How to Rob a Snowman
Watch Out Santa
Happy Christmas & Good Will toward you and yours! From Alistair and Alastair at SelfAssemblySites
Friday Shorts 21st December
Friday Shorts 16th December
Desert Island Copyright of Xkcd.com
- What The World’s Biggest Websites Looked Like At Launch: It’s hard to imagine but the world beating websites we all love or loath today were once just scribbles on a piece of paper, or the brainchild of a 19-year-old college student. With the help of the Wayback Machine, which provides screenshots of any website imaginable from its inception until now, we can view the original designs and content of the most visited websites in the U.S.
Screenshot of Path Copyright of VentureBeat.com
- The Path to Make You Want to Delete Facebook: Many now see Facebook as a glorified phone book, chances are you have more than 300-500 ‘friends’. But Path, a lightweight social networking app, caps the number of friends you can have to a more natural and manageable 150. It’s the Dunbar Number — a theoretical limit to the number of connections you can meaningfully track at any time.
- YouTube Buys Company That Processes Music Royalties: In an effort to streamline its often complex relations with music publishers, YouTube has acquired RightsFlow, an upstart company in New York that processes royalties for the music industry. This move could mean a little or a lot more money for musicians.
- Paid Search Drives $6 is Local Sales for Every $1 in Online Sales: Paid search has 6:1 impact on offline sales over e-commerce. Only now with the rise of smartphones and other methodologies is online-to-offline tracking becoming more widely available. Approximately 9% of clicks on a paid search ad generated an offline sale, with some reporting up to 26%. It’s a fascinating insight into consumer behaviour and a warning to online only retailers, that we haven’t all moved away from real world stores just yet.
WordPress 3.3 Fix for “Fatal Error Undefined Function is_rtl()”
Here’s a quick fix if you’re seeing the following error after upgrading to WordPress 3.3:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function is_rtl() in /wp-includes/general-template.php on line 2102
First of all, don’t panic, the error seems to affect the admin dashboard but not the publicly accessible areas of your site. Secondly, it’s a fairly simple fix.
The cause is most likely a plugin, and for many people reading this it’s the “PopupDomination” plugin.
Fix for “Fatal Error Undefined Function is_rtl()”:
- Login to your site via FTP and navigate to the
/wp-content/pluginsdirectory. - If you have PopupDomination installed look at the directory names starting with ‘P’ and see if you can identify it (it could be “popup-domination”, “popupD” or similar).
- Rename that folder to “PopupDomination-broken” or something similar.
- You’re done! Reload the page and everything should be working. Contact the plugin author and ask them for a fixed version and re-enable after you’ve updated.
In the unlikely event that didn’t fix your problem, try the following:
- Deactivate all plugins to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s).
- Try renaming the plugins directory to plugins-broken by FTP (sometimes, an inactive plugin can cause a problem so this works).
- Deactivate plugins in the mu-plugins folder by renaming that directory to mu-plugins-old
You can find more on how to do this on Fixing a Broken WordPress Site
Hope this helps!
Friday Shorts 9th December
A few interesting bits and pieces we’ve come across this week:
- This week, the Android Marketplace had it’s 10 Billionth app download! Google created this beautiful infographic to tell us more.
- Amazon $6M fund for ebook authors: Amazon have announced a $6 million fund for ebook authors. To get a share you need to commit to sell your ebook exclusively through the Kindle Store and agree to your book being shared within Kindle Prime.
- Good Sight for All: Josh Silver delivers his brilliantly simple solution for correcting vision at the lowest cost possible – adjustable, liquid-filled lenses. At TEDGlobal 2009, he demos his affordable eyeglasses and reveals his global plan to distribute them to a billion people in need by 2020.
- Minority Report is Here: Xbox & Microsoft reveal interface updates centred around Kinect and Bing. Motion and voice commands will be key.
Friday Shorts 2nd December
A few interesting bits and pieces we’ve come across this week.
Property of Xkcd.com
- Building Something From Nothing, How I Harnessed the Wind At age 14, in poverty and famine, a Malawian boy built a windmill to power his family’s home. Now at 22, William Kamkwamba, who speaks at TED for the second time, shares in his own words the moving tale of invention that changed his life.
- Germans Say Nein to Liking Facebook: Is this the end of the Facebook Open Graph?
- Bionic Contact Lense to Read Emails?: Scientists are close to creating a contact lens that projects images and text before your eyes.
- Remove Fake Sites: Judge Orders web giants to delist domain names linked with websites selling counterfeit goods.
- Platforms for Real Money Gambling: Facebook holds exploratory talks with over 20 online gaming sites, consultants and online gaming entrepreneurs.
Ted.com William Kamwamba On Building A Windmill
Friday Shorts 18th November
A few interesting bits and pieces we’ve come across this week.
This happened to me - don't let it happen to you :)
- How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell. Entertaining and educational cartoon from Matthew Inman at The Oatmeal. “It’s funny cos it’s true.”
