I ate Dominos Pizza before all this, but this latest crap might drive me away foreva!

Dominos Pizza has a new advertising campaign that shows how honest they are. They are shocked that in taste tests people compare Dominos to card board… I hate it when companies use social media and the power of peer review to market products.

I’m pretty sure that when Dominoes Pizza started, they KNEW their pizza sucked. They were in the same league as Little Ceasers, Costco, and store bought frozen pizza. They are now just making a campaign with the hottest marketing strategy we have ever seen. That strategy is to use peer reviews and company CEO’s to show how much they care…

On a side note

I’ve often thought that if I was homeless and I begged for money, I would eat pizza everyday. Probably not expensive stuff like Dominos. More like Litte Ceasers. I think LC (little ceasers) has a $4.99 pizza. Not only only can one large pizza fill you up all day, but you also get a box. Add some duct tape and in a few days of eating nothing but pizza you have yourself a nice little cardboard house. It even folds up nicely for travel.

But, I’m not homeless, and I have a computer and a Dominos minutes from my house. So I go online to order a Pizza.

Please watch my video as I order a pizza and ask yourself… If a company that cares so much about the consumer, why does their online order form  have a bug that charges extra, AND the store owners know why???? AND they don’t fix it???? Yet, do not offer any refunds??? AND, why doesn’t a huge company like Dominos Pizza have the resources to fix a simple bug that over charges every consumer that orders a pizza through the website.

Simple, They don’t really care…

I’m now off to Yelp.com to rate my local Dominos store… Hopefully Yelp will extort them after my review!

I was at a tech meeting yesterday at Intero Real Estate in Fremont, CA talking internet marketing with a bunch of Realtors. One of the questions I got was “Is there an easy way to move all my personal Facebook photos over to my new Facebook business page”. Here is a quick tutorial on how to do it.

Doing a quick Google, I found a nice Firefox extension that lets you download entire Facebook photo albums.

The extension is called Facepad

The iPad is going to be pretty expensive. Even the base model at $499, which is relatively priced to a good quality netbook seems a little high to me because of the “closed” Apple OS. Of course the price is always reflected to the the cost to build. So how much does it cost Apple to build an iPad and how much room do they have to lower the prices when the other tablets are released later this year.

I got this information from isuppli.com via businessweek magazine.

• Aluminum Case: $35.30
• Memory: $29.50 (16GB) $118 (64GB)
• Display: $80
• Processor: $17 – Apple builds their own processors. They acquired PA semi in 2008 so they could build low power consuming processros for mobile devices.
• Battery: $17.50 – Non-removable
• Wireless: $27.10 (GPS and 3G) $8.05 (WI-FI). Totals $35.05 for the 3G models. Data Plans run $30/month from AT&T

The total cost to Apple for the base model: $187.35.

Estimates for Apple will be a gross margin of 54% or $269.95 for each iPad sold. With an estimate of 3 -4 million units sold in 2010, Apple will generate over a billion in revenue from the iPad.The large margin also gives the iPad some room to lower the price if competition gets fierce, or if they want to add additional hardware like a camera.

Whether you think the iPad is a revolutionary product  or think it was a revolutionary hype machine, you have to agree that is a lot of money for Apple.

The iPhone was estimated to sell 10 million units in 2008, but ended up selling over double that in 2008, and over 42 millions by the end of 2009. Could the iPad do the same?

Wordpress is so versatile that you can use it as a blog, static business website, community, or CMS (content management system). For pretty  much anything you need to do, you should reach for Wordpress. Lately, I’ve had a lot of requests for information on multi-author blogs. Using the leverage of multiple authors is a great idea, but you should plan out your strategy before you begin. The biggest benefit is the leverage of more people for both content and promotion. When you start a website like this, the website owner assumes the role of community manager and has to keep the blog running smoothly. Don’t expect the blog to just take off because you have more content then before, you still have to run it like a professional blog. What platform to use, how will you find bloggers, and how to reward your bloggers are a few good questions to start with.

What community blogging platform to use?

Worpdress (WP) and WPMU (Wordpress Multi-user) are both great platforms for a multi-author blog. I have found that a normal Wordpress website is good for a close knit group of bloggers, that communicate regularly and understand the overall strategy for the website. Examples on this type of website is Mashable.com. WPMU on the other hand is better for a blogging website where the bloggers don’t really know each other, but all have similar interests in the overall blog topics. WPMU powers wordpress.com.

A WP website is much easier to run compared to a WPMU site, but the WPMU site can grow to be much larger because a WPMU site creates subdomains for each author. Each subdomain can use different themes, plugins, etc, they are each individual websites. You can think of it as each website made by WPMU is a normal WP website.  WPMU will always be under attack by people trying to make a fake blogs and game your system, but there are many plugins and strategies to stop this.

An example of a WPMU structure will be as follows. maindomain.com will be main website and all sites built under it will aggregate to it. Now as authors start blogs, each one will have a subdomain. Let’s say this is a car site. honda.maindomain.com, toyota.maindomain.com are examples of subdomains.

If you really want to make your WPMU community take off, you can offer Top Level Domains. Basically the author that made honda.maindomain.com, can upgrade to hondacars.com… Now that author can have subdomains under them. CRV.hondacars.com… As you can see it can go on forever and can offer much more benefits that a normal WP install. Again, it will take more effort from the community manage to keep things running smoothly.

How to find Authors for your multi-author website?

When I get approached for a multi-author blog, The first question I ask is “How will you get people to blog or interact on the website?”. Most often, this causes a long pause…

Setting up a blog takes very little time, but the website owner quickly finds out that it is very hard to get people to commit to join their blog as an author or guest blogger. Try to make it beneficial to the authors and make a win-win for everyone. Most authors will have their own personal blogs or websites. It definitely helps if you have a large social following to start, In other words, build your community and group of authors before you start the website.

Rewarding Authors to make your community grow

Your website will live or die by the content and participation. You need to make it worthwhile for high quality authors to contribute. Points systems have long been used to indentify the best authors, but this doesn’t always mean you will get good content… and of course if you run a WPMU blog, you will find a lot of authors trying to game the system to get more exposure. Therefore, if you do use a point system, place higher points for creating conversations. Comments, retweets, bookmarks, etc… should get the most points, while blog posts get very few.

Make sure you provide ways to get your blogs’ authors content out into the wild.  The community manager should tweet every post, submit it to sharing sites, and make sure the website is running high SEO. Let your authors see the analytics so they can see what organic searches are used to find their content. Not only will they see that you (the community manager) is promoting the site and driving traffic to it, but they will also know what to write about and what people are looking for.

In Summary

Wordpress is used by many top websites and can handle almost everything you throw at it, but when it comes to a successful website, the people working with the website are what really matters. Before you start the next big thing make sure you have the connections and network to find bloggers. The better quality of blog posts, the better the website will be, so try to focus on getting the best authors possible. When you find those authors make sure you reward them for their hard work. If you follow this strategy you will have a win-win for everyone involved.

Driving and listening to Rob Black today compared Google to his father… Meaning Google is unhip and doesn’t know how to mix it up with the younger generation. Now, I’m 36 and feel a little depressed that I’m out of the 18-35 range, but I still feel that I know a lot about the internet. Of course, not as much as Google, but I find it funny that Rob basically called them out because Google Buzz is a flop.

