Applying Web technology to business (and other ideas)

How to Embed Video on your Website – The Easy Way

Edward — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:50:15 +0000

Last year I built the Al Alamia TV launch website. The TV station was launching in the UK and needed an overnight website to coincide with their first broadcast (literally). As the ‘hit man’ for this assignment, I needed to wrap a live stream of the show’s video feed into the website along with some general information about the channel.

A streaming feed is slightly different to a pre-recorded broadcast as Al Alamia was streaming the content from their own third-party provider. However, the direct feed link does not work out of the box using traditional EMBED codes in HTML.

I hit the same problem last week when trying to add a video to the Meejana website. I tried to get the LongTail Video plugin to work (which I used on the Al Alamia site – a great option for embedding streaming links from other providers) but, after trying several video conversions to different formats (.mov, .mp4, .avi, etc), the video just wouldn’t play.

A different approach was needed.

Enter YouTube

Possibly the most widely known video site on the planet, YouTube offers the perfect platform to host and stream your video. They have taken care of all of the technical issues surrounding playback and now offer a host of editing solutions to help you enhance your uploaded video if you so choose (for example subtitles, closed captions, new soundtracks, etc).

There are other sites that can deliver the same solution for you – such as Vimeo – and the choice is up to you.

Create an account on YouTube for yourself or your brand. This is your ‘channel’.
Access the ‘Video Manager’ and select ‘Upload a Video’.
Click ‘Select Files from your Computer’ and select the video file on your hard disk.
While the video is uploading (it will take a while), enter the Title, Description, Tags and select the Category that relates to this video. These will help you get views on YouTube and via general web searches.
After your video upload has completed, click the ‘View on Video Page’ button. This will take you to the live YouTube page that displays your video. Congratulations! You are now a video publisher!
To get the video on your website, click the ‘Share’ button under the video, then click the ‘Embed’ button that appears.
Copy the HTML code that is shown and paste this into your website where you want the video to appear. You can edit the options associated with this code, such as displaying related videos and the size of the player window – just remember to change these options before copying the code.
Upload your changed website page to your website.
That’s it! Your new video will stream from YouTube on your website.

Another advantage of using this method is that you can embed your video easily into other systems, such as Facebook, simply by copying the YouTube URL. This gives you an easy mechanism to share and propagate your content over-and-above simply embedding it in your website.

Copyright © 2012 Brilliant Thinking. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement.

Thoughts on Movie Piracy in the #SOPA era

Edward — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:20:34 +0000

Why web design companies should avoid 1&1

Edward — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:52:29 +0000

As many of my readers know, I run a web design company called Emissary. Many years ago we decided to use 1&1 as our principle domain registrar as they provided a unified account system that enabled us to register domains on behalf of our clients through a single account. We could easily transfer domains in and out of this account as per the regulations set out by the domain registries (the governing bodies).

However, a few months ago 1&1 changed their systems which now actively prohibit transfers away from them. The system still allows you to register domains on behalf of clients, but refuses to allow you to make any changes to the domain once you do this – for example when a client’s business evolves and moves to a new solution provider and you need to transfer the domain or even if you simply need to cancel a domain renewal.

1&1 tell me that the way to transfer domains away from them (or in fact make any changes to the domain registration status) is to change the registered owner of the domain to match my account’s user details – ie ‘temporarily steal‘ the domain from the registered owner (our clients). At first, they even prevented our ability to UNLOCK domains (a requirement of the transfer process) just because we were a UK company and they had decided that this feature was not necessary in the UK control panel. After all, why would a UK company want to buy a .com or a .net domain?

Fortunately, the UNLOCK function has been restored but their systems still do not comply with the registries guidelines. But even that doesn’t solve the issue …

Calling their technical support (which you are told to do when their control panel tells you ‘this action cannot be completed because you do not own the domain, please contact support’) is a waste of time. They take a note of your problem, give you a reference number and ask you to email support instead. After doing this you wait a couple of days for a response and then get a message which basically says the same thing as you read on screen – ‘you are not the owner of the domain so you can’t make that change’. Requesting an escalation just leads to more days waiting for a response, brick walls and a lack of support for you – the customer. Their only option is for you to ‘steal’ the ownership of the domain in order to proceed, and they won’t make the internal changes necessary to allow the release of the domain and comply with the registrars policies.

