This is the young generation of entrepreneurs who are using the resources at their disposal, and finding ways to ‘get it done’.  As a software developer, I can really see the potential of giving this core demographic tools with which to conduct business and be their own bosses.  The formula must be: Ideas + Energy + Resources = Success.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/Teenagers-are-building-their-own-job-engine/2100-1022_3-6249826.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

Publishing for Flash Versions Which Already Have a Wide Footprint

Of course Adobe wants users to have the latest Flash version, so if you are developing in say, Flash CS4 and you export your movie, it may be set automatically as “Flash player 10″.  Personally as someone who is thinking about the end-user experience, this doesn’t work for me, because I don’t want my users to go through a download process or update process using Flash.  Therefore, if my content does not use AS3 or advanced animation features, I will simply publish in “Flash player 8″ — a version that I know has very good rendering standards and is widely in use.

Providing Alternative Content

It is also very important to provide alternative (i.e. non-SWF) content, that can be viewed in the case of the user not having the Flash plug–in installed.  This happens more than Adobe would lead you to believe — for exapmple one ofmy friends who runs an older Mac laptop has had to install a “Flash blocker” on Firefox because his system cannot handle the high-performance that some Flash player 9 and 10 content requires — therefore he has to block it in order to avoid system hang-ups when browing to a page.

In order to make sure that (as close to) 100% of your audience can view your content, you should always provide an alternative, such as a .jpg, .png, .gif, “or even text content.  Use that space to show meaningful content, instead of lousy error messages!

Improve the User Experience by Reducing End-User Technical Knowledge Requirements

In my mind there is a direct corelation between our users being able to focus on content and the user experienc, as opposed to having to worry about technical tasks like installing plug-ins.  Let’s provide a service to them by reducing end-user labor, as well as the amount of  technical knowledge– required to view your content — your user does not have to think about what technologies are being used in order to experience it

In order to implement alternative content, here is a great article abou using SWFObject 2.0:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/alternative_content.html

Happy Interaction!

San Francisco, California – February 19, 2009

Heaven Interactive is pleased to announce that it is now offering custom WordPress installations for publishers, marketers, and on-line retailers.  These packages will allow clients to have custom-designed, fully-editable websites containing both static and dynamic web pages, such as blog and news content.

By utilizing the power of templates, and dynamic content, Heaven Interactive can build unique websites tailored to clients’ needs, freeing clients from tedious technical installation and maintenance, and enabling them to do what they do best — publish content, and generate sales.

Aimed squarely at content publishers (whether on-line marketers, P.R. firms, or retailers), these packages will put the power of Internet publishing in the client’s hands.  And best of all, the web sites are all built on WordPress, the most flexible CMS system available.

For more information, visit the WordPress CMS webpage.

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Many businesses rely almost entirely on affiliates to bring in new customers, and find it a more efficient and cost-effective way of marketing their products and services to an audience.  Affiliate programs are especially attractive to advertisers and publishers who work with niche content and products, because it allows them to focus their marketing efforts towards only the people who may be interested in certain products and services, rather than the general public as a whole.

Affiliate marketing can be very effexrtive for small- and medium-sized  businesses who do not have the advertising budget of large corporations, yet have products that sell within a given niche.

Example: Gourmet Coffee Niche Marketing

AS an example, an on-line retailer of rare gourmet coffee beans from Hawaii may offer a product which only appeals to a small audience of people.  Although this niche is very small, however, this audience is highly interested in information and products related to the preparation and serving of this gourmet coffee.  In this case, a blogger may start a website giving customers background information, reviews, and purchasing information about cofffee beans, or start a ‘coffee lovers forum’ which encourages people to partciipate in discussion about the coffee and share tips with other aficionados.

To generate revenue for such a coffee lovers site, the blogger may place certain affiliate links in different areas on the site, whether banners or text links.  These links contain sepcial codes which allow parent businesses to track which affiliates are sending them traffic, and thereby credit, or pay the affiliates for any sales generated by their leads.  Thanks to sophisticated tracking technology, many affiliates are able to receive credit for sales generated by visitors as much as 6 months after the first visit – that is, if the visitor does not purchase immediately the affiliate may still get credited for a later purchase if it is proven that the affiliate was the person who referred the customer.  Most affiliate programs utilize ‘browser cookies’ to verify the last affiliate who referred a user, therefore ensuring the affiliate receives the commission.

