YouTube is nothing less than an online video phenomenon and if you aren’t already using it as a tool to promote yourself or your online content, you should really give it some thought.

Having already served up over 1.73 billion video views and 45 terabytes of video footage to the world, YouTube is everyone’s first port of call when they want to search for online video.

While it might not be the best featured or even best quality service for video producers, it is by a long shot the most popular. If you are a blogger, marketer, film maker or any other kind of online publisher or entrepreneur, you stand to gain a lot by getting some exposure on YouTube. Especially if you leverage YouTube Wordpress plugins.

But how do you get your content noticed, when there are 6.1 million videos for your audience to choose from? Certainly, there is no replacement for making or aggregating great content, but there are several ways that you can make your presence felt, and drive traffic back to your own website.

There are tricks to getting the best out of YouTube from a marketing perspective and there are an assortment of YouTube strategies and features that you can use to raise your profile, whether you create your own videos, or act as a video NewsMaster, selecting and grouping other people’s video for your niche-audience.

YouTube Pro is an awesome new plugin for WordPress 3.0! Upload, edit and delete your videos without leaving your blog. Also, you can change the appearance of your player with full customizations.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo8674K-8wQ

Once you have imported all your movies over from YouTube to WordPress, you never have to leave your blog again. Basically you can do everything you need to from within Wordpress and it becomes your sole point of entry for interfacing with your YouTube videos.

Features

• 1-Click install
• Import your videos from YouTube
• Add new videos
• Edit your existing videos
• Delete videos from WordPress or YouTube
• Custom player appearance
• Quick video insert into your post using the WordPress “Upload/Insert” feature.
• Use YouTube Pro for your videos and others.*
• Update checker

The package
When you download the plugin from CodeCanyon it will contain the YouTube Pro plugin. The most optimal Zend package has been included within the plugin in order to use Zend in combination with WordPress.

Want to see more?

Feel free to leave a comment with a feature request. The author will do whatever they can in order to assist you!

Support

Please use the forum or use the contact form on my profile page:http://forum.philohermans.com/

Zend Framework

YouTube Pro makes use of the Zend Framework. This is required to make use of the YouTube API . See the following link for the Zend Requirements:

http://zendframework.com/manual/en/requirements.introduction.html

PHP5 is Required

This plugin is only supported by PHP 5 .2.4 or later.

WordPress 3.0 Only

This plugin makes use of the latest features of WordPress 3.0. Therefore it will not work with older versions.

Developer Key

In order to upload movies to YouTube, you need to have a developer key. You can get your developer key here

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Powered by the cX Core PHP framework, Public Marketspace is a new website making a big impact.

Features include: a robust user management system, sophisticated marketplace engine, multi-layered logic engine, 2 tier business management, centralized dashboard, administration features, multi-tenant e-commerce cart/system, social media integration… just to name a few.

Their mission is helping entrepreneurs compete online, and part of that committment is giving back to our small business community. Public Marketspace believes that helping market proven entrepreneurs grow their business, hire employees or expand their operation is vital to the health of the main street economy.

The Public Marketspace community pledge:

We pledge to give back 3.5% of our EBIT profits back to our small business Vendor community in the form of business expense programs, holiday charitable programs and neighborhood rebuilding programs.

These programs will be managed and publicized at PublicMarketspace.org (coming soon), including our assistance programs for non-profit small businesses, minority and women owned businesses, and rural Chamber of Commerce associations.

We’re pleased that we could be a part of this much anticipated launch and welcome Public Marketspace as one of the first social e-Commerce platforms to market.

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Update: 7/1/2010 12:06 PM
Rackspace has contacted us in clarification that it was coincidental that the hurricane was happening at the same time of the network-related issues they were experiencing and that the support representative who informed us of the issue was incorrect in stating it was hurricane-related.

Update: 7/1/2010 12:25 PM (response from Rackspace)
We do not take incidents like this lightly and realize the impact this has on our customers.  It is important to note that this incident being mentioned below has not resulted in any customer’s email being lost.  The incident has caused connectivity issues for some of our customers, causing them to be unable to connect to their mailboxes.

