Rick Stratton's RSS feed

Communicate and spread YOUR ideas

anonymous — Wed, 4 Feb 2009 10:02:00 CST

I was asked a couple times, recently, for some suggestions on running a web political campaign (for political office). I thought I'd summarize these suggestions here, on this site.

Probably won't get implemented (for one, I had to send a Word doc, so probably not) , but maybe these can help someone running for office in the future.

(BTW, the "you" is the candidate.)

============

The Web is about spreading ideas: Some people would say it's about creating a community. If you're Obama, then yeah, it's about community. But you're not Obama.

For you, it's about IDEAS. Your IDEAS. Communicate and sell and spread those IDEAS.

And it doesn't have to be expensive. But it's time consuming and YOU need to be involved (staff can help).

The Web is your network to communicate and spread your ideas using the tools at hand: your website, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, uStream. Here are some suggestions on how to utilize this network:

Your Website: The depository for the archives of your campaign. Remember to think about Google Search.

Blog: Where you can write about your ideas. This isn't a press release. Reactions to current events, your ideas on improvements, thoughts on articles/editorials. Etc.

Twitter/Facebook: Twitter/Facebook for your "status" so people can follow you and learn more about your life. Also, Publish links/notes to your blog, important issues, editorials, etc. You need to reach out to as many relevant people as you can. (Use an autofollow service on Twitter.)

Twitter Search: Find people with similar interests. Also, track what people are saying about you, and respond when needed.

Flickr: Use Flickr as the photo archive for the campaign. Use it for all the website's photos and link back to Flickr whenever there's a photo on the site. Flickr is a great source of new, interesting contacts.

TV: Use the Web as the your TV network. Regular, short videos from the campaign. (Get a Flip camera.)

Live: Do regular live broadcasts, using uStream (campaign events or broadcast an interview with a reporter).

Donations: Just has to work easily for contributor. However it's important to be able to an "affiliate network" of sorts and track how/who the donations came from. Also be able access/import contributor info easily.

Campaign events: Use Google calendar and evite for public events.

Google Adwords: Make sure people can find you easily.

Mobile: I hate campaign text messages. Don't do it. Just use Twitter.

Track it all:

It's not about how much $ comes into the bank. It's about people. You need up-to-date information about the people you're reaching. Your followers in Twitter and your friends in Facebook. Use Google Analytics to track your visitors on your site. Read about the Obama Houdini project and use 37signals.com's Highrise and Basecamp for contact and project management. And get a daily report of it all.

Website staff: Get someone with CSS/xhtml ability. If they can do CSS, they can do everything else you need. Also, get someone that's handy with video editing.

Why you can't buy Feed.Us

anonymous — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 09:01:00 CST

I really hate that Feed.Us isn't "live". It remains in a "private beta" almost six months after I hoped we'd launch.

(In case you haven't been following us, Feed.Us is a content management/syndication service that is 'hosted' and feeds content to your server. It works with/on any platform (php, asp.net, jsp, asp, ror, etc) and was built to be integrated with just copy/paste of some code, ie no installs. It can work with any site, within other platforms, within applications and for content syndication.)

The main functions (writing/adding content and 'feeding' to sites) have been working really well for over a year. Then we added other ways to import and export content. Then finally last summer we started in on a clean, nice interface (screenshots here) designed by the guy who did Writely.

So why aren't we live?

One issue has been .Net and adding some of the "ajaxy" stuff (note: I did not say 'ajaxy goodness'). .Net has been a bitch with the ajax. We went with .Net so that our core code would be really, really solid. But .Net has not been fun for John and Cliff to add a lot of the interface stuff that I've asked for.

But the main issue is that it's just not ready. There's a widely accepted theory that we're supposed to launch early and often. I don't really subscribe to the theory.

One of the rationale behind the theory is that you need users to help start and improve the service. And we have done this with all the sites I run, plus select customer sites (and a couple applications). And as of January, we even have paying customers (several even have died, but that's a sad story that I'll save for a different post).

But we can't offer it for sale yet. Why not?

We've found a bunch of bugs that are being fixed.
The help isn't complete. I'm personally making video help page for every function, and it takes a while.
I haven't completely decided on our pricing. I really want to make it 'pay as you go' but that might not be possible at first, so we need to decide on a price before we start, and then shift, later to PAYG.
Image/file uploading has to kick ass and it currently doesn't
Import functions that need to be completed (embed video from youtube) and twitter importing via API
Our 'export' functions (to Facebook & Twitter)

BUT the main reason is that it's just not perfect, yet. I don't want to disappoint people who try it. If it's going to be one of the best services you've ever used, then you can't be frustrated. And when I use something that isn't 100% ready, I get frustrated and I question why I paid for it. And I don't want our customers to suffer like that.

Quick site change

anonymous — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:01:00 CST

I've added a new page and rss feed to the sidebar options.

Now along the right you'll see a link to "everything on the web" under "archives". There's also a new RSS feed that includes the same content.

Basically everything I add on the web - this blog, photos/video on Flickr, videos on Viddler, comments on other blogs in disqus, Twitter and Facebook statuses gets imported into Feed.Us and then exported to the "ALL" page on my site and to a separate Feedburner RSS feed.

Not that anyone cares that much about me - don't think I'm that vain. But it's just very cool to store all that stuff in one space and Feed.Us can do it all.

It would be especially helpful if you operate a 'brand on the web' and do a lot of social networking.

(Just another helpful feature from your friends at Feed.Us.)

Use Windows Live Writer with Feed.Us

anonymous — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:01:00 CST

Windows Live Writer is the quick and easy version of Word for feeding content to blogs and websites. It functions similarly to Word, but lets you update your site remotely or save your work for later posting.

We recently added the ability to write posts on Feed.Us using Live Writer via MetaweblogAPI. (You can also use MetaweblogAPI to send posts to Feed.Us from other CMSes. More info later on.)

Also, the most recent version of Office 2007's Word works like Live Writer so you can actually use Word with Feed.Us

Before you start, check out these directions or the video below. You'll need 2 URLs:

http://dev.feed.us/Publishing/PostMgmt.aspx
http://dev.feed.us/Services/MetaWebLog.ashx

1. Download Live Writer and then "run" the program to install it.

2. It will try to get you to install all of the "Live" family of products. You just need "Writer". (Be careful not to get tricked into making Microsoft your default search engine.)

3. Close the installer.

4. Then go to "START" (on your computer) and find the "Windows Live" folder, and choose the "Writer" program.

5. Under the "BLOGS" tab, select "Add Blog Account".

6. Choose the "other blog service" option.

7. The "Web Address for your blog" should be the first URL above (http://stage.feed.us/Publishing/PostMgmt.aspx)

8. Username and password are your Feed.Us username (gjohnson, etc) and password.

9. Resulting page has a dropdown for "Blog Provider". Choose "MetaweblogAPI".

10. Put the second URL into the "remote posting" field. (http://dev.feed.us/Services/MetaWebLog.ashx)

11. You don't need to "detect the theme" so choose "NO".

12. Give it a nickname.

That's it! Remember to choose a category when you post using Live Writer.

To submit/post/etc, choose the "Publish" button in the left-upper corner.

Watch the VIDEO BELOW for further instructions.

GOOG 4th Quarter

anonymous — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 11:01:00 CST

Google announces their 2008 4th quarter numbers next week. If you care about how they've done, here are some stats from my Adwords and Adsense. (FYI I have a bunch of Caribbean travel related sites that use Adsense and I purchase Adwords ads to promote the sites.)

My adsense is WAAAAAAY down this year. I also was dinged by Google in their index (no idea why) so the organic traffic has dropped off. (I need to do a little work apparently.) But Adwords is the most interesting. My budget and keywords and ads are essentially unchanged from 4th qtr 2007, so it's very simple to compare.

Clicks are down 36%
Impressions are down 24%
What I paid Google is down 36%

Some thoughts:

Obviously, trips to the Caribbean are not being planned. So that means impressions and clicks have dropped off. (FYI Click-thru-rate is actually better in 2008). But the biggest issue is that Google can't seem to spend my budget for me.

I think that people haven't stopped advertising, but they've drastically reduced their budgets. And at the same time, dramatically less people are searching for destinations.

These two issues are related. But, because both are happening, it double hurts Google. (Google does better when there are more ads being placed and when there are more searches being performed).

So it's going to be a scary quarter for GOOG.

VID00125

anonymous — Thu, 8 Jan 2009 12:01:00 CST

1871 posted a video:

Feed your news to the Kindle via Feed.Us

anonymous — Wed, 7 Jan 2009 21:01:00 CST

We here at Feed.Us love our Amazon Kindles. Obviously, other folks do too.

A couple of months ago we stumbled upon the fact that Feed.Us could be a great Kindle software tool for publishers. With just a few tweaks, we could help thousands of newspaper, magazine and blog publishers send their content (news, articles, etc) to Amazon without having to learn about Amazon's syndication system (it's not as simple as you might think).

Currently there are only 29 newspapers and 21 magazines selling their articles on Amazon's Kindle marketplace. We think we could help change that. We just need to find a publisher to help us finish our Kindle publishing service.

If you're interested, all you'd need to do is give us your content via RSS feeds or email. We will take care of the heavy lifting and put it into Amazon's format and send it to them. contact rick at feed dot us.

BTW, if you reached this page because you're trying to figure out how to use Amazon's Digital Text Platform - that's just for books and we're talking about web/newspaper/magazine content, which does not seem to be supported in Amazon's DTP. The best person around for book-related kindle publishing info is Joshua Tallent.

remember-this-segala

anonymous — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 21:12:00 CST

1871 posted a video:

Driving an SRT neon this week. It's a remarkably great car.

anonymous — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Cvs increased revs by reducing clutter in stores. This walgreens needs to try it!

anonymous — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Waterside shops

anonymous — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Sanibel & captiva

anonymous — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 17:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

I bought myself a porsche for xmas

anonymous — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 21:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Great snow car

anonymous — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 17:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Coooold

anonymous — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Why should developers consider Feed.Us?

anonymous — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:12:00 CST

Lunch at Zaca Tacos (again!) last week. I asked Feed.Us CTO John Welborn why developers should consider using Feed.Us in their applications and website.

Money quote: "The best reason is that it reduces your deployment time."

See the video below:

Too much snow

anonymous — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Awesome snow fort

anonymous — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

More snow!

anonymous — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

IMG01075.jpg

anonymous — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Can't get the car out of the garage enuf to get the snowthrower out!

anonymous — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Lotta snow!!

anonymous — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

NW md80 over mitchell

anonymous — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

View from dr office

anonymous — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

The "Madoff Writeoff"

anonymous — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:12:00 CST

Let's bail them all out! Even the billionaires! No one should be allowed to lose money... ever!!

"... the Securities Investor Protection Corporation asked that steps be taken to protect investors in the scheme, which has ensnared several major banks and prominent figures as victims and could result in as much as $50 billion in losses."

http://wcbstv.com/business/madoff.ponzi.scheme.2.888036.html

Listen & respond

anonymous — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:12:00 CST

I recently gave a chat to a consumer product company about web stuff. It was supposed to be about internet trends, but it was really turned into 'social media'.

I've written previously about using social media for personal explotation, etc. And since then I've thought alot about how a company could use.

I'm sure Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc is a confusing place for most "brands". How does your brand participate in a place that was built for individuals? No one really wants links to press releases. Some people might want to know about a sale. I doubt people really want to know what your CEO is doing for his birthday.

I think the opportunity is to listen and respond to customers. It's not really to 'participate in the conversation', it's to react to what people think and say about your brand.

1 . Monitor 'live search'.

Google was built to give you the 'best' webpages for your search. It wasn't intended to give you the most recent results.

But there are tools that you can use to do a "live search": a search about what people are saying about you or your company/brand right now, instantly.

I use Twitter search and Google Blog search. Here's a twitter search for Briggs and Stratton:

I think it's really important to monitor your brand. Feed.Us is small so doesn't show up. But big brands, like AT&T or even Windex get mentioned a lot. It's like a consumer 1-800 hotline, but it's free.

2. It's important to listen. But it's also important to respond.

You shouldn't just listen. You should respond. For two reasons:

If someone articulates a negative result with your product, it's really nice to reach out and try to correct the issue.

Why else? Because these days, everyone has an audience. It might be 10 followers on Twitter or 15 friends on Facebook... but everyone has an audience. If someone loves your product enough to mention it, send them a thank you note. If they had a problem, it's really a nice opportunity to correct the issue. Send them a product sample or a coupon. Sending an @reply on Twitter is simple and not invasive.

Google Blog Search works well too. Since Feed.Us is small and isn't mentioned much (yet) on Twitter or blogs, I sometimes respond to people when they post about related products or related problems they have with CMS software. I use the comments on their blog, if enabled.

3. Learn and then reach out to folks who don't Twitter/Blog, etc.

The feedback you get from watching "live search" can allow you to build a response. If someone is blogging or twittering a problem they have with your product, you can bet that folks are searching Google for the answer to that problem.

I use Twitter Search to help me create Google Ads for Feed.Us. Example: I know a specific issue that a lot of new Drupal users have when they create a site for the first time. I use that info to target an ad in Google Adwords that lets them have a free trial with Feed.Us. On the landing page of said ad, I offer to help them personally - which appeals directly to the issue they have with Drupal. So far it's been really successful.

4. Video:

Based on what you learn, you can also build small, quick "help" websites that feature usability videos. For Feed.Us - I make 2 minute "screencapture" videos that shows how our software works.

For physical products, you can do this as well. I think that "real" videos with "real" employees using "real" products can be an amazing sales/marketing tool.

For example, you're annoyed with the Toyota alarm beep beep when you lock the doors. It's not the easiest change. What if Toyota realized how annoyed people were with the feature? They could make a video and a website that showed exactly how to turn the feature off. Throw it up on Youtube for Google optimization and take some $.05 per click Adwords ads.

Summary:

I think that listening and responding is really the way that brands can get involved with social media. And it's a great path to make new customers and lasting customer relationships.

Advertisement: How can Feed.Us help? We think fits very well in the above 'social media' scenario. Feed.Us has a couple of things going for it: (A) We enable you to build & launch websites very quickly. (B) Feed.Us is great at handling content across multiple sites. (C) Feed.Us is built to manage embedded video from Youtube viddler, etc. and we will be working on a dedicated version of Feed.Us some time in 2009 for embedded video. Talk to us! rick at feed.us.

Use Word, email or a blog to update your website via Feed.Us

anonymous — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:12:00 CST

Here's a quick video post to show how you can avoid Feed.Us to post articles, news etc. to your Feed.Us powered website.

Feed.Us works with Microsoft Word (or Live Writer), Email (Outlook or gmail, etc), and third party blogs (like Typepad or Blogger).

Windows/Live Writer - setup via MetaweblogAPI
Email: send an email to helpsick5865 at newsstand.feed.us (try it!)
Blogs: via RSS

See the video below for more info:

Stupid new tropicana packaging

anonymous — Fri, 5 Dec 2008 18:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Awesome day out

anonymous — Thu, 4 Dec 2008 11:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

I love winter driving

anonymous — Wed, 3 Dec 2008 21:12:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Feed.Us intro video

anonymous — Wed, 3 Dec 2008 20:12:00 CST

Here's a quick (less than 4 minutes) video of me setting up Feed.Us on a new site FeedUsDemo.com.

Why we do what we do

anonymous — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:11:00 CST

I spent most of the day creating a new site for a local community organization.

Of course it uses Feed.Us. The webmaster can email in new announcements and schedules. And the site grabs a flickr RSS feed so that members can email photos to Flickr and have them automatically added to the site.

But I was a little frustrated. I wanted to spend just 1-2 hours and but after 4-5 hours I was still plugging away. I was taking so much time away from making/improving Feed.Us.

But then it hit me: This is improving feed.us.

How many other website software providers actively use their own product? I do every day. If I'm not posting to the PackerBackerBlog.com (the top ranked packer blog in google, btw), I'm helping a beta customer make a new site or operating one of the Feed.Us network of sites (blog, help site, etc).

Creating and operating websites is what we do and it's why Feed.Us is in our blood!

Feed.Us loves Zaca Tacos

anonymous — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:11:00 CST

John and Rick visit Zaca Tacos and show you how it's done:

Publish everywhere with Feed.Us

anonymous — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:11:00 CST

We've just about wrapped up the 'new' interface on Feed.Us and we are in the process of migrating beta customers to the new interface. After a few weeks of testing, we'll be ready to open up Feed.Us to all customers.

Meanwhile, we're finishing up a couple syndication projects. One of our main goals with Feed.Us is to be able to import content from a variety of sources and then export that content anywhere. This is the idea of "publish everywhere".

Currently, FeedUs customers can import content from email, XML and RSS. We'd also like to be able to import ical calendar files and Google's calendar XML.

Feedus currently lets customers publish to any website via javascript widget and serverside (non javascript) widget. They can export to an RSS feed or XML. We're about to finish a Facebook application so that customers can add articles to any profile. Integration with Google and Mac calendar files will come shortly as well.

Another project we're working on is exporting content to Amazon for selling news/articles on the Kindle. Publishers will be able to import their content from a variety of sources and then send that content to Amazon for the Kindle.

Feed.Us is a great content management platform, but it also will be a powerful syndication platform as well.

*This article was published to the FeedUsBlog via an email from Gmail.

New feature on feed.us

anonymous — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:11:00 CST

I'm emailing this post to my site from my blackberry. I think it's really cool to be able to use gmail, outlook, a blackberry or an iPhone to post to a website. That is all!

The Obama Web Campaign

anonymous — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:11:00 CST

I spent several hours reading about Obama's web success. I have decided to write a summary of my research here.

But before I do, I want to address something that struck me. There seems to be some myth that the Obama people created some sort of digital trojan horse that magically carried the candidate to victory on November 4. Omar Wasow wrote the following on theroot.com: "Like John F. Kennedy before him with his masterful exploitation of television, Barack Obama proved that a new medium can not merely impact, but completely transform presidential politics." Others describe Obama as the first 'open source' candidate.

Surely Obama was able to harnass the power of his supporters online, but there is no secret Web weapon to Obama's success. The folks from Blue State aren't eons better than the people at 3EDC. Obama and his brand clearly motivated more Americans to vote for him and that remarkable message also inspired millions of people to organize, collect, network, donate and proselytize for Obama on the Internet.

Here is my summary of the Obama campaign web efforts. If I've missed something, please comment?

1. Campaign Website:
The official Obama campaign website barackobama.com is essentially the same as the official McCain site johnmccain.com

2. Social Networking -
my.barackobama.com (MOB) was a secondary website, the Obama campaign's version of Facebook. Just like Facebook (and created/run by Facebook founder Chris Hughes), M.BO.com was the place to meet and find other Obama supporters. That was sort of the crux. But the big deal was the tools available to Obama supporters on MOB: registered members could create events, invite their friends/supporters to events/rallies, develop their own fundraising drives (with a reward system built in), and organize phoneathons (groups in MN called likely voters in NV etc). This "member center" was also particularly important to fight the obama rumors (muslims, friend of Osama, no pledge, etc), it armed the supporters with defensive materials. According to TechPresident.com, MOB boasted 35,000 local organizing groups and over 200,000 events.

Facebook: Obama had an official Facebook page, but so did Mccain. Obama finished with around 2.5 million facebook "friends" versus McCain's 625,000. Obama also gained 20% of that 2.5m in the final weeks before election day.

But Having a official profile is 1/10 of the power of Facebook. The power of Facebook is when millions of people use Facebook to prosletize to their Friends. I estimate about 1/2 of the Facebook friend-friend communications (status, wall posts, etc) was election related and a large majority was pro-Obama and/or anti-McCain. (On the eve of the election, I asked via Facebook 'status' why folks were voting for Obama. I received 15 replies in an hour and none in favor of McCain.)

3. Online video

Online video is probably where the most interesting developments happened.

The campaign paid for and organized videos and films that popped up on Youtube, Facebook and other web video outlets. Hollywood loves obama so there are plenty of talented people who could make videos and music that really resonated with the youngins. Sarah Silverman's video is a great example, but there were scores of videos and films made about/in favor of Obama.

Another example is the "nonvoter" video. This was a late campaign move via MoveOn.org. It was built to be passed on amongst supporters to undecideds. But it was so well produced that two McCain voters sent it to me the day before the election. This really wasn't anything new. That 'church sign generator' is about 7 years old. But the timing and production value was brilliant.

Ads: All of Obama's ads were uploaded to Youtubeand watched for 14.5 million hours, the equivalent of $47m on TV according to Joe Trippi. Also on Youtube, The Huffington Post's 'Off the Bus' group recorded everything that McCain and Palin had to say and uploaded to Youtube so that volunteers could fact check McCain and Palin later in the election.

Live, online video from every campaign event via ustream was a really nice touch. I'm actually surprised this wasn't/hasn't been used more.

The one thing Obama didn't do a lot of, but probably will, is create personal messages for supporters and distribute via Youtube, etc. Quick, simple, effective way to reach a crapload of people directly. Probably better to reach his own supporters than an ad or infomercial. (Obviously the youtube nation was mostly Obama supporters - to reach an alternative audience, TV ads and that infomercial were still necessary).

4. Mobile:

According to Bloomberg, Obama campaign spent several million on last minute text messages to mostly young folks.

But Twitter is probably where the campaign did the most mobile activities. A Twitter "account" was setup in late 2007 by the Obama campaign. The 'official' Obama twitter sent personal Obama messages and event info to supporters via Twitter text message or on Twitter.com. Each message was likely written by a staffer but felt as if it was coming straight from Obama.

But the real use of Twitter was the Twitter commmunity. Again, like Facebook - Twitter's power for Obama was individuals sending messages amongst themselves. I'd say that Twitter members were about 90% in favor of Obama and in an almost cultlike fashion. (I mentioned, once, that I wasn't going to vote for Obama and lost several 'followers' instantly. Twitter isn't a democracy.)

Supporters also wrote Twitter API enabled "bots" and websites in support of obama. Most interesting was votereport.us which tracked messages about Obama. During election day, people texted messages to VoteReport via Twitter in order to signal their vote for Obama. A nice animation of those messages appears here.

5. Online Ads:

Obama spent a record amount of online advertising - more than $8 million. Which is actually not very much if you compare what was spent by both campaigns on TV. But it's very telling where the campaign spent money online: Almost half with Google ($3.5m).

That means search advertising. It also suggests that other kinds of web advertising just don't work. Search advertising was likely purchased to ensure that people found the right website after a search in Google. I would assume that they did some pretty sophisticated search research so they knew what people were searching for and could redirect those people to the correct answers on Obama campaign websites. For example - "obama muslim" search would route to a myth area of Obama's site.

6. Houdini:

Newsweek first reported the existance of "Houdini", the Obama campaigns GOTV (get out the vote) tracker. Basically it's a web based tracking program that allows the campaign to see who has voted where and when.

A neat, personal description is here. In a nutshell: at each polling place, an Obama supporter watched the polls and checked off names in an mobile application (iphone). That application sent the information to a central database. And as people voted across the country, their names evaporated (like Houdini) off of the Obama GOTV list.

"Every time someone came in to vote, their names were entered into a computer system and their names disappeared or escaped, Houdini-like, from the call and walk lists."

The Houdini Project is likely just one of the campaign's internal applications. They likely had lots of internal applications and databases that they could tap to see how the campaign was evolving. Data mining is not new. But the ability to see live data and visualize large amounts of data is one of the most interesting developments for future campaigns.

