Delamain IT / Blog

Rounded Corners with JS and CSS

If you want rounded corners on your DIVs and are in a hurry, then you should try Curvy Corners.

Curvey Corners is great because it offers an easy solution that even works in WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver, which is perfect for the complete novice.

To get started you only need to do 3 things:

1. Create the DIV and assign it a class name and style it accordingly
2. Include the CC JS script in the HEAD
3. Amend the onLoad JS to reflect the desired settings and the  associated class name

You can even use the same script to re-style multiple DIVs on your webs page, making your web pages a totally curvaceous and awesome delight to behold.

Great features of CC include the fact that it is free, produces anti-aliased corners, allows full borders, provides auto-padding, can be configured with easy-to-understand JS object, corner-by-corner user-defined radii, and has fluid height and width support.

Enjoy!

Posted in Internet / Web Sites, Technology | No Comments »

Last.fm Frees Their API

Today, Last.fm has announced the release of a new version of their public API. The massive upgrade is designed to further compliment and enhance existing data feeds over at audioscrobbler.net and to:

“Allow anyone to build their own programs using Last.fm data, whether they’re on the web, the desktop or mobile devices.”

Getting started is simple, with a simple process to apply for an API key which then allows you access to the their web services. It doesn’t matter if you are a one-man-band or a corporation, you can all apply and play from there.

The possibilities are endless, many of which are showcased in Last.fm’s own “build” project gallery, with ideas ranging from Flickr and YouTube mashups, to alternative scrobblers and visulisations of both artist and user relationships.

There are a range of possible licenses available: Non-commercial, Commercial, Commercial-promotional, and Bespoke, and that can be applied to most projects. Enhancements to the old web services include single session keys, authentication layer, tagging API, search, playlist, geo, and event APIs with more promised to come.

Find out more on the Last.fm blog or read up on the API docs. So what are you waiting for? If this doesn’t make Last.fm the music platform of choice for developers and all, I don’t know what will!

Posted in Last.fm, Music, Technology | No Comments »

Remember Everything with Evernote

Del.icio.us has been my networked repository for links and web-based stuff I’d like to flag for some time now, but I recently took part in the Evernote beta and am moving ship. Wanted to take this moment out to recommend the service to others of you out there who, similarly, like to keep stuff in the cloud.

13 reasons why I like it:

• Ability to create multiple notebooks, collecting items from various subjects.
• Ability to tag any item, across notebooks.
• Killer search capability, even text in images.
• Web-based UX.
• Desktop-based application.
• Mobile version. iPhone goodness, too.
• Cross-platform (Windows and Mac OSX).
• Killer bookmarklet for all browsers.
• Menu-based clipping (with keyboard commands) in OS X and likely Windows.
• Notebooks private by default, though you can make any public.
• When clipping content from a page, much of the HTML remains intact.
• Desktop-to-web syncing thats fast.
• Lots of space on free accounts, lots more for $5/mo as a premium user.
• Supports clipping of all sorts of content beyond HTML.

Again, I can’t recommend it enough. As with many of my favorite services, there are so many ways to get data in, view it, and get it out. Lovely!

Posted in Internet / Web Sites | No Comments »

How To Write A Good Blog Post Title

A blog post title is just that, not a book, not a word, not a memoir, but a title. It amazes me how many people will seem to write an entire blog entry in the course of the title of their post and then continue to harp on about the aforementioned topic for another 10 pages. The trick to picking a good blog post title is to choose a selection of words that are concise, informative and will draw the punters in.

It is as much about SEO as it is about marketing. Too short and you won’t give enough information, too long and you risk putting people off. When you have a split second to catch someone’s attention, in a set of Google search results, you want to be sure that they are going to see all the pertinent information and that they will make the snap decision to surf to yoru blog.

So what are my top tips for creating a good blog post title?

Useful - Make the title as useful as possible, keep the title on topic, don’t use words which refer to anything other than what is being discussed in the post.

Concise - Keep the length to a minimum without making it too short. You are trying to sell your 500 word blog post in probably 5 or 10 words. Conveying your message with minimal fluff is key.

Sell Your Story - Read your title again and again and think hard about whether it does a good job of selling the post. As soon as a reader sees it are they going to automatically want to click? Sell the blog post, don’t just comment on it. Use positive words and make them feel like they are finding the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Excerpt Launchpad - Remember that the title is a launchpad into an excerpt, if you have got a reader to look further than half the trick is done, you can tie the sucker up with your exceprt and make a slam dunk with the rest!

Posted in Internet / Web Sites, Marketing & Promotion | No Comments »

Converting XOOPS N-Sections to WordPress

The Backstory

Back 5 years ago when XOOPS was all the rage, alongside a bunch of other CMSes vying for each and every web developer’s attention, I completed a number of different sites with XOOPS. The problem is that as time has moved on, keeping the sites going on older versions has become tiresome at best and problematic at worst, thus, I am sitting here, writing a quick piece on how to convert N-Sections module data from XOOPS to WordPress posts.