Exasperated, I changed the registrant details of one of my personal domains so that it matched the company data that 1&1 held on file for Emissary. I waited a couple of days for the new data to propagate out to the web and then tried the transfer again. According to 1&1′s system, the domain is UNLOCKED and the transfer is ‘in process’. However, my new registrar keeps receiving a ‘blocked by the previous registrar’ message and the transfer is continually blocked by 1&1 even though it now complies with the rules they have instructed me to follow.

I have tried resolving this with 1&1 but keep getting the runaround. I have reported them to ICANN and finally gone public with this blog post to help web companies like mine avoid the current unethical (and illegal?) practices in place at 1&1. If you can, I would recommend you move your business to another registrar who plays by the rules (such as Daily). And if you haven’t yet used 1&1 to register domains, just walk away.

To help those of you who are trying to move, here is a process that eventually works (for .com, .net, etc). You have to follow these in order, and if you’re stuck in the middle already you’ll need to stop and start over, requesting a new transfer from your new registrar once you have implemented the preceding steps.

UNLOCK the domain from the 1&1 control panel
Change the registrant to match your account details
Let the details propagate
Log into the 1&1 ‘CONTRACTS’ control panel and request a change of provider
Take a note of the authorisation code
Wait for the confirmation link email and click it to approve the transfer
Wait for a confirmation or 24 hours just to be safe!
Initiate the transfer from your new registrar
Follow any authorisation links you are sent to approve the transfer by entering the code you noted above
(You may need to escalate the situation with an email to 1&1 support or complaints@1and1.co.uk)
You can then change the registrant details back once the transfer is complete

For .co.uk domains, the process is slightly different because you cannot change the registrant as you can for .com domains without paying a fee to Nominet. For these, you need to email 1&1 and ask them to escalate the release of your domains. Here is the process:

Request the transfer to a new registrar from the 1&1 CONTRACTS control panel
Enter the IPStag for your new registrar
You will need to escalate the situation with an email to 1&1 support to release the domain
Initiate the transfer from your new registrar

Good luck!

How to protect your website with Google’s Webmaster Tools

Edward — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 13:39:31 +0000

Google Webmaster Tools should be an essential tool in your quest for web dominance. OK, that’s probably a little exaggerated, but the toolkit that Google’s Webmaster Tools provides is essentially what it says in the title – a set of tools to help you master the performance of your website.

“Performance” is interpreted by many to infer search engine optimisation in connection with the Webmaster Tools - which is a very good application of the toolset as they provide up-to-date feedback on how your site is being found, what keywords are prominent, what people are searching for and how many of these convert to click-throughs. So they are good for SEO and SEM.

However, they are also great for managing the actual performance in the original sense for fine tuning and tweaking your website to give the best experience to your visitors – this is from within the “Diagnostics” section. Here are two examples.

Website Security (Malware)

Complex websites – especially those with any form of login such as content management systems, WordPress blogs, etc – are more vulnerable to hacking. Hackers may want to steal information about your customers or plant malware to infect unsuspecting visitors. The latter is particularly true for open source systems such as WordPress and phpBB (etc).

The great thing about Google Webmaster Tools is that they scan your site when the search engine crawler indexes the page and alert you (via email) if they find anything abnormal. If your site is hacked, you have an insight into what it is infected by, and even though your site may be flagged by Google as “harmful” to visitors, once you fix the problem you can use Webmaster Tools to resubmit your site to be crawled (usually within 24 hours) to remove its “harmful” status.

Without Webmaster Tools your site could be flagged as dangerous for some time before you realise - and so lose you valuable traffic – plus it can take some time for the site to be marked as “safe” as you are dependent on ad hoc crawls from Google to pick up the new status.

No More Dead Ends (Page Loading/Access)

Another great feature of the Webmaster Tools is their ability to flag broken links – both inbound and internal (titled “crawl errors”) – along with an error code telling you why the page is listed.