He makes perfect sense, and it’s easy to see that Google is trying so hard to grab what Facebook and Twitter have seemed to nailed, social interaction, and social search. What peers are talking about and the information peers share amongst each other.

I was really disappointed when Google’s flagship social product “OpenSocial” died. It’s still around, but has no heartbeat. Since the group turned to a big spam board I called it quits. Now that I think about it, Google groups could be a really good social network, but gets no focus from Google and most groups eventually fade away.

OpenSocial was to compete with facebook apps, but on an open front. Opensocial would allow you to create apps for any social network. Sounded cool, but Google seems to think you can release a product and then let the buzz carry that product… Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way and Google has yet another social product get a lot of notice and then it fades.

So, is Rob black right?

Is Google relatively old?

Are they relatively old enough to be unhip and not able to connect with the new generations of Internet users?

What will Google look like in 5 years? They want to advertise in pretty much every medium realm known to man… So, I think they are going to just be a huge advertising company. they already are huge, but not known for it.

I personally think think Rob is onto something… I’ve talked about this with my friends and we all seem to agree that the search results from Google are getting worse and worse. Recently trying to find a tutorial for a simple Flash application, I was finding results dated back to 2004, not one or two, but half of the first page search results… 6 year old results for a product that has evolved many times in that period. Those search results are absolutely useless.

I do find it easier to just Tweet the question, or post to Facebook and let someone guide me the answer. Google better figure out how to do that or else there cherished Pagerank algorithm will be nothing more the  dusty old media, like newspapers and magazines.

What makes a revolutionary service? How do you get people to fully embrace your service? How can you make a service expand beyond your wildest dreams… The answer is simple… Make a killer API.

I got access to Google Buzz today. I played with it a little, but IMO, it’s not that special right now. Of course the biggest problem is that I never built up my Google profile and have no connections with my Google contacts. I assume most people are like this since Google has never really broken into the social network arena. Even though I have used Gmail for years, I seem to have very few contacts, which is bizarre to me.

What I do like is that even though the status updates are small, you know that some are full blog posts, videos, images, etc… I always wanted a Twitter that had more information then just the ridiculous 140 characters. With that being said, it does look an awful lot Twitter or FriendFeed, or facebook status updates or… So needless to say, I’m not too excited.

What makes Twitter so special is that they allow 99% of the service get accessed through their API. You can pretty much do anything with the Twitter API except create a new user. This allows people to create their own twitter clients and applications. Most of us will agree that the main Twitter website is sad. The retweet function sucks, the automatic url shortening is poor, and overall hard to follow lots of people, even with lists.

Twitter apps make everything better Tweetdeck makes Twitter useful and recently I found Hootsuite, which seems even better.

Google had to have know that the API is what makes Twitter so powerful, yet they released Buzz with little but a empty shell of an API. They don’t even have an Android app available???

you can access the Google buzz code here.

Sure, eventually there will be many Buzz applications and most blogs will be buzz enabled to deliver real-time pushed content… meaning as soon as you post, it gets Buzzed. That’s really cool, but if you’re like me there have been many times you publish a post then need to edit right away, how will that work?

I’m going to play with it some more now and try to get PubSubHubbub working on my wordpress blogs, and I’m going to continue to try to figure out how to follow people on Buzz, which is probably the most basic thing ever, yet I can’t find out how to do it other then searching for people.

Google is again trying to conquer the social arena. This time with Google Buzz. Will it fall to the wayside like Opensocial or will it rise to the top above Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and all other microblogging / status / location based services?

One of the coolest things about working at Google is that employees are encouraged to create new and innovative products. While the core of Google’s business is advertising, Google tries to make as many products as possible. In other words they shotgun development and when all the shooting is done they see what they can do with the remains.

Google Buzz looks a lot like Google Wave. Wave was a huge buzz (pun intended) but as soon as beta testers got their hands on it, they quickly realized that even the developers of Google Wave has no idea how to really use it. It is really complicated and confusing. Maybe in a year or two people will understand it better, but for now it’s a mess.

In comes Google Buzz, which seems to be very similar to Google Wave, only that it’s working now and incorporated into Gmail.

Google Buzz seems like a good idea, since email is already a very understood medium and still considered the number one social app.

But why does Google seems to cross paths with their products. Why do they confuse us so? Why don’t they just move Wave were Buzz is and continue to grow the idea of Wave. Now they have two paths that users can jump onto and therefore will separate the public acceptance between the two. Please, Google, just make an executive decision as to what social app you want to push and push it!

Buzz also wants to differentiate itself another way: social curation. As Mike wrote about the other night,the social web right now is largely a mess. There’s simply too much going on
Source Techcrunch

How can Google Buzz differentiate itself when it’s really trying to be all things at once?

I agree, it is a mess, but what can you do? Do you want to stop companies from trying to make new services that can possibly change our lives? Of course not. But with overlap and separation between the services it’s inevitable that a big pile of junk will appear.

One thing I am excited to see is if Google Buzz is using pubsubhubbub which is a new technology that allows real time content updates via pushes… not queries. It’s like Twitter only you can pass anything like video, images, blog posts.

the first videos spoofs of the iPad were released withing hours of the keynote… Here are my top 5 funny iPad videos. I’m sure there will be more.

Pee-wee gets an iPad

Chris Pirillo (Lockergnome) unboxes the iPad

iPad with roadrage

Gorgeous, Beautiful, Revolutionary, Gorgeous, Amazing

Of course, no video can go without a Hitler rant

Do you know of a funny iPad or Apple video… Add the link to it in the comments

Poor iPad. It was hyped, it was released, it was bashed… Even the lackluster response to the iPad kept me reading blog after blog. Each one seems to get more and more negative. Even a few Apple fanboy’s made some videos on why you shouldn’t buy the iPad.

Before I offer my solution, I have to give props to Nalts.

Leave it to Nalts, a youtube celebrity, to make the craziest iPad video yet… Not only is he driving with an iPad mask, which seems highly dangerous, but he also used duct tape to attached the mask to his face… I was laughing when I saw the mask, but when I saw the duct tape wrappd around his ears, it was just too funny.

Here’s my solution to this whole problem… Too bad I can’t go back in time and offer this brilliant advice to Steve Jobs and possibly de-rail the epic failure that is the iPad.

Set aside the hype of this device, which was par for any Apple product. The name iPad created an instant joke. Combine that with a sub par device and the hate blogs will go crazy.

All they had to do was name is iPlate… a computer you can eat off of.

That’s it. Simply change the name and you will dominate an entire market that has been stagnate for decades, the plate market. Mr Jobs positioned this device as a device between smartphones and laptops… to replace the netbook market. Unfortunately, it is not a good replacement for netbooks, but it’s a perfect replacement for plates.

Is iPlate a game changer… Hell yes! Restaurants would jump all over this idea. Not only can you eat off the iPlate, but you can surf the web, watch videos, tweet what you are eating. You could even use the iplate to order your food and pay your bill, of course you can’t do it at the same time because it doesn’t multi-task, and for you foodies, you can’t take a picture of your meal because there is no camera.

I’ll just start off by saying, I knew it… As with a lot of other people that just knew this new tablet was going to be a let down, but I didn’t know it was going to reach epic fail proportions. All that set me onto the negative was the rumored $1,000 price tag. What I wasn’t expecting was how this failure makes me love my Android phone so much more.