The Need-To-Know

Thanks to this article by Rachel at Cre8d Design, my life has been made a little easier. Her insight and the like-for-like mapping of fields, despite being from stories to WordPress posts was still exceedingly handy. The SQL posted was easily enough edited to use the correct field names from N-Sections, and with the simple addition of INSERT INTO `wp_posts` meant that channeling the data from one table to the other was super easy too. The only real amendment I made to the posted SQL code being to avoid a clash of IDs on the fresh install of WordPress by incrementing the old ID by two as the initial install already includes 2 posts.

The SQL code

SELECT (artid+2) AS ID, 1 AS post_author, FROM_UNIXTIME(date) AS post_date, FROM_UNIXTIME(date +43200) AS post_date_gmt, content AS post_content, title AS post_title, 0 AS post_category, ” AS post_excerpt, ‘publish’ AS post_status, ‘closed’ AS comment_status, ‘closed’ AS ping_status, ” AS post_password, artid AS post_name, ” AS to_ping, ” AS pinged, FROM_UNIXTIME(date) AS post_modified, FROM_UNIXTIME(date +43200) AS post_modified_gmt, ” AS post_content_filtered, “” AS post_parent, ” AS guid, ” AS menu_order, ‘post’ AS post_type, ” AS post_mime_type, 0 AS comment_count FROM `xoops_nseccont`;

The Follow-Up

With this you are ready to go, making the necessary changes to tidy it all up from within the WP-Admin interface. Something lse you might want to consider, at the same time if you wish to port the data, without publishing immediately, then you need to switch out “post_type” from “published” to “draft”. Whilst in addition, if you want to avoid poting old IDs simply replace “artid as ID” for “” as ID” so that MySQL will auto-increment the ID for you.

Posted in Internet / Web Sites | No Comments »

Free Book = Free Marketing … The Pirate’s Dilemma

As of June 8th, The Pirate’s Dilemma by Matt Mason, is now freely available online in eBook format for whoever and whomever wishes to share the book. In a move that signals marketing tactics for the 21st century and beyond, the author and publisher have both agreed that they should make the electronic format freely available and that, in doing so, it will not significantly impact the physical sales of the book.

I personally bought the book as soon as I saw the video of Matt Mason giving a talk at the Medici Tech Summit, so, as others, I will not feeling impeded to download an electronic copy. Though it is something that, ultimately, I will probably not even look at, the goal is served, because the free marketing and promotion that Mason and publisher, Simon and Schuster get for the book out of blogs such as this, is untold and incalculable.

The notion that you can give away your product and still make money, or actually make something out of it by saving costs might seem like an odd one in the traditional world, but in the new data driven economy where digital copies can be made at zero additional cost, the advantages are great in giving away your product. This is because no product is created equal. A digital product is not the same as the physical product and they are not sold at the expense of one another but in conjunction with one another.

The fact that vinyl is making a considerable comeback in the digital age is testament to that fact. How odd that people would buy such a cumbersome product that they cannot even rip easily to their iPod or other MP3 player. Clearly quality usurps convenience and that people will happily spend money on both vinyl and digital download at the same time, generating twice as much revenue for the artist or record label.

So perhaps the real dilemma isn’t quite one for the Pirates, but one for the creators in the new internet economy and whether or not to try and increase interest and sales of their physical goods by giving away electronic copies that cost them nothing to generate and share.

Find your copy of the Pirate’s Dilemma Here.

Posted in Marketing & Promotion | No Comments »

Finding The Right SEO Keyword Combination

To some the process of SEO is a black art and like snake oil. That being said, it is clear that the choice of keywords in relevant positions on your pages does help drive traffic to your blog or web site. Keywords are just a small part, but a critical part in the wider context of web copy, and marketing speak on your site. If keywords are what get your pages in search results then it is the marketing orientated copy that helps catch the eye and bring the punters in. So if keywords are the building blocks to the text on your web site how do you best pick them and place them tentatively?

Well firstly, the trick is to choose keywords that are relevant, and which spring to mind when people are searching. Ask yourself, what you would search for when looking for say: “A place to drink in Birmingham, AL?”. If the answer is “drinks downtown birmingham, al”, then those are the kinds of terms you need to include in page titles, descriptions, keywords, titles and paragraphed content. Critical keywords should be included in the URL.

You also need to think of key phrases, people will just as frequently hit 2 or 3 word phrases as they will search on individual words. Indivudual words work better then they are unique or unusual such as “naturopathy”. In addition, when thinking about terms or phrases you need to consider plurality. “Keyword” as a keyword will be matched with any instance of “keywords”, so in many respects it is better to use terms in the plural when trying to produce traffic from potential clients.

Secondly, you want to try and dominate keyword terms that are perhaps a little less “busy”. It’s easier to fight for second spot and get the lesser market share than to aim for the top, at first, and drive the #1 competitor from their spot. Terms that are searched for 6,000 times are just as good as those that are searched for 15,000 times. Use the omniture keyword search tool to try and figure out the best terms to use initially.

