Author Archives ⇒ Brandon Hann

Google's New +1 Button

· Brandon Hann

Google has launched a new feature for search results called the +1 Button. It works like a recommendation button where you can click +1 on a particular website or webpage to help others know that it’s been recommended. If you’ve used sites like Digg.com, you know how this process works. Basically, after you’ve read some content on a website and decided you liked it, you click the +1 Button and it helps other web users by ranking your site/content like a score card. In turn, websites and web pages with higher “votes” can potentially gain higher rankings on Google search results pages (SERPs).

Adding the +1 Button to your site

After logging into my AdSense account, I was greeted with this lovely message:
Google +1 Button AdSense message
From there, I clicked on the link that took me to the code page where I had a choice of 4 different sizes for the icon as well as some other advanced settings. I didn’t spend too much time on this page as I wanted to get the button on my site ASAP! I simply chose the standard size and left everything else the same.
Google +1 Button
The code was easy to implement. In WordPress:

  1. Open your theme editor and begin editing header.php
  2. Find the </head> tag and place the code: <script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://www.ledfrog.com/content/images/2011/06/plusone.js”></script> right above it.
  3. Save header.php
  4. Begin editing single.php (if you want the button to appear on each post)
  5. Find the area you want the button to show up. On my site, I placed it right before the content starts so it’s at the beginning of every post.
  6. Place this code: <g:plusone></g:plusone> before <?php the_content();
  7. Save single.php

Now that you have all the code in place, go to one of your blog posts and verify that it’s showing up.

What’s Next?

Well as with any traffic-related feature on your site, all that you really can do now is wait. If the users want to vote up your content, they now have the option to do so within Google directly. If you find that you’re not getting a lot of response from this feature, try moving the button around your site to see where it works best.

The purpose of this feature is to help web users find valuable content as ranked by other web users that have already seen what you have to offer. This helps Google in their never-ending quest to filter out junk sites and sites with little to no content while pushing more valuable sites up to the top of the SERPs. Let’s just hope that this feature doesn’t get abused like so many other Google features have been in the past!

Create a custom store with Zazzle

· Brandon Hann

How long have you been creating works of art or taking great photographs or how long have you had all those funny t-shirt ideas locked up in your brain? At some point, you probably wondered about the best way to get those items out to potential customers. There are quite a few websites out there that can help you accomplish this goal, but the one I want to discuss today is Zazzle.

I liked Zazzle after watching a CNN news report that interviewed the company’s co-founder, Jeff beaver. He talked about the company’s sales figures and how popular the site had become, but what I really got from it was just how easy it is to launch your own slew of products branded with your custom designs. Watch CNN’s Zazzle video to see what I mean.

What is Zazzle?

Simply put, Zazzle offers you a selection of over 50 customizable products that you can place into your own custom store using your own custom designs. From there, your products are instantly searchable through Zazzle’s main website as well as 15 other domains around the world. They claim to have over 20 million unique visitors across their websites, so there’s plenty of buying potential out there.

The selection of products include all the usual suspects such as tshirts and many other types of clothing, cards, stationary, postage stamps, coffee mugs and stickers, but Zazzle also offers a few of the obscure like phone cases, skateboards, guitar cases, speakers and canvas art prints.

Once you create a store, you start adding products into it by uploading all of your artwork, resizing it to fit on whatever you’re creating and then publish it to potential customers. The process is super easy and literally takes a few minutes.

Get paid!

Zazzle has preset prices for all of their products, but you have control over how much your royalty rate is. For example, if you have a poster print that you want to sell, the standard price for a glossy print starts at $24.95. You can then apply on top of that, a percentage you’d like to make ranging from 0% to 99%. This will be your profit. Note, any percentage after 20% carries with it a service fee.

Anyway, so you list your $24.95 product with a 10% royalty fee and your new sales price is $27.45 with you making about $2.50 in profit. Now in the case of posters, depending on how large of an image file you’ve uploaded, you could easily have prints available for your customers in very large sizes. The pricing can be further customized by a customer given the paper type selected and whether they want it framed or not.

All that for just one product! As I mentioned before, you can choose how many products you want and customize their look to infinity.

My two cents

This post is just a very light view of what Zazzle can offer to you and your products. Personally, I am not much of an artist, but I’m discovering that I do have some photographic talent that I plan to utilize with Zazzle. My goal is to take some of my photos and turn them into high-quality prints and sell them from my own website. With Zazzle, I don’t have have to go out to a print shop and have 50 posters made, keep them on hand and hope I can sell them to people.