If you are getting lots of error 500s, this most likely means you have a coding or database optimisation issue which is causing requested pages to fail to load for the spider. If you look at your “crawl stats” you can also see how slow or fast search engine indexing is. In a current project, I noticed very slow indexing and also lots of error 500s. I tracked this back to database optimisation issues, and after changes were implemented indexing is now significantly faster (by a factor of 10 overall), the number of pages indexed has increased significantly and the error 500s have stopped appearing. The end result is a better performing site, both for visitors (they also don’t see error 500s and pages load more quickly) and in terms of what Google can index (which in turn is better for SEO as there is more content visible to the search engine).

Where there are lots of broken links, you can use this list to go back and fix them. If they are inbound links, you can update your .htaccess file (on a LAMP server) to catch and redirect them with a different error code. This has a benefit for SEO as when a search engine follows the external link it is told nicely that the page has moved and it should index the new page in place of the old one. You are being helpful to the search engine and so you get a more cleanly indexed site.

However, the real benefit is to the visitor because they don’t get 404 errors (and so decide to go elsewhere) which results in more readers for your site.

Microsoft Outlook Crashes

Edward — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 09:00:37 +0000

It’s a fact of life that we all depend on email nowadays. However, email is prone to interruption when your email client (in this case Outlook) just crashes when you try to do anything. The first thought is often that there is a problem on the mail server, but it is usually Outlook that is causing it.

The Root Cause

The problem is that Outlook stores all the messages you read in a single file on your hard disk. This is usually a .PST file. The problem is that Outlook has a problem when this file gets over 2Gb in size, and can start to object when it gets close to this limit. Note that this depends on the version of Outlook you are running – earlier versions can object at around 1Gb.

The Solution

The only way to fix it is to adopt a system that prevents the situation occurring. Unfortunately, just creating new folders to move emails to isn’t sufficient as these folders are all stored in the same .PST file that everything else is stored in also (including calendar appointments, your contacts list, tasks, and all the data for the other tools that Outlook provides).

In Practice

You need to create additional .PST files to store archives of your old emails in – if you want to access them – or just delete the old stuff and keep the size down though this is very final. Your email server probably has a much larger quota than Outlook can cope with, so it’s best to adopt this practice early on and maintain it.

The method I use is to enable the Auto-Archive function in Outlook to automatically move the old emails out of the main account .PST file into a new .PST file. My settings moved everything over a month old out of the main .PST file into the archive .PST file. It kept everything running smoothly. Every January, I rename the archive .PST file to something like Archive2009.PST so that I have an annual backup. You may need to do this more often if you have huge amounts of email, but you get the idea. Outlook quite happily recreates the default archive .PST file next time the auto-archive process ran so it was relatively painless.

I could then re-open the old, archive .PST files from within Outlook and search back through emails if I needed to track anything down.

Here is a video showing you how to set up auto-archive in Outlook 2003. The approach is the same for all versions of Outlook though where the option is found may vary.

Of course, you can always tweak the auto-archive settings to suit your needs – archiving different folders into different .PST files for example to separate different types of emails – or just keep everything together. This method provides you with an elegant toolkit to keep your main Outlook .PST file below the dreaded 2Gb crash-and-burn limit. Hope it helps!

If you have already breached the limit

You will probably need to recover your .PST file as it may effectively be locked and even if you delete files from the mail server the .PST file won’t open until it’s fixed. In this case, I would suggest having a read through of this article which provides a good background and some tools to help. A word of caution: If you are unfamiliar with sysadmin type activities, ask somebody who understands things ‘under the hood’ of Windows. It might be better to get an expert in to fix it rather than spend hours trying to fix it yourself only to end up deleting everything by accident.

How does Klout rank your social influence?

Edward — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 20:36:38 +0000

I saw a post on twitter which was titled “Increase your Klout Score“. I followed the link and listened to the 30 minute audio interview with one of the founders of Klout. It was quite interesting, although I don’t feel that it necessarily gave me the tools to actually do what the post said. After I listened to the audio, I posted a series of soundbites on my twitter about the content (see below), and will now elaborate on some of the points I took away from it.

EdwardTerry

(Edward Terry)

My takeaway on the #klout audio: Write consistently and produce good content that gets acted on by your followers. Niches are better.

