April 2008 - Posts

• TelliTip 20: Add Custom Links to your Navigation Bar in Graffiti CMS

  So you use Graffiti for your content management, but you want to create top level links on your site to a non-Graffiti page.  This is easy to to.  Lets pretend, in my case, that I want to create a top level link to my personal site ledgards.com from EvolvingWe.com.  Open the control panel on your site as a site administrator.  Click the presentation tab. Click Navigation Click the custom links sub tab. Add the text for your link and the link itself Click add to Navigation Position the link where you want it in the navigation links control. Posted Apr 28 2008, 08:44 AM by evolvingWe Filed under: Software

• TelliTip 19: Setup GraffitiCMS Locally before deploying

  Via our Graffiti support forums the question "How can I switch servers?" came up. The answer, if you used the default configuration, is very simply.  It's also very simple to run Graffiti locally, configure everything you want, and then deploy it to your hosting provider. The reason this is simple is because the default GraffitiCMS configuration uses a file based database system so you can simply copy the files off of one server and paste them to the new server. You will have to configure the application and permissions again as highlighted in our installation documentation, but it should be a 5-10 minute operation. The tip here, that I recommend for people setting up your sites, is that it is super easy to have a local version of your site running that you can simply push updates to. I set up my sites by getting them running locally, doing all the data imports, completing the theming, and then just copied it over. Posted Apr 25 2008, 09:36 AM by evolvingWe Filed under: Software

• Ledgard Twitter Race: Subscribe to my tweets

  Sure, it's a petty thing, but I've been Mr Gretchen for a long time in some circles.  I'd like to prevent that from happening in the Twitter-Verse.  You can help prevent this by heading my shameless call to follow me on twitter via http://twitter.com/evolvingwe. With blogging I started first, Gretchen called me a nerd, and very soon afterwards she was more addicted than I was and eventually way more popular.  The same cycle is starting again in Twitter.  I started and she called the "tweet noise" cute with a hint of nerd.  Now she's addicted to Twitter and goading me about her cult of followers starting to overtake mine.  Well, here are the current stats: gledgard: 63 Followers  evolvingwe:73 If you have any tips for generating followers quickly I'd love to hear them! Posted Apr 24 2008, 05:57 PM by evolvingWe Filed under: Social

• TelliTip 18: Configure E-mail Support in GraffitiCMS

  Once you have Graffiti set up and you are posting content you'll probably want to be notified by Graffiti when new user comments are made or if someone uses your contact form.  So, one of the first things you'll want to do is make sure your e-mail settings are configured properly. Log into Graffiti as a site administrator and click on the Site Options tab and then click on e-mail settings. Once you are on the e-mail tab you'll want to configure the settings. Your ISP should have help on how to configure applications to send e-mail so you may need to contact them.  After you have updated the settings from your ISP you'll want to make sure the from address is set appropriately and that you've tested via the test settings field. More information can be found here about the e-mails that are sent by default, but Graffiti plug-ins may also be taking advantage of e-mail settings that are configured as well. For example: with the blog extensions authors will get notifications for trackbacks that are posted just like comments. Posted Apr 23 2008, 01:19 PM by evolvingWe Filed under: Software