The iPhone was game changing. It filled a need for a much better smartphone. It’s strong enough for power users and easy enough for old ladies, although I still think the blackberry is going to stay king of executive phone use for a long time, just because of the email abilities.

The problem with the iPhone and all other Apple products is the closed system. Steve Jobs basically says “You’re in my world now!!!” and if the innovation doesn’t live up to the expectations people are going to bitch. The iPhone was awesome so people didn’t complain. The iPad is a lackluster device, topped with a restricted system, and two wrongs don’t make a right.

Unfortunately we’ve come to expect that from our smartphones. For a larger device that’s supposed to replace your netbook as a complete portable computing solution, though, this is almost unprecedented — at least from a device that’s likely to have a great deal of influence on the market and on the design of future devices. That’s bad news no matter how you spin it.
Source: Mashable

Seriously, you can’t even share files between the iPad your home computers… There might be a way around this, like uploading to the cloud.

I love you Google… Not really, but this was a big win for them and the Android OS. It’s coming on strong, because it’s open, it’s got many more carriers and phone makers, and Apple dropped the ball.

Here are just a few of the problems with the iPad

• No Multitasking – WOW, I can’t listen to music and work on a spreadsheet at the same time?
• No USB – the universal adapter.
• No GPS – Where am I, and more importantly, where are cool places to hang out in my area. Location based services are all the rage, someone should have told Apple this!
• No Camera – I heard there was going to be a camera that let you use hand gestures to control the tablet… That would have been cool.
• Not OPEN – You have to play by Apple’s rules.

Don’t even get me started on the name iPad… iSlate was cool, iPad has already been coined iTampon which trending to #1 on Twitter today… That’s bad. I can’t believe…

Nope, not going there, gotta stop…

We all get writers block from time to time, and find it hard to add content to our blogs. My approach is pretty simple, just listen for some problems and try to solve them.

Not only will this help get your creative juices flowing, but you will also be accomplishing so much more. If you have not become part of any question and answer forums yet, please do so. a few to look at are; linkedin.com, yahoo answers, answerbag.com. Google “question and answers” to find more sites.

Almost every industry will have them. For example, real estate has Trulia voices and Zillow advice just to name a couple.

I don’t recommend joining every social network that you see. It’s better to join one or two and become heavily involved instead of spreading yourself thin.

I use linkedin.com only. Each question topic has it’s own RSS feed. I added the technology and marketing feeds to my Google reader. My reader is open all day, so I can keep up with new questions. I really try to be the first person to answer. I also like knowing about the question as soon as it is posted because if it is a really good question that I can make a blog post about, I try to make a quick blog post and them use the permalink as a reference in my linkedin answer. You’ll be surprised how fast you can write a blog post if you have a question to answer.

Business karma

The new mantra of business is “help others first”. Listen for problems and help people solve them. The more you give the more will receive. So jump onto a Q&A website and start helping people, making connections and building relationships.

Finding popular topics

You’ll notice as you follow all the questions that are being asked, you will see trends and common problems that need solving. Use these trends to create blog posts that you know will be popular. Remember to restate the question in your blog post because that is probably what people will type into the search engines.

Use your blog posts as references

A good blog posts can be used a reference. Instead of retyping your answer everytime, just post a link to your blog post that answers the question. Great way to kill two birds with one stone, help some one out and drive traffic to your website.

2010 is the year you should start video blogging. I know I am. Today I got a Creative Vado 3rd Generation Pocket Cam. I’ve been trying to get a pocket cam since early December 2009, but the one I wanted was all sold out (Kodak zi8). Luckily Creative released the 3rd gen of the Vado in America shortly after Christmas. I canceled my order for the Zi8 and bought the Vado.

The feature I looked for most was the external microphone jack. When I vlog I want to have a microphone close to me. My office has bad acoustics and it sounds like I’m in a bathroom.

Overall the Vado is really easy to use and I’ve been using it a lot. Already have a an hour of my baby playing. It’s is really small, light and easy to carry around with you.

When I was doing my research on pocketcams, the biggest complaint that I saw for the Vado was the sensitive buttons and the gloss finish attracts fingerprints. In my opinion both are not a problem. I can hardly see any fingerprints on the case and the button are sensitive, but not to the point where it causes problems while shooting videos. When the camera is in playback mode, you will hit the play button by mistake when reaching into your pocket, but not a big deal.

Picture quality is great when the camera is steady, but the slightest movement will cause a lot of motion on the video. All pocket cams are like this though.

Overall, I think its a great camera. My last camcorder was the Sony DCR-SR40 if you want to see what I am comparing the Vado to.

If you have any other questions about this Pocket Cam, feel free to ask them in the comment section.

I used to be the master of automation. Many of my blog posts are about automating things, especially syndication of content. Being a programmer for so long, and having job after job where I made automated tasks, it just became second nature to me. The problem I find is that the less time you spend with your personal touch on the content you produce the less effective it is.

For example, Everyone wants to blog once then have every social network get the link and drive tons of traffic to there site. Problem is, this doesn’t work. I’ve been doing it for years with little to show for it.

There are tons of websites that will automate everything for you. Some are free and some charge outrageous monthly fees. The thing about the internet is that everything is a click away. you don’t have to drive all over town to go from one website to another. If you spend 5-10 extra minutes manually tweeting, or adding your blog posts to facebook, you will see much better results…. Here’s why.

Twitter allows for 140 characters, but most automated tools and plugins don’t care. They only tweet your blog post title and the short url. In most cases you still have about 60 characters to work with. You NEED to use that extra space to make your tweet stand out. Use #hashtags (don’t spam hashtags) and keywords.

Make your tweets stand out!

Tweet this: “I’m thinking about how tech is ruining our lives and making us work harder and hurting my professional image http://bit.ly/asdasds ”

Not This: “New blog post: Why Automated Blog Tools are Ruining Your Professional Image http://bit.ly/asdasds ”

in the first example I have used almost all available space. In the second example, I have 43 characters left…

Don’t waste your  friends time on Facebook!

On to Facebook… there are plugins that will post to your facebook wall but they all suck. the reason is becuase they just add a plain jane link with no explanation at all. They are a complete waste. When you add a link to your wall Facebook makes it look great. Theygo grab images from the page and let you add an extra description.

In the above image I just copied and pasted the url to a blog post of mine. If I was really posting this to my wall I would remove the link and add my own description.

Automation = repeat links!

The last reason it’s bad to automate everything is that you get many repeat links. FriendFeed is awful when it comes to repeat links.

Google is an advertising juggernaut, with 97% of all Google revenue coming in from Adwords, they are always pushing the envelope of search engine advertising. Their next venture is contact lead generation forms in Adsense ads. According to PPC hero (Adwords beta tester) Google has a new way of generating business for their top placing adword clients.

Image Source: ppchero.com

Lead generation forms insights

1. Only the #1 adsense spot will have the lead generation form. Of course this will cause more advertisers to bid more to get top placement.
2. The advertiser does not get the contact information, Google does. In order to contact the lead you have to use a special Google phone number with a pin number. Sounds like they are trying to integrate more uses for Google Voice
3. The advertiser can add up to 3 questions for the customer, but Google decides how many the potential lead will see in the contact form.

