theCMSblog

Worldwide Recovery Meeting Database

2009-02-24T05:30:44Z

So your traveling on business hundreds of miles from home and its been a stressful day, your alone and feel like a drink, but you instead search online for "California Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings" and you find the most accurate fellowship meetings database in the world. But it is not just for Alcoholics, its for drug addicts, gamblers and overeaters.

You say to yourself what a great idea. You click the link, locate a meeting near your hotel, go to the meeting, make some new friends and afterwords you go back to your hotel and see online that you have some messages from your new friends on InTheRooms.com which is where you go the other 23 hours each day your not in a meeting. Fascinating how the creators of your favorite social network have also created the most accurate, comprehensive meetings database in the world.

Traditionally meetings are located sporadically throughout various independent web sites, not up to date, have to call a phone number that is no longer in service. Who needs that?

So its not perfect you say? Well get this, you can add a meeting if it doesn't exist and you can even edit one that needs correcting. That's right, this database is setup using Media Wiki software which allows the community submit revisions to improve this massive collection of Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings, Narcotics Anonymous Meetings, Gamblers Anonymous Meetings and Overeater Anonymous Meetings.

A wiki meeting database for the worldwide recovery community is just another way InTheRooms joins hands and brings the 12 step fellowships together as a single group all working together for the best cause, to save those who won't help themselves.

Free Video Chat and Instant Messaging

2009-01-17T04:21:50Z

Did you ever wonder when we would all be speaking on the telephone from large cinema screens like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future II when Marty is fired by his boss in the video tele-conference in his living room?

Well, video chat is here and it is not only futuristic and space aged it is Free!

The creators of WebDate, free dating, have put together a new social networking site that allows you to one on one video chat or instant message without having to download or install any software. It is so simple even my 65 year old mother was have to log in and start her on conference.

All you need is a video camera, most lap tops come equipped with them these days and an internet connection and you are ON.

On.com provides Free Video Chat and Instant Messaging to web user around the globe. Check it out you have to see it in action.

New Social Network puts fun in Recovery

2008-12-05T04:54:56Z

Today we have so many options of online social interaction. So many in fact we must pick and choose where we want to spend our time. I myself left MySpace long ago and am really not enjoying too much the revised FaceBook. It is too much like work entering all of that data.

One place I recently got acquainted with in supporting a friend was a social network called In The Rooms. They call themselves a global social recovery network and although that may scare those not in a 12 step program you won't believe how friendly and helpful the people are in this online community.

Within minutes of joining the site you are welcomed by many online users which you can add to your friend network. These relationships will inevitably lead to group discussions on all sorts of various topics. Not only have I made some real friends and had some great conversations but I found myself going back often to check in and see who is doing what. The site really focuses on the community, social recovery, helping others and takes a positive approach for those in recovery.

I see those battling addiction login and ask for help and instantly people are messaging to offer support and assistance. I mean literally saving these individuals from drug, alcohol addiction and even suicide. It is a warming feeling to know you are involved with such a caring group.

This new social network is truly exciting with new features on a regular basis from daily meditations, photo galleries, user twitter feeds, fellowship information and unique user contributed news articles. There is always something going on in the rooms.

We all know someone in recovery. Why not share something with them that will become a part of their daily lives. Go to http://www.intherooms.com and click Invite a Friend.

Legal Advice with Your Rights in Mind

2008-11-24T03:22:21Z

When you get in a car accident or motorcycle accident do you call the gimmicky lawyer on the radio 411 this or 911 that? Do you call your family attorney or an attorney who is a friend? Have those experiences turned out not so in your favor?

How about working with an attorney who works for your better interest? The gimmicky lawyer works in numbers and takes as many cases as possible. He works to close your case quickly not necessarily to get you what you "deserve". Your family attorney doesn't specialize in personal injury and cannot perform as well as a lawyer who specializes and your friend is offering a discount on his time to help you out. This leave him torn between helping you and spending time with family.

You can have the best of all worlds with your legal case. If you are in a motorcycle or auto accident David Harris is the one person to call. He handled my auto accident with exacting precision. I simply provided him with all of the information I had, I was missing some things, and he did the rest. I was able to go about my regular schedule and he did the heavy lifting.

