Technology Archive

SEO Your WordPress Site

Last night I had the opportunity to speak at Boston WordPress Meetup on the topic of SEO and Wordpress. One of the questions I asked the audience before I started was how many people were using WordPress for their business site. The answer was almost all of them.

When I started thinking about it, I realized that many of our customers probably are using WordPress as well, so why not provide some tips here on how to make a WP site SEO friendly.

All in One SEO Pack

One of the great things about WordPress is that it is open source so people are always making it better and keeping it current with technology. While SEO certainly isn’t new it has become much more important over the last few years.

The All in One SEO Pack is a terrific plugin that can help improve your site and eliminate issues that can be caused through WP, including duplicate pages (the plugin blocks /tag, /author & /category) and canonicalization.

The other great thing about the All In One plugin is it allows you to set a custom title and meta description.

URL Configuration

With so many people using WP for their business website, it’s important that you can configure the URLs to your specifications. Read more »

3 Key Factors to Success in an Agile Environment

Agile development means a lot of things to a lot of people. Depending on what role you have in a software-centric company, agile development might impact you in regards to anything from hiring, to marketing tactics or organizing planning sessions. As a front end developer here at Grasshopper, I’m a member of an agile team of engineers, and have experienced agile from the depths of the development trenches.

With all that can be said about agile and the concepts surrounding it, from my point of view there a few simple things that are absolutely key to finding success using this process: know yourself, know your team, know your project.

the_thinker_by_Brian_Hillegas

Knowledge of self is the first key factor to being able to find success in an agile environment. In order to achieve your goals within small, demanding iterations, you have to be aware of your own limitations within that span of time. Work life, personal life, and everything else in-between can be factors that impact not only the amount of time that is at your disposal during a development cycle, but the level of focus that you will be able to give your tasks. Having a solid understanding of yourself is the first step towards successfully producing high quality work with the rest of your team.

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Audio in the Year 2010 – No More iTunes Store

So it’s 2010, and the times they are a-changin’.  My cd rack is now non-existent, but I still want to find, listen to and buy new music regularly, and in the highest quality format available.  When it comes to quality, MP3’s and the iTunes store’s m4a formats are both ‘lossy‘ music formats – meaning the quality of the audio is degraded by discarding data when the file is encoded.  So for me, the only real options for buying music are lossless formats, and sweet delicious vinyl.

headphones_girl

A lot of people might say that you can’t even tell the difference between a high quality mp3 and a lossless format such as flac, ape or wav – but those people probably don’t have a ZERO DAC headphone amp with Sennheiser 650’s or AKG701’s plugged into it (like I do).  When you use a high quality audio system, the difference between lossy and lossless audio is like night and day.

So where does someone who is concerned with selection and audio quality go to get music, knowing that the iTunes store can’t adequately provide either of these things?  Thankfully, there are options, and the iTunes store should be a shameful last resort for audiophiles anywhere.

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CSS3 & Me: Bros

If you ask any front end developer about CSS3, you’ll probably be hard pressed to get them to stop singing its praises, but why is everyone so excited about a technology that doesn’t even have a solidified specification yet?  The answer is simple.  CSS3 will save front end developers time.

bros

There are a number of visual elements that are currently trending in web design:

  • Drop shadows

  • Rounded corners

  • Gradients

  • Typography / Font diversity

Until now these effects were achieved by creating static graphics in photoshop or fireworks, then chopping the images up into pieces to be put back together in the code later, like a prom dress made out of carpet scraps.

The creation of these graphics takes time and patience to achieve the look desired, and then even more time needs to be committed to chop the image up and code it accordingly.  CSS3, when used properly, can effectively reduce the amount of time it takes to create these effects to around 1/4 of what it used to require.

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Formidable Apple App Store and the World Rivalry? How This Can Benefit You!

WAC-vs-appleWith the recent announcement at the Mobile World Conference, It will be very interesting to see who wins this war of apps – whether it is Apple or WAC.

Industry giants all over the world are uniting to build the so called ‘Wholesale Applications Community‘, an open marketplace for mobile applications. And I hope this works.

Imagine the opportunity it can create for an entrepreneur who is into the business of creating mobile apps. Just one app can potentially be sold to over 5 billion subscribers around the world. While not all these subscribers currently use Smartphones, think of the potential this can create.

It is time for mobile application developers to start thinking global.

Read more »

Technology & Crisis Response in 2010

How Social Media is Helping in the Haiti Relief Efforts

red-cross

On January 12, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti focusing in on the capital city of Port-au-Prince. As the world has watched on TV the heart breaking pictures of a city of 2.5-3 million people in ruins, it seems they have also picked up their phones and texted in financial support.

Five years ago this wasn’t an option. Today we have mediums like Twitter, Facebook and text messaging to not only spread the word, but help raise money. According to BusinessWeek, $8 million has been raised in the US through a ‘Text Haiti’ appeal that lets mobile-phone users make a $10 donation to the Red Cross via text message. Twitter and Facebook have played a huge role in spreading that campaign.

Google is also helping. On the Google home page you can find a link “Information, resources, and ways you can help survivors of the Haiti earthquake.” that brings you to a site with information on ways to give to organizations such as Care, UniCEF, Yele Haiti and the Red Cross as well as the Google earth view of the Post-Earthquake imagery.

Technology has certainly played a large role in the immediate actions of this crisis, especially the fundraising. I may not be able to donate the $1 million that Google is, nor the $1.5 that Giselle is but I can post the ways to help.

Here are two numbers in the United States.

  • SMS text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts

  • SMS text “YELE” to 501501 to Donate $5 to Yele Haiti’s Earthquake Relief efforts

* Chargify is also matching dollar for dollar up to $1000. Check it out.