I don’t think I would ever use this.

First of all, You can get better ROI by placing 2+ in Google Adsense placements. Secondly, when I click on Adsense, I do it specifically to go to a website. I have never clicked on Adsense, then tried to find the contact form on the resulting website. Of course, If a customer does fill out the contact form the conversion rate will be much higher.

Less people will use it, but it will have a better conversion rate…

It’s the beginning of 2010 and already I have come across 2 people that have made blogging their new years resolution. This is an awful idea… not the act of blogging, but the idea that you want to blog more. Do you know what this screams?

this screams, I have absolutely no idea what internet marketing or social media is all about. If you follow this plan you will not be blogging in June of 2010.

Here is the secret, instead of saying “I’m going to blog more” or “I’m going to blog everyday”, change your mindset and say “I’m going to get 10 new subscribers every week”. Do you see the difference?

One is goal oriented and one is task oriented

Goal oriented let’s you forget about the minuscule tasks it takes to reach a goal while task oriented puts all the focus on the little things that take up all your time. a few months later your hitting all your tasks but none of the results are manifesting. Why is that? It’s because as soon as you finish a task your done, there is no big picture, there is no reason, you just know that you have to do something.

What’s more important a blog? that has 10 times more content then all the other blogs in the same topic, or the blog that has the most readers, subscribers and fans. Content and fans do not go hand in hand. people don’t read blogs for a lot of content, they read it for information, ideas, views that they will not get anywhere else.

So, really, I think blogging is a great idea, just make sure you have your priorities set straight on why you are blogging at all.

If you really want my honest opinion about blogging, especially if you don’t have a blog and want to start one now, would be to really think about upcoming forms of media… most notably, video. I’ll be blogging about this soon, but the way we consume information is moving from text to video. I’m getting on the video bandwagon. I got a new pocket cam coming in about a week, and vlogging is my #1 reason why I got it.

Cloud based webhosting is all the rage. The ability to deploy servers, upgrade, downgrade and delete on the fly is a huge advantage over having to buy or rent a full server with co-location rackspace. With cloud prices starting at .015 cents/hour… It’s a no brainer if you need a full webserver.

When you control the full server, you have many more options on how the websites are ran. Of course, maintaining a full server with little experience can be risky for production servers, but if you want to learn how to set one up, here are the steps. I’m going to install LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, and PHP) That is all you need to build powerful database driven websites. I’ll then update the Iptables to allow for secure access to the server and provide a fairly secure server.

Install Mysql (Database Server)

yum install mysql mysql-server

/etc/init.d/mysqld start

mysqladmin -u root password YOUR_UNIQUE_PASSWORD

Install Apache2 (Webserver)

yum install httpd

/etc/init.d/httpd start

If httpd starts you will be able to enter the ip number of the server into the browser address bar and visit the website. One thing to note is that fresh Fedora installs do not allow access to port 80. So you will not be able to see the website until you edit your Iptables. for now let’s just flush them so we can look at the new webpage.

iptables -F

Flush and try again, if you see the Fedora test page, congrats, your up and running. You can only server HTML files. We now need to install PHP for server side scripting.

Install PHP5

yum install php

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

To check PHP, go to the default www folder located at /var/www/html/ and make a new file called info.php. In that file add this code
<?= phpinfo(); ?>

Then hit that page in your browser and you should get all the information about your PHP installation.

Everything looks good, but PHP is not talking to Mysql yet, we need to connect them.

yum install php-mysql

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Optional, but recommended

In our current state, if the server gets restarted, our LAMP server will have to be started manually and the iptables will have to be flushed again. So, enter the following commands to make sure httpd and mysql start automatically on boot up.

chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on

chkconfig --levels 235 httpd on

You will probably need a few more php modules installed

yum install php-gd php-xml php-xmlrpc php-eaccelerator php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-mhash php-soap php-tidy

Don’t forget to restart httpd after you install the modules
There are many more, to do a search for all modules

yum search php

Then for the iptables, instead of flushing them, and opening up the server, we are going to just open port 80 so you can display your website. Port 22 is the only port open by default. Make sure you don’t remove that or else you will not be able to access the server.
First reload the old iptables

iptables-restore /etc/sysconfig/iptables.old

Then append the new iptables entry:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

services iptables save

Next check the iptables again to make sure you are allowing SSH and HTTP

iptables -L

If they are there, restart iptables

/etc/init.d/iptables restart

Check your website again to see if you can access it. If you server gets restarted you should reboot with these two ports open.
Here is a list of common entries for Fedora
Another helpful page for iptables at ubuntu.com

Now that the server is up and running we need to start adding  virtual directories and domain names. The next couple of posts will cover setting up virtual directories and parking domains, how to set up a templated website directory so you can deploy many websites fast, and I’ll cover more on how to set up WPMU with top level domain names. I have a post about TLD’s, wpmu and godaddy… but with your own server it is much easier and you can automate it!

The iPhone has over 100,000 apps, the android has over 20,000 and the palm has about 1,000 apps in the market. did you know that there are apps for almost every phone out there?

mobile computing on smartphones has been around for a long time. Probably the most well known smartphone was the palm Treo. That phone was the first to take people from owning a cellphone and a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). I owned a couple of them and would install apps all the time. There was no app market, we had to get them the old fashion way, by searching the internet and downloading them from personal homepages. I was able to find a disk once with about 700 apps on it. Everything from chess to SF Bart maps to GEOtagging. Of course, it was nothing like it is today, but don’t forget, apps have been around for a long time.

I remember buying Tom Tom Navigation for my wife’s Treo. Worked great and was a cheap alternative to buying a separate navigation device for her car. Of course it was all disks, there was no way to get maps on the fly with a download, and you had to use an external GPS unit to receive the location signals, but that was just the standard a few years ago.

I use to make apps with a program called Codewarrior. Codewarrior for palm was discontinued a few years ago due to the fall in popularity of the Palm Treo, and the Palm OS. The new Palm apps run on a hybrid HTML language… but has yet to gain any serious following. I have only seen one Palm Pre on the streets.

Codewarrior basically let you make forms and pages with wrappers to handle all the behind the scenes activities. It was crude, but you could definitely build apps and distribute them to other users without having to jailbreak or hack the phone.

It makes me think how palm, and the earlier smartphone companies didn’t see how smartphone apps would change the way we use smartphones?

Why did it take a company like Apple to unleash the next evolution in apps. Even with inferior data plans from 5-6 years ago, the companies should have still seen this coming. Many times I complain about new technologies and new media getting a lot of attention, when in reality the technology has been around for years. All it take is a tipping point I guess for them to hit critical mass and society to find a use for them.

It’s 1-1-2010, the new year, the new decade. Actually I think the real new decade starts on 2011, since there really was no year zero, but that can be argued another day, maybe at the end of 2010. The last few days have brought about a lot of year and decade in review shows. In my opinion the overall vibe for the last decade was bad. Some say a wasted decade.

In many cases they are correct, but of course technology marched on. Internet businesses imploded then regrouped to form many new ways to run a business. There is much to talk about as business find new interesting ways to march on, but this first post of 2010 will be more on the big picture for processing power over the next decade.

