Microsoft have created TV commercials to promote the new IE8 browser. This one tells you about their “Web Slices” feature. Enjoy.
You can view more of the ads here.
Download IE8 from http://search.yellow.co.nz.
Colours of Atumn
Captivating photos that I Aneez Nabi have managed to take during the cold winter presently being experienced in 2009 using a range of cameras from Cannon’s to the more sophisticated likes of Nikon’s.
These photos showcase the beauty of a cold morning that I have experienced and are reminiscent of experiencing what snow felt like for the first time when in New York City.
My philosophy on photography is that one must combine playfulness and discipline, using imagination with reality.
As a result we can agree on the quote that “Creativity is the natural side effect of Intelligence” – Anon.
Enjoy,
Aneez Nabi
A new feature, Friday Links, some stuff for you to think about over the weekend…like homework.
Analytics as WMD (Weapons of Mass Delusion)
I still have a love/hate relationship with analytics. There is so much value, but then so much that we still need to know and so many times when the numbers just don’t make sense, rocking confidence in the whole medium/strategy. My number one wish is for a quantum leap in progress in analytics in the next 12 months.
Facebook finally launches Vanity URL’s
Quick, grab yours.
Are blogs on the way out?
Twitter and other micro formats seem to have taken quite a toll on blogging. Is there still a place for them? I hope so, I’m not sure everything can be communicated in 140 characters.
What people are talking about on Twitter today
Disturbing similarity between Air France disaster and that movie Final Destination.
Yes please! Sign me up for six-packs
OK, so I had this ad show up on my facebook page (which I was totally checking for work related purposes) and was a little confused at the message that it was trying to convey, was it suggesting that I get my “6-pack” by going to their totally generic site? Or perhaps the message they were trying to convey was a little more subtle, perhaps they meant that I should commit a hate crime, do some hard time in jail and get my “6-pack” that way?
For those that are unaware the image in the ad is taken from the movie American History X (Wikipedia entry). Here’s the part in question @ the 2:33 mark (warning, some people might find it disturbing, so don’t watch it then come here and complain at me) via YouTube
Perhaps Facebook should screen their ad’s a little bit more? Or maybe the people who put up those awesome, quality ad’s (i’m totally sure that your “new proven method” is totally legit, i’m sure you even asked a real scientist guy right?) should engage what little brain they have? Or maybe people just don’t care and I wanted to write a blog post?
We are very excited to announce that one of our team members, Darren, has been selected as part of the CodeBlacks team representing New Zealand at this year’s FullCodePress 24 hour web development competition.
FullCodePress is a web competition - the brainchild of the people at Webstock and WIPA. In essence it’s a geek Olympics! The concept is simple. Web teams take each other on, at the same location, to build a complete website in 24 hours. Two non-profit organisations, one from Australia and one from New Zealand, will be selected to receive a complete website at the end of the 24 hours.
Darren is the HTML/CSS person in the 6 member strong team including:
The competition will be held in Sydney from the 12-13 May 2009. You can follow along on flickr and twitter by using the FCP09 tag.
Google AdWords is going through some major changes currently. There is a new version of the interface due to be released very soon, and now they are planning to make quite a substantial change to how they track conversions to make it much more granular.
