Up at 4 a.m. to take on the day and finish the massive amount of work on the agenda, I took a plunge into the realm of social media to distract me from the real duties of the my world. And there I was meandering from website to website reviewing what's cool and of interest on the Twitter stream, and up pops one of the best social media icon sets I've seen yet. Gotta give props to software developer of one of the slickets Joomla extensions, the jTweetsAnywhere plugin, Thomas Billenstein (@TBillenstein), for finding the icon set found on Designr Fix.
Twitter being my personal favorite of the social networking platforms, it's always great to see a long awaited update from the Twitter staff. Addressed in the Twitter newsletter update below is Oauth and URL wrapping, both of which are highly necessary for the purpose of web security.
If you're looking to get a better fix on your Justin.TV analytics for the purpose of presenting your show to potential sponsors, then having some tangible numbers to present to the marketing director would help you to have your way with sponsor dollars in support of your live streaming show effort. One way of making this happen is by enabling Vaughn Chat Stats. What's cool about this is with Vaughn Chat Stats, you're measuring perhaps the most engaging facet of social video casting, the interactive audience. Since social video casting is not the one-way dictator-like presentation seen on CNN or other conventional broadcast TV venues, such statistics serve as an excellent measure of your show's success.
When I needed the code, I had forgotten all where I had seen the cool Ajax search widgets. And here I am months later, and I happen upon the trick Google search widgets. This time, though, after seeing it once again on the Group Y Network website, the action sports & youth marketing industry networking group, I'll post a reference here as a reminder to put it to work on a specific site I have in mind. Enjoy.
GOOGLE / YAHOO / BING / SEO / NEW SITE TEST: Six days on web with no inbound links / 37.50% Bounce Rate / 00:19:25 Average Time on Site / 16 Unique Visits / 180 Page Views / 11.25 Pages Per Visit / 17 Content Pages (not including tag pages)
Wandering over a few Joomla related web pages this evening, including Best Of Joomla (BOJ), I happend upon a really cool and really free flash video player that plays FLV, MP4, MOV, 3GP, 3G2 and H.264 videos on your website. While the YouJoomla FLV Video Player was developed and hosted by a business that is known for its commercial and free Joomla templates and extensions, the flash-based FLV video player is a standalone web script that works to play XML-powered video playlist. The interface is functional and intuitive, as can be seen on the demo.
There are some huge advantages to using web software such as Wordpress and Drupal when compared to Joomla. Amid those reason is seemless authentication plugins such as the social authentication engine Gigya. Joomla just doesn't have it.
Optimizing a server is like voodoo. Likewise for tuning MySQL. Niether of these tasks are my forte but each of them are tasks I've had to take on mutiple times throughout the years. If you're running the Joomla content management system, server resources are likely being taxed, particularly when you get to somewhere around 20,000 to 30,000 unique visitors per month with an average of five to 10 page views per visit. For me, that's been the magic number that requires a dedicated server.
It's a debate that's been brewing. It's like a coffee pot that's been on the burner far too long. The fuel is evaporating. And what's left is the pungent stench and foul taste of burnt-dry coffee beans. The idea of recent months that's been brewing is social polling and other interactive promotions.
Back in the day, cranking out 20-column inches under a late night sports deadline was rough, especially with the printing press fired up and bleeding ink while the press manager was barelling down his eyeballs at you and your staff. Well, today, my fingers tap danced upon the keyboard to cut three to four times that. Instead of the sound of printing press roaring, the onslaught of intermittent text messages & interrupting phone calls. Instead of a tabloid-sized paper laden with four color ink and aimed at a localized demographic, it was ad copy, PR, Facebook, Twitter and Twitpic. Rather than a one-sided byline, the work produced today engaged, igniting lifestyle-focused dialogue for the world to lay witness.
Google Wave, an innovative real-time collaboration and communications web environment launched in beta last year, will soon see the demise of its development, according Google Senior Vice President Operations Urs Hölzle via the Official Google Blog. While recieved much acclaim and even saw invites to its beta release selling for $50 or more on eBay, the application, according to Google, did not receive the addoption developers had expected.
TwitPic just received an image boost. For far too long, the social sharing photo service that serves as the right-hand app for the Twitter micro blogging service has been dormant, laden with somewhat archaic features. Tags and hashtags were nearly useless, as they weren't automatically created from a post and had to be manually input. Account names, or @names, were unlinkable. There was no way to determine how many characters were left in an update before being annotated when arriving at Twitter. Location data was non existent. And the Twitpic widgets were sadly outdated.
Throughout the last several weeks, the workload has increased considerably for a variety of reasons. Amid those reasons is the addition of a new client that arrives yet again via an old friend, Mikey Childress, one of many friends who have gratiously returned time and time again to team up on projects.