• Bring me a hotfix for the weather oh, and the Internet noise

  What a wild weather pattern we're in out here.  Seriously, I pitched in the snow today at our baseball game.  It looked something like the picture to the left... except replace real fans with homeless people that wandered by on Capitol Hill in Seattle.  Today's post is another grab bag of my recently shared items.  Enjoy! I'm glad they've found an even better home for hotfixes. Brian is a great high level guy at Microsoft that continues to push the envelope for his customers.  A new home for Visual Studio Hotfixes Weve been publishing hotfixes for general download for a year or so now. Via bharry's WebLog Ad volume?  This same thing happens with web ads.  Do people really click on bright, flickering ads like a collective of bugs being zapped over and over again? How Advertisers Shoot Themselves In Their Collective Feet The biggest challenge for advertisers today is to get people to watch their commercials. Via Blog Maverick As much as I love how Twitter provides me, as a remote employee, with the opportunity to have "water cooler" conversations it really does up the noise a level on the interwebs.  I help I turned off of audio and visual notifications like I've done for Outlook over the last few years.  Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise—And Twhirl Isn’t Helping It’s my own damn fault. Via TechCrunch Not a bad attempt... this "offline client" tries to piece together structure from web pages & RSS feeds for web forums.   Web Forum Reader: Desktop app for reading... well you know Filed under: Internet, Windows, Commercial Spend a lot of time reading web-based forums? Wish there was a way to sift through new articles without visiting umpteen sites every day and hitting refresh a few hundred times a day? Web Forum Reader is a desktop application that lets you keep read postings from a wide variety of internet forums. Via Download Squad OpenID for Community Server 2008 is pretty cool.  OpenID 2.0 for .NET now available The OpenID open source project for ASP. Via Rob Howard's Blog I loved this new twist on a dating site.  Sort of like a combination of your friends + dates + american idol.  This link goes out to my peeps at http://www.zoosk.com/.  Avoid Online Rejection, Get Your Friends Involved Unlike dating in the real world where friends and family provide introductions and serve as wingmen, online dating is usually a very solitary experience. Via TechCrunch I knew the interwebs loved Obama, but there is a serious online divide.  Know what this means... still more wild Internet growth to be had... unless it's just more old people voting for Hillary.  Maybe Barack needs a Wii channel to get the old people in between bowling games.  Stats: Obama Still Winning On the Web We all know by now that if you could vote on the Internet, Barack Obama would already be president. Via TechCrunch Crazy Idea of the week... Connect your web forums to twitter and let forum members answer support tweets. How to Get Customer Service via Twitter There has been a lot of talk lately of companies monitoring social media, be it Twitter, blogs, or social networking sites, for mentions of their company name and responding to customer service issues. Via ReadWriteWeb I like the Telligent promotes & gives back to the shared open source world.   Graffiti CMS Blog Extensions now in Google Code Earlier this week we published the Graffiti CMS Blogging Extensions. Via Rob Howard's Blog You are only going to see more and more web analytics built into web sites in the future... some of those coming from Telligent. ;-) YouTube Updates Layout, Now With Tabs And Statistics YouTube has quietly launch a new layout on video pages with a new tab focused layout and video statistics (pic above). Via TechCrunch Will the discoverability of RSS matter or will everyone be aggregating through facebook & friendfeed? 32 Unique RSS Icons usage Almost all the blogs contains at least one small RSS Icon, which sometimes create nerves to us, if we can`t find it to subscribe. Via WPZOOM I'm not sure if the post or the south park episode was more timely. AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010 (Andrew Donoghue/CNET News.com) Via Techmeme Posted Apr 20 2008, 07:51 PM by evolvingWe Filed under: Business

• TelliTip 17: Exposing trackback on your content in GraffitiCMS

  If you are using the Blog Extensions plug-in for Graffiti you may start seeing comments on your site that are not being published. This is likely because the theme you choose did not support showing trackbacks by default since they weren't part of the core GraffitiCMS app.   Kudo's goes to Jeff, who did an outstanding job explaining how to enable all of the cool functionality of the blog extensions here.  This post will borrow from that to show you how to enable trackbacks/pingbacks showing in a theme that did not support them. Log into your control panel as an admin. Go to the theme customization with Presentation > Themes > Personalize on your current theme. Click on the post.view file to open it. I recommend saving your existing copying the current post.view content into a new next file as a back-up at this point. Insert the following code where you want trackbacks to appear and save.  NOTE: I'm using the Skittlish theme so your CSS mileage may vary.  The basic concept would be to borrow as much as you can from your theme's comment section. <!--Loop through trackbacks --> #foreach($trackback in $trackbacks) <!--denote as a comment list with your CSS and title --> #beforeall     <div id="commentslist">     <h3 class="content">Trackbacks </h3>     <UL> #each     <li class="comment  by-guest">     <p class="meta"><strong><cite>     <!--Insert Trackback Title & Link -->     <a href="$trackback.WebSite" title="$trackback.Name">$trackback.Name</a></strong><br>     <!-- insert date/time posted -->     <em>Posted on  $trackback.Published.ToString("M.dd.yyyy") at $trackback.Published.ToString("h:mm tt")</em>     </cite>     </p>     <!-- Insert trackback body -->     <div class="body">     $trackback.Body     <!-- Insert check to see if you have rights to delete trackback -->     #if($isUser)     [<a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="Comments.deleteComment('$urls.AdminAjax', $trackback.Id,'comment-$trackback.Id','comment-body-$trackback.Id'); return false">Delete Pingback</a>] #end     </div>     </li> #afterall     </ul>     </div> #end <!-- end loop --> Of, if you like the way my site looks, you can download my theme here: SkittlishTrackbacks.zip Posted Apr 18 2008, 01:21 AM by evolvingWe Filed under: Software

