browser battle long ago. The fact is, most people don’t even realize they have a choice.

If you use it, chances are good you don’t know any better; after all, it’s what came on your computer. Let this be your wake-up call. You have alternatives. Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are outstanding, completely free, more secure, and offer an all-around better user experience than IE.

I believe in this strongly enough that I’ve signed Ward on the Web up as a supporter of IE 6 No More. If you visit Ward on the Web in IE 6, you’ll get a special message telling you that you need to upgrade.

Personally, though, I don’t think that goes far enough. Internet Explorer has a bad enough history that the most up-to-date versions should be suspect. Thus, I proudly advocate that not only IE 6, but all versions of Internet Explorer, should be discarded in favor of better alternatives.

So, please, for your own sake and the sake of the internet, if you’re reading this in Internet Explorer, it’s time to upgrade. Download Chrome or Firefox and never look back.

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Good news and bad news. I’m a pessimist realist, so we’ll start with the bad news. Bad news: Your web team says the site has to go down for maintenance. For several hours in the near future, your company’s presence on the web will be invisible to any potential customer. Good news: You get to [...]

Read the whole article on BoldInteractive.com

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That sort of thinking is a slippery slope, though. A fraction of a second here or there, measured over thousand of visits, can add up to lost conversions. A little extra processing time per execution, over millions of executions, can add up to significant power consumption and wear and tear on the server. And since most good programming habits require no additional work on the part of the programmer, there’s a real business case to be made against lazy programming.

It’s time to break out of those lazy habits and start coding with performance in mind. Practice these ten PHP performance tips and watch your code go from sluggish to speedy in no time.

1. Use echo instead of print(). As a language construct rather than a function, echo has a slight performance advantage over print().
2. Echo with commas, not periods. I’m a repeat offender of this one. If you use periods, PHP has to concatenate the string before it outputs. If you use commas, it just outputs them in order with no extra processing.
3. Avoid function tests in loop conditionals. If you’re looping through an array, for example, count() it beforehand, store the value in a variable, and use that for your test. This way, you avoid needlessly firing the test function with every loop iteration.
4. Use include() and require() instead of include_once() and require_once(). There’s a lot of work involved in checking to see if a file has already been included. Sometimes it’s necessary, but you should default to include() and require() in most situations.
5. Use full file paths on include/require statements. Normalizing a relative file path can be expensive; giving PHP the absolute path (or even “./file.inc”) avoids the extra step.
6. Favor built-in functions over custom functions. Since PHP has to take the extra step of interpreting your custom functions, built-in functions have a performance advantage. More importantly, there are a lot of useful built-in functions that you may never learn about if you always default to writing your own.
7. Avoid needlessly copying variables. If the variable is quite large, this could result in a lot of extra processing. Use the copy you already whenever possible, even if it doesn’t look pretty (e.g., $_POST['somevariable']).
8. Pass unchanged variables to a function by reference rather than value. This goes hand-in-hand with the point about needlessly copying variables. Much of the time, your functions only need to use the values from their parameters without changing them. In such cases, you can safely pass those parameters by reference (e.g., function(&$parameter) rather than function($parameter)) and avoid having to make memory-intensive copies.
9. Debug with error_reporting(E_ALL). Every warning is a performance improvement waiting to happen, but only if you can see it. Cleaning up warnings and errors beforehand can also keep you from using @ error suppression, which is expensive. Just don’t forget to turn off error reporting when you’re done; warnings and errors are expensive as well.
10. Ditch double quotes for single quotes. There’s some disagreement, but the common wisdom is that PHP has to do extra processing on a string in double quotes to see if it contains any variables. Concatenation with single quotes is marginally faster.

Sources

Tips from this article were pulled from the following sources.

• Bootstrike.com
• Cluesheet
• Google Code

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It’s a fine line, but there are legitimate reasons for needing to hotwire WordPress. For example, the client who owns the site may not be available to provide the username and password, or a hacker may have locked you out. Personally, when I need to get into a client site, I find hotwiring is sometimes faster than digging up the password myself and waiting on someone else to find it for me. The point is, there are good, honest reasons to do it.

Now that you’ve listened to my lengthy disclaimer, we can get down business.

1. Access the database. Most web hosts nowadays offer PHPMyAdmin, which I recommend using. If you don’t know the database credentials, you can get them from the wp-config.php file in the WordPress root directory.
2. Find the users table. Don’t forget that it might have a prefix; if there’s any confusion, the prefix should also be in wp-config.php.
3. Find the account you want to hotwire. In my experience, the first user is most often the administrator with all of the best privileges, so that’s the row you’ll want to change. If the user_login is “admin,” like it is in most default WordPress installations, you may want to make a note to discuss changing it as a security precaution, but that’s a different article.
4. Copy the old user_pass. See that gobbledygook in the user_pass field? Copy it and save it for later. Otherwise, you won’t be able to restore the previous password. In the event that you’re changing the password permanently, it’s not necessary to copy the original value, but that would be more like hijacking that hotwiring.
5. Insert your temporary user_pass. You’ll want to place an md5-encrypted version of the temporary password you’ll be using in place of the old user_pass. There are plenty of websites out there that can hash it for you; just plug “md5 encrypter” into Google. Put the md5 hash value into the user_pass field and save your changes.
6. Log into WordPress. You should now be able to log in normally using the username of the account you’re hotwiring and the temporary password that you encrypted.
7. Restore the old user_pass. Most people don’t like having their passwords changed arbitrarily, so it’s good form to change it back for them. To do this, repeat steps one through three and replace the user_pass field with the original value that you overwrote.