It wasn't just the ease in working with him it was his friendliness and willing to provide personal advice. If you are in an accident call David Hughes Harris, P.A. (239) 898-9050. Listen to what he has to say and if you don't agree then you have only lost a few minutes of your day and will most assuredly learned something because that is what David is all about.

Padded KiteBoard Bags from Hooley USA

2008-10-17T05:07:55Z

I recently tried kite surfing for the first time for $300 and they provided all of the equipment including wet suit. It was at Matheson Hammock here in Miami in two foot deep seaweed bay water. I have been snowboarding for 10+ years so I figured it can't be that hard. Boy was I wrong. Snow boarding you use your feet and lower body, imagine doing that and flying a big kite at the same time. the kite is hard enough just on land. Controlling your upper body to be focused an exacting manner while surfing it quite difficult and I now have a new respect for those dudes up in the air. Just one minor adjustment to your hand position and the kite flies feverishly to the opposite direction.

My good friend Christian at Hooley Worldwide had been trying to get me to go for quite some time. He sells these amazing Kevlar Dog Collar and if you kite surf a must have is the Padded Kiteboard Bag.

He has a new clothing brand that just came out called LIVE W.R.O.N.G which is also available on his web site hooleyusa.com if you don't find him in the board room, his shop, then he is probably giving lessons to those who want to dangle from a kite like Ben Franklin's key in a Hooley storm. Don't worry, I'm not giving up.

Historical Patterns are not just for Halloween

2008-09-03T04:33:18Z

Did you ever wonder where all of those costumes in the store come from? Did you ever wonder why some historical patterns cost more than others? Well I did and here is what I found...

You can basically be wearing the same costume as another person at the party in your mass produced Chinese costume in a bag or you can be wearing historically accurate to the period garb.

This is no joke and many take it so serious they dress the part in festivals all around the world. You have seen these costumes on the History Channel for reenactments and you have seen people wearing these outfits at elaborate parties. One thing is for sure is that the historical pattern was designed by Kass McGann at Reconstructing History.

Kass is a historian who painstakingly researches every stitch to historical accuracy. Her patterns are purchased by history buffs, museums, re en actors, television production, doll makers, enthusiasts, hobbyists and professionals looking for the best historical patterns money can buy.

Be sure to check out Reconstructing History for the uncompromising historical accuracy you should expect in your next historical clothing purchase.

Custom Made Seashell Mirrors

2008-08-17T03:42:06Z

I have several custom made pieces from Bea. They are the most fantastic, original works of art in my Miami beach inspired home. Click to view her seashell mirrors.

Born in the tropical island of Cuba, Bea's Tropical Designs founder Beatriz Valiente, had an epiphany while sitting in her Florida home. As a hard working professional, and artist she dreamed of making her love for the tropics a part of her artistic trade. Bea's loves for seashells came from growing up by the sea, one of her hobbies has always been collecting seashells. During family vacations in Naples, Fl Bea and her two daughters spent many early morning hours collecting seashells that would later be used to decorate the Christmas tree during the holidays.

Today Bea is living her dream creating and designing beautiful tropical jewelry, unique seashell decorated mirrors and home décor. Her artistic talents are undeniably noticeable in her creations. Bea puts hours of her time and inspiration into her work, each creation is guaranteed to be a one of a kind.

Among the seashells that Bea uses are; Pearlized Nautilus, Melo Melo, Green Abalone, Bat Volute, Mitra Mitra, Star Fish, Coral, Sand Dollars, Sea Urchins, Silver Trochus, Wale Eyes, Shark Eyes, tiny Coquinas, White Arks, and Natural Umbonium and many others not mentioned here. In her process of decorating she uses an industrial glue gun and other commercial glues to carefully decorate.

If you have a preference in types of seashells and colors Bea will take custom orders please call her at 386-216-3240.

Investigate Your Mortgage for Errors and Fraud

2008-07-31T03:02:03Z

My family, friends and colleagues,

I want to share with all of you a new company that I am behind 100%. They are truly going to save many Americans from foreclosure and legally get back at all of those thieving lenders. Call them modern day Robin Hoods.