This way, I just create the products I want to offer and let the world have what they want. Zazzle doesn’t make anything until it’s actually ordered. Of course, there are costs to be had, but that’s business. I’d rather pay a small premium to not have to deal with inventory. Plus, this could just be a small stepping stone…if my products got big and well-known, I could easily carry inventory later, knowing that I’ll sell everything and make even more money!

Check out the DigitizingLife Print Store to see the store I created and the products I have. At the time of this writing, I only have one. As a follow-up to this post, I have ordered a copy of my own product to see what the quality will be.

The Power of Flickr

· Brandon Hann

Happy Memorial Day! Consider yourself autoblogged because like you probably are, I’m relaxing and enjoying my day off from work. With that said, today I wanted to write up a simple post regarding my newfound love, Flickr.

I’m fairly sure at this point in time, every single person that has ever searched for an image online has seen one or more Flickr accounts out there! So what’s so special about it? Let me tell you.

The Power of Flickr

If you’re a photographer or just someone who likes to take pictures and video of life, consider Flickr to be the equivalent of Facebook for you. The premise is simple: you upload photos, tag them, describe them, organize them and let the world have them.

There are two types of memberships, free and pro. The pro costs $24.95 per year and gives you some added benefits, which I’ll go over below. Once you setup your account, you’ve just created your Photostream. This is where all of your photos show up in the order they were uploaded, new ones first. It is basically your homepage:
Flickr Homepage

The best part of Flickr is how well it integrates with all of your existing social media sites and/or blogs. You can link it to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr, LiveJournal and any WordPress-enabled site. By linking everything together, you can now take your photos to a worldwide stage and bring the visitors to you. From there, if they like what you have, you will likely start receiving new visitors to your site(s).

A perfect example of this would be if you’re already running a photography website, but you’re not getting many hits. That’s because you have to market that site on its own using all the SEO tricks you can find, but even that might not be enough. Instead, move (or copy) your portfolio(s) over to Flickr and you’re basically dumping your pictures into a digital world full of people searching and browsing for images!

Free vs Pro

As with everything free, there’s always a catch! Free accounts have the following limitations: 300mb upload limit per month for photos, 2 video upload limit per month, only the first 200 images appear on your photostream, limited to posting images in 10 groups and only your smaller size images are shown.

My advice is to get the Pro account. It’s not much money when you break it down per month: only about $2, but so worth it.

Copyrights

Flickr also supports the use of Creative Commons copyright restrictions. You can place these restrictions on one image or all of them. Better yet, each image can have a different copyright than the next one. You are always in full control over how your images can be used online!

My two cents

Since I’m starting to get into photography, I love the idea that I can share my photos with the world. In time, the goal is to continue gaining more and more momentum with the quality that I’m bringing to the table. In turn , I’m hoping this will lead more people to me, which I’m really hoping will turn into actual business. There’s so much more to Flickr—I feel like I just scratched the surface, so go check out the Flickr FAQ page to answer all your questions.

What is the Creative Commons?

· Brandon Hann

I wasn’t sure if I should have called them a “who” or a “what”, but one thing’s for sure…if you’re putting content online, you should be aware of what CC is. First and foremost, copyright laws and regulations were designed years and years ago in a time where there was less to worry about in the way of content theft. We’re talking about the days before the Internet, computers and even copy machines. If someone wanted to steal your manuscript for example, they would physically need to possess it and then make a hand copy. While it was harder to steal content, it was also much easier to find out when someone did. Now, it’s easier to steal content, and much harder to found out when someone does it.

Today, we have computers, the Internet and copy machines plus a whole slew of computer programs that make digital copying and manipulation possible and surprisingly easy. The problem is that general copyright enforcement has not been able to cross over to the new age—that is until now.

Creative Commons

According to their own mission statement,

Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.

Anyone who uses Wikipedia on a regular basis has seen the full power of Creative Commons at work. In fact, every single picture you click on will have a variation of a CC license attached to it. Copyright owners can mark their work with a customized copyright license that may or may not extend any rights to 3rd party users. Just the same, Flickr users have access to select various licenses for their work as well.

