Website topics – Page 3 – PDG & Associates Web Design

August 1, 2011August 2, 2011

Selling Tickets to your Event

New ways to sell tickets

If you are having an event and need to sell tickets, EventBrite might be the best way to go.

We used EventBrite to sell tickets to our North Country Film Festival in 2010. It was a success.

Now, the California-based company has released an iPad app that faciliates at-the-door sales. The NYTimes has an article:

To deal with similar situations, and to compete more directly with the big guns of the industry, in June the company introduced Eventbrite at the Door. Using an iPad app and a credit card scanner, Eventbrite at the Door customers can let in advance ticket holders and sell 400 new tickets per hour.

We are hoping that soon their new At the Door app can utilize the awesome Square card reader software available for Android and iOS. It does not appear possible yet… from Techcrunch:

Eventbrite is bundling the hardware and testing it in beta with about five or six event organizers, but it plans to release it as an iPad app this summer. The first iteration will be called Eventbrite at the Door, but as more features are added, such as seating, it will evolve into a full mobile box office. CEO Kevin Hartz sees it as akin to Opentable terminals at restaurants. Eventually he’d like to partner with Square for the card swipe readers, but is waiting for Square to open up its API. Square just launched its own iPad cash register app as well, but that is geared more at merchants than event organizers.

In the meanwhile, EventBrite charges less than TicketMaster:

The company charges consumers 2.5 percent of the cost of each ticket plus 99 cents, plus credit card charges of about 3 percent. For a $20 ticket, those fees would come to about $2.10, or 10.5 percent — much less than customers are used to paying through Ticketmaster, where surcharges are often 30 percent or higher.

The industry resists EventBrite’s low costs to consumers:

“A lot of people in the music business don’t want ticketing democratized,” said Josh Baron, editor of the music magazine Relix and co-author of the book “Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped.” “It’s a business, and venues want money.”

May 25, 2011May 25, 2011

Mac Malware spreading

Because of gamed SEO placements and poisoned links, some thousands of Mac users were tricked into installing a fake Mac security program.

Mac security vendor intego.com writes:

Intego has discovered a rogue anti-malware program called MACDefender, which attacks Macs via SEO poisoning attacks. When a user clicks on a link after performing a search on a search engine such as Google, this takes them to a web site whose page contains JavaScript that automatically downloads a file. In this case, the file downloaded is a compressed ZIP archive, which, if a specific option in a web browser is checked (Open “safe” files after downloading in Safari, for example), will open. The file is decompressed, and the installer it contains launches presenting a user with the following screen:

UPDATE: See Intego’s full security memo with detailed information about the MAC Defender fake antivirus.

PDG Recommends:

Sophos makes a free Mac security program. Read more about it in another post, and use it soon!

Apple will release a cleaner update for it as well. See their recent tech note.

May 25, 2011May 25, 2011

Hype Flash replacement spawned at Y Combinator

The Startup Foundry website published an interview with a software programmer, one of the cofounders, Jonathan Deutsch, of Tumult Co. He left a job at Apple to launch a startup.

I was faced with the decision of continuing to work with the great people on my team on a clearly high impact project, living with the “what if” syndrome, or trying to forge my own path. ”Regret Minimization” is what should win out in life, so it did. I had done a lot of different projects at Apple, and felt I made my mark both internally on the company and externally on Mac OS X.

About his experience at Y Combinator:

YC is definitely worthwhile. The network effects are staggering… it gives any YC company an advantage in making the right contacts, finding investment, and being in a support net with others in the same boat. And if you’re starting a company, why wouldn’t you want every advantage available to you? Paul Graham, Paul Buchheit, and Harj Taggar all give great advice with brilliant ideas sprinkled in. The dinners are fun, and there’s a lot that we learned from the speakers. Most founders would come early before each dinner just to hang out and discuss their startups or demo their products. The atmosphere is electric and contagious.

Visit the Hype website. Unfortunately for Mac OS Leopard (10.5) users, the app requires 10.6. A bad decision for many thousands of us.

May 25, 2011May 25, 2011

Google makes new image format

But fails to support Alpha channels (for true transparency)!

Firefox maker rejects the format, and will not support it until changes are made.

WebP’s lack of basic feature parity with JPEG in areas like metadata handling and ICC color profiles is identified by Muizelaar as another major problem with Google’s format. It also doesn’t add any important features that JPEG lacks, such as support for an alpha channel. He goes as far as using the phrase “half-baked” to describe the deficient WebP feature set.