Please share this post with every homeowner you know in hopes that they can help them negotiate lower rates on their existing mortgages and more importantly with an expected 1.4 million foreclosures this year – SAVE THEIR HOMES.

http://www.loancsi.com – Loan CSI Website - Check Your Error Probability

CSI stands for Compliance Service Investigation - Loan CSI will investigate your home loan documents for potential errors and give you negotiating power to actually stop a foreclosure, lower your interest rate, negotiate short sale, modify the loan, or even cancel your mortgage.

Here is the official opening press release…

http://www.loancsi.com/mortgage-compliance-advocate-for-homeowners.php?w=2&a=22&pr=Y

This is a really good thing for all homeowners and the country.

Visualize Your Online Relationships and Discover New Ones

2008-06-01T14:04:45Z

TouchGraph's powerful visualization solutions reveal relationships between people, organizations, and ideas.

Explore the wealth of information in today's growing data collections with the Google Browser.

Individuals and organizations have more vital information at their fingertips than ever before. Traditional search engines provide a way to sift through this data. However, the greatest insights can be achieved not by sifting, but by looking at the big picture to see how items are connected.

Here is a sample view of this blog site...

I use this tool for all of my SEM customers to help them visualize online community growth.

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TouchGraph was founded in 2001 with the creation of the original visual browser for Google. Since then, millions of people have used TouchGraph's tools to discover the relationships contained in Google, Amazon, Wikis, and other popular information sources. Our commercial applications include solutions for companies in management consulting, social networking, and mass media.

If Your not Tracking, then You Don't Know

2008-05-22T23:02:04Z

At least that is what I was told and then I found out for myself.

I recently signed up for a trial of PositiveWare time tracking, project planning, budget and billing management software. First of all, it is one of the only ones of its kind incorporating all of these features in one easy to use web based interface. Second, I was able to see the power of it immediately within just a few days of using. This is good because I do not have a lot of patience when it comes to software; considering I write and develop my own.

At first I thought I would only use the time management, at least that is what I was searching for, but I ended up putting all of my projects in, breaking them down into tasks and assigning them. This seems to cause a little interruption, but, since communication is all managed via email and only updates through the web interface, it seemed to just fit into our current processes.

The budget management is a very interesting feature and not something I ever considered, at least at the level of detail you can see using PositiveWare. Simply enter in expenses, integrated with projects already, and look at forecasts and past expenses to see where you have been and where you're going to go, if you keep your current project plan or move it.

The billing management was something I was hesitant about at first considering we already had a process in place. However it was very time consuming and as I learned from using the time management feature; costing us a certain amount per month to manage. Customer service at PositiveWare recommended I give it a try and well sure enough it is saving us time. We all know what that means. The software is already paying for itself, as well as, giving me and my co-workers piece of mind.

If you are not tracking your time, projects, budgets, and billing your customers, then you do not know where you are wasting your time, missing deadlines, over-shooting budgets, and certainly not getting your invoices paid on time. Fix everything with one piece of simple software and start a free trial for yourself.

Take the Chore Out of Link Building

2008-04-29T18:59:44Z

Evaluate Your Link Building Strategy and Let Others do the Work for You

How much are your links worth? How much did you used to pay and how much do you currently pay? How much will you continue to pay per link? How many links do you have? How many do you need? Are you getting a good return on your investment? Eliminate the cost per link, invest in content and get better returns from link building and see how others will do a majority of the work for you. Link building is tricky business and, if done properly, can mean big business. If done improperly, you can lose face and your rankings.

Link building is expensive and there is no way around it. In order for your web site to be considered an authority online you must have links and lots of them. Just like anything else there are automated ways of getting links, there are companies you can pay to get your links, you can buy individual links, or you can spend time negotiating linking exchanges yourself. There is a right way, a wrong way, and the sleazy way.

Links are a tricky part of site optimization because you can have hundreds of them and only a low percentage offers any value. Many link building service providers bank on your lack of understanding with this issue and are able to easily get links for you, however, they charge you a premium and the links are likely causing more harm than good. Be sure you can trust your SEO to provide quality links and ask them to show you the value.

Telling the difference between a good link and a bad link is complicated and technical. Every site is different and handles linking in a different way. There are many online programs such as a blog that can be used for community interaction and discussion. They may allow an opportunity in the comment for linking, but normally not the kind of value you’re looking for. If you understand a little bit of HTML, view the source of the page in question and locate your link. Here’s a tip: If you see rel=nofollow in the <a> tag of your link, then search engines are unable to follow the link and therefore unable to give you any equity from the link.