Keys to Affiliate Success

There are many affiliates who earn a six-figure (that’s right) income from affiliate marketing.  This of course takes real planning, intention, and savvy, that can only be gained by practical experience.  So get started today!   Some of the keys to success as a performance (or affiliate) marketer are also important for content publishing in general::

1. Providing useful relevant, targeted information for a user. Relevant information will build traffic to your website, which will increase your chances of sales.
2. Highlighting specific products and services which ‘complement’ the content that the user is viewing.
3. Becoming an expert in your particular niche, and gaining the trust of your readers.  (This can happen as a result of steps 1 and 2).
4. Highlighting sales and promotions so that your users will save money as a result of clicking through your links.

What Kinds of Affiliate Programs are Available?

There is a great deal of technology behind affiliate programs – tracking all sotrts of metrics such as effectiveness, “cost-per-view”, “cost-per-click”, and other technical statistics.  Because of the need for such technically detailed reporting and tracking, many businesses choose to use a 3rd party affiliate program provider, which then takes care of the technical specifics regardings setup and execution of the program.  This allows a publisher (such as a blogger) to go to sign up for multiple programs via one website, instead of having to go to multiple websites and manage multiple programs.

There are affiliate programs for just about every niche on the Internet, and new affiliate programs are created every day.  If you are a publisher, this is  great news, because you are then able to combine your relevant and interesting information and services with products and links which are actually useful to the user, which means revenue for you. This is a ‘win-win’ situation as all parties (users, service and product providers, and yourself) benefit and gain information and services that they want. Affiliate programs work well when people learn more about what they are looking for (rather than seeing ads for what they do not want).

Where Can I Sign Up For Affiliate Programs?

Listed below are some of the well-regarded (and highly successful) affiliate program providers on the Web.  To get started, just click through, signup, and begin placing links on your website.  With a little patience and perseverance, you can begin earning affiliate income.

Linkshare

Commission Junction

Shopzilla Publisher Program

Amazon Associates Affiliate Program

Ebay Partner Network

Pepperjam

My SQL knowledge is fairly basic.  I am an interactive designer, not a strict low-level coder, so I am looking for solutions that do not require cryptic or highly detailed SQL, when I want to access a DB system.

If you want to access the WP MySQL database tables, you can of course include the ‘wp-db.php’ file and use their class which is a wrapper (as detailed on the Wordpress.com site) for accessing the DB.  I tried this, and within the system I am working on (PHP files pulling posts from a certain category on a WP install into a completely different site), this didn’t work for me.

Again my SQL is quite basic, but you should be able to see the table relationships based on my ‘kiddie code’.  

Below is the code to pull in articles from a category:

SELECT DISTINCT post_name FROM `wp_posts`, wp_term_relationships, wp_term_taxonomy WHERE wp_term_relationships.object_id = wp_posts.id AND post_status = ‘publish’ and post_type = ‘post’ AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id AND wp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy = ‘category’ AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = YOUR_CATEGORY_ID

Check out this very thorough (well-written and commented) script. Works like a charm.

However, the problem was not what I thought it was — the system querying the database for the WP configuration information, and then subsequently executing my own scripts. It always seemed just a little TOO slow for this to be the problem.

In another (what I thought was unrelated) search, I was looking for why I was getting 404 headers being served from all of my pages, that were non-wordpress, but included that pesky wp-blog-header.php file.

Turns out that the old wp-blog-header is a freakin megalomaniac. It wants everything. It was the one sending 404 headers out for my pages that were non-wordpress. This effectively killed my google indexing for pages.

On top of that, it WAS SLOWING THE SYSTEM DOWN when rendering that header, doing extra processing.

Now that that is fixed, my non-wordpress pages render about 3 times as fast.

Hallelujah, Praise be to Allah Krishna Jesus and the cast of ‘That 70s Show’.

Here is a link I found detailing a good fix:

http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2984

and thanks to these dudes for telling me about it!

Basically the code, in whatever file that includes the header, should look like something like this (mind the paths):

<?php
define(’WP_USE_THEMES’, false) ;
require(’../../../wp-blog-header.php’); // i’m in wp-content/themes/js.php
header(”HTTP/1.1 200 OK”); // else we get 404
header(”Status: 200 All rosy”) ; // what should this really say?
?>

If you are running live WordPress installations, you may come to a point where you need to make an actual copy of your existing WordPress installation on the same server. I could not find this procedure documented on the WordPress.org site (I did find moving and upgrading, but not copying).

