Friday, April 17th, 2009
Today has been a really long day at the office.
We have had interviews with three new candidates for SEO positions in the company. We've talked SEO strategy. We've gotten a couple of video promotion companies underway. We've created a new reporting system for life insurance quotes. We've fixed our SEO Images plugin. We've done a detailed quote for a new e-commerce site. We've tested two potential CRM-lite solutions. We've unsuccessfully tried to invoice again (too much work to have time to invoice!).
Life is not easy at the front lines of the web wars.
But sometimes working on the web can be great.
Peter and I had to spend a half an hour going over the intricate workings of a good sample Magento site to decide if we wanted to build that shopping site in Magento or build a custom cart of our own in WordPress. Here's the model Magento site:
Sexy ecommerce: WordPress or Magento - definitely Magento
- Splendid implementation.
- Perfect design.
- Wonderful proportions.
- Incredible attention to detail.
- Flexibility.
And I am talking about the code not the excellent photographs. It was easy to see all the different variations available of the items. Easy to navigage from item to item.
But digging deeper there's a lot of fragile and browser dependent code here to troubleshoot. Keeping this site looking perfect and running right in five or six browsers is a serious undertaking.
PS. In the end we came down on the side of a preference for WordPress, as that's what we can SEO and build in our sleep. If the client would prefer a dedicated Magento site it may happen.
By Alec
WordPress |
Friday, April 17th, 2009
While developing the Foliopress WYSIWYG we decided to create the images management on the basis of Kae Veren's excellent KFM file manager. While we are totally happy with how KFM handles the images itself, we were unable to work with images uploaded via ftp.
SEO Image managing a large sub directory of images uploaded via FTP
Uploading images one by one through an image editor is fine, uploading twenty that way is annoying. One of the reasons to prefer WordPress over Typepad is that you do have direct access to the server via ftp. So this was clearly not acceptable. It wasn't even possible to change the file ownership of httpd via SSH (without root permissions).
Keep reading How to get HTTPD and FTP to play well together or SEO image management nirvana
By Peter
IT, WordPress |
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
Surprise, surprise. It's not just Twitter hurting for cash.
Gideon Yu, Facebook CFO
Facebook has just shed its CFO, Gideon Yu - the same guy who negotiated the deal for YouTube. That's somebody I'd like on my team. (Hey, Gideon, we need a CFO at Foliovision.) Apparently Mark Zuckerberg who is the last cofounder of Facebook still standing wasn't seeing eye to eye with Yu about potential monetization plans.
Zuckerberg is rumored to want an IPO. Normal mortals would settle for being acquire, In the meantime, the company is bleeding red ink.
Just the kind of place I would like to store all the contact information of my family and friends: at a business who is desperately in need of a $100 million.
Not only is Facebook desperately in need of cash, but they are an onshore American company. Under all the various Bush decrees, any information stored anywhere in America is accessible by American intelligence and security agencies with the rubber stamp of a secret tribunal. Normally when intelligence agencies get close to data, they don't take what they need, they take all they can get.
In general, Facebook is not somewhere I would be comfortable keeping a full database of all my contacts and all of their contacts, along with exact information about the nature of our relationships. See our page on the dangers of Facebook.
By Alec
WordPress |