Adopting a new image format in Web browsers is a big decision. Once a format becomes a part of the Web, it will have to be supported in perpetuity—adding overhead to the browser—even if it largely fizzles and only gains a small niche following. The chances of WebP attracting widespread use at this stage are very limited, so it seems prudent to avoid shoveling it into the browser.

WordPress editor has an iframe glitch

If you have been trying to paste in Amazon product iframes, then you will discover that the WYSIWYG editor in WP (provided by TinyMCE) strips out the entire Amazon html snippet that you’re trying to embed.The editor does not know how to show the iframe, so it strips it out. Argh.

WordPress configures TinyMCE (i.e. the Visual Editor) to strip IFRAME tags. So it’s not a bug per se. It’s just terribly inconvenient for those wishing to embed a product from Amazon.com, like this:

One way to stop this is to keep the post in HTML view/editing mode. Do NOT switch to Visual mode, ever, for that particular post. But this is a hassle.

A blogger posted a solution in this WordPress Forum post. It involves editing your Theme’s functions.php file. I tried it and it works well; just be careful if you every update your Theme; it likely will be overwritten.

You can also install the plugin TinyMCE ADVANCED by Andrew Ozz — it has the option in its Settings config to allow iFrame tags. Go to: http://www.laptoptips.ca/

I don’t prefer solving the problem by using this plugin, however. The TinyMCE editor is heavy already; adding 17+ new buttons and features will slow the page load times even more.

Recommendations: edit the functions.php file with the easy fix by Chip Bennett. It is:


function mytheme_tinymce_config( $init ) {

// Add IFRAME to list of valid HTML elements (so they don't get stripped)

	// IFRAME
	$valid_iframe = 'iframe[id|class|title|style|align|frameborder|height|longdesc|marginheight|marginwidth|name|scrolling|src|width]';

	// Add to extended_valid_elements if it alreay exists
	if ( isset( $init['extended_valid_elements'] ) ) {
		$init['extended_valid_elements'] .= ',' . $valid_iframe;
	} else {
		$init['extended_valid_elements'] = $valid_iframe;
	}

// Pass $init back to WordPress
	return $init;
}
add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'mytheme_tinymce_config');

It works great for this blog.

May 7, 2011May 12, 2011

SEO Advice from a Pro

Understanding the SEO business.

Build a solid understanding of the SEO business with this interview of Jon Payne of Ephricon Web Marketing.

This post is a work in progress; more thoughts soon.

What not to do in SEM

The takeaway is simple: do not pay for inbound links to your site.

Why? These so-called “backlinks” are prohibited by Google’s guidelines.

The only time you can legitimately “pay” for links is via their own paid ad networks (AdWords and AdSense).

Read what the NYTimes discovered about the country’s 4 major flower sellers google-gaming efforts for Mother’s Day.

April 30, 2011April 30, 2011

Amazon’s Cloud service failure

A client of ours wants to host their video subscription site on Amazon’s cloud services. Last week they had an outage. Egads, this was not to supposed to happen. A point of view by Scott Gilbertson:

Amazon Autopsy Reveals Causes of Cloud Death

Amazon is also promising to improve its communication with customers when things go wrong, but as we pointed out earlier, the real problem is not necessarily Amazon. While Amazon’s services unquestionably failed, those sites that had a true distributed system in place (e.g. Netflix, SmugMug, SimpleGeo) were not affected.

In the end it depends how you were using EC2. If you were simply using it as a scalable web hosting service, your site went down. If you were using EC2 as a platform to build your own cloud architecture, then your services did not go down. The later is a very complex thing to do, and it’s telling that the sites that survived unaffected were all large companies with entire engineering teams dedicated to creating reliable EC2-based systems.

That may be the real lesson of Amazon’s failure — EC2 is no substitute for quality engineers.

Amazon has offered its promised apology. It’s published its post-mortem on the recent outage of its AWS EC2 (Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud) and RDS (Relational Database Service). It says what went wrong and how it’s planning to avoid such problems in the future.

April 15, 2011April 15, 2011

Techie debate over cloudhosting services

Rackspace vs Amazon Web Services

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2448812

Understanding why cloud services (software as a service, saas) removed infrastructure as a competitive advantage:

http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2011/03/11/how-important-is-software/

And what does Cloud services even mean?!

Read the article at readwriteweb.com

And how Facebook has released an open computing initiative, removing infrastructure (hardware, software) as a competitive advantage for competitors.

Even email can outsourced to a cloud provider. Enter: Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) (but beta), and a former Twitter techie’s Message Bus API.

Read the article at Twitter and Webshots Veterans Launch New E-Mail API