Posts Tagged ‘Helpful’

Learning PHP

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

PHP Programming has become one of the trends today. To learn more about it, you can first start through the internet. Although you may also try books however internet provides more comprehensive information. Think what topics about PHP are you most interested about. You can visit and join forums discussing PHP programming. You can even ask questions in the forums. Friends who are into the field of programming might help.

If you want to know more about PHP Programming, it should not be limited to that there are also other areas that you need to learn about like JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is helpful to always have knowledge on the latest trends and innovations regarding PHP Programming.

What is the best example that you know of of a site that implements reputation patterns?

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

I don’t know if it’s the absolute best, but a site that I’ve praised in the past is Yelp. They’re a review site and they feature a nice variety of reputation indicators. What I like about Yelp is that they seem to have payed close attention to their community, and what motivates people to write reviews, and their reputation system leverages that nicely. It doesn’t work against it.

A really simple example: some of our own research, at Yahoo, indicates that one reason some people may write reviews is just this desire to ‘fill a void’ or provide a review for a product or venue that has none. (I’ve wondered if this isn’t somehow psychologically related to those guys that like to type ‘first!’ into comment fields.) Now of course this isn’t the only thing that motivates someone to write reviews, but it can be a small motivator for some folks.

Yelp must be aware of this tendency, cause they give users a small boon for being the first person to contribute a review for a business. The first review for any establishment will display a ‘first to review’ badge for ever-after. So it’s not a huge thing. They don’t place a lot of importance on it, but there it is: a small and very natural show of appreciation for those users that like to help get the conversation started.

And Yelp does this in a dozen other ways as well. They have specific reputation types that reward funny Yelpers, or helpful ones. They have a special designation (the Yelp Elite — you’ve written about them before, in fact.) So Yelp encourages a wide range of expression from their review-writers: basically, you can be any kind of ‘Yelper’ you want to be, and—as long as the community finds value in your contributions—Yelp has a way of rewarding you. (And Yelp doesn’t ‘rank’ users against each other, or display a leaderboard anywhere on the site.)

And, of course, I’ve already mentioned XBox Live. I think they do a fantastic job. I believe that they employ just about every pattern from the set that we’ve published, and probably a couple others besides. And all for great effect, for a very specific purpose. BUT… they’re a fairly competitive context, so I think they get a lot of leeway to do things that a lot of social community sites should probably not be doing.

9) What is Yahoo’s strategy in getting these out to the community? Are you simply being altruistic? Wouldn’t these help your competitors?

There are a couple of dimensions to my answer here. First, I’d say that the Pattern Library, in general (which has been open since February of 2006, btw) is a good fit for Yahoo!s stated goals of openness and transparency.

Secondly, there’s nothing especially proprietary about the information or opinions embedded in the patterns. Christian, who I’ve mentioned, actually vets all of our public patterns with our Legal team, so if there actually were some sooper-sekrit game-changing reputation business logic in there…? Well, that probably wouldn’t make it outside the firewall. ;-)

But, also, these patterns are in large part drawn from examples and experiences of competitors, as well as products that we’ve shipped at Yahoo! So in a way, it’s not so much ‘getting them out’ to the community as giving them back to the community. There is some work involved in these patterns (compiling, researching, refining and writing them out) but the benefits for us are innumerable: the ability to positively influence the community, be seen as thought-leaders in social software. Heck, just taking part in a smarter dialog about the place of reputation systems… it’s all good.

5 Really Simple and Effective Blogging Tips

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

In the last three months or so, I’ve learned quite a bit about blogging in general from a few different sources. Whenever I’m not reading one of the dozens of RSS feeds, I’m usually researching the industry, or closely related topics. Of course, there are a few blogs in the niche I’m interested in that I consider “authority” blogs. A few big name bloggers have really “made it”, and I can never figure out if that makes me envious or inspires me to ascend to their level.

For all of those that think the big guys have it easy, then I’m here to tell you right now that they don’t! Running and maintaining a blog with such a high public popularity has to be one hell of a job. I know they make money even when they’re sleeping, but if they slow down, so will the several thousand dollars a month they make. They always have to be ahead of the game, and better than the rest. That’s why they are what they are. Props to them for accomplishing such a feat. I dream of the day I pull in a few hundred bucks while I’m sleeping. If it ever gets to that point, you can be damned sure that I won’t be stuck in a cubicle all day!

So since I’ve started blogging, I’ve seen a few things happen without fail. It may seem like common sense, but sometimes we need a little reminder.

If you want traffic, then you have to write great and helpful content.

If you stop writing great and helpful content, you stop getting traffic.