7. Donations:

Like #1 above, Obama campaign didn't do anything really different than McCain/Palin in the donations area. Yet Obama shattered all records and raised $150 million in September alone. The average donation size was less than $100, according to campaign manager David Plouffe. (That likely misrepresents the numbers. There were probably plenty of $5 donations that offset plenty of $2300 donations.)

I haven't seen any data on this, but I would surmise that not only did Obama get more people to donate to his campaign, he probably received tons of repeat donors. I bet there were thousands of people who paid as much as they could every month.

Summary/Analysis

1. McCain/GOP demographics aren't web users. These people trend older and more rural. McCain could have had Google running his digital operations - wouldn't have mattered. The target audience doesn't conjugate online. Obama's core group however, is web savvy. Of the 5 people that contacted me about Obama before the primary and election, 4 were 30ish, stay-at-home moms.

2. Web creators lean left. The people who invent, design and create web applications are predominantly liberal.

3. Power of the People. Most of Obama's success isn't from whiz-bang new technology. It's the candidate's connection with voters that creates the opportunity for those people to build a network for the candidate. It's the same offline as online. McCain's story just didn't resonate. I like what Seth Godin wrote about this.

4. Power of the People part 2. The record donations weren't generated by some fancy new web trick. More people gave more often.

My Facebook obama query

anonymous — Mon, 3 Nov 2008 23:11:00 CST

I "pinged" my Facebook friend list with the following question: "I would really like everyone voting for obama to tell me one reason why I should". I was looking for folks to tell me why they're going to vote for Obama on Tuesday.

Here are the responses:

"David Sedaris said it best in the New Yorker: "I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?” To be undecided in this election is to pause ... Read Morefor a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked. I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?"

"Two words: Sarah Palin. And three more words: George W. Bush."

"Colin Powell, David Brooks, The Economist, CC Goldwater, Christopher Buckley, Bill Weld, Jim Leach, Lincoln Chafee, Scott McClellen, Susan Eisenhower...there are more--but you should vote for the guy who can best handle domestic and foreign policy--and appeal to level headed voters who normally vote with the other ... Read Moreticket. Voting for Obama won't make you a Liberal."

"because kooks who think obama is a terrorist vote for mccain. you don't want to be a kook."

"she's got a point Rick. Also, you have to look at, if something happens to the president, who do you eventually want to run the country, Palin or Biden? Personally, I'd choose Biden over Palin any day:)"

"Because I thought you had some sense."

"if i only had one reason, i would have to just plain go with sarah. but i'd also like to point to the environment, abortion rights and general intelligence level. gobama, rick. gobama."

"I'm attaching a link to the Tax Policy Center's breakdown of the impact each tax plan will have on you: http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/candidates_taxproposals_tpc/index.htm As for the rest of Jay's comment above, please reread Rachel's."

"Have you read this article?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/opinion/24fri1.html?pagewanted=3&hp"

"Or this one? http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-chicago-tribune-endorsement,0,1371034.story. The Trib has never endorsed a Democrat for president in its entire history."

"Nader for Democracy, the other two for Kleptocracy. Or follow George Carlin's advice: screw hope, the public sucks, we get the politicians we deserve. Obama is a nice, smart man who very likely lacks the experience, will, and luck to make Washington as 5% as good as his fans think he is. Let alone Milwaukee, or Iraq. Obama and his messianic cult... Read More is perhaps the best argument for voting for McStinko. At least with McCain at the helm people would be more uppity about the gov. Under Obama--same wars, same wall street casinos, same pork, same everything...but suddenly it's all cool. I'm a little apprehensive about that."

"first of all, you must understand the moral imperative of mutual responsibility, and that it doesn't mean "reditribution of wealth". I am a business owner, and i want my employees to be able to go the doctor when they are sick. Does that make me a socialist?"

"It's more of a question of whose moral imperatives and which ones should be mandated by the state (whose power comes from the threat of violence), if any."

I was hoping for comments that had something to do with Obama's "issues" webpage.

Something like...

"Obama wants to pay our teachers more."

"Obama believes in government sponsored programs to increase the use of alternative energies and fuels."

"Obama is going to make sure that our government helps every citizen pay for healthcare."

"Obama wants to our government to spend $50 billion to 'jumpstart' the economy."

Even better...

"Obama will give a tax cut, or even a tax refund, to 95 percent of Americans."

A quick tour of the new Feed.Us interface

anonymous — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:10:00 CST

We've been working the last 4-5 months on an interface for Feed.Us.

The new interface highlights the "Sections" concept (that was built after the old interface). But the main reason was to make Feed.Us a lot easier to use with new ajaxy functionality.

Check out the tour. And thanks to the PackerBackerBlog for trying it out!

A bunch of Terms of Service

anonymous — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:10:00 CST

I'm writing the TOS for Feed.Us right now. Luckily, I've been gathering Terms of Service (or "Terms of Use") from different online services.

The first TOS we had at 1871 was written by our lawyer and then heavily modified by me because I understood the service more than he did. As you can imagine, we paid too much for that. I knew that I'd have to write another one someday so I began collecting in order to save $$$.

Most of these are publishing-related because 1871 and Feed.Us are publishing services.

All the files are text because I always save them into notepad files. You can download them (right click) or view in the browser.

30-boxes
basecamp
blogger
carbonite
dabble
electric-checkbook
gmail
godaddy-hosting
google-admanager
google-analytics
google-apps
microsoft-partner
num-sum
snipperoo
speaklight
twitter
wordpress
writeboard
yahoo-hosting

Please post a comment (below) if there's a problem with one of the links.

Be authentic

anonymous — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:10:00 CST

Sorry for the 'inside baseball' here. Gary Vaynerchuk speaks about Britney Spears and Obama's use of Twitter. Here's the video:

There's going to be a big marketing move to social networks for celebrities and pro athletes. And it's a perfect opportunity for these famous folks: the chance to get close and become "friends" with fans.

But Gary (in the video) makes a great point in the above video. It can't be a handler.

If it's not authentic, it's a waste of everyone's time .

Predicting $GOOG Q3

anonymous — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:10:00 CST

Every Google quarter I try to extrapolate my Google Adsense earnings and Adwords spending to try to determine if GOOG will beat analyst expectations.

I compare my Adsense (aka the "Google Network") from the same quarter of the previous year. My sites (travel) are very cyclical. I've had some increase with better SEO, so I compare numbers that don't change: the click thru rates (percentage of visitors that click on an ad) and the price per click (that I'm paid by Google).

For Adwords (aka "Google Properties"), again I look at numbers that are comparable. I look at the clickthru percentage (the number of google searchers that click on an ad) and what I pay per click.

(BTW I can't give actual numbers because that's against the TOS and I don't want to piss off mighty GOOG.)

When I looked at Q2 2008, not much changed. My revenue via Adsense was level (more clicked in 2008 at a slightly less rate) but Adwords was up a little bit in 2008 (more clicks per impression at about the same price). My data would have suggested a solid quarter (Google missed).

For 3rd quarter (again comparing 2008 to 2007), things are weird. With my Adsense, I'm making less money from Google this quarter vs 2007, despite making more on each click (ie less people are clicking on the ads).

Adwords is where it looks bad. It looks like Google is struggling to deliver my daily budget. Google had to give me more impressions because less people clicked on my ads. HOWEVER, I paid half as much for each click as I did in Q3 2007.

So, my analysis is that it's not going to be a great quarter for Google. Google's network is probably about the same, but it's search properties are not keeping up with Q3 2007.

Disclosure: I own shares of Google that will be under water until $468.

Pet project: Milwaukee web tv show network

anonymous — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:10:00 CST

Video below. The cat jumps into my lap at one point in the video, in case you're wondering what the heck that was.

Here's a preview link to the show site

UPDATE: This great Ad Age article talks about the opportunities with web tv shows.

Some Facebook stats

anonymous — Thu, 2 Oct 2008 16:10:00 CST

30 million people visit Facebook everyday.

4 million (15%) are kids ages 12-18.

13 million (44%) are 18-24 years old.

7.5 million (25%) are 25-34.

35% of Facebook users use FB more than a cellphone.

Facebook users average 3 visits per day.

Feed.Us featured on the Thirsty Developer Podcast

anonymous — Wed, 1 Oct 2008 19:10:00 CST

Feed.Us was recently featured on the Thirsty Developer, a .Net podcast. We were interviewed by Microsoft's Larry Clarkin last month and the interview is now up.

Larry refers to Feed.Us as "content management in the cloud". We wish we had thought of that!

Thanks to Larry for getting us on and for enduring the TGI Fridays veggie food.

You can listen or download the MP3 of the podcast here.

Google Yourself

anonymous — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:09:00 CST

Google me. I'm the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 6th, 7th results on the first page of a Rick Stratton Google search.

Why is this important? Because there's a gay porn star named Rick Stratton. He starred in hits like "Bone Ultimatum". (I won't link to any site for fear that it will jump that Rick Stratton up in the Google juice.)

There's also a hypnotist named Rick Stratton (aka the "hypnoRICK". Get it?!). We compete for that top spot in Google. And an emmy winning make-up artist named Rick Stratton. There are 50 publicly listed Rick Strattons in the US, according to Intelius.

But I'm the master of the Rick Stratton google search. It's a battle. I own the top spot and I will control it. It's essential to my business that people can find me. If I can't make me the top spot -- how can Feed.Us customers hope to be the top spot in their industry?

But what about you?

I think that it's essential for you as well. People Google you all the time. What do they find?

If you're John Smith, you're screwed. There's little you can do to insure that people find you. (Hint pay for some google ads.)

If your name is less common -- how will people find you? You may not want to show, that's fine. But if you want people to find you -- or you don't want people to find your gay porn star alter ego -- what do you do?

1. A website: The key to my site is that I've followed some very simple google optimization rules. And I own rickstratton.net. I have neglected the important URL SEO rule, but that's a trick that I can add later on.

2. A blog: The big blog services have mucho Google juice. Just setting up a blog on Typepad or Blogger with minimal posts and you can get to the first page in Google within a few weeks. Just make sure you put your name in the blog's title.

3. Linked in or Facebook: These social networking sites have beaucoup google jugo, especially Linkedin. Get a Linkedin or Facebook profile, and you will probably be on that Google first page within weeks.

4. Wikipedia: When all else fails, there's wikipedia. I have a client that shares the same name with a pro golfer and a rock star. He's Google screwed, right? Thank you Wikipedia. I started a Wikipedia page about him. He's actually wikipedia worthy, a very interesting guy. But it worked - first page of the Google results.

So remember, unless you want people to think you're a gay porn star, get some Google juice.

Ad results on 37signals job board

anonymous — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:09:00 CST

I took out an ad for a web designer on the 37 signals job board. I have been trying to find a regular "go-to" designer for projects that fall into my lap.

I have had mixed results with Craigslist in the past. I hoped that the folks who read Signal v. Noise would also be the ones responding to the ads.

I was not disappointed. I think I found someone on the very first response. And he's in Indiana, not India (if you've taken an ad on Craigslist you know what I'm referring to).

Of the 35 people who responded, I found six people who I would like to learn more about. That's based on their response and the work examples they sent.

Here are some other results from my search:

Location: London, NewJersey, Florida, Conn, Penn, Pakistan, Vancouver, Montreal, Serbia (2), Romania, Argentina (3), Madison, Miami, Germany, Georgia, Chile, India (2), NYC, Kansas, Utah

Developer, not designer: 3

Poor grammar/misspellings: 4

Porn links: 1

Word docs: 4 (total turnoff!)

"Outsourced India IT Solutions: 1

Best line: "My WebFu is strong."

More on "The Doorman"

anonymous — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:09:00 CST

At least 5 people, every week, visit this site via Google, looking for more information about "The Doorman" aka Mark Simons.

Well, On Milwaukee obviously realizes the drawing power of The Doorman so now they've got some more details. And it's a great article, too.

OnMilwaukee.com: Enjoying the view from the best seat in the house

(btw, that's my mom standing behind Mark)

Syndicating news articles using Feed.Us

anonymous — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:09:00 CST

One of the great features with Feed.us is the ability to add/edit/write/manage/etc content across multiple publications. I currently use one Feed.Us account to manage articles on my 37 travel-related websites (like Caribbean Travel News).

There are two features that make this especially easy. The first is our "categories". Categories are similar to "tags" on blog systems. You can add a category on the fly and any one article can be added to any number of categories. For example, a story could be added to the "news", "Illinois news", "political news", and "Illinois political news" categories.

Each category creates a "feed" of articles that can be added to any website with just a few lines of code. So if you've got a special section or an upcoming event, a new section of your website can be added for a new category within just a few minutes.

But these categories can also be used across separate publications/websites. This is where syndication gets interesting.

The customer in question (let's call them X) produces real estate news for daily and weekly newspapers. Currently X has to login to separate CMSes for each publication and post each story. So X's writers have to be schooled in many different systems. It's a real pain.

Feed.Us can simplify the process. With Feed.Us, X can give each of its partners some custom Feed.Us code and one local file. Within a few minutes, X's partner can install Feed.Us on their website. Now X can use Feed.Us to control pages on the partner website without any access to their CMS.

An example? The FeedUsBlog. Posts on the FeedUsBlog also show up on Feed.Us's homepage. Feed.Us is the application, so it's hosted on our fancy servers at the fancy data center. But FeedUsBlog is hosted on cheap servers over at Godaddy. The same articles appear in both places, by just selecting the right categories.

If you'd like to learn more, contact me about it: Rick at feed dot us.

Stuff worth paying attention to

anonymous — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:09:00 CST

I've been sick for almost three weeks but finally feeling better. So it's time to talk a little more about Social networking optimization.

While I was out, Seth Godin wrote a terrific post that has a lot to do with Social Networking Optimization. It's a long article, but very worthwhile.

I am often struck by the links, photos, graphics, articles, forwarded emails, etc that people in my network send to me. Often I wonder why they bothered to share. Other times I'm thankful that they did. Seth speaks to this, with the following:

"A lot of the stuff marketers make is unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk that consumers merely tolerate. But some of it is not spam, it's content. Stuff worth reading, worth paying for (at the very least, worth paying attention to.)"

Here's the idea: everything you share within your network should be worthwhile, valuable, etc.

A video of your kid walking around would probably would only matter to his grandparents (however a video of your kid in a major wipeout might just be entertainment). Any article, any link, Powerpoint presentation that you share, remember to consider...

Is it worth it?

This is the third post in a series about Social Networking Optimization (SNO) aka Social Media Optimization. I am attempting to flesh out some ideas regarding social networking for personal marketing and career/business advancement.

Podcasting, MP3 storage for web radio shows

anonymous — Tue, 9 Sep 2008 23:09:00 CST

We here at the Feed.Us headquarters have worked with a number of radio show producers. I thought I would share some insights about getting radio show MP3 podcasts online.

1. Domain: Buy a separate domain name for your shows. You don't have to make a separate site, it's really for the storage of the files. Like WBBQPodcasts.com or something.

2. Hosting - I'd buy a cheap hosting plan, like Godaddy. You can get 150 Gigs and 1500 gig transfer for $7 a month.

2. FTP - Funny how old school FTP has become, but it's still the easiest to upload large MP3 files. Create a folder for each show and save the FTP folder on your desktop.

3. Now with the new domain and FTP, you'll have your podcast URL. Example: WBBQPodcasts.com/showname/filename.mp3

You can just give out the MP3 file names on your website. But you can also use Feed.Us, Feedburner, widgets and iTunes to get more listeners. Details:

4. Use Feed.Us to create an RSS feed (you'll have to contact us for an account). You should create RSS feeds for each show.

5. "Burn" your MP3s into iTunes using Feedburner.com. Feedburner is setup to automatically submit your podcasts to iTunes as long as there is a URL in the body of the RSS feed (Feed.Us can automate this for you).

6. "Stream" your shows using a Web Widget. You know how it's really nice to play a video on Youtube? That's a flash Web Widget and there are tons of free widgets that you can use to allow your website visitors to easily access your shows. It's better than making them download the show.

I like the ones at WidgetBox. You can find others using a Google search for "flash mp3 player".

You could actually give out the code to the Web Widget and let others display your shows on their own Websites as well.

If you have any related questions, feel free to email me. rick at feed dot us.

In time for college football: fight songs

anonymous — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:08:00 CST

Here's a flash player with the best college football fight songs, including: Notre Dame Down the Line, Wisconsin On Wisconsin and Budweiser song, Michigan Lets Go Blue and Hail to the Victors,and finally USC's Fight On.

More about Social Networking Optimization

anonymous — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:08:00 CST

Do you use Facebook or have a blog? Have you sent a link to your network about something you're involved in? That's social networking optimization. SNO is a deliberate, systematic, and creative approach to leverage your network for promotional purposes. And everyone can benefit; effective social networking can be a tool to help you achieve your career and/or business goals.

If you are focused, you can utilize your online network to sell more products, get a better job, get more clients, start or sell a business.

How?

1. Consider what you are going to promote. What are your goals? What are you passionate about? How do you want to get ahead?

2. Then build your network. Use facebook or LinkedIn (or both) and build an audience out of friends, collegues and old aquaintainces. Don't be afraid to re-introduce yourself, this is about building your audience. These people aren't just your friends, they are also potential customers. This can also be as simple as creating an email newsletter list.

3. Choose your weapons. A blog, a regular email newsletter, share links in Facebook, making a weekly video on your mac laptop. There are such great and simple publishing tools at your finger tips.

4. Next: It's time to promote yourself.

That's kind of a strange concept but you need to begin to think about what you're passionate about. There is something in your head that is of interest to your audience.

What's next?

You've got an audience "audience". What are you going to say and how will you communicate?

That's next in this series. I'll also share some examples of how people exactly people have benefited from SNO.

Mariotti brainstorm: the Interweb

anonymous — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:08:00 CST

Sun Times columnist Jay Mariotti newsflash:

"Mariotti said in a phone interview Tuesday night that he decided to quit after it became clear while in China that sports journalism had become 'entirely a Web site business. There were not many newspapers there.' He added that most of the journalists covering the Games were 'there writing for Web sites.'"

Think he's resigning because he's bitter and disquested that no one reads newspapers? No, turns out the Web is the FUTURE!

"He 'is talking with a lot of Web sites' and added that the future of his business 'sadly is not in newspapers.'"

Maybe the Internet isn't a big truck or a series of tubes... Maybe it's the future!

SNO is about YOU

anonymous — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:08:00 CST

I spoke, this morning, with political consultant about social networking optimization. We are working on some ideas for a company that he is starting.

And then an idea popped into my head regarding search engine optimization (SEO) and Social networking optimization (SNO):

> SEO is for companies. SNO is for individuals.

SNO is about YOU. It's about optimizing your communications on the Web.

And it's not just for getting more traffic to a website, it's about reaching an audience, spreading your wisdon and gaining influence.

More ideas about SNO coming soon...

This is the second post in a series about Social Networking Optimization (SNO) aka Social Media Optimization. I am attempting to flesh out some ideas regarding social networking for personal marketing and career/business advancement. Previous posts in this series are located here.

Brewers and CC win versus Astros

anonymous — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:08:00 CST

CC Sabathia doubles home Hardy and Fielder as the Crew down the Astros.

Rick on NPR's "The Takeaway"

anonymous — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 08:07:00 CST

I was on the NPR show "The Takeaway" to discuss the Favre situation. Don't ask me how they found me, I have no clue. But I'm more than happy to complain about my hero. Click the "play" button to listen.

Oil will go to < $100/barrel

anonymous — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:07:00 CST

The price of a barrel of oil has dropped almost $15 in the last 9 days. That's like 10% drop in a week!

I can't stop thinking about a editorial that ran in the WSJ three weeks ago about the role of "perception" in the oil market, by Martin Feldstein. Nutshell: Dr. Feldstein said that the perception of higher oil prices (at that time it was $140) drives speculation and pushes our prices higher, not demand. But, that some simple changes in perception will cause the price to sink and that price change will will then trigger a larger supply. He's the economist so I'll quote him:

"When will an owner of oil reduce production or increase inventories instead of selling his oil and converting the proceeds into investible cash? A simplified answer is that he will keep the oil in the ground if its price is expected to rise faster than the interest rate that could be earned on the money obtained from selling the oil. The actual price of oil may rise faster or slower than is expected, but the decision to sell (or hold) the oil depends on the expected price rise...
...Hence, with no change in the current demand for oil, the expectation of a greater future demand and a higher future price caused the current price to rise. Similarly, credible reports about the future decline of oil production in Russia and in Mexico implied a higher future global price of oil – and that also required an increase in the current oil price to maintain the initial expected rate of increase in the price of oil.

Once this relation is understood, it is easy to see how news stories, rumors and industry reports can cause substantial fluctuations in current prices – all without anything happening to current demand or supply."

So how has perception changed? Well, it looks like we may get drilling in the US at some point in the future. "May" and "some point". Very powerful words - 10% drop!

The airlines drop flights. JoshJS sells his car. People stop driving to starbucks. SUV sales are in the dump (used small cars currently sell for more than similar mileage used SUVs).

Huge changes in US demand caused what? The price to continue to go up! But the annoucement that the US may start drilling at some point in the future and the price drops 10%!

I spoke to my dad about that editorial tonight. Of course he perfectly summarized the article. He also added: "I bet that oil is under $100 soon". Interesting bet.

Again if you have a subscription to the WSJ online, go read that editorial. It was great.

Facebook privacy stuff that you should know that they don't tell you

anonymous — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:07:00 CST

Here are seven things that Facebook doesn't tell you about Facebook that you should know. Mostly this is just privacy crap, but I think it's important to remember when you're playing around in Facebook.

Why doesn't Facebook tell you this stuff? Because Facebook was created to help guys meet chicks and hook up. Sure it's evolved, but that's still at it's core and it's important to remember.

1. Personal info

For reasons I'll describe below, more than just your friends will see your profile. So don't put personal info that you wouldn't want strangers knowing, like your address (see #2 below). Unless you're desperate, then you should probably put directions to your bedroom (joke).

2. networks

I see this all the time. The default FB setting is that anyone in your networks can see your profile.

This is fine if it's your school, work, etc. It's not good if you join your city's network - then everyone in Milwaukee can see everything about you.

Configure it so that only friends can see your profile. Privacy > profile. (I would do profile and basic info and personal info all set to "only friends".)

3. Your Friends

Who can see your friends? That's something you should consider. Default is anyone on Facebook can see who you are friends with. Change this in privacy > profile.

At the very least, block "public" people from viewing your friend list. That's actually a good idea. privacy > search

4. Search settings

I live it open. I want to find people from way back, and I let facebook search find me. However, if you're a movie star, you might not want this. privacy > search

You can also block google from indexing your profile, btw. privacy > search. If you've got a goofy profile photo (or you are ugly), you may want to consider this.

5. The News Feed:

This is that page that everyone gets after logging in and it's an important one.

Almost everything you do (on facebook at least) gets published in your news feed. So if you don't want your girlfriend to know that your now friends with your exgirlfriends (or exboyfriends for folks who swing that way), then you can change that option. Privacy > News feed

6. Comments on photos/videos

Here's one that I cannot seem to control. When you post photos or videos to facebook, others can comment on said photos/videos. That's usually fun.

However, for some reason, Facebook allows the friends of the commenter to view the comment, and thus the photo/video. So those naked photos of you that you thought just your friends can see? Someone comments and you're now more famous (or less famous) than you intended.

7. One last one... photos

This is just my personal annoyance. Professionally shot photos are just cheesy. Also, cutting out your spouse or ex-spouse? That's just wrong. And if you're really ugly but your photo makes you look hot? That's just mean.

(FYI, these are part of a larger "social networking optimization" consulting project that I've been working on.)

