Tag Archives ⇒ Internet

Visual Design – CDN

· Brandon Hann

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. Its sole purpose is to help you evenly spread your entire website’s content (mostly the larger media files) across multiple web servers to alleviate server load from a single machine. This, in turn serves two purposes.

First, it minimizes how much bandwidth you’re serving out to your web visitors on your webhost. Second, it allows your site to run smoothly without server crashes, timeouts and user caps. However, a CDN can be quite expensive depending on what type of CDN you require and what services you need. Let’s explore these.

CDN Types

A Content Delivery Network can serve the function of completely mirroring a portion of your site or a specific area of your site, like your video section or streaming music channel. Back in the old days, we didn’t have sites like YouTube, so if you wanted to play videos on your site, you needed a lot of bandwidth or pay a company to host the video for you and stream it live from your site.

  • End-to-end Transport – This is the fundamental standard of the Internet. It basically means the service will connect you to the content directly. Let’s say you had 10 videos all about 5 minutes each. Just for the sake of this point, let’s assume to stream each video, it would “cost” you about 100mb in bandwidth. If your site streamed all 10 videos 10 times a day, that’s 10GBs of bandwidth every day! To offset this cost, a CDN would charge you a monthly fee to host the video thus sparing your server–and your wallet.
  • P2P Transport – I can write a whole article on just P2P alone! To keep this one short, P2P is short for peer-to-peer and it is currently used as the backbone for downloading content online. The idea behind it is sharing. For example, when you are downloading (and watching) a video, you are also helping in the upload process for someone else who is watching it too. So rather than 1000 people streaming 1 video from 1 site, each of these thousand are sharing the parts they downloaded with the other users who need them. This allows the 1 video to circulate through all viewers at the same time thus removing the main load from the website.

CDNs aren’t generally described as P2P networks as they were designed to use point-to-point protocol, however P2P has become a fast alternative and popular protocol among the large media sites of today. Some examples of CDNs (and P2P) are bit torrent, Internet radio, Hulu, YouTube, Webcasting and Internet tv.

Content Providers

High-end delivery companies are designed to handle massive amounts of web users, traffic and media data every single day. If you’re running a basic website or blog, you will never need something of this nature, but nonetheless, here are a few commercial companies.

How does all this help me?

Again, depending on your specific needs, you may or may not even need a CDN. The point is that if you have a very large web presence, you might want to consider saving some of your webserver’s bandwidth and going with a company that specializes in these services. Doing so can dramatically decrease your monthly costs and save you a lot of headaches over time.

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Social Bookmarking – Plaxo

· Brandon Hann

Over 40 million people trust Plaxo to store their address book in the cloud. At least that’s how it started out. Today, Plaxo offers the same address book features plus adds new social networking features that are very different than Facebook, MySpace and others because it isn’t a place where you simply add a bunch of people you don’t know.

Benefits of using Plaxo


Plaxo offers a new way to network with your friends. The approach is different than other sites because it isn’t a place where you see how many online friends you can collect. It allows you to connect with your real friends, co-workers and family.

Plaxo has something called Pulse that makes all this possible. It allows you to better see what everyone is creating and sharing online–things like blogs, pictures, videos, etc. They tout the fact that they have one of the strongest privacy policies out there and make sure that your personal information doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

Plaxo is part of Comcast

Comcast Interactive Media now owns Plaxo and this will allow them to offer more connectivity through the Internet and tv based connections. They intend to make Plaxo the most unified social networking site available.

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Social Bookmarking – Sphinn

· Brandon Hann

Sphinn is a concept site that specializes in discussing Internet marketing and news. One of the major advantages of using and being on this site is that it allows you to take part in discussions and network with similar people in your specific field.

How can Sphinn help my site?


If you’re running a blog, Sphinn can give you an advantage over other site owners. Just like most of the social networking site I’m covering in this section, you are able to submit articles and news related to your topic of choice. Naturally, these articles link back to your own website where you are currently marketing yourself or your products.