So to put it into simple terms, if you create a digital work (photograph, video, etc) and you wish to display it online, you can use Creative Commons to attribute a specific license to the work that allows you to decide how that work can be shared, copied, used, manipulated or displayed should someone come along and wish to do one or all of those things.

How licenses work

CC uses a 3-layer license format. The first layer represents the Legal Code which is all the legal mumbo jumbo that most of us non-lawyers don’tCreative Commons License Layers really understand. These are the words that basically dictate what is protected and what is not on a copyrighted work. On top of this comes the Human Readable layer that incorporates something that CC calls the Commons Deed. It is essentially a watered down version of the legal code beneath it. In other words, rather than sort through long paragraphs of rules and restrictions, the Commons Deed simply points out the most important facets of the copyright status.

Finally, the top layer is a machine readable layer that contains all the same legal information as the previous two, but can now be accessed by software used on computers, in search engines and on hardware that makes copying possible. This allows manufacturers and software vendors to create new ways of stopping the illegal copying of copyrighted materials. For example, on Flickr, if you don’t want to allow people to download your images, you can set the license to do that and Flickr can read this license and block people from downloading the image. It’s a great piece of technology. Now if only we could stop screen capture programs!

There are 6 types of Creative Commons licenses. I won’t go into all the details here, but this is a basic rundown of what the differences are:

  • Attribution – This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
  • Attribution-ShareAlike – This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.
  • Attribution-NoDerivs – This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
  • Attribution-NonCommercial – This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike – This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs – This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

For more information on the licenses, the logos that you can use to place on or near your work and a form to create your own licenses today, please check out the Creative Commons website.

My two cents

I fully support the Creative Commons movement and now that I’m beginning to post my digital photography online, I can clearly see the value in such a system. However, I’m also a realist so I understand that nothing is full-proof and even though systems like these are in place, there will still be ways to get around them and there will always be people willing to steal and copy materials from the Internet. It’s simply the way of life. But because I know this, I’m willing to assume that anything I post online will be accessible to the world and at any given time, can be copied and manipulated in any form.

That’s good advice for anyone wishing to post photos and videos online whether it’s on your own site or places like Facebook and YouTube. Think before you post.

World IPv6 Day – June 8, 2011

· Brandon Hann

As usual, I’m late to the game! It’s a good thing I don’t purport myself to be a newscaster of any form because sometimes I feel like I’m the last to know. Even after I discussed the death of IPv4 the other day, I still wasn’t aware of June 8, 2011. But as it stands, June 8 is the day where 243 huge Internet organizations will participate in a 24-hr “test flight” of IPv6 across their servers and networks.

World IPv6 Day

On this day, the likes of Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Akamai will be offering their websites and services over the IPv6 protocol. The basic idea behind this plan is to motivate other industry leaders and hardware manufacturers to continue getting devices and services ready for the new protocol.

Fortunately, these changes will be transparent to end-users, so there will be nothing special you need to do in order to see your favorite websites. Computers and hardware have in one way or another supported IPv6 for some years now, but if you want to verify this, proceed to the test site that’s been setup to run a series of tests on your computer system. It will tell you your current IPv6 compatibility and what, if anything, you can do to fix problems.

I’ve been an active Internet user for many, many years and I’ve often wondered how long it would take to run out of IPv4 addresses and as of February 11, 2011, we no longer have to wonder because it’s happened! There will come a day when IPv4 is no longer supported and it’s important now to ensure that systems across the world are able to operate on the new protocol.

More information

The Internet Society (isoc.org) is probably your best bet for obtaining more (and updated) information about this event, so I’ve posted some direct links here for you to get the information you need:

Dashes, En Dashes, Em Dashes and more Dashes

· Brandon Hann

Commanding your chosen language is essential to everything your blog is and will be. Poor grammar, mis-spelled words and inappropriate use of words will not only make your readers confused, but it can also damage your reputation. Throughout history, these bad traits have made writers seem uneducated or just plain dumb.

Today, I was dealing with an issue that I’ve often wondered about, but never really took the time to figure out. I was writing in Microsoft® Word and I wanted to use a “double-dash” which I knew to be an element that allows you to separate two very distinct phrases, but not distinct enough on their own to create two different sentences. Naturally, Word will do this for you if you type in the two dashes and continue to your next word. My question was simply, when do you use this dash and are there any other variations. I was surprised to learn that there was.