• TelliTip 16: Get free stats with web analytics tools in GraffitiCMS

  I moved this post up after a comment on Tellitip 15 reminded me that if you are using the free version of Graffiti you don't get stats built in.  You still have an option, however, to use any number of stat tracking utilities on the web.  Graffiti allows you to insert tracking scripts into the header of every page from the control panel with these steps: Sign up for a free analytics service such as google analytics. Copy the Tracking Code from the service into your clipboard. Log into your site's control panel as an admin Click the site options tab Click the settings panel 6. Scroll down to the "Web Analytics" form and paste the tracking code there.  7. Click update settings At this point it usually takes a couple of hours for the metrics to start showing up in the analytics tool, but you'll be getting some great data. Posted Apr 16 2008, 12:12 PM by evolvingWe Filed under: Software

• Community Server 2008 Launched!

  Early this morning Telligent launched Community Server 2008 and a new home on http://communityserver.com/. Some of the details are located here, but my pet favorite things about CS 2008 include... Enterprise reporting and analytics to help dissect, analyze, and trend user and community behavior. For developers, Community Server 2008 includes a complete Web Services (REST) API for easily integrating and extending the platform. Widgets for easily sharing data between applications. (Includes widget support for Google and more). Facebook-like rich user profiles, a "friending" system, & social streams to keep tabs on your community. Groups that enable larger community sites to create smaller public or private "niche" communities.  Like having "mini-community servers" hosted in your larger community.  I've had very limited involvement, but have had the opportunity to be a "fly on the walll" as the product team closed out this release.  I was very impressed with the attention to detail and effort that went into creating this product and am looking forward to being able to help more directly on future releases.  Oh yeah, my new job... the first product focused Program Manager at Telligent. I guess that makes me "Director of Program Management".  I officially started earlier this month and have been working to define the role while planning the next few big releases from Telligent.  They have some awesome devs to have gone this long without our discipline. :-) Posted Apr 15 2008, 05:30 PM by evolvingWe Filed under: Software

• TelliTip 15: Shortcut to your top 10 posts for a specific day in GraffitiCMS

  You may have noticed the "Reporting" tab in your Graffiti administration UI.  What you may not have realized is that the graph that opens on your dashboard page is click-able. You may, for example, log in and see that you have a spike of views in a day and want a quick answer about what content item caused this spike.  To get to this view you'll want to log into your dashboard, wait for the chart to load, and click on the day you are interested in.  The related tip is that most of the charts and graphs in Graffiti are click-able. This allows you to drill into the numbers you see with ease. Clicking any point will open up the following view for that day: Posted Apr 14 2008, 07:38 AM by evolvingWe Filed under: Software