  • Publish original articles – When you publish original content, submit it to Sphinn so you can start building web traffic that you need for your site. The more original and fresh your content is, the better it’ll rank.
  • Discuss – As a member of Sphinn, you can jump into a conversation about any item on the site. This creates a very interactive experience.
  • Network – Meet other users in the same industry as you and talk about topics that are of interest. You can also add these people to your contacts list.

Is Sphinn for you?

As mentioned above, this site is only for content related to Internet marketing, SEO and making money online. If your site does not fall into one of these categories, Sphinn will not be able to help you out.

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List Building – Enticement

· Brandon Hann

How exactly do you get people to sign up for your newsletter? Maybe the more important question is: how do you get people to want to sign up for your newsletter? This question will not be completely answered here because there are so many factors that go into your marketing strategy. These factors are then varied based on the industry you’re involved in.

What I can tell you is that you need to find out what makes your visitors/customers “tick”. Researching your site’s demographics can help with this. Here are a few tips you can use to create buzz around your newsletter.

Enticements

  • Content – First and foremost you need to remember that nobody will want your newsletter if it contains useless information. Always provide new, quality content. If you keep rehashing the same material over and over or copy content from other sources on the Internet, you will not be able to maintain a consistant subscriber list.
  • Free stuff – If your newsletter is primarily used to promote products and services that you’re selling, you might want to think about giving away something for free to get people to sign up. This will show your visitors that you are interested in keeping them around. Free stuff can include a special edition newsletter or a free eBook on a subject of interest for your visitors.
  • Speak the truth – Don’t fill your newsletter with bogus information, half-truths or outright lies. This will ruin your reputation and make you lose subscribers faster than you can send out your next message. This is especially true if your newsletter revolves around the latest news in your industry.
  • Be consistant – If you tout that your newsletter will be delivered weekly, send it weekly. In fact, send on the same day and time. Think of your publication as you would the daily newspaper. If you read it, you probably expect it at a particular time everyday. Your visitors will expect the same from you.
  • No spam – Never spam your visitors! Don’t send them offers that you know they won’t be interested in. Never sell your email list (unless you explicitly say you will before someone signs up) to any third party companies. Most of all, don’t overdo it!! If your visitors are expecting a monthly newsletter, don’t send one daily.

If your visitors know that your newsletter will contain the qualities mentioned above, they are more likely to sign up. The best advice I can give you is to put yourself if their shoes. If you were on someone’s website, what would make you want to submit your email address? On the other side, what would make you not want to submit your email address?

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List Building – Cookie Tracking

· Brandon Hann

Despite all the negative you hear about tracking cookies, they’re actually not that bad. In fact, the majority of websites out there use cookies in one way or another to save information about your visit to their site. When you log into a site like eBay for example, a cookie is placed on your computer that allows eBay to recognize you the next time you come back.

In the case of your website, you can utilize tracking cookies to tell you a little more about your visitors such as what web browsers they use, what countries they come from and how they got to your site. This information will help dramatically with learning your site’s demographics.

Advertising cookies

Tracking cookies are most commonly used in advertisements to help keep everything organized and most importantly, relavent. Ad networks use these cookies as you travel from site to site where the same ad network(s) are used. This allows that company to follow your movement (tracking) and show you ads that are based on your previous activities.

From an advertising perspective, this makes perfect sense. If you were on eBay searching for car parts, eBay might show you ads related to cars and then if you go over to Amazon, the first ads you see are likely to be car parts. Amazon could also use previous cookies to show some car-related products on their homepage in hopes of selling something to you.

Tracking cookies

Essentially all cookies have some sort of tracking element to them and their sole purpose is to carry Internet usage data with them as you travel from site to site. Some people are fearful of tracking cookies simply because of their name. The words tracking and Internet don’t play well in a lot of people’s minds and they immediately have visions of companies hoarding personal information.