This next decade will be remarkable, 2020 is going to be exciting. Start keeping track of innovations and new technologies now so you can see the changes. Will they make our lives easier? probably not… look at computers from the last 2 decades. All we heard about was how they will make our lives better and improve our time management. Well, it hasn’t, we work more, spend more time away from “real” people and now spend a majority of time with followers from around the world.

We are hyper-social, yet interact with fewer people. We have more information about overall health, but the US is overweight. We have terabytes of past information about the stock market yet, we cannot predict outcomes to common stock prices.

Back to processing power. The end of a decade is a good time to look back to see how we have advanced with computers. The reason why I’m started to look back was because I was watching a show about the singularity of computers and technology. Singularity is the theory that someday computers will be smarter then humans and therefore be able to overtake humans… Terminator style.

Many people say this WILL happen, but the person on the show basically said that by 2030 computers will be so powerful that if singularity is going to happen, it will. If it has not happened yet, it probably won’t… I found that interesting, so I took a look at the fastest processors that we have today for personal computers and compared them to processors from the year 2000.

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change

Sure, there are supercomputers that can harness the power of multiple processers and in turn have much higher MIPS (million instructions per second), but singularity would seem that each processor will have to be able to manage millions of MIPS. Yes, I said a million X a million instructions per second, because that is how many instructions the human brain and nervous system can handle. Some say the brain can handle much more then that.

Currently the Intel i7 processor can manage 76,000 MIPS at 3.2 g. Compare that to a typical Pentium III released in 2000 which had around 830 MIPS. That is astonishing growth.

So, this decade will be special, either this decade or the next will be the gateway into new technologies that we haven’t even thought of yet. By the end of this decade we will have a very solid understanding of if, or when computer processing power will be able to rival the human brain.

Go to any webmastering forum, or question and answer site and inevitable you will find questions about website design. “Can you please look at my site and tell me if you like it…”

That’s a good question, and you should have as many people looking at your site, but it really won’t solve any problems with your site. You might get suggestions to fix little things, or maybe even a full reorganization. The problem is the critiques are coming from non-customers.

There is a big difference between getting advice and feedback from customers and from friends and family. The only way to truly understand how well your website works is for you to monitor your website and see how customers use it. Not only see how they are using it, but also fix problems you can see. Google analytics is great at letting you see how people find your site, what pages they click on, and what pages they leave from. Imagine finding a page on your site that causes 80% of the visitors to leave… I would guess you would want to fix that page.

If you are hands off and hire a designer, make sure you ask them how often they will provide traffic reports. Not just how many people visit the site, but drill down to understand your customers. The more you know the better.

Rules of thumb when organizing a website for your business.

I’m not going to talk about design issues. I’m talking about organization and they way you want visitors to navigate through your site and buy your products and services.

1. Set goals for your website. The great thing about Google analytics, is that you can set goals and monitor how many people reach your goal. The goal can be a thank you page after they buy something or sign up for a newsletter. EVERY WEBSITE NEEDS AT LEAST ONE GOAL
2. You will probably spend a lot of time on the home page of the website. The landing page it is often called. You will probably have a blog on your site too. If you have a blog, most of your website traffic will come in from your blog, in essence making it your most important entry point. Make sure you have all the call to actions and sections that show the visitors what you do, what you sell and how you can benefit them.
3. provide your readers a way to join your conversations. Don’t be scared of them bashing your products. If they want to bash, they will probably do it on a social network. You website is your home and you should make it very inviting to your customers.
4. Every page needs to allow the customer to contact you easily. This doesn’t mean you’ll be up all night answering phone calls. There are many ways to provide customer support, help sections, FAQ’s and other ways for your customers to help themselves.
5. Always be testing. Your website will need tweaks along the way. Monitor and tweak, monitor and tweak. Google analytics has a product called Optimizer that allows you to create split tests to see how different sections capture your customers. Always test and let the best pages win.

Yesterday I was in Barnes and Noble looking for Crush It and other books about social media. I go to Barnes and Noble a couple times a weeks to browse, but I hardly ever buy. This time I did walk out with Crush It. I over paid but didn’t care, I just wanted to read it now. Technology is so cool right now. You can walk into a store and get tons of information about the products you want to buy. You can even order the product from a different store while your shopping.

A few months ago, I was in Office Depot looking for a printer. I used my G1 to find the same printer at Circuit City for about $150 less, and it was less then a mile away. I called CC and placed the order for in-store pickup while I was still in Office Depot. My wife and I were so happy. From that day I was hooked on the G1.

Back to buying crush it. I knew I overpaid for this book because I had my G1 with me loaded up with the Amazon app for browsing pretty much everything. It’s a good app and I recommend downloading it, not because of the price checking feature, but for product reviews. The app allows for  3 ways to find a product. You can enter the title, scan the barcode or take a picture of the book cover. Some books I tried failed on the barcode scan, but worked when I tool a picture of the cover.

The app lets you add  the product to a shopping cart and then sign it with your amazon username and password to order. I almost did order it, but since I only had one book in the cart, I would have paid shipping. I know this doesn’t  makes sense since I paid a higher price for the book and tax, but still I wanted it now.

I think one feature that is missing from the Amazon app, is the ability to find related books. I think I might have placed and order if I found related books so I could get free shipping. I spent some time looking for books on the shelf, but after scanning the barcode and then reading reviews, I found it to be taking too much of my time.

Like I said before, I recommend this app for the reviews, but if you are looking for an app to save money, download Shop Savvy barcode scanner. With Shop Savvy you can view multiple websites and compare prices, but Shop Savvy doesn’t provide reviews. Walmart.com is selling Crush it for the lowest price according to Shop Savvy ($9.50)

I admit it, I’m a serial dieter. I’ve tried a few diets in my day to lose some weight but the diets are so strict that you can’t stay on them for very long. I think that I have a normal weight of 220. Even though that is probably 30 pounds over what I should be. Over the last 36 years, that is where by body goes if I eat my normal ways.

About 3 months ago, we booked a trip to Hawaii… SO yeah, I have to lose some weight. I was watching TV one night and browsing the Android app market on my G1 at the same time. I was looking for pedometers to track how far I walk and to see if any had a calorie counter on them. I found 3 apps that got me on my new diet, which have helped me to lose 20 pounds.

I don’t know how my thinking got so screwed up, but I will not drink a normal soda. I hate sugar and carbs and try to eat as much meat as possible. Yet, I’ll drink 4 beers a night and not think twice about it? I blame it on the media,  Atkins craze and slow burn diets.

The first app is aBMI, which is a body mass indicator. This will tell you that you are fat and need to go on a diet. If you already know your fat, skip this step.

The next thing I did was find out how many calories I need to maintain my weight at 190 pounds. I thought there was an app for this, but I can’t find it… So I just do a Google search for “How many calories to lose weight calculator”. Brings up a ton of sites that have calculators for this. They all seem to have different calculations so feel free to choose the one that fits your needs.

Since about 3,500 calories equals a pound, I need to cut down on my caloric intake and add some exercise to my day to lose weight. My goal is to eat less then 1,500 calories a day, and try to exercise and lose another 500-1,000 calories per day.