You hate Feed.Us, what do you do?

anonymous — Wed, 9 Jul 2008 16:07:00 CST

I recently tried a new cell phone voicemail service called YouMail. It's supposed to replace my AT&T voicemail and send me emails with caller ID and an mp3. Pretty sweet, right? Well, it doesn't seem to work on my phone. And they had me turn off my AT&T voicemail and now I have no voicemail! Now I'm worse off.

This kind of crap really pisses us off. At Feed.Us, we realize that you might not love us. And you might want to leave. We hope not, but we understand that it could happen. So we're going to try to make it really easy to leave:

1. Your site. If you've setup a site with Feed.Us, the site is on YOUR servers and uses YOUR platform of choice (or your developer's). There's no special templates, no fancy "themes". If you view the source on this page, it looks just like a normal flat file. Go ahead and try this if you're using Drupal or WordPress. You can't "leave" those services very easily.

2. Your content. It's your content. We don't want it, actually. So, if you close your account, we'll delete all of it off of our servers.

3. Take your content to go. Feed.Us is about getting your content in easily (email, RSS import). But we're also about getting your content out easily, too.

Take a look at this link:

http://feed.us/render.aspx?xp=4&id=245&cs=&xs=Default-RawXML&l=feeduscontent&a=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

That's all of the content from this site (the Feed.Us Blog). View the source. It's one big-ass XML file.

Like RSS? You can have your entire archives in RSS as well.

Update regarding YouMail: seems like it was user error. I went through the setup on YouMail again, and bingo it's working. So far, so good.

Best video game ever?

Rick — Wed, 9 Jul 2008 10:07:00 CST

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

Ryan Hunter Reay wins

anonymous — Sun, 6 Jul 2008 21:07:00 CST

Congrats to Ryan Hunter-Reay on his win today at the Watkins Glen Indycar race.

Ryan now has wins on oval, street and road circuits.

Customer Frustration: TCF Bank

anonymous — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:06:00 CST

The Mini Me (my 1 year old) is airplane-crazy. And because of which, we are desperately awaiting this summer's Milwaukee Lakefront Air Expo. Of course, that is, if it's still on. We don't know. The Thunderbirds say it's on. But there's no other reference to it, anywhere. Wikipedia says it's off, due to lack of sponsor.

So I decided to call the old sponsor, TCF Bank, and ask them WTF? Well, that was a mistake.

They're based in Minneapolis. But there's no local business office number, except for a customer service line. The customer service line is IMPOSSIBLE to get through without being a customer because you have to have an account number. How do they get new customers, I wonder?

I finally got through only by incorrectly entering an account number that I don't have. The customer support rep. had no clue and was (surprisingly) instantly annoyed that I didn't have a problem for her. She seemed relieved, actually and enjoyed telling me that she couldn't help me. When I asked her what I could do, she told me that I could hang up. It's against policy to give out any kind of corporate information that would allow me to call the main folks in Minnesota (which I quickly found on their website).

The last thing I did was try to explain that banks make money by bringing in new customers, and since I wasn't a customer, I was an active candidate. "I don't deal with people who aren't customers" she explained.

At the very least I know not to bother setting up an account with TCF for any business stuff.

Recent Feed.Us beta sites

anonymous — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:06:00 CST

We have enjoyed working with some new beta customers. Heck, it's easy to love our customers when we love Feed.Us.

Here's a list of some new sites powered by Feed.Us:

GolfHippie.com - Feed.Us integrated into an ecommerce site.

The penske file - RSS importing website.

Nicolet Home Run Club - team website

Wisconsin Condo Law - SEM website

Wisconsin Bike Law - SEM website

TwitterBotting - twitter news site

WineTweets.com - RSS import and Twitter API website.

Whitefish Massage Therapy - marketing website

NBC rubs

anonymous — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:06:00 CST

Yes, we all will miss Tim Russert. He was a giant. He will be missed this fall, surely.

But my goodness... he wasn't President. NBC get over yourself.

And meanwhile, Katrina part deux is taking out the Midwest. People out here are losing everything. Des Moines looks like New Orleans.

But back to Tim's legacy and how you can prevent heart disease.

Update: Slate agrees!!

The typepad conumdrum

anonymous — Mon, 9 Jun 2008 21:06:00 CST

So you want to move your blog outta typepad/blogger?

Congrats, you can't: the URLs are stuck in Google.

(Fred Wilson has the best description of this problem.)

There are two options, here:

1. Borrow the Typepad URL for a few months.

2. Call Google and have them update their PageRank for you.

Obviously, neither of these are viable. What do you do? I don't know, but I'm searching for a solution.

I'm offering a bounty: If you've got the answer, I'll pay you $1000. You don't have to do the work - just tell me how it can be done.

email me at rick at feed dot us or comment.

More twitterbots

anonymous — Mon, 9 Jun 2008 21:06:00 CST

I'm kind of addicted to Twitterbots. I love the idea of crowd publishing for recreational endeavors like food, wine, books, music. Anything where there's a huge supply and there's a need for recommendations. Mkefood and NYCfood are now live and working. Twit your food and restaurant recommendations for those cities, please.

Meanwhile, last week, I created WineTweets for Fred Wilson. There are now almost 300 people following WineTweets and almost 100 wine suggestions.

The next one is BookTweets. What are you reading?

Also, keep track of twitter bots via TwitterBotting.

The Feed.Us "detail" page

anonymous — Fri, 30 May 2008 23:05:00 CST

I've avoided try to explain this step in FeedUs site setup. It's not that it's a difficult thing to do because it's quick and easy. It's just tricky to explain.

Look at this site (the one you're looking at). It's got the title and teaser on the homepage. It links to a permalink that we generate dynamically. When I write this page, I don't have to create the permalink location. I just have to have one file located on my server called "Detail.asp" (or detail.php, etc) and that file has this code (there's a php version too):

<%
                If (request("c") <> "") Then
                    NewsStandURL = "http://feed.us/render.aspx?xp=2&id=" &request("c") &"&cs=&xs=Default-Title_Body&l=loginname&a=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
                else
                    NewsStandURL = ""%>
                    No content specified.
                <%end if%>

It's a great feature of feedus because it makes some really interesting functionality. You could actually make two files, a default (index) and a detail page and then use feed.us to create your navigation and all the rest of the pages of a site.

Also, using a URL rewrite (like ISAPI rewrite), you can include the page's title out of Feed.us into your URL.

Santa Fe Century success

anonymous — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:05:00 CST

Final stats on our Santa Fe Century:

> 103 miles

> 4000 ft of climbing. Elevations changes from 5900 feet to 7300 feet

> 4 PB&Js, 3 cliff bars. 12 bottles of water.

> 6:04 of riding with 30 minutes of stops.

> Bad sunburn on the arms

Check out the photos and video on Flickr.

Santa Fe Century photos and videos

anonymous — Sat, 17 May 2008 13:05:00 CST

I'm adding photos and videos (via the Flip) to this flickr set. Check it out.

Santa Fe Century

anonymous — Wed, 14 May 2008 22:05:00 CST

On Sunday, I'm riding the Santa Fe Century in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It includes the 15-20% grade, 1/4 mile "heart break hill".

Below is the embed code from MapMyRun.com, a very cool google mapping service. I'm going to download the map to my bike's gps as well.

Btw, when you wake up on Sunday morning, think of us as you're having that second donut (Ollie!).

&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href=&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;http://www.mapmyrun.com/ride/united-states/wi/milwaukee/968861241884&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; mce_href=&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;http://www.mapmyrun.com/ride/united-states/wi/milwaukee/968861241884&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Santa Fe Century&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href=&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-ride/united-states/wi/milwaukee&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; mce_href=&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-ride/united-states/wi/milwaukee&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Find more Bike Rides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Getting started with Feed.Us

anonymous — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:05:00 CST

We've got a series of video help pages up on the Feedushelp blog to help get you started with Feed.us.

1.Adding, editing, managing Website content with Feed.Us

2.Add a directory in Godaddy's hosting

3. Use the Feed.Us Scriptomatic to get the code.

4. Add that Feed.Us code to your website

5. Finally "refresh" aka "publish" your content to your site.

We also need to add one that describes categories. Categories are a little confusing... I will add that next!

Email us or add a comment if you have questions.

Little things cause big problems in AJAX.NET - Subtitle: asp:ControlName is not a known element or RTFM

anonymous — Sun, 11 May 2008 16:05:00 CST

I can't really blame this on anyone but myself. I suppose RTFM probably applies here, but the error seemed misleading as well. In any case, I was attempting to add an AJAX.NET update panel to a page (without reading any tutorials, or manuals, or much of anything else for that manner), because I had seen a demo video or two in the past. Supposedly, it's just drag 'n drop Ajaxification! Woohooo! Well, as it turns out, it is pretty easy, but not quite as easy as drag n' drop (though it is close).

Include the Script Manager.
I saw this on someone's page where AJAX was working, and it wasn't on mine, so I put it on there. As it turn out you need exactly one instance of this on your page. In other words, if you're working in a team environment, and someone else created your Masterpage that uses AJAX (read: it already has the scriptmanager) then you won't need it on yours or you'll get an error (Only one instance of a ScriptManager can be added to the page.) and then you'll beat your head on the desk for a while until it finally occurs to you to check the master page.
<asp:scriptmanager id="ScriptManager1" runat="server"> </asp:scriptmanager>
Drag on the UpdatePanel.
Easy enough... check the toolbox for AJAX Extensions and drag it out where you want your Ajax.
Add a ContentTemplate to the UpdatePanel
This is the part that threw yours truly. I tried adding all my controls directly into the Update panel. To which .NET calmly replied: asp:MultiView is not a known element. Sweet. Thanks guys. So apparently you have to add
<asp:scriptmanager id="ScriptManager1" runat="server"> </asp:scriptmanager> <asp:UpdatePanel ID="UpdatePanel1" runat="server"> <ContentTemplate> <-- YOUR CONTROLS GO HERE!!! ---> </ContentTemplate> </asp:UpdatePanel>
Add your controls to the ContentTemplate
It probably makes sense to the gang that created this stuff... but why wouldn't you include the ContentTemplate when you drag it into the Form in the first place? The only other option there is a Triggers tag... and I doubt that is going to be useful unless you have some content. Oh well... blah blah blah.
Take that puppy out for a walk!
At this point... you should be Rokken like Dokken.

Hopefully this can save someone a little frustration.

xBox "This disk is unreadable" error

anonymous — Thu, 1 May 2008 15:05:00 CST

I regularly get the "This disc is unreadable" error on the old xbox. It happens pretty often. It's pretty annoying.

Since I got GTA4 (which is AWESOME!! LOVE IT!), it's been happening more often.

It's not a disc problem. It happened withing 5 minutes of putting the new DVD in the xbox. It's a problem with the harddrive.

But not according to Microsoft!! Read here... Only causes that MS admits to are disc related. That's bulls*%t.

It only happens with more intense game, like GTA4. It only happens when the game is loading. My theory is that the xbox HD heats up and can't hack it and then gives the error.

(I still love my xbox btw.)

Feed.Us is just for your site's CONTENT

anonymous — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:04:00 CST

We seem to have a tough time explaining this one. Maybe it's because we're not speaking loud enough or frequently. So we'll try it again:

Feed.Us is just for your Website's (or application's) Content.

What do we mean by CONTENT? It's the stuff that's in the center of your site. It's the stuff that gets added regularly and edited. The stuff your readers submit for publication. It's the stuff that's added by the non-techies (how come techies don't write much, besides code?). It's the stuff that you need to add a photo to or make a movie for.

It's your company's news. It's your President's press release. It's your publication's articles. It's your firm's product line. It's the video you made that's on youtube. It's the calendar of your team's games in June. It's a list of famous quotes or favorite recipe. It's a big bunch of important links. The stats of your favorite football team. The directions to your office. That's what we mean by "content".

And Feed.Us only cares about Your Content. In fact, we care A BIG BUNCH about your content. We want to make it REALLY EASY to add more of it, edit it on the go, syndicate it to your partner's site or sell it to a larger publisher. Most of all, save it, store it, and FEED IT to any website, any application, any server hosted anywhere.

What don't we care about? Your site's template. In fact, we don't care what your site looks like. We don't care about What "platform" you use to put your site or where that site is hosted. Because feed.us works with virtually all websites on any server.

Pheew. That was a rant!

Some tips for using Web analytics services

anonymous — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:04:00 CST

by Rick Stratton, Feed.Us founder

I'm a webstats junkie - daily... sometimes several times a day, I sort through the stats on my sites to figure out who's been there and what they looked at and where they came from. The measurements, the tools, the services have changed through the years, but I'm still doing the same digging and I still love doing it.

Webtrends is what we used for a long time. We used their log analysis product. It did a fine job but it hogged a ton of server space/resources. We've moved on to a Google Analytics.

The main reason we changed is because it's free (Google DESTROYED a large segment of the web software market by releasing GA totally free). Also, it works via a javascript on each page, so we didn't have to keep all those logs around anymore. But Google also has made a terrific product. (It could use some improvement but hey... it's free.) Also, Google has done a great job integrating location and 'network properties' of website visitors. (Probably the only real change in analytics since I started my addiction.)

So here is what I do:

1. Set the date: Google defaults to a monthly view of stats. I have to automatically change the date settings to the last week (ok last 24 hours!).

2. Total Visits: this is the number of visitors, but it's not unique. If one person comes back 100 times, then you've got 100 visitors. There's a unique visitor number somewhere, but people care less about this stat these days.

3. Pageviews: the number of visitors x the number of pages they viewed is pageviews.

4. Bounce Rate: bounce rate is confusing. It's good to be low, but not always. Bounce rate means that someone visited one page of your site and then left. If that's your goal - your bounce rate is probably not important. For a site like the DrudgeReport, their bounce rate is like 100%. If you want folks to 'dig deep' then a low bounce rate is better.

5. Some stats get ignored: I don't care much about pages/visit or new visits or avg time.

6. Visitors: Next I look at my visitors - where they came from (map) and if their 'Network Properties' are set. Network Location is probably the most addicting for me. (Nutshell: if your visitor is on an IP address that is identified, it'll show. Most are from a large cable company (Comcast) so you can't tell anything about them. But many corporations are set so you know they came from Microsoft or Adobe, etc. We never had this before 2006 so it's pretty addicting. If you don't run a business-to-business service, this probably doesn't excite you.)

7. Source & Keyword: Next I typically go to look at where and how the visitors came to our site. If you've got a consumer-facing site, this is probably where you need to spend most of your time. Google's "Traffic sources" is awesome. It puts the top sources and keywords on one page. Unfortunately it only shows like 10 at a time.

Google Analytics tip: you can slice pretty much any stat using the "segment" option. For example you can figure out that the person who typed 'calendar xsl tutorial' came from Google, is located in Brisbane, and works for a company called Citec. They also left after 23 seconds (whoops!). Click on the stat you're interested in seeing, and thenuse the "segment" dropdown.

8. Finally "Content": aka the pages on the site that people visited. I like to keep tabs on what is most popular, least popular etc. This is probably where Feed.Us works really well for analytics. If you're using our "detail" page (that dynamically creates asp or php pages), you'll get a nice record of each page and how many folks have visited each one. If you're running a URL re-write program on your server, it'll work nicely with that too.

That's pretty much my strategy. In summary: total users, pageviews, keywords, source and location.

Final Tip: Consultants should like the way that Google lets you give access to different users. It's great for consultants to have one large account but give specific access to clients.

Todd Barry on Chipotle and McDonalds

anonymous — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:04:00 CST

Every time I talk about Chipotle, someone goes, ‘Oh, Chipotle is delicious. Can you believe they were started by McDonald’s?’
Hello?! McDonald’s is delicious, so yes... I can believe that.
It’s not like Ben and Jerry’s opened up a lingerie shop. The world’s greatest restaurant chain taking a stab at another kind of food and hitting it out of the park.
- Todd Barry

Why go Free?

anonymous — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:04:00 CST

We just blogged about our first version. It's coming in June and it's going to be Free. Yes, free as in $0.

It really goes against everything we ever wanted to do with Feed.Us, but yeah we're going to offer a free version. We spent several years not charging enough for our previous venture. So we've done the 'not make enough money' thing before and we've vowed to never do it again.

However, based on a lot of the feedback on our beta version, people are averse to way we are providing our service. We think our method of hosted, SaaS, web services content delivery is simple and thus superior. So we need to provide a way for our future customers to try out Feed.Us without much risk. Thus the free version has become essential.

By the end of the summer, there will be several levels of expanded service with elevated pricing. Longterm, there won't be a free option. We are dedicated to our customers so we're going to limit, cap the number of customers in order to provide the best service we can . We know from years of experience here, that there's a fine line between serving current customers and aquiring new ones. We'd like to have our focus on serving rather than aquiring.

Rest assured, anyone who signs up for the free account will always pay nothing.

This isn't our software - this is your software. We'll always remember that.

Feed.Us free version launching soon

anonymous — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:04:00 CST

We're all very very excited here, right now. Well, we always are pretty excited. But we're especially excited because we're getting very close to launching the first public version of Feed.Us, and it's going to be FREE! And it's coming in JUNE.

This initial version of Feed.Us is going to be simplified and not the full-throttle Feed.Us. Why? Well because we want to make money off this thing, eventually. But the 'Free version' will still be MONEY (pun intended).

So what do we offer?

1. A simple to use CMS that can be used by even your dumbest clients/co-workers. Create stories, calendar events, product guides, how-tos, FAQs, link lists, etc.

2. Some basic 'work flow'. Users can have some basic limits on what they can see and do.

3. Importing from RSS and from email. Writers can submit their articles via Blogger or their blackberry, etc.

4. The Feed.Us "scriptomatic" Web service that makes it really easy to add Feed.Us-hosted content on any site/platform/server.

5. Pre-set Feed.Us: We'll set it up so it works right out of the box, er... screen. With "sections" that are pre-configured for common content: news, calendars, product info, links and video.

6. A simple RSS generator for making a crap-load of RSS feeds 'on the fly'. Burn them into Feedburner, use them on other applications, whatever. It'll be the best thing out there.

7. A startup zip file that has all the stuff you need to setup a feed.us powered site in 15 minutes or less. Just add a domain and hosting.

8. Simple account setup, Reaaaally great help and support. (Help is via video and text. Support is via me.)

We're FIRED UP. So watch our twitter or RSS feed.

Also - why is it free?

New logo

anonymous — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:04:00 CST

Along with the new layout/design of Feed.Us, we're going to change the logo. We like the old one a lot and we like the newer one that we've been using on the new layout.

Here are all of our logos over the last couple of years, back even when it was RSSCMS.com. Any thoughts or comments?

More design thoughts: create newsletters for your audience

anonymous — Thu, 3 Apr 2008 22:04:00 CST

Recently my favorite email newsletter's design went from elegant to horrible.

It made me realize that we should comment about the dying (dead?) art of email newsletters.

We've posted about newsletters in the past. We're really not big fans, really never have been. Actually, we're not fans of any kind of marketing where the target is a single digit response rate. (Update, just checked our data: our previous company's email newsletter application had a 33% open rate and a 26% average click rate. We assume that's about typical?)

The only way to do a newsletter is to think of the effort as customer support. It's not marketing and it's definitely not sales. It's about giving your audience another way to touch you that's convenient to them.

That's why we were so disappointed to see the WSJ's Best of the Web Today newsletter design change at the start of March. I've always enjoyed Best of the Web 's clean, almost elegant newsletter design; It was extremely readable.

On the left is the old version. On the right the new. Why all that space along the left side of the new newsletter? All that space is saving room for advertising.

Hey, we love ads! Advertising makes the web work and grow. But newsletters should probably be advertising free or at least minimal. Why? Newsletters are all about reaching your audience the way they want to be reached. Few people want newsletters anymore. Those that do are very serious about their subscriptions.

So treat your readers with respect and make your newsletter as readable as possible.

More on iPhone and iPod Touch website design

anonymous — Wed, 2 Apr 2008 20:04:00 CST

We're stuck on the topic of iPhone / iPod touch website designing. (But we're also pretty stuck on our iPod Touches and iPhones.)

Browsing is pretty phenomenal on a wifi connection for such a small device. As we've said before, eventually, maybe even now, lots of folks are going to be surfing your website via an iPhone.

One of the dramatic problems that the iPhone creates is with the "pinch". This means taking your thumb and for finger and kinda reverse pinch the screen to make the page magnify. It makes it easier to read text on a non-iphone formated webpage.

It used to be that I'd recommend making a news article webpage as wide as possible in order to make it easier for folks to read. But that's probably not the case any more with the iPhone. It's actually better to be narrow.

Compare these below screenshots (sorry for the crappiness). On the left is the BrewCrewBall.com website (the new design is niice, btw). On the right is "under the fold" of one of the WSJ websites. Neither are formatted for the iPhone. The BrewCrew site is very "pinchable". The WSJ is completely unpinchable.

Why? The center column of the Brewers blog site is 450 pixels wide. The WSJ site is is over 800 pixels wide. Here's the deal: when you pinch the center of the Brewers blog website, it expands perfectly to the right size to read. Expand that WSJ site the same way and you'll have to scroll side to side. It's practically useless on an iphone.

This seems like a minor point, but it's not.

Designing a news site for the iPhone

anonymous — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:03:00 CST

We're making a news site demo for Feed.Us. We're also going to make an iPhone version. I haven't made an iPhone specific site before, so I'm doing a little research. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. If you're a publisher and you don't have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you better run out and get one today. Your site probably sucks on an iPhone. In case you haven't heard, these things are pretty popular -- you're site needs to work on them.

2. ESPN.com SUCKS on an iPhone/Touch. So does My.Yahoo. You need a SEPARATE version of your site for the iphone.

3. Text needs to be huge. Bigger text... much larger... how else do I put this?

4. The "two finger expand" aka "pinching" works, but it's not great. You shouldn't force your readers to use it. Accidental clicks happen too often when I try to "pinch" a page.

5. Best iphone/touch pages I've seen so far:

ESPN's Podcenter for iPhone

New Leader's ThinCloud Twitter app.

6. The iphone/touch screen is 320 pixels wide and 690 pixels tall. That's what you've got to play with. See screenshot below. That's what you've got to work with. (BTW, it's ThinCloud by New Leaders).

New domains

anonymous — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:03:00 CST

I just bought these domains - can you explain the relevance?

FRANKLINDELANOROMANAWSKI.COM
KRUGERINDUSTRIAL.NET
KRUGERINDUSTRIALSMOOTHING.NET
PENDANTPUBLISHING.NET
TYLERCHICKEN.COM

Why are Toyotas so boring?

anonymous — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 10:03:00 CST

Almost nightly, I awake to my neighbor's Toyota Corolla annoying door lock "beep".

Last night, as I lay awake after hearing that annoying, boring, incessant "beeeep beeeep", it got me thinking... is there no more proof that Toyotas are the most boring cars in the world than that ridiculously boring and annoying sound?

It's confirmed. Most boring vehicles in the world.

In order to make your Toyota less boring and make your neighbors happier, here are the directions to remove that ridiculous noise. This should work for any Toyota (btw, it's in your owner's manual).

1) Unlock the Toyota
2) Open Drivers door
3) Insert the key into the ignition
4) Remove it immediately
5) Reinsert the key and turn the ignition to ON (within 5 seconds of step 6)
6) Wait for the normal startup beeping to stop
7) Push the unlock or lock or alarm button twice within 10 seconds.
8) The Toyota should beep twice to confirm the change.
9) If it doesn't confirm, keep pressing the unlock button until the it beeps 2 times confirming the change.