This is simply not the case. Sure, cookies do store information that is specific to you, but it’s nothing that could identify you. However, due to privacy concerns, you have the option of turning cookies off in your favorite browser. I don’t recommend it because I actually like going to a website that remembers who I am and is able to show me products and ads that are related to my preferences.

Spyware

These days, software called spyware can be installed on your system and you may not even know it. But, as mentioned above, not all spyware is bad. One example would be your printer software. Most printer manufacturers install spyware on your system as part of the driver installation and it’s used to “phone home” to make sure that your device is always up to date.

However, every positive has its negative and spyware is no exception. There are many malicious programs out there that can harvest much more than driver versions. Things such as keyloggers can be used to gain unauthorized access to machines, but this is a separate topic!

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Web 2.0 – Groups

· Brandon Hann

Online groups are just as important and functional as groups in real life. They allow people that share common interests to network with each other and share information, opinions and ideas. Finding a group is easy and it’s something that you should always consider when you’re looking for a competitive edge in business.

What are groups?

Lets say you’re in the business of building websites and you’re having a little trouble finding clients or maybe you feel a little stuck with some of your skills and you need a little help. You could go it alone and spend countless hours scouring the Internet for all the resources you need, but imagine if you belonged to a group other other web designers and maybe a few web hosting providers?

You would now have access to countless amounts of free tools and help from people all over the world!

In the days past, web groups were all important for your business to gain that slight advantage and it was hard to find them, but today, groups have kind of taking on a new image.

Social networking has arrived and services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Groups and Xing are providing a hybrid experience that incorporates everyday communications and updates with actual business-networking building tools.

Group websites

I have compiled a small list of websites that offer network building tools, user groups and more. This section was not expected to be very large considering the majority of this information will be available later when I begin discussing social networking, but here’s a small list of popular sites.

  • LinkedIn – LinkedIn uses a simple premise–connect with former and current colleagues and friends. Once you start building your connections in turn, you gain access to their connections and so forth. The more people you can connect with, the more networking you can do.
  • Xing – Xing takes global networking to a new level. They boast over 8 million professionals using their services for managing business contacts. You can even search for new employees for your business, advertise with other companies and use your profile to draw attention to your company.
  • Facebook – Although Facebook is mainly a social networking site, it does allow you to create a group for your business. This allows you to promote your services and get your name out there, but in comparison, I’d rather create a fan page. See my next topic for more information.
  • Google Groups – This is yet one more service from Google that’s less hyped and promoted compared to everything else they do, but it’s a great tool anyway. You can find a group for just about anything you could want. From what I noticed, the majority of people are using Google Groups to provide tech support and help, but it can still be used as a viable networking site.

Of course, there are plenty more out there, but the general idea is to connect yourself and your website with others in related fields. Before you know it, other people will be linking directly to your site and this will help increase your traffic!

<< Back to Comments Forward to Fan Pages >>

Web 2.0 – RSS Syndication

· Brandon Hann

You’ve seen it all over my site and probably many other sites you’ve been to. It’s the little orange icon that indicates there’s a subscription you can subscribe to on a website. If you want to get all the latest updates for a website without having to go back multiple times a day to see what’s changed, subscribing to an RSS feed will help you.

RSS is short for really simple syndication and it is exactly that! A feed is the url that provides the content to your visitors. As a publisher, you enjoy the benefit of all your content and site updates being automatically syndicated through your RSS feed, while your users benefit from having these updates delivered to them instantly. Current web browsers usually offer the reading of RSS feeds inline with the browser which means it opens and navigates just like the original website. Go ahead and try it now by viewing my RSS feed. I’ll wait…

Some browsers don’t read the RSS inline, but rather bookmark the feed in the browser and then open it in a built-in RSS reader. Here’s a list of popular browsers and how they interpret RSS feeds.

