ProSPOTLIGHT Blog Posts

Online Marketing - The Boxing Out Factor

Search Engine Optimization is an important marketing strategy because it can deliver inexpensive targeted leads. It's a long term process where a company will attempt to create a site that is viewed by the search engines as the authoritative source for that term and will be displayed first.

Over time, a company active in SEO marketing will determine which phrases result in the highest conversion. For truly valuable phrases, it's often not enough to claim the top spot. Instead, the company will work to box out their competitors on the first page. In other words, the company will promote additional pages so that they will also be listed on the first page causing others to be pushed to page 2. Since search engines will only list 1-2 pages per domain per search, the company would need to have other domains that are relevant to that keyword phrase. This doesn't have to always be their domain. They might have a listing in a directory, a page on another site such as Squidoo or Wikipedia, or an article on somebody else's site.

For a while, people used sub-domains to box out their competitors, but there's talk that the search engines are going to start looking at sub-domains as folders, which limits it down to the 1-2 links per search. Because of this, the only reliable method is to promote pages on several sites.

The more you own a keyword phrase, the better. Repetition is a powerful selling tool. The more somebody sees references to a particular business related to what they're looking for, the more credible that company becomes in their mind.

Online Marketing - creating Content Islands™ to increase your web presence

Content Island ™

A Content Island is a term I've coined for the process of creating a set of pages that link to each other. This can be a full website, but it doesn't have to be and usually isn't. The fact is that it's far more beneficial to have higher ranking pages linking to your website than pages with few links back to them.

To create those higher ranking pages, you'll need to have several pages linking to them, and that's where the concept of the Content Island comes into play. Many websites allow you to link to your website from your profile page, and those same websites link back to your profile page in many places. Take, for example, a blog site where you can comment on other's blogs. Typically, part of the comment will include a link to your profile or blog. The more you use their site, the more links are pointed back to your profile or blog, which will increase your profile page's value. This makes that one link from your profile on their website to your main website much more valuable.

In addition, you'll start to build credibility on that site assuming that your comments and other activities are legit and sincere. This will result in more traffic to your pages on that site and ultimately more traffic to your real website.

ProSPOTLIGHT is a great site to create such a place because it gives you the ability to create a 5 page website, a blog, and a profile. Each of these pages link to each other, which gives them intrinsic value for both your readers and the search engines. When you comment on other's blogs, there are additional links that point back to your spotlight page, which further increases your spotlight's worth.

Online Marketing - the importance of generating buzz for your website

The Internet is a massive encyclopedia of knowledge that millions of people have contributed to. The web is made up of billions of pages that are all linked together. Some of those pages are linked to by thousands of others, while some are linked to by very few. This is nothing new since it's the fundamental concept of the world wide web.

The search engines have looked at the Internet as a whole and have tried to figure out what pages are the most important. Google, in particular, decided that each link is like a vote. The more links that point to a page, the more important that page must be. In addition to this, they've decided that a vote's worth is determined by how many pages link to it and so on. They also look at how closely both pages relate to each other. The closer their subjects are, the more valuable that link is. Google calls this concept PageRank.

As with any sort of ranking algorithm, there's an underlying problem. The pages and sites that are deemed important are shown to more people, which in turn makes them more important since more people will view them and potentially link to them. This makes it so the sites that are on top stay on top, while the rest are left in the dust.

There are as many strategies to get somebody on the top of the search pages as there are people trying to get there. What it ultimately boils down to is that a web site needs to generate some buzz to break into the upper crust of the existing monolithic websites. Once a buzz gets started, more people will link to them, which generates more buzz. Over time, they'll reach the top of their prized keywords.

So how do you generate buzz?

There are many methods, but the one that I like the best is a technique I've coined Content Islands.

The bundled mysql.rb driver has been removed from Rails 2.2 in Aptana

I use Aptana Studio to program in Ruby on Rails. Today, I upgraded Rails to 2.2.2 on my laptop and after I did that, Aptana complained that MySQL's driver had been removed. The error happened after I loaded Mongrel inside Aptana and I tried to view the application's homepage.

This is the error that I'd get:

"!!! The bundled mysql.rb driver has been removed from Rails 2.2. Please install the mysql gem and try again: gem install mysql."

After reinstalling everything a few times, I found a forum post that put me on the right direction.

When I upgraded, it installed a newer version of the MySQL gem, which apparently doesn't work well with Aptana. To fix, I put the old MySQL dll in my ruby\bin folder, and it worked like a champ.

The dll file is here:

http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/InstantRails-win/InstantRails/mysql/bin/libmySQL.dll

I'm using the InstantRails package, and so my ruby folder is here: c:\rails\ruby\bin

I then restarted the MySQL server and Aptana and it worked perfectly.

