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How to Manage Social Media?

Wednesday, 04 August 2010

Social Media Set We have started to incorporate a lot more social media for into our sites and seeing excellent results.  The challenge with Social Media is to keep up with it.  This is not that tough when you only have one site or all of you time is dedicated to managing the website. 

The real question is how do you manage all of the Social Media Channels when you have multiple websites or maintaining your online presence is only a small part of you job?

This is the next challenge we will divide, conquor and develop best practices.  In the spirit of Social media, we will working out the details online and hoping for lots of great input.


 

How to automate moderated review tweeting for JReviews

Tuesday, 03 August 2010

RSS to Twitter for JReviews JReviews has a very cool feature that allows the automatic publication of reviews to twitter. If you have unmoderated reviews, you can enter you twitter information, bit.ly information and check the publish to twitter box.  Then when a user leaves a new review the review with bit.ly link is automatically added to your twitter account.  Pretty Cool and Helpful.

I have moderated reviews so this feature does not work for me.  I have to have moderated reviews due to high amounts of spam reviews.  Luckily the solution to my problem has already been found. No coding needed, just configuring a few settings.

The solution: Use existing JReviews RSS feeds and a RSS to Twitter service to publish latest reviews/listings/etc to Twitter.  FeedBurner by Google and Twitterfeed.com are two examples of this service..

 

WordPress Hosting Reviews Relaunched

Friday, 09 July 2010

WordPress Hosting Reviews Over the past few years Intown Web Design has done a some work with WordPress and it has alway gone very well.  Recently we there have been requests for more WordPress and WordPress Review sites.

To bring ourselves up to speed we redesigned and updated our WordPress Hosting Review site. For WP Hosting Reviews we thought we would drop the www from the url and opt for WP in the domain name instead of the full WordPress.  Trying to keep things short.

The site has quite a few reviews and we would love to get some more.

For WordPress Hosting Reviews we are using My Review Plugin .  it has the features we were looking for and even more important the developer, Mark has provided excellent support.  He is always turning out new versions and features and has been very helpful with updates, modifications and suggestions.

If you have a WordPress blog that needs hosting be sure to it out, and a few of our favorites hosts are:

If you have a great hosting company be sure to leave a review so that it will help others!

When do your prefer WordPress and when do you prefer Joomla? 

 

 

Top 100+ Joomla Resources

Friday, 26 March 2010

I got tired of trying to remember all the different Joomla places I would go, so I put them all into this blog post.

See something that should be added?  Let me know.

Official Joomla Sites

Open Source Matters

Joomla Social Networking

Joomla Blogroll

Joomla Templates

Joomla Hosting Resources

Joomla Beginners Help

Best Joomla Extensions

Joomla Conferences / Events

  • CMS Expo -- (joomla-resources-rss-feeds.gif joomla-resources-twitter.jpg) Showcase of the Best CMSs in the world

Know of any other resources that should be added to the list? send an email to info **at** intownwebdesign.com and we will get them added.

 

How to add hReview Aggregate formatting to JReviews

Tuesday, 09 March 2010

Google is adding rich snippets to their search listings.  So far I have only seen the stars added for the big sites (Yelp, Cnet) but maybe we will start to see smaller sites get listed with stars. Even if we do not other applications may be able to pick up and use your review formatting.

 

Best Joomla Blogs

Thursday, 04 February 2010

With Google Reader working very well on my iPhone, it was time to get my Joomla news feeds just right.

Here are some of the Best Joomla Blogs and Resources that I subscribe to:

Great Joomla Blogs To Follow:

  • Alledia.com by Steve Burge. Joomla SEO and Training info, many good Joomla How to and Tutorials
  • Joomla Blogger.net by Kristoffer Sandven.  Great info and the nicely wrap up the big Joomla happenings each week
  • HowToJoomla.net Cory Web.Joomla Tips, Tricks and Tutorials. Cory wrote the Beginning Joomla! book.
  • BrianTeeman by Brian Teeman. Different take on Joomla and its events.
  • Why Joomla by Qaslim Virjee. Joomla Design, Extensions and Joomla Hacks. 
  • Torkil Johnsen by Torkil Johnsen Great blog for developers, covers technical aspects of Joomla

Official Joomla News Feeds:

 

Bookmark this page and be sure to visit or subscribe to the Intown Web Design Blog or Intown Web Design RSS feed.

See one that a great blog that is missing? use our request information form to let us know and we will get it added. 
Wonder why we do not have comments ?

 

Google Browser Size: What Your Users See

Friday, 29 January 2010

Google Browser Size A big challenge in web design/usability is understanding that visitors have different screen sizes and most screens are smaller than you would think. This can be particularly difficult convincing clients, website owners, and graphic designers with large monitors the rest of the world does not have 24 inch widescreen monitors.