(No offense if you own/drive a Toyota. I'm sure you're a nice person. If you own a Prius, I seriously doubt your ability to even choose your own clothes, again, no offense.)

iPhone/Touch apps

anonymous — Sat, 8 Mar 2008 21:03:00 CST

I finally got an iPod Touch (or as I call it, an "iTouch"). I don't want/need a new phone because I love my blackberry. But I want something that can go wifi with a bigger screen. Also, for Feed.Us, I need to know what all the hubbub is about.

What took me so long? I don't care about the phone. I don't care about music (on the iTouch, I love music), I don't care about movies. It's all the wifi web connection. It's pretty amazing on my home wifi. My Yahoo, Drudge Report, google feed reader, sports scores.

Am I typing this via the iTouch? No. Because of FeedUs? FeedUs works great on the iPhone/Touch. It's the keyboard. I cannot type on it. Would take me an hour. The keyboard needs to be improved if Apple thinks they can take business away from the Blackberry.

Other, Initial reactions:

1) You need to have a separate iphone/touch site. Sure, any site works... but the small links/text suck big time. Because it's hard to identify the mobile safari browser from the non-mobile, it's probably best to just make a separate site and buy a new URL (like iDrudgeReport). Also, you gotta promote it.

2) Mobile apps are going to be huge. Jason Fried said it this week. There's browser-based apps and then there are true mobile apps (like desktop apps). I don't know the difference yet on the iphone/touch, but there's a huge difference for blackberry (i.e. the facebook blackberry app). If I was starting from scratch, I would concentrate on making a series of dedicated iphone/touch apps and make similar versions for blackberry and then android.

3) Looks like the adsense links dont work. Javascript thing?

FYI I cannot WAIT to use this at Brewers games. The 'crew has an open wifi connection for media. I can sit there and get the ESPN scoreboard.

College fight song MP3 Ringtones

anonymous — Fri, 7 Mar 2008 12:03:00 CST

I made a few MP3 ringtones out of some college fight song wave files. Feel free to download...

Michigan's Let's Go Blue and Hail to the Victors

Notre Dame's Victory March

Wisconsin's On Wisconsin and the Bud Song (you said it all)

USC's Fight On

Illinois' Oskee Wow Wow (for Jake)

To download: point your phone to http://tachophobia.com/wireless/detail.asp?c=5315 . Most phones should allow you to click on the link for the song and then, via the browser, download and install any MP3 as a ringtone. It's especially easy to do with a blackberry, btw.

Nice life, tom.

anonymous — Tue, 4 Mar 2008 08:03:00 CST

Nice life, tom.

So why the heck did we pick .NET?

anonymous — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:02:00 CST

by John Welborn, Feed.Us VP of Engineering

Honestly, I suppose part of the decision was based on past experience with the Microsoft platform and environment. I used to develop in ASP and wrote some VB components for performance critical components. ASP was / is a pretty solid scripting language. If you ever took the time to explore the, although weakly implemented, class system, you could do some pretty advanced stuff while maintaining a reasonable separation of interface and implementation. I even experimented with Visual Interdev, which was, IMO, an early version of asp.Net. and if it didn't have so many bugs and such a lack of documentation, it might have gone somewhere. So it seemed natural to check out .Net.

I started fooling around with vb.net and went through a few tutorials, and the Visual Interdev experience made it very familiar. I'd been hearing about c# and how it was like a cross between c++, which I cut my teeth on in college, and vb which was easy to develop with. Visual c++ was a nightmare... I new c++ but when I looked through all that MFC stuff that got thrown in when you tried to make a windows app I was LOST! And I had plenty of learn Visual C++ in x days books, that I never really made it through... but I could make vb apps with ease, so I was really excited about the prospect of a combination of the two. The OOP of C++ and the simple application development of VB!

Now that I've used it for a while I can say it is exactly what I wanted.

All that history aside... why .Net?

1) A great development environment.

One of the wonderful things that was SUPPOSED to happen in Visual Studio was a great debugging interface. Which was pretty cool if you could ever get it to work, but it took everything short of an act of God to make it so. .Net however, has its own built in web server and the debugging is fantastic. A great debugger makes development SO much easier. Gone are the days of putting in 500 print statements to check what the variables are at any given time, and then having to go back and remove them or comment them out. Instead you just set a watch and keep rolling.

2) It's a real object oriented programming language.

Asp was great, Php is better... but at the end of the day, they're scripting languages. The .Net platform is for application development. We wanted Feed.Us to be a true application. I really wanted to plan ahead this time, and build our application with the future in mind, and in that future the web is just one piece of the puzzle. With .net we could build a standalone windows app, or a Windows Mobile app or whatever else might pop-up and we can leverage all of the same code. Now arguably, you can get to a browser on most phones and pcs so we may not need another interface, but I still like having that option.

3) It's compiled.

That means it runs faster, and , if you want, you can distribute it that way so folks can't root around in your code. That's not too inline with the open source way of doing things... but it is an important factor if you're considering selling your application.

But what about RoR (Ruby on Rails)?!

Yeah, well I looked at that too... and I'll admit it's pretty cool, a nice framework. Someone else wrote a whole bunch of code so you wouldn't have to! Yeah! But that also means your code has to work the way theirs does. I've worked with and written some frameworks, so I know how they work behind the scenes... before the scaffold:TableName ever comes into the picture.

I know we wrote those frameworks to make it easy for people with limited programming knowledge to make sites, and I know what compromises were made in order to do that. Certainly, Ruby is better than ours ever was... but in general I think frameworks are excellent for building straightforward sites that follow the rules, but if you're pushing the envelope it can be a serious waste of time.

Freemium

anonymous — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:02:00 CST

Lots of folks have written recently about pricing software & services at $0.

Meanwhile, I spent some time today playing with the new Streetview Google maps for Milwaukee. What a wonderful, useful and entertaining service. All for free. But Google can offer great crap like Streetview because they're so profitable on search.

We've been working on our business model for feed.us. Guess what? Feed.Us is going to be free. It will be a simplified version. And we'll probably reserve the right to display small ads at the bottom of our customer's content. But it will be free and still take advantage of our cache web service.

The main reason to offer Feed.Us for free is to let potential customers sign up and start using feed.Us easily/quickly. The idea that we host the content and feed it to outside sites seems to be very illogical to a lotta people. We'll have trouble getting people to try it unless there are very few strings attached.

So, all hail free!

Microsoft v. Yahoo

anonymous — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:02:00 CST

I have been fascinated by Microsoft's hostile takeover bid for Yahoo. I find myself reading dozens of articles about the deal. Probably because it's similar to last summer's Midwest-Value Jet takeover bid (which thankfully failed).

Mostly it's because I own a bit of GOOG and MSFT.

The article that caused me to blog is this one by NY Times' Randall Stross.

This is such a defining moment for Microsoft and Balmer. They've got such a great business. Vista is just kicking in and contributing to earnings. They can't keep Xboxes in stock and XBox live is growing. They've got people crying.

But they can't seem to get anywhere near Google in search. It's almost as if it just kills them to lose out to Google. So they are going all in.

If they start to compete, it'll be great for MSFT and probably good for GOOG too. But I worry that all they are doing is increasing their desire to not fail. And trying not to fail is always a good way to fail.

CMS Wire interviews Feed.Us's Rick Stratton

anonymous — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:02:00 CST

CMS Wire's Jason Campbell sat down for a discussion about Feed.Us with Rick Stratton.

Sorry, Rick but you were pretty wordy. We here at Feed.Us actually feel sorry for Jason and wonder how he made it through the whole thing. But thankfully he did and gave us a pretty good intro:

Feed.us has taken a shot at the content management market and one that strikes a distinctly different approach to solving the typical problems with light-weight publishing. Via the combination of software-as-a-service (SaaS), XML data transformation and flexible input and output APIs, Feed.us thinks they’ve carved a foothold in the market. If they’ve played the cards right, it could be one that’s going to make life easier for a whole lot of folks.

If you feel up to it, you can read the full interview over at CMSWire.com.

What the...?

anonymous — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:02:00 CST

You gotta love the way CMS "solution provider" describe their product. It's as if they have a program that makes their language extra convoluted. We've been doing this work for more than 10 years and we cannot understand what some of these product descriptions mean.

You can't even make this stuff up:

"Interactive content management (ICM)-which is generally viewed as the evolution and integration of digital asset management (DAM) and web content management (WAM). Interactive content engages an audience with information that informs, involves, and entertains them."
- EMC Documentum

"Uniquely provide native management and delivery of all electronic assets"
- Vignette

"... solutions that enable organizations to effectively leverage content to drive business growth by improving the customer experience, increasing collaboration, and streamlining business processes in dynamic environments."
- Interwoven

"... a dynamic run-time delivery engine..."
- Interwoven Livesite

Even Wordpress can't escape this trap (but at least they realize it): "WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time."

So here's our description of feed.us, in techno babble:

"Feed.Us is a highly scalable and flexible content delivery platform, utilizing a server side Ajax request and cache mechanism combined with standardized XPath content retrieval."

Which translates to...

We're Feed.Us. We want to save your web content and then make it really easy to put on any website, anywhere.

More on Feed.Us sections

anonymous — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:02:00 CST

There are a lot of folks who hack-the-crap (HTC) out of Movable Type and Word Press to make them do more CMS-y things.

We can understand why folks HTC them. MT and WP are inexpensive (or even free). Both are widely-used, thus well-known and safe. And they're certainly easy for the end-users (writers, content creators, editors, etc).

But it's just blog software.

Here's an example: you're using MT for your company's site. It's great for a company blog, obviously. It's also great for press releases. What if you want to display all the events your company is going to go to? Yeah, it's not so great for an event calendar. You've got to HTC MT in order to make it work.

Enter Feed.Us sections...

We designed Feed.Us, from the very start, to have a variety of different kinds of Web content. News & blog posts, yes... but also product info, address books, FAQs, event calendars and even recipes.

You can build your own publishing applications to make it easy for your folks to add a variety of content. Use fields like "start date" and "location" or even "event coordinator email address" or "number of spots available".

Also, Feed.Us imports from RSS feeds and will import from calendar XML feeds. So adding events to your site's calendar can be done via Google Calendar or even Outlook.

Here's the first calendar we built. It's the the 2008 National League Central Division Champs MLB 2008 schedule. Imported from the MLB's Google Calendar to a Feed.Us Demo site. It took about 30 minutes to get the whole page working.

Try that with MT.

If I was starting a company today, it would make mobile apps

anonymous — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 09:02:00 CST

A new photo via Engadet of the new Google android.

If I was starting something new today, it would be to make web applications for iphone, blackberry and android.

There are not many applications that truly combine the web with the medium. I sound like a broken record, but that blackberry facebook app is the best example.

Are you prepared for the mobile web?

anonymous — Fri, 8 Feb 2008 15:02:00 CST

More evidence that supports our theory that 2008 is the year of the mobile web. Research from a publisher called "Change Wave":

Record numbers of consumers are abandoning their basic cell phones for more-advanced models, according to the latest ChangeWave consumer cell phone survey... the Apple iPhone is now the top choice among respondents planning to buy a new cell phone in the next six months (up one point to 17%), but second-place RIM has the most momentum (up three points to 15%).

We belive that all publishers have to come to the realization that a larger, growing chunk of their visitors will be on iPhones and Blackberries. Publishers have to create multiple sites and be prepared with alternative versions of their articles that work well on smaller aka "third" screens.

Here is the full story.

CDN vs. CDP

anonymous — Thu, 7 Feb 2008 17:02:00 CST

If you're confused between a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Content Delivery Platform (CDP), we can understand the confusion.

According to Wikipedia, a CDN:

is a system of computers networked together across the Internet that cooperate transparently to deliver content (especially large media content) to end users.

CDNs, like Akamai and Limelight, are employed by large websites to host and delivery large files to the website's audience. Example? A publisher, like ABCnews.com, would give all its large files (photos, mp3s and videos) to Akamai while ABC hosts the site, site files/code, text, etc. The large files just get delivered faster by the CDN.

While, a CDP (like, ahem, Feed.Us) is a hosted publishing application. Publishers store all of the website content on Feed.Us. News, product reviews, calendar events, images, etc. Then publishers feed the content to their self-hosted Website using one of Feed.Us's APIs, like our very cool Server-side Ajax request mechanism. Publishers control the site files and site structure; the content flows from Feed.Us.

We hope that settles it. If not, email us. Or if you work for Limelight and might need some more info...

rick at feed dot us.

I rant about MShoo

anonymous — Sat, 2 Feb 2008 21:02:00 CST

At first glance, I was pretty excited about the potential deal. With apologies to my friends at Google, I would like to see a little competition. Especially an Adsense/Adwords competitor.

At second glance however... what a mess!

Microsoft: MSN, Live, Hotmail, Windows Messenger, City Guides, Money, Music (zune)... etc.

Yahoo: mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, MyYahoo, Travel/shoppping/autos, sports, movies, music, delicious, Hotjobs, Finance, etc.

Search is the key. They've got to create a powerful combined search service. They need a search/adwords/adsense competitor that works. Overture and YPN suck but they're better than MS's version.

What to do with the rest of those services? Music, finances, mail. Each one of those services has tons of customers. Example... You can't cut Hotmail or Yahoo mail... yet you don't want to keep the status quo.

Then there's stuff like Flickr and Delicious, things that were never really integrated (and probably not great buys). Do these get spun off?

And what do you call stuff? MSN sucks. But you can't rename MS stuff as "Yahoo". Do you make a new Cingular-style name?

Seems like a big mess.

Update: Gotta love Umair:

It's not often that we get to witness fatal errors. Strategic errors, sure. But bona fide fatal - company-killing, firm-vaporizing errors - errors? Almost never - they're the strategic equivalent of meteor strikes.

More thoughts on XSL, CSS and Feed.Us

anonymous — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:01:00 CST

I just finished a CSS/xhtml site and I thought I'd share a few thoughts about why CSS and XSL are powerful ingredients of Feed.Us.

First a couple of admissions... I am not a programmer nor do I play one on TV. I can only design using Photoshop and have to off load my layouts to a CSS guru (theChoppr). I can't really straight up code HTML or xHTML. Most of my sites start as free CSS and then I tweak em till they do what I'm looking for.

Also, despite having used Feed.Us for about 6 months now, I finally forced myself to integrate CSS tags into Feed.Us so the content coming out of the Feed.Us servers adhere to my CSS.

XSL loves div tags

Feed.Us sends all the content to your site as XML. So we use XSL to decide what content needs to be displayed. Then we give you a little cached piece of code that you can put on any page to display that content.

In Feed.Us you can quickly copy and convert your own XSLs (we've got default ones). Then you can add div tags within the xsl so that the content coming out of Feed.Us adheres to your style sheet. XSLT is very different, so think about that. You can put your own div tags in the XSL on FeedUs's server so that when your content displays, you won't actually have to put the div tags in your xhtml.

That's very different but very cool.

XSL also allows javascripts

The other thing I love about XSL on Feed.Us is that I can embed javascript services in to the XSL on Feed.Us so that specific services run on pages on my sites.

Again, you're probably like "but why?" You can actually put embed code within the XSL - add Google ads or a js-based comment system (like Disqus) to the XSL on Feed.Us. Then when you add the FeedUs code on your own pages, those javascripts all appear.

That might not be important to you right now. But imagine if you're feeding content to 100s of other sites. You could put your Google Ads on all of those sites (technically it violates the Adsense TOS).

I'm sure I'll add more advantages to Feed.Us and XSL in the future. Stay tuned!

Congrats to Jesse and Sean

anonymous — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:01:00 CST

The Academy Award nominees were announced this morning and two Conn College Camels are competing for the documentary award. Both are members of the class of 1996 and I am proud to say that I was friends with both!

18. Documentary Feature: "No End in Sight," "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience," "Sicko," "Taxi to the Dark Side," "War/Dance."

Sean Fine's "War/Dance" is competing against Jesse Vogelson's "No End in Sight".

Good luck to both!!

How do I make an RSS feed?

anonymous — Tue, 8 Jan 2008 21:01:00 CST

"How do I make an RSS feed?" I am continually suprised by how often we hear this question. We heard it a lot in 2005 when RSS was becoming popular and here we are in 2008 and we're still hearing people ask this question.

Even with all these great Web 2.0 services popping up it still isn't simple to create an RSS feed. You want to use Feedburner! Great, you still need an RSS feed. You want to syndicate your podcast to iTunes... great you still need to make an RSS feed. It's not automatic but it should be.

With feed.us, you can make a RSS feed on the fly, with no technical expertise, from any type of content. Content based on date or author or category. Or all items. And with our implementation of XSL, you can easily edit the actual RSS code without going back to coder school.

But there are a lot of folks out there who aren't using FeedUs. We don't know why you wouldn't want to try it, but that's fine... we all have our flaws.

If you're not using Feed.Us and you want to make an RSS feed, here is a hack to make yourself an RSS feed without being a developer:

Create an RSS feed quickly, easily:

(Assumptions: you're not a developer and your CMS software doesn't make it easy to create an RSS feed. You can figure out Delicious and Feedburner.)

1. You're going to use Delicious or a similar bookmarking service. (There are others out there but we have always been partial to Del.icio.us. I guess you could even use something like Digg or Reddit.)

2. You'll need to decide what is included into your RSS feed. All of your 'news'? All of your 'blog posts'? Calendar events? Product pages? What will make up your rss feed? Hint: generally it's news and items that get regularly updated.

3. "Bookmark" every item, story, article, page, etc that you want included into Delicious. we recommend adding the "browser buttons" so you can make this a one click process.

4. Write a description of that item. Delicious doesn't allow for a lot of space... so write a short summary. If your site isn't using decent page titles, you'll need to write out a page title as well.

5. Tag each item with a custom tag. I sometimes use "ricksreading".

6. Go to your page for that tag. It should list all the items you've tagged. At the bottom of the page there's a link for the RSS feed for that page.

7. Take this RSS feed over to Feedburner. "Burn it" in feedburner. Make sure you go back to the "Optimize" page and edit your title/description.

8. Feedburner will give you the new URL for this RSS feed. Congrats, you've got an RSS feed!

Note that there are two problems with this: (1) It's a manual process. RSS feeds should flow automatically. (2) The feed will just use shortened items - not the full post.

Also, an alternative hack if you have a general RSS feed and you want to make an RSS feed out of certain categories... use Google Reader and publish your "shared" items out of the RSS feed. Google Reader's shared public page has an RSS feed that will work nicely in Feedburner.

What is the future of Content Management Systems related to Social Networks — mrtopf.de

anonymous — Mon, 7 Jan 2008 22:01:00 CST

Google Reader is my CMS (and so can you!) | Zac Echola

anonymous — Mon, 7 Jan 2008 22:01:00 CST

Xbox Live please come in

anonymous — Fri, 4 Jan 2008 09:01:00 CST

Slowly over the past couple years my "normal" friends have started gaming again.

By "normal" I mean older guys who are typically married and even have kids. We grew up on Atari, NES and Sega hockey '93 (the move!). And by "gaming again", I mean that these guys are buying Xbox.

This holiday season was the "tipping point" for my friends. They've got Xbox 360, they've got a bunch of games and they're all on Xbox Live. We may even have enough to form a "clan".

It's great to score goals on them and knife them in the back. But there's a problem...

It seems that these "newbies" have created a tipping point for xbox live.

Starting almost immediately on December 25, it's been quite difficult to start-up an online game. The online waiting room gives a really long wait or times out, regularly. Games quit in the middle. It really sucks and everyone is complaining. "You'd think Microsoft could afford more servers" is the common rant.

This means a couple things to me:

> I should have purchased Microsoft's stock a couple months ago.
> The economy ain't so bad if folks are ponying $400 for xbox and games.

On a related note... how come people never mention xbox when they talk about social networking? My online friendships via email, AIM and Facebook are no where near as fun as knifing a buddy in the back in a game of COD4!

UPDATE: MS sold 4.3 million xboxes from September to January.

Blackberry applications

anonymous — Wed, 2 Jan 2008 10:01:00 CST

Over the holiday week I downloaded and installed the Facebook blackberry application. Now I've tried dozens of applications on my blackberry and none of them live up to the blackberry's email abilities.

But this facebook application is different.

As a married guy, I don't really use Facebook that much. It's basically just for reconnecting with friends. So the facebook blackberry app isn't that useful to me. So that's not why I was impressed. I was impressed because someone figured out how to intergrate facebook into a blackberry.

Best example is the Facebook "site mail". I'm always annoyed that I get an email to my inbox whenever someone emails me within facebook. Then I have to go to the facebook site to view the email. Well on the blackberry, there's a little facebook icon whenever there's a message (or friend request). Open the blackberry app and read/reply to the email. It's actually better. Viewing profiles works pretty well too. I have to say: it's very cool.

Why hasn't anyone else come up with great applications like this? If I could start any new company right now, it would be to make Blackberry applications. Applications that work like RIM's email system. Applications like:

Sports: I would love a sports scores that gives me score updates as they happen - just like RIM email. (ESPN's blackberry version is just a link to their mobile website. It's not an application.)

Financial: I would love to get all my stock prices on my blackberry... not a mobile webpage but work like RIM email.

News: Headlines on my blackberry from AP, google news or even Drudge? Have it look/work just like the RIM email.

RSS reader: I use NewsGator on my blackberry all the time. And it works pretty well. But again, it doesn't utilize the Blackberry. I'm sure they built it for all mobile phones.

Again this is part of the reason I think that 2008 is going to be the year of the mobile web.

Cafe Press: hellooo?

anonymous — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 11:12:00 CST

I made some t-shirts with a Feed.Us logo via CafePress.com. I was hoping to send them as Christmas gifts.

So the order arrived with just one t-shirt. Not the 10 I had ordered. One shirt.

(BTW, it looked great. MUCH better than the ones I made at t-shirts.com.)

So I called them up to find out just exactly what happened. The customer service person informed me that they'd send the remaining shirts, at no cost!

What nice folks - FREE SHIPPING on something that I'd already paid for! Thank goodness!

As I usually do when someone screws up an order... make it up to me. I asked the customer service rep that, since the ONE shirt looked so nice, give me a discount and I'll order some more?

"Well, I already gave you free shipping" was the reply. Oh, yeah... You're right, that was already a great deal for me.

Why don't companies empower their customer service people to offer great customer service? Why not give your people flexibility? If you think you've got a great product or service, why not make it easy for your customer service people to extend that greatness to their roles as well?

Great quote from Howard Schultz

anonymous — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:12:00 CST

Howard Schultz to Larry King in 1997 interview:

“People weren’t drinking coffee. ... So the question is, How could a company create retail stores where coffee was not previously sold, ... charge three times more for it than the local doughnut shop, put Italian names on it that no one can pronounce, and then have six million customers a week coming through the stores?”

Great article.

Congrats to Putin, the Time Mag person of the year

anonymous — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:12:00 CST

Vladimir Putin is Time Magazine's person of the year.

As last year's recipient, I want to first congratulate him. It's a true honor. Maybe you should take this award to heart and start thinking about your country's freedoms, eh Vladimir??

Top reasons NOT to use Feed.Us

anonymous — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:12:00 CST

We've traveled the world (ok the eastern half of the US), hosted conference calls and spammed people on Twitter in order to convince some beta testers to try out Feed.Us.

And although we've got some great feed back (feedusback?), we've also here many reasons why Feed.Us doesn't work.

Now, from the home office in Milwaukee, Wisconsin... here are the top reasons NOT to use Feed.Us:

#6: Paying $150,000 for a CMS and then spending another $300,000 in consulting fees is a good investment.

