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links for 2010-12-20

  • Quality product descriptions can transform e-commerce conversion rates — it’s common to see increases of 30-100%. As well as converting more visitors, search traffic increases drastically when unique copy is written for each product. Most online retailers use manufacturers’ copy or rely solely on images to sell products. They then use inadequate copy elsewhere on their site and fail to achieve a consistent tone to persuade their audience. This creates a compelling opportunity for savvy retailers — by writing quality e-commerce copy you will create a unique competitive advantage. Essentially, your copy must achieve two goals: 1. Establish trust and 2. Convince visitors that your product is right for them. Potential customers cannot see or touch the product since it’s not physically there in front of them. This is why it’s important that your copy anticipates the needs of your visitors while convincing them that your company can be trusted to provide excellent products.
  • Wirify is a bookmarklet that lets you turn any web page into a wireframe in one click.
  • Web Highlighter and Sticky Notes, Online Bookmarking and Annotation, Personal Learning Network.
  • After giving millions of users a good 24 hours to express their anger and frustration at wide reports of a plan to kill off web bookmarking service Delicious, Yahoo got around to explaining that there was no need to panic. A leaked internal presentation had showed on Thursday that Yahoo was planning to “sunset” some services, including Delicious, and Yahoo statements to the press that it was “cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products” encouraged the idea that this meant Delicious was doomed.On Friday, Yahoo said something new: “We are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company”, officials wrote on Friday on the Delicious home blog. The service will stay up as Yahoo talks to potential buyers. Perhaps the company changed plans after a torrent of criticism.
  • (No joke. This is actually how I deal with Lawyers. This isn’t just theory, this is my experience.) Have you ever seen the movie “Monsters Inc.”? It’s a cute animated Disney film about Big Scary Monsters. All day long they go through magical doors, each leading into a bedroom of a young child sleeping at night, and the monster’s job is to scare the shit out of that kid and extract screams for money. That’s very much like the life of a lawyer. He goes about his work day, new situations come up, he gets involved and scares some people, he gets paid. The better he is at scaring people, the better paid he is. I’m not attacking lawyers for doing their job, everyone’s got to eat and earn a living. I just want to show you how best to deal with him. You have to understand this fundamentally: When someone hires a lawyer to threaten you, he’s not hiring someone to figure out the legal matters involved, he’s hiring someone to threaten you.
  • We are all obsessed with sites like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin at the moment but rewind a few years to when the term Web 2.0 first popped up and a whole host of different sites were the hot young startups destined for great things. It’s amazing what a couple of years do though because as we can see below, some of the biggest sites from the “Web 2.0 generation” are either on a massive decline, facing huge competition or about to be closed down. There’s a good lesson here to highlight; how the hype cycle around websites and services can come and go and what was once lauded and destined for great things can within a couple of years shut down and be abandoned…
  • In a blog post today, Delicious says “No, we are not shutting down.” But they aren’t staying at Yahoo either. Yesterday, it was all but confirmed that Yahoo! was sunsetting Delicious, one of the most popular social bookmarking services. They do admit that they are not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, and are looking for a home outside of the company. From the blog, “We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can.” In the words of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, “Don’t Panic.” Delicious says they are maintaining the site and encourage users to stay active.
  • For busy websites, using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to transfer static content such as images, javascripts, stylesheets, Flash etc. is highly recommended (as listed in Yahoo!’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site) as it reduces server load and bandwidth thus improves stability and availability. There is a catch – Commerical CDN’s like Akamai and Limelight are not cheap at all. Good news, we have an exception however – the free, P2P-based CoralCDN allows us to take full advantage of a powereful CDN without spending a dime. How to use it? Well, basically, just append `.nyud.net` to the hostname of any URL, and that URL will be handled by Coral – simple. This plugin takes that simplicity one step further (or closer?) by rewriting your static files’ URL’s (JavaScripts, CSS, images etc.) so that they are served from Coral servers instead of your own. You don’t have to touch anything! Just enable it, and boom! your static cont
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-10-30

  • Maurice Murphy, who died yesterday, is an essential part of the soundtrack to your musical life – even if you don't realise it. Maurice was principal trumpeter of the London Symphony Orchestra for 30 years, from 1977-2007, and you have sung along to his unmistakable, brilliant sound even if you have never knowingly been to the Barbican to hear the LSO in the flesh. It's his trumpet playing you hear blazing over the soundtracks to all six Star Wars films, and it was his playing for John Williams on the first film – his first gig with the orchestra – that made Williams stick with the LSO for his future movies. But Murphy's playing was always cosmic in its splendour, as anyone will know who heard him with the brass section of the LSO in the countless concerts and recordings they made together.
  • Today on the Twitter blog, the company wrote a post that was all of three sentences to let people know about their new logos. Yay! But there’s actually quite a bit more to it then it seems. If you follow the link they provide to Guidelines page, you’ll find some interesting tidbits.
  • Mike Pantoliano of Distilled had a good post over at SEOmoz about how to turn Google Analytics into your own rank tracker. We have been playing with the cd= parameter at Yoast before to track SEO rankings, as Mike also notes, and his improvement on the idea is a welcome one. In the comments, my buddy Richard Baxter immediately suggested this would be a good addition to the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. The "problem" was/is that Mike's example was in PHP, doing the rank recognition server side. This won't work, as we all use W3 Total Cache to cache our pages, right? And then, we'd be storing the same rank over and over again, or no rank at all, or, well you get it, mayhem ensues.
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    Categories
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    links for 2010-10-08