Google solved this by creating a simple browser size tool that overlays screen size percentages on top of your website. Giving you a quick easy way to see where the fold is for different visitors.  

This visual representation will help make the point how valuable the upper left corner of your website is and help you make a better decision when placing your call to actions.

 

Make JReviews Fast!

Tuesday, 26 January 2010

JReviewsOne of my goals for 2010 is to make JReview sites run fast, very fast.

A great way to do this is to take advantage of HTML Caching and JS/CSS Combination and Compression extensions. 

There are are many extensions avaible some work and some do not.  These posts are to help compare and organize the best extension to make you JReviews site fast. 

First lets breakdown the improvements into the different areas so we can understand what we are trying to acheive.

  1. CSS/JS file optimization and Compression
  2. HTML View Caching
  3. GZip the site for faster transfer
Once we have reviews the different areas for improvement we will list combinations of extensions that work well together. (Still working on this article)

Note: This article is still a work in progress.
If you have addional information, email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and I will get it added. Thanks!

 

JReviews JS-CSS Optimization Solutions Compared

Monday, 25 January 2010

JS/CSS compression removes the whitespace and combines all the files into one single file. One file for JS and a different file for CSS.  By reducing the number of files transfered and the file size you web pages are able to display faster. 

It can be tricky to get the files compress and have all of the functionality work correctly.  Several extension are available some work very well and are not so great. 

It should also be noted that CSS and JS Optimization work independently of each other.  Meaning you can enable CSS optimization while leaving the JS files unmodified.  It has been our experience that the JS optizmization has been a little more difficult than the CSS optimization.

 

JReviews HTML View Caching Options Explained

Friday, 22 January 2010

First lets explain what HTML view caching is.  Each time a visitor requests a page Joomla makes the Mysql calls to the database pulls the needed infomation and then assembles it through the php then to html.  This can be a lot of work and a lot of repetative work. 

HTML Caching stores the final output of the page as a file and then when the second visitor calls the page the page is pulled from the file system rather than through all of the Mysql database queries.  This is much faster and efficient.  The page then stays as a file or cached until the time expires then at this point the page is regenerated and a new version is stored in the cache. 

For a more detailed explanition of Joomla Caching check out this Joomla Caching Explained at the art of Joomla.

There are several extension that will cache you JReviews/Joomla site.  Lets start with the JReviews settings

JReviews LogoJReviews Caching Options

JReviews View Cache

This works for visitors only and only for the JReviews component pages. If you are not very familiar with caching options and have a simple site it is probably good to turn this one on.

You may want to turn off this option if you are using another sitewide caching solution.  Generally I would recomend looking for a sitewide solution to cache your site.  A sitewide solution will get all of your pages and one system is easier to manage than two.

JReviews Query Cache

This setting operated independently of the view cache and reduces the number of Queries the JReviews makes.  The trade off is that the cache takes up more disk space.

If you can it is a good idea to turn this setting on with what ever extensions you are using.  You may want to monitor the disk space it uses but it will most likely not be an issue.

Joomla! LogoJoomla Core Caching Options

Joomla Global Config Setting

found in Site > Global Configuration > System

Part of the core joomla system.  Some modules and menu links can be excluded from the cache. Works very well but does not have any options to automaticaly clear the cache when a guest leaves a review.  Check the links at the bottom of this page to learn more about Joomla Core Cacheing.

Joomla System - Cache Plugin

 found in Extenions > Plugin Manager > System - Cache

Part of the core Joomla system.  The setting will cache the entire page.  not possible to exlude any pages it is either on or off. Check the links at the bottom of this page to learn more about Joomla Core Cacheing.

3rd Party Caching Options

Cache Accelerate ProductCache Acclelerate

This extension has quite a few features.  From Gzipping, to page Caching, to CSS/JS compression.  The page caching is very flexible and triggers can be added so that a specific page or entire cache can be cleared based on a user event.  Example a guest leaves a new review, when they hit submit, Cache Accelrate sees this and clears the referring page from the cache so that the visitor can see his review with out having to wait for the cache to time out or breaking the site.

If you are using Cache Acellerate it is best to disable the JReviews view cache. 

Cache Accelerate has a raw mode where it will run very fast.  I am still learning about this feature. Learn more about Cache Accelerate Raw Mode

Cache Accelerate Home Page

 

WEBO Website Optimizer

Have not worked with this one so not entirely sure if it works or not.

 

 

 

 

 

Comments for Registered Users only

Thursday, 21 January 2010

After dealing with comment spam for to long we decided to disallow guest commenting.

About 90% of the comments were spam or did not add that much value to the site.

After seeing the Alledia blog post about going against the grain and how several blogs turned off comments, it seemed like a good experiment.If you have a comment or notice something that needs updating please contact us and we will get it fixed.

We may in the future allow comments from registered users.

We will see how this goes first.

Many new blog posts on the way!

 
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