#5: What else would I do if I didn't have these servers to manage?

#4: I enjoy learning a whole new, custom mark-up language!

#3: A four day software installation sounds like fun!

#2: Updating to a new version helps mark the passing of the seasons.

and #1: We need more money so we're going to make something custom for our client!

Do we sound bitter? Yes, we do. It's not like we're Chuck Yeager vs the sound barrier, but we still get upset when people think there isn't anything better out there.

There is a better CMS out there. It's actually a CDP and it's called Feed.Us.

Quick screen cast video about using Feed.Us

anonymous — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:12:00 CST

Click on the video below to start.

Here's the URL of the page I created with the content coming from Feed.Us. I made the page dynamic, with perma-links to the full story. It's just as easy, but you have to make a second ASP (or PHP) page that has a different FeedUs scriptomatic code on it. Longer description, here.

Email us with questions: contact at feed dot us.

Making a mobile site (using Feed.Us, of course)

anonymous — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 20:12:00 CST

Hopefully you saw our earlier post about why we think the mobile web will finally take off in 2008. In this follow-up, we offer some suggestions for making a mobile news website.

We here at Feed.Us have most of our web experience building/managing newspaper Websites. So our suggestions are probably for a site that has regularly flowing "news" (we throw the term news around a lot).

We think the aim of a mobile news site should be to get the most recent items to regular readers when they're away from their computers. In that way, it's similar to RSS or even email newsletters.

We built this mobile version of the FeedUsBlog to test/try out our suggestions. Just two pages and very simple, it works quite well and we don't mind saying it.

Domain/URL:

We like using http://m.domain.com. This seems to be the defacto url. Examples abound.

In fact, we'll go so far as to declare the "m.domain.tld" format as the official URL of mobile browsing.

Layout:

The mobile site is where you need to keep it simple.

We're a big fan of a small logo and then your headlines. There should be a brief "teaser" aka a summary as well, but not necessary. Each headline links to the story. Some news services offer just a short summary. We prefer the whole story - let us do the skimming.

So to repeat, just a logo and headlines. Keep your nav short and near the top if you have to have one. But you shouldn't need one, we think. Just go right to the latest news.

Also, the sites that use "accesskeys" in the links are really helpful. See CNET's mobile site for an example.

Drudge has a list of mobile-friendly news sites. Each seems to agree, to some extent, with our layout suggestions.

The W3C's mobile best practices is quite helpful, but a tad outdated. It's located here.

Coding it:

You can use asp or php or jsp or asp.net. We don't think that matters (also, FeedUs works with each, did we mention that?).

We used the xhtml mobile 1.0 as is standard in Dreamweaver. There is a 2.0 but we couldn't find a site that uses it.

Also, we recommend making the images' code display the width and height. Supposedly that helps.

Using Feed.Us (aka it's our blog so we'll pimp our product):

Feed.Us offers a number of advantages. The way our service displays news content, via a few lines of code, works really well on mobile xhtml pages. And Feed.Us was really built to display news headlines with a teaser or without. Finally the news story dynamic pages (we call it the "detail page") lets you just make 2 mobile pages: a homepage and the detail page. Feed.Us code on the detail page pulls the full body of the story automatically. More on this here.

Already got a CMS?

Say you've already got a CMS and you want to create a mobile site but your CMS ain't so friendly? If you've got RSS feeds, Feed.Us can be your solution. Feed.Us can import your RSS and then you can build normal xhtml/asp or xhtml/php pages. Use Feed.Us's simple scripts to display the content from your CMS via RSS. (Or probably email us for a better description: contact at feed dot us).

Redirect:

It's important to redirect your potential mobile readers to the mobile version. If they don't know it's m.yourdomain.com, then they need to be redirected.

Redirection depends on your website (php,asp, etc) and on your audience's phone type. A good description of how to do it is located here. A list of the mobile phone "user agents" is here. Generally, the mobile browsers types are: netfront, minimo, series 60, open wave, opera mini, blackberry. Apple iPhones use Safari which isn't easy to redirect. Please use the comments if you have any suggestions. (It doesn't look like Drudge is using a redirect, even for Blackberries. That's interesting. Probably because of the Apple Safari problem.)

In Sum:

Make a mobile version. Use m.domain.com (cause it's the standard, now). Make it simple. Use Feed.Us. Got it?

Update: The Wall Street Journal had an article on Monday titled "Web Surfing on iPhone Erases Doubts of Mobile Devices Futures Online". Link is here. It's login-able so you might not be able to read it. However, the title pretty much sums up the article. We don't agree with their assumption that most mobile sites are "watered down". The iPhone's screen is still too small to view a full, normal website. And Drudge probably agrees with us, because his mobile site is intended specifically for iPhone users.

Mobile version

anonymous — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:12:00 CST

Yes, my peeps I know you've been clamoring for it... and it's finally here. The mobile version of this site is now complete. Now everyone can check it on their phones and blackberries... all four of you don't crush the servers at once... m.tachophobia.com.

2008 is the year of the mobile web

anonymous — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:12:00 CST

Yeah, the mobile web has been around for a long time. And it's been active, for sure. But we here at the Feed.Us headquarters are witnessing a sudden explosion of mobile browsing.

Finally, worlds are colliding (and George is getting upset!).

The problem with the mobile web has been slow connections and small screen, not to mention the crappy mobile phone companies. Slowly the tide has moved in favor of the mobile web and we think that 2008 will have an explosion.

(Toot toot our horn here... We created this mobile site for eprairie back in 2000. Weird that it still exists in the same form and still looks/works fine.)

Recent developments:
Obviously, the iPhone is the serious development for the mobile web. We finally have a decent phone for viewing websites. But have you tried it on a normal digital phone network? It's too slow for surfing. But try it on a Wifi connection... and it's not bad. If you're sitting on your couch, watching a football game. It's still a small screen, but it's a nice connection.

Wifi Blackberries
In November, RIM started to sell the Blackberry Curve with wifi. (Unfortunately for me, they started right about 30 days after I bought my curve... right after my trial ended.) Like the iPhone, more folks won't mind browsing on their phone.

Twitter and texting
I think 2007 was the year when "normal people" began text messaging. Meanwhile, new mobile applications like Twitter have started folks sending links to mobile phones via text messages.

I think publishers are just starting to realize that there's an audience on phones. Publishers are starting to send their news via text. (FYI, I previously made some suggestions for sending news to mobile phones using Twitter).

NYTimesRiver.com
There are some creative mobile news solutions popping up. Dave Winer created this nifty mobile phone homepage of the New York Times website. It links to the mobile versions of the New York Times.

iDrudgeReport
Last week is when I think the new game started for mobile browsing. Drudge released probably the first change to his service since he started in 1997, this new mobile phone website at iDrudgeReport.com.

He hasn't really changed anything in years. No email newsletter. No RSS feed. No widgets. But a mobile site. Obviously, Drudge sees the potential here.

However, Drudge includes this redirect. I have to assume that most of our news sites do not publish mobile versions that work well.

Mobile Web
So based on all the previous clues, I think it's pretty obvious that you need to start thinking about the mobile web.

It's certainly easy to make a mobile version of your news site (or blog). And we think Feed.Us can help create and manage a mobile site. It can also work with your existing system by using an RSS feed.

In part 2 (coming Tuesday), we'll make some suggestions about making a mobile version of a news site and, of course, identify how Feed.Us can help.

jsp and php versions of Feed.Us

anonymous — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:12:00 CST

It has always been our goal that Feed.Us works with just about any kind of platform out there. Flash, php, asp, jsp, .net whatever.

Well we're on our way. Last week we completed the .PHP and .JSP versions of our "grabber" so that Feed.Us is now fully compatable on .asp, .php and .jsp websites. Asp.net is coming soon.

If you've been playing along at home, you know how Feedus works. But if you aren't our mother, we'll try to explain it quickly: Feed.Us is a content management platform. You store your site(s)'s content on our servers. Then there's one file you host locally. That local file (a jsp, php, asp, asp.net file) pulls content from our servers and serves it into your page via 2 lines of javascript-like code.

Special thanks to Melissa, Dee and the "JSP guy" for help on this project.

Mobile browser - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

anonymous — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 12:12:00 CST

Promote your site or blog using Twitter

anonymous — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:11:00 CST

You may have heard of Twitter. It's a group text messaging service, kinda. Folks use it to text a group of friends or even as a "microblog" service.

There's a growing trend to use Twitter as a way to publish to mobile users. News sites and blogs have long used RSS feeds to reach regular readers via feed readers. Now with the growing use of the iPhone (and of course Blackberry), more folks are reading web content via their mobile phones.

Guy Kawaski's Truemors was one of the first to regularly push website articles to mobile readers via Twitter (see it in action, here). The NY Times has followed, as well as many others.

You don't need to dig into the Twitter API in order to get this going. It's actually quite easy to get going. Recently, Feed.Us helped the PackerBackerBlog.com start publishing to twitter using Twitterfeed. The PBB has about 200 visitors per day. With the the Twitter addition, the PBB has added about 20 mobile readers per day. Publishing articles to Twitter has also increased the number of Twitter followers of the PBB.

Here's how it was done:

Twitterfeed takes an RSS feed and publishes it to Twitter using the Twitter API. Twitterfeed is actually pretty sweet - even though the OpenID login is kind of a pain.

But you need an RSS feed. The PackerBackerBlog wanted to publish specific articles that worked well on a mobile phone. Long stories aren't really ideal. So using Feed.Us, they built a separate RSS feed that is used in Twitter (using a separate category and then a separate XSL schema. Sounds complicated, but it's pretty simple).

Twitterfeed allows you to adjust how often items are sent to Twitter. Every 3 hours, Twitterfeed checks the new RSS feed for new items, and publishes the headline, the summary and the URL over to Twitter. Mobile readers get a text message with enough of the story that they can click the link to visit the PBB site directly on their mobile phone.

Using Twitter is a nice little addition that you can try to help promote or reach your visitors where they want to be reached. Try it out (even if you don't use Feed.Us).

(Update: we just realized that we should probably build the Twitter API into Feed.Us. Duh!)

(Update again: Kawasaki twitted today: "Twitter generates so much traffic to my site.")

Virtual Hosting Blog » Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies

anonymous — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:11:00 CST

XSL and CSS

anonymous — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:11:00 CST

Here's some background on XSL - one of the main ingredients of Feed.Us:

About XSL

XSL is Extensible Stylesheet Language. It formats or transfers XML (the data) for, or into, a layout. XSL is a template language developed by the W3C and is recognized in all the big browsers. You can actually attach an XSL file to an XML document much like you'd apply a CSS file to an xHTML document. Your XSL dictates what fields get displayed out of the XML and how it displays. (BTW, XSLT is Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations - the language of XSL.)

Most big web companies, like Six Apart, Facebook, Automattic etc write their own markup language rather than use the widely accepted XSL. That's why you probably had to learn something new if you created a MT, WP, Typepad blog or if you're working on a Facebook app. But XSL is more convenient - there are tons of documents and existing files floating around the internet. The W3C tutorial is a great place to start to learn more about XSL.

Negatives?

XSL has a received a mixed reaction from developers, from issues about competition with CSS, to performance. After lots of research, it's seems there are pros and cons as with any technology. We've seen the benefits outweigh the ills. It also appears that XSL 2.0 proves to address many of the concerns with XSL 1.0. We're looking forward to that and will implment it as soon as it's available.

The most tangible concern is that of performance, but with Feed.Us we're caching the XSL results to a local file on your server. So it performs remarkably fast.

XSL works great with CSS.

XSL was created to transform XML, and with a little knowledge it works wonderfully with CSS. You can easily apply whatever div tags and classes you choose within your XSL file in order to make the data (the XML) work in conjunction with your CSS. See the graphic on the right - it's from an XSL we're using to display this article.

XSL dovetails really well with XHTML and CSS because they are both W3C technologies, made to fit together. The proper use XSL and XML can make your CSS work a lot easier. You can standardize your div structure and just change the CSS.

Why we use XSL with Feed.Us

Well, first of all your content (your data) comes out of our server to your website as XML. So it's a natural that we'd use XSL. But the big reason is that we try to not push anything new or unconventional on our customers. We want to re-use technologies that are accepted and well-known. Everything you need to know about XSL can be quickly found at a bookstore or on a tutorial site.

Plus, XSL is a natural progression for folks who started with HTML and picked up CSS. Like CSS/xHTML and HTML, it's very readable. You might not be able to code it straight up, but you can easily read through it and make modifications and there are so many XSLT users out there you can find answers to almost any questions you might have.

For example, a common use for XSL is to transform an XML source into multiple output formats (i.e. HTML, WML, even other XML and it's derivatives like RSS, ATOM, etc). So by simply checking the source of your web request you can respond with a properly formatted document, and since it's all cached, it happens lightning fast. We provide the starting templates for you and you can customize them as needed.

Platform independent.

XSL is conveniently platform independent. The XSL documents you use with Feed.Us can come from outside sources and can be used outside of Feed.Us. If you choose to leave Feed.Us, you can take your XSLs with you and continue to use them with your CSS layouts on some other service.

More importantly, you can get XSL files from other sources and apply them within Feed.Us. We recently found a really nice "box style" monthly calendar XSL file via a search in Google. We're using it to display a bunch of upcoming events. It's a lot like the free CSS templates that are readily available via a Google search.

Customer highlight: WNS-Hockey.com

anonymous — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 04:11:00 CST

WNS Hockey is a local high school team in Milwaukee playing in the WIAA. The team is made up of 4 local high schools. Because it's a diverse organization from a bunch of communities, the Website is run by the parents and is the way the coaches, parents and players stay connected.

The site had been previously created in Frontpage but in 2007, the team wanted an upgrade for look/feel and for management. They chose the Feed.Us content management platform.

The design of the site is CSS/xHTML template provider Free CSS Templates. The site is hosted at Godaddy, on Godaddy's basic windows hosting. Feed.Us powers ever piece of content from the photos and calendar to the copyright in the footer.

Content:

The site serves as both a calendar and a news service. The practice and game schedule for both varsity and JV is the most visited part of the website. Feed.Us's calendar application should come in handy as should Feed.Us's XSL support - WNS should be able to make daily weekly and monthly calendars with ease.

News and game photos are also included. WNS is using Flickr for photo storage and uploading. Any parent can email photos to the WNS flickr account. Feed.us can access the Flickr RSS feed, download and then display photos directly from the Flickr account. That makes the management of the Website much easier for Webmaster/parent Jim French.

"I have been able to do all the work on the site... pretty easy!"

Visit:

WNS-Hockey.com

Dodger Blues - features - infamous dodger moments

anonymous — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:11:00 CST

Classic Tommy Lasorda tirade. What the bleep do you think my opinion is?

YouTube - GI Joe Public Service Announcement

anonymous — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:11:00 CST

Funny youtube video. Why do I love it when cartoons swear?

Testing the import

anonymous — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 08:11:00 CST

Testing the way we import from Blogger. This post comes from this blogger account. It's imported to Tachophobia via Feed.Us.

Works perfectly. Damn!

Incentives

anonymous — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:11:00 CST

I spent about 30 minutes too long in my local Walmart, today. (The Walmart on Capitol Dr. is a scary place - people begging inside the joint.)

I was hoping to find a copy of a new Xbox game, of course. Usually Walmart has video games that the other retailers don't.

The "associate" informed me that they indeed had several copies but it was "impossible" to find them. After a perfunctory search - the associate gave up. And so I kept my $59.

Compare that with my trip to the dentist yesterday. My denist is always pushing new procedures on me. Drilling, filling, crowning, cleaning, whitening. She must have a lot of equipment to pay for. (She is a good dentist, btw).

So, what's the difference? It's not a rhetorical question - I would love to know more about encouraging people to sell and service current and future customers.

At 1871 Media, our pricing structure and software made it a pain to do new or more work for customers. I'm sure the situation was similar to Walmart, at times. It was frustrating and I fell into the trap at times as well.

Next time (FeedUs) we'll have a product that makes us love to do more work.

Ryan Braun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

anonymous — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:11:00 CST

Brewers' Braun selected NL Rookie of the Year - The Boston Globe

anonymous — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:11:00 CST

Redesign

anonymous — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:11:00 CST

I did a quick redesign of Tachophobia today.

I'm importing RSS feeds into Feed.Us and it has made the site a little confusing. So instead of putting all of the content down the center, I changed everything up. It really wasn't a redesign, because my CSS and XHTML didn't change. No, it was more of a content layout change. I changed what Feed.Us feeds are being displayed and where.

Down the center, I've got the latest stuff from my site and from the FeedUsBlog.com. Both of these orginate in Feed.Us and are syndicated to this site and the FeedusBlog via the Feed.us web service. Then along the right, I'm pulling RSS feeds from Flickr and Twitter, and then reformating them using our web service. (Also I made a new "XSL" that adds the "MORE..." as a link in every article 'teaser'.)

Probably the biggest change is that I've got the latest stories prominently on the top of the main page.

Also, I made some new RSS feeds that are being used in different spots. There's one that goes to Twitterfeed and posts all my main articles to Twitter. Then there's the old one... but it now pulls my photos from flickr, my twitters and my delicious bookmarks.

Random Monday Thoughts

anonymous — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:11:00 CST

I haven't really updated this site since I added the RSS importing functionality. The site feels a bit neglected so here are some thoughts...

Importing Feeds:
I am working on a redesign of the content on this page. I've been thinking about it for a while. The feeds coming from Flickr and Twitter and Feedusblog need to have their own space. Going to try to work on that this morning.

Ryan Braun:
I hope he gets rookie of the year. He saved the Crew from a miserable finish.

Packers:
No one... NO ONE would have picked the Pack to be 8-1 at this point. Ridiculous!! I keep waiting for the shoe to drop, and they keep reeling off wins. Carolina at home, then Thursday games vs. Detroit and Dallas. Going to lose at least one of those... I predict a 12-4 finish.

Miller:
The merger with Coors is not good for Milwaukee. If you live in Milwaukee you realize that it's a great place to live/work. But if you're not from here you have no clue. So guess what? No way will Milwaukee win the Miller Coors headquarters. Book it - they will be in Denver and I don't blame them. Sad because it's like 300 people, and about 100 executives, many of whom are young and smart and we'll lose them again. (As long as we can keep GE Healthcare, we'll be ok.)

UPDATE: Ryan Braun named NL Rookie of the Year!!

Google wth?

anonymous — Wed, 7 Nov 2007 11:11:00 CST

My site had finally worked its way up to #5 in Google... after 4 years of hard work. Suddenly on Monday, it's back to like #30.

The only change I made was to insert the "no follow" attribute into all the outbound links. I did that so that Google doesn't think I'm selling links, which I don't. I did it per the official google blog and after the last PageRank update.

I wonder... because I now have so many no follows on my links... that they think "gee he sure sells links" and dinged me?

UPDATE: Back to normal by Friday. Ranked 4th again. Weird.

Shipwreck

anonymous — Mon, 5 Nov 2007 16:11:00 CST

A sailboat ran aground off of Bradford Beach. It's been there for about a week. But with 50 MPH winds tonight... probably not going to be there tomorrow.

Full story here.

Contextual Ad Networks part 3: Maximizing clicks

anonymous — Fri, 2 Nov 2007 21:11:00 CST

This is a four part series. Part 1 was about monetizing your domains. Part 2 compared the different contextual ad networks. Part 4 will consider ecommerce.

I am assuming, here, that you're running Google Adsense or Yahoo YPN. In my niche, I run Adsense because the ad quality and per click prices are better. It may be different in your niche. Regardless, there are two ways to increase your ad network revenue... more traffic (I covered the SEO basics earlier) or more clicks.

So... how do you drive clicks?

1. Remember to help people

By all means, provide answers. People search and visit your site to answer their questions. Your main goal has to be to help people. If you do a crappy job of giving people answers, eventually people will not click on ads and Google will not rank you high. Remember this point - I think it's essential.

2. Format the ads to look like content.

I tailor my ads to look like my site. White background and make the ad links the same color as the other content links. Also, I use the biggest unit possible and build the content around it.

3. No other ads

If you want to maximize your ad power, don't run ads for anything else. No link exchanges, no banner ads. All of that will reduce the power of your contextual ad network.

I used to run a hotels.com search (IAN.com). When I took it off, my clicks jumped up.

4. Maximize the ad units

Whatever the limit that Google or Yahoo places on the number of ads, maximize it. I've got 1 link unit and 2 ad units on each page.

5. Make the ads blend in

I run a Link unit where my navigation used to be. The navigation is at the bottom of each page. People skim read - they don't read everything that I write. So they are going to click on ads if the ads are compelling. So I make a long page, then places above and along the units.

6. Don't give people an option

Reduce your number of website pages. Make less options for people to click on. Combine these two ideas and your clicks will go up.

7. Follow the big SEO plays:

When you're in doubt, check out some of the big companies that make money like this. I follow Squidoo.com, Mahalo.com and Associated Content. These guys are setup to arbitrage traffic from Google and turn it into clicks so they spend money on figuring out how to do what I just described.

I am constantly tweaking and tracking. During October, I made some pages and tracked the results. I currently have a about a 27% click to impression ratio. So for every 100 visitors to my sites, I get about 25-30 clicks. I have to assume that's pretty good. However, if you think I can do better - please comment or email me?

Zoom cloud

anonymous — Fri, 2 Nov 2007 16:11:00 CST

I added Zoom Cloud's tag cloud along the right side of Tachophobia.

It's a javascript thingy, so it's kind of slow. However they do a nice job.

It grabs your RSS feed. So if you click on one of the words/phrases it will kick out to zoomcloud.com where they show all the results.

Let me know what you think by commenting?

SEO basics for folks who are SEO averse

anonymous — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:10:00 CST

Over the past couple years, we've made thousands of websites. Some did great with the search engines, many didn't do well.

SEO was never our MO, instead we hoped content-rich websites would make the search engine love fall down like rain. In some cases it worked.

However, we realized we had to figure out what helps Google's software. As Kramer said, "I'm watching the watchers, Jerry!!", we too have learned to figure out what Google likes and what Google hates.

Here are some guidelines for Google. (Not sure about the other engines - I hope they all just copy Google.) These are not "tricks" - just a method that helps in Google's PageRank.

1. Page title should be unique to each page and should be like a headline.

Example: BrettFavre.com/I-am-the-greatest-of-all-time.htm

2. Use <h1> tags near the top of the page, for the page headline and be unique to each page.

Example: The page title and the <h1> headline for this page should be both "SEO basics for folks who are SEO averse"

3. URLs should be unique to each page, be the headline and use dashes (not underscores) between each word. (Dashes are very good, btw).

Example: See #1 above.

4. More content. Obviously the more "keywords" in the content, the better.

5. This is a good one: when possible, the page title, url and <h1> should all be the same or very similar.

6. Use a <h2> paragraph to summarize that page's content, article, etc. It should go right under the <h1>

Example: "Here are a few, basic, often neglected SEO tips to remember."

7. Change content frequently.

8. If you sell links on your site, use the "no follow" attribute within the <a href> links. It's this: rel="nofollow"

9. Use Google's webmaster resources and sitemaps (Yahoo and MS have sitemaps programs, too). Link below.

10. Keep track of Google's "ranking factors".

UPDATE:

11. Metatags...

We didn't talk about meta tags. They are important, though not as important as they used to be.

Just remember that the MTs should be unique on each page, both keywords and description. They should sync with the page title and the h1/h2.

12. This just in...

Seems like Google (currently) really likes the combination of title, url and H1 to be very similar.

