Thursday, November 30th, 2006
A very interesting discussion at Slashdot earlier this month about how to stop spam.
There were many suggestions involving images with obscured characters, but that's just not acceptable for business.
A lot of these suggestions are fine for personal sites; but if you're actually in business they aren't practical.We use Javascript. You don't want to make life more difficult for the person trying to correspond - the point is to raise the cost to the spammer. If they have to add a Javascript parser to their spider, it's going to slow them way down. It's not going to make financial sense for them to do a custom solution for each site (and if they do, the "image" methods will break down as well).
What do we do for our own clients to lighten the spam load?
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By Alec
Business |
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
Time for some forums for client sites.
Second I wanted to introduce an old friend you are all probably familiar with from our support forums, bbPress. bbPress is forum software with the WordPress touch, and developed by the same folks. It has some pretty cool features, such as tagging, RSS feeds, Akismet spam protection, AJAX interaction, but the team focused the most on creating something fast and light. bbPress can power a forum with hundreds of thousands of posts with just a fraction of the load as WordPress. (If we could re-write WP from scratch, it would be a lot like bbPress.) What is probably most compelling for WordPress users, though, is that bbPress supports complete user and login integration with WP.
We'll be integrating any forum with each client's WordPress installation.
By Alec
WordPress |
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
If you need to get some images up on your website in a hurry, here's a bit of code which is extremely straightforward: Lussumo Filebrowser.
The filebrowser is a lightweight PHP application that allows you to thumbnail images and view them in a web browser. That's it. Short and sweet.
While it's too lightweight for what we are doing, some of this might show up in our future foliovision applications.
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By Alec
WordPress |
Thursday, November 9th, 2006
This is one great tool! Download your YouTube videos hasslefree and for free. Great job Techcrunch. Nice tool. Not overcommercialised (looking at you SEOchat.com).
To download a video to your computer, enter the YouTube URL for the video in the box above (example). It will be downloaded in flv format - use VLC or another compatible player to view it.
No stupid application to install (doesn't work in Safari Mac though, does in Firefox Mac). Simple instructions.
Now that's the way to do linkbait!
By Alec
SEO |
Thursday, November 9th, 2006
Veerle Pieters lashed out recently at freeloader clients. The client in question would be a big client (city website in Belgium).
That particular city wasn't content with a design mockup alone oh no they even had the audacity to state that the design revisions to that mockup had to be free too. You only got to have the nerve to think that's normal. This pisses me off and I have one clear message to all those freeloaders "stick it where the sun doesn't shine"! I don't work for free! Somebody has to say it out-loud.
Time to put a stop to it
The purpose of creative pitches are to give clients a better understanding of the creative capacity of the selected agencies. To me it is a lame excuse to not browse around in the portfolios and let someone else do the work for free. I wonder what goes on in the mind of the people who write that stuff down, do they expect the freebies in everything else also? From what understand it is not only a Belgian problem but an international one.
So when was the last time that somebody did a day of work for free for you? Think about, let a painter do a few rooms as a proposal and maybe you'll order the rest later. Good luck in finding one that will do so. Those RPF's are 8 to 10 pages if you are lucky and doing everything to the letter it will cost at least a day of work.
From my time working in major advertising agencies, I know we do these things free all the time. We used to call them pitches. The creative department (I was television production) would end up staying all night for a couple of nights doing mockups, phony storyboards, new looks. The account executive types would be putting fat binders of research together.
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By Alec
Business |
