Black Out Your Site Like Wikipedia

This site and Wikipedia both used a pretty harmless method to block our content for the protest. The method we used involved simply covering up the normal content with a layer of HTML that hides it and shows something else in its place. To accomplish this in an elegant way, you will need an image and/or content to display, the HTML shown below, and a small change to your site’s CSS. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Create your image and content. In my case, I made a couple very simple changes to a large version of my logo image to make it more protest-y.

2. Add the overlay code. In your site’s template (or your theme’s footer.php in WordPress), copy the code below and paste it right above the /body tag. Modify it as indicated to include your own image or message.


<div style="position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px;
width:100%;height:100%;
background:url(/images/darken.png);text-align:center;">
<!-- Add your image and message below this line -->
<img src="/images/sopa.png" />
<!-- Add your image and message above this line -->
</div>


Here’s the background and content images I used.

3. Stop the scroll. Update your site’s CSS file to stop the original content from being larger than the new overlay content. This may not always be necessary, but will be pretty obvious when it is. Just add the following code anywhere to the bottom of the CSS:


body{overflow:hidden;}


That’s it! Follow the three steps above and you’ll have your protest/maintenance/special message up in no time on every page on the site.

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What Is S.O.P.A.?

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the less known PROTECTIP (PIPA) are proposed legislation that aim to give more control to the U.S. government and copyright holders to thwart piracy online. Sadly, the legislation will instead give our government the power to blacklist sites that allegedly contain any small amount of infringing content, thereby blocking the whole site from users. As an example, if I post a video on YouTube of my cat being funny and it happens to have a pop song playing in the background, YouTube has to remove it quickly or face harsh consequences. And if they’re not fast enough? That’s when Uncle Sam gets to start messing with DNS (the naming system of the Internet), making the site unreachable by normal means to most people in the U.S. If that doesn’t work, private companies (RIAA and MPAA, for example), can get advertising and payment companies like Google and PayPal to shut down the accounts of the allegedly offending site.

In this case, YouTube could vanish to anyone in the U.S. and lose all advertising revenue if I don’t edit some music out of my kitty cat video. Sounds reasonable, right?

And if you want to read the full text, here’s H.R. 3261
Pay attention to 102(c)(2)(A)(i) regarding DNS re-routing and 102(c)(2)(B) regarding search engines.

If all that’s too much to read, check out the SOPA infographic from Mashable or watch a video about the legislation below:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Wikipedia And JoeTech.com Are Going Dark In Protest

At 12:00 AM on January 18th, 2012, the English version of Wikipedia will go dark for 24 hours, and so will JoeTech.com and we’re certainly not alone. Reddit got the SOPA Strike rolling, and Mozilla has been vocal about this for a while. My dedicated server provider, Codero, voiced their own opinion about SOPA/PIPA, urging customers to get educated.

During that 24 hour period I’ll have a blackout page up, but as of 12:00 AM on January 19th, 2012, JoeTech.com will be back to normal.

How You Can Protest

If you have a web site, go on strike with me.

Even if you don’t have a site, you can make your voice heard. That link will do the work for you to connect you to your senators to voice your opinion about SOPA/PIPA. Politely urge them to consider the freedoms we fight so hard to protect before voting on this horrible legislation.

Share this post on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +. Better yet, share any of the helpful links above.

Stop waiting for bad ideas to become laws.

Update: It looks like our politicians are listening, promising to make changes to the bill to help with our concerns, but we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of it. At this point, the bill may be vastly changed for the better or may just die completely.

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Create Custom Error Pages

What you see above is my custom 404 error page. In WordPress, I replaced everything in /wp-content/themes/joetech/404.php with my own HTML to make my error page custom. The HTML can be anything you want, but you should make sure to view it in a browser by trying to visit any non-existing page on your blog. In my case, I went old school with the famous Windows Blue Screen of Death that often felt like an extension of Windows 98, popping up more often than anyone would like. Of course, I changed it around a bit to include a Star Wars quote and links both to my site and to share the 404 page on Facebook for any who think it’s amusing.

While 404 is the error code and page that surfaces the most, web servers have several codes to indicate the result of a web request. A couple others that come in just behind 404 are 403 (Forbidden) and 500 (Internal Server Error). Many years ago, at an Internet service provider I worked for, we had Macho Man Randy Savage for our 500 page and Mr T. was there to “Pity da Foo” who tried to access a forbidden page. Have fun with it and post links to your results in the comments below.