  • Google Chrome – Chrome opens feeds directly in a new tab (or window) and allows you to read the content in the browser. From there, you can bookmark it as you see fit.
  • Mozilla Firefox – When you click on a feed link, you’re automatically prompted to bookmark the feed. This feed is then sorted by all of the content entries by title. When you click on any link within the bookmark, it takes you directly to the original page on the site.
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer – Internet Explorer 7 and newer will open a feed very similar to the way Chrome does, but it has the added benefit of being able to sort content by category (site tags).
  • Apple Safari – Apple also opens feeds just like Chrome and Internet Explorer, but it allows you to sort and search content in greater detail than Internet Explorer.

Publisher benefits

A old way of keeping your visitors notified of updates was to have them sign up for an email newsletter and hope they check their mail. Since email is so flooded with spam these days, it’s getting harder and harder to retain the attention spans of your web visitors. By having these updates delivered to their browser window, it increases the chances that they’ll respond.

  • Ads – If you’re using Google AdSense, Google has new tools for RSS feeds that allow ads to be dropped right into the feed content and it works the same way as it does on your site.
  • Bandwidth – Although images and video still show in your feeds, other images such as themes and logos don’t. This can save you bandwidth charges every month when people view your content only through RSS.
  • Loyalty – Your visitors love updates and the faster and easier they can get it, the better. RSS provides you with both of these features and the best part is that it’s all automatic.
  • Promotion – Your feed urls can be distributed all over the Internet to create more or less, a new following for your website.

I recommend syndicating your RSS through Feedburner, which is now part of Google. This way, you add another useful service to your Google account and also take advantage of Google AdSense. Everything is built right in and you are able to create multiple feeds in needed.

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Site Creation – Portals

· Brandon Hann

Business portals generally provide web-based access for authorized users to core functions of a business. In the past, businesses opened at 9 and closed at 5. When the lights went off, so did your work. You went home and forgot about everything for a while and nothing needed to be done until the next day.

In today’s business world, things are not so serene! Due to huge advances in technology, we now rely on everything 24/7 and this includes our emails, files, contacts, orders and general processes. If you’re running a business online, you need to be ready for anything at any time. Business portals are designed to do just that. Better yet, they help streamline your operations.

Better Communication

Your organization can always use a better and more efficient way to work. Creating a portal for your company can consolidate backend functions that would normally require multiple software programs (and probably personell) to manage. When you have constant access to all of these features, you can get the information you’re looking for whether you’re travelling, with a customer, at the office or at home.

Improve Productivity

Unlike the past where business hours dictated your personal hours and family time, the world we live in now requires our time like never before. To make up for this lost time, most people prefer to work from home. This way, they can spend time with their children while tracking sales reports from the early morning. Studies have shown that if an employee works from home, they are likely to become more productive because they’re in their own comfort zone and are generally stress free.

By offering a portal within your company, you’re also offering a new collaborative way for team members to share ideas and work on projects. What used to take days of mailing revisions back and forth and waiting hours for travelling employees to arrive at their destinations, can now take minutes over the Internet. Imagine having all of your employees logged in to the company portal from wherever they are in the world and be able to provide the same level of quality without having to be in the same room!

Improve Partner Relationships

Your company might be working globally, but not everyone in the world works on your schedule. Business portals allow your far off partners and clients to access your company when it’s convenient for them! You can even provide them with various levels of access that pertain to their specific requirements. This way, they can update needed information without you having to even be awake.

Improve Customer Relations

Being able to track customer’s buying habits and preferences allows you to stay in-tune with your customers. Provide them what they’re looking for better than you competitors and you’ll win every time. Customer experience is the number one focus when it comes to retention.

Portal Software

  1. DynaPortal – This company provide portal software online. You can choose from over 50 web-based applications to help manage your business.
  2. BroadVision – They offer portal services to large companies and allow you to completely customize your web interfaces with multi-lingual tools and applications.
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Site Creation – Email

· Brandon Hann

We obviously know what email is, so this one’s going to be short. However, it’s how you use it that makes the difference. The difference between your company looking professional and looking like a fly-by-night operation. How many times have you seen an advertisement, sticker on a car or a business card that had a company name followed by an email address from hotmail.com or yahoo.com?