• TelliTip 14: Improve your blogging with the Blog Extensions for GraffitiCMS

  Graffiti is really a great CMS solution, but you can also use it as a simple blogging engine.  If, like me, you are using it primarily as a blog engine you'll want to take advantage of the blog extensions that have been released by Telligent.  Among other things the blog extensions adds a comments RSS feed, the ability to receive and automatically send trackbacks and pingbacks, the ability to ping blog update services, and support for GeoRSS. Here are the steps to install the blog extensions: Make sure you are on v1.0.1 or higher.  Log into your control panel as an admin Go to Site Options -> Plug-ins -> and Search for online plug-ins.   Select the Blog Extensions Click install plugin Refresh the plugins page Click Edit on the Blog Extensions Plugin. Enable the services you want to use and click update. On the plugins screen click "enable" on the blog extensions plugin. Congratulations you've now installed, configured, and enabled the Blog Extensions for GraffitiCMS! Time to celebrate... Posted Apr 11 2008, 03:41 AM by evolvingWe Filed under: Software

• What determines the quality of user generated content?

  On the Freakonomics blog they link to a comparison between recent YouTube and MetaFilter user commentary.  The question is asked if $5 can improve the quality of the comments.  You can guess what this looks like, but its worth checking out the difference in comments for yourself. On the Web site thatsaspicymeatball, you can view the latest comments from MetaFilter (which requires a one-time, $5 membership fee to post a comment) and YouTube (free) side by side... Here’s how a poster from each site expresses disagreement: Metafilter: And here’s where we diverge, as we have from the get-go … YouTube: yeah you’re dumb you expect me to shut up because you tell me to? ha yeah sure Via Freakonimics My personal opinion is that there isn't just one thing that determines the quality of user comments. My theory is that the quality of commentary (and user contributions to a site in general) is dependant on a mix of the following in order:  Original Content: The content you put on your site is what draws users to it in the first place.  It also sets an example of the type of writing and quality you expect from your visitors.  Present a well written set of wiki articles or blog posts and expect well written replies for the most part.  Host videos of flatulent pandas and the people that are drawn to that sort of thing are the people that are going to be leaving their mark (for better or worse) on your site. Monkey See Monkey Do: If your user comments are already full of LOLSpeak tnage txtspeak (man I'm old) then that's what people think is expected of them.  Then, wanting to fit in, people will devolve to match to the expectations. It's going to be hard to prove otherwise once you start letting content you don't want to see flow into your site.  Reputation:  How do you reward/credit the people who generate content you like?  Do you look them up, thank them, and highlight their content?  How tied are users to their accounts?  Do you give them a reason to post good content?  This is the carrot side of things and the stick, of course, is... Moderation Policies:  It's your site so you have control over what's posted and behavior you want to see.  If you moderate posts and aggressively and penalize bad content by removing or hiding it from other users then you start to impact factors #1 & #2.   Did I miss a category?  What else factors into the quality/type of user content on community sites?  If anyone knows about a study with real data that would help prove or disprove the importance of these factors I'd love to see it. I'll leave you with the following, semi-related, picture. Posted Apr 10 2008, 08:14 PM by evolvingWe Filed under: Social

• Is your application "ready to rock"?

  I love this touch of personality... especially considering this tool is made for something that's traditionally boring... Posted Apr 09 2008, 09:29 PM by evolvingWe Filed under: Design

• TelliTip 13: Check what version of GraffitiCMS you are running & Upgrade to V1.0.1 needed.

  If you've recently downloaded Graffiti then you are likely running the most recent version, but how can you find out for sure?  To verify the version of Graffiti you are running you can view the page properties on your site. In Firefox right click on your site and click "Page Info".  You'll see the following dialog.  The version is stored in the "Generator" meta-tag. In IE you'll need to right click to "view source" and look for the following line at the top of the source... <meta name="generator" content="Graffiti CMS 1.0 (build 1.0.1.963)" /> This means that I'm now running V1.0.1.  If you find you are running something less at the moment you can find upgrade instructions here. To see what's new in the V1.0.1 release you can see the release notes here.   Posted Apr 09 2008, 07:36 AM by evolvingWe Filed under: Software

