Archive for November, 2007

Blackboard Friday : Silence Is Golden

With PubCon going down next week I thought it would be appropriate to talk a bit about keeping quiet. To me as a coder talking about other people’s techniques, apps and scripts is just off limits unless that person expressly tells me they don’t care if I do. Even then I make a point not to as there may be many others who are doing the very same thing.

As you enjoy your week of sessions, parties and gambling you will have the opportunity to make several new friends and be privy to certain topics of discussion. Some people will be more up front about the things they do while others more reserved and only talk to trusted friends. You will meet people who work in areas that may be considered black hat, white hat and or several shades of grey.

If you happen to fall in to the right crowd consider yourself lucky and enjoy! You might learn a thing or two, score some points by answering some questions or over hear some great new ideas or methods people have tried. Keep this to yourself! Don’t go around talking or blogging about it. Some people have made a career out of outing others techniques and or clients while claiming it is for the greater good in a very guilty/apologetic tone. It’s never right to out anyone no matter how guilty you feel or apologetic you are. You will only create doubt in the minds of your peers and be kept out of future conversations.

Personally I am fortunate to enjoy access to people who have shared or have shown me some impressive methods, applications and scripts. Access to non public forums and comped memberships to paid forums I must say is awesome. The experience of all of this has helped me tremendously in growing my own skill set and general knowledge of this industry. The price I pay for all of this? Silence.

I sincerely hope you have a great time in Las Vegas and find the answers to your questions. See you all there!

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.Net or PHP - What should I learn?

Learn them both! One of the best things that could ever happen to me was to be talked down to by an older engineer who said something like “You can’t learn all the programming languages… its very difficult… you are lucky if you can learn one…”. I kind of took that on as a challenge instead of an insult in a time when the internet was just taking off.

Not only have I learned and coded in several languages (ASP, Visual Basic, C#, Perl, PHP, Javascript, TEA) but I took on Photoshop and Flash to boot.

Is one better than the other?
No! Why? Because they are two seperate and distinct things like apples and oranges or Honda and Ferrari. Lets take the Honda/Ferrari example for a spin. I have seen many people pump tons of cash to create a high performance Honda for racing. Custom Suspension, Turbos, Tires you name it. But it will never perform and compare to a Ferrari. Both are cars and will get you from one point to the next and thats pretty much where the similarities end. Now one will cost next to nothing and be efficient while the other will cost you much more and be a bit of a burden to maintain.

PHP
At this point in the internet game you need to know PHP. Its free, widely adopted, hosting is less expensive and many great applications like this wordpress blog are available at no cost. PHP is optimized for the web and is a straight forward scripting language that is easy to pick up and if you run into trouble guess what? Tons of info and help is available online at no cost to you.

Theoretically you could build just about anything you need for the web with PHP like websites, webservices, scrapers data aggregation, wordpress plugins, etc… I have “seen” PHP scripts that can do anything from login to websites, create email accounts, blog spam auto update blogs to generating images and flash files. With some work you can even simulate multi threading but in the end its not true multi threading and thats where .Net starts to shine

.Net
If you need data crunching reporting or massive multi threaded applications .Net whether its c#, c++ or Visual Basic is going to be the way you want to go. And guess what? Microsoft offers its .Net Visual Studio development software for free!

.Net can create powerful windows tools but unfortunately at the moment in my opinion gets out done by PHP when it comes to the web. PHP was developed for the web around proven and efficient platforms while .Net still has a windows application mindset towards web development.

Remember…
As a coder you are only as good as what you can create. If you limit yourself to PHP or .Net you limit your ability to create and more importantly your opportunities of which there are many.

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Blackboard Friday : TALKING to Shoemoney

Why 90% of visitors hoping to ask questions to the big players at Pubcon will miss out on great lessons and friendships.

Usually when you see a mob of people approaching there is no doubt that one of the many Big Dogs of SEO or SEM is heading your way. Players like Greg Boser, Todd Friesen, Dave Naylor and Shoemoney are constantly getting barraged by fans and professionals looking to get in on some secret sauce formula for success. In my opinion the single most greatest reason why 90%+ of these people will not get any insight is because they don’t stop talking.

Seriously you got to imagine that these guys have heard it all and it takes one hell of a story to peak their interest. So here are my tips for getting your questions answered and maximizing your learning experience at Pubcon and future conferences.

1. LISTEN! It’s the easiest thing to do. Just listen instead of trying to talk about something you know nothing about or tell your story about how your business is so great or you are the next great spammer black hat making $100k before the sunrises. What you will see is how quickly people who just talk don’t get there questions answered (if they ever get to asking a question) and more importantly don’t LISTEN to the response because they just can’t wait to start talking again.

2. PRACTICE! That’s right I said practice. Sometimes you only get one crack at these guys so the last thing you want to do is stutter or mumble through your question. Distill your question down to the core of what you really need answered.

For example don’t ask general questions like “How can I make money with AdSense?” because that only leads to more questions like “What is your site about?” or “What kind of traffic do you get?”. Instead practice getting your description down to one sentence followed by a specific question. For example, “I run a music forum that gets 10k unique visitors a month. In your experience what have you found to be the best placement for ad units?”

3. ASK YOUR QUESTION! So by this point you have been listening and hopefully picking up some good tips. But what you don’t want to do is let your opportunity slip by saying to yourself “I can ask later… He/She seems busy…”. That’s procrastination knocking and you didn’t practice your question(s) for nothing. Trust me you are not the first nor will you be the last to ask a question. So make sure to walk up and ask your question.

4. WHAT NOT TO SAY! So you have already listened and been patient waiting to ask the question you practiced over and over again. Then you get your shot and ask and get a great response. The one thing you do not want to say ever after receiving a response is “Oh really? Well so and so said to do the complete opposite.” Why? The biggest reason is you are leaving a negative impression on a person who has taken the time to answer your question and secondly you are basically saying “I don’t believe what you just told me even though you are in a obvious position to know better.”

5. BE COURTEOUS! Remember to say thank you. It goes a long way.

Those are some quick tips that I hope will help to get you the answers you seek at Pubcon and any other conference you attend. Some of these conferences can cost a ton of money when you include Hotel and Airfare on top of your conference pass. So make sure you get the most out of them by preparing, setting your goals and follow up with action to accomplish the goals.

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Wordpress Plugin Maker

This plugin is made for developers or Wordpress users who love Cut and Paste and hate FTP . If you have ever been in a pinch where you wanted to create a quick Wordpress plugin to do something but didn’t have FTP info or weren’t at your terminal you can use this plugin to be a life saver.

What it does is take the minimum set of information to create a plugin and writes to your plugin directory an empty plugin template php file ready to be edited and activated online through the Wordpress admin plugin editor.

Just drop the Plugin Maker into your plugins directory and know that next time you need to create or cut and paste a plugin to add to your Wordpress collection you got it covered.

[ Download Plugin Maker v1.0 ]

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