There are other techniques employed which are harder to detect where javascript is placed in the <a> tag of your link, which also prohibits search engines. They may contain something like an “onclick” event, which does the linking and is also not followed by search engines. If the search engines don’t follow the link, the only benefit it provides is whatever traffic frequents that page and the percentage of traffic clicking on the link.

So, how do you know if your link is the good kind of link, if you aren’t very technical? You could always email me at stacy@edit-x.com or you can check your sites link index in various search engines to see if it shows up. This can be done by putting “link:www.yourdomainname.com” in the search engine query box. Yahoo is the best for this purpose as this will show you all of the sites linking to your site and the location of the link. This can take time depending on how many links you have, as you may have to sift through several pages to find or not find the link in question.

By now we have likely all subscribed to a link building service or paid for links, some good and some bad. We all get the emails from off-shore development or SEO companies offering a service to get you links of varying Page Ranks and for X dollars per link. Either that or your SEO company offers the service through some automated software and charges you monthly. We get our link reports and feel link progress is being made. Well it is not. In fact, this type of link building is doing more harm than good.

These techniques often have short term affects, if any at all. They lack stickiness, which means they often don’t last more than a few days to a couple months. A true link would be around forever or as long as the community or web site exists. Off-shore companies often employ persons who lack the understanding of your spoken language and/or the language of your community, in which case cannot effectively contribute a meaningful comment. This leads to a spammy looking link to your site and the links or posts containing the links are often reported and removed within hours. The ones that stick are put into a report, you are billed, and then they are likely removed within months, as the administrators may have limited time for moderation. It’s a numbers game. They submit 50 to get 10 to get paid, to make you feel like you’re getting value and repeat. Automated software works in much the same way, only they have a tendency to create highly uniform links, which are detectable by search engines and can actually lower your rankings. Plenty of software claim to allow for random link generation. Don’t be fooled. If it sounds too good to be true, then it is. If it were this easy, I wouldn’t be writing this post.

Real link building is hard work and requires knowledge about your industry, products, and services in order to be able to contribute meaningful interaction in the site or community where the link will be obtained. Be sure your link building provider has invested the time to learn about your business and can speak at an educated level to represent your company for community involvement.

Link building and community involvement are great and no doubt, if executed professionally, will embed your web site into the audiences that are looking for your products and services. There is another way to obtain links which pushes you closer to becoming the authority, has a longer lasting viral effect, and contributes to your web sites growth and allows your web site to become a true asset to your community. All of this for roughly the same cost of more traditional link building.

Calculate how much money you have spent on Link Building, thus far. 20 links of varying PR at an average of $20 will cost you $400. This example is likely small for many of you, but $400 is a lot of money especially when you consider copy writing costs or potentially saving that money and writing a bit of content yourself --you’re the expert, right? Your expense is now time that is invested into your website, instead of others. You are the expert, right, don’t forget that transferring the knowledge to the copy writer takes time.

If you were to write one decent blog post or one decent article related to your industry, it is likely to contain many of the keywords you are targeting. If you write this content to be informative, catchy, entertaining, yet educational, you will notice a whole new type of link building, which will get you more bang for your buck. This one article has the potential to be linked to from many users who found your article useful and want to share it with others. To get 20 links on an article of this caliber would be a simple thing and likely generate more. You would have spent the same, if not less, and contributed something meaningful to your industry or community and are one step closer to building your online persona or identity.

This is often referred to as Link Bait. You’re using your knowledge or expertise to entice others to link to your information and they will do so, because they found it useful and want to share it with others in their community. This is often done with videos, freebies, useful online tools, quizzes, games, and yes, simply content.

Not only is this the good way to build links, you’re not having to go after related sites, track down people, correspond for months, make time consuming posts only to find them removed, negotiate or barter. The links will come to you and they will last a very long time. Other people will do all of the linking for you and that is how they thank you for creating something helpful or useful. One helpful hint here is to be sure to return the favor. If you see others linking to your posts and they have similar meaningful posts, don’t forget to mention their post and link to their sites. You will be amazed to find they might return the favor again.