On 24-8-2011 00:21:50 from Twitter for Mac

EdwardTerry

(Edward Terry)

#klout Acted on means clicks and "considered"/"thoughtful" retweets. Links you post are also analysed to determine your topics of influence.

On 24-8-2011 00:25:16 from Twitter for Mac

EdwardTerry

(Edward Terry)

#klout +K is a new signal in the web of influence and provides a physical feedback from your network of @klout's semantic analysis.

On 24-8-2011 00:29:17 from Twitter for Mac

Firstly – what is Klout?

Klout defines influence as “the ability to drive people to action.”

Essentially, it is a clever set of algorithms that analyse what you say, who you say it to, what content you link to, and how your followers respond to said content (via retweets, clicks, etc). Taken together, this produces the Klout Score – a virtual rank of how well you are seen to influence your followers. Klout now extends across most of the main social networks and tools including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, Foursquare, and Last.fm, with more being added over time.

Why is it popular now?

It’s growing in size in terms of how many users it measures, and how many people have created ‘verified’ accounts (ie logged in via Twitter or Facebook and added their social networks). It’s also very easy to look at and provides an easy helicopter view that helps people make decisions about you quickly. It’s also integrated into Hootsuite to help filter out less influential information from your information stream. I think the ease of use is it’s main advantage.

How does it work?

The details were neatly avoided in the audio. I think this was partly so people don’t start to game the system and cheat it like they have Google PageRank (although this will happen over time as more people start to get used to how it does its analysis). I think it’s also because the technology is still quite new and there are a few kinks to iron out. I say this because some of the assumptions it makes about me are a little confusing. For example, I have been an expert on tea and diamonds … neither of which I recall talking about at length.

However, it is iterative and each day adds weight to one set of assumptions and discredits others which moves the Klout score in one direction or another, and also your style of influence (e.g. pundit, networker, conversationalist, etc).

A recent addition of +K (like all good social tools we need a user-feedback system and we have LIKE for Facebook, +1 for Google, etc). +K allows other registered Klout users to agree with Klout’s suggestions about your areas of influence. This human +K adds significant weight to the accuracy and helps provide feedback tuning to the semantic analysis.

How do I think it works?

Reading between the lines there are four main factors at play (as well as a host of lesser ones):

The content you link to, and where you link to it from
The conversations you have with people and their topic
How your followers act on your content (primarily how they retweet/share your content)
+K

The third of these factors is interesting as Klout suggest that judiciously propagated content is more highly regarded than other forms. This means that – for example – you have a follower who posts a dozen tweets a day; only a small number of them will be retweets which means that follower has digested all of the information fed to them by the people they follow and selectively chosen the more important topics to pass on. This is very subjective, and assumes that the have actually read/skimmed everything that comes in, but does mean that if you have followers who prefer to RT your content you’ll be getting additional Klout as a result. Of course, if a follower just retweets everything they receive then these nuggets will be treated with the proverbial pinch of salt by Klout.

Essentially, this brings the idea full-circle – the idea of why have a Twitter account (or Facebook, etc) and how you should use it.

Is it important?

Klout is measuring value – value of content – and ranking your relevance in the broader scheme of things, the broader social web. If you are looking to establish yourself as a ‘go to’ person for a particular area, you can use your Klout score to see how you are doing and help you iteratively adjust what you do on the social web to achieve your goals. That doesn’t mean you should stop doing the other stuff, but it may be better to think before you tweet if you care about your Klout.

B2C Online Reputation Management & the Bad Customer Effect

Edward — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:43:23 +0000

Social media is what everybody is talking about these days, and – to be fair – it is very important and something every business should get a grounding in. Social Media 101 if you will. As an aside, a key checklist is the Social Media Map from Overdrive Interactive. Click the link to find out more and to find the current tools in all social media spaces identified and cross-referenced. An excellent resource.

The main reason everybody is talking about social media is that pretty much everybody with a computer is now connected in some way – through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – and also ready, willing and able to post reviews on sites like Trip Advisor, Yelp, Qype and many other sites you may or may not have heard of. If you run a business-to-consumer (B2C) type business, you really need to get a grounding in social media skills or unhappy customers could cause more damage to your business than you think.

