You know the millions of dollars Rupert Murdoch spent designing “The Daily” for iPad- and Conde Naste and all the other publishers? Yeah, well a free plugin for your wordpress install makes your site sexy like a magazine app- with a quick click of the install button: either go to your plugins and search for it- or go to the addon page Onswipe
It’s been rolled out to all the wordpress.com sites- and is supported by Automattic– the people who manage the WordPress project. From their blog:
With the launch of Apple’s iPad we have seen the future of computing and it is touch. Nothing matches the visceral feel of navigating your digital world with your hands. The past four months we’ve been working closely with Onswipe to bring your iPad visitors our vision of what a blog can look like re-imagined for a touch experience.
Our iPad-optimized view is app-like in its functionality, but pure HTML5 goodness on the backend: it supports touch interactions, swiping, rotation, and many other features of the iPad….
There are some fun options to play with too. If you browse to Appearance -> iPad in your Dashboard you can:
- Have the theme use an image from your