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Too Many Eggs, Not Enough Baskets

Today, I received an email from Zlio. They’re a company that provided a unique way for people to create online shops and earn money. It was pretty innovative when it began, but I had forgotten about it for the last year or three. Today’s email from Zlio was intended to announce the end of life for their services due to the end of the company, but it also provided some details about how this happened. Those details underline my message.

Six years after its launch, we regret to announce that we are going out of business.

The service will officially end on September 11!

Zlio had a fantastic start, receiving capital from one Europe’s largest venture capital funds, Mangrove Capital. In addition, we held advanced M&A talks with Google, which unfortunately fell through at the last minute.

Our strong initial growth was interrupted on September 27, 2007, when the majority of Zlio shops, which were generally very well ranked, saw their Google ranking drop dramatically, eliminating 65% of our traffic.

Despite our best efforts, and the opening of 380,000 stores to date, it has not been possible to regain our previous Google rankings, except in exceptional cases.

When we founded Zlio, we thought that you, members of Zlio, would successfully promote your shops among your circles. We did not believe that Google referencing would be so crucial. Unfortunately, it has proved to be indispensable.

Among the actions taken to improve our Google ranking, we approached an SEO company who claimed they were able to fix our problem.

In view of their poor performance, we assessed that this company had not fulfilled its obligations. Therefore, we entered into dispute with it, which resulted in a court case whose sentence was rendered on July 26, 2011. This ruling is available on the website of the Paris Commercial Court (Tribunal de Commerce de Paris).

This decision sentences us both to pay the whole of a service that we still believe have not been provided and to pay damages for publishing our opinion about Referencement on Twitter. The latter part of the sentence has already drawn much attention in the French media.

This sentence means we cannot go on. The service has been losing money for several years (which forced us to gradually reduce our staff), and the amounts to which we are sentenced to pay today no longer allow us to meet our obligations.

The email goes on to point out that they will honor amounts owed to Zlio shop owners, etc., but the important thing to note is how they describe a timeline in which they saw some early success with their Google placement that abruptly went away, and how the resulting actions ended up putting them out of business. This may be a unique case, but if you do some searching on Google, you’ll find that every time Google changes its search placement algorithms, scores of blogs and web sites speak out about how they’ve lost over half their traffic. To some sites, this becomes catastrophic.

Protect Your Web Traffic

Search engine optimization is a huge factor in the success of most websites. I’m not here to tell you otherwise, but while optimizing to make sure Google sends you a lot of qualified traffic, don’t forget other marketing channels. Share your voice on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, check your rankings in Yahoo and Bing, comment on blogs and in forums, and hand out business cards at events. Whatever you do, spread those eggs around in many baskets and you’ll be one step ahead of everyone else when the industry shifts.

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For the uninitiated, here’s how paid reviews generally work: A company (or an agent company) contacts the blog about a paid review. A price is agreed upon and money is paid to the blog (or agent company). Then the review is completed and published. I make a point to personally use or try anything I review, whenever possible, in order to provide a complete and honest opinion based on actual experience. This takes a lot of time but is a necessary part of the process.

What I Get Paid For

One common misconception is that “paid” means “positive”. There may be a couple blogs that will guarantee a positive review, but I guarantee an honest opinion. When I provide a paid review, the payment is for my time and honest opinion. This was the case when I provided a generally positive Infinity Control iPhone game review as well as my even more lucrative Boost Mobile review, in which I devoted half the review to relaying my horrendous activation experience.

Bad Business With FutureMedia Studio

Historically, I’ve done well with a review agent company called IZEA and their review service, Social Spark, which has pioneered the paid review process. Now and then, companies skip the middle man and come directly to me for a review. Recently, I was emailed by a new company called Review Roster that brokers reviews for Android and IOS apps and decided to try the service out.

My first review opportunity with Review Roster was FutureMedia Studio’s iPhone and iPad app, Perfect Reader. I provided the review as agreed (seen here) and waited for payment. As a new paid review business, Review Roster had not been collecting payment before reviews were completed. I discovered this after they informed me that my payment was delayed due to trouble getting payment from FutureMedia Studio. Review Roster now collects payment in advance. What struck me as odd was that the app got some great remarks from me, so it couldn’t be that they were unhappy with the tone of the review (although that shouldn’t matter). As it turns out, it seems FutureMedia Studio just didn’t want to pay.