Here is an example of what can happen: Woman kicked out of restaurant over Twitter Insult.

The trouble with customers is that they are not the most rational of people when it comes to leaving feedback. Of the three groups – your evangelists, your disgruntled customers and “everybody else” (the latter making up about 80% of your customer base), the disgruntled customers are 4 times more likely to tell people about it (usually via the Web) than your evangelists. And your disgruntled customers are also prone to exaggerate.

Be Proactive

You need to be proactive – you need to recruit your evangelists and encourage them to leave reviews. You also need to encourage some of “everybody else” to do the same. This provides a more balanced view online when that disgruntled customer does leave a bad review.

Respond Quickly & Professionally

This disgruntled customer may just be having a bad day and that one little thing that happened at your place broke the proverbial camel’s back and made everything too much for them. They may not say anything to you personally, but they will happily go away and invest a lot of time writing a venomous review which, while based on an issue which did occur, is often wilfully exaggerated and peppered with untruths to make you appear much worse than you actually are.

The problem is that when left unchecked these nuggets can pull down your good reputation – one that 80% of your customers don’t mention. Fortunately, some negative reviews are clearly inappropriate and you may be able to get these removed since they do not follow a particular review site’s guidelines. And then there are those “Bad Customers” that are deliberately out to get something for free. You can usually spot them and they need careful managing throughout their interaction with your company, but sometimes that’s not even enough to prevent the knife in the back after they pleasantly thanked you and went on their way. Sometimes they are even sent by the competition to deliberately harm your reputation. Yes. Really.

Always respond professionally to feedback – good and bad – and you may also need to give a little (in terms of freebies) to win back the trust of the disgruntled customer. Each response you make is on a case by case basis. Personally, I would advocate a trust and honesty basis – if the customer has been relatively honest in their negative review you know they are still approachable and you can discuss this to try to resolve the issue. If the customer has been dishonest in their review, you may not want to win them back, but need to redress the balance. These are the hardest reviews to respond to but you need to make it clear that any issues raised are being resolved.

A simple approach to social media for the novice

Before you worry too much about everything, remember that everything is still essentially “the Internet” and as such can be searched for just like anything else with the small exception that some posts might be protected (for example within Facebook) meaning that you will need to log in to that service to search for them. And it’s all essentially “marketing”, it’s just that there are a few new tools in the toolkit you need to be aware of. Here are some basics to get you started:

Create an account with Facebook, then create a PAGE for your business. This provides a forum for people to discover and interact with your company and by providing an open communication channel you can often mitigate issues before they become PR problems.
Periodically search on Google for reviews about your business. For each site that reviews are posted on (e.g. TripAdvisor, Qype, etc), make sure you create an account for your business and claim the reviews. This allows you to provide feedback publicly to the person who posted the review.
You can open a Twitter account for your business, but whether you do or not, remember to include Twitter in your searches for your business to see if anybody has made a mention of you, good or bad. As a piece of advice with Twitter, refer to this article: Look before you leap.

These are the basics for getting involved in social media for your business. In essence they are just aspects of marketing and PR but should be applied rigorously. But what should you do when you find mentions of your business. Here are some guidelines:

Post replies to reviews – thank the people who posted good reviews and, cautiously, respond to negative reviews. You will often want to put your side of the story and set the record straight, but you must be objective. Recognise that mistakes may have been made, but ensure you clarify to readers any untruths that the reviewer posted which may mislead others who are trying to make a decision about whether or not they will deal with your company (for example misrepresenting the price, skewing the star rating when it was only a small issue, etc).
If you have a Twitter account, thank the people who post good tweets about your business. You can also retweet them to spread the good word to your followers. If somebody says something bad, engage them in conversation – encourage them to talk to you (preferably offline or via direct message) and try to resolve the issue amicably.
Ask happy customers to post reviews as well. These may be in the 80% who wouldn’t usually say anything, but would be happy to do so if asked. This helps improve your average for the days you get the bad reviews and provides a more accurate picture of how your business fairs overall.

Of course, if your business consistently gets bad reviews you should think about what you are doing and how to fix it!