rants and ramblings - an XHTML 1.1 weblog

For many of us who create, design, maintain, and run the daily operations of a high volume website know the issues that we face. The easy part for me is keeping the sites cross-browser compatible, and maintaining the most current CSS techniques. But where I can honestly say that I need help in (and would rather hand off the responsibility for) is making sure the mysql optimization is up to par with the demand of the site. So I have been on the hunt for someone to take the database portion of web tech to the next level, and out of my hands until I jump into that role more prominently.

Well, I found a mysql consulting firm that does just that. They offer mysql expert consulting service, and their advice is top notch. They will even take the MySQL responsibilities off of your hands, and maintain the database themselves.

And while that is great for the meantime, I found out that they also offer MySQL Training, as well as SysAdmin consulting! Now that is something I am going to invest in myself.

They even offer client-side optimization by helping us identify problematic AJAX transactions. They will also fix bad javascript code (and even accelerate javascript libraries for us!). Now that is great customer service!

Here is what they list on their site as services they offer:

Servers

• Apache, Lighttpd, Ngninx, Squid

Cloud

• Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, SimpleDB, SQS), Nirvanix, RightScale, GoGrid, RackSpace

Server Side

• Objective PHP (with templating), Perl, ASP Classic, Key/Value Store acceleration w/ BDB, Tokyo Cabinet, Kyoto Cabinet, Neo4j, Cassandra, MemcacheFS, MongoDB, FlockDB, Redis, DRBD

Client Side

• Advanced Javascript, Custom Frameworks, mootools, thickbox, jquery, ajax

And many more options are available! So if I were you, my faithful tech geek readers, I would seriously consider checking them out! Then, we can begin to take that role of SysAdmin upon ourselves and get it right (…after we let them do it right in the first place for us)!

By Alex Furlin

1. It isn’t.

Well, let’s back up. Yes, SEO is important. Sort of. It’s an absolute base-builder. If you want to have a successful website, of course you’re going to want to have high search engine visibility. But at most, this is either the first or last step, and certainly not the most important.

This may seem to defy conventional wisdom, but the conventional wisdom of the internet is two years outdated. The Internet of a couple years ago was a more simple construction: you heard about news stories, so you searched for information about them on the internet. The internet was the second step in that process, because the information about the story had come to you through some other medium, like TV, or print, or a friend telling you. Straightforward A-to-B relation. The site with the highest placement on the search engines got the lion’s share of the hits. And so it continued, a perpetual war for views.

Enter the absolute domination of social networking and the subsequent democratization of the internet that gave rise to what I like to call The Internet Meritocracy. Basically what happened was this: because “real life” became more and more emulated and prominent on the internet, the way information spread was drastically changed. The rise of sharing articles and videos with someone via a social network did two major things: it bypassed the search engine, and it solidified the meritocracy of reputation.

So what is this Internet Meritocracy? In simple terms, it’s the reputation you give certain sources on the internet. That’s why when your friend sends you a YouTube link in a Facebook chat, you are a million times more likely to click it and watch the video than if you had just randomly browsed YouTube. That’s because you trust your friend. They have merit to you, more than some random stranger. Merit holds. Merit doesn’t change every day like trending topics.

That’s why SEO is secondary to Merit. Sites like The Onion and Gawker are master classes in site merit because they have built an incredibly devout userbase. They don’t need to depend on SEO to get hits because people know they are a worthwhile website. People will go straight to them, and more importantly, will share their content directly to someone else. Direct sharing has a far, FAR higher rate of effective link-clicking and site viewing compared to a search engine. What matters is attracting influential, reliable users. Users that will come to the site because the content you generate attracts them specifically, not because it’s riding on some trend of the week. These users will come to your good content consistently and will share it with their friends. That’s merit in action.

If the content has serious merit, their friends will share it with their friends on social media. The search engine part is no longer a huge necessary factor. The time SEO comes into play is when the meritocracy works so well that people outside the original chain start to hear about this web article or video, and that’s when they go to search engines. If you market exclusively to SEO, you’re only targeting the non-savvy users at the absolute end of the internet chain. If you can hook the influential, merited users at the beginning of the chain, you can ride the long, long road of page hits and shares. This is also why, once something goes “viral”, it goes viral BIG. It’s a total exponential curve. Once something has been deemed worthy of significant merit and has been tossed around social networks with influential users, the back-end, bottom-of-the-chain users pick up on it through SEO and it spreads like wildfire. But it’s silly to concentrate on the giant fire if you don’t have two sticks to start out with.

Summary: The file formats are introduced with the aim of making document handling easier. They should not be compared they all have their pros and cons.

There are times when we need to convert the PDF files into EPUB format for the purpose of getting the document in the compatible format for the iPad. Not only on the iPad, there are several other applications of the EPUB documents. These applications involve various fields like the academics, business or the services sector. Both the PDF and the EPUB have their utilities and the application areas and before you rush to convert PDF to EPUB Mac just wait and read this discussion. Have you ever thought why these formats are into existence or what is their role in the document handling over the internet? If not then you need to pay attention to this discussion as we are going to tell you about both these formats.

PDF or the portable document format is a format that is the evolution of the Camelot system introduced by Adobe Systems Co-founder John Warnock. This format was introduced to make the files independent of the application software, hardware and the operating system. Before the release of its open standard in 2008 PDF remained a proprietary format of the Adobe Systems. In 2008 Adobe made all the jobs involved in the selling usage and promotion of the PDF royalty free. This was made with the vision of making the PDF format available for the document transfer over the internet easily. There are other technologies surfacing to make PDF handling easier like the PDF OCR for Mac.

Then is the EPUB which is short for electronic publication, a free and open source standard format for the eBooks introduced by the International Digital Publishing Forum. The essence for this format was felt due to the rapidly changing display devices market. EPUB supports the reflow able content format that means readers can optimize these documents to display on any device.

So now you get the idea of the applications and the scope of both the formats.

In order to build a strong business there are a few things that you need. A good concept, knowing what your audience wants and making the most of the latest technologies can be a good place to start. If you love web design call this number +1 (646) 233-3369 (US) and find out more and the design services from this company. Web design can be extremely important as it helps people learn more about themselves and see what they can do with their companies in order to have a stronger influence on the target audience of their choice. Catchy unconventional design is very important for people who want to find a balance between being professional and catching the attention of trendy modern customers. With additional services like html 5 web development you can be sure things will go really well. Always finding creative solutions and investing into the future works best.

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