In this case the procedure is pretty straightforward. Here is an overview of what needs to be done:

• Make a new folder inside of your web root.
• Copy your WP files there (but don’t open anything in a web browser yet.)
• Create a new database for your blog copy.
• Edit the wp-config.php file in your new copy to reflect your new database and login credentials.
• Update the “wp-options” table in your DB to reflect your new site location.

I found this tutorial online which shows you how to do it from the command line. You will need some basic UNIX skills, but this way really is quick and easy. Especially if you are running on a virtual dedicated or dedicated server.

The tutorial is written for copying to a local installation on Ubuntu. But you can modify it for copying within your server. You will not necessarily need to setup the alias in the conf.d/ directory or enable mod_rewrite as most likely you will already have these elements installed correctly. Other than that it translates very easily.

Since I use GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated Hosting, it’s pretty freakin’ simple to work with multiple WordPress installations, domains, databases, and files. Just get a shell and every file, folder, as well as MySQL is accessible from the command line. It’s the joy of Linux and the joy of webmastering.

Happy Blogging!

Make a Backup Copy of your Production Wordpress Blog on Ubuntu

I really dislike calling tech support. It’s just not in my blood. I’m very happy that I have it (it makes me feel very secure, thank you), and if I was a newbie, I would probably use it more. Myself, I just like things to run, and run smoothly. Just keep going without any hangups and everything will be fine. I know a decent amount of Unix and I can find my way around the terminal from OS X (my OS) or Putty on Windows, so being able to just SSH into my system is essential. I call it “my system”, because A VDS is really a platform in itself; and if you are running multiple websites or interactive applications you will definitely need a platform that gives you access to the computing and networking power of the server itself. Sure, lots of shared hosting accounts offer SSH, but it’s usually limited, and of course you can’t get root access, or really install any scripts that use up resources constantly. What if I want to install a Perl chat server, or a Java multi-player game server for Flash? Trick out my PHP installation with new modules? What if I need to work with sockets? Even if I am just prototyping something for myself or a client, having my own VDS just makes it so easy, and I don’t need any one’s permission to go crazy on my own server. It’s my world! Woohoo.

What is a Virtual Dedicated Server?

A virtual dedicated server is basically a partition on a server which is running its own instance of an operating system. A VDS server can be rebooted and managed separately, making it independent from other virtual servers. A VDS can offer a performance level substantially higher than shared hosting, as well as root access and static IP addresses.

Safety Net

The good thing about having a VDS account with GoDaddy is that it’s “managed”, by their system administrators, to a degree. Yes you get root access, but if you really screw things up in a big way, you can always call the aforementioned tech support people and have them reset, reboot, or try to help with your problem. That is a great thing about GoDaddy – they don’t really have to clean up your messes for you, but they will try to give you as much help as possible, because they want your business. You can call them anytime and they will try to sort you out. That means a lot to me, and that’s why I’m sticking with them.

Handling Multiple Domains and Users

When you work with a VDS, you can handle multiple domains very easily, compared to shared hosting. Every domain really is its own entity, not just an aliased folder in your public_html directory. Each website has it’s own true directory structure, with a private/ directory and cgi-bin of its own. Also, each domain will have its own users (shell and FTP), which will give you the ability to handle a big organization’s hosting needs, with every one only being able to see what they need, without exposing the rest of your files.

Run Anything

As mentioned, with a VDS, you can run anything on your server. This is HUGE, if you are creating multimedia apps. I am basically a Flash (ActionScript 3.0) developer working with a lot of PHP / MySQL. However, I often need to add modules to my core system, especially Unix apps that handle .Mp3s and streaming (like Icecast and Ices, getid3, etc), or libraries for processing images or video on the server. I then hook these into Flash through PHP, Perl, Java, XML, or some combination of these. I set up a few cron jobs and init.d scripts, and suddenly I am running an extended back-end, much bigger than I expected at first.. It’s impossible to do this on shared hosting , but if you want to play with the big kids, then VDS will allow you to do it. You can tie in your apps with web services already out there, like Flickr, Amazon, Facebook, etc., making your computing / multi-media power “virtually” unlimited (no pun intended).

Super Responsive

My VDS is quite ‘fast’, from a response standpoint. Even though VDS servers are actually partitions of a bigger server, because of virtualization, when you use a VDS, you are getting your own set of resources. This means that other partitions on the main server can be overloaded, but this will really not affect you – your sites will keep cruising along as fast as your scripts allow. This is so much better than shared hosting where your traffic can see a big drop because of bad programming, or your scripts will end up executing slowly because someone is running resource-hogging scripts. This doesn’t happen on a VDS.

