These two companies show little sign of slowing down, but I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that 2010 will be the year that users begin to move away from social networking sites and back to the ancient art of blogging. Here’s why …

Two things will happen in 2010;

1. Facebook will go public.
2. Twitter will be bought (probably by Google after a bidding war with Facebook) .

It is not the action of going public or being bought that will turn users away – but the news reports of huge sums of money being paid for our content should be a penny-dropping moment for a lot of people. Let’s say Facebook raises $5 billion in an IPO (even in a depressed stock market this should be a relatively conservative estimate) that values each user at roughly $15 per user or $40 per active user. If the creators of Twitter cash out for the bargain price of $0.5 billion that values each user at $40 per user. $40, $15, hell, even $10… doesn’t the thought pop into your head, “Hey, that’s my $10 goddamn it!” And in a round about way it is.

If you are writing a note about your favourite foods – why shouldn’t you get paid for the weight loss ads? If you’ve just finished a really good book – why shouldn’t it be your affiliate link to Amazon? Even without the advertising and monetising angle … why should you be building value for a third party when you could be investing equity in your own business or in your own brand?

In 2010, I predict we will see old blogs revived and new blogs created by people keen to take control (and take advantage) of their own content. Status updates will originate on personal websites and then be broadcast to Twitter and Facebook or directly to Google. Photos may be hosted on Facebook or Twitpic or Posterous but the reference and discussion will take place on the blog. Farmville won’t be a pixelated pig, it will be a short video of a backyard and a poll on what to grow this season. OK, that last one may be wishful thinking.

Facebook and Twitter will still be important platforms – Facebook will still be a valuable tool for friends and family to keep in touch and Twitter will still be useful for unearthing the latest news stories and gossip – but the most active and prolific content creators on these sites will seek to change the focus back to their own personal websites. Indeed, some would argue this is already the case for Twitter – it’s role in marketing and link building has eclipsed it’s early life as a way for geeks to meet up at SXSW.

“What are you doing?” Come to my blog and find out.

eBooks are about to become very popular
We already have the Kindle from Amazon, Stanza for the iPhone and products like Sony’s eReader, but at the moment these are mostly the domain of tech geeks. Next year we will see a slew of devices which will help push eBooks as a more mainstream way of reading books. Apple is rumoured to be releasing a Kindle like device, and other hardware manufacturers are jumping in with their own versions of tablet/media devices.

Offer PDF and EPUB formats
Independent authors should offer at least two formats; PDF and EPUB. PDF’s should be offered as an all purpose solution, if all else fails the user can open the PDF on their computer or most users will be aware of work-arounds to get the PDF to display on their preferred device. However, for a better reading experience authors should also offer the EPUB format, this is currently compatible with a large range of eBook readers and will reflow text to the size and dimensions desired by the user (ie: PDFs currently lack this feature, page sizes are a fixed dimension with a fixed number of words). The world of eBooks is still relatively young with many competing formats, but I believe EPUB stands the best chance of becoming the eBook standard just as MP3s have become the open standard for music files.

You can create professional looking books in EPUB (for free)
There is a new, free program available for creating eBooks in the EPUB format called Sigil. At the moment Sigil only imports TXT, HTML and EPUB documents, this might mean a two step conversion process for most independent authors, for example;
1. You’ve got the book written in Microsoft Word or something similar
2. Export an HTML version
3. Open the HTML version in Sigil and fix any formatting issues
4. Export as EPUB file

Sigil is very new, but a very promising open source project… I imagine it will not be long before a version is released capable of importing MS Word documents natively along with other common word processing formats.

Amazon provides a great marketplace for books
As well as offering the book for direct sale over your personal website, independent authors should also look at selling their work on Amazon. Amazon charge an ongoing fee and take a chunk of the sale price, but they have millions of eyeballs each day so it is very compelling marketplace. To sell on Amazon they require you to join the Advantage program which is $US29.95/month, they also take 55% of the List Price … which I think is steep, but probably not that much different from a brick and mortar bookstore.

Free the words!
Many authors are seeing benefit in releasing an eBook for free in order to establish an audience or to expand their existing base of fans. Sites such as Feedbooks will let authors publish their work for free and gives instant distribution to a range of popular devices, such as the Kindle.

More resources:
EPUB format description on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB
Sigil ebook editor: http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
Amazon advantage: http://advantage.amazon.com/gp/vendor/public/join
Feedbooks guide to self-publishing: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/self-publishing

When you extract that zip you will see a folder named Classes and inside that a folder named XMLRPC, drag the XMLRPC folder into your project. You will also need to grab NSString+XMLExtensions.h and NSString+XMLExtensions.m and drag them into your project.

