Archive for March, 2010
Friday, March 26th, 2010
We want to have nice pictures in our posts. So do You. Good composition, colors and focus are by all means necessary. But there's at least one more step between picture in your camera and picture on your web - resizing. Either on your computer in your own image editor, or on the server using image processor designed for that purpose, or on both.
In this article we will look at the quality of the server-side processing of the pictures when they are being resized. There are two tools for image handling running under php. First is build-in php image processor called GD. Second tool is ImageMagick which needs to be additionally installed on the server.
Focus on Details
If you want really nice pictures, details matter. Details are the magic that makes the picture look extraordinary good. We examined how GD and ImageMagick behave when it comes to details. With GD we don't have many ways how to affect the result, but with ImageMagick we have the choice of filters and sharpening options. Look at the following portrait and notice the difference. You can see that the GD picture looks somehow blurry while the ImageMagick looks more sharp and preserves details.
GD, 32kB
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ImageMagick, 63kB
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Photoshop, 58kB
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Keep reading ImageMagick vs GD vs Photoshop
By Zdenka
Design, WordPress |
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
I should preface this article by saying that of the social networks, we like LinkedIn best. They don't try to get ahold of information about you they shouldn't have and they give the account owner very good granular control of what appears in his or her account. On the other hand, sometimes one wants to close an account. And it should be easy.
How can one quickly and easily delete one's LinkedIn account? It turns out nohow.
First, it’s almost impossible to do it without seeking out very detailed documentation. Fortunately you have arrived at the right place.
The received wisdom is that you have to open up a customer support ticket to close your LinkedIn account. That’s no longer the case. Possibly thanks to the direct pressure that celebrity programmer (can a programmer be a celebrity?) David Heinemeier Hansson brought to bear.
In the second round of Heinemeier Hansson’s LinkedIn let me go hell, Heinemeier Hansson wrote:
But two people from LinkedIn has now been in touch and hopefully we can work this out. I’ll try my best to get the quit-account operation to be automatic, not manual. That’s the big problem.
But it’s still not easy.
Keep reading LinkedIn: How to Delete your Account
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Friday, March 19th, 2010
We use a WordPress plugin called Amazon Showcase WordPress Plugin to put books from Amazon on some of our client's sites. Well, we used to, until recently.
This plugin produces ridiculously long Amazon links for Amazon Affiliate Program (which let's you make money advertising Amazon products):
http://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Over-Artist-Fiction-Thomas-Beller/dp/0393321711%3FSubscriptionId%3D(Access-Key-ID-here)%26tag%3Dfoliovision-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0393321711
There are parts of this long URL which seem to be pretty easy to understand and they seem important and there are some part which seem to be redundant.
After reading some articles on this topic we decided to create a quick tool to generating these Amazon Affiliate Links. The basic idea comes from this nice article from 2008 and even nicer from 2009.
Check out our tool here:
http://foliovision.com/seo-tools/marketing/amazon-affiliate-link-generator
Other thing which bugs us about the Amazon Showcase WordPress Plugin is that it's not caching the images. The images are always loading from Amazon servers - slowing down your page load.
That's why we are working on our own Amazon plugin which we may release on wordpress.com when it's ready (it will have nice URLs and will store the images locally, among other cool features).
By Martin
Internet Marketing, WordPress |
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
Many sites whose new posts were previously indexed in one day have found themselves waiting 7 day to have their posts indexed. If you are depending on AdSense revenues for visitors clicking on topical recent posts, this is a big problem. I'd imagine that would be about a 60% income drop for your site overnight.
What's causing this issue?
Longtime rogue SEO Michael Martinez is bandying about the theory that the issue is using WordPress SEO plugins. And running around every forum in town shouting it from the rooftops.
Let me reiterate my opposition to the use of "All In One" and other SEO plugins - they are not helping any blogs with search engine optimization. They are bells and whistles, busy working gadgets....
A typical default WordPress installation does a perfectly fine job of allowing you to configure your page titles, URLs, and content. You don't need to embed "Keywords" in meta tags and your autogenerated descriptions will be no better than whatever a search engine would provide (and the search engines will ignore meta descriptions in many queries anyway)....
There is a LOT of confusion over what you need to do with a WordPress blog. The less you burden it with so-called "SEO friendly" features, the less likely you'll screw up your site in the search results.
If you don't know enough about search engine optimization to do it yourself, then you're really in over your head when you depend on a theme or plugin to make the decisions for you.
Installing an SEO plugin will not damage your SEO.
- Having custom handwritten descriptions can increase your clickthrough 50% or more.
- Including a good short keywords section with the 5 or 6 top tags for your post can help with Yahoo still.
- Writing a second structured title for search can really help (your article header should be written for the reader and not for search, i.e. with wordplay and puns and spin and short forms are good. Like a newspaper headline but the page title must include keywords)
So an SEO plugin can really help your SEO with minimal time and trouble.
Keep reading Google 7 Day Indexing Delay: WordPress All in One SEO Plugin
By Alec
SEO |
Friday, March 12th, 2010
MenuMeters is a superb tool for those who use their computers heavily.
While you are multitasking you are instantly alerted to issues in uploading, memory leaks and paging, caches being permanently to disk, core processes or user projects getting stuck.
Frankly the cost of the instant info is having a fair amount of your menu bar taken up with the four indicators.
OS X MenuMeters Raging Menace
So on my most recent two Snow Leopard installs I tried to get by without MenuMeters. Bliss in simplicity. Higher productivity.
No such luck. Without instant visual feedback, your computer will bog down on a broken Internet connection or a runaway process, slowing one down more than the milliseconds to see where the issues are.
Keep reading Keep your Apple OS X Computer Running Fast with MenuMeters
By Alec
IT |
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
For reasons unknown, Apple makes it really difficult to move around one's iTunes library.
Just moving the library to another hard drive will result in all the files being disconnected. Unlike Aperture or Final Cut Pro, there is no automated path fix. If you want to correct the paths you have to do it file by file.
There's also a hidden function inside iTunes which is really deadly (I believe it comes turned on by default) to reorder your library. If you do that, compilation albums will often be broken into the individual song. Each in their individual artist folder.
Basically if you let iTunes loose on your library, you will entirely lose Finder organisation. Guess what? Then you will be fully dependent on iTunes as no finder based album play system (the excellent Vox for instance) will work well anymore. So there is method to the madness.
Even the songs which don't have correct metatags will all get dumped in a large virtual graveyard instead of being left in their date or album structure.
Keep reading Apple iTunes Library: Move iTunes Successfully via the Finder
By Alec
IT |
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Whatever happened to the CDDB and to FreeDB?
CDDB evolved into Gracenote. It looked like they were losing their stranglehold when Roxio moved to FreeDB in 2000. A closed settlement resulted in Roxio moving to Gracenote full time. I hope they were clever enough to get free stock in Gracenote for the pleasure.
The next death knell (although no one knew how important it was at the time) for FreeDB was that Apple went with Gracenote and then disabled any ability for users to submit to FreeDB (for a couple of years it was possible to use the FreeDB servers instead by monkeying around in one's hosts file, but it was a pretty techy solution). Without
Keep reading FreeDB or Musicbrainz: Why is there no software to upload album info in OS X?
By Alec
Business, IT |