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The AP is making a big hubbub about fair use of its material.

The music industry is waging war against the Pirate Bay.

What the people behind these headlines fail to realize is that, on the web, information cannot be contained. It flows and propagates, spreading across the globe at the blazing speed of a billion internet connections.

Can you track a lightning bolt with the human eye? Can you catch it in your hand? No? The same goes for information. The second it’s out in the world, it’s gone in a flash.

This isn’t about right and wrong, copyrights, fair use, or anything remotely resembling legalese. Like it or not, the internet is too big for that. Fight it with law suits and legislation all you like; you can’t kill a billion-headed beast by cutting off one or two heads, especially when a million more grow back in their place. It’s futile. You’ll just make it angry.

The way to survive in the information economy of the 21st century is to create free products and services that can be monetized in other ways, to generate information that benefits you as it spreads, to embrace the free flow of information rather than try to strangle it.

Not lucrative enough, you say? People have to pay, you say? Keep embracing your outdated business models and see just how much money you’re making in 10 years. That is, if you’re even around that long.

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“Omit needless words.”
- E.B. White, “The Elements of Style“

Answer these three questions:

• What determines the difficulty of a school writing assignment?
• What kinds of books are you likely to brag about reading?
• What is the basis on which a writer should charge for his or her work?

If any of your answers involve pages or word counts, you’re stuck in the mentality that the value of a written work is based on its volume.

Now answer this question: Which are you more likely to read, a short article or a long one? Which are you more likely to value, remember, repeat, or link back to?

Focus on quantity and you’ll create swollen, fluffy content. “Happy talk,” to use a term from Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think.” Lots of words; low value density.

Focus on quality and you’ll create quick, easily-digestible content that makes visitors more likely to read, spread, and convert. Fewer words; high value density. Exactly the way your visitors want it in the age of Twitter-induced information overload.

Quality is the new quantity, ladies and gentlemen. Don’t forget it.

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Then another “little thing” pops up. And another. Like cockroaches, they multiply and creep into your schedule where they’re not welcome. Of course, you dealt with one, so now you’re obligated to deal with them all. Before you know it, though, entire swaths of time are being devoted to the “little things.” In horror, you realize too late that the “little things” have swarmed and devoured your big projects.

This begs the question: If “little things” can topple big projects, how can we think of them as “little” at all?

The answer should be obvious. “Little things” are a myth. Like the computer guy, it’s a term we use to simplify a complex business reality. We call a task “little” to trivialize it out of our minds.

But time is a finite resource, and each “little thing” eats a small piece of it. More importantly, these pieces can add up to big chunks, days even, if you’re not careful.

The only solution is to kill every “little thing” you see. Stamp them out wherever they appear. “Fumigate” your office by performing regular kaizen sessions. Do whatever it takes to eliminate the need for “little things” or include them in proper projects.

This post is dedicated to everyone who thinks “little things” aren’t a big problem for productivity. May you learn better before the “little things” get you.

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One of my favorite examples is turning a standard HTML list into a menu.  As with all things, we begin by using HTML to define the kind of information being displayed.

<ul id="menu">
 <li><a href="/url1" id="menu_item_1">Menu Item #1</a></li>
 <li><a href="/url2" id="menu_item_2">Menu Item #2</a></li>
 <li><a href="/url3" id="menu_item_3">Menu Item #3</a></li>
 <li><a href="/url4" id="menu_item_4">Menu Item #4</a></li>
 <li><a href="/url5" id="menu_item_5">Menu Item #5</a></li>
</ul>


Simple, straightforward, boring, yet effective at communicating that this is an unordered list of links.  Take note of the IDs I’ve included; these will be important later.

Enter CSS to make this menu beautiful.  Let’s say we have an image prepared that is meant to serve as the menu.  And let’s say this image is using gradients or drop-shadows or a font that isn’t safe for use on the web, all good reasons to make it an image rather than text on a background.