You can even use a small budget to help get your ideas off of the ground and start linking to your content with pay Per Click advertising, use traditional link building techniques to seed your link bait within related communities. A link to an article of value is a lot less spammy looking that a link to a product, service, or web site homepage.

Link building is a chore, it can be very expensive, whether they have value or not. Create something that has lasting value and you will continue to receive good links month after month with no additional effort. Use the power of numbers and the viral nature of your knowledge, expertise, and written content to increase your good links. Who knows, you might find that you actually enjoy interacting with your community, your customers, potential customers, and search engines.

Quick Tips

Be weary of purchasing paid links or directory listings
Be sure, if you subscribe to a link building service, you are getting links of real value
It’s more time consuming but if you are involved in related communities you can get quality links
Your best option is to provide unique, quality content that others will want to link to

Relationships matter and it helps to be Linked In

2008-03-21T04:54:17Z

We are all involved with social networking one way or another, Facebook, MySpace, Classmates, Ancestry.com or [insert name of some random niche] forum. All of that is fine and well for your friends and family but what about your coworkers, colleagues employers or potential employers?

If your not using an alias for your personal social networking you should be. Did you know you can likely search your name and find all sorts of information about yourself? Yeah you, try it. A potential employer or client might search your name before doing business with or hiring with you. Party photos are not great for business and business boring details are not good for friends.

You spend so much time socially, why not business socially? One good way to help yourself stand out in the corporate world is Linked In. You can build a profile, essentially a resume, and get rankings for top job titles in your area. Your colleagues can recommend your various jobs and you can give details of your efforts for each position. More important, you can link to colleagues and build up a reputation.

Check out my LinkedIn profile and make a connection... R. Stacy Cook or Stacy Cook.

I have aliased my personal domain name www.stacycook.com to my profile at www.linkedin.com/in/stacycook/ and because LinkedIn is ranked already very well essentially I have used it to improve rankings for my namesake and you can too. I also use my profile to link to my other web projects which helps promote them.

I also use the pages in project proposals and introduction emails when conducting business with folks I do not know very well. This allows them the opportunity to get more information about me and feel more comfortable knowing I come highly recommended and they can view my experience and history. Relationship are important, they matter, LInked In provides a solid avenue for business social networking. It helps me and it will help you too.

Get Linked In Now

How do you know if your SEO is worthy? Kick the tires on your SEO.

2008-03-18T01:25:20Z

I had a customer inquiring today about our SEO services. He asked me to provide him with some rankings of our existing customers. I told him, sure I can show you them, but it will make no difference to you.

If I told you we ranked someone for red widgets, would you know the difference in red or blue widgets. If we rank a customer #1 for red widgets and only 100 people per month search the keyword, what does it matter that we have a #1 ranking. Really the keyword to have ranked is blue widgets at 10,000 searches per month, but we only have a #4 ranking. Obviously less impressive even still on the first page, but what if I told you we got 1,000 clicks per month from that organic listing? That is more impressive than the #1 keyword ranking. Sounds obvious, right?

The only way we can provide meaningful information for our new customer is, if we have another client with data in the same industry, same products, and often same location. Targeting red widgets in Denver is very different than targeting red wigets in Miami. So rarely do we have an example of what we can do for our new customers and looking at existing work doesn't provide an accurate detail of what we can do for your business in your specific industry. Looking at previous work only shows our accomplishment in that industry and with that customer’s budget constraints.

Any keyword ranking can be achieved provided the right amount of time and effort. Search Engine Optimization is not rocket science, but it does take a certain amount of experience to know where to focus your time, energy, and which keywords should be targeted first. Often taking a mid-range keyword, building off of that to increase traffic, and ultimately conversions will help create new revenues to help offset your SEO expenses. I am not saying not to focus on the top keywords all this time, only to take a long term approach with them. Some SEO efforts improve with age.

So how can you determine, if your SEO knows what they are talking about? I'd say the best thing to do is ask for references. Why don't people ask? Any one of our customers will be happy to share their experiences with another and tell how we have improved their rankings, conversions, their overall knowledge about search engines, their own customers, and web sites in general. If you can't get references, then the SEO likely does not have repeat monthly customers because they are not performing. I would ask for references from customers from six to twelve months of continued service.