The next app I download for the G1 is awesome. It’s called CalorieCounter and tells you how many calories are in the food you eat. It goes way beyond just hitting generic food. You can find menu items from pretty much every major restaurant like TGIF, and Burger King. This app also goes into all food brands including generic store brands. It has everything. One thing I wish it had was a way to combine foods and make a custom food item like a sandwich. It will let you save foods you eat a lot, but doesn’t let you combine foods to easily add to your daily intake.

My plan is to eat small meals that are 300 calories each. So I can have 5 meals a day. Egg white and toast in the morning. Tuna sandwich for lunch… it is actually very easy to eat this way. I’m not hungry all day and I don’t get sleepy from large meals. Since I do go to bed really late at night, I seem to need a snack at around 10PM… I usually grab a banana or something (100 calories)

I look up one of my favorites, a foot long meatball sandwich from Subway… 1,600 calories, WOW

For the exercise, I want to see how many calories I burn. I download Cardio Trainer to map out where I bike, run, or walk and see how many calories I burn. Another really good program. Uses the GPS very well. Even when I don’t have a connection to the phone it still tracks my location. I mountain bike in the Oakland hills all the time and there is really spotty reception. I think the calories burned is off a little from other calculators I found on the internet. You can choose what activity you are doing, but I think biking on this app, is roadbiking, not mountainbiking.

I don’t use them everyday, anymore. I used them to change my thinking about dieting and food intake. Of course, the apps really had nothing to do with it. I could have done the same thing by reading a book or searching the internet, but with all the junk and bad information out there it’s hard to get your head on straight. Forget about all meat diets from the 4 hour work week. Forget about fats, carbs, sugar, etc…

1. Find out how many calories it takes to maintain the weight you want to be at
2. lower your calorie intake and exercise more
3. be steady and it’s easy to maintain.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about social media strategies for businesses. A popular topic when talking about social media is customer service. The way the public can syndicate information through social networks can make or break a company based on their customer service. I also feel that customer service, marketing and PR departments have merged into on when it comes to providing help to your customers via Twitter, facebook, or company website.

Providing good customer service to make happy customers tell their friends is nothing new. What is new is the way that companies can now use tools like Twitter to basically say “Everyone, look how we provide good customer service” Seems a little like PR to me, but that’s social media. These tactics can go either way. If the community thinks you are playing one over them, they will retaliate and let other know what you are up to.

This got me thinking…

How do you feel when you see a company that you had a bad customer service relationship with in the past, jump onto Twitter to basically broadcast their new social media strategies?

I was thinking about bestbuy and their tweelpforce, and comcast cares. I’m pretty sure there are people that got poor customer service from them in the past. I saw a question on linkedin about someone that tried to communicate with comcast via email and got no response. When he complained on Twitter they responded immediately… I feel that is because they want to broadcast it to the public.

About 4 years ago, I was frauded for $2,000 from a seller on bid4assets.com. I tried and tried to get a hold of someone at that website to ask for help, with absolutely no response. Today, when I was thinking about this post, I wondered if they have a twitter account. They don’t… and good thing.

Personally, I would be furious if I saw a company that treated me so poorly in the past now using social media to show the world how they know how to use web 2.0 and social tools. Even if they have completely new management and culture, I would still be pissed and it would take a lot to win me over as a return customer. I’ve never used bid4assets.com again, an never will.

One thing to note about bestbuys twelpforce. I cannot find anything about the twelpforce on bestbuys website. The front page has nothing, and so does their customer service section? I thought they were doing a huge push for it?

It’s really easy to start a blog with the intent to blog about one thing, but then completely change your blogging focus. I see this problem with real estate blogs all the time. Realtors are very good at marketing to other Realtors. It is very evident in their blogs and in real estate networks. Most business owners find it very easy to talk to other professionals that deal with the daily in’s and out’s of your business.

I find myself doing this all the time. While, the main purpose of this blog it to reach out to small business owners and teach them how to use social media to promote their business, I often find myself blogging about technical issues. I find it very enjoyable to blog about Wordpress hacks, SEO, and Website development. Most of my blog posts go way over the head of small business owners, but other tech bloggers use my blog posts for references. The problem is, other tech bloggers aren’t my customers.

Not all goes in vain. By reaching out to other professionals in your industry, you will build relationships.

I’m a big believer in the 80/20 rule, where 20% of your actions will bring in 80% of your business. Problem is, that 20% is the hard part. It is really easy to do the other 80% and get very little return. When you are not blogging to your customers and blogging to impress your competitors, you are doing the 80%. It’s hard to blog with real messages to people that need your services and provide education and training.

Here is my solution.

1. Try to blog everyday to your customers. Blog about the benefits of what you do, and how your services will help them. You don’t have to sell anything, let your benefits sell themselves.
2. To make connection with others in your industry, go read other blogs, and comment. Let them blog to other professionals. It might seem tricky, but in reality what you are doing to encouraging them to blog to their competitors. When you blog to your customers you will get very little comments, but when you blog to competitors, you will get more comments which is turn makes you feel like you are doing something worthwhile.
3. Be social on Twitter and Facebook. Make friends, build relationships and business contacts.
4. Answer questions on forums and Q&A boards.

In summary, I you should set out a plan and stick with it for a while. Don’t continually change at a drop of a hat. Blog to your customers, and then go get social with your competitors.

You just spent an hour writing the perfect blog post for your business. Let’s say you are a clothing store owner and you blog about fashion trends. You sell a hot new belt that has many uses. You just finished a blog post about all the ways you can wear this belt. You might not know this but you can re-use that copy and build valuable backlinks to your website or blog.

• The main blog post - People love lists in their blog reader. 5 ways to do this, top 10 ideas to do that… you get my point. In this example you have a belt that has many ways to be worn. Your blog post should be in a list format.

5 ways to look drop dead gorgeous in a red leather belt – Blog title taken from something you would see on the cover of Vogue.
Notice it is catchy for feedreader, and you want to make sure that you hit on your keywords. In this case “red leather belt”. I could have just used belt, or even leather belt, but we want long tail search results. There are people out there that type in  “red leather belt”, you have a better chance for them to read this post.

• Article Sites – Articles sites have been around for a long time. Many have really high pagerank, which means a backlink from them is worth a lot. I use Ezinearticles.com mostly. They have a PR of 5/10. They have a good admin area and they seem to try to control the articles and moderate them so they offer higher quality articles then other article sites.

  Your main goal for the article site is to get some backlinks to your blog post. You need to take one of the five ways you wrote about for your main blog and expand on it a little. For example, your #1 way to wear the belt was to not put it through your pants loopholes… Expand on that and remember to make a link to your site somewhere in the post. The link should point to your main blog post and the text for the link should have “red leather belt” in it. As you can see your building highly targeted keyword links pointing to your site for SEO.

• Guest Blogger – Go find a fashion blog and ask the blog owner if you can write a guest blog post. Again, you will take another item from the main blog post and expand on it for this guest blog post. You will also make another backlink to your main blog post.

  You’re probably saying to yourself, why not just use the same copy from the article site. They will find out you are duplicating content and probably will not let you post on ezinearticles or be a guest blogger anymore. It really is not that hard to exapnd on already made content. It will take only a few minutes to do it.

Try to find more then one article site and blog to submit your articles to. Use prchecker.info to find out the pagerank of the site. You can also download Google’s toolbar for firefox and use the pagerank tool directly from your browser.

