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Archive for May, 2007

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Spam? Bah! We got it undercontrol.

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Longtime ‘Spam King’ Charged With Fraud – washingtonpost.com colchicines

Today’s article in the post featured the high profile arrest of spammer Robert A. Soloway. This is good sign that legislatively some are trying to criminalize spam.

A couple of facts are needed to put this in context:

1) His arrest is in no way going to stop spam, it’s a drop in a bucket, oh size of Lake Michigan

2) We don’t sweat spam.

We recently launched a hosted email Outlook/Exchange solution that brings the glorious benefit of seriously curbing spam, so your Inbox doesn’t flood with messages.

3580 Spam Emails - No problem.

Have a personal email address for over 8 years, so trust that I get a lot of spam. Approximately 300+ spam messages a day. Ever since switching over to our new email system, I have seen perhaps one or two sneak into my inbox, the rest junked into a folder to be trashed a couple of weeks later. This is one of the several nice benefits of this hosted Outlook/Exchange service (i.e. my Blackberry, which wirelessly synches to with my Outlook/Exchange hasn’t downloaded one spam message).

Here’s a screenshot of my Junk folder where all my spam gets thrown in with no problem.
Screenshot of my junkmail box

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Google Analytics: What is this /NaN thing?

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Recently we started setting up our clients with Google Analytics. After Google’s recent upgrades to a more Ajax styled reporting GUI, we found it to be quiet the upgrade. There’s tremendous improvements in layout and flexibility, along with simplified explanations. Very easy for our customers to get in there and get around.

For one of our clients, we started to see the characters “/NaN” as one fo the pages of significant traffic, located in the Content reports. There’s no page called /NaN, it is actually a JavaScript error that means “Not a Number”.

Well, it turns out that this is usually an indication that there’s some other JavaScript on the web page that interfering with the JavaScript that is download from Google. The way to fix this, is to move Google’s code up into the <head> tag of your web page.

Google Urchin JavaScript Code

We usually add the Google Urchin code at the bottom as indicated by Google, but in this case, the second recommendation it above all other JavaScripts.

Google Urchin JavaScript Code moved

Once we did that, Google Urchin code was run first and that fixed our odd /NaN problem.

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Traveling anytime soon?

Sunday, May 27th, 2007

Here’s three sites I never leave home without checking first.

kayak.com
I start with this one. They are an aggregator of airline prices. They are not online travel agents like Orbitz, rather, they report pricing through a fantastic GUI, easy to use, and covers 250 some airlines.

Farecast.com
If you have flexiblity in your travel schedule, you may want to check this website out. It uses a modeling engine that estimates roughly when the lowest fare will likely happen in the near future. Started from a University of Washington research project, computer scientist Oren Etzioni has developed modeling engine that does pretty accurate job. Nice!

Yapta.com
Airfare prices fluctuate, and occasionally you can get a real deal if you’re there at the right moment. Once you’ve picked the an airflight and fare that you want, you can use this site to alert you to any price drops. If you already bought a ticket, go ahead an do it anyway. The real secret is that most airlines will give you a travel voucher for the difference if you tell them that you noticed that they dropped the price of your ticket.

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Ryan Singer at FOWD on Ten Things to Improve Sign-Up Forms

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Ryan Singer of 37 Signals gave a talk on ways to improve a sign-up forms for websites. It is a good refresher for web professionals to remember to think about the user experience first and foremost. It’s easy for developers to get into their projects’ technical goals and forget that their users are going to come with varying levels of expertise and experience. Its vitally important to put the user experience first, and “building momentum” as Ryan refers to it, is very important. Your website conversion or your web apps adoption rates depend on it.

I love using the “don’t make me think” rule of thumb, heck, it’s a core principal as far as I’m concerned. Your websites and web apps need to be designed to minimize the amount of “thinking” your users have to do when interacting with them. Especially with sign-up forms, if it’s complicated, if it’s long, if it has ambiguous language, this is going to work against you by increasing the likelihood of a frustrated user experience.

Tips, helpful advice, embedded reminders, are now more easily applied with AJAX technologies than ever before, so there’s even less of an excuse not use them. More on this topic soon.

By the way, yes, apparently the camera man was distracted by Ryan’s stage pacing, so unfortunately some of the presentation slides were not included, sigh… yes, that’s another topic for another day as well.

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5 Things To Do Right Now to Get Your Web Site Ready for 2008

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

We are fast approaching the end of the year and for some of you, you only have a few days before you leave for the holidays. Before you rush off to gift giving and eggnogs, here are 5 things to do right now to make sure your web site is in good shape for 2008.

1) At the top of the list, check that darn copyright date! Nothing is more glaring than reading about all the rights you’ve reserved, last year. Make sure that the date either automatically updates itself (dynamically generated) or that someone in your organization adds 2008 to the date range the minute they get back into the office January 1st (yeah right). Yes, it may be a mere formality in most cases, but search engines do look for incongruent elements like these and factor them into their algorithms to determine your page rank and ultimately your search engine results placement. If they see your site is still claiming rights for 2007, they may penalize you over your competitor who’s got a brand new 2008 copyright declared.

2) While your you’re at it, check that privacy statement and terms of service. A year has passed and can you remember the last time you looked at the privacy statement? Probably not. Is it still congruent with your company policies? Does it reference services or products you no longer support or provide service for? Privacy statements and TOS’ seem to fall into the “create and forget” types of pages. However, considering that in the even of a dispute or issue, they may save you or your customers some heartache, you should really be periodically reviewing them. Every 6 months for information web sites (corporate web site), quarterly for ecommerce sites, and monthly for any innovative, user content generated web sites. Yes, that means reviewing them with your attorney if your fortunate enough to afford one.

3) Do you need update pricing? Now is as good as any to decide if you need to update your pricing or inventory. Look and see if there will be any increase in shipping costs in particular. 2008 is already shaping out to be a sketchy year so you might as well get ready now.

4) Look for any outdated or soon-to-be-dated content. Do you need to move anything into those “archives” like you did the year before? Do you need to setup any new 2008 areas of your web site? It is better to avoid creating directories with the date as part of the URI. Yes, my blog does say 2007 in each of the top posts. And yes, in this particular case, do as I say, not as I do. Again, search engines will automatically start to defer down dated content, particularly last year’s content. Don’t be surprised to see drop in your web stats, it’s part of the search engine year end clean up that happens. That leads us to #5.

5) Create and stage any new content for early 2008! After a week or two off for the holidays, you will likely have to take a little time to get back into the routine of updating your web sites. So get started now! Create a few draft articles for your blog and try to get the bulk of it done before you leave. Sure, you may want to write the proverbial “look back to 2007″ article, but its far more important to talk about what’s coming ahead in early 2008 than what happened in 2007. As far as SEO goes, nostalgia is always out, “new and improved” is always, always going to be in.

Happy holidays everyone! Thanks for making 2007 fantastic.

Ernesto Gluecksmann

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