State Abbreviations

Posted on by brennon

I’m always searching for these so I’m just posting them here. As I use them in different languages I’ll post them here preformatted for those languages. If you feel like contributing post them in the comments and I’ll put the translations in this post. Thanks!!

Ruby:

{‘Alabama’ => ‘AL’,'Alaska’ => ‘AK’,'Arizona’ => ‘AZ’,'Arkansas’ => ‘AR’,'California’ => ‘CA’,'Colorado’ => ‘CO’,'Connecticut’ => ‘CT’,'Delaware’ => ‘DE’,'Florida’ => ‘FL’,'Georgia’ => ‘GA’,'Hawaii’ => ‘HI’,'Idaho’ => ‘ID’,'Illinois’ => ‘IL’,'Indiana’ => ‘IN’,'Iowa’ => ‘IA’,'Kansas’ => ‘KS’,'Kentucky’ => ‘KY’,'Louisiana’ => ‘LA’,'Maine’ => ‘ME’,'Maryland’ => ‘MD’,'Massachusetts’ => ‘MA’,'Michigan’ => ‘MI’,'Minnesota’ => ‘MN’,'Mississippi’ => ‘MS’,'Missouri’ => ‘MO’,'Montana’ => ‘MT’,'Nebraska’ => ‘NE’,'Nevada’ => ‘NV’,'New Hampshire’ => ‘NH’,'New Jersey’ => ‘NJ’,'New Mexico’ => ‘NM’,'New York’ => ‘NY’,'North Carolina’ => ‘NC’,'North Dakota’ => ‘ND’,'Ohio’ => ‘OH’,'Oklahoma’ => ‘OK’,'Oregon’ => ‘OR’,'Pennsylvania’ => ‘PA’,'Rhode Island’ => ‘RI’,'South Carolina’ => ‘SC’,'South Dakota’ => ‘SD’,'Tennessee’ => ‘TN’,'Texas’ => ‘TX’,'Utah’ => ‘UT’,'Vermont’ => ‘VT’,'Virginia’ => ‘VA’,'Washington’ => ‘WA’,'West Virginia’ => ‘WV’,'Wisconsin’ => ‘WI’,'Wyoming’ => ‘WY’,'American Samoa’ => ‘AS’,'District of Columbia’ => ‘DC’,'Federated States of Micronesia’ => ‘FM’,'Guam’ => ‘GU’,'Marshall Islands’ => ‘MH’,'Northern Mariana Islands’ => ‘MP’,'Palau’ => ‘PW’,'Puerto Rico’ => ‘PR’,'Virgin Islands’ => ‘VI’,'Armed Forces Africa’ => ‘AE’,'Armed Forces Americas’ => ‘AA’,'Armed Forces Canada’ => ‘AE’,'Armed Forces Europe’ => ‘AE’,'Armed Forces Middle East’ => ‘AE’,'Armed Forces Pacific’ => ‘AP’}

Magento Ruby API

Posted on by brennon

Just in case there is someone else out there that is looking for this I have created the bare bones version of a magento api that is written in ruby.

I have used this to batch create a load of products and it should be a good starting place for adding any thing that is supported by the magento api to an existing ruby project.

Thanks for reading!

Click this to download the ruby file

Tools for better emails

Posted on by brennon

There are a few select things that you need to do in order to make and send professional looking html emails. Here are a few of the tricks and tips I’ve picked up along this 1996 tableful, anything but golden, road to beautiful html emails.

One of the first things to do is make sure that you have read the book “Create Stunning HTML Email that just works!” by Mathew Patterson and published by sitepoint. I’ve learned quite a few interesting things in this book and it comes with a few tables and charts that tell you what tags and css is supported by which email clients.

Next you’ll need to create an inlined html version of your email where there is little or no css in the head of the document, but rather everything is put in the body in style tags, and this is a nifty little tool that I’ve been using to help do this HTML Email Inliner

I’ll add more information in here as I’m learning and feeling inspired to receive some of your beautiful html emails!