Duh, right? Well, sometimes writing great content is easier said than done. We all start off with super ambitious intentions, but then we soon realize that real life still has to be attended to, and time is usually a factor that we don’t have enough of. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you expect big numbers, then you need to give them (readers) a reason to come to your blog on a consistent basis. As a matter of fact, I wrote two articles (about automobiles) in May that have accounted for almost 50% of my total traffic since blog inception. When the buzz from those articles died down, I kind of just sat there with a stupid stare wondering where everyone went! The worst part of it was that those two articles had absolutely nothing to do with “making money online”. So once the readers read the article (which offered valuable advice), there was really nothing left for them to look at. That’s okay though, I’ve definitely learned from that, so no harm no foul.

This is more of a ramble than anything, so I’ll leave you with a list of some simple rookie tips and advice that you should consider taking seriously. I’ve seen a whole new crop of rookie “make money onliners”, and I don’t think they realize what kind of road they have ahead of them! Best of luck to them though.

1. Don’t put your Feedburner subscriber count button on your blog until you have at the very least, 100 subscribers. When I come to your blog (or anyone for that matter) and I see that you have 4 readers, I’m probably not going to be inclined to subscribe. It’s human nature. Humans like big numbers. So hold off until you have a respectable number to show off. Trust me on this one.

2. Being a blogger (especially in the make money online niche), you’re going to encounter several opportunities from other bloggers, website owners, and whoever, that want you to help them with a project. While this can potentially lead to great things, most of the time it will fizzle out and leave you with a lot of lost time. Pick your side projects VERY carefully. Don’t feel like you need to say “yes” to everyone that invites you to work on a project. Don’t worry, if you turn one down, you’ll have plenty more in the future. Please trust me on this one, as it’s a weakness of mine, and it has cost me plenty of my extra time.

3. Easy on the advertising. The first thing any blogger in this niche wants to do is implement every type of advertising possible to try and earn the big money. Guess what? Even with 14 different types of revenue sources on the front page, chances are you’ll make less than what you would with just a couple of select ones. People in general hate advertising, so don’t fill up your page with affiliate ads and other types of clunky advertising. Stick with Adsense and one or two others at most. You won’t make any real money anyway until you have a decent amount of traffic, so all it’s doing is taking up space and looking bad. Again, you should be in this for the long haul, so time is your friend. You will not be John Chow in a week, I guarantee you that.

4. Promote the hell out of your blog. You’re going to need a jump start when you come out of the gate, and the best way to promote for free these days is to leverage the power of social bookmarking and networking sites (digg, mybloglog, blogcatalog, stumbleupon, technorati, etc…) Sign up for all of these, and make good use of them, it will definitely pay off, and it really is necessary if you want any kind of long term traffic stability. Also, start surfing every blog in your niche and related niches, and get to know them. Leave conversation sparking comments and be generous on the link love when you write. The good karma will follow you around for the rest of your blogging career. Make friends fast, as they’ll be the ones to help you along the way. Remember, without promoting your blog, your not going to get the traffic levels that you should be getting, so do this until you’re sick of it, and then do it some more.

5. Don’t give up! This sounds pretty cliche, but you will inevitably come to a point where you are sitting on your thumb wondering what you need to do to succeed. The answer is simple - keep writing! Any good writer can make it, but it takes time. Success isn’t overnight, it’s built up over time and if you provide great and valuable content, then the success and money will flow eventually. I promise you that. Give your readers something to think about, and they’ll keep coming back. That will be the key to your success. Remember, readers come first, then all the rest can follow.

I hope these tips help you in some way. I know they are pretty obvious, but again, they are easily forgotten and sometimes all it takes is someone to remind you. Good luck to all out there, and let’s make it a good month!

Eliminate Ie’s Autocomplete Reminder

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

AutoComplete: Some people like it, some don’t. Those who don’t like it turn it off. Those of us who turned it off are now constantly being prompted to turn it on. By now, we despise it! How do we turn it off completely, with no more pop-ups asking us to turn it on?

It does seem that Internet Explorer really wants you to use AutoComplete. On a system with AutoComplete turned off, it will prompt you from time to time, asking to turn it on again. A Registry tweak will prevent IE’s “helpful” reminders. First, close all IE windows.

1. Launch REGEDIT from the Start menu’s Run dialog.

2. Navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Control Panel.
Note that this key may not be present in its entirety. You may need to create the Internet Explorer and Control Panel subkeys. In the right-hand pane, look for a DWORD value named FormSuggest it will probably not be present.

3. In that case, right-click in the right-hand pane and choose New | DWORD Value from the pop-up menu. Name the new value FormSuggest. Whether you found it or created it, double-click this value and set its data to 1.

That should terminate the annoying reminder.

Helpful accessibility keyboard shortcuts

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Switch FilterKeys on and off. Right SHIFT for eight seconds

Switch High Contrast on and off. Left ALT +left SHIFT +PRINT SCREEN

Switch MouseKeys on and off. Left ALT +left SHIFT +NUM LOCK

Switch StickyKeys on and off. SHIFT five times

Switch ToggleKeys on and off. NUM LOCK for five seconds