The part of our system that sends and receives email is not affected and any incoming email to our customers is being delivered to customer’s mailboxes.  We actually do provide our customers with two different MX records that point to different systems, so that in case one fails the backup will pick up any incoming mail.

Having a 3rd party backup MX service can offer an additional layer of protection for your mailboxes, but for this incident in question the backup MX service would not have provided any additional protection.

Original Article:

Rackspace, the company often thought to never be offline, has been hit by hurricane Alex and is suffering from power outages this morning. I don’t want to prey on their misfortune and my prayers are with the employees and residents near San Antonio, Texas. I will, however, take a moment to reflect on what this means for the stability of email and online applications hosted at one of the world’s largest and most successful data centers.

Rackspace just told us via phone that their Outlook, OWA (Outlook Web Access) and Entourage systems are experiencing downtime due to power outages caused by hurricane Alex and that email was safe. When we asked the phone support technician how the emails were safe if the servers were offline in San Antonio, Texas, there was a brief pause before a reply was given.

The reality is that email is directed solely to those mail servers and that there was no way to guarantee emails sent to addresses hosted by Rackspace are not going to be bounced to the sender. This is a first for us, as we’ve rarely (if ever) heard of this happening at a company like Rackspace.

Ashworth Consulting offers a backup MX service that will queue your email in the event your mail server is ever down. The email passes through our powerful email servers for SPAM filtering, virus scanning and will not deliver the messages until the system has determined that it’s safe to do so. In a nutshell, your email is almost unbreakable in terms of stability and reliability.

We would like to assure our customers that email and data are 100% operational due to the measures we have taken to ensure data redundancy and reliability. None of our services are affected by the hurricane at this time and your websites and email will continue to remain unhindered by these events.

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We’ve teamed with some of the brightest SEO people in the industry and are capable of handling any size of website for your online marketing needs. If you’re just starting out, we have something for you in the form of a low monthly package or a one-time $99 SEO report. If you have an existing website (large or small) we have you covered as well.

For a listing of all packages and options we offer, please have a look at our search engine optimization services page for more information. Pricing is clearly outlined and we want to make sure we have you covered in your success online. At Ashworth Consulting, we realize that your success is our success too!

Coming Soon

We’re working on a more elaborate offering for the one-time report option in addition to the $99 SEO report. This will likely be priced in the area of $499 and offer a var greater analysis of your website than what the $99 one-time option currently offers.

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Did you know that there’s an easy way to keep that updated automatically?

On any server that supports PHP, so if you simply drop this code wherever you want, (for example, into your WordPress themes footer.php file) then you’ll automatically have a current copyright date on every page.

©
<?php
echo date("Y");
?>

The first line is the © copyright symbol, and what’s inside the brackets generates the date. You can of course add anything to this that you wish, like All Rights Reserved, your company name, your domain, or even links to this site.

What if your server doesn’t support PHP, or for some reason this doesn’t work?

Here’s a pretty cool tool that gives you even more flexibility, and although it uses JavaScript, it’s still better than an outdated page. It’s better for your users as well as the search engines to see that you’re keeping your website up to date.

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1. Google Now Supports Cross-Domain ‘Canonical Tag’

1. Consider resetting your stylesheet first to null values for everything, then re-declare all of your settings from scratch. You’d be surprised how often you’ll build something in Firefox as your test browser (simply because of the developer plugins available to you), only to find that when you test in Internet Explorer at the end it looks messed up. Padding and margins will be off, etc. Reset to 0px for everything then start from there to ensure a unified look in just about every case.

   Although I use a variation I have created myself, this is an excellent starting point:
   http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/

2. When developing a website, we don’t always see the same thing in all browsers. Things may shift slightly in each browser and certain features may not work if an older browser doesn’t support the feature you’re trying to use (ie., transparent PNG support or certain positioning elements).
   
   Adobe BrowserLab gives you the ability to preview and test your websites in multiple browsers and operating systems. Since building a website to be cross-browser compatible is one of the more annoying aspects of web design, this should be a valuable web app to all of us.