  • Google just announced that it plans to shut down 1-800-GOOG-411, its voice-powered directory assistance service, on November 12. GOOG-411, which launched in 2007, was the company's first foray into voice-powered search. According to Google, GOOG-411 "provided a foundation for more ambitious services" on smartphone platforms like Google's own Android and Apple's iPhone. Interestingly, today's announcement also notes that Google plans to put all of its resources "into speech-enabling the next generation of Google products and services across a multitude of languages."
  • A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do. It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted their expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday. The answer came when half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi’s apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device. Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, cooperated willingly and said he’d done nothing to merit attention from authorities. Comments the agents made during their visit suggested he’d been under FBI surveillance for three to six months.
  • You can quickly create a seamless background texture in our online image editor Phoenix. First import, and select your seamless tile with one of the selection tools. Next use the "Define Pattern" functions under the Select menu to set it as the foreground fill. Then use the paint bucket tool to fill the canvas with the new pattern.
  • Did you ever feel like there just weren't enough hours in the day? Have you ever stayed up late because you weren't tired enough to go to bed? Have you ever felt like you didn't get enough sleep and it was, too soon, time to get up? Have you ever wished for more free time to pursue different activities and goals? If you can relate to these feelings, you will be interested in the 28 Hour Day. Under the 28 Hour Day system, the current week would remain at exactly 168 hours. (24×7=168) However, this 168 hour period would be divided into six 28-hour days rather than 7 24-hour days. Some of the benefits of extending the length of the day are relatively clear: you would simply have more time to do the things you wanted to do. Everything you do now in a typical day could be done for a little longer: you could sleep longer, work longer, spend longer blocks of time with your family and friends, and have more leisurely meals.
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    Categories
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    links for 2010-08-30

  • When digital cameras first hit the market, they were kind of a novelty.  My mother bought one, but she didn’t love it because it was just an expensive, complicated way for her to get a physical photograph. And that’s all that mattered to her – the physical photograph.  The digital version was an annoying step in the process.  My wife was the same way for a long time. Related to this, two years ago, I posted a short item about how global paper use is declining.  In it, I quoted this: “Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is,” says Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. This has also become true with pictures.  We had family portraits taken a couple weeks ago.  They turned out great, and my wife made an appointment with the photographer to pick the ones she wanted.  She asked me which ones I wanted, and I was a little taken aback by the question.
  • The conversation began here, when THQ's Cory Ledesma stated that buying used games "cheated" developers. Then it picked up steam when Penny Arcade made a comic about it, as they do. Then it turned into a discussion between PA artist Mike Krahulik and a number of other people. The thrust of the thing is that when a gamer buys a used game they might save themselves a few bucks, but all of that money will go to GameStop and none of it goes to the developer. You save five, but the developer loses forty-five. (Or however much of the purchase price they normally get from a new copy.) The conversation has taken the shape of a battle between Developers and Gamers. This is a shame, since there are three actors in this equation. I don't like the idea of painting a Snidely Whiplash mustache on GameStop and declaring them to be our villain, but we should at least list them in our cast of characters.
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-05-12

  • Facebook has made all kinds of privacy changes lately. It's made some users uncomfortable and, thanks to a couple poorly-timed screw-ups, Facebook is getting a lot of heat about the changes from Senators, media, and watchdog organizations. We don't think any of that will ever cause you to quit Facebook. You love what Facebook does for you too much to quit. But if you're going to stay on Facebook, you should definitely know how to keep your information private.
  • Facebook fan pages number among the few social media channels that allow page customization for users. Instead of a mediocre interface, business owners and professionals can now apply HTML code to enhance their Facebook fan page presence to promote and build business branding. Rich content creates a memorable interface that gets people talking, lets a special announcement or contest go viral, improves fans’ engagement and so much more. To create an important hub to reach out to millions of potential supporters, you need to up your game and optimize your fan page to meet its ultimate purpose. Everything is possible, thanks to the powerful Facebook application known as Static FBML. Many people may be unaware of the advanced functionality FBML gives a fan page, such as creating and naming your tabs or boxes freely. For those who are curious just how powerful Static FBML can get, we’re going to inspect it all here:
  • Google chrome is a relatively new web browser but it has already gained huge popularity with its great speed and features. Web developers must work more faster and more productively – what could help more than these extensions aimed to ease your daily development process and save time. At least for me – none of extensions have made browser load speed slower – I cannot say this about Firefox though, which I don’t use anymore. Scroll through this list – I am sure you will find at least few new extensions to use daily!
  • This picture was taken at the Vancouver airport by Michael Lonergan when he felt a disturbance in the atmosphere.
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