Skookum Webmaster Directory

Spock.com a new people search social network found you, and wants you to step up and claim your identity.

The managing your online identity page on Spock.com tells of a plan in which you will be able to claim, add to and be alerted about your online identity. Spock searches the Internet for mentions of names and links to the associated content. You claim your identity and are able to add tags to your profile in order to further identify your self or even link to your own personal blog, which shows in your news section. Spock wants to be a primary source of personal information by showing up in the top rankings of a Google search performed for your name.

But what of the downside to a public application like Spock? Wired Magazine reports of a mini application which was placed on Facebook, another social networking site, which allowed people to fill-in-the-blanks about someone they new and create a story about the person. Some people made humorous or even crass stories about their friends with the mini application. What they did not know was that the information was used to populate Spock, and some of these tags they gave to their friends were less then flattering, or even libelous.

In investigating the Spock site I have found that it will find other profiles and information which exists on the Internet regarding you. Once you make a profile you are able to include the content which belongs to your identity by telling Spock that the information is relevant to your identity. The more you interact with the system in claiming your identity the more your actions matter. This is tabulated on the system in terms of ‘Spock Power’. Spock Power is gained by interacting in the social community, suggesting and approving tags being one way of gaining power.

Other social networks exist which are related to people searching, such as Wink.com. Wink allows you to claim your profile and when I searched my own name in this tool I found the same content that Spock found. This is another site which scours social networks and Search Engines such as Google in order to find your online presence. With similar capabilities it might end up a matter of marketing and funding to determine which might be the next big thing in people searching.

SWD Recommended

I did promise some scripts and I figure it’s about time to post one.

This script will strip images off a web page, it can be placed in the address bar of your browser to strip any images off the current page your looking at.

These scripts will cover most of the stripping of images from a page.  Turning off an image can be done either with the ‘display’ attribute or the ‘visibility’ attribute. 

The difference is in the rendering of the page. 

• If you use the ‘display’ attribute then the image will not show up and not reserve any space. It will be like the image never existed.
• If you use the ‘visibility’ attribute then the image will still reserve space, but will not be rendered.  Its as if the image was invisible, but still there.

 Now these are not comprehensive hacks, however it might get you started thinking about some things you could do with command line Javascript or CSS.

SWD Recommended

Here is the skinny on new Google Analytics.

Finally the world gets what Webtrends Live had (has?).  I used to work for Webtrends consulting and creating custom Javascript for Webtrends Live.  I am glad that Google finally has it together enough to emulate the functionality of WTL.  This is a great day for me because I can use all my tricks to make Google Analytics track what I wanted.

New features:
Now you will be able to track e-commerce transactions, secure site pages, cross-domains, Ad Campaigns and even types of visitors and events. 

With e-commerce you can also track the value of visitor actions.  For example if you have multiple calls to action on your site you can create a value for the different calls and set them up as their own item.  Say you have two actions:  subscribing to a feed and joining your community.  You can assign a $.05 value to join your community and $1 to feed subscribers.  This amount could be based on the value of the visitor reacting to your site.

Cross-domain or secure site tracking will help keep the visitor session consistent when you are using hosted e-commerce or your commerce pages are on a secure site (as they should be).  Funnels are broken across secure and non secure with the old urchin code, so this is a great development.

Ad campaigns and visitor segmentation set on click events, or landing pages can allow you to track visitor behavior for different types of visitors.  This seems like it would be a natural for A / B testing.

Event tracking is great because events such as mouseovers, flash movies, page unloads and other events could be tracked. 

Using the new code:
It might not look simple, but the change to a more object orientated code format is a great move.  Extending the code is simple as setting object properties.  New functionality are methods on the tracking object. 

The event tracking (beta) is interesting as it would allow for the tracking of Ajax as an example.  Ajax is based on javascript events which would be easily tracked with the new event tracking code.  You could even look for load times on Ajax or possible orphaned processes which could trigger a time out event.

Summary:

Google is on the right track with this new change, it makes their tool a potent weapon in the analytics war.  Since they are giving away this functionality for free, I think they will become the defacto standard in analytics from now on.

SWD Recommended

ShangNing my first encounter with an online renegade since the old BBS days.

I am pretty new to blogging, but I find it to be an interesting new world.  For example one of the first visitors I have had to my blog was this gentleman out of China.  I just got on a blog reader tracking network and his was the first name, so I have checked him out.  I’m not too big right now so I like to check out everyone that see’s my blog.  It seems to be a good thing to do since I am still small enough to do it.

Anyway, I was reading about him and it turns out that he is blogging through a proxy server because he could not access the blog thought the national firewalls.  I think that’s a real cool thing, kinda hacker-ish and impressive.  To take that sort of effort to communicate with the rest of the world.

Well I am happy to have him visit me and am happy to see that he even responded to my accidental trackback.  I didn’t know exactly what they meant, so I figure I owe him a mention in my blog for real at least.  Sorry about the false ping ShangNing =).

Keep it up, even with your new English I hope that you will keep blogging about what is going on from China.