I keep pretty busy, so I set the experience aside, got assurance that payment for future reviews would be pre-collected, and provided two subsequent reviews for Review Roster. I was paid for these second and third reviews without much concern and it wasn’t until recently that I thought again about the Prefect Reader review while reviewing traffic logs. I decided to throw out a tweet to FMS and RR and see if I could provoke a resolution to the problem. Here’s what my tweet read:

Still curious why @perfectreader never paid for the @reviewroster review I completed. #badbusiness

Keep in mind, this is after several emails with Review Roster months before to resolve the issue quietly. Sometimes you need a megaphone to get a company’s attention. This was clearly the case with FutureMedia Studio as they replied a couple days later with the following:

@joetech @reviewroster Contact tim@futuremediastudio.com pls. Don’t understand what you’re talking about.

Someone at Review Roster contacted Tim at FutureMedia Studio and eventually got a response that was emailed to me a couple days ago. After reading the response, I knew immediately that I would turn down the proposed resolution to my complaint, but I decided to think it over before I responded. Essentially, RR forwarded the offer Tim made:

“I’m ok to pay that invoice as it comes from our team member. but could you please ask JoeTech to remove the old review as I really don’t need it. In exchange, I’d like JoeTech to review our popular book – MS Office 2010 Professional Handbook…Otherwise, I am not paying.”

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. FutureMedia Studio acknowledges that they agreed to pay for a service that was provided, refuses to pay, and now wants me to just delete my hard work and do another review just to get paid for the first one. I replied via email with a resounding NO, of course, adding that the offer is just insulting. Holding payment for a provided service ransom to squeeze additional work out of me is bad business.

What do you think?

Am I wrong? Do you agree with me? Would you be insulted by this response? Chime in and let this company know what you think about how they conduct business.

NOTE: While Review Roster stumbled a little at first, they’ve always had great communication and worked with me to resolve this.

UPDATE 07.28.2011: This morning, I’ve been informed that payment was made for my work and that Tim fired the guy who originally initiated the work. This is a horrible outcome, in my opinion. It’s great that the payment was eventually made, but I was far past expecting the payment and and to fire someone else for the negative press Tim caused is wrong. If you’re the guy who got fired or if you want to hire the guy, email me at joe@joetech.com. Maybe I can help.

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Using the App

Dragon has a commercial app that you can buy for your computer but who wants to spend the money? And if you can get something for free why not. This article is about actually getting something for free that normally would cost you money and using it to help you work smarter instead of harder so that you can enjoy life more. What you say into your phone gets translated into text so you can dictate e-mails, jot down things you’re thinking about while you’re on the road or whatever else you would normally do that might require typing sitting in front of the computer. As an example of this I am currently dictating this complete blog post from my iPhone while I’m on the freeway driving home from work. I’m wondering if this will work as well as I hope for a lengthy blog post, and this should be a good barometer of that. The goal is to read through what is dictated and put it into my WordPress editor do a couple small edits in and fix any possible mistakes before publishing.

I have taken a couple peeks not really reading too much while driving but in the peeks that I’ve taken I have determined that it seems to be translating what I’m saying really well. If there’s minimal errors to correct, I’ll go grab an image and just dress up the post a little bit to make it look good. Normally, I would spend maybe an hour or two writing this post and instead I’m spending a mere five maybe ten minutes max while I’m on the road doing something that I have to do anyway. Instead of just listening to the radio, I’ll have gotten something more productive done on my ride home, provided you guys with something informative, hopefully, that you can use it in your business or your even in your personal life and I’ve made my drive home a little bit more interesting because I’m doing something not quite as mundane.

Problems

The only problem that I’ve found with the dictation app so far is that it only allows me to dictate on the iPhone about for a minute or so before it pretty much stops. The upside is that the app will allow you to continue where you left off and will combine everything for you. What happens is it stops so that it can process all the audio, shows you all the text that you have so far, and then it allows you to continue where you left off. You just hit the record button again.