Upgrading to Rails 2.2.2 in Instant Rails with Rmagick

This article assumes assuming that you're using the Rmagick gem. If not, just skip the Rmagick instructions. It also assumes that you're comfortable getting around in a Windows command prompt and installing and uninstalling standard Windows programs.

Upgrading Ruby on Rails is fairly easy, though there are a few steps involved.

First you'll need to download the latest Rmagick gem with ImageMagick. At the time of this writing, it is 2.7.1 for Ruby 1.8.6.

Unzip it to somewhere easy to get to at a command prompt then type the following commands:

gem uninstall rmagick
gem uninstall sqllite3-ruby
gem update --system
gem update
gem cleanup

Uninstall any existing version of ImageMagick that you have and then install the version of ImageMagick that came in your Rmagick gem zip.

Navigate to where you unzipped the Rmagick gem in the command prompt and type:
gem install --local rmagick

Next, make sure you have all the gems required by your application such as will_paginate by navigating to your application root, and running:
rake gems:install

Of course, the gems need to be defined in the config/environment.rb file. In my case, I have mislav-will_paginate defined like this:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
#Get the Will_Paginate Plugin
config.gem 'mislav-will_paginate',
    :version => '~> 2.3.6',
    :lib => 'will_paginate',
    :source => 'http://gems.github.com'
    #...
end

That should be it. I usually run 'rake log:clear' just to clear out those text files since they get pretty fat. For tips like these and other useful technical tips, visit Ask Some Geeks.

Running on Clouds

Traditionally, the three flavors of web hosting consists of shared hosting, virtual private hosting, or dedicated hosting.

In a shared environment, your site sits on the same server as hundreds or perhaps thousands of others. This is typically the cheapest option, and different hosting companies allow a variety of different features. Usually, you'll have the ability to run server side scripts such as Perl or PHP, have access to a database server such as MySQL, and a variety of other features. For most sites with a limited amount of traffic, low security concerns, and generic requirements, this is a great option, especially since there are companies that will host your site for under $10/month.

Dedicated hosting is where you rent a server and have all of its resources to yourself. This is much more expensive than shared hosting, but it has traditionally been the best option for sites with specific needs, lots of traffic, and consumes lots of computer resources. Dedicated plans start at around $100/month and go up to many thousands.

Virtual hosting is a hybrid of the shared and dedicated models. Relatively few users are on the same server, and each has their own installs of the programs that they use. For example, each would have their own install of MySQL, Apache, etc. This tends to be priced in the middle of dedicated and shared hosting and works well for sites with specific needs, but not huge amounts of traffic.

The problem with each of these plans is that it's somewhat difficult to estimate how much computer resources your site is going to need because of the possibility that your site may be featured by a large site, which will drive more traffic than your server can handle. If you go over your limit on a shared plan, the hosting company will turn off your site for a period of time so that you don't bring others down. If you have more traffic than your dedicated server can handle, people will see their pages loading slowly or they may see errors such as 'too many connections'. To account for this, many people get into plans that far exceed what they need on a regular basis, which ends up costing much more than they should have to pay.

The solution to this is cloud computing.

Cloud computing is similar to virtual hosting in that you don't have dedicated computers at your disposal. Instead, the cloud is a server farm with many thousands of computers all acting as one. A person is then able to create server instances that use slices of the overall cloud. This allows for very flexible configurations and makes it possible to increase resources very quickly when needed. Each instance has its own operating system and all the programs and data that go along with it, and works for both Windows and Linux servers.

For example, let's say a person has one instance running a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and a Programming language such as Perl or PHP). Using Apache's Proxy or another Proxy server program, it has the ability to load balance website views. At first, the proxy hands off each request to itself. A short while later, the company starts a major marketing campaign that is going to last for 6 weeks during the holiday season, but drops off dramatically at the first of the year. The company can then bring up as many new instances as needed, and configure the proxy server to load balance between them. On January 1st, the company shuts down those extra instances, and they're back to their single one. This way, during their traffic spike, they have the resources needed, and aren't spending extra money on hosting when they don't.

There are companies such as RightScale that help automate this process for clouds such as Amazon's EC2. Using their system, they can make it possible for instances to be spawned automatically when the site reaches configurable threshholds such as when processor reaches 80% usage for 30 minutes. When the load drops back down, it removes the instance so that the site's capacity can ebb and flow with its traffic. Sudden spikes are no longer a concern, and the cost savings because of it can be huge.

Since cloud computing only charges you for what you actually use, there's another benefit... staging servers. You can set up an instance exactly like your production environment to test new site features. Once it's fully tested, you can turn it off and you only paid for the time it was actually turned on. This way, you're not affecting your production environment with testing, but you can test the exact production set up instead of just from your local machine. In the past, you had to have dedicated machines that just sat there for days or weeks at a time doing nothing except during the testing phase. Now, you don't have that expense.