About the Cart

Shopping cart software can be broken down into 3 pieces: storefront, information collection and transaction processing.  The rest of what a cart comes with is related, but not crucial for the selling of products.

• Storefront:  This is the cart system that people most likely think of first when they think of e-commerce.  This is the front end, or what the customer uses to look at your products.  The usual method carts use is to present a tree of categories of products, which narrow down to individual products.  The user would be able to select the product and perhaps pick from some options such as color or size.  They would then choose a quantity of the individual product and place it in a cart which is a holding bin which allows them to shop the site further and purchase many different products in a session. 
• Information Collection:  This is asking the customer for identification, shipping and transaction information: filling the forms to purchase the product.
• Transaction Processing:  Actually making communication with the bank in order to process the transaction.  Money moves from customer’s bank to your bank.

Functionality

On top of this core, there are many more features that can be tacked on to the cart.  This is part of the reason for what has to be the tens of thousands of carts which are in existence now.  Features might include:

• Product limit:  How many products can be in the cart.
• Category limit:  How many categories you can make.
• Multi-language
• Gift Certificates
• Loyalty program:  Discounts based on repeat purchases.
• Email merchant on order:  Email sent when an order occurs.
• Affiliates program: Others are able to refer customers to you and get a percent of sale.
• Site search:  Search for products.
• SEO Tools:  Take into consideration good URL and Code practice.
• Product Reviews:  Allow visitors to comment on products.
• Newsletters:  Emailed to your customer list and offer information and coupons.
• Discount coupons
• Customer registrations:  Customers are able to login on a revisit, their information is stored and they don’t have to reenter.
• Wish list:  Customers can make a list of what they want to allow someone else to purchase it for them.

These features, while some are interesting or useful do tend to add to the complexity of the system.  This means the cart will be harder to maintain and use.

Working with the cart

Adding or changing a cart can be difficult.  Often you will find that simple moving of elements on the pages which are programmed into the cart involve major development time to change.  Some carts are much better then others when allowing for change.  Most have a similar look and feel, this contributes to the user experience in allowing for a familiar user experience.  The downside to this is that the interfaces in a cart are usually pretty locked down and even minor changes can end up being major programming efforts.  You often will get exactly what you see with a cart, so make sure you like how it works and don’t want to change much at all besides logo graphics and maybe some of the colors.

That being said, I always try to use ecommerce which is simple and flexible.  These are the 2 major concerns for me, as I have often had to try to change a minor thing in a cart only to spend days or even weeks trying to make it work without breaking the whole cart.  The look and feel of carts is usually very locked up and I value any situation where I can change look and feel.

Types of carts:

Complex carts:

These carts are for very large sites.  If you plan to have a small staff of people able to maintain these carts and want to have tens of thousands of products or more in the cart these are for you:

• Interchange
  • This cart separates the jobs of site designer, admin, product manager and programmer.  It is flexible and scalable.
• OS Commerce
  • Many add-ons and community involvement makes this cart very good.  Layout very static, change can require deep code change.  Add-ons can conflict with each other.

Simple carts:

These claim to have less overhead because they omit any functions outside normal cart duties.  I will be performing further testing on PHPShop as it looks most promising.

• PHPShop
  • Claims easy layout with CSS.
  • Claims minimal features and easy to change code.
  • Dreamweaver integration.
• BakeSale
  • Built on CakePHP which is a RAD environment like Ruby on Rails, but for PHP.
  • Simple cart, minimal features.

Web Service Carts:

A web service is a program that sits ready on the web, exposing its functions which can be used remotely.  Paypal was the first I had heard of to do this, and Google now has a cart.  The freedom here is that you don’t need to do much more then add some code to a page to make it a cart page, cart layout is totally in your hands.  The provider handles all the dirty work, but they also take a cut of the proceeds.  They are your merchant account, so you would not use your normal way of processing credit cards, rather they would be your merchant account for your online cart.

• Paypal
  • First to market (that I heard of at least), well tested.
  • A lot of 3rd party support.
  • Ebay integration?
• Google
  • Big name, everyone will be developing for them
  • Master of API’s – your building a cart on their API’s and they are good at making very useful API’s.
  • Base / Froogle tie-ins?

Summary

Personally I favor Web Service, or API based carts.  I have found resistance from clients because they want to use their current merchant service.  Google and Paypal make good sense in the long run because most developers will become more and more familiar with them as they become more and more popular.  I also like a simple cart that I have fine tuned control over and can just add a few lines of code to and have full control over how product catalogs work.

Start thinking of the features you want and see about what might fit the bill.  Make sure the person that works on your site is comfortable with the cart and that you are able to use the back end admin section without getting too confused.

I found a good site to look at the carts in comparison, not complete, but shopping cart reviews is a good site.

RSS Hugger connects blog writers with readers.

They call it a sandwich board, those folding signs that you often see on the sidewalk outside a business.  The idea is to divert some of the passing foot traffic into the store by putting something right where they can see it when they are walking by.  This is what RSS Hugger does.  Blog writers post their feed to a page on the RSS Hugger site and readers will be able to browse categories to find blogs to read.