That’s all the required files for the XML-RPC framework and now implementing is fairly straight forward. You need to put the following to your header file:

#import "XMLRPCResponse.h"
#import "XMLRPCRequest.h"
#import "XMLRPCConnection.h"

and to your .m file you need to add something like:

- (NSString *)loginToServer {
  NSArray *args = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"test",nil];   // the param(s)
  NSString *server = @"http://example.com/xmlrpc";         // the server
  NSString *method = @"loginUser";                        // the method
  XMLRPCRequest *request = [[XMLRPCRequest alloc] initWithHost:[NSURL URLWithString:server]];
  [request setMethod:method withObjects:args];
  id response = [self executeXMLRPCRequest:request];
  [request release];
  
  if( [response isKindOfClass:[NSError class]] ) {
    return nil;
  }
  else {
    return [response valueForKey:@"key"];          // the response key
  }
  return nil;
}

- (id)executeXMLRPCRequest:(XMLRPCRequest *)req {
  XMLRPCResponse *userInfoResponse = [XMLRPCConnection sendSynchronousXMLRPCRequest:req];
  return [userInfoResponse object];
}

You need to enter the appropriate values where I’ve commented, but this bare bones example should get you started. You can see more examples by sifting through BlogDataManager.m file in the Wordpress for iPhone project.

Content Management System (CMS)
A CMS gives you control over various aspects of your site through an online administration area. The two CMS’s that we predominantly use are Wordpress and Expression Engine, both are very well developed and easy to use, updating content or adding a new page is as easy as using MS Word. If you need to post news or blog entries, run a forum, shopping cart or similar, then you will need a CMS.

Hire a developer by the hour!
This option seems a little self serving I know, but seriously consider how many updates you will actually make per year. If it’s less than 12 updates a year, or one a month, then I can almost guarantee hiring me by the hour will be a cheaper option than a CMS. I have lost count of how many clients who have requested and invested in a content management system, only to let it sit and not regularly update their websites. Adding a CMS, along with training etc can quickly add thousands of dollars to your quote. My standard web fee for website updates is $50/hour, uploading a new photo and changing some words might take 30mins .. so if you make 12 updates a year: $25 x 12 = $300/year.

Your AdWords campaign should fit into your overall advertising budget and marketing plan. A suitable advertising budget will vary from industry to industry and from business to business, but a good starting point is around 5% of sales. This advertising budget may be spread over various forms of media; such as print, radio, television and the internet, but even if your marketing is solely directed online you should be wary of putting all your eggs in one basket. Advertising through Google may not give you the best bang for your buck.

Once you’ve arrived at your budget for online marketing consider these three alternatives;
1. An AdWords campaign
2. Direct marketing via an email campaign
3. Search Engine Optimisation (improving page rank, link building etc)

AdWords Campaign
If you’re reading this article, I’m hoping you know at least a little about this Google service. Put simply; with AdWords you are buying traffic to your site. The cost of each visitor varies but is usually between $0.20 to $1 per click. This can be handy when your site is not ranking in Google’s organic search results, or perhaps you want to target a particular site. Let’s say you make designer jeans, your site may not rank highly in a search for ‘jeans’ but you can bid for a spot on the search results through AdWords. Or perhaps you notice your favourite fashion blog is running AdSense, through AdWords you can bid for advertising on this site.

Email Campaign
Email campaigns can be very successful particularly if you have a targeted email list of potential clients. Email lists can built by using a “subscribe to newsletter” form on your website, from your database of past clients or by researching a list of potential clients (cold-calling). Email cold-calling is a delicate subject, no one likes to receive mountains of unwanted email, but if you don’t send the emails out in bulk, make it personal, offer something of value and give a clear opt-out option… then I believe you can tread the fine line between marketing and spam.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
By far the best method for driving traffic to your site and improving sales is hitting that number 1 position on search engines for your relevant keywords. Improving page rank should be part of your long term strategy for online marketing, this is an area where things generally don’t happen over night. Page Rank can be improved by optimising your website code and keyword density, but ultimately it comes down to investing equity in your site by producing content and being active in your online community.

This is a very basic introduction to Adwords and online marketing, if you’d like to learn more please view the resources listed below, or contact us!

Other resources:
AdWords Learning Center
Email Marketing Reports

http://mrnews.com.au/

… and was surprised I couldn’t find one out there on the internet. So, with a *sigh* I rolled up my sleeves and created one. You can check it out it after the break. Merry Christmas :)

Update 22/8/2009: I had to remove the country list because it was messing with my xml feed. You can still get the list here: countries.html

http://ferrariinteriors.com.au/

http://www.kindermemories.com.au.