How much better would it look to have an email address from your company’s domain name? As an example, if you changed your email address from YourName001293@hotmail.com to YourName@YourCompany.com you just took your image to a whole new level.

If you’ve been using an email address from a free web service, you need to change it now. And if you’re stuck on the idea that you can check your email anywhere there’s an Internet connection, you no longer have to worry with a service called IMAP. Let’s take a look at some differences in email services.

Types of email services

  • POP3 – POP email is the most basic of email services that allows you to simply download your messages to a third party software program such as Outlook, Entourage or Thunderbird. This is a great advantage given the fact that your email is stored on your computer, but this can also be the downside because if you’re not around your computer, you won’t have access to it. The major drawback, however is that if have more than one computer and you download your email on one computer, you won’t have access to it on another.
  • IMAP – IMAP allows you to use your third party software to map it to your email account(s) on the server. This means that all your emails are synced between your software and your server. You still need your computer and an Internet connection, but unlike POP3, your email isn’t moved from the server and therefore can be accessed on multiple computers that contain your mail settings. One drawback with IMAP is that your email always stays on the server until it’s deleted, which can fill up any storage quota you may have.
  • Webmail – All web hosting plans and services you can buy come with free webmail services. This is the best choice for getting your email if you like the idea of being able to access email truly anywhere. This service works exactly like Hotmail or Yahoo!, but it may be limited in features. One of the only drawbacks with webmail would be storage limits. You can also use webmail and IMAP together since any changes you make on one or the other will affect both.

When running a business, you always want to be in contact with your customers. If you have to, get yourself a smartphone so your messages can come is as soon as they’re sent. After choosing your preferred way to get email, stick with it as you don’t want to become confused later or have email stored in more than one location.

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Site Creation – Domain Name System (DNS)

· Brandon Hann

Understanding the Domain Name System, or DNS is an important part of understanding web hosting as well as the Internet in general. Without it, we wouldn’t have domains and the Internet would not be what it is today. You may not have known it, but underneath the entire infrastructure, lies DNS.

What does it do?

In short, DNS takes domain names such as Ledfrog.com and translates them into an IP address like: 205.186.139.27. Imagine if you had to remember how to find websites based on their IP address? Even if you did, imagine what would happen if that website changed its physical location, thereby changing the IP address? DNS was created to bypass these problems and allow for the creation of what I call aliases that are understandable to humans.

How does it work?

When you register a domain name, you’re placing a record in the domain registry that tells the Internet how to find your website. If someone types in Ledfrog.com, this is what happens:

  1. Your computer asks your ISP (Verizon, Time Warner, AOL, etc.) if it knows what and where Ledfrog.com is.
  2. If your ISP doesn’t know, it asks the Top Level Domain server. In this case it’s .com and of course .com knows that there is an entry for “ledfrog”.
  3. It returns the IP address of the server that Ledfrog is located on and tells your computer where to connect.
  4. Your web browser then connects to the IP address and you now see the website on your screen.


Of course, that’s a very basic look at the process because there are thousands of DNS servers out on the Internet that do search queries to help with the processing of domain names.

How does this apply to me?

Once you register your domain name, you need to point it the name servers of the web host you’ve chosen to host your site. As an example, the name servers for my site are: NS1.MEDIATEMPLE.NET and NS2.MEDIATEMPLE.NET because MediaTemple.net hosts my site. Those nameservers are responsible for telling the world that my website is located there and to display it to everyone who asks for it.

Another main advantage to DNS is the ability to change your web host at any time. Since the web host isn’t going anywhere, their IP addresses will never change. If your site moves, your nameservers change and therefore get updated with the new IP addresses. Because you have a registered domain name, there’s nothing more you have to do once you update your nameservers.

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