Conclusions

This post was edited, leaving in some of my rambling, but fixing spelling and grammar mistakes as well as some mis-translated words. In the end, I found myself doing a lot more editing than normal, but I had to do a lot less typing. Looking back, the bigger hurdle to overcome, perhaps, will be how much I rattle on when I talk as opposed to my (hopefully) much clearer written communication. Free is pretty much unbeatable, though, so learning to speak like I write may prove a worthwhile experiment to help me get more done during my idle time. If you have an iPhone and could optimize your time a little, head to the app store and search for Dragon Dictation and let me know what you think.

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If I win, I’ll give two $50 Apple gift cards out to random winners. Your “Like” or share of this page on Facebook will enter you to win. Just be sure to post a link to your Facebook profile in the comments below so I can see it. Thanks to all the people who have supported me already on Twitter and Facebook. Contest aside, I feel like I’ve already won.

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Their company, Genwi, recently launched iSites.us, a site that enables people to easily create an application for the iPhone and Android platforms with little effort, and little cash outlay. The whole process involves $25 (or $99 – see below), some image preparation, and about 10 to 15 minutes of your day. This is followed by a week or two of waiting, depending on demand.

Preparation and Planning

iSites offers a couple different pricing options. The more expensive option gives you full control over advertising, allowing you to have your own ads embedded in your app or none at all. The cheaper option (the one I chose) is $25 and includes their own ads in your application. The ads really aren’t in the way, so for me, this was not a problem. If you want your own ads, you’ll need to make sure you have an account with the ad network you choose, but either way, give it a little thought and determine what will work best for you and your budget.

Another thing you need to worry about is your brand management. Before starting, think about your application’s title and description as well as keywords. Additionally, there are a few images you have to have ahead of time. You need an icon, an iTunes display image, a banner and a splash screen image (see the iSites Learn More page to get a peek of the image size and file type requirements. It’s best to have these images all ready to go to streamline the creation process.

Finally, you should grab the category feeds for your blog or site so you can have categories in place when the app launches. The more frequent your content, the more categories you may want to have set up.

Creation and Approval

The creation process and completed application is better seen than described, so I’ve included a video showing the process. For the most part, it’s about 10 minutes of filling out web forms and uploading some images. After that, it’s just a game of waiting for an email announcing the completion of your application.

There may be the rare case in which your application is not approved. In this case, you’ll need to revise text, images, title, etc until it’s approved. When the whole process has been completed, you can just search for your app and download it.

Completed Application

Once completed, the application doesn’t have a lot of features, but it does have some of the important ones. When you start up the application, the first thing you see is the splash screen. I saw at least one other company creating iPhone apps while inserting their own brand here, so I really liked that iSites helps you insert your own branded spash screen here. The app then loads up to the Home screen which shows a listing of your recent posts with thumbnails where available. Each post can be selected to view and read. While reading a post, you can jump up or down a post, favorite it or share it via email, Facebook, or Twitter. The sharing options are a must for an application like this.

Over all, the application is really smooth and brings my blog to a whole new audience pretty seamlessly. Better still is the ability to manage it from the iSites web site control panel. From the control panel, I can change my images, description, etc. Additionally, I can add or change categories and other feeds. This really does feel like a pretty decent blend of control and simplicity.

Application Analytics

I love numbers. More than just any numbers, I love numbers that tell me people are reading what I write. Even before purchasing my app creation, I was a little excited about the prospect of seeing how many people downloaded my iJoeTech iPhone application. Once the app has hit the app store, you have analytics at your fingertips via the iSites web site control panel.

Amazingly, I had a nice bunch of downloads of my app before I even knew it was in the App Store. Pretty exciting. While it’s fun to watch, the numbers are important as a barometer for how your keywords and other criteria work to get someone to look at your app and then to download it.

What’s Missing?

I’m not sure if the analytics pages cover just the iPhone downloads or both iPhone and Android. I’d love to see analytics for both on the same graph. It would also be nice if the application had an option to open a post in Safari. Most of all, though, I’d love if there was some way for the application to hook into my WordPress and let the user submit a comment right from the app.

Conclusions

I’ve been wanting to create a JoeTech.com app for the iPhone for a while now and although I had seen other offerings, this one resonated with my mostly due to the ease of setup and the low cost. It truly is pretty amazing that I can give JoeTech.com readers a customized iPhone application so easily for only $25. I think every blog should have such an app and iSites.us is the place to get it done.