Simple Control Panel

I am not a big fan of those overloaded control panels that some hosting companies offer. They are generally too many graphics, and too many page refreshes for my liking. If I just want to create a database, why do I need to go through 5 screens to make it happen? With my particular VDS account, I get a ‘Simple Control Panel’ which gives me everything I need, without bloat.

Plenty of Benefits

There are other things I like about my VDS, but too many to mention here. I’ll summarize some with bullet points:

• Root Access – Basically gives you complete control of your server, giving you the lowest-level access available
• Unlimited Databases and Command Line Management of Them
• Total Control Over Cron Jobs
• Abiliy to Reboot Your Server When You Want
• Unlimited User / FTP Accounts
• Run Java / C++ / Perl Socket programs — Woohoo!
• Lots More

In short, if you are an interactive designer or developer, and you are still running shared hosting, you will probably need to step it up at some point. When you do, consider a VDS account that gives you the flexibility you need. Oh, and you might want to learn just a little bit of UNIX – it will go a long way. Happy scripting.

Links

GoDaddy Virtual Dedicated Servers

More About Virtual Dedicated Servers

(Download the files for this tutorial.
You will also need: Flash CS3. Download Trial or Buy Now.)

Instead we have to use the Loader class, as well as the URLRequest class. This actually gives us more flexibility when loading external images, because of the various events of the Loader object that we can create event listeners for.

Let’s say that we a .swf file called “main.swf”, a document class file called “Main.as”, and a .jpg file called “thePic.jpg” in a directory called “images/”. (If you are not yet familar with the document class, please see this tutorial).

Our directory structure would look like the following (click to expand):

In order to load the .jpg into our file, we first need to import the correct classes into our scope. We will require the URLRequest and Loader classes, and also, we’ll go ahead and import the “events” package, since it is often good practice to have all of the events handy.

The Code

Here is our code for the Main.as file so far:

package {
	import flash.display.MovieClip;
	import flash.display.Loader;
        import flash.events.*;
	import flash.net.URLRequest;

Next, we’ll go ahead and make our constructor, a function called Main(). Inside our constructor we will create:

1. A Loader object, called imageLoader;
2. A URLRequest object, called imageRequest.

We will pass the path to our bitmap image (which should be a .gif, .jpg, or .png file), to the URLRequest() constructor. In our case it will be a .jpg.

package {

     import flash.display.MovieClip;
     import flash.display.Loader;
     import flash.events.*;
     import flash.net.URLRequest;

	public class Main extends MovieClip {

		public function Main() {

		var imageLoader:Loader = new Loader();

		var theURL:String = "images/thePic.jpg";

		var imageRequest = new URLRequest(theURL);

Next, we will add the all-important event listener. As you should now be aware, interactivity is all about events (so you should get to know your event listener syntax ). Please note here, that we are not adding the event listener directly to the Loader object, we are passing it to one of its properties, its contentLoaderInfo object. For more about the contentLoaderInfo class, see the Adobe docs here. This object will trigger an event called “COMPLETE” when everything is loaded, so this is what we will listen for. To this event we assign the listener onComplete(), to be defined later (see below).

After the event listener is set, we then call the load() method of the Loader() object that we have instantiated as imageLoader.

Lastly, placing the image on stage is handled by our (nested) function called onComplete(). It does the work of adding our newly loaded DisplayObject instance (in this case the content property of a Loader object) to the display list using addChild(). The complete constructor function is below:

public function Main() {

     var imageLoader:Loader = new Loader();
     var theURL:String = "images/thePic.jpg";
     var imageRequest = new URLRequest(theURL);

     imageLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onComplete);

     imageLoader.load(imageRequest);

     function onComplete(evt:Event) {

          addChild(imageLoader.content);

     }

}

Notice the line:

addChild(imageLoader.content);

The content property of the Loader object is used here because it actually contains our image. If we want to manipulate it as a Bitmap however, we will have to cast it to the correct data type (not covered in this tutorial).

Don’t Forget to Unload the Image When You are Done With It

The title of this section says it all. You should use the removeChild() method of the DisplayObjectContainer that the object belongs to (in this case our main timeline), as well as the Loader.unload() method to remove all references to the loaded image. (Unless you want to keep the bitmap in memory of course). Once there are no remaining references, our good friend the garbage collector will remove the bitmap from memory.

And that concludes this tutorial. I hope you enjoyed it. Ciao and happy ActionScripting!