SEO Search Engine Strategy

Posted on by brennon

Find your competition

- search for your keywords in google, bing, and yahoo i.e. software developer
- search for your keywords in quotes in google, bing, and yahoo i.e. “software developer”
- look for the number of PPC ads at the top or/and right of the page. More PPC means more popular keywords, and most likely more SEO on their pages
- look for bold keywords, more bold keywords per entry means more optimized pages and more SEO
- bold words in links usually mean more popular key phrases, and more SEO
- complete phrases on the page mean more popular key phrases, and more competitive SEO

If a competitor is ranking much higher than you are majority of the time it is because they have a link building strategy in place and have lots of links pointing to their website with keywords in the links pointing to their website.

Some techniques

- go local, optimize for local keywords salt lake city software developer rather than just software developer
- focus on more specialized term such as web application software developer rather than just software developer
- pick up on search tail, use google keywordtool to find other keywords that are being searched for an optimize your site for multiples of those keywords rather than just banking on the top searched keyword

Search engine variables

you have control over five variables when it comes to search engines

- keywords
- content (there are two strategies to content)

  • create thousands of pages and hope that some of the text matches a keyphrase
  • or create pages optimized for specific phrases that you are sure are used frequently

- page optimization

  • use correct placement and format (bold italics) of keywords on the page
  • proper title tags
  • meta descriptions

- submissions

  • no need to ping google, yahoo, bing with your site url since it most likely will get ignored
  • on the other hand always submit a sitemap.xml to at least google and bing and add the Sitemap: http://www.example.tld/sitemap.xml to your robots.txt

- links, make sure you can get some good relevant links pointing to your site with good keywords in the links

and a sixth which you cant control, obvious when I tell you what it is

- time

tools

- wordtracker.com

**Most if not all of the information on this page was found while reading Search Engine Optimization For Dummies 4th Edition

SEO Tips and Tricks

Posted on by brennon

Is your site indexed

- google msn or yahoo search site:domain.com
- google toolbar navigate to your page click page rank button
- google toolbar navigate to your page click the cached page button to see what google has in it’s cache for this page, if you don’t have the google toolbar google search cache:http://domain.com/page.html

Check some directories

- go to dir.yahoo.com and search for your website without http://www. i.e. domain.com rather than http://www.domain.com, note commercial sites have to pay to be in the yahoo directory
- go to dmoz.org search for domain name without the www. i.e. domain.com rather than www.domain.com

Is your site invisible

Do this if only your home page is visible in the search results.

- create more text links throughout the site especially if you are using javascript included menus
- add a HTML sitemap page to your site especially if you are using javascript included menus
- dynamic pages can be a problem. If your URL has more than 2 or 3 arguments in your url (i.e. domain.com/index.php?page=1&cat=13&group=5 has 3 arguments) then some search engines will not index this page.
- if your url is never the same (i.e. if the url contains session id’s in it domain.com/index.php?jsessionid=03896v82094kd028098v) then the url’s change for every page every time it is access and sometimes it will not be indexed.

Picking good keywords

- use the google keyword tool to research good keywords (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)

Framed Sites

- frames dont index well if you can revamp your website to not include frames
- if you cannot remove the frames on your site make sure you are using good title and description tags.
- add noframes tags in the body with 200 to 300 words of keyword rich content
- in the noframes text include a number of links to other pages in your site
- make sure every page contains a link back to the home page so it is not considered orphaned by the search index

Title tags

- title tags are very important to search engines
- title tags should be closer to the top of the page when viewing the html source, NEED to exist, make sure that there is only one set of title tags on the page, make sure to put valid and proper keywords in the title that pertain to the content of the page, should have 40 to 60 characters (including spaces), and perhaps repeat the primary keywords once.
- i.e. say you are working on Rodent Racing Web site your title might be <title>Rodent Racing Info. Rats, Mice, Gerbils, Stoats, All Kinds of Rodent Racing</title>

Description tags

- description tags may be index by search engines, and may be used as the site description on the search results page
- think of description tags serving two purposes: to help with search rank and as a “sales pitch” to convince people viewing the search results page to click your link
- place the description tag directly below the title tag at the top of the page and may contain up to 250 characters (including spaces)
- make sure you put your description tag attributes in the correct order, which should be <meta name=”description” content=”your description goes here”> don’t put the content first and the name second

