Website Promotion

Over a full month after the fact I present my summary of the BarcampScotland2008 event.

The event was split over two days. It kicked off on the Friday evening (1st Feb) in the main room of Alison House at the School of Architecture. It was just the one room with a decent communal feeling. I think most people were holding back with their presentations for the following day. Despite this two presentations did take place. James Littlejohn made the first presentation after the welcome session and talked about data portability.



It was a good summary of the current situation. I also happen to agree with most of his positions. He has taken the decision of making his homepage the hub of his social network. Although I think he has perhaps taken things a little too far my main criticism is the implementation. Looking at the site it took me about 20 seconds to figure out that aboyne is where he is based and not his surname. I couldn't find his surname anywhere on his homepage. After navigating around for a while I found it in the byline for his blog. It wasn't an easy process. I highly doubt that data was machine readable despite the importance he attached to this during his talk.

Ewan Spence was next up with an improvised talk he largely made up on the spot. This rapidly migrated to a conversation with some interesting points raised.

Following on from this Dave McClure set a small competition going. A excessive number of random words were gathered from the audience which then broke up into 5 groups to brainstorm company ideas around any pair of words. Somehow the team I was in won with sexydyslexia.com, a couple that takes standard prose and converts it into netspeak and vice-versa. I notice that the domain name is still available so although rated as the best apparently no one in the audience wanted to run with it.

All the details on the second day after the jump . . .

Continue reading "BarCampScotland2008 Roundup"

The second BarCampScotland event finished yesterday. This was the first BarCamp event I've attended and I have to say I was impressed.

Almost without exception I would describe the talks I attended as interesting or very interesting. I plan to post summaries and link to slides where possible in a later post.

The facilities were also quite impressive. Appleton Tower always looks to me to be a rather drab building from the outside but the concourse, where BarCamp was based, was a deceptively impressive space and certainly met our needs. Having said that I don't know whether they turn the heating off on the weekend but it was definitely chilly.

There were five large (easily seating 100+ people) lecture theatres available on two levels which were again well equipped. For the number of laptops I saw out on display the power sockets beneath every other seat would have been invaluable. It was only in the penultimate session I realised they were there but as that was when I started being concerned about power it all worked out well.

The Slides

I spoke in the morning about contact importers and where I felt they were going in the future.

I've embedded the slidecast below. Feel free to link to it or embed it elsewhere.

After learning about the future of web design conference back in January and then deciding I was just going to be too busy in April when the conference was scheduled to be held I've been looking for something else. All the more so after watching some of the presentations.

Future of Web Apps . . . I'll be there

Well the Future of web apps conference is being held in London on the 3rd and 4th October and this one I can attend. I've already booked my place and I'm not too busy this time around.

I'm flying down late on Tuesday and then leaving as soon as the conference ends but if you're in the area, or attending the conference, and want to meet up during the conference get in touch.

Roadtrip

The team behind the conference is also organising a roadtrip were they plan to go out and visit 12 European cities. They are visiting Edinburgh so I'll catch up with them then.

A couple of quick announcements . . .

New PEAR package for the Compete API

After writing about the compete API Hiroki Akimoto contacted me mentioning a proposal he had made to PEAR. Our scripts each had strengths and we decided to combine our attempts and hopefully make something better. After a week or so we updated the proposal with the new code and after a little time for comments and a week for voting the proposal was accepted and on 30th July a new package, Services_Compete, was available on PEAR.

The developer page at Compete is already updated.

The PEAR package is in my opinion superior to the wrapper I released but I'll keep it up in case anyone wants something more lightweight than PEAR.

Youmoz Post

Youmoz is the section of the seomoz site for 'user generated content' and over the previous weekend I decided to give it a try. Lessons Learned from Webmaster Central discusses some of the problems I discovered when I registered the site with Webmaster Central at Google. The fixes involved a little PHP, a small change to my database and a handful of new RewriteRule's in my .htaccess file.

It was more technical than most of the posts there but it seemed to go down well.

There have been a handful of people contact me recently stating that the MSNM contact fetching script doesn't work, or works poorly, with email addresses other than @hotmail.com. Addresses ending in @hotmail.co.uk, @hotmail.fr or none hotmail addresses were hanging and not returning results.

Obviously not good so after a disappointingly long wait I was able to devote some time to fixing the problem. Last weekend I was able to put something together which I think was going to work and sent it out to a few people to beta test.

Over the past few days I've been getting back responses (thanks to all those involved!) and for the most part the responses have been positive. It still isn't 100% but it's much better. The remaining problems are a result of taking someone else's code and twisting it to suit a new purpose. I would have been far better figuring out how it did what it did and then refactoring it to meet the new aims.

The new and improved script can be downloaded from the original thread or from the MSN contact grab page in the new scripts section.

The web service has been updated to reflect the changes.

As I write this http://staples.co.uk is reporting that it is down. There are probably quite a few people interested in shopping at one of their stores going elsewhere. If the site was actually down that would be fair enough. It isn't though. http://www.staples.co.uk works perfectly.

You quite often see 'server not found' warnings when visiting a site without www., for example my university, but to get through to the site and have it tell you the site is down is even worse. It demonstrates that whoever manages the server knows what they are doing but carelessly hasn't set things up correctly.

It doesn't matter which way round you have things but all traffic to www. should be redirected to the www free version or vice versa.

There are three main reasons why this is important:
- All your visitors actually reach your site
- No duplicate content issues in the search engines (this is assuming that both versions of the site actually work)
- Strengthens search engine positions by concentrating all incoming links on one site.

All it takes is a couple of lines in a .htaccess file if you're on an Apache server

%{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

It's not difficult so please sort this out.

I'm currently subscribed to the developershed newsletter. I mainly get them for the programming articles but having just read the emails from the past few months and it was a couple of SEO articles that really caught my attention.

The SEO field is great in that a lot of people are willing to share what they know. It's possible to take a sceptical perspective and say they're only looking to build their mind-share and brand but there is still good information out there. Brands are being made by offering real value.

This is why these two articles stuck out. These articles were not about valuable content. They were about self-promotion all the way. Continue reading "DeveloperShed - All about self-promotion?"