You have successfully extracted every drop of worth out of your blog post about belts. You will truly benefit from the additional work it took to extract points from the main blog and use them as articles and copy on other websites. Backlinks are like gold on the internet, the more you have, the more people will find your blog and the mote customers you will get.

Just putting a website up doesn’t work anymore. I don’t think it really ever did. Success on the web has always been about generating traffic for your business. You can pay for traffic using Google Adwords or other advertising channels, or your go out with a grassroots mentality and find your customers.

I’ve been on boths sides of the fence when it comes to generating traffic for your website. Most small businesses will want to GET CUSTOMERS NOW. The idea of going out to social networks and slowly building relationships doesn’t sound like a good idea. For the most part I agree. You should get business as soon as possible and therefore should set up tried and true advertising and marketing plans when you launch your website.

Remember, your website is not marketing. Your website is not the end all, it is the beginning of your new venture onto the internet. Just like opening a brick and morter store, nobody will find you without advertsing. One word of advise, make sure you are ready to dish out cash for ads. Make sure you have a system set in place that can monitor the traffic you get from your advertsing. You have to measure your return on investment.

Enough about paid ads, you should also go out and build authority on the web by joining communities that are built around your products or services. Of course facebook and twitter are find, but you really need to go out and prove that your are reliable, experienced and personable. Very hard to do that on Twitter, IMO.

Here are a few ways to build authority for your business

1. Your Business Blog – nuff said, I know you have heard this a thousand times. No matter what type of product or service you sell you can write about it. Actually the more obscure your product is,  the easier it is to blog and get noticed. Of course the consumer following will be smaller for niche products but the following might be a lot stronger.
2. Question and Answer forums – Linkedin and Yahoo answers are great places to start. I prefer Linkedin because you can match up your answers with your Linkedin Profile. I find Yahoo not as easy to match up your yahoo profile. Set up an RSS feed of new questions that you want to answer. When you check your blog reader you will will see the answers as soon as they are posted. Remember your goal is to help people, not promote your services. If you service helps, then they will see it, but don’t push it on other members.
3. Community forums – Forums have been around a lot longer then most social networks that we talk about today. You have to do a search to find the community that fits your business. There are not as many questions for you to answer on a community forum, but you can just hang out and make relationships. You will be able to answer a question every now and then too.
4. Other blogs in your niche – Be a guest blogger. Go find other blogs that are related to yours and ask the webmaster if you can be a guest blogger. They will probably as you to write the post and send it to them so they can review it. Do not try to sell your product or service. but do provide at least on link back to your blog with related information.

I’m hooked on Flashforward. It’s a cool show based on the book by Robert J. Sawyer with the same title, Flash Forward. where everyone on earth blacked out for a minute no matter where they were, driving, swimming, sleeping. A lot of people died, but that’s not the premise of the story. If that was it, life would get back to normal pretty quick. The catch is, everyone had a future vision 6 months from the blackout. Now they are all trying to figure out if the visions will come true or if they are nothing more then just a dream.

Now for the Internet professionals spin on things.

In order for the government to analyze all the future visions and to figure out why someone did this, they set up a website called Mosiac… This is where I start to lose it. I think at this point they are only about a week into the investigations, but the new website is getting hammered with people posting about their visions.

Logistics and planning aside, do you know how much spam would be on this website?

Here is a sample post:

Some people are really freaked out about their future visions, but to be honest, I’m totally happy. In my vision, my penis is huge thanks to <spam link to you know where>.

I would bet even the large corporations would get into the marketing of future visions too.

My vision is really scary… Taco Bell bean burritos are now used as money across the globe… Damn, I should have bought as many as I could 6 months ago while they were only 49 cents

It would be a total waste of time to post on it. Especially since they put it up in a week, by the government. Don’t you think that there would be many more sites, including Twitter blowing up, facebook fan pages, and of course there will probably be a site made by icanhascheezburger.com

By the way, the government is also filtering it for any suspicious posts… How well would that go over?

If something like this did happen and we needed to find out everyone’s future visions, it would be so hard to get the public to get involved. Only about 10% would create any content, ie… blog, tweet, make a video. Instead of trying to capture all the data and information coming in, they should focus on the communication that develops between people. If 2 people see the same future vision where they see each other, they should get together and discuss and try to figure out the vision. Would that be enough to eventually create an overall concept of what happened and what the future will hold?

BTW, wouldn’t it be freaky if someone called you and told you that you were going to be murdered on March 15th… Spooky, gotta watch the next episode

Did anyone watch The Ultimate Fighter on Spike last night? I was waiting all week to see it. I remember the first time I saw a Kimbo fight on Youtube (Kimbo Fights), it was pretty awesome, and scary. It looked like the guy that fought Kimbo in the video almost lost an eye… for a better explanation, his eye was about to pop out of his broken face… Kimbo was a mysterious, scary dude…

Last night on Ultimate fighter, I saw Kimbo as a sweetheart. Really, he seemed like a really likable guy. His fighting skills are lacking when put in the ring with professionals but really having skill is only half the battle in the world of professional sports and media. Kimbo could have easily made mid 6 figures from Pay-Per-View sales on his lackluster fight. Ticket sales and fan fare have a lot to do with it also. Kimbo brings that to the octagon, at least he did until last night.

Kimbo used social media to become a fan favorite. Youtube in particular. I’m not sure he has a twitter account, let alone a computer or cellphone. He probably had no idea that his Internet videos would create such a buzz. If he did know he is a genius, up there with Tila Tequila, Kim Kardashian and the guy from Saved by the bell, Skreach, I think he was called.

The questions are:

how can someone that is such a badass on Youtube, seem like such a cool guy on TV, and in general, in person?
Did the badass persona help or hurt Kimbo?
Did it raise up his status to beyond what he could back up?
Should he go back to YouTube and fight in people’s backyards again?
Bottom line, what is Kimbo’s future????

I’m slowing learning how social media can benefit businesses. there are so many ways, but not one silver bullet to make your business skyrocket to the top. In the case for Kimbo, what can he do to keep this train rolling?

My answer:

He needs to ride his nice (sweetheart) personality all the way, but every now and then freak out and do something controversial. It works both ways. You can be good and go bad, or be bad and do something good. In a world with social media websites, you can guarantee no matter what you do they will make the news 10X bigger then it really is.

1. Terrel Owens… Hasn’t done Sh*t in the last 3 years, yet somehow he is regarded as one of the top receivers in the NFL? How does he do it. He uses the media all the time. He baits them to ask the controversial questions, and he gvive cryptic responses that leaves the media to create thier own views. Then every sports show, internet site, twitter account is giving their view of what T.O. said…
2. Tila Tequila… Whether you thinks shes a walking STD or internet marketing genius, you have to admit, everything she does gets amplified 100X. Last night on twitter she trended because she used her baby picture for your profile avatar. WOW!!! As soon as she fades away, she’s back, drunk as hell pressing charges against NFL linebackers. She’s lovable and loathable everyother day, and it works, we can’t get enough.
3. Mike Tyson… From Rape, streetfights, to heart warming documentaries, to losing his daughter… You never know what to expect from Iron Mike. He was around long before anyone else, and will be around long after.

The list goes on and on. I don’t even have to mention Mike Vick. Also, you can see that I do consider TV as social media. We all watch TV now with our laptops tweeting away. TV is as much social media as Facebook is.