Links:

Google webmaster

About google page rank

Google ranking factors

IMG00163.jpg

anonymous — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 18:10:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Lake Drive hill

anonymous — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 18:10:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

This is actually a decent hill, especially for Wisconsin. There's a crapload of serious bumps, too.

RSS importing now working

anonymous — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:10:00 CST

The new RSS Importing is now functional. I'm using it on my site with Twitter, Delicious and Flickr feeds.

This is the first step in our "importing" project. The goal is to enable Feed.Us customers to use Feed.Us without visiting Feed.Us.

We hope that our customers can assemble sites from a variety of sources. I think the big use is to allow writers to publish via their own favorite source, and then send an RSS feed to their editors.

(Next, we're going to do email importing, like Flickr. Metaweblog synching will come as well. Metaweblog will be really cool because you could 'pull' content from a variety of different CMSes and Blog systems, or use a variety of different publishing applications. Then assemble and syndicate all that stuff to wherever you want.)

There are few tweaks left (not bugs, tweaks) on this RSS stuff, but email me for info/suggestions/help.

Update 1: The only problem I see, right now, is that Twitter seems to put the entire tweet in both the headline and the body of the RSS. Weird.

Update 2: I just saw that Tumblr got funding. Tumblr is a really neat blogging tool. Basically it lets you 'reblog' all the stuff you create in other places, using RSS, and assemble it on one Tumblr blog website.Try it out.

(Of course, you have to maintain your site on Tumblr. Feed.Us allows you to put all that stuff anywhere. Tumblr is for consumers, where Feed.Us is a professional solution.)

athomedepot

anonymous — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:10:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

this photo kills me!

New Feed.us addition

Rick Stratton — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:10:00 CST

Welborn has been finishing up our new RSS Importing. You'll notice on this site there's now Twitter posts and Flickr photos. I'm also going to add an RSS of a specific tag in Delicious. (Jake - we could now do Saved Stuff even better.)

It's the first step in our importing project. The goal with importing is so that our customers don't have to use Feed.Us to use Feed.Us. We hope that our customers can assemble sites from a variety of sources. I think the big use is to allow writers to publish via their own favorite source, and then send an RSS feed to their editors. (Next, we're going to do Metaweblog synching as well. Metaweblog would be really cool because you could 'pull' content from a variety of different CMSes and Blog systems, or use a variety of different publishing applications. Then assemble and syndicate all that stuff to wherever you want.)

There are few tweaks left (not bugs, tweaks) on this RSS stuff, but email me for info.

Update 1: The only problem I see, right now, is that Twitter seems to put the entire tweet in both the headline and the body of the RSS. Weird.

Update 2: I just saw that Tumblr got funding. Tumblr is a really neat blogging tool. Basically it lets you 'reblog' all the stuff you create in other places and assemble it on one Tumblr blog website.

They import RSS like Feed.Us does. Try it out.

World series tix

anonymous — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:10:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

Turkish PM responds

Rick Stratton — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:10:00 CST

As you are probably aware, the US Congress is set to have a full vote about the Armenian Genocide. Per the bill, it's just a US Congressional "recognition" of the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Empire between 1914-1920. But to the 1.5 Armenians spread across the US (more than actually live in Armenia), it means more - a lot more. Armenians have been working on this since before Clinton. Never has our government tried to force the world to officially acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, even though it is generally considered the first genocide of the 20th century. (Here's some good background info about the bill via USNews.)

So Erdogan responded via last Friday's Wall Street Journal. Here is the editorial. Reminds me a lot of what Sudan President Hassan says about what has gone on in Darfur.

This part is the most offensive:

Many Turks lost their lives during the mutual killings. And despite an onslaught of Armenian terror that lasted decades and took many innocent Turkish lives (including in the U.S.) Turkey has always been the one extending the olive branch.

That quote is insanely offensive. However, his threats look to be working: previous supporters are suddenly losing interest in the bill.

Eventually, someday, it will pass.

If you don't know much about the Armenian Genocide, here are a few links:

Wikipedia

ABC News' the forgotten

University of Minnesota's Center for the study of Genocides

PS: FYI, I am a little fearful of what Turkish hackers will do to my sites when they read this. This is not a joke - I've had run-ins in the past.

hottwheels

anonymous — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:10:00 CST

1871 posted a photo:

RSS importing update

anonymous — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:10:00 CST

That's the new RSS import page, via our dev site. Click on the image and you'll go to the Flickr page with a better view. This is setup so that you can take RSS feeds from your other sources (Flickr photos or Twitter accounts or Google Blogger rss) and have them show up within your site(s) as individual posts. This is great if you have a ton of content in different places and you want to combine it all in one site.

But why we're really doing it... is so that you don't have to use Feed.Us to use Feed.Us. Your writers might like Blogger or Typepad. Then they give you an RSS feed of their writings and you can add their content to your site or to other sites.

Yes, Tumblr does this... Tumblr is very very nice. However, Tumblr isn't a professional solution. It doesn't let you manage your content on your own servers, multiple sites, etc.

Conn College Panel

anonymous — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 22:10:00 CST

If you happen to be in beautiful New London, CT on Friday afternoon, stop by the "Plugged In" panel at good old Conn College.

It'll be me, Andrew Margie (CSTV.com), Luke Beatty (AssociatedContent.com), Anne Holland (MarketingSherpa.com) and Tim Armstrong (Google).

Contextual ad network tips, part 2.

anonymous — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 18:10:00 CST

Over the past few weeks, I've experimented with the contextual ad networks. I've just gone back and forth between Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher's Network. In my experience, Google is way better. However, there's a reason to use both networks - and you probably won't guess why.

Both networks work the same. The only difference that I noticed is that Yahoo doesn't offer "link units" - while the Google ones do quite well for me. It may be because they look like a navigation.

(One note: it's against the TOS to use both ad networks on the same site. And your limit is 3 ad units, and one link unit.)

In my segment, travel, Google does way better than Yahoo. I'm told that it depends on the type of content. There seem to be way more advertisers in Google. Yahoo seems to have a smaller number of advertisers. That makes sense to me - Google is the leader and has been around longer.

The per click ad rate is also better in google (although it seems to have declined quite a bit over the last six months).

From an advertiser's perspective, I would be using Yahoo more. They have a ton of traffic and they own more content. But there is less competition for that traffic - advertisers have got to get better rates at Yahoo (I should test it out). Of course, Google has way more search traffic, that's the advantage with Google).

So why switch over to Yahoo YPN? This is where it gets interesting.

When you add Google Adsense or Yahoo YPN ads to your site, Google and Yahoo (and Microsoft) force their search engines to re-cache your site. They use the caching to display relevant ads to your site.

They also have a tendency to display your site higher in the rankings. This makes sense - they want to send more traffic to your site, improve your ad results, and make more traffic.

So yes, you move over to Yahoo and you reduce your per click rate. However, you'll get a bump in traffic (about double, I've found) when your site hits the cache.

Once your site is cached, the ads will start to make sense. That's when you know you can switch back. I believe if you keep it over at Yahoo for a while (a month?), when you switch back to Google, Google will re-cache you. (I am not sure about this one... it's an assumption.)

This isn't going to make our break your ability to make money via content. But it's important to keep in mind that you should be trying out all the different systems from time to time.

Nice work doorman!

Rick Stratton — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:10:00 CST

Mark Simons aka the doorman.

Setup Feed.Us on Godaddy

anonymous — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:10:00 CST

Feed.Us was made to work on any servers - especially cheap hosting.

Feed.Us works by using a local directory setup for read, write and web access. Here is how to setup the directory in Godaddy's Windows/asp/asp.net hosting to work with Feed.Us:

1. Login to the main Godaddy login. (Godaddy is confusing. There are separate logins for everything. Just start at the homepage.)

2. Select 'My Hosting Account' under 'Hosting & Servers'.

3. Choose the hosting plan that you're going to setup with Feed.Us. Click 'Open'.

4. On the resulting page, go to the 'Content' tab and select "IIS management" (formerly "Directory Management").

5. Click "Create Directory".

6. Type "CachedWebContent" and select "read", "write" and "web" permissions.

7. Click Continue, and then confirm your choices.

8. Takes about 10 minutes to setup on Godaddy's end.

Check out the following video:

Armenian Genocide

Rick Stratton — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:10:00 CST

From Boston Globe:

No more waiting to bear witness to genocide truth
October 15, 2007
FOUR GENERATIONS of my family (of which I am the third) would not exist were it not for the courage and strength of one woman: my great-grandmother, Azneve Ohanian. As a 9-year-old girl, she marched through the deserts of Der-el-Zor with her infant brother strapped to her back, while the rest of her villagers were raped, mutilated and massacred by Turkish soldiers.
It was more than 90 years ago; the Ottoman Empire no longer exists. But its successor, the Republic of Turkey, shares in the human obligation to acknowledge the past. If we let Turkey erase it, how long until we erase Croatia? Burundi? Rwanda? Darfur?
The White House argues that now is not the "right time" for the United States to speak on this chapter of history ("Genocide vote sets a face-off with Bush," Page A1, Oct. 11). And Turkey, in keeping with its longstanding policy of intense lobbying and indignant posturing, has suggested that repercussions could be felt by American troops in Iraq should the resolution acknowledging the genocide pass the House.
I am not so incensed as to ignore the resolution's less-than-ideal timing. But I wonder when it will be the "right time," because in the last 90 years, we have yet to find it convenient. Perhaps, for the truth, it is always the right time.
When it began, the final solution to the Armenian question was "annihilation." Later, it was "a tragedy." Today, it is "unfortunate."
What will it be tomorrow?
DEREK J. JOHNSON
Brighton

Thoughts about Facebook

anonymous — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:10:00 CST

Below is a summary of a couple of conversations I had about Facebook and use/impact for college administrators.

Facebook was created to network students together. Conn College had a facebook before there was a facebook. (Tim Harrington utilized our 1992 facebook in order to find freshmen babes... Right, Timmy??).

Here are some thoughts on to effectively utilize Facebook for communications and networking amongst college alumni and students:

Facebook is the leader:

Facebook is by far the best software platform for connecting people that are within a community (Myspace and Linkedin do better jobs of connecting people from independent communities). It's by far the best way to connect students, alumni, administrators, etc. It's way better than anything you could ever make. And it will continue to improve.

That being said, Facebook is in the middle of a large bubble. It's not really worth $100 billion dollars or whatever the news is reporting. It's a bit of a fad.

Here's the big deal with Facebook: It has a wonderful audience of teens and 20 year olds. 90% of the students in classes 2011-2002 are not only going to have a "profile" but they're going to be logging in to Facebook daily. And the older folks will continue to join Facebook, though probably never be more than like 50%.

The bottom line is that Facebook will be the best way to reach the people who are class of 2001 and younger. You'll still need to use email and snail-mail to reach the older folks.

How to use Facebook to reach students, alumni, etc:

Your network's page:

Each Facebook "network" (your college, your city, your work place) has its own page. Conn's page is here. Community members can post a lot of information to that page. Events, discussions, even pay for "Flyers" that are a form of Facebook ads. This is a great way to reach out to your network's members... however not many people realize they can go to that page.

Groups:

Anyone can make a group in Facebook. A "Group" is a network within a network or a network that compasses multiple networks. Example: "All Because of U2" is a U2 fan group. Anyone can join. I created a group within the Conn community called "Conn people in web" for students and alumni that are working in tech/software/media etc. Only folks within the Conn network can join. The downside is that it's kind of hard to promote a group, it has to grow by word of mouth. But once you have a decent amount of members, it's pretty easy to publish news to your group.

Applications:

The new Facebook "applications" are another way you can reach students, alumni etc. Outside developers can build small programs that will exist in the Facebook system. These "applications" can be added to Facebook members profile pages. The popular applications involve animation, video, travel maps, photo, music related stuff, etc.

A college or university could create applications for publishing news, events or even fund raising. This area of Facebook needs further exploration - the application stuff is still very new.

Making money with domains and contextual ad networks, part 1.

anonymous — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 23:10:00 CST

This is part 1 of a 3 part post regarding making money with domains. It's for folks who own domains and the domain just sit there in your godaddy/netsol/register.com account.

I'm also going to discuss my experience with the contextual ad networks (read: Adsense), in part 2. Part 3 will be about maximizing clicks and then ecommerce in part 4.

(Note: I suggest AssociatedContent.com or even Squidoo.com if you are looking to make money quickly with web content. Feed.Us is a content management platform that works on your own domain and hosting.)

Background:

Back when Adwords & Adsense were new (2003?), our customers looked to us for guidance about these new services. In order to learn, I bought some domains and built a few web travel guides. I purchased traffic on Adwords and then monetized the traffic using Adsense.

I learned quickly that "news" sites don't make many 'clicks' with Adsense. But 'how to' type sites do quite well. So I started to make money on sites like: VisitTortola.com.

Making some cash:

At the start I was making a couple bucks per day in profit. At the height of the deal, with 40+ sites, I was doing about $1000 and spending $600 in Adwords (per month). Over time, there has been a general decline in adsense revenue.

Why the decline? I believe that Google and Google's customers are getting savvier about their keyword buying. Additional factors could be: type-in traffic has declined overall on the web, everyone is better with SEO now, Google has not changed their algorithms in a while, seasonality.

But mainly people have learned how to buy traffic cheaper.

Some tips if you are considering monetizing your domains:

1) Choose a revenue-driving topics.

Your content and domain need to be in a category that drives revenue. Politics doesn't pay. Writing about your pets is not going to pay. Some categories that do well?

Travel, especially expensive destinations. Home Improvement (design, fix a roof, etc). Automotive (not car reviews, how to fix things). Finance (Mortgage related ads used to be money, probably not as much now). Lawsuit (not much traffic but high per click prices). Wellness (drug-related sites are huge, disease probably do great).

Bottom line: domains that like hilaryvsrudy.com are not going to make any money with Adsense (Sorry Andrew).

2) There's no free lunch

Your efforts have to be genuine. You can't just slap some ads on a domain. You can't just "domain park" it and retire. It takes effort.

If you focus on making a property that is valuable to someone, you can make money. But it has to be genuine -- not a trick.

3.) You can't give them everything.

Now for the sad part: if you do too good of a job, visitors won't click on ads. If you provide just enough information, your customers will be more inclined to click on ads.

(I know, it's sad.

4.) Less links.

Put as few links on your page. Basically the only clickable options should the ads from Google or Yahoo. Again, another sad reality. You can't make a really functionable site.

The links should also blend into the content as much as possible. I'll talk about this more on PArt 2.

5.) Other kinds of ads.

If you're making money via adsense, don't try to use other kinds of adnetworks. For a long time we tried to sell hotel rooms via Hotel.com's ad network. I think it just took clicks away from Adsense.

6.) Updated content. Google likes refreshed content. Keep adding and tweaking and editing.

7.) Google News. If you can get your site into google news and then publish often, you're money. It's hard to get into Google news, but if you do, it's a traffic gold mine. If you're publishing in a category that gets high price per click - you may be able to quit your day job.

Stay tuned for Part 2 because I'll talk about contextual ad networks (like Yahoo YPN, Adsense, etc).

VooDoo economics: tax cuts lead to deficit reduction

Rick Stratton — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:10:00 CST

From the WSJ:

We hate to be the bearers of good news, but someone's got to do it: The Congressional Budget Office has released its preliminary estimates for Fiscal Year 2007 that ended September 30, and the federal budget deficit fell again, this time by 35% to $161 billion.

I was taught, repeatedly, by my Conn College professors that "trickle down" "voodoo" economics didn't work. How many times were we told that the tax cuts early in Bush's presidency were going to wreck the deficit? Too bad it's all bull----... the tax cuts spurred the economy and generated higher returns for the IRS. It's one of the few successful ideas out of GW Bush's tenure.

The WSJ continues:

The overriding lesson here is that the best antidote for deficits is faster growth, not tax increases. The budget deficit has declined more rapidly this decade in the wake of the Bush tax cuts than it did in the 1990s in the wake of the Clinton tax increases.

So if you're a liberal and you feel guilty about having money, what should you do? Easy, cite the US poverty rate! Clinton, who reduced the deficit the right way, reduced the poverty rate as well! While Bush's tax cuts increased the poverty rate. From Wikipedia:

The official poverty rate in the U.S. increased for four consecutive years, from a 26-year low of 11.3% in 2000 to 12.7% in 2004, then declined somewhat to 12.3% in 2006. This means that 36.5 million people were below the official poverty thresholds in 2006 and that there was an increase of 4.9 million poor from 2000 to 2006 while the total population grew by 17.5 million. ^[12]

It's up 1% during the first 2/3 George Bush's tenure! That must mean that he does all those tax cuts for the wealthy.

So when Hilary and her Congress takes power next year... we should all feel enough shame about our money and give in to tax increases, especially on the rich because it's such a large group of people who don't do anything with their money anyhow! Let the government distribute it for us. We can all feel so much better about ourselves, and we won't even have to give more money to charities!

More on Bush's tax cuts from DircktheNoorman.

Miller and Coors team up

Rick Stratton — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:10:00 CST

So Miller and Coors are merging. JSOnline.com has the story:

The new company, to be known as MillerCoors, will claim 29% of the U.S. beer market once the deal is completed in mid-2008. MillerCoors will have the size, cash and expanded brand lineup - ranging from mainstays Miller Lite and Coors Light to imports and craft beers including Pilsner Urquell and Blue Moon - to more effectively compete with Anheuser-Busch Cos.

Now, iIf the two companies would just stop making average beer for average people, maybe they could beat Budweiser.

Long time no talk

anonymous — Mon, 8 Oct 2007 18:10:00 CST

We haven't posted to the FeedUsBlog in over a week, so here's a quick summary of what's coming up:

Feed.Us "sections" update is in "dev" mode and being tested internally. We're using it to make calendars and recipe pages. We've got a few more things to finish up so it will be a few weeks before it's live on the 'normal' Feed.Us system.

Meanwhile the "RSS Import" update should be wrapped up by next week. We hope to have our beta customers trying this out. (If you'd like to 'beta' Feed.Us, just email me).

Finally, I've been testing the different pay-per-click ad networks on my group of sites (Microsoft, Yahoo Publishers Network and Adsense). I am going to publish some thoughts and findings this week, here on this blog.

Later!
- Rick Stratton

I hate F.I.P.s

anonymous — Mon, 8 Oct 2007 15:10:00 CST

We got our butts kicked by Illinois teams. Cubs eliminated the Brewers. Then Illini outlasted the Badgers. Finally the Bears caught the Pack. What the heck? Isn't hogging our roads enough??

Strange things are afoot...

Rick Stratton — Mon, 8 Oct 2007 15:10:00 CST

My neighbor (5 blocks away, luckily) was involved in a very strange incident. He and family were held at sawed-off-shotgun-point for an hour one evening last week by an extremely large black man. The guy tried to rob them of cash, but after a few beers took off with just a laptop and iPhone. No police were called; instead the guy calls the mayor the following day. Still, almost 2 weeks later... police are not investigating because he won't let them.

The man in question is John Jazwiec, CEO of Red Prairie (probably the only big software company in Wisconsin, btw). He's been a vocal critic against Milwaukee's taxes (ridiculously high taxes) and services (poor services). Supposedly he's scared of the police too (the local police are really good, actually but don't visit our neighborhood often because not much goes on here).

Here's the background for you, if you are interested. First is a J-S article. The second is a summary of the emails sent between Jazwiec and the Mayor's office.

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=670875
http://freedomeden.blogspot.com/2007/10/john-jazwiec-and-not-your-typical-thug.html

Here are the things that our neighbors are asking each other...

1. What piece of information is missing.

2. Would someone fake a robbery in order to bring more attention to city's problems?

3. His next door neighbor was robbed and the police immediately caught the suspects. He obviously knew this. Still he's skeptical of the police?

Blackberry curve

Rick Stratton — Thu, 4 Oct 2007 23:10:00 CST

I've got a birthday coming up in a few weeks and I found myself driving by the ~~Cingular~~ ATT store, and well... now I've got a Curve.

Wow, what a nice machine. I miss the the wheel, though.

But I love the camera. I've been emailing my photos over to my Flickr account right after I take 'em with the Curve. So now the pictures of the Beck can double.

I think this blog will soon become just different feeds of my life. Twitter, Flickr... I cannot wait. Actually, I'll have to because the RSS import on Feed.Us won't be done till next week.

I want to get my photos into Twitter... I wonder how I'd do it. I don't want them all there, though.

Know what I hate?

Rick Stratton — Thu, 4 Oct 2007 19:10:00 CST

I hate it when people misuse comments by placing one small comment and then one of those "I blogged about this" and a link to their blog. Drives me nuts. If you say something smart, I'll visit your site.

Adaptive Blue guy this is for you.

Software for the Blackberry

Rick Stratton — Tue, 2 Oct 2007 17:10:00 CST

I've recently installed the blackberry twitter application. Pretty nice - works really well.

It got me thinking about other blackberry applications. NewsGator's blackberry feedreader works pretty well. Google Maps on my bb saved my ass a couple weeks ago.

I tried to download a blackberry google calendar sync program. It didn't install for me because my BB has older java software. But everyone seems to think that it works fine.

I would love an IM application that uses the blackberry network. Is there one out there that works on a cingular phone?

What about sports scores? That's the killer app. Why do I have to log on to the web to get the latest scores? Why can't it connect and get the scores for me like it downloads emails? And news headlines? Or a fantasy sports monitor? I'd pay for that.

There's definitely opportunities out there.

Choosing an ad system

anonymous — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:09:00 CST

One of our last large projects, before Feed.Us, was to create an ad network for a medium sized daily newspaper. Our original intention was to integrate an existing ad system for the customer.

The customer had advertisers and ads lined-up, ready to go. Just wanted to serve these ads.

Unfortunately there aren't many options. Here's what we found...

Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network, Quigo, etc...

These are all Advertising Networks. Emphasis on NETWORK. Their business is selling ads. They don't care about people who already have ads and advertisers. (We well rate the different networks via an upcoming post).

Basically if you've got ads and advertisers (and you need to get those ad(s) on your site) your options are somewhat limited.

OpenAds: Great news, the open source advertising system "Open ads" (which used to be PHPadsNew) has raised a bunch of money recently and they seem to be making an effort to get organized. Also good news - lots and lots of sites run Openads.

Now for the bad news... Open ads, like most open source projects, is complicated, doesn't have a great amount of documentation. You can't add Open ads like it's Adsense (copy/paste), you're gonna need someone who is a decent level developer to set this up on your site (my $.02 is a $40k or higher type person). You're also going to have to have someone with a technical ability to run the system as well. It's also going to take at least 2 weeks (50-80 hours) of development to get it to really work on your site.

On the plus side, they've got most of the options you're going to want. It'll just take some work to get it.

Doubleclick or Doubleclick provider: Great News, again. Doubleclick is the industry standard that all the big guys use to serve their ads. New York Times, Wall Street Journal. It's got anything and everything you'd want. Your advertisers will get great analysis, etc. You can tap into their network when you've run out of your own ads.

Bad news, of course. You're going to need to be huge (like 20 million impressions) to be able to work with Doubleclick. If you're a tad smaller (Say 10million impressions) you can work with a reseller (like Operative).

Doubleclick warns that it will take up to 10 business days to setup, even on their end. We have no clue what they have to do on their end. Also, it's not copy/paste on your end. You'll need a developer. And your sales folks WILL NOT be able to run this bad boy - you'll need to get someone trained specifically on how to post ads.

DC was built like 10 years ago and it's my feeling that they haven't upgraded to modern systems since then. Hopefully Google's purchase will help them get updated to where a person with normal abilities can add their ad system to a site.

