Archive for May, 2008

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The True Secret to a Better Google Page Rank

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

The bottom line is people have to like you and more importantly link to you. Check out Memo (Courtesy of 37 Signals, SVN Blog)
A couple of lines of code, 1 image, No SEO, No Meta Tags, and a Google Page Rank of 4. Here is the entire website:

<html>
<head>
<title>memo</title>
</head>
<body>
<center>
<br><a href="mailto:info@memo-ny.com"><img src="memo_12_07_1.jpg"
alt="memo a graphic design firm located at 156 Fifth Avenue, 10th Floor,
New York City, NY 10010 (212) 915-7135 info@memo-ny.com" height="1820" width="680" 
border="0"><br><img src="memo_12_07_2.jpg" alt="Memo Productions www.memo-ny.com" 
border="0" height="15348" width="680"></a><br>&nbsp;
</center>
</body>
</html>

Tags:
Posted in business best practices, creativity, design, hosted solutions, ruby on rails, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Are You an Online Jackass?

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

We’ve all been there, but to what degree?

Find out your degree of Jackassery with Gawker Media’s Quiz.

I would add one more category to the 20 Point Death Round.

  • Posted a bulletin on your Myspace, Facebook, or Blog page after hoisting one too many libations.

Lifted almost in whole from Gawker Media . (A Jackass move in itself)

For each time you did the following in the last thirty days:

1 point

  • Asked for a digg
  • Added someone on Facebook the day you met them
  • Visited MySpace
  • IMed someone asking who they are
  • Messaged someone on a site like Facebook when you could have called or e-mailed
  • Used a “Sent from my Blackberry/iPhone/etc.” e-mail signature
  • Discussed an Apple rumor
  • Made a joke about fonts

2 points

  • Commented on a blog just to say you liked or hated something
  • Posted a Craigslist missed connection
  • Used MySpace
  • Submitted your own blog post to Digg
  • Asked someone to blog you
  • Added to a Wikipedia talk page
  • Bought a Threadless T-shirt

3 points

  • Told a personal story in a Yelp review
  • Used Tumblr
  • Gave a bad review on Amazon to a book written over thirty years ago
  • Added a celebrity on Facebook
  • Made a YouTube response video
  • Twittered about your blog
  • Got fake-married on Facebook
  • Friended someone on MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, or Yahoo 360
  • Asked anyone to tag anything

4 points

  • Invited someone to add their photo to a Flickr group
  • Invited someone to a Facebook app
  • Vlogged
  • Made a Facebook event that wasn’t really an event
  • Blogged about dealing with someone in the service industry
  • E-mailed a press release
  • Wrote “why do I care” in a blog comment

Death Round: 20 points

  • Sent an unneeded “reply to all”
  • Sold someone’s contact info
  • Played Second Life
  • Rickrolled someone
  • Reviewed your own book on Amazon
  • Complained that someone reblogged a third party’s content without crediting you for finding it first
  • Said the word “microcelebrity”
  • Invited your whole address book to something
  • Talked like a LOLcat in real life

Results
0-10: Get the hell off my blog. But first digg my story.
11-15: You must feel great about yourself. Add twenty points for taking the quiz.
16-25: Very mediocre. Why are you reading this on your Playstation? Go play GTA IV.
26-40: All your Tumblr posts are stolen from other people’s blogs. Your Twitters are about Twitter. But somehow all the YouTube clips you IM me are two years old.
41+: All my base are belong to you. Oh god, you probably laughed at that. You can haz the finger, jackass.

Posted in just for fun, web 2.0 | No Comments »

How to get your Creative Agency to Push Your Jobs Through Quickly

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

Never use the phrase ASAP – “After, Sometime, Almost, Possibly”

Instead, give the agency a tangible time-line.

In today’s fast paced, on demand world, the phrase ASAP has lost its meaning. In fact, in the creative world ASAP pretty much insures that your piece will get pushed to the end of the line, or even worse get lost in the process.

Creative shops hear it all the time, “I needed it yesterday, Do It ASAP!” The problem is that everyone needs their work done tomorrow. Most creative companies such as Nimbletoad work on 10-15 projects at a time. The jobs that get done first are the ones that have tangible deadlines. ASAP jobs get put on back burner whenever a job with an impending tangible deadline approaches.

If you really want your piece to made a priority, tell your vendor the day you actually need it. If it is tomorrow at 11:00, so be it. This gives your agency or developer a tangible time to lock onto. Tangible times always take precedent over ASAP.

Tags: ,
Posted in business best practices, creativity, design | No Comments »

HubSpot.com: Our Favorite Internet Marketing Website – Turn Your Website Into a Marketing Machine

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

HubSpot.com is our favorite site for Internet Marketing and SEO [Search Engine Optimization] tips and tools. They have numerous articles and a great blog that gives tips for turning your website into a marketing SEO machine.

One of the most important things you can do to increase internet traffic and create leads is to put your time into it.

Most people still think SEO is something their web designer does once. Companies that committ to doing ongoing SEO reap ongoing rewards. To do SEO successfully, you should continuously do 3 things: 1) find more keywords that will bring you relevant traffic 2) create more content focussed on those keywords 3) build links that support ranking higher for those keywords in search results. Who knows your business, your customers, your market, the problems you solve, the solutions you provide – better than anyone else? Hopefully you.

Aren’t you the best one to find the keywords your prospects would type at google? Aren’t you the best one to produce content that’s relevant to your prospects?

If you haven’t done link building beyond directory submissions, you won’t understand this. But doing link building well requires your time too. Trust me. If anyone says that they’ll get you 100 new links per month and they don’t ask you for press release ideas, article ideas and a list of the leading bloggers, forums and trade publications in your industry, do not hire them.

Check out their cool website grader too. This will let you know where your site stands and what you can do to increase your site’s marketing effectiveness and SEO.

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Posted in Internet Marketing, SEO, business best practices, functionality, usability | 1 Comment »

Ruby on Rails 2.0 – Scaffolding is Gone!!!

Friday, May 9th, 2008

Scaffolding is gone? Well… sort of.
In Rails 2.0 the method scaffold is gone from the ActionController::Base so there is no dynamic scaffolding.

So what is a developer to do?
You could uninstall Rails 2.0 and downgrade to an older version of Rails, but what is the fun in that?

Our hats are off to Leonardo Borges for saving us from Rails 2.0 frustration, or worse – starting from scratch.

Now that the dynamic scaffold is gone, we’re left with the static one.
Ok, let’s try it then:

$ script/generate scaffold contact

And it won’t work again! ;) At the end of the output, you will get something like this:

Another migration is already named create_contacts: db/migrate/001_create_contacts.rb

It really means that if your model is meant to be used by a scaffold, you better generate it in the same line. It will fail, afaik, if the model previously existed. Destroy your model and controller, and execute the following:

$ script/generate scaffold Contact name:string email:string

Done! Just run your migrations, startup your server and your new scaffold in rails 2.0 will be working gracefully!

Tags: ,
Posted in geek, ruby on rails | 1 Comment »

Computer Camp

Friday, May 9th, 2008

The last post got me thinking. What the heck… 1984. Commodore 64... I will always have memories of my first Vic 20, but lets face it. Those of us who actually went to to Computer Camp in ‘83-’84 used the Apple IIe.

We all had Commodores at home, but Apple controlled education. Hat’s off to my brother who still runs an underground Amiga bulletin board.

Long live the Commodore and for that matter Datarock for reminding me of how cool Computer Camp was.

Tags: , ,
Posted in business best practices, design | No Comments »

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