We begin by defining the image, text and all, as the background of our menu item list and setting its width and height to exactly match the width and height of the image.  We’ll also need to break the list items out of their display state and redefine them as blocks.  While we’re at it, let’s hide the text; it’ll just be getting in the way of our beautiful menu image anyway.


ul#menu {
 background: url(/path-to-images/main-menu.png) top left no-repeat;
 height: 31px;
 width: 500px;
}

ul#menu li a {
 display: block;
 text-indent: -9999px;
}


Now, we’re going to need to move these anchors around in a minute, so we need to set their position to absolute.  To make it work correctly, we’ll also need to create a positioning context by setting the containing list’s position to relative.  Don’t worry; it’s not going anywhere.  This is just a trick that makes the list items move absolutely in reference to the menu rather than the whole page.


ul#menu {
 background: url(/path-to-image/main-menu.png) top left no-repeat;
 height: 31px;
 position: relative;
 width: 500px;
}

ul#menu li a {
 display: block;
 position: absolute;
}


Okay, we’ve got the image in place and the anchors redefined as blocks within it.  Now it’s time to position them.  Remember those IDs I defined earlier?  By referencing those, we can set each menu item’s unique width, height, and position.


ul#menu li a#menu_item_1 {
 height: 19px;
 left: 9px;
 right: 6px;
 width: 91px;
}

ul#menu li a#menu_item_5 {
 height: 19px;
 left: 402px;
 right: 6px;
 width: 91px;
}


Finding these values can take a bit of work.  Often times, I’ll open the image up in PhotoShop and measure them out.  I may also use the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar’s Edit CSS function to place them incrementally.  Just apply a static background color to each menu item block, adjust the size and position until it’s where you want it, then remove the background color and save.

Voila!  Now you have a menu that is beautiful, fully accessible, and all-around… wait, what’s that?  You want rollover states, too?  No sweat.

You already have the entire menu defined.  Now all you need are images to swap in as backgrounds when the user mouses over the menu items.  Note that these should be the exact height and width of the menu items themselves, and should mesh seamlessly with the background image to keep your users none the wiser.  It helps to have a modified version of the original menu that you can cut into chunks for this purpose.

Once you have your rollover images ready, just define them as background images for the active and hover states of your existing menu items, like so.


ul#menu li a#menu_item_1:active, ul#menu li a#menu_item_1:hover {
 background: url(/path-to-images/menu-1-rollover.png) top left no-repeat;
}

ul#menu li a#menu_item_5:active, ul#menu li a#menu_item_5:hover {
 background: url(/path-to-images/menu-5-rollover.png) top left no-repeat;
}


Congratulations, your new menu is now beautiful, fully accessible, and dynamic, to boot.  Not to mention, your design is also fully removed from your HTML.  As a bonus for using a pure CSS solution, there’s absolutely no JavaScript to muddle up your cross-browser compatibility.

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How is the price of the service determined?
There are many different cost metrics thrown around in online marketing: CPC, CPA, CPM, flat rate, etc. Ultimately, the only important metric is how much the service costs versus how much value it delivers (i.e., ROI). However, different cost metrics elicit different quality concerns. With CPA, you have to be more cautious about the quality of conversions, with CPC, the conversion rate, and with CPM, the clickthrough rate. Always be on guard that the provider might be illegitimately inflating your costs.

How likely is the traffic to convert?
The question here is whether the visitors’ demographics and intent match your site’s conversion goal. What is the age range of the visitors? What are their interests? If you’re selling something, how much disposable income do they have and where are they at in the buying cycle? This will require testing to verify, but you can often get a good idea of traffic quality by asking where that traffic is coming from before it reaches your site.

How much volume can the service drive?
It’s possible for a channel to deliver a great ROI, but only at a low volume. If a channel doesn’t produce enough traffic and/or conversions, it may not be worth the trouble to manage in the first place.

How well does the service scale?
Business needs have an tendency to change. The best online marketing services can scale in cost and volume to meet those needs. Often, scalability is the key to retaining a service over the long term.

Does the service use affiliates?
Depending on the nature of your conversions and the cost metric involved, affiliates may be useful. For example, when e-commerce transactions are required, affiliates are generally safe. However, if your conversions are, say, form submissions, fraud becomes a chief concern. In situations like this, affiliate-based services are best used cautiously or avoided all together.

Is the traffic incentivized in any way?
As with affiliates, incentivized traffic may or may not be useful depending on the nature of your conversion and the cost metric involved. Generally speaking, though, you want visitors who are interested in your offer, not visitors who just clicked through to get a flat screen TV.

Does the service offer online utilities?
Speaking from experience, nothing is more frustrating than managing a service that doesn’t offer online reporting and management utilities. Services that lack online utilities are suspect, either because they aren’t willing to give you transparency and control, or because they lack the technical savvy to create them.

Does the service include a campaign manager?
Although management and reporting utilities are the ideal, when large-scale adjustments need to be made, a dedicated human being can help reduce your management overhead. Obviously, you should prefer campaign managers that are good at achieving your goals.

How easily can the service be terminated?
When it comes to online marketing services, a contract is almost always involved. Depending on your faith in the service, you’ll want to be sure that the contract can be terminated to minimize losses if the ROI turns sour.

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