Having good readable (by search engines) content

- avoid having a (usually pointless) Flash intro on your site
- avoid creating a totally flash based web site
- avoid embedding much of the text on your site into images, use readable text rather than images on the page that contain text
- avoid using flashy visuals to hide the fact that your site is light on content
- avoid using the wrong keywords

Keyword techniques

- use keywords in folder names and filenames, and in page files and image files
- use keywords near the top of the page
- place keywords into <h> (heading) tags
- use bold and italic keywords; search engines take note of these
- put keywords into bulleted lists; search engines also take note of this
- use keywords multiple times on a page, but don’t use a keyword or keyword phrase too often. If your page sounds really clumsy through over repetition, it may be too much.
- ensure that your link titles contain keywords don’t use “Click here” links unless they are combined with valid keywords “For more information on rodent racing click here”

Create and submit xml sitemaps to google and MSN/Bing and add a line in your robots.txt file that points to your sitemap.xml

- i.e. Sitemap: http://www.example.tld/sitemap.xml

 

**Most if not all of the information on this page was found while reading Search Engine Optimization For Dummies 4th Edition

ModX Tiny MCE

Posted on by brennon

While working with the ModX CMS I keep running into the issue where importing an image using TinyMCE will do some really funky things.

It likes to put /assets/components/tinymce/assets/ in the front of every image that I select. Then I can change it to use relative positioning, but then the images don’t work if the page is a sub page i.e. http://example.com/sub/page.html since it is looking for the image in http://example.com/sub/assets/images/image.jpg

So here is the super simple fix that makes my life bearable while using modx and tinymce :)

I added this line to public_html/core/components/tinymce/tinymce.class.php on line 164, or right after “case ‘rootrelative’:”

 

$this->properties['document_base_url'] = “/”;

Learning cocoa development – part 1

Posted on by brennon

This is one of my first (well, first recorded) post about programming in cocoa. I’m reading the book “Cocoa programming for Dummies” even though I hate the for dummies series, but I only hate the name the content of the book is usually great! So this is the project from the first few chapters of the book. It’s not very expansive or very awesome, but hey “Gotta start somewhere” right. I want to take this to programming for the iPhone (and maybe getting an iPhone someday) and being able to create some of my pet projects on the mac!!

SimpleCalculator

Great ways to get free Search Engine Optimization for your website

Posted on by brennon

Get some local listings


Google Places: http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

Yahoo Local: http://listings.local.yahoo.com/

Bing Local: https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx

Best of the Web Local: http://local.botw.org/helpcenter/jumpstartproduct.aspx


Add some directories and business directories

Superpages: http://www.supermedia.com/spportal/quickbpflow.do

Citysearch: https://selfenroll.citysearch.com (not free :( )

Localeze: http://webapp.localeze.com/extranet/createaccount.aspx

Yelp: https://biz.yelp.com/signup

Local.com: https://advertise.local.com/ (not free :( )

Yellowpages: http://adsolutions.att.com/internet-solutions

Hotfrog: http://www.hotfrog.com/AddYourBusiness.aspx

infoUSA: http://dbupdate.infousa.com/dbupdate/startupdate

Manta: http://www.manta.com/

Locally Type: http://www.locallytype.com/pages/submit.htm

List of free directories: http://www.best-web-directories.com/free-directories.htm

Another list of free directories: http://freewebsubmission.com/

 

Add your website to any show cases if you can (only submit to relevant showcases or they will probably be removed from the showcase)

ModxCMS Showcase: http://modxcms.com/learn/showcase/ (only use this if your website is using the modx cms)

 

Ping search engines about your url so they will be crawled and added to multiple search engines

Add Me: http://www.addme.com/ (great service to ping search engines about your url)

 

Thunderware is now part of the BBB!

Posted on by brennon

This week Thunderware was invited to be part of the BBB. I’m not quite sure how one becomes part of the BBB, but I do know that you have to be invited for having exceptional customer service and an honest business motto. So as of October 15th Thunderware will officially get its BBB stripes. So thank all of you for noticing and thank a very special few who must have submitted some remarks about me!