- Do Schools Kill Creativity? From TED Talks - Sir Ken Robinson entertains while making a very moving case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity. Highly recommended – if you watch one online video this week, make it this one.
- Is Google Making Us Stupid? What effect does using the Internet have on our brains. An article from a couple of years ago, but really interesting and more relevant now than ever.
- Ricky Gervais admits he may be wrong about Twitter. One for the Twitter sceptics: “I may have been wrong about Twitter. [...] Of course there are idiots on Twitter. But there are idiots on the high street and I still go there. People say awful idiotic things all the time, but I don’t give up language because of it.”
- A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. A Clay Shirky article about groups, the internet and social software. Quite long but very interesting. A must read if your business is focused on online community (social network, discussion forums, etc).
If you have any suggestions or comments please leave a comment below :)
SelfAssemblySites News Update November 2011
Here’s an update for November to let you know what changes and improvements we’ve made around the site – and what’s coming next – as well as a taster of the website training videos we’ve produced or have in production. Please give us your thoughts and suggestions on anything you think could make the site better for you!
We’re continuously shooting more videos for you – here’s a list of recently completed screencasts:
- CutAboveHost.com Website Review [FREE VIDEO - no membership required]
- Key Principles Behind Different Hosting Control Panels
- Setting Up StatCounter
- Setting Up Google Analytics
- Setting Up A Standard Gmail Account
- Linking to Particular Part of a Page (HTML Anchors) [will be online 2011-11-05]
- Read More Link in Blog Posts [will be online 2011-11-05]
And recently completed Expert Answers videos:
- The Hosting Business Explained
- Advanced Hosting Options
- How Many Is Too Many Plugins
- Why We Moved to Yoast SEO Plugin
On the way over the next few weeks:
- Show/Hide Content On A Page
- Installing A Picture Gallery
- List of Recommended Plugins
- Ecommerce Plugin Overview
- Backup Plugin Setup
- Yoast SEO Plugin Setup
- Westhost Hosting Setup
We’ve also made some improvements to the website itself since our last update:
- Completed our site move to faster hosting
- Made improvements to code and images to optimise page load times
- Design improvements on the Members Dashboard
Site improvements we will making over the next few weeks :
- Improving the layout of the category pages (e.g. http://www.selfassemblysites.com/cat…dating-content ) – to differentiate between video pages and blog posts
- Tidy up how Tags appear (on all pages)
- Add blog specific sidebar for blog listing page
- Add a new custom field to the videos which will tell you “How this particular video benefits you” (we’re working on figuring out a better way to word that, it’s a bit clunky, but we want to make it really obvious what result you will get from watching any given video)
- Reviewing the plugins we use on the site currently, ensuring we have everything we want installed
We will update this community forum thread regularly – feel free to add your suggestions and comments!
Thanks,
Alastair.
Ebook Review: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, A QuickStart Guide
In this review we’re going to look at an ebook from Christine Giri from Time Tamer Consulting. Why? There are a lot of social media gurus selling ebooks so we wanted to check out what’s out there and see if we can recommend one or two for our members – this is our first and we hope to have more on the way! Aside: we’ll only take the time needed to write up a review if we find the resource is worthwhile so you won’t find many 1 and 2 star reviews here. (If you have written a good social media ebook and would like us to review it, please contact us here.)
Ebook Review: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, A QuickStart Guide
There are 2 versions of the ebook available:
- Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn: A Quick-Start Guide for Entrepreneurs
- Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn: A Quick-Start Guide for Virtual Assistants
Both retail for USD $24.99. We reviewed the Entrepreneur version, which is 65 page PDF (5.7MB) download.
In this ebook, Giri concentrates on introducing the key tools around the big three of social media; Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and provides a systematized approach to using them.
Moving Your WordPress Directory
When developing the new version of an existing website, what a lot of people do is develop it at a subdirectory of the current site, at e.g. www.example.com/newsite. When your new site is ready for production, you’ll probably need to move it up to the top level e.g. www.example.com – here’s what you need to look out for when you’re doing that.
First, make a backup of the old site – in FTP create a directory called something like “oldsite” and move all of the files and folders except /newsite in there.
Case Study: Portfolio Site Review
This review was prompted by a request by David Crowley for feedback on his website. (Note this website was built with Dreamweaver and not WordPress).
Firstly, your architectural woodwork looks truly excellent, but it’s on your website you want constructive feedback, so here we go….
THE BASICS: A good website, should have a professional appearance, your business name and and contact details, all good there. Most importantly it should have clear calls to action, primary and secondary. This one is a little trickier. When I viewed the site I wasn’t sure if I was meant to view or download a brochure, or call you. The brochure wasn’t downloadable but all the work was viewable. Contact you it is then!
Since I was looking to download the brochure why not let me? Wrap it up in a simple pdf, and make it a complimentary gift. That way people can have something to take away with them as well as a positive impression of you as generous while at the same time you can put in all your sales message with the images of your beautiful work. If they stepped into a bespoke furniture store, they’d expect to be able to take a brochure away with them, so why not do the same?