I had the opportunity to attend the Dallas WordCamp 2008 this past weekend. Aside from the drive from San Antonio to Dallas, the weekend was great. Cold, but great. WordCamps brings the largest gathering of WordPress bloggers, podcasters, designers, programmers and aficionados to teach, learn, eat, drink and generally have fun with one another.
In the opening segment on Saturday March 29th, Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and founding developer of WordPress spoke about WordPress 2.5 and the changes that were made from previous versions. The poor man just had his wisdom teeth removed and was in a little pain that day, but he was a trooper! While he spoke, he displayed the changes in WordPress 2.5 on the big screens. A couple of changes included a new Dashboard (many people learned of WordCamp 2008 through the Dashboard widget), new Gallery Features - upload feature: set thumbnail sizes, proportions of pictures, extracts all photo information from your digital camera (date, time, pixels, camera type), comments in 2.5 - editing has been completely re-designed, cookies are now encrypted and a couple more added security features.
The Mayor also popped in for a few minutes to thank everyone for coming, that was a pleasant visit.
Lunch was catered in from Rudy’s BBQ, thanks to Find My Host who funded it. It was the perfect opportunity to mingle with other bloggers, podcasters, and the like.
The majority of the event, we sat and listened to bloggers and podcasters speak about tips and tricks, how to drive traffic, security, and best practices. These people have done their homework. I was really taken in by some of the tips they were giving, things that had never crossed my mind. Did you know that Google Analytics only tracks people who have Javascript turned on? If someone has Javascript turned off (I generally do), they’re not being tracked - skewed numbers, not good.
After Saturday’s event, many people got together afterwards for a night out and had a great time. Sunday was a jam packed day full of a lot of Q&A and the weekend in general was a very good learning experience for all bloggers and podcasters. John P. moderated the panel and asked very real questions that companies face when looking at building a blog presence. Why should businesses have a blog? What if my employees post something bad? What if my customers post something bad? These are questions that companies have to take into account when making a decision to have a blog - just as ServerBeach did. One of the panel members, Liz Strauss, was dead on when she said, “a blog can turn the faceless company into real humans you can relate to.”
All in all, it was a great event. The city of Frisco, TX allowed WordCamp to use their city council chambers. Many thanks to those who made this possible and I look forward to attending many more in the future.
A couple of weeks ago, someone got hassled by airport security - they couldn’t make sense of his MacBook Air. Because the MacBook Air does not look like your every day laptop, it grabs the interest of security personnel, according to the TSA’s Blogger Bob. Why? Its solid state drive. Which means any notebook with a SSD could cause a delay for you if you’re traveling.
Blogger Bob states -
We were able to get our hands on a MacBook Air and run it through the X-ray in our lab. My suspicions were correct. The MacBook does look completely different than your typical laptop or DVD player. I can’t get into specifics of course, but there were a couple of areas on the X-ray that could pique some interest for TSOs.
According to A List Apart, “sign-up forms must die“. Now, when I read that my first thought was - I agree. I find myself often going to a website just to browse around or read an article but find that I cannot do so without filling out a sign-up form. What does that prompt me to do? It makes me move on to the next website and browse elsewhere.
To quote the author of this website -
I’ll just come out and say this: sign-up forms must die. In the introduction to this book I described the process of stumbling upon or being recommended to a web service. You arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form.
We can do better. In fact, I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step.
I certainly agree with the above quote. I agree that showing a potential customer or visitor what services you have to offer, if nothing more than a sample, will entice them more to stick around if interested and be more than willing to fill out a brief form to sign up.
The article, “Sign Up Forms Must Die” is a very interesting read. The view is mainly from a user standpoint and does not really discuss the views or impacts from a business perspective. One comment (#10) in the discussion forum from the article makes a very good point from a company perspective -
I notice that you are giving opinions from the user perspective only and thought I could give a company perspective on this. A web application I created a couple of years ago (www.ausrackid.com) went through this thought process. Ausrack ID allows IT pros to configure 19” racking systems in a visual way, save print out the results, and get quotes from the company I work for. I chose having no sign up until the user decides they want to save, at which point you are asked for username and email address, if they want a quote for items they get asked for more details. This is quite a way through the process. I was advised to put in a signup process at the front end to allow us to collect information on the users which we could potential use for emailing info. I resisted this at the time, and still do today. However, for the first year, the site was getting significant traffic, and significant usage, but very few people were saving their design, or asking for a quote. As the site needs to fund itself, it was very difficult to justify it’s existence at this stage, and the whole project was almost pulled. I think the moral of the story is that your user details have a value, and giving those to a website you use may be the only way they can stay afloat. Think of YouTube, they can justify their existence by the data provided by the number of users. That is why Google bought them. At the smaller scale my advice would be if they ask for it, and you want to use the service, give them your details, it might just help them survive in a competitive world.
Great point. So how do you create the ultimate user experience, get the data you need to remain competitive, and create a win-win for all?
Read the full article here and share your thoughts.
ServerBeach has been recently testing out the MTRON MSD-SATA drives. This is currently being beta tested in our San Antonio data center and not available to the general public at this time, but we’re working on it!
The MTRON MSD-SATA 6000 Series features high performance with sustained throughput reading at 100MB/s and writing at 80MB/s. The Access time is less than 0.1 mses!
The MTRON MSD-SATA 6000 has high reliability with
- Wear-leveling Algorithm
- BCH 7 Bit Error Correction Code (ECC)
- Bad Block Management Algorithm
- Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF): 1,000,000 hours
- Data Retention: 10 years at 25 degrees Celcius
A ServerBeach customer, Kevin Burton has been testing and running benchmarks on this drive and posting frequent updates on his blog. Thanks Kevin!
While this is still being tested at ServerBeach, we expect to be able to offer this to our customers in the near future. Be sure to keep an eye on our website and your future e-mails!
Blogging, instant messaging for internal groups, constant communication from online IM’s to cell phone text messages. We all do it, utilizing whatever we can to remain in contact with people.
WordPress, the most dominant player in blogging is about to make some changes in the game with Prologue.
The idea seems to be that if you have multiple bloggers on your WordPress blog, you can now use Twitter-like short messages to chat internally.
“Is it a Twitter-killer? No, not currently anyway, as most Twitterdiction folks are using it for shouting to the public vs. internal messaging.”
Matt Mullenweg comments in the announcement for Prologue stating, “Some folks have suggested that using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter. This isn’t something we’re personally interested in, but we’ve made the theme available as open source under the GPL so if you want to hack around it yourself you’re welcome to. For WordPress.com users the theme is available in your “Presentation” section.”
According to a “Sanity Check” article on TechRepublic this morning, the dependence of business on technology will continue to accelerate 2008, but not all of the trends are happy ones. They’ve created a list of which tech trends to keep an eye on during 2008 and how they will impact business and IT — for better and for worse.
1. Enterprise IT budgets will shrink in the U.S.
2. Utility computing will start a new wave of IT outsourcing
3. Mobile Internet will change the way people work
4. Green IT will gain legal momentum
5. Unified communications will unlock the business value of VoIP
6. Businesses will continue to avoid Windows Vista
7. WAN caching will save bandwidth and speed up remote users
8. Demand will grow for alternative form factor computers
According to The Dave, “During the initial installation of a USB device (most often external drives, although not always), Windows Vista does not locate or install drivers for the device.”
For those of you who run across this problem, check out his blog post where he also explains how to correct it.
Google Adsense millionaire Markus Frind explains how a homegrown coding project turned into Plentyoffish.com, the no. 1 free online dating site with 1.4 million visitors a day. Find out how PEER 1 helps Markus connect people looking for love online by clicking here.