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{hi|hello|howdy|greetings|gooday} there, i just {stumbled|came across|discovered|found|saw} your {blog|website|site|web portal} via {google|yahoo|bing}, and i must say that you write {exceptionally|pretty|interestingly|awesomely} {well|good} on your {blog|website|site|web portal}. i am really {impressed|taken|moved|motivated|struck} by the {way|mode|method} that you write, and the {content|message|subject} is {superb|good|great|quality|excellent}. {anyway|anyhow|anyways|in any event|in any case}, i would also like to know whether you would like to exchange links with my {blog|website|site|web portal}? i will be more than {happy|willing} to reciprocate and {put|enter|insert|drop} your link off in the {link exchange area|blogroll|link section}. {waiting|looking|anticipating} for your {reply|answer|response|respond}, thanks and {cheers|have a great day|enjoy your day|gooday}!

To other bloggers, this may look a little familiar. It’s the popular complimenting blog spam. The idea is to compliment the blogger so that he or she will want to approve the comment. Once the comment is approved, the spammer has a link back to their site and, depending on the threshold of the blog, the spammer has a previous comment and may be auto-approved for future comments. The script seems to choose randomly from each of the variable pieces of content to eventually form a comment that is supposed to appear to be hand written for your blog. Don’t get fooled by this junk.

The spam I got was from michaelwoo.net, which is the web site of some kid who seems to think he’s on the right track in online marketing. His contact email is me@michaelwoo.net which he spells out on his site as “me@michaelwoo dot net”. I find it funny that he’ll use a script to comment spam popular blogs, but takes measures on his own site to prevent spam-harvesting scripts from getting his email address.

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Phoenix isn’t the only city to have a WordCamp. They’re all over and they’re a great way to get a ton of important blogging tips for only about $30 to get in. If you’re a blogger, find your local WordCamp and buy your ticket early because our WordCamp sold out. I learned way too much to post it all here, but I’ve pulled out the most important tips for you below:

Read and Re-read Before Publishing

Originally expressed during the keynote from Lorelle of Lorelle on WordPress, this was reiterated throughout the day by other speakers. Be it text or video, photos or audio, take a look when you’re done and edit as needed. Then read through it again just to be sure. There’s nothing worse than publishing a post only to have someone point out mistakes after most of your readers have already seen it.

Publish With Intent

Whether you’re writing a review, a how-to, or just an editorial piece, do it with intent and know what your intent is going into it. Loreelle reminded us that if you publish with intent, it will show through to your readers.

Don’t Plagiarize

It’s easy on the web to just take good content and share it as your own. Lorelle couldn’t stress enough that this is just unacceptable. Not only can it make you look bad, but you’re also not offering anything original to your readers.

Be Timeless

Yet another top tip from Lorelle is to write timeless content, and I couldn’t agree more. Unlike a newspaper, you want people to find your post for the first time months or years later. When they do, it shouldn’t feel old or outdated.

To Stand Out, Be Outstanding

What a great point made by Dave Moyer, from wordcastpodcast.com. When you look at a blog and it’s just OK, you probably won’t be back. It’s the outstanding blogs that are rewarded with reader loyalty.

Make Use Of Keywords

GoDaddy.com not only sponsored the event, but they threw in their SEO expert, Jim Christian. In addition to a lot of other great SEO tips, Jim reminded us that you should use your target keywords in the post’s title, description, keywords, and any tags. You can’t retain readers if they can’t they find you to begin with.

Engage Your Audience

Writing is only half the job, cautioned Jayson Cote’ from WPCOOP.org. The other half, he says, is engaging your audience, and I agree completely. I don’t always respond to every comment on my blog, but I try to personally respond to most and this theory carries over to your social media as well. Social media is a two-way conversation.

Find Your Unique Voice

Merlin Mann of 43 Folders, the best speaker of the day in my opinion, warns against being average. He says, “It is very hard for someone to become you because of blank. Find out what that blank is.” This will also make it a lot easier for people to remember you. Most of the sites I visit are from memory and not bookmarks.

Give More Than You Get

Merlin could not be more clear about his stance on social media and blogging and how he hates that so many people want to create a selfish, one-sided relationship with their readers. Everyone wants to be successful and help themselves, but the best way to do that is to give first. When you do that, good things will come back to you.

Form = Function

That is to say that neither form nor function is most important. When you design or choose a template for your new blog, be sure to think about design, but make sure you think about usability and function, too. The two should compliment each other.

I hope these tips help you and if you have your own, please leave them in the comments.

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