Go to the search page at the RSS Hugger and you will find a category list which shows you what sort of blogs are on the service at this moment.  I would like to see this have an actual search box on it.  Perhaps one which could search current RSS headlines?

I like the design of the site as well as other sites which the author has made.  His sites look sharp and function well.

I also wonder if there could be an interactive box or widget which we could place in our blogs.  For example, it would show top blogs in the same tags which our blog is tagged with.  That might be a nice way to interlink the network with each other.

All in all I see a lot of potential in this product.  This is a simple blog network concept which could grow into something larger and more robust if the interest is there.  I don’t know if this was the intent, but I see almost a sort of opt-in blog network idea in this product.  With all that said I’ll have to recommend it to others running a blog.

SWD Recommended.

The Internet Advertising Bureau sets the recommended dimensions for web site ads.

So you are designing a banner ad and you want to know what the size of the banner should be.  Maybe you paid for ads on an ad network and are offered button, rectangle and banner impressions.   You are not sure what dimensions your graphics should be. 

You have a few possible ways to solve the problem, call their support, steal a peek at some other ads or hit this site to find out.

Ok, so this is a pretty trivial problem, but if you get bored and feel like digging around the IAB has a whole bunch of free information on marketing which is so good I feel like not sharing is cheating.  The information has sort of a scholarly bent to it, so it may not be suitable for anyone but marketing fan’s, however you never know and it doesn’t hurt to look.

I am going back to school to finish a marketing degree, so I can’t wait to delve into this site and really geek out on the content.  I also have come across Seth Godin’s name a million times as of late.  I have a sneaking suspicion that I will need to check out his Blog on a regular basis.

So the secret message in this post is:  Go check out the IAB. 

SWD recommended.

Seems fairly obvious, but I didn’t say it first, Dave did. 

So, to get more traffic to your blog you need to participate in others blogs.  I can see this being a good thing for 2 reasons:  One the blogger will notice you and will either allow you to link to your site (if your comment is good) and you’ll be reading a blog, only by reading blogs would you expect to have anyone read yours, after all if we are all writers then who is the reader?

I got to looking around more on Daves Blog and I did find a lot of interesting content which I might also go back and comment on.  He has sections on Search Engine Optimization, Web Programming, Blogs, Writing and much more.  There is a lot of information which I can check out there and see if I can comment upon.

This brings up a good point, freshness and comments.  If an article is fresh, it would seem that it would be much better to make a comment on.  There is more a chance of getting real visitors from your comment.  However, there could also be a value in commenting on older articles.  These can be a source of links which might not be as looked at by current visitors, but could provide some more incoming links for search engines to discover.

So, check out Daves blog, I know I am going to comment and hope to comment on some other blogs before the week is out.

SWD Hot Tip.

Website Magazine has a new affiliate program.

Maybe I should have signed up and gotten you all to click my affiliate link!  Perhaps later, but in this post I just wanted to talk to you about this magazine and the fact that you can get a free subscription to it. 

As far a magazines go it’s not too bad.  It reads a lot like a blog (magazine -> zine -> blog), which I suppose is not surprising.  I would suggest getting it because it’s free and if you want you can get involved in an affiliate program with them.

I cannot state too often how there is so much on the web that is free and useful.  My goal is to use free or inexpensive components in any project I do.  Get this magazine and use it as the starting point for further investigation into the web.  This sort of material can provide your imagination fodder which can start you on a long meandering search of the Internet. 

I think of this as information prospecting.  I see the article on e-commerce in the magazine, check out the sites of what they recommend and then do some Google searches for those products.  If those products are services which are ones you might supply, or are competitors do a search with "link:" before their domain name in Google, this will show you who is linking to them, which can give you a clue on who you might want to ask for links to your web site.

Anyway it just brightens my day when my free magazine comes.  I guess I am still a pushover for that sort of thing.

Free is a very good price.

Paint.net is a solid and free image editor.

You won’t find many truly free programs for Windows anywhere.  It is very noticalble when one is useful and free.  Paint.net is similar to Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro with some advanced image editing functions such as layers and effects.  It does a good job of resizing images and can shrink or expand canvas’.  These are some of the main functions I use when editing images and I find this tool to be too good to be true for the price.

Layers are very useful when using graphic tools such as this and learning to use them is one step toward learning the full power of graphic design with a computer.  Essentially the layer is a stacking of many images on top of each other in the same image.  Sort of like tracing paper on top of more tracing paper.  The difference is that you have control over how transparent a given layer will be.  This means they can act as masks, only letting part of the image underneath the layer to show through. 

Common effects like drop shadows are super easy when using layers almost as easy as the drop shadow button in most editors.   The difference is that you have much more control over the shadow if you learn to use layers well.

I have some free tools that I find that are so good they are worth donating to the programmer in order to encourage them to keep up the good work.  This is one of those products.  If you need to do some basic image editing and don’t want to spend $100+ on software then Paint.net is a great way to go.

Recommended by SWD.