Please see the below explanation from Google for details on how this will impact your campaigns and reporting, once this is implemented:
We know different campaign goals often require different success metrics. If you want to drive online purchases, you probably look at the total number of sales, so if one person buys three items from your web site, you’d want to count three sales. But if you’re measuring leads, you may care more about unique leads, so if the same person fills out a lead form three times on your site, you’d want to count them only once.To make it easier for you to manage campaigns with a variety of advertising goals, in the coming months we’re updating AdWords conversion tracking metrics in the new AdWords interface and other AdWords account management platforms (such as AdWords Editor and the AdWords API).Today we’ve taken the first step by clarifying the conversion terminology on the AdWords Report Center and conversion tracking tool pages. “Conversions” columns are now labeled Conversions (1-per-click), while “Transactions” columns are now called Conversions (many-per-click). The current AdWords campaign management pages display 1-per-click conversions, so if one click leads to multiple conversions, they’re counted only once. On the other hand, many-per-click conversions count each conversion that occurs after a click on your ad.Here’s an example to explain the difference: Let’s say you’re selling gardening supplies online and you’ve set up conversion tracking on your “Thank You For Your Purchase” and your “Newsletter Subscription Confirmed” pages.If a customer clicks on your ad, buys a bag of peat moss, then subscribes to your newsletter, you’ll see two many-per-click conversions, but just a single 1-per-click conversion in your account. If the same customer returns to your site a few days later and buys a trowel (but doesn’t click on one of your AdWords ads to get there), you’ll now see three many-per-click conversions, but your 1-per-click conversions will still remain at one.By focusing on many-per-click conversions, you may be able to more easily compare AdWords campaign performance with the performance of your other online advertising campaigns, since a large number of online ad serving and search campaign management tools (such as DART for Search) use many-per-click conversions as the default conversion metric.You can learn more about the new terminology, as well as get guidance on when to use each of the different conversion metrics to measure success, in this Help Center article.Over time these metrics will also be released to AdWords Editor, the AdWords API, and the new AdWords interface. We’ll also improve conversion tracking for display advertisers through the release of view-through conversion tracking for campaigns on the Google Content Network.
Disclaimer: This post contains unsupported guideline for configuring your Kentico CMS 4.x to utilise extensionless urls with IIS 7.0. Use with care!
Base System Requirements: IIS 7.0 with .net 3.5 SP1 on a Windows Vista dev machine or Windows 2008 server to utilise extensionless urls.
Firstly, install the marvellous IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
Get it here: http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1692
Learn about it here: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-url-rewrite-module/
Now, make sure Kentico is configured not to interefere with things…
Kentico automatically applies a filter to the form tags. You need to disable this here:
There is currently no way of ensuring that automatically generated urls from Kentico contain a trailing slash. The user must set the Document UrlPath for each page in Page > Properties > Urls to include the trailing slash. However the trailing slash is enforced via in IIS 7 rewriting rule. It is hoped that a future version of Kentico will allow for this to avoid the extra 301 redirect.
Now apply the following website configuration….
Place the following code in the Page_Load of your master page.
// ensure we fix up the form action if required
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_URL"]))
{
form1.Action = Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_URL"];
}
This ensures that Asp.Net postback and ajax work correctly with the IIS7 URL Rewrite Module
Now all you need to do now is apply whatever special rewriting rule syou like within the web.config, utilising the IIS Rewrite Module’s capabilities as you need them. (Note that you don’t need to do anything within IIS, you can manage everything within the web.config and simply deploy it out to target servers without worrying about any additional configuration).
For example, the EnforceTrailingSlash rule below will ensure that a trailing slash is added to all urls without extensions, performing a 301 redirect in the process. This is so to avoid multiple urls (ones with and without slashes) returning the same content which isn’t ideal from an SEO perspective.
The TrailingSlashToAspx rule below will ensure that a trailing slash is rewritten internally to .aspx, so that the kentico rewriting engine can take over. Note that the Kentico CMS folders are ignored (ones starting with CMS..)
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name=”EnforceTrailingSlash”>
<match url=”^(.*)$” ignoreCase=”false” />
<conditions>
<add input=”{REQUEST_FILENAME}” matchType=”IsFile” negate=”true” />
<add input=”{REQUEST_URI}” negate=”true” pattern=”(.*)\.([a-zA-Z]+)(\?.*)?$” />
<add input=”{REQUEST_URI}” negate=”true” pattern=”(.*)/$” />
</conditions>
<action type=”Redirect” url=”{R:1}/” redirectType=”Permanent” />
</rule>
<rule name=”TrailingSlashToAspx”>
<match url=”^(.*)/$” />
<conditions>
<add input=”{REQUEST_FILENAME}” matchType=”IsFile” negate=”true” />
<add input=”{REQUEST_URI}” negate=”true” pattern=”/cms(.*)$” />
<add input=”{REQUEST_URI}” negate=”true” pattern=”^(.*)/\.aspx[#\w=\|\&%-]*$” />
</conditions>
<action type=”Rewrite” url=”{R:1}.aspx” />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
And so there you have it, a relatively painless way to get yourself all SEOd with IIS 7.0 and Kentico CMS 4.0.
