From a security standpoint, company laptops can be a hassle to maintain. In the case of theft (very likely) your data is completely compromised. Viruses and wireless data sniffing are another huge concern.
My first line of defense is updating the OS. Second is anti-virus, and third is encryption. Typically I will encrypt the entire hard drive using TrueCrypt. This took about 3 hours per computer to complete on these brand new machines.
I recently read Leo Laporte’s post about wasting time on social media and it inspired me to write my perspective on creating content for someone else’s platform. I equate this to working at a large company or grinding away at a job just to pay the bills. A lot of your effort spent on someone else’s dreams. Not only are you building someone else’s platform for them , but you are neglecting yours. Yes, there are cogs and people perfectly fine with this, but from an entrepreneur’s prospective, this is pure agony.
I came across a friend’s website who was using Posterous as their primary blog for their tech startup company. The blog content was very well written, keyword rich and focused. Why the hell would you not want this content on your own domain? The SEO benefits are huge, especially since the content is very useful and targeted. Please stop donating this much energy to someone else’s project. I’m all for “Marketing by Sharing” but some times you gotta kick in the door and take what’s yours. Also, if there is any benefit of having a Posterous blog over your own blog, someone please correct me. (more…)
This weekend I began learning WordPress plugin development. After several hours I simultaneously learned the basics of jQuery, AJAX and WordPress plugin development. This was long overdue.
My plugin requirements were to have a password generator that creates tables and inserts data into a database. I wanted this to be accessible in the WordPress back-end.
The ultimate goal is to have these passwords associated with pages and posts and can only be used a couple times. This might end up being a separate plugin.
This Random Password Generator plugin creates a table in the WordPress database ‘prefix_randpass’. It stores the password, timestamp, and sets the ‘active’ field to 1.
Once I complete development, I will send it to the WordPress.org repository and create more comprehensive documentation.
You can download it right now: random-password-generator-wp-0.1.zip
Joomla! was the first content management system I learned. It’s somewhat complex, buggy, and the community isn’t as large as WordPress. I built a few a websites in hopes of letting the client loose and have them maintain it. This is not a good idea for people with weak computer skills.
Basically I learned Joomla, never used it again. Now, most of my CMS based websites are WordPress. All was not completely lost. It’s one of those “chalk this one up as experience” situations. My knowledge of Joomla enabled me down the road.
I was asked to finalize the Cuyahoga Falls Chamber of Commerce website. The previous developer was in over her head, or basically didn’t know the fundamentals of PHP and Joomla! syntax. Either way, I was summoned and I conquered. Now the website works. Enough shameless self promotion, check out cfchamber.com
I’ve been paying Turkers $1 for articles, which is a lot for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Why so much? I wanted quality, and that’s what I got. For $1, exploitation of laborers in rough times can go lengths. Given the right system and circumstances, magic happens.
Ok, maybe not that extreme, but I’d like to explain how I feel. I feel a sense of accomplishment without really doing anything; affiliate marketer’s dream. The bottom line is that Mech Turk is incredibly efficient. I could care less about the naysayers and labor laws.
This is what I do: Feed Mech Turk a link to my target company, get them to summarize their business , then post their 200-300 word summary on a blog. It’s an incredibly effective way to dominate a niche with relevant unique content.
I’m probably already in trouble, but if you want more details, give me a shout.
And by ‘Bocas Villas’ I mean Philip Albrecht.
Gathering and curating content from a remote location is difficult. To solve this, I end up educating someone within an organization on how to craft and publish their own articles, photos and videos. These people have domain expertise and intimate understandings of their company. Granted their writing does not completely suck, I feel this is a good approach.
Quality content in Bocas del Toro is sparse, especially video. This is one of my main focal points for Bocas Villas’ online marketing campaign. But without physically being there and lack of decent video gear, my options were slim.
Jon Johnnidis of Axios Productions, contacted Phil and offered to trade video content for vacation rental time. Phil was skeptical, but I told him it was a great opportunity, especially after seeing Jon’s work. It worked out well, and the video quality is amazing.
Bocas Villas – Bocas del Toro Panama from Philip Albrecht on Vimeo.
I have several projects in the pipeline right now. This is one that I am pretty damn excited about. The story goes as follows:
This is a brief tutorial on how to SSH (Secure Shell) into your HostGator account. It took me a few minutes and a chat with tech support to get this going. I hope this helps someone since it is not very well documented on HostGator, at least I couldn’t find it easily.
Jeff Lee’s BuddyPress presentation from March 2010 North East Ohio WordPress Meetup
Also check out: Office Space Coworking Blog for more info
Introduction:
I recently got into Magento about a month ago and absolutely love it. After testing out many different ecommerce platforms and doing extensive research, I decided Magento was the ticket. It is insanely robust and comes packed with SEO rich features. I recently listened to someone speak about his Magento installation for a store that contains 600,000+ products, yes, that many. Which goes to show its ability to scale.
My partner and I have been working on this project for… well I can’t say because it’s ridiculous how quickly we can knock these websites out. This store is strictly dedicated to baby strollers, because, well… we love baby strollers. Seriously, we’ll be doing videos soon on the subject. Having said all of that, any mommies that know me personally get coupon codes for free shipping and/or discounts, just hit me up. Check out http://babystrollersdiscount.com