The next item you can ask to review, although they may not show, is current and archived reporting. Essentially you should ask to see those reference reports and look for an increase in rankings over time. They may not show you current client data, but they may show you expired client data. Each of our customers has an initial report before any work begins so we can see the improvement over time. The problem is that targeted keywords lists can change, so the reports are not 100% reliable for that purpose. If they have good aged references and good steady reporting they are at least doing the most time consuming part of the project, which is customer service and data management.

You can, also, ask for examples of copywriting. If the copy is illegible to a human, then you have a problem. Your SEO needs to write copy for both search engines and people. Remember, getting the user to the page is only half of the equation. Your SEO should also focus on converting the user for a sign up or a sale. The content should contain some marketing one liners with calls to action. You have to have some action you want the user to take, engage them, and give them tools to use your site more efficiently. Give them a reason to contact you or buy from you.

As far as what your SEO will be doing with all of the data collected each month, its a tough call. Every SEO is different and their are so many techniques for achieving rankings you have to go with what works for you. I recommend a trial period 6-12 months with goals you both agree on. You can also ask to see the monthly plan and make suggestions. The more you get involved the more you will get from your SEO.

Here are some things you will want to pay attention to:

The number of links back to site. Try putting this in Google: "link:www.yourdomain.com" and "link:yourdomain.com" See Edit-X here
The number of pages indexed. Try putting this in Google: "site:www.yourdomain.com" and "site:yourdomain.com" See Edit-X here
Fresh new content each and every month. They may ask you to hire a copywriter and then optimize those pages.
Internal site links, keywords linked in your site to pages in your site.
Title, Meta Keyword, and Meta Description Tags, Headline text, Image Alt Title Tags and Body text on all pages.
Monthly Reporting, traffic analytics, visual charts and graphics, and detailed activity logs.
Compliant HTML, XHTML etc. Clean lightweight code and images makes for happy search engines.

Interested in getting an SEO? How about a test drive? Kick the tires on Edit-X. Give us a call at 720-982-7770 and Get a Free Usability Review and Free Site and Keyword Ranking Report. That is a $250 value.

Why not look under the hood? We will give you aged references to call and show you our detailed and exclusive reporting. You will learn something about your web site and, more important, you will learn how to improve your web site. See why we are a safe and trusted White Hat SEO.

Edit-X Wants to Be Your SEO

Updated Content Technologies Subway Map

2008-03-15T22:57:28Z

CMS Watch has created this handy Subway map to help you navigate the content technologies vendor landscape. To be sure, not all vendor stations are listed, but this should give you a sense for the major players.

Believe it or not Edit-X does not fit into this subway map. That is because they classify by products single category and can only relate to additional categories.

The Edit-X Framework encompasses Ecommerce, Social Networking and Content Management on top of a scalable development platform. None of the products listed can say that. I guess we would be on multiple stops through this underground tunnel system. It is still a cool way to look at related technologies.

Many different tools -- and scores of vendors -- fall under the rubric of "content technologies." Can they be organized on a single page? CMS Watch asks. I already proved not.

Well they tried, using the good old "subway map" motif year after year. I hope you find it useful explaining to your colleagues what different vendors can -- and can't -- do.

Download Content Management Subway Map - PDF

Double Your Conversions in 30 Days

2008-02-29T02:27:40Z

Would you read more if I said, Double Your Sales?

Doubling conversions can mean various things for different web sites. It depends on what you track as a conversion. It could be a contact, a page view, a lead generated, or a confirmed sale.

If it is a sale, this means you just got a whole lot busier. This is the case for one such client who recently signed up for the Edit-X Usability service. We did a full site review, tested the processes, and quickly had a plan to increase the user experience. Within just a few hours of simple changes, we had already noticed a change in user response. The web site inquiries were coming in at rates never seen before. This meant more communication with customers, which translated into more sales.

Edit-X has a new layout method, which places a small contact form on every page. This addition can be worked into almost any web site layout and will prove to be beneficial. Sometimes renaming a link or moving the required action to a different location can make a big difference. In this case, we are placing the form for quick inquiries on every page making it easy for the user to make contact, without having to click another link to view the main contact form. Since it is simple and already in front of the user, instead of bailing they submit the form. This allows you the chance to correspond with them, instead of loosing a potential customer. Even if you can't convert them to a sale, the data collected from the inquiries can help you to further enhance your site.

Before Usability

After Usability

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