The problem – 12,000 old emails
I have kept pretty much every email since 2003, that’s when I set up my first POP3 account to download mail to my desktop. Previous to that I was using webmail and had to carefully pick and choose which emails to keep so that I wouldn’t go over my 200Mb limit. Downloading all my email to the inbox worked fine until 2005 when the volume of emails I was receiving increased dramatically, space wasn’t a problem but the usability of my email client dropped significantly – Outlook just didn’t like searching through a few thousand emails at a time. I switched to Thunderbird which generally handles search better, but it too became swamped, so in 2006 I began moving my old emails into folders marked 2003 Archive, 2004 Archive etc and exported them to an external hard drive and that was that… until I need to quickly retrieve an email from 2005, in which case I import the archive then search then delete … ugh.

So what I needed was somewhere to stuff all my mail, it had to have quite a bit of room because my archive mail and current mail was already tipping 5Gig, and it had to be searchable, fast. And for this GMail fits the bill perfectly.

The solution – GMail
Obviously we need a way to get the mail into GMail, ideally Google should include an option to import your mbox or pst files and suck in all your email at once … but they don’t have that option yet, so we will have to use a slightly more painful, but nonetheless effective solution: IMAP.

You have probably heard of IMAP and POP3 as ways to get your email from a server, there are differences between the two protocols, but put simply POP3 is used when you want to download and remove email from a server and IMAP is used when you want to sync your local email with the server email. Using IMAP we can get GMail to ’sync’ with our archives and suck up all that email.

Step 1: Make sure IMAP is enabled in GMail by going to your settings menu.

Step 2: Set up your favourite email client (Outlook, Thunderbird etc) to access your Gmail account. There are instructions on how to set up a range of email clients on the Google Support website. Make sure your email client is not going to store a copy locally which would defeat the purpose. Mine is set to not download messages over 1kb.

Step 3: Once GMail is set up on your email client you can add folders, for example, 2003 Archive, 2004 Archive etc. In Thunderbird my folders looked like this:

Step 4: Drag and drop your email into the appropriate archive folder. You could try dragging whole folders at a time but I found this troublesome; every now and then GMail would throw up an error which means you have to start again. I found it safer to drag and drop a few hundred emails at a time, starting with the smallest emails and then working up to the large ones. Email over 10Mb might have to be done in smaller batches still, and there seems to be a maximum size limit of around 30Mb; I had one email with attachments that was 36Mb and it threw an error everytime … I guess at that size you should be archiving the attachments separately.

The syncing process is not terribly fast so it will require a little patience (it took me about 2 days to get all the email up, chunk at a time), but eventually you should have something like this:

2.69Gb, around 12,000 email messages, easily searchable and stored for free.

The form worked as expected in Firefox, Safari and Opera (I develop on a mac), but when I tested in IE 6 & 7 nothing happened – you’d click the submit button but the form would not be processed… a rather serious usability issue you might say.

Turns out the issue was to do with the image input type:

<input type="image" src="path/to/image.gif" name="submit" value="Submit" />

In PHP, I had set my form up to start processing on a $_POST['submit'], however IE will append _x and _y onto the image input giving $_POST['submit_x'] and $_POST['submit_y']. A small change to the PHP code and everything was working fine across all browsers:

// start processing on submit or submit_x
if (isset($_POST['submit']) || isset($_POST['submit_x'])) {
  // run code here
}

It is a little embarrassing to admit that I hadn’t noticed this difference before now, but in my defence I will say that I rarely use the image input type for styling my submit buttons. For sites that contain more than one button, a much better solution is to separate the style from the content. I prefer to use the <button> tag in combination with the <a> tag, eg:

<button>Submit</button>
<a href="#" class="button">Submit</a>

which can then be styled with something like:

button, a.button {
  background: url(path/to/image.gif) no-repeat top left;
  width: 100px;
  height: 40px;
  display: block;
}

Some tasks you may consider hiring me for;

• Professional PSD to XHTML/CSS/JS work.
• HTML email templates, tested on all major email clients.
• SEO consulting and Google AdWords consulting.
• Website maintenance, from adding an image to recoding an entire site.
• Wordpress plugins, theme creation and training.
• PHP scripting, from custom forms and surveys to complete online applications.
• … and pretty much anything to do with the internet. Try me :)

Please contact paul@kilbot.com.au for more information on availability and rates.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# You may need to change this path to /usr/local/bin/perl

print "\nRunning postwwwacct...";

# set up variables
my $user   = $ARGV[0];
($name, $pass, $uid, $gid, $quota, $comment, $gcos, $dir, $shell, $expire) = getpwnam($user);
$statsdir   = "/home/".$user."/public_html/stats";
$webalizer   = "/home/".$user."/tmp/webalizer";
$tmpdir   = "/home/".$user."/tmp";

if(eval 'symlink("","");', $@ eq '') {
  mkdir($webalizer, 0755) unless -d $webalizer;
  symlink($webalizer, $statsdir);
  chown($uid, $gid, $webalizer);
  chmod(0755, $tmpdir);
  chmod(0755, $webalizer);
  print "\nPublic stats added for ".$user;
}
else {
  print "\nPublic stats not added for ".$user;
}

exit;

You can then update existing accounts through the command line using:

/scripts/postwwwacctuser username

Where username is the account username you wish to update.

