Archive for the ‘Communities’ Category

Google Analytics is made of win

Friday, January 29th, 2010

This week, for the first time, I got on the Google Analytics bandwagon. I never thought charts and graphs could be so damn fun. Look at this:

Google Analytics site overlay

Google Analytics site overlay function

That is what Google calls the “Site Overlay” (it’s under the Content menu, if you’re looking for it, Googlers/Bingers). I was FLOORED when I saw it for the first time. The numbered percents everywhat represent the percentage of visitors that clicked the link – but I’m sure you didn’t need to be told that, since the data is clear as day.  WAY TO GO GOOGLE for taking data visualization to the next level.  Mad props.

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Posted in Communities, Design, Google, community site building | No Comments »

A chat with a professional designer

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

If you are, work with or want to be a professional designer, you MUST READ THIS…

I had a chat with MD, a professional designer friend of mine. I wanted to get an idea of what his design process is, as well as his thoughts on the current “Web 2.0″ situation and what it means for professional designers right now. He graciously agreed to allow me to post the conversation to the blog!

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Posted in Communities, Design, HTML, community site building | 3 Comments »

New updates to iswapyou.com

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

Theres been a lot of new functional changes made to iswapyou in the last two weeks. Summary is listed below.

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Posted in Code, Communities, HTML, community site building | 3 Comments »

Why should my site use a database? Dynamic Data for Web 2.0

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

Databases run just about everything on the web, from ebay to the latest social networking site. Any site that generates a lot of content and updates on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis should use some sort of online database. There is a reason that most blogs use either a “flat file” database (i.e. MoveableType), or a commercial or open source database application (i.e. WordPress – which this blog uses). Databases store your data so you can output and shape it based on the function that your sites user wishes to perform. This is the meaning of “dynamic data”, the benefits of which i will describe below.

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Posted in Code, Communities, WordPress, community site building, phpBB | 1 Comment »

Nerdgasm #3: Woot.com

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Todays nerdgasm is the ever fun, ever cheap Woot.com. “Woot!” (yes, the name has an exclamation point – i know… they’re insane) has is the purveyor of absolutely rediculous deals. There have been $16 one GB name brand MP3 players. I bought a 250 GB hard drive for $50 in 2006 (that’s half price what you’ll get it for now, and it’s almost 2008 folks)! Companion sites sellout.woot and wine.woot also have amazing deals.

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Posted in Communities, Nerdgasms | No Comments »

Finally – updates to iswapyou.com!!

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

I completed a lot of updates that were in the works on iswapyou.com today. The site search was updated to make it easier to use – instead of having multiple options on it, it now searches and gives results for everything. I changed it on the advice of a few usability experts.

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Posted in Code, Communities, HTML, Nerdgasms, community site building, php | 1 Comment »

Cracking YouTube, part 3

Monday, June 11th, 2007

Response to my previous two posts about Cracking YouTube has been amazing . Thanks to everyone in the community for the amazingly intelligent discussion that this has spawned, and for all of the high quality responses/comments to the original posts! Keep it up guys, it helps me tremendously and allows me to write more interesting articles like this.

No one has contacted me yet indicating that the technique in part 2 should NOT work by pointing out a hole in the logic. This makes sense, because…

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Posted in Code, Communities, Google, Hacking, Nerdgasms, Security, YouTube, community site building, php | 4 Comments »

Integrating phpBB in to a community site – part 1

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

PhpBB is definitely one of my favorite open source projects ever. Because its open sourced with the GPL, a huge modding community has emerged full of people molding the forum software in to what they want it to be. Its pretty common for people to add on their own stuff, like spam filters or ways to post YouTube videos…

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Posted in Code, Communities, HTML, Nerdgasms, php, phpBB | No Comments »

Blogging, Podcasting and Invisible Communities

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

Ryan, a friend of mine and co-designer of iswapyou, has a new podcast called Ichiraku Ramen. It’s a Naruto podcast, and a total nerdgasm of one at that…

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Posted in Communities, Nerdgasms, Podcasts | 1 Comment »

Cracking Youtube

Sunday, May 13th, 2007

Update: As of 5/21/07, I think YouTube rigged it so it doesn�t update your video views, only your channel views. Thanks to reader Mario for pointing this out.

Mashable recently posted about a user named “SuperMoviesDownload” getting top results on YouTube consistently, and trying to charge $10,000 to allow people to get a top video on YouTube. Mashable says that “it was easy to enter the Most Viewed list on YouTube just by opening some tabs in Firefox and setting them to auto-refresh – no real skill required.” That’s what Mashable said. This is what they meant…

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Posted in Code, Communities, Google, HTML, Hacking, Nerdgasms, Security, YouTube | 58 Comments »