• TelliTip 12: Post Silverlight Streaming Media Easy

  Jim Martin spent the weekend creating a great plug-in for Graffiti that makes it super simple to insert streaming Silverlight media into your posts.  The download and usage instructions are here. Note that this should be considered a beta/demo/(however you say not officially supported). I should also not that because of that installing this plug-in, similar to the Silverlight photos plug-in that Kevin created, requires manually dropping the DLL onto your sites BIN directory. The shortcut to doing this without server access is to use the GraffitiCMS file uploader: In Graffiti, as an admin, you can do this with Site Options > Utilities > File Browser.  Open the Bin directory and click Add Files. Posted Apr 07 2008, 04:14 AM by evolvingWe Filed under: Software

• From "asshattery" to remembering Kozmo.com in the year 2000

  Time to check on on things I've recently found interesting. This post is brought to you from Google Reader by my Feed Inserting plugin for Windows Live writer.  Get your copy here. People don't realize it, but Xbox live is one of the worlds largest social networks with a true API and great applications that people share with each other.   The network is very popular, but because it sports voice communication the illusion that you are playing against people like you is completely destroyed.  I'll be very interested to see how they approach solving this problem with new releases of Live and the Xbox.  They've taken step one... admitting that "asshats" exist... Microsoft: Online behavior reducing sales Filed under: News, Xbox Live, Multiplayer So dear reader, when was the last time you were on Live? Now, when was the last time you were on Live and did not encounter some form of asshat? However long ago it was, it was definitely too recent, and word is starting to really get around.Via Xbox 360 Fanboy Everyone go welcome Craigslist <conan voice> "To the yeeeaaarrr two thouuuusand" </conan voice> Craigslist Launches Official Blog Craigslist launches their official blog today at blog. Via TechCrunch It's amazing to me that the music industry continues to treat digital distribution like a red headed step child... Apple Is Now the #1 US Music Retailer Quantrell writes "A leaked e-mail shows that Apple hit the #1 spot for music sales in January.Via Slashdot I can't tell you how much confusion and how much energy has gone into google spreadheets to figure out who owed who money on our friend group. Now if only it was a facebook app with mobile support.  Finnish Startup Scred Adds Another Way To Divvy Up Debts Between Friends Today, at the Next Web conference, I met the founders of Scred, a Finnish startup that lets friends manage their their debts to each other. Via TechCrunch Will there be anything left worth buying for MSFT? Yahoo Loses Its Musical Soul Yahoo Music Vice President Ian Rogers has resigned to join a new stealth music startup called Topspin Media as CEO. Via TechCrunch Well, if they are going to do this then the least they could do is offer me TBS in HD so I could watch the baseball games with some better quality.  The really bad part about this is that, during the games, they run ads about how many more HD channels they have... just not the one you are watching! Comcast Degrades HD Quality To Make Room For More Channels Wow. Via Digg If the web replaces TV time for people then what is Friendfeed... TVguide?   Friendfeed Frenzy - Why it continues (Charlie Anzman/SEO and Tech Daily) Charlie Anzman / SEO and Tech Daily: Friendfeed Frenzy - Why it continues  —  I think we can all comfortably credit Louis Gray with carving out a neat niche and bringing the so-called numerous lifestreaming apps to the ‘significant awareness’ pool. Via Techmeme You knew it wasn't going to last, but there was nothing better <conan> in the year 2000</conan> than ordering up some wine, ice cream,  and the latest dreamcast games and having it at your door faster than the pizza. Wakozi is Kozmo For Booze One of the great flameouts of the 1990s tech boom was Kozmo, which started in Manhattan, and let you order a pint of Ben Jerry’s online and a Kozmo bike messenger would deliver it to your door. Via TechCrunch He also seems to have the strongest set of web communities.  Coincidence? Obama Rewriting Rules for Raising Campaign Money Online Obama has shattered fundraising records and challenged ideas about the way presidential bids are financed. Via Digg A good thing for those of you trying to figure out how much "theoretical money" you've made on YouTube.  Track statistics of your YouTube video with YouTube Insight Filed under: Business, Internet, Video, Google Google, reigning king of exhaustive analytics, has just released a specialized analytics tool for YouTube, aptly named YouTube Insight. Via Download Squad Posted Apr 06 2008, 11:42 PM by evolvingWe Filed under: Business