Hyphen ( – )

The hyphen is your standard dash line that you can use to separate compound adjectives, verbs or adverbs. Some examples of proper usage are:

This site runs on an Linux-based server.
Creating a WordPress-powered website is easy.
The German-designed car was much faster.

Hyphens can also be used to separate proper names as well as any other wordbreaks that may be required.

En Dash ( – )

For some reason, you can’t see the length in the title, but the En Dash is slightly longer than a hyphen and is used to show range between something. For example:

The Lakers beat the Heat 91–87.
The Los Angeles–New York flight was about 6 hours.

The reason it’s called an En Dash is because it’s approximately one ‘N’ long. To get the En Dash to show up in HTML, the code is &ndash; or &#150;. In Word, you have to click on Insert → Symbol. The En Dash can also be used in conjunction with hyphens too, such as in:

Dual-core–64-bit processors are much faster than 32-bit–single-core processors.

Em Dash ( — )

The longest of the dash family is named accordingly due to its size being that of about one ‘M’ long. As previously mentioned, in Microsoft® Word, this symbol is created when typing in two hyphens together. In HTML, you can get this by using &mdash; or &#151;. It’s used to separate parenthetical elements that tend to be abrupt.

This is contrary to commas, which separate parenthetical elements that are not abrupt. Some examples of proper Em Dash usage:

The cake—with chocolate sprinkles and all—was amazing!
There were many people at the reunion—most of which were old classmates of mine.

My two cents

Great writers aren’t made overnight and even though some people have a knack for their native language, anyone can become great at writing. The first step is to be aware of how the language works. Avoid slang and other non-conventional ways of writing. Learn how to spot errors and always, always proof-read your work before posting! I think one of the biggest mistakes bloggers often make is that they write with their audience in mind. While that is great strategy for topical content, it’s not a good move for grammar. In other words, just because your Internet audience often types like this: “hey u, wats up? hows ur day been goin so far!?” doesn’t mean your blog should reflect that same style.

Israeli Couple Names Baby After Facebook "Like" Button

· Brandon Hann

I was trying to come up with a better headline, but seriously, there’s no other way to put it. That’s right people, it has happened. Facebook has integrated with our lives more than anyone would have ever expected. Instead of just maybe creating a Facebook page for your baby to show off their new life to the world, you had to go and name your baby, Like.

I can’t even write it without laughing! Names have been passed down for thousands of years for various reasons including special meanings, symbolic purposes, the joining of two profound descriptive words or just simple creativity on the part of the parents, but this one takes the cake. Not so much because of the word Like, but because of their reasoning.

People have been named after saints, martyrs, prophets, gods, cities, countries and occupations. An example of an occupational name would be George which comes from the Greek, georgos which means .husbandman, farmer’. Now, for the first time in history, we have someone being named after an Internet phenomenon. In my opinion, I think they should have just named the kid, Facebook or better yet, Bookface. Can you imagine the childhood this kid is going to have?

After reading a bit more about this story, it seems that someone has already named their kid Facebook, so I stand in awe with the rest of the world trying to figure out what’s happening out there?! Somebody please tell me. Also, if you name your baby Like as opposed to Love, that says volumes about your feelings toward your children.

By the way, after announcing the name on Facebook, the proud father received 40 ‘likes’.

Whatever happened to Microsoft Bob?

· Brandon Hann

An email was sent to me today with a link going over the top 10 failures of Microsoft and one of my favorites on the list came in at number 2: Microsoft Bob. I remember wanting to own this program because I thought for some reason, it would make life easier. Let’s see why…

Back in 1995, Windows 95 was released as a follow-up to the ever-so-popular Windows 3.1. If you remember correctly, there wasn’t much in the way of operating systems before Windows and without it (let’s be honest), there wouldn’t be much of computer world today. What’s interesting is that Windows 95 was supposed to be the crown jewel of the industry—making computing far easier than it had even been and with a bit of flash too. So why then must Microsoft create another piece of software on top of Windows that’s supposed to make things easier??

Introducing Microsoft Bob

Bob was a house. A virtual house that contained a virtual dog and many different rooms of varying design and function. This is how it worked:

  • You logged into Windows 95 – After realizing it was much too difficult to perform any tasks, you opened Bob.
  • Bob launches – You’re presented with a door that allows you to sign in.
  • You choose a room – Based on what tasks you want to do, you pick a room that has what you want inside.
  • Open an app – Click on the applicable icon to open the app you want to use.
  • Follow instructions – Now you get hand-walked through every single step of doing even the most mundane tasks.