We also hope that Google/Doubleclick builds an ad serving system "for the rest of us". We'll be waiting.

How does Feed.Us work with Ads?

Feed.Us can work easily alongside any kind of ad system or network. We're also hoping that our customers will manage ads like they'd manage other web content. Writers submit articles or reviews. Advertisers submit their own ads. That's the way we think Feed.Us will work with ads - so your advertisers can add/edit their own ads like it's their own content. And of course across all of your sites, if you have more than one.

Try a web publishing application

anonymous — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 21:09:00 CST

We, here at Feed.Us, have been making web publishing applications since the "glorious" 1990s.

Back in 1998-2000, it was at Guitar.com. We hosted the world's guitarists and gave them a place to learn, share and connect. Sadly, it's gone. (Some day it will rise again!)

From 2001-2006, we made customized publishing applications for the customers of 1871 Media. 1871 is now uxCast, LLC and has one of the best ecommerce systems on the planet (if we do say so our selves).

The benefits of our 10 years of experience is that we have an understanding of the kinds of "stuff" that our customers want to put on their websites. We built dozens of different kinds of applications from polls and email newsletter mail systems to shopping carts and banner ad serving.

What's the point?

The future is now and you don't need someone to custom make you some sort of application. Whatever you want to do, there's a developer out there making an application for you.

You need a little flexibility, how to use a javascript, and have access to your site and be able to use the "control p" keys (aka paste).

Here's my list of website "plugin" applications (so far)...

> Email newsletter and RSS: Feedburner.com
> Polls, surveys and quizes: Quibblo.com
> Comments/discussion: Disqus.com
> Email newsletters: Feedblitz.com
> Donations, shopping cart: Google Checkout (or paypal)
> Ads: Adsense, Yahoo, Adpinion.com , Adbrite.com
> Search: Lijit.com, Google Co-op.
> Discussion, texting, community: Twitter.com, MyBlogLog.com
> Photogallery: Flickr.com
> Music Player: Streampad
> Video player: Brightcove.com
> Avitar: voki.com
> Site discussion: MeeboMe.com

What am I missing? Please reply and let me know.

If you're a designer, you should love CSS

anonymous — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:09:00 CST

CSS is a little scary, whether you're a html monkey or a designer. (There are no tables! Ahhh!).

But, you should learn to love CSS.

(To be technical, CSS can be used on other types of documents besides HTML. I'm specifically talking about CSS and xHTML.)

First some background: CSS means "cascading style sheets". CSS is like HTML version 2. xHTML and CSS has been recommended by the WC3 since 1998, yet it's still not the norm on the Web. Why? Probably because we fear change.

Your xhtml webpages reference one CSS file for the style - the way everything looks: Font, background colors, amount of space, etc . You can modify one/hundreds/thousands of pages by changing just one item in the CSS. Say one day you want all the text in the main body of your site should to be a dark gray. The next day you can change it to red - on every page - all via the CSS file.

I've simplified, but if you want to learn CSS, I'd probably recommend CSS for Dummies. It's written for all levels - not just for dummies.

If you're a designer, you should love CSS.

So why should you love CSS? I've always avoided coding. I can make tables etc... but I've always left the heavy stuff to the experts. CSS lets me do just about everything. Because I don't have to really know CSS in order to use it, I just understand it.

I get by using CSS templates from other people. I purchase them online or even download free ones. (See list below.) When there's a big project and I need to create something from scratch, I'll design a few pages in Photoshop, and then use a "Slicer" service to "chop" my design into CSS. (We use the Choppr.)

You could probably do a layout in powerpoint or in Word, and they'd probably be able to turn your sketches into CSS.

CSS on Feed.Us:

Feed.Us was made to work with CSS/xHtml so I've been using CSS templates a ton since we started testing. Feed.Us will work with HTML sites, but we built it to work with the CSS/xHTML div tags.

So don't be afraid. Embrace it asap. You'll be happy you did.

Links (Please comment if you have others.)

Learning:
> CSS tips: http://htmlhelp.com/reference/css/
> CSS Zen Garden: http://csszengarden.com

Layouts:
> Arcsin templates: http://templates.arcsin.se/
> Very bare CSS files: http://www.code-sucks.com/css%20layouts/
> Free CSS templates: http://www.freecsstemplates.org/
> Template monster

Slicing/Chopping services:
> The Choppr
> Most Sliced

Coding:
> Firebug
> CSS Fly

HTML newsletters in a spam-filled world

anonymous — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:09:00 CST

Back in the day, say 2000 or 2001, you could garner a pretty good audience with an email newsletter. You could create a newsletter, ask people to join and folks would. And they'd read it. And they'd click on ads. Marketers wanted HUGE lists. They even spammed people (everyone did it back in the day).

Those days are long gone. You cannot spam people - actually you never could, but nowadays you get in trouble for it, thankfully. And worse - few people actually read even the newsletters that they actually used to want (it's call "bacn", btw). The nice thing is that doing an HTML newsletter back in the day was a major pain. Nowadays it's not as important and technology has advanced, so you don't have to spend much time.

You STILL want to do an email newsletter?

Here's how I would do it. Before I start, remember these two things:

> Permission. Let them get you the way they want to. That means email newsletter, but also RSS feeds, your site, Twitter.com, the way they want to be reached, not the way you want to reach them. i.e. Don't interrupt your audience.

> Short. Don't write a book.

Doing a html newsletter with Feed.Us:

If you had Feed.Us (you can't yet, but soon!) you could quickly add email and RSS capabilities. Make a category for your RSS and email posts. This could also be your blog posts, that's what we do with the FeedUsBlog. Then make an RSS feed with Feed.Us's simple RSS tool.

What is RSS? Read here.

Do a html newsletter without Feed.Us:

If you don't have Feed.Us, don't worry. Yes, Feed.Us is great, but there are other options.

Have your programmer make an RSS feed out of whatever CMS you're using. If you don't have a CMS (or a programmer!) then you can also use one of the free/cheap blog systems to publish and create an RSS feed. Examples: Blogger or Typepad. These services have an RSS option (but it's not built in to the system like Feed.Us!).

You've got an RSS feed for your newsletter:

Once you've got an RSS feed, you've getting close. The first option is to make sure folks can sign up on your website for your RSS feed. You can make a simple link to the RSS url and most people can figure that out.

However, we always use Feedburner because FB makes everything very easy. They give you some code to copy/paste on your site that allows folks to subscribe to your RSS feed easily. Get your RSS feed using Feedburner's services here.

Guess what? Feedburner also has email newsletter service(s) built in. Once your RSS feed is rocking in Feedburner, you can use Feedburner to sign-up for three different email newsletter services. They've got their own service, which is sufficient. But they also have FeedBlitz and RMail built in.

I've got one setup for the FeedusBlog. Every morning, after we've added a new post to the FeedusBlog... Feedburner sends out a newsletter to all of our subscribers. I don't actually do anything... that's the way I like it. I've spent countless hours sending newsletters in the past, that was back when we had like 30% readership. Now you're lucky to have 5%.

FeedBlitz has some nicer qualities than Feedburner. So if you want to do more with your newsletter, check them out.

Additional tip: use Feedburner's "Headline Animator" to display your newsletter content on other people's websites.

Have an additional tip? Add it via the comments, here.

Update: I forgot to add one thing... remember that folks with Blackberries (Blackberrys?) enjoy reading HTML emails on their device. This is an audience that would actually like to read your newsletter. However, most HTML email newsletter are heavy on the HTML and thus look terrible in a Blackberry, which is a very basic email viewer. I think that Feedburner's emails look pretty good on a Blackberry. But the BIG email providers (Constant Contact) look horrible. Whatever email system you go with - test it on a Blackberry.

Thinking about my blogging

anonymous — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:09:00 CST

I've been using Twitter pretty regularly. It's starting to change the way I use this site. In fact, I don't post as much. All my stupid crap that no one wants to read goes into my Twitter posts.

Soon we'll be adding the ability to import RSS feeds into Feed.Us. That means our customers actually won't have to use Feed.Us to use Feed.Us.

As soon as that happens, I think I'll change this blog so that it's just a bunch of my RSS feeds... flickr, Twitter, feedusblog.com, Packerbackerblog etc. This site can be a summary of what I'm publishing.

Meanwhile, I am starting to write more thought-out crap over on the feedusblog. My first one was last week - how to add video. I've started keeping track of the things people ask advise for... like ecommerce, html newsletters, what to do with those domain names you bought years ago, make an RSS feed, get on iTunes, that kind of thing.

Anyway, look for this site to change, soon.

Update: just changed my twitter to FeedUs.

Add videos to your site

anonymous — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 22:09:00 CST

Below is a description of how to add web video to your site, blog etc when you're using Feed.Us. I originally wrote this piece to help out an old customer who was new to making web video. I thought it would be helpful if I re-wrote it including the Feed.Us steps.

First an overview of creating/hosting a web video:

Shooting the video:

If you're shooting video of a person at a desk or something similar... you can use one of those still digital cameras that has a video option. These cameras work fine for web video, actually, because the video quality has to be reduced to run on the web. If you're going to be shooting at night or of sports, an actual digital camcorder is better (but not essential). I currently use our Cannon $400 point and shoot. (I'd go here to find the right camcorder).

The next part is getting it off the camera on to a computer:

There are some newer options for this, but it's still the toughest part. The files that come off a camera can be gigantic. So if you took 30 minutes at a football game - that would be like a hard drive full (not really, but kinda). This is really the toughest part. The easiest is to just export a set segment of less than 10 minutes to a computer, I think. However the newer camcorders let you put the video on a flash card or even a DVD, which can be quickly put into a computer (with a flash card reader or a dvd player). I haven't tried this, but I have to assume it's quicker than the old firewire I use on my computer.

Editing:

If it needs editing, this is also difficult. Macs are natural for this stuff, but Windows PCs are more challenged. Windows Movie Maker is the basic on the PC, Macs come with iMovie but Final Cut is the big one that people use. I don't know a better PC program. Maybe someone will comment and say what's the best. Final Cut comes for the PC I believe.

Convert to web format:

The next step is to get the video to a small enough form to work well online. Basically we're talking file size. A large size is just hard to upload, download, view etc online. So you need to get the file less than 100 megs, that's kind of the limit these days. I use the free "Windows Media Encoder" and I optimize the videos for streaming (I use the 784 option, btw) and they come out as a WMA file - perfect for uploading to Youtbe or Brightcove. iMovie and Final Cut can do the same thing as WME.

Storage:

Right now, I've been recommending and using BrightCove. BrightCove is like Youtube, but it's meant for organizations. But it works the exact same. Create an account, upload videos, etc. It's got a much nicer looking video than youtube. Eventually Brightcove will start embedding ads into your videos, but for now it's free (note to brightcove, offer a cheap paid, no ads version, and not the 'professional' thingy).

Once the file is on Brightcove (or youtube, whatever), the video can be "embedded" into any website. Brightcove gives you some "code" that can be copied and pasted into any website. So you'd just copy/paste it into a story (right into the full description field). Same thing as Youtube. It's generally a javascript. Typically it says "embed" and you can copy/paste it anywhere.

Now get it on your site using Feed.Us:

With Feed.Us, you setup categories for all the different parts of your site(s). For most folks, they'll be adding videos into an existing part of their website. However, you could setup a separate category for 'Video' and put the video embed codes (described above) in their own category. If you're using our "sections" (longer description coming soon), you can actually setup video specific fields so that it's much easier than what I'm about to describe.

But lets assume that you're uploading it into a 'normal' news or blog type page. That means you've got the body of your page in the "full description" field. Compose a 'new' article. Give it a name, add a quick summary, choose an author. Then in the "full description" field, put in any text that you're going to run around the video.

Thinking about adding video news?

Rick Stratton — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:09:00 CST

Question:

For a while now we've been wanting to start shooting digital video and placing it on the Web site alongside our stories. We're planning to start small -- 30 second video interviews, sound clips, etc. Can you give me an overview of how to get started?

My answer:

Shooting the video:

If you're shooting video of a person at a desk.. you can use one of those still digital cameras that has a video option. These cameras work fine for web video, actually, because the video quality has to be reduced to run on the web. If you're going to be shooting at night or of sports, an actual digital camcorder is better (but not essential). I currently use our Cannon $400 point and shoot. (I'd go here to find the right camcorder).

The next part is getting it off the camera on to a computer:

Editing:

Putting the video on the website:
Once the file is on Brightcove (or youtube, whatever), the video can be "embedded" into any website. Brightcove gives you some "code" that can be copied and pasted into any website. So you'd just copy/paste it into a story (right into the full description field). Same thing as Youtube. It's generally a javascript. Typically it says "embed" and you can copy/paste it anywhere.

6 years ago

Rick Stratton — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 23:09:00 CST

On September 9, 2001, Keeks and I were in engaged in NYC. We flew back to Chicago late Sunday. A weekend of food, engagement, US Open, more food, Yankees/Sox. What a great weekend.

All that changed on the following Tuesday. I was at my desk in our apartment that overlooked the Hancock and the Sears. Right in the middle of my view was our TV - tuned to the Today Show. Keeks was about to leave for work - she never went. The Today Show switched the cameras to the Towers. I remember wondering whether it was live or not (The Today Show is taped for non Eastern timezone markets).

I immediately tried to call Josh Metnick Schneider and make sure he was out of the Hancock. We thought for sure the Sears or Hancock was next. To this day, I feel a fright every time I see a 767 flying overhead.

We were so far away from NYC but we felt so close.

Car lust: Ferrari Maranello

Rick Stratton — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 19:09:00 CST

The car I most want to own is regularly on my mind.

But the car's details regularly change. Viper GTS, Lamborghini Miura, Ferrari Dino, 73 Porsche 911RS.

Until last week it was a Lamborghini Gallardo. Not anymore. I saw a couple of young high school punks looking in the trunk (front) of an orange Gallardo in NYC last week. I honestly think they were looking for the engine up there.

So I've moved on. It's now the Ferrari Maranello. 1999-2001 Ferrari 550 or the 2002-2006 575 Maranello.

The 550 and its upgraded friend the 575 were Front engine Berlinettas with V12 5.5L (later 5.7L).

I would get gray exterior, classic Ferrari tan interior (see photo). I'd go for the GTC package with brakes and handling upgrades. Oh, and a clutch, please - no paddle shifting nonsense.

eBay pricing places the earlier 550s in the low $100K range. Maybe $110k for a decent one. Compare that to $500K+ for the current Berlinetta (ugly!).

My fantasy team

Rick Stratton — Wed, 5 Sep 2007 11:09:00 CST

It's a good rule of thumb not to blog about one's sex life, finances or... fantasy football team.

I'll violate that third one, here.

Our annual draft was last night. It was our first "online" draft - the 10 previous seasons have been manual. This year it's on ESPN instead of Commissioner.com (sportsline). For the most part it went well but there were some technical glitches when manager's computers froze. It happened to 4 people. The JRE stuff ESPN runs definetely has issues.

I cannot use ESPN's JRE as an excuse. Here's my lineup:

QB Peyton Manning
RB Thomas Jones
RB Cedric Benson
WR Roy Williams
WR Calvin Johnson
WR Deion Branch
Packers D/ST
K Ryan Longwell
RB Warrick Dunn
RB Chris Brown
QB Jon Kitna
WR James Jones
RB Heath Evans
WR Steve Smith (giants)
TE Bubba Franks

RSS in and RSS out

anonymous — Tue, 4 Sep 2007 19:09:00 CST

One of the really cool parts about Feed.Us is the roll of RSS.

Once we launch it, Feed.Us will probably be the quickest/easiest way to create an RSS feed (if you don't have a Phil Plencner around).

Feed.Us started life as RSSCMS.com. It was a quick and dirty way to make a feed, add news and then burn the Feed into Feedburner. It worked fine.

But then we started using Javascripts and using RSS CMS as a website publishing tool. It was so easy that we started to think about it seriously.

So now Feed.Us uses XML instead of RSS and has a variety of options besides javascripts (RSS, XML feed, javascript, XML&SOAP, our PHP/ASP web service). But you'll still be able to make an RSS feed for any category (like tags) within seconds.

The other thing we're adding is the ability to import via RSS. We don't really want force your writers to use Feed.Us as a composition tool. If they like Typepad, they can publish via the RSS feed out of Typepad.

So RSS goes in and RSS goes out.

FeedUs on CSS

anonymous — Tue, 4 Sep 2007 19:09:00 CST

We are about to put the finishing touches on our "sections" update.

But meanwhile, Welborn did an upgrade on Feed.Us' CSS. The new layout screenshot is to the right (click to enlarge).

All of Feed.Us' frontend (where you'd go to manage sites, get the scripts, etc) is all via div xhtml/CSS.

So if your customers don't like the way our layout looks, you can upload your own CSS and change the whole thing around.

Kinda like CSS Zen Garden. CSS/xhtml is pretty amazing.

The US Open

anonymous — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:08:00 CST

We've got the pleasure of being able to watch tons of sports this week on the tube. We've got Yanks vs. Sox and Brewers vs. Cubs (I'm not jinxing it).

But I'd prefer to watch the US Open on Universal HD. For some reason, the stuff on Universal HD is noticeably better than the HD sports on other channels. Even ESPN. The US Open night matches, outdoors... all in HD. It's so perfect and we'll have it every day and night for almost 2 weeks.

Cheap hosting

anonymous — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:08:00 CST

We spoke with a hosting company CEO last week. He told us, "I can't compete with Godaddy." He charges between $10-$15 per month. Godaddy charges about $4 per month for the same options. It's hard to compete with the likes of Godaddy and Yahoo and the other big hosting companies.

One of the reasons we started making Feed.Us is that there's tons of cheap hosting out there yet most CMS applications can't run on Godaddy or Yahoo, etc... you need custom hardware or software that won't run on normal, basic hosting. Not to mention that the developer probably wants you to pay him $50 per month just to host the site with her.

With Feed.Us, all you need is to be able to run php or asp pages on a site. You don't even need mySQL.

One of our beta sites is doing about 25,000 uniques per month on Godaddy hosting. It's only $4 per month via godaddy and with Feed.Us only utilizes .01% of the disk space and .02% of the 250000.00 MB bandwidth allotment.

So with Feed.Us... cheap hosting, no developer to setup a MySQl database and no need for a $20k Microsoft SQL Server license.

Javascripting Widgets

Rick Stratton — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:08:00 CST

Yesterday I added the Disqus comment system to my site (and here and here). I was actually amazed at how simple they've got it working. They really thought through their AJAX and their Javascript. Hats off to them.

I immediately thought of all the newspaper/magazine writers and editors that I've worked for over the last couple year (at ~~1871~~ uxCast). There are dozens of our old customers who would love to have this kind of comment system. We made several attempts over the years, but it was never our focus.

Then reader polls. We had a nice reader poll through the years and every newspaper utilized it. Now there's a widget reader poll from Qubblo that looks terrific. They've done a really nice job.

Surveys... i'm sure there's a nice Widget-based survey system out there. Newspapers would love it to get feedback from readers about articles.

Then there's the ad systems... all are javascripts. And the video... newspapers love adding video. Brightcove has the best player, in my opinion. They did a great job. Better than what we tried to do with flash video.

So here's my point: we have all this great software, just a copy/paste away, but we rely on javascripts.

There are all these companies out there making pieces of an overall publishing system. They all focus on their individual component, and because of their focus, the product is WAY better than anything else out there.

But all of them get added via a javascript. And as most folks know... Javascripts dramatically slow page load time. For newspapers, it cannot be done. Newspapers are already deathly slow because of the desire/need/fasination with placing EVERYTHING on EVERY PAGE.

So adding all of the widgets I described above is a deal breaker.

Maybe...

1) Somehow combine a bunch of services into one javascript. There are services out there for this, but I doubt it reduces the overall number of javascripts.

2) Build a common API that publishers can easily implement.

3) Do something "local" like we did with Feed.Us.

We built Feed.Us with the idea that we're a cog that works in a larger gear system. But we'd rather be part of Audi's multitronic CVT rather than a Shimano 105.

We think we've done a really good job of avoiding the pitfalls of javascript widgets. I hope others will figure this out, too.

Now with comments

anonymous — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:08:00 CST

Thanks to the folks at Disqus... any site can now have a blog.

Disqus' comment system works with a simple Javascript. It's insanely easy to add comments to your Feed.Us-powered site.

See the comments below. Nice work Disqus!

Oh my gosh this rocks

Rick Stratton — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:08:00 CST

Disqus.com... one quick javascript and I've got comments. Goodbye SixApart!

Sour Grapes

anonymous — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:08:00 CST

Joe Leonard enjoys sour grapes...

We sought to acquire Midwest because we believe joining the two airlines would have created a unique, efficient, truly national low-cost carrier with tremendous benefits for shareholders, communities and employees. We hoped the Midwest board would come to share our vision and reach a consensual agreement - just as a majority of Midwest shareholders recognized the value in our strategic plan. However, we accept the Midwest board's decision.

A couple things...

Employees and shareholders wouldn't mutually benefit under what was his plan. If shareholders wanted this to happen, they would have expected more profits which only would mean reduced salaries. That was the "synergy".

Also a majority of shareholders weren't in favor. A majority of the shares were voted... but with the amount of funds that owned the company, there's no way a majority of shareholders were interested in the deal.

Anyway, he can find another city to screw and the NY Times can help him then too.

Coming Soon: Feed.Us sections

anonymous — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 05:08:00 CST

For the past couple months, we've been hard at work at one of the last "beta" upgrades on Feed.Us. Once we get this one out there, we're going to start opening Feed.Us up. (We'll also have to get some real servers in a real hosting facility).

We call this new upgrade: sections.

There are two meaningful advances with Feed.Us. I've talked about the first one, many times (i.e. feed.us makes it really easy to add our software to any website hosted anywhere).

The second advance is sections. "Sections" refers to the sections of a typical website: Products, News, About, Contact, Calendar, etc. Each section generally refer to different kinds of content.

"News" typically is either press releases or media articles about the organization. News uses typical RSS fields for the content: title, maybe a summary, body, links, etc.

News is also very similar to blog content. If you've worked with Moveable Type or Wordpress, you recognize these fields above.

Also if you've worked seriously with MT or WP, you realize that when you bend MT or WP to fit non-"news" type content onto a site, it gets hairy. Example: have you ever tried to do an event calendar with MT?

Currently Feed.Us handles News-type content. But with our upcoming "sections", we're now branching out so that we can store just about any of the fields of data/content that our customers might need.

Examples: Product length, event start date, address, last name, pet's name, mother maiden name, first girlfriend, end time, address 2, cooking time, ingredients, cell phone number, etc, etc.

Our hope is that advanced users of Feed.Us can combine different fields into their own CMS applications, hosted on Feed.Us. Their users can add/store any kind of data with ease. And then developers can easily display that data on any site hosted anywhere.

Again, if you're interested in trying out Feed.Us, contact me at rick at feed dot us.

Customers actually win

anonymous — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 22:08:00 CST

Finally the months-long saga of the Midwest Airlines acquisition is over, and Midwest's shareholders and customers are both winners.

For those who haven't been paying attention... Midwest's board was fighting a hostile takeover by Airtran. It was a cash and stock offer that was only appealing to the institutional owners.

At the last second, a private equity firm, partnered with Northwest Airlines, swooped in to steal the deal. Luckily for us, Northwest - a lifelong Midwest enemy - didn't want Airtran stealing more business that it had already lost to Midwest. And the private equity firm saw an opportunity.