The NRMA in Australia has just taken road rage anger to Web 2.0. RoadTube is an avenue for road users to let politicians and others know what is bugging them and what they want done to fix it. People can upload videos or post a written comment. They can also link videos to their social networking profile, comment on other videos and even rate what the experts have to say in their videos.
RoadTube is on the road as well. Three portable “Toll Booths” are traveling around NSW equipped with portable webcams so road users can express their frustrations and have their say. An Itinerary of the locations dates and times are published on the website.
The website has a news section and browsing what others have posted be it a video or written comment is nicely laid out. Users can also apply a rating to a posting plus there is a counter function where visitors can agree or disagree with a comment - valuable data for the NRMA.
The Marker team have built the website on WordPress and also cleverly customised it. They have taken the ability to make postings out of the back-end and put this into the front-end enabling all posts to appear in realtime. They also designed and built the interface for the standalone portable “Toll Booths”.
The project has been launched to consumers under the byline “Take the Rage off the Road” and intends to build a community by tapping into the growing trend of user-generated content. The website is designed to give motorists a voice and a way to channel their frustrations and put them to good use.
The site is already well populated since going live two weeks ago. There are already over 400 posts with 74 being video postings and over 320 written postings and the website has had over 10,000 visitors.
Check it out here.
Congratulations go out to our resident Information Architect. Justin and his Fiancee Amber were married this Saturday on Willow Island, Auckland Zoo at 3pm. It was a magical day and Marker was very lucky to be a part of it. We wish them both the best of luck together in the future.
My good friend Nigel Parker over at Microsoft beat me to the post with his excellent blog post on Marker Studio’s new search site for Yellow and customised IE8 browser experience:
The launch has been very successful with over 10,000 downloads of the Yellow IE8 browser in the first 2 days!
To add a bit of technical detail to Nigel’s post we made heavy usage of the Google Search Ajax APIs. I kind of wish they still had the SOAP apis as it would have been easier in many respects using .net to bind the results using server side asp.net rather than be forced to work primarily with the ajax apis. Also, the ajax apis come with handy code snippets http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/ but they assumed things like ajax calls for paging requests which means the user can’t bookmark the urls. Aside from that a few workarounds here and there got us enabling Google integrated search quite easily. I would like people to note that the Live Search apis were superior in terms of the range of ways one could consume search services, and relevance in my book is very comparable between the two.
We made use of Linq to XML when consuming the core Yellow listings api which is REST based. This made the consumption and binding of the search results to the page using a standard asp.net repeater much easier. In fact, i cringed to think of the additional effort that was involved before Linq for XML in navigating XML Documents with the .net 2.0 xml apis which I never found particularly intuitive.
There is also some Salesforce integration for helping to manage competition entries where we created custom lead objects in Salesforce. It’s kind of nice to have the ability to regenerate the wsdl for the web service after you make changes in the gui to core field information. It would be even nicer to have this discoverable at runtime so i could just regenerate proxies using a url rather than having to download the wsdl and re-run svcutil across the wsdl locally.
And let’s not forget our good friend JQuery, and loving that Intellisense support in Vs.Net 2008;) Also a shout to facebox for those obligatory modals with rounded corners.
Oh, and the whole thing is powered by Kentico CMS. Kentico CMS is a powerful, flexible and affordable content and document management system that i have been personally recommending to all and sundry since i first came across it in 2005. At Marker <shamelessPlug>we have a great team of experienced Kentico developers should you be looking in this direction. Please give me a yell if you would like to discuss further</shamelessPlug>.
Stumbled across this gem of a site on the weekend. It is essentially a collection of “nicked” images from sites around the world - kinda like a social network for media bookmarking – “loosely based on the idea of a droplet contributing to a pool, filling it ever-so slightly one by one” … lovely stuff!