Back to Kimbo… Kimbo will probably fade from The Ultimate Fighter, along the shows viewers, but what would happen if Kimbo goes MIA for a while, then all of a sudden he appears on Youtube again, kickin someones ass. It would go viral, it would make the news, it would trend on Twitter whether Kimbo new it or not. It would probably get him another shot at the UFC.

The videos of Kimbo on Youtube have given Kimbo the opportunity to make millions. Book deals, clothing, video games, are just a few of the potential products kimbo can market all from being a badass on Youtube.

Wordpress has some really good functions and classes that help developing a website quickly. Sometimes you want to make a webpage that is outside your wordpress theme but still use classes like the database class ($wpdb). It is very simple. All you have to do is inlcude the wp-config.php file located in your website root folder into any webpage that you want to access wordpress functions.

I’ve had to use this  in a few different scenarios.

1. Writing a plugin where you have some files that are not activated when you activate the plugin. A very simple plugin will have a single file that contains the functions needed to activate the plugin, add the menu items, and do the job of the plugin. What if you are using AJAX and you need to access some data from the database but the file is not the main plugin file. You will need to include wp-config.php for this to work.
2. If you make a file in the root folder and include wp-config.php you can then access get_header(), get_footer(), etc… even though you are outside the theme folder. The header for this file and webpage will be the same header as the current selected theme.

This can be used for a webpage located in the root folder.

include('wp-config.php');
global $wpdb, $table_prefix;
//this will now allow you to access the database and if using wpmu, use the table_prefix to access the proper website data

I love linux, but every time I try to fully make the move from Windows, there is always something that keeps me coming back. Usually it is PHP development IDE’s. Since the majority of my time is spent programming in PHP, my software of choice is Dreamweaver. I have dual booted and used wine, but they both seem to have problems. Wine has never seemed to work with Dreamweaver and Photoshop. I can’t stand Gimp, and never really found a good IDE. I recently found a very exciting programming video about real time development with Eclipse. This might just make me jump back on it.

Eclipse has been the closest to my liking, but it just wasn’t as polished and fast as Dreamweaver. I recently noticed that Eclipse has a new version so I’m trying it again on my XP laptop. I started to use Eclipse again, because I wanted to do some Android programming for location based service application on mobile devices. Eclipse is the #1 choice when programming for the android and has a good ADT plugin and a lot of examples and tutorials based on the ADT eclipse IDE.

Doing a little exploring on the Eclipse website I ran across this video of Real Time Development. The video shows 2 programmers editing the same file. Basically creating the functions together. It is pretty cool. Especially for someone like me that works with a developer in Kathmandu. Normally we discuss things via IM, and then edit accordingly. We never edit the same files (because we can’t) so we are always working on two different sections of applications at the same time.

Cola: Real-Time Shared Editing from Mustafa K. Isik on Vimeo.

I remember when I just started to learn how to program. Imagine if I could have learned with someone that was editing the files with me in real time.

This tutorial will guide you through setting up WPMU on a shared host like godaddy.com. After you set this up properly, you will be able to run unlimited websites on your host, each with a different domain name and website theme. This will save you money because you can use the cheapest hosting, which usually does not allow for parking domains into separate folders. It also allows you to create a large community just like Wordpress.com where you control all the plugins and themes.

If you are going to work with this example, please use Opendls.com. All the examples will be from that host. Hosting is only $3.99/month.

Prequisites:
Linux Hosting Account. Wordpress will run on Window hosting account, but in the past I have had trouble with setting up PHP in a windows environment. I think you have to use IIS7 in order to install php on your host, but then you lose Frontpage extensions… Not that you need Frontpage extension… My point is just use linux, much easier. Also when you set up the hosting account make sure you are using PHP 5.0

The Database is set up and you know the location, username, password, and database name. Most shared hosting accounts come with Mysql, and allow for around 10 databases. You should be familiar with PHPMyAdmin (database manager)

we will assume that the host is set up with domain name aaa.com.
we will be adding bbb.com

Steps:

1. Go get Wordpress MU
2. Unzip WPMU onto your computer and then upload to the host. The folder structure is much like normal Wordpress site.
3. Once it is all uploaded go to your domain name. You should see this
   
4. Read this page and then enter you database username, password, location, etc… There are additional README’s on this page, but you should not need to read them. Your host should be set up already.
5. Click install and if everything went well, you should see a congrats page with a link to admin section or link to homepage. You will also see the username and password for the website. The username will be admin and the password will be random. If you miss it, check your email. It will get emailed to you.

Now that WPMU is set up, we need to set up some domains to use. Get the IP of the host your website is running on, this can be found by either going to your hosting manager control panel or pinging your website domain name. From windows desktop go to Start > Run > Type cmd, then in the command window type “ping yourdomain.com” you will see your IP number.

To point a second domain to your host, go to the domain manager and set the “A record” for the domain. Click on edit, then update the IP number.

After you set the “A record” it will take an hour or 2 to properly point to your host. While you are waiting, go to your hosting manager and add the second domain name to your hosting. Go to hosting manager > Settings > Domain Management. Add a new domain name. Make sure that the second domain name points to the root folder of the host. For economy hosting, the root is the only option. Click save and now you can wait until all DNS is working properly. You can go to you browser and type the second domain name. When the DNS is set up, you will see the first domain name… meaning the second is set up, but the host does not know what to do with the second domain name. This is where WPMU comes into play.

Go to the admin section of the wordpress MU install. it is located at aaa.com/wp-admin

then go to “site admin” located on the right side of the page. You will notice that “site admin” is new and only on WPMU. You can select available themes, and other site specific settings in “site admin”. Once in Site admin, go to “blogs” and add a new blog. Normal WPMU is set up for subdomains, but we are going to use Top Level Domains (TLD) for our websites. So, for the new blog, you can use any subdomain name you want. For this example just use “test” so, then enter a title (optional) and your email address.

once the subdomain name is made, you need to go into the database and update the wp-options table and change the domain name from the subdomain name to the second domain name you set earlier. There are 3 rows that need to be changed.

WPMU is different then single user in that the table prefix is wp_‹blog_id›_options. On normal wordpress is is just wp_options. So if you have only made 2 websites, go to wp_2_options table to change the submdomain to the TLD.

The 3 rows are where the site_option is:

1. siteurl – this will be the subdomain, change to “http://bbb.com”
2. home – again, change to “http://bbb.com”
3. fileupload_url – change to “http://bbb.com/files”

then go to wp_site table and add the new domain name. ID is auto-incrementing, so you only have to insert the new domain name in domain, and add “/” to the path. Click save and you will see that your new domain name is now id = 2.

go to wp_blogs and update the subdomain. set the site_id = 2 (should be 1) and change the domain name from the subdomain to “bbb.com”.

That is it, now go to bbb.com in your browser and you should see your new bbb.com website. You can set different themes for each website, and they are all separated from each other. There is a special plugin folder called “mu-plugins” where you can add plugins that handle site wide functions. In that folder you can add scripts to automatically change all the database settings so you only have to enter the new domain name, and it magically make TLD and bypasses the entire subdomain set up.

If you need any support to install WPMU on a shared host, feel free to contact me, I can get it set up quickly.