So instead of just shareholders winning, Midwest's customers win too. We still get good food, nice people, short lines and the best care center. Though we're probably going to lose our wider seats.

So Value Jet CEO Joe Leonard can go back to Florida, and Gretchen Morgensen can join him. She wrote this press release for Airtran and got Joe Leonard his prime spot on the frontpage of NY Time's Sunday Business.

Bottom line is that the board supported the majority of shareholders and resisted Airtran. We all knew that Milwaukee would suck without Midwest and that Airtran's stock was not a fair trade.

And we won.

There's a Feed.Us in the basement

anonymous — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 05:08:00 CST

As of Friday, August 17, Feed.Us is now being utilized as the CMS on over 40 websites. It reaches approximately 10,000 unique users every day.

All via one server sitting in a basement.

We've built Feed.Us in such a way that it can handle any amount of traffic that your web host can handle.

And if Feed.Us were to go down - your site would be unaffected.

Late this summer we'll get Feed.Us off the dryer and moved over to a real hosting company.

But for the time being, it's pretty fun to say: "Feed.Us is in the basement".

The internet is amazing

anonymous — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 08:08:00 CST

The web is amazing.

I was looking for a quote from Seinfeld that was about George being divided against himself. It's from one of those episodes where George is afraid of getting married.

I put in "george, seinfeld, divided" into Google. Second result was some guys Seinfeld youtube with the exact scene.

"A george, divided against itself, CANNOT STAND!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp1tohmTx40

Feed.Us is live on these great sites

anonymous — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 22:08:00 CST

Feed.Us is currently live on over 40 websites. We run several networks of sites that mostly make money via advertising. We also occasionally help out our friends. Here's a sampling:

www.InnerControlGolf.com

www.TurtleCreekOnTheParkway.com

www.VisitTortola.com

Contact Rubber Corp

Caribbean Travel News

The Caribbean Search Engine

StBartsTourist.com

Visit Anguilla

Installing Feed.Us

anonymous — Thu, 9 Aug 2007 17:08:00 CST

Ben Smith, out in Boston, said:

"Why do I need to learn to be a programmer in order to install Drupal or Wordpress?"

That's a good question, Ben.

Here's a comparison of Feed.Us setup versus the major blog systems. Remember - with Feed.Us there's nothing to download, unzip, etc. It's completely hosted.

Install Feed.Us:

1. On your server, your hosting company's "control panel", setup a new "directory" called CachedWebContent. Give it read, write and web access. (We have instructions for the major hosting cos.)

2. Upload the "grabber" file. Just one file that gets ftped to your server, hosting etc.

3. Plug in the 2 lines of code whereever you want the content to flow.

Compare to Wordpress:

Compare to MoveableType:

Compare to Drupal:

I'm sorry. I would have put the full setup directions for Drupal, Wordpress and MT, but it's just too long of a process.

Feed.Us screenshots

anonymous — Thu, 9 Aug 2007 17:08:00 CST

Feed.Us is almost ready for everyone/anyone to try. In the meantime, here are some screenshots of Feed.Us that I've uploaded to Flickr.

If you'd like to try it yourself, shoot me an email at Rick at feed dot us.

Comments?

anonymous — Thu, 9 Aug 2007 17:08:00 CST

We've avoided adding any kind of comments system to Feed.Us. It's not really a blog system (though it works great as one) it's more of a CMS or web publishing app then just a simple blog system.

But comment-type activity is really unavoidable in our future and we hope to make a really smart comment-like interaction manager that works within Feed.Us. But that's a different post for a different time.

We are currently watching two new blog comment startups. They are both javascript-based systems (at least I hope they are). They are:

> Disqus

> Intense Debate

We hope they will be able to just "plug" right into a site that uses Feed.us.

If you have a different suggestion - email me at rick at feed dot us. (Or use the new Meebome chat widget along the right there!)

Permalinks

anonymous — Thu, 9 Aug 2007 16:08:00 CST

When we setup our initial sites using Feed.Us, Jake Parrillo asked, "where are the permalinks??". Good question.

"Permalinking" ie separate pages for specific posts. Without a "dynamic" code (asp, php, etc) how were we going to do it?

Just make a file, on your site, called detail.asp (or php, etc) and then copy/paste our Feed.Us code on both the homepage and on the new "detail" page. Then your site will make pages on the fly for you.

It's actually that simple - even though you're probably like "what?"

So Jake - it's up. When are you converting from Wordpress?

Getting your content into Feed.Us

anonymous — Thu, 9 Aug 2007 16:08:00 CST

We created Feed.Us so that non-technical users can quickly manage/edit/add to/control the content that sits on a website, in a blog, on a web calendar, etc.

Examples:

> Customer service folks want to add/edit the FAQ section of your site.

> Sales guy wants to update the product pages.

> PR firm wants to update the press release area of the site.

> Events Coordinator wants to publish the calenar.

Feed Them:

So you "plug in" Feed.us scripts into the approiate places on the site and upload the "Grabber" file to your server (see below for more info).

Then give a login and password to your folks and they can add/edit using a simple web form that looks like this:

We're also working on other ways to import posts... from RSS, email, etc.

Not a javascript

anonymous — Thu, 9 Aug 2007 16:08:00 CST

Feed.us doesn't use a javascript to put your content on your website(s). We started out with a javascript but quickly realized that Google can't spider a javascript.

We made our own process for it. It's like a javascript - kinda.

There's one file on your server (or your host's server). That's called the "Grabber". The grabber downloads content for you.

Then you copy and paste 2 lines of code into any webpage. That code tells the grabber file what to display. The code looks like this:

That's it.

19-4

Rick Stratton — Thu, 9 Aug 2007 09:08:00 CST

19-4. That's the brewers' score vs. the Rockies yesterday. The Rockies.

I think the wheels officially have come off the bus.

I believe I have significantly distanced myself from these Brewers in order to keep from getting too disappointed.

Nice work Nick

Rick Stratton — Thu, 2 Aug 2007 18:08:00 CST

In Nick Aster news...

"A representative for eco-blog TreeHugger has confirmed that the site has been acquired by Discovery Communications, parent company of the Discovery Channel, The Science Channel, Animal Planet, and several other properties. A report of the deal initially surfaced in the New York Post today."

CNET Article here.

Try your best Wisco accent

Rick Stratton — Wed, 1 Aug 2007 15:08:00 CST

I love doing my Milwaukee accent for folks out east. They think it's hilarious. Since moving back, I don't think my normal accent and my Milwaukee accent are that different anymore. Still it's fun to put it on thick.

Say this with a really thick Milwaukee or Wisconsin accent (there's a difference, a-na). If you can't do a WI or MKE accent, just imitate Fargo - which is close enough.

"John ain't here -- he's on vacation. He went by the Dells. No way I'd go to the Dells. Nothing to do there -- Only fish, though. You can't even ATV there even."

Trying out a new application

Rick Stratton — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 12:07:00 CST

I've used Meebo on and off for about a year. It lets you IM when you don't have one of the IM clients installed (or work won't let you). It's browser based - nothing to download, install etc.

Meebo just added a chat widget (www.MeeboMe.com) and I've added it to the right side of my site. It's really cool - any visitor can send me an IM. Unfortunately, it goes to my Meebo account and not to AOL or MSN. There must be a reason why they wouldn't want that part to work? Maybe it's too difficult?

Anyway - shoot me a message if you drop by!

>> Update: I added the same Widget to Feed.us and my facebook profile. Pretty cool.

Final Stage for the Tour

Rick Stratton — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 17:07:00 CST

I'm going to try to enjoy tomorrow's final 2007 Tour de France stage with extra gusto. Because it will probably be the last one we see for a while in the US.

The final stage is really cool. The finish is on the Champs in Paris. The team in yellow traditionally enters the Champs in the lead and then makes way for the sprinters. They do like 6 laps (I think) from the Arc d'Triumph to the Louvre and back. It's beautiful and it's one of those sporting events that should not be missed in your life time.

But tomorrow will be the last time it's on live in the US, I believe.

There's just too much working against us. No Lance, Floyd Landis's postive test. Discovery Channel leaving Tailwind Sports (Lance's team), waining interest for cycling, and now more doping scandals in 2007.

I feel for the OLN (opps Versus) guys. They do a great job. It's fun spending July with them.

>> Update... Keeks guessed, about 2 weeks ago, that Livestrong would takeover for Discovery. Rumors have it that Livestrong, Nike and some of Lance's drug company sponsors (Cancer drugs not EPO!) will take over. Good call!

EAA plane crash

Rick Stratton — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 21:07:00 CST

When I was about 10, my dad and I got a ride in Paul Poberezny's P51 Mustang. It is one of the all time thrills of my life. I puked.

On Friday, two P-51s collided at the EAA Fly-in. One of them - the blue one close to landing - was the P-51 I got a ride in. Scary! Here are the details.

The All Drug Tour

anonymous — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:07:00 CST

This year's Tour de France reminds me of an old Saturday Night Live segment... "the All Drug Olympics...."

"He's taken anabolic steroids, novacaine, nyquil, dervine and some sort of fish paralyzer. Also I believe he's had several cocktails in the last hour or so. All of this is completely legal in the All Drug Olympics."

It's disappointing to be sure. But there's going to be a great timetrial on Saturday and exciting final stage on the Champs. I'm still going to tune in.

What ESPN should do with Sportscenter

anonymous — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 09:07:00 CST

There's a football (soccer) highlight show in England that is perfect. I guess it's a little like Baseball tonight. I can't remember the name, but I think it's on one of the BBCs.

It's what SportsCenter should be if ESPN was actually run by people who like sports.

The highlights are maybe 5 minutes long, each. Then the 2-3 hosts briefly discuss what happened. Then another 5 minute clip.

There's NO music, NO "5 questions" or "True or False", "Who's Now" etc.

No gimmicks.

Just the sports.

>> update: Jake Gibson says it's the "English Premier League Review Show" and it runs on FSN, here in the US.

2007 Tour

Rick Stratton — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:07:00 CST

I swore off the tour after Floyd Landis got caught with extra testosterone in 2006.

Here it is almost a year to the day and I find myself glued to the TV every day. I've got the Slingbox going... I'm getting up early with Beckett... I'm double-checking that the Tivo is working... all so I can catch every minute of this year's tour.

For the first time I find myself checking the GC for the first time in years. The Mallot Jeune is up for grabs by about 10 different cyclists and it's going to go down to the line.

Oh, by the way, that photo is of a dog that wandered out in front of the back end of the peloton this morning. Dog was fine - TMobile rider went down hard avoiding him.

ESPN - what ha ha happened?

anonymous — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:07:00 CST

The 1990 World Cup was on ESPN and finally we got cable.

Also, for the first time, I got to see the NHL. (Note to my mom: if I could have grown up watching the NHL on ESPN, instead of waiting till high school, I'd probably be finishing a nice, long pro hockey career. It's all your fault.)

Over the years, Directv channel 206 (Now HD channel 73) has been my number one stop on the channel lineup. I've loved the Tour de France, NASCAR, Formula 1, America's Cup, Sunday Night Football, Championship Week Basketball, Baseball Tonight, RPM 2nite, Sunday Night Countdown, Wimbledon, Sports Century, the IRL, NCAA Lacrosse championships and Sunday Night Baseball.

Notice what's not on that list... the ESPYs, "Who's Now", Poker, The Bronx is Burning, Cold Pizza, ESPN hollywood, The Madden Tour, and "texting" to any ridiculous poll.

SportsCenter has become almost unwatchable. The self promotions are awful. I used to be able to sit through back-to-back Sportscenters, now I won't even bother with 10 minutes.

When did the "E" in ESPN become more important than the "S"?

Be a layer

anonymous — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:07:00 CST

"Being a tech company means you aspire to be a platform, a layer in the stack that others can build on."
- Founder of Facebook.com, Mark Zuckerberg

TdF

Rick Stratton — Sun, 8 Jul 2007 21:07:00 CST

After the Floyd Landis fiasco, I thought I'd never be interested in the Tour de France again.

But it's stage 2 and I'm watching the whole stage.

So I'm sucked in, whether I like it or not. The TdF is one of the great sporting events, regardless of the scandals (or because of them).

My bet: Kloden or Sastre... but I wish it would be Hincapie.

The Beck-man's first fourth of july

Rick Stratton — Wed, 4 Jul 2007 21:07:00 CST

It's the Beck-man's first fourth of july, and we're spending it in the car going far north.

I tried telling him that 231 years ago, today, a bunch of men gathered in Philly and signed a letter to the king and declared the colonies independent from england.

Beck seemed more interested in a set of fake plastic keys.

However, he came alive during the red sox games's 7th inning stretch. A woman from the boston pops sang God Bless America and she was really great.

The Beck got in the spirit big time but suddenly crashed out to sleep.

Happy first 4th, Beck!

Summerfest

Rick Stratton — Mon, 2 Jul 2007 22:07:00 CST

I am lying here, in bed, reading on a Monday night.

The weather is such that I can almost perfectly here multiple bands performing on stage down at Summerfest, which is almost 2 miles south of our house.

I think it's Social Distortion playing on the Leinie's stage.

Tomorrow, July 3, is nightmare night. Always the worst night because of the crowds. John Mayer, Ben Folds, Buddy Guy, Weird Al, War, and Randy Travis. And great fireworks.

Nice! Crew sends four to San Fran

anonymous — Sun, 1 Jul 2007 19:07:00 CST

After years and years of hoping our one guy gets in the game, the Crew actually is gonna have plenty of representatives in San Francisco. The Brewers are sending:

Prince Fielder, starter at 1B

Ben Sheets

JJ Hardy

Francisco Cordero

Just try and get a refund from McAfee... we dare you!

Rick Stratton — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 11:06:00 CST

Please wait while we find a customer service representative to assist you...
All agents are currently busy. Please stand by.

You have been connected to Kevin Tucker.
Kevin Tucker: Thank you for contacting McAfee customer service. How may I help you today?

rick Stratton: This is about order # RA266931612
rick Stratton: I would like a refund. I don't use McAfee anymore.
rick Stratton: And I would like to not have it auto-renew

Kevin Tucker: rick, I'll be happy to help you.
Kevin Tucker: One moment please, while I look up your account details. I appreciate your patience.
Kevin Tucker: rick, I see that you have valid McAfee products registered under your e-mail address.

Kevin Tucker: Your business is very important to us, I see that you have valid McAfee software in your McAfee account, as an exception we would like to offer the below two options to our customers. The first option is: I could transfer this license to any other account of your choice so that you don’t lose your subscription. The second option is: I could extend your subscription’s validity period for an additional 30 days at absolutely no charge. This way you get all the upgrades for your products free of cost. Would you like your account to be transferred to your family members or friend’s account or else extended instead of receiving refund?

rick Stratton: no, i just want a refund.
rick Stratton: I've stopped using all of the mcafee software
rick Stratton: too bloated, constatnly trying to upgrade me.
rick Stratton: I am very frustrated

Kevin Tucker: I do have another option; I could provide you a 50% discount on your recent renewal. Shall I go ahead and discount the charges on your account?

rick Stratton: no, i want a refund for the charge that just went through. order #RA266931612

Kevin Tucker: Please give me a moment while I process your refund. I appreciate your patience.
Kevin Tucker: As requested, we have refunded the McAfee Always on Protection charges of $41.99 for McAfee VirusScan Plus, which will be credited to your account within 3 - 5 working days, or before you receive your next credit card statement.
Kevin Tucker: The McAfee Always on Protection feature for your account under the e-mail address has been cancelled. Your account will no longer be automatically renewed.

rick Stratton: Thank you

Vista and Office 07

anonymous — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 14:06:00 CST

My laptop crashed about 2 months ago. I tried to go through Dell customer service, but it was pointless. I knew the hard drive had crashed. I didn't care that much because I back up everything so I didn't lose it all. But Dell wanted me to do endless analysis instead of just sending me a new harddrive. (Actually, I wanted a new keyboard as well because Bart took out the \ key).

So I gave up and just ordered a new HD. It arrived and so I decided to load Vista and the new Office Unlimited. Microsoft has a great program for software manufacturers (Bill Gates actually got us into it but that's a longer story). We get a couple licenses for free in order to stimulate development.

So I loaded Vista for business and Office 2007 unlimited. It went very very easily. The only driver I had to find was the audio and it would have been very smooth if Dell's download system wasn't down yesterday. (I actually downloaded it from Toshiba.)

So the little laptop is now cruising on Vista. And the new Word has a really nice "Blog Post" feature that we're going to get working for both Feed.us and uxCast/1871. Basically you can create and save and publish "posts" from Word. It's well done.

So kudos to Microsoft and I have officially put off getting a Macbook for a bit longer.

The beauty of Twitter

Rick Stratton — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 11:06:00 CST

I've been using Twitter for a couple months now. I don't use it regularly like other people do. Probably because I don't have much of an audience.

If a few of my good friends used it regularly, it would become essential, I think. But I have a hard time convincing my friends to use IM, so there's fat chance they'll go on Twitter (notice how I wont use twitter as a verb yet).

I would love to see Twitter start some sort of group-type network thingy. Where we could communicate within a group without others watching. Right now to do this you need a separate Twitter account and then you can't send a text to it... so it doesn't work. Maybe someone will create an app for this.

However I think that the big idea behind Twitter is not new. It's very simple to publish. Blogs did this for personal websites and now Twitter is doing it too. When people can publish quickly easily and reach lots and lots of people (or none in my case), it's addicting.

So to sum up... the growth of blogging isn't about citizen journalism. And the cult of Twitter isn't about cell phones, etc. It's about freedom and the ease of communication.

What is Feed.Us?

Rick Stratton — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:06:00 CST

Speaking of confusion... I generally have trouble telling people what Feed.Us does.

Welborn and I have discussed a good, short description and we immediately decided on "Remote web page management". But that confused people. Lately I've started calling it a "content management web service".

Feed.Us is a Web Publishing application that works like a Widget. No need to download or host Feed.Us locally. Copy/paste a few simple scripts to any web page hosted any where and you can quickly/easily use Feed.Us to put text, images, audio, video etc on a website remotely - without knowing any coding, or using ftp, etc.

But it's more than that. It can publish to multiple sites from one account. Or store your content all in one location. Collaborate with others on Website(s). Make RSS feeds on the fly. Make a feed of display or text ads that can run on any Website. There are a lot of options.

The immediate market is web developers and web designers who want to quickly add CMS functionality for their clients or co-workers who are not technically inclined. But it's more than just a CMS tool, so we think the opportunity is greater.

If you'd like to try it - please let me know. rick at feed dot us.

Godaddy confuses me

anonymous — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 14:06:00 CST

We've been fooling around recently with building sites on several different company's hosting systems. Godaddy, Mydomain, Yahoo, etc.

For Feed.us to work, we're going to need to know it works easily on your hosting service.

But, I was surprised to find that it hasn't changed much since when i put up my first website in 1997. In fact, it hasn't changed at all. No one has figured out a way to make it simple.

Let's take Godaddy, for example. Great deals. I can buy a domain and hosting for an entire year under $45. What a steal. The bare-minimum hosting is all you need with Feed.us, so it makes it extremely affordable.

But, Godaddy won't make it easy on you. First of all, you're bombarded by offers. 8 extra options that Godaddy wants to make you think you need when you're buying hosting. If you're a beginner, all that stuff seems pretty necessary.

Then the domain management. There's a separate site with separate navigation for controlling domains. It works nice, once you figure it out, but it's confusing. Try to go "back" to the main account page? Sorry, Godaddy has figured out how to lock you into the domain admin.

Next you'll have to make a separate login for your hosting account. It's great to have a simple login/pw for the hosting account and ftp that is separate from the Godaddy account. That way you can give the hosting account access to a developer, and keep your godaddy account free.

However, you can't log into the hosting account without first logging into the Godaddy account. So that doesn't work.

I just wish there was an easy option for hosting that we could recommend. If you have any suggestions - rick at feed dot us.

The move is complete

Rick Stratton — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 19:06:00 CST

The move to feed.us/godaddy is now complete. I've added the RSS feed out of Feed.us and into Feedburner - that was the last step.

Thank you for your patience. (as if anyone actually reads this).

BrewCrew back on track

anonymous — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:06:00 CST

Thanks to some decent pitching, and Prince Fielder's Major League leading HR surge, the Brew Crew is back to winning.

Last week we took 2 of 3 from the defending AL champs. Over the weekend we took 2 of 3 from Minnesota. Then last night we held off the Giants.

And Prince keeps knocking them out. 26 and counting.

Airports blogging

anonymous — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 17:06:00 CST

I love airports. Even though I probably won't get into Beantown until late tonighjt, I still enjoy sitting around reading, people watching and crackberry-ing... I can update the new FeedUs via mobile browser. But I would prefer to use normal Crackberry email. We're working on that. We also need to add a desktop version. I learned a little bit about the new Office's blog-posting tool. It would be great to be able to post from anywhere on phone, computer, etc, all without accessing Feedus.

Air Tran nominees elected

Rick Stratton — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 12:06:00 CST

So it's done. Value Jet, errr Airtramp, errr... AirTran got their nominees elected.

Ousted are the two longest and largest individual shareholders.

Sad and ridiculous.

Midwest Airlines

Rick Stratton — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:06:00 CST

Today is probably going to be a sad day for Milwaukee, and for the majority Midwest Airlines shareholders.

At 10am this morning, AirTran will most likely get most of the hedge and mutual funds to help vote its 3 appointees (ie bribed yes men) to the Midwest board. Air Tran is paying these guys $40k each to trojan horse Midwest Airlines. If they succeed, I'm sure they'll get even more.

Meanwhile three of Midwest's best board members will no longer be looking out for the majority of Midwest's shareholders.

It's a shame and a crock, and should be illegal... but that's the way public companies are run now that Hedge Funds are in control.

And our fabulous little airline will become part of horrible AirTran, aka Value Jet.

Tachophobia on Feed.Us

anonymous — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:06:00 CST

Well, finally the move to Feed.us has begun for little Tachophobia.com.

Last night I purchased a transitional domain and 2 months worth of hosting from Godaddy. Price tag = $5.

Then I downloaded a decent free CSS template. With my limited knowledge of CSS, was able to change the layout enough to make it my own. And then set about adding the widgets, including Feed.us's code.

Feed.us doesn't use a javascript or flash to display the content. The content gets 'fed' via a URL and a file that sits on your website. The pages have to be php or asp or jsp, etc but only so that the file works.

So all I had to do is add one url of code into the XHTML, rename the homepage file to default.asp, and upload all the files, inlcuding the Feed.us file, to the Godaddy FTP. And now this site is coming to fruition.

I still have to make the other pages. It would help to actually understand ASP so I can use includes. Hopefully I can learn that.

Feed.us is pretty amazing!!

Greatest Bob Marley album

anonymous — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:06:00 CST

Bob Marley is probably my most favoritist artist of all time (U2 is the greatest band of all time, btw). All summer long, and during the coldest days of winter, my playlists are dominanted by Sr. Marley, and no it's not because of marijuna (I may be the only one).

He was my introduction to reggae and I cannot remember a time without Bob.

My favorite Bob Marley album is easily "Natural Mystic". I believe it's been re-introduced twice now because the album cover to the right is not what I have on my CD.

Regardless, it's got a great track lineup: Natural Mystic, Iron Lion Zion, So Much Trouble, and the live Trenchtown Rock.

[btw, this is my last post on the 'old site'. I'm working on a new one using a new design and the new Feed.us.]

Ask Jeeves

anonymous — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:06:00 CST

If you work at Ask Jeeves and you visit this site, can you shoot me an email? I'd love to give you a demo of Feed.us. rick at feed dot us