   Adobe BrowserLab supports screenshots in most major/recent browser versions and is incredibly fast at generating the previews for you. At this time, the software only shows the single URL you type in, so if you need to test multiple pages on a website you will need to test each separate URL independently of each other.

   The service is 100% free and much quicker at generating the preview compared to other semi-free services such as BrowserShots.

There are many techniques we learn over the years through experience but these are a few of the really big hurdles you’ll encounter when developing websites. Good luck!

Anything we forgot to mention you’d like to add? Feel free to comment.

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2. Kuler color palette creator
3. Looking for an easy site builder?

Here’s a quick preview of how it looks on an iPhone.

A focus on reporting

When deciding what functionality to include in the mobile version, we’ve been keeping a close eye on our customers. It turns out that the most popular section of your account accessed by a mobile device is email campaign reporting, so that’s where we focused our efforts. More than 95% of all mobile visitors also come in on an iPod or iPhone variant, so we put a lot of work into making sure the experience was perfect on these devices in particular. It’s a really nice way to get the latest stats on an email campaign you’ve sent in a couple of thumb presses.

Launch it like a real application

One great thing about the iPhone is that you can launch web applications just like a traditional app you’ve bought from the App Store. By heading into your account with Safari and adding it to your Home screen, you have a dedicated button that will load your latest reports with a single click. We even provide a nice icon and loading screen for you and your clients while the latest stats are downloading.

There is lots of cool technology under the hood of our mobile version, and I’ll be sure to share some of the more interesting details in a future post.

Easy switching

While the mobile version is all about your campaign reports right now, you can still switch to the full version of our email campaign system and access all our functionality with a single click. At the footer of every page is a link to switch to the corresponding page in the full version of the app. We’ll automatically switch you back to the mobile version the next time you log in.

Tell us what’s next

We’ve got lots of our own ideas on other features that would be handy in the mobile version. With the first release out the door, we’d love to hear what else (if anything) you would like to see in future updates.

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It’s important to ensure you’re going after directories with a high pagerank so that the link back counts towards your rank significantly. Here is a top list of article directories that are search engine friendly for your SEO campaign that will hopefully get you on the right track to success.

1. EzineArticles
2. GoArticles
3. Constant Content
4. Article City
5. Buzzle
6. Isnare
7. Amazines
8. Article Alley
9. Articlism
10. Article Central

So there you have it. Get writing and make sure not to spam the article directories. Be careful that you’ve read their posting guidelines clearly and that you’re including your link(s) below the fold so you don’t lessen the quality of their article directories.

Please note that it takes time for your article directory posting to kick in. It may be a few weeks to several months before you see the results of your article writing and posting to the various search engine friendly article directories. Stick with it and it will pay off in the long run for you with search engine rankings that don’t disappear overnight.

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While the maintenance window is one hour, we anticipate that the total amount of downtime for your accounts will be about 5 to 10 minutes. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact a member of our support team.

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<?php
function ValidateCreditCardNumber($cc_num)
{
  $pattern = "/^3[47]\d{13}$/";//American Express
  if (preg_match($pattern,$cc_num))
  {
    return true;
  }
 
  $pattern = "/^([30|36|38]{2})([0-9]{12})$/";//Diner's Club
  if (preg_match($pattern,$cc_num))
  {
    return true;
  }
 
  $pattern = "/^6011\d{12}$/";//Discover Card
  if (preg_match($pattern,$cc_num))
  {
    return true;
  }
 
  $pattern = "/^5[12345]\d{14}$/";//Mastercard
  if (preg_match($pattern,$cc_num))
  {
    return true;
  }
 
  $pattern = "/^4\d{12}(\d\d\d){0,1}$/";//Visa
  if (preg_match($pattern,$cc_num))
  {
    return true;
  }
 
  $pattern = "/^30[012345]\d{11}$/";//Diners
  if (preg_match($pattern,$cc_num))
  {
    return true;
  }
 
  $pattern = "/^3[68]\d{12}$/";//Diners #2
  if (preg_match($pattern,$cc_num))
  {
    return true;
  }
 
  // Not valid
  return false; 
}
?>

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