If you are the kind of person who likes to have a fresh quote in the sidebar, this is a plugin for you:
WP Sentence is a wordpress plugin that allows you to add new widget to Your sidebar. WP Sentence shows one of the 430 citations. When the page refreshes widget show different (random) quote.
Posted in web concepts, web design, wordpress, wordpress plugin 
Tags: plugin, quote, sidebar, wordpress 
No Comments »This is a very in depth post on how mikeindustires.com was able to grab a domain at expiration time:
I recently found myself in the position of wanting to register a domain which was owned by someone else. The domain was set to expire in a week, and I figured there was a decent chance that the person who owned it wouldn’t be renewing it. Upon consulting the WhoIs registry on the current owner, I discovered the guy was a bit of a domain shark and didn’t seem to be around anymore.
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There is so much buzz about free and paywalls and hybrid of the two. There is a nice article on Logic+Emotion called “The 4 Kinds of Free“:
This is a new kind of currency that we’re seeing being used and what fuels it is the accessibility we have to each others through more of an open source way of working.
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Posted in business, ecommerce, web concepts Tags: business, Business model, ecommerce, free, web commerce No Comments »
Woah – this may be the first PayPal horror story I have heard of. But I have not looked to hard. Eitherway – this is a great post from four bean soup.
The 24 hours came and went, so I called customer service back. They reviewed the documents on the phone with me and lifted the restrictions on the spot! I was so happy that I could put it all behind me. Then I logged in and saw the Website Payments Pro was still gone.
…
23 hours later I received an email informing me I was too high risk and my previous approval was being denied.
This is an interesting story. I will have to do some more research to see if I can find others with the same issue. Anyone?
Posted in ecommerce, web concepts Tags: Add new tag, Customer service, paypal, Website Payments Pro Comments OffAlong with keeping the day-to-day rolling in webdev this week, my task is to test out a couple of web classified apps. We’re looking to test drive two methods – one called geodesic and then drop a couple of WordPress themes too.
The hard part will be figuring out how much is “enough” to get us to the next step in the game. We get a lot of heat in WebDev for not building out entire sites as requested. The hard part is trying to convince our internal clients they don’t need the Cadillac quite yet and we have a nice Honda ready and waiting.
So this will be a good test for both WebDev and our internal clients to see if we can meet in the middle.
Challenges:
Suggestions:
Oops! We could not locate your form.
Posted in Featured Post, marketing, new media, technology, web concepts, wordpress Tags: classified, craigslist, ebay, wordpress Comments Off
Danny Brown had a great post about IKEA and the design of their stores. It reminded me of the struggles my work is going through right now trying to be come better eCommerce people. Here are a few things from the article – see the full post here:
Great point and one that is hard to do. Hard to have the discipline:
Consumers love simplicity. We don’t want to be confused with multiple messages and options. We just want to buy the product or service that we need at that time and have it work, or improve our lives. Make our lives simpler.
Same concept we should emulate online:
BUT… I am a huge fan of the layouts in their retail stores. You go in the front entrance, and you simply follow a path until you reach the checkouts. You never feel lost, or cluttered – everything is relaxing.
Anyway – great food for thoughts. Please leave comments if you know of other great user experience in online or off line stores.
Posted in Featured Post, Web design, business, ecommerce, web concepts Tags: business, Danny Brown, Electronic commerce, Online shopping, Retail, Retailers Comments Off
This is a very timely article, as today our network guy gave a me a call to warn me our website’s error log was out-of-control. The caching plugin we were using was haywire. I had to turn off the page level caching to slow the bleeding. That increased our page load times and Tim said, and I quote, “this is getting so slow – page load times are almost 3 seconds.:
WHAT – 3 seconds. Seriously – but he is right. We need to get pages loading as fast as possible…and now.
Here is a tool for you:
We’ve just launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.
Posted in Quick Post, Web design, web concepts Tags: Cache, Google, Google Webmaster Tools, Load, Site Management, Website Comments OffIf you are not using CSS sprites, you need to get on it. If you don’t know what they are – well, please figure it out.
It’s all about getting the page to load as fast as you can. Remember – half your audience has ADD!
5 things you might not know about CSS sprites
Posted in Quick Post, Web design, web concepts Tags: Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, Sprite, Style Sheets Comments Off
This is some really good information on the “free” – “Non-Free” conversations.
Getting back to my series of posts on understanding economics when scarcity is removed from some goods, I wanted to address the ridiculousness of the “can’t compete with free” statements that people love to throw out. If we break down the statement carefully, anyone who says that is really saying that they can’t compete at all. The free part is actually meaningless — but the zero is blinding everyone.
I think if we do as the post says and get back to some basic, fundamental economics we could look at the current marketplace – then make some decisions on supply and demand. See that the price of what we’ve been offering is moving and we need to become more efficient at producing the product and maximize the areas we have the ability to make revenue.
Saying You Can’t Compete With Free Is Saying You Can’t Compete Period
Posted in Quick Post, business, web concepts Tags: Economics, free, Price, Supply and demand Comments OffAs I prepare for a couple of internal presentations I’m giving at work I stumbled across this post from Fred Wilson called “Presentations vs Discussions”
A presentation is like a TV show. It’s a lean back experience. A discussion is like an online chat room. It is a lean forward experience. They are not the same thing and in many cases they work against each other.
Although I LOVE TV shows – I’m not wanted to be one. I love discussions – the more heated and debate ridden the better. I need to take a look at my preparation and see how I can turn what I was thinking into a discussion.
If you have any tips…please let me know. I’ll post a reply to this post when I find some.
“Changing the paradigm away from a presentation” is the point of this post. Presentations are important. I do a lot of them and post all of them on this blog in advance. I am not saying they don’t have a role. But if you want to foster real engagement and real discussion, they are not helpful and in fact I think they are hurtful.
NOTE: Fred Wilson is a very cool guy who is a venture capitalist/president at Union Square Ventures and lives in New York. Fred is a true spokesman for the entrepreneur, and a cool guy – do yourself a favor and check him out.
Posted in Featured Post, web concepts Tags: Chats and Forums, Debate, Fred Wilson, Relationships, television, Union Square Ventures Comments Off