Please note: My knowledge of Perl is pretty basic, so use this script at your own risk. Please post any questions/improvements in the comments.

Most impressive for me is the upgrade to the rich text editor, Wordpress still uses TinyMCE but they’ve upgraded to v.3 which seems to have ironed out a lot of the bugs. Anyone familiar with the old rich text editor will know it was frustrating at best, for most clients I would switch it off and tell them write in code view… not the best solution but much easier than trying to explain/teach the quirks of visual mode.

I haven’t had a chance to put Wordpress 2.5 through it’s paces, but let’s just do a quick test. Here’s the code:

<table border="1">
  <tr>
    <td>Row 1</td>
  </tr>
  <tr class="alt">
    <td>Row 2</td>
  </tr>
</table>

And the display:

No great woop there, but in previous versions of Wordpress the rich text editor would have deleted (yes deleted!) any table rows with a class selector – try explaining that to a client. Then there was the endless quirks of mysterious p tags, disappearing line breaks… a nightmare.

At first dig it seems that Wordpress 2.5 (and TinyMCE 3) have addressed most of these problems and that alone is worth the upgrade. Perhaps even worth the extra time you’ll need to find your way around the new admin.

You can test connections to port 25 using the Telnet command. On PC, go to the Start menu, then select Run, then type

telnet mail.domain.com.au 25

telnet mail.domain.com.au 25

220-host.kilbot.com.au ESMTP Exim 4.68 #1 Thu, 18 Jun 2007 12:58:25 +1000
220-We do not authorize the use of this system to transport unsolicited,
220 and/or bulk e-mail.

Now see if you can connect to your ISP’s outgoing mailserver. Repeat the process above but exchange mail.domain.com.au the appropriate outgoing mailserver, below are some server settings for popular Australian ISPs.

Telstra Bigpond: mail.bigpond.com
OptusNet: mail.optusnet.com.au
iiNet: mail.m.iinet.net.au
Internode: mail.internode.on.net
Netspace: mail.netspace.net.au
TPG Internet: mail.tpg.com.au
Netlink: smtp.netlink.com.au

If you can connect to your ISP’s outgoing mailserver please change the setting in your email client. If you can not connect to any server on port 25 you may be blocked by a firewall on your local network, in this case you will need to adjust your firewall settings to allow outgoing TCP traffic on port 25.

• Stripped out the old table-based layout and started from scratch with a fresh, modern design.
• Installed Wordpress as a content management system for easy updating.
• Integrated Google Calendar and Flickr to increase community involvement.
• Brought members and participation to the fore with feature boxes and quick links.

We think the results speak for themselves, so please check out the Waterkeepers Australia website and help protect Australia’s precious waterways.

http://www.waterkeepers.org.au/

If you need assistance adding nameservers to your domain name please contact support@kilbot.com.au.

http://www.gisbornegolf.com.au

http://www.pressuredynamics.com.au

The role of the web developer will vary from agency to agency and from project to project. Most commonly, the web developer refers to the person responsible for the code component of the development process. In a small web development agency, a web developer may be responsible for all aspects of development, including design. Indeed, a good developer should have experience in all aspects of the development process so that good practices are built into the web site as a matter of course.

As the internet industry matures there is a need for more specialised roles in web development. Large agencies will usually include a project manager who takes care of the site planning, wireframing and manages the web developers and web designers. Specialist SEO firms are springing up all over the internet (although most of them are charlatans in this humble web developers opinion :p ). Web developers themselves will usually pick one or two languages to specialise in.

For more information about my specialities, please visit the About page.

On a semi-related note, Whirlpool.net.au is having their annual Australian Broadband Survey, you can give your view on the state of broadband in Australia by going to http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/. The survey will take around 10 minutes to complete.

<IfModule mod_php4.c>
php_value max_execution_time      120
</IfModule>

The Kilbot Factory has released a brand new site for Brooks Hire Service. The site uses a Content Management System for easy site updates and expansion, standards compliant XHTML and CSS, and quite a few keyword tweaks to get the best search ranking possible.

Google fills first and second places, which fits with data collected on my sites. Yahoo are next and then MSN.

Interesting to note Yahoo tops the rankings in the United States. I would suspect the figures are a little skewed to the type of web user would would install the Alexa tool bar.