It’s not perfect, but still a nice effort.  Wordpress 2 for iPhone

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

I just noticed that the default search options for the domain auction for DomainFest were .COM, .NET and Other.  It seems that  SnapNames thinks most domain buyers will have a preference for either .COM or .NET above all others.

Is this an indication that .NET’s are becoming a viable alternative to .COM’s?

I think so.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

I suspect that Google will manually take this down soon.  They say they can only rearrange search result pages (SERPS) algorithmically, but we all know that they may consider  if (page = ‘obama’) { rank = 0 } an algorithm.

More on this by Danny

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Does anyone else read this as: Acquisio if and only if Newsletter?

I did.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

MySQL Command Line Bar Chart


mysql> select date_format( create_time, '%Y-%m-%d') dt, repeat( '#', count(id)/20.0+1) dt from result group by dt;

Comand line stats are addictive. Nothing like real time… enjoy. Thanks to snipplr.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Oracle Boards Sun and Takes MySQL Captive

I’m a little amazed that no-one seems to care that Oracle has bought MySQL through it’s purchase of Sun announced today. MySQL is used by over 40% of developers, and is one of the key backend databases for many of the sites you know and love.

The WSJ didn’t mention it. Nor did CNN. Bloomberg? Nope. Forbes? of course not. The NYT at least mentioned it at the bottom.

Although Oracle won’t own the open source version, they pretty much control the main development path. How would you feel if Microsoft was the lead for the Linux development? I thought so.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

I registered and paid for the 2008 show, but didn’t get to attend due to the birth of my daughter. The 2007 show was killer, however. Like most conferences, it’s not about the talks, but all of the talks for 2008 are posted below.

Web 2.0 Summit 2008

Just don’t know if I’m going to bother this year. Seems irresponsible to drop that kind of cash. What do you think?

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

With the time-delay cloaking method, a webmaster will partially render the page so that the ads at the top of the page show by themselves to users long enough to get a click and not get distracted by content. Lets face it, a page with nothing but ads on it has fantastic CTR without all that pesky content getting in the way.

Time-Delay cloaking isn’t actually ‘cloaking’ and webmasters have plausible deniability that it’s just a wonky server, or a slow connection, or perhaps just how the script hits a slow database. Eventually the content loads, and no one is hurt.

Big Benefits

A delay of 6-10 seconds can double an advertisement’s CTR… or more. The actual improvement, of course, depends upon a lot of things. Just a few seconds of delay can have a measurable affect on click throughs. When the advertisement is Adsense or another remotely hosted ad network, the delay may be even longer so that the remote script has time to load and render. Time-delay cloaking can go a long way to make sure that advertisers aren’t ignored while still giving users what they came for.

Credit CNet

I first noticed this type of cloaking back in 1998 on CNET. At the time, I think it was unintentional, but perhaps I don’t give them enough credit. Their implementation involved a flaw in browsers at the time that would wait to render parts of a table until all the content loaded. They would put their ads at the top of the page in a separate table, and it would render as soon as you hit the page. The rest of the page would follow a few seconds later or more, depending on your connection speed.

Implementation

Implementation is fairly straightforward. In PHP the simple implementation:

<?
echo $yourHeader;
echo $yourAd;

sleep( 5+rand(4,8) );

echo $restOfYourPage;
?>
** you may or may not have to flush the output buffer.

In some cases, you could also put a slow loading remote script with a document.write(). There are many more ways to implement this, and I encourage you to be creative and let us know what you come up with.

Some Tips

Make sure you remove the delay for any bots as this can reduce your crawling rate, or worse. I’m not sure how the search engines may see this, but that alone is a sure sign that you should proceed with caution. Some tips for using this method:

- Randomize the delay time so it’s not obvious what you are doing
- Don’t delay for bots - you may get reduced crawling or worse
- Don’t over do it - if you delay too long, do you really have content?
- Only delay once per user per day to avoid reverse engineers

Disclaimer

Cloaking of any kind may risk your search engine rankings. I don’t endorse this technique, nor do I recommend it to anyone that hasn’t evaluated the risks. In general a site should cater to what is good for their users. When in doubt, ask for help.

Happy Cloaking.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Security

Security, or more correctly the lack of security, is probably wordpresses biggest downside. Because it’s so widely used and open source it’s a natural target for hackers. There are plugins that help you lockdown wordpress a wordpress firewall plugin and ways keep an audit trail to help keep track of changes and even ways to limit access to your admin panel by IP, but at the end of the day, from a security standpoint wordpress is a block of swiss cheese. So you should always make sure you have backups and keep your wordpress and plugins up to date.

Maintenance

Over the past year wordpress has dramatically increased the frequency and complexity of their new releases. In 2008 wordpress moved from wordpress 2.3 to 2.7, with more than one update requiring major changes to database schema. For organizations who are interested in doing business and not being a system admin for the ever changing world of wordpress, all of time maintaing a wordpress CMS, can make it look fairly unatractive. Normal maintenance combined with the required due dillegence for security can and will probably eat up a few man hours every month. If you are responsible for more than one blog the time commitment grows geometrically, often to the point of absurdity. Once you’ve commited to the wordpress platform it’s like getting a tattoo, getting rid of it is going to cost a bit of money, and be very painful. Ignore the maintenance aspect of wordpress and the weak security will come back to haunt you. It won’t be a matter of if your blog gets hacked, it will be just a matter of when.

Lack of Enterprise Features

Earlier this year Wired Magazine published an article saying blogging was dead. While this was probably a well executed piece of linkbait (which worked), one thing the article was right about, personal, and single author blogs are dying out, and being replaced by bigger multi-author blogs. These new blogs bear more resemblance to magazines and newspapers than than to blogs in the classical sense. Wordpress has been slow to incorporate and enhance some of the key features enterprise publishers look for and need in a CMS. For example you can schedule posts for future publications with wordpress, but the most recent version removed this information from the dashboard. The post administration screen now shows “post publishes in 9 days” instead of the actual time and date of publication, which is a pretty serious oversight. Other features include a lack of native advertising management, instead relying on plugins, and the absence of built in template editor. IMHO features like this keep wordpress from being given serious consideration by mainstream publishers.

While I’ve painted a pretty grim picture, there is a lot to like about wordpress. You can’t beat the price, and if you invest the time, it can be an amazingly powerful piece of software. But choosing wordpress for your site, or your clients sites, is something you should give serious consideration too. Locking someone into a piece of software that requires a significant time investment for upkeep, isn’t for everyone, especially if there isn’t someone who is technologically savvy with time to devote to the upkeep. Think of wordpress as finicky european sports car, it may spend a lot of time in the shop, but when it’s out on the road, cornering like it’s on rails, it’s hard not enjoy it. If you do decide to move to wordpress Google recently released some tools to make the migration easier.

About the Author

With over 10 years experience in internet marketing and website development, Michael Gray has helped many companies with their SEO, ecommerce and website marketing needs. Michael has been a long time speaker at industry events such as PubCon, Search Engine Strategies and SMX. You can read his blog at www.wolf-howl.com, or his articles in many industry publications. In addition to internal search engine optimization, Michael also helps companies with their product campaigns with ViralConversations.com

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Affiliate Summit West 2009

For anyone wondering, I’ll be heading to Affiliate Summit West in Vegas from 1/10-1/12. Last year’s Vegas show was great, and I’m looking forward to it once again.

The show is at the Rio, but I’ll be kicking it at Steve Wynn’s new hotel, Encore. I’m excited to see the new hotel since the Wynn has been my favorite Vegas hotel so far.

See you there?

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.