Francesco Castaldo

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devu — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:00:23 +0000

When developing a commercial project, one of the first steps to take care of during the design process, is to choose which environment suits the project most and set it up. When coding for wordpress, one of the most difficult things to take care of is not the coding itself but developing something that should [...]

User management framework?

devu — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:00:30 +0000

Some weeks ago I started working on a project that required a basic user management (sign up, sign in, authentication, user profile etc.) and, instead of writing everything I spent some time looking for a sort php framework, or group of classes, easily-extendable and easy-customizable to see if I could save some time. I didn’t [...]

Twitter Geo Location

devu — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:56:26 +0000

I’m pretty sure no one did notice it, but a couple of weeks ago I developed a test widget that plays with the current Twitter location feature combined with the visitor ip location. It’s in the lower right corner, called Tweets near you :) It was more a sort of exercise than a real widget, [...]

Twitter: your lost replies

devu — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 23:12:24 +0000

When you’re new to Twitter and start following some popular Twitters, have you ever wondered if they saw your replies? I did, and some friends did too. The answer is no, they don’t (in their tw home). The same, after a while, happens to you: will you be aware of all Twitters who mention you [...]

Facebook as Rss Reader?

devu — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:33:46 +0000

I love rss as maybe you do. But analyzing stats of many sites I have access to, I noticed that, compared to visits, rss driven traffic is much lower. FeedBurner says Rss users are hundreds (one or two), a very little slice of many hundred thousands visitors per month. If I speak with friends who [...]

gBook new features: photo detail and notifications

devu — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 07:30:01 +0000

Two new features have been released today on gBook: the photo detail page and the notifications page. Photo detail You access the photo detail when clicking on a thumbnail on the “Photos” page, on the notification page or on the album page (yet to be released). The photo deatil opens in a popup window; I [...]

Facebook Gmail Gadget: gBook

devu — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 07:00:19 +0000

I am proud to introduce you the prototype version, the very first release, of the Facebook Gmail Gadget: gBook. gBook allows you overview your Facebook account directly from your Gmail with a glimpse: status, walls, comments, photos and much more. The gadget doesn’t replace the Facebook website, it’s just a different, ligher way to access [...]

Run a Pay Per Click Campaign: Yahoo! Search Marketing

devu — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 07:00:06 +0000

Yahoo! Search Marketing allows online advertisers to meet their potential customers in Yahoo! search engine result pages and on Yahoo! partners websites. Let’s set up a PPC campagin for this blog with Yahoo! Search Marketing. Step 1

Plugins

devu — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 07:00:31 +0000

It’s not that I am completely disappeared, it’s just that last week I shot a few bands (No Conventional Sound, The Rasmus, Children of Bodom, Cannibal Corpse and Negrita) and then spent the remaining free time improving my plugins. Search engine query in wordpress I know the name is not that cool, I’m not a [...]

Run a Pay Per Click Campaign: Google AdWords results

devu — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:00:19 +0000

The Google AdWords ppc campaign ended. How did it go? Here is the campaign data: Campaign cost: €49.99 Number of clicks: 990 Average CPC: €0.05 Ads impressions: 691,217 Average Position: 3.5 CTR: 0.14% Before going on, let’s have a closer look at these data. I set the average keyword bid at €0.15 (some at €0.80), [...]

WordPress Search Engine Optimization: how is it going?

devu — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:00:40 +0000

Six days ago I started my Link Building activity, it’s now time to check if search engines are aware of my efforts. First, let me say that search engines are as fast returning search results as they are slow indexing and ranking new sites. IT TAKES AGES!! If Google activated a “Donate” link on a [...]

Run a Pay Per Click Campaign: Google AdWords day 2

devu — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 07:00:33 +0000

The campaign has run for a day or so, what’s happened? The ads have been shown both in search results and content network. With 10 euro of daily budget, I got 271 clicks. Straight to the point: how many conversions? Zero. First thing to do: click on “Opportunities for improvement” in the campaign home page. [...]

Run a Pay Per Click campaign: Google AdWords

devu — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 07:00:42 +0000

AdWords is the Google solution for advertisers. It allows publication of text ads in Google search result pages, and of text ads, traditional banners, video ads on a wide number of websites. The ad publication is paid per click the ad receives. In this article I am setting up a real campaign to promote 2 [...]

Run a Pay Per Click campaign (part 1)

devu — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 07:00:49 +0000

As I told you, with the 99 cent subscription I payed for hosting this blog, I got a 50 euro bonus to spend on Google AdWords. By subscribing to Yahoo! Site Explorer (a while ago), I got 25 bucks to spend on Yahoo! Search Marketing. I thought it would be cool to set up the [...]

WordPress Search Engine Optimization: link building

devu — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:00:49 +0000

Your theme is seo-friendly, your posts have proper titles, meta descriptions and keywords, you created and submitted your xml sitemap to all the search engines who support them, you installed a web analytics tool to monitor your blog. Will it appear in search results? 99% no, here’s why. What you have done until now is [...]