Thirdly, once you have updated the site and the impact of your keyword choice is taking effect you should monitor your choice of words using your favourite web log analyzer, examples include Analog, Awstats, Urchin, or even better, Google Analytics. Modify the terms as required to help improve the kind of coverage and hits you get. Unless your site is high content and high traffic, the search engines are not going to update it in their indexes as often, so you need to pull out the tricks hat to make sure they do.

Sounds simple, and for the most part it is, but there is a certain art to it that you gain with experience. At least start by thinking logically and then let the feedback from Google et al help divine the path you take with your search term hit choice.

Posted in Internet / Web Sites, Search Engine Optimisation, Services | No Comments »

The Best Way to Resign - No Kidding!

Having just been reading about the “more than bizarre” exit and resignation letter of Stewart Butterfield and Catherine Fake from Flickr, as well as about other interesting exits from companies on the Valley Wag blog, and having come across the more than amusing Yahoo Rezinatr web site - the quick way to draft a resignation letter to Jerry Yang - I was reminded of my own resignation antics some years back.

On April Fool’s day 2004 I drafted a fake resignation letter and emailed it to the entire company I was working with at the time. The fact that it was addressed to the heads of the company and none of them were included in the CC list was lost on most, as was the fact that it was April Fool’s day. I pity the one poor fool who rang the bosses at 630am to ask with trepidation: “Have you seen the email from Vincent?”

When the employees rolled up to the office at 7am, they found a desk, freshly cleaned and minus all my gear, along with other signs of my departure. Personally, I was enjoying a lie-in at the expense of a good joke, whilst I let them all sweat. I am sure that when I did finally climb out of bed and turn up to the office some hours later, more than just one or two of them were secretly wishing it hadn’t all been a joke.

Despite repeatedly telling my boss, prior, that there is “no such thing as a free joke” sic, ne’er a truer word has been said in gest, it still took another 2 years before we finally parted company, by mutual consent. That being said, the head of PR and marketing for the company was well impressed that I had been able to highlight major problems with the style of work and operations in an email to the entire company, and at the same time take a certain sting out of the tail by masquerading it as a so-called joke.

Anyhow, as I finished the email: “If it sounds too good to be true … It usually is!”

Posted in Humour | No Comments »

A Slice Of Heaven in Palm Springs, CA

If you love your chocolate and other epicurian delights, then Kaffee Haus at 185 S. Indian Canyon Drive in Palm Springs, CA is the place to go.

The list of the delicious, the heavenly and the down right “wrong” is endless and there is something for even the fussiest’s palette. Should the thought of such rich scented teas and coffees, potted Armenian jams and exotic sweets not get you licking your chops then something is most certainly wrong with you.

To name yet more delights, rose petal or white peach and apricot jams, Japanese mache or cherry roibois teas, Viennese melange coffee donned with a mop of cream, and espresso with a cap on the cup which melts, exploding with flavor on your tongue.

If you are still reading this then, what are you doing? It’s time to get out of here and head on down to the Haus!

As an alternative, with a great online mail order business check out Joseph Schmidt, based in San Francisco, CA

Posted in Food, Travel / Transport | No Comments »

Is RapidWeaver Better Than iWeb?

Having written many an article about how to make iWeb more search engine friendly, and highlighting all the areas where it lacks decent SEO support, I was contacted by the team at macwyse.com to discuss the possibility of giving a course or two on the topic as part of their wider web design with RapidWeaver for small businesses.

Opening the lid on RapidWeaver is like entering a whole other world compared to iWeb. The developer and theme SDKs and documentation are a breathe of fresh air in comparison to the closed development and add-on environment of iWeb. That being said, does this really make it (a) better than iWeb and (b) better at SEO in general? The answer to (a) is quite clearly yes, though with a price tag, a small ransom to pay for improved opportunities, as for (b) compared to iWeb, the answer is most definitely yes.

The problem is that all this software is created by programmers with little thought for the basics of web design and SEO in general. After years of complaint from authors and developers alike, blogs and content management systems are paying better attention to detail but it has been a long and winding road, that’s for sure.

In that respect RapidWeaver is definitely ahead of the game in the types of things it allows users to do, from adding meta-tags to adding breadcrumb trails, creating cruftless links, changing directory path names and file names  and more, so in that respect RapidWeaver is definitely better than iWeb, but there is definitely room for improvement and significant failings, as with everything, nothing is perfect, and the new version 4.0 is heading in a better direction for WYSIWYG editors.

Overall, the SEO process is certainly part human know-how and engagement, part software-based, but when tools actually block the user from doing what is right regarding, not just SEO but good web design and programming principle, then you have to just throw your arms up in horror!

Anyhow, back to the original question, in a battle between iWeb and RapidWeaver, I would take RapidWeaver, every single time.

Posted in Internet / Web Sites | No Comments »