For the best instructional walkthrough, you must watch this video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZegWedG-jk4

I think what’s most disturbing about how Bob worked was just how much more difficult things seemed to get after using him. This is pure irony considering Bob was supposed to simplify things. Bill gates was even quoted as saying Bob was ahead of his time. I’m sure at that time, this seemed far-fetched, but if you really think about it, software interfaces have become more GUI-based and things are becoming much easier to do on computers than ever before.

$0.45 per email?!

As I was learning more about Bob, I found out that when he came out, the Internet was just starting to take off so Bob included an email app that would allow you to send up to 15 emails per month that were each limited to 5,000 characters. Beyond that, you would have to pay $0.45 per email sent! These emails were sent over the MCIMail service, which was essentially a dial-up email account.

Can you imagine having to pay to send emails? What a bargain—a stamp to mail a real letter cost $0.32 and an email cost $0.45. I guess things have really changed for the better. Now you can buy a stamp for $0.44 and send as many emails as you want for free. I wish we could still charge spammers though.

IPv4 is Dying

· Brandon Hann

Last month, I ran into quite a snag when trying to install a second iteration of WordPress MU on my server. I currently run a copy for this site and some others I manage, but I also have a few other clients on my server and one of them would like to also run multiple sites. I quickly found out exactly why you can’t run multiple instances of WordPress MU without a few caveats.

The caveat to be explored here is one that affects many areas of the Internet and its users. IPv4 is the fourth revision of the Internet Protocol. In layman’s terms, it’s the protocol that provides you with the IP address allowing you to get on the Internet. You may have seen them on your computer or device: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

Each octet can have 255 bits in it, meaning the whole IP address range is 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255 and after removing a few reserved address blocks, you end up with about 4.3 billion combinations. In the original concept of the Internet, reaching this ceiling was thought to be impossible since the Internet was never to be used by the mass public. In order for a device to be on the Internet, it needs to have its own IP address.

In the beginning of the public Internet, large blocks of IP addresses were given to the phone companies to issue out to their customers based on various needs. At this time, if a computer network contained a thousand computers, 1,000 unique IP addresses were needed. This caused a lot of corporations to lease very large amounts of IP addresses. All that changed when Network Address Translation (NAT) was created. NAT allowed a network to use one public IP address for the entire network and a device such as a router to issue out individual private IP addresses to each device connected to it.

Confused yet?! It’s ok…that’s about as deep as I want to get in the definition of IP. Where I’m going with this is that no more IP addresses are available because the last 5 blocks were allocated to the 5 regional Internet registries (RIRs) on February 3, 2011. This doesn’t mean that all are being used, but they are at least in the hands of those responsible for leasing them to customers.

With that said, IPv4 is essentially dying, if not already dead. Our only hope now is the release of IPv6 which would allow for 340 undecillion IP address, or about 5 x 1028 addresses for each of the 6.8 billion people alive on the earth today.

The Google Chromebook Netbook is Here

· Brandon Hann

When I was in New York back in February, the friend I was staying with received a mysterious package in the mail and decided to open it while we were all there. He pulled out a strange-looking black netbook that had no logos, brand names or stickers of any kind on it. It was small, sleek and didn’t have a rom drive. From the looks of it, it was your run of the mill netbook except with a 11.6″ screen.

Once he turned it on, the device booted into a strange, but refreshing operating system known as ChromeOS. He then told us that months before, he had signed up to become a beta tester for Google to test out the new OS they were building around Chrome. The arrival of this netbook was a surprise given that he had forgot all about signing up for it. At any rate, we played around with it and noticed that this wasn’t your average computer. It wasn’t a watered-down version of Windows and it wasn’t trying to do things it wasn’t meant to do…it was simply a cloud computer.

Samsung Chromebook

I’ve talked about cloud computing before and I have to tell you, ChromeOS nails it! The computer boots in 8 seconds and has nothing on it except the Internet. That sounds funny to say while you’re holding a laptop, but it really only has a web browser. Everything is managed over the Internet through integration with all of Google’s services like Google Docs, Gmail, Maps, etc. This video explains it all:

Amazon has already created the product pages for the new Chromebooks from Acer and Samsung. There doesn’t appear to be any price points at this time, but I can’t imagine this device costing much for than a few hundred dollars. More details to follow.