Archive for May, 2007
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Is it possible for the medium sized guys to make money?
You bet.
Network Solutions, bought for $20 million in 2003, was just sold for $800 million three years later.
And amazingly enough, this deal was done by a Persian - Iranian American Jahm Najafi.
So do the Iranians know how to play a poker hand?
It certainly looks like yes. No wonder the Israelis want the Americans to bomb the Iranians to smithereens. Competition isn't fun.
Anyway here's Najafi's story:
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By Alec
Business |
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
Philip Dow's Journler
Philip Dow is the developer of the very well received Mac PIM (personal information manager) Journler about donationware. His application Journler had an open donation policy for personal use. Contribute whatever you like. A single commercial use license was/is $25.
Phil is going full-time as a developer now and is starting to feel the pain - lots of downloads and good press, but not a lot of revenue rolling in.
Out of 580 registered users, Phil had received an average donation of $17. That makes a total of about $9800. But in the end, Phil feels that some are abusing the donation system.
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By Alec
Business, WordPress |
Monday, May 21st, 2007
Some gentlemen search colleagues are thunderstruck by the acquisition of 24/7 Real Media by advertising holding company WPP for $649 million (a tidy sum it is - congratulations 24/7 - although I've always hated your technology). Raycam wonders why more ad agencies aren't snapping up the smaller search houses.
It's simple. All the assets go down the elevator every night (David Ogilvy is reputed the first to coin this phrase).
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By Alec
SEO, Business |
Saturday, May 19th, 2007
Lost an hour today to trying to debug Ecto posting to this weblog (if you're not using Ecto, you should consider it).
I was constantly getting this error:
XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only
Finally I wrote up a nice little support ticket for Dreamhost with all the details. Surprisingly I got the fix back in relatively short order.
I was wondering what the problem with WordPress was. It turned out to be a PHP 5.2.2 bug. The file xmlrpc.php is broken under PHP 5.2.2. As WordPress is the weblog system in widest use in the entire world, it would be nice if the PHP team would get with the real world and debug their releases before rolling them out.
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By Alec
WordPress |
Saturday, May 19th, 2007
At popular news site Digg users vote stories up and down. Stories either rise to the front page or top of category pages or are buried.
Some of my SEO colleagues are bemoaning their lack of success in getting their annoying marketing materials to the front page of Digg.
They justify their indignation with a chorus of "the others are doing it, the others are doing it".
In the words of Andy Hagans:
Nearly every story that makes it to upcoming/most - whether it makes it to the homepage, or gets buried -has a 'gaming' group that votes together. Like I said even top users without site affiliations will plug stories to friend, and nevermind the 'fanboys' that vote together.
It's rather amusing if it weren't so sad. These SEMs support their position with convenient libertarianism:, accusing Google or Digg or hypocrisy for trying to keep them out:
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By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Saturday, May 19th, 2007
It's official - Google will be kicking the AdSense spammers off the network.
What AdSense spam is are those sites which you arrive on via either organic search or PPC results (usually the former) and you find nothing but RSS feeds or chopped up articles on a very basic template. The sites rarely have any contact information. To be blunt, they are of no value at all except to their owner who brings in traffic at one price and sells it off at another price.
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By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Saturday, May 5th, 2007
We are currently relatively happy customers of SiteCounter.
I even worked with Aodhan on getting improving the keyword stats. Out of our discussions in 2005, the single and opaque Keyword Analyis became three separate: Keyword Analysis, Recent Keyword Activity and Search Engine Wars. Aodhan was a joy to work with.
Statcounter-Summary
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By Alec
SEO |
Friday, May 4th, 2007
John and I have often quarreled over the appalling WordPress login visuals.
Every site has to go to the same ugly login page:
Wordpress-Login-Old-V1
The login page gotten somewhat better since version 2.1 but it still just doesn't fit in with the rest of the site. Which site? Any site!
Wordpress-Login-New-V2
I guess this would be a great design if you are running a Star Trek fan club.
John would prefer not to fix the login page issue as it means altering core code. He's got a point. Once you start forking core code, you better be tracking your changes minutely (it's okay to hack into one file in my opinion, or one section, which you replace wholesale - but once you eat the first cookie, it's hard to stop and pretty soon the tin is empty and you have nothing but crummy code...).
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By Alec
WordPress |
Friday, May 4th, 2007
Just discovered a very nice shopping cart for WordPress. Fits in well with the upcoming FolioPress release. We will take WordPress from weblog software to CMS, bypassing bloat.
The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.
WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind. Perfect for
- Bands & Record Labels
- Clothing Companies
- Crafters & Artists
- Books, DVDs & MP3 files
All is not rosy however with WP e-Commerce lite. The URLs for shopping cart pages are atrocious, something like:
http://www.condomstoyourdoor.com/products-page/?category=11
That takes us back to the bad old Mambo days. At some point John and I should do a rewrite of the plugin to incorporate search engine and people friendly URLs so that the above would read:
http://www.condomstoyourdoor.com/products/non-latex
or even
http://www.condomstoyourdoor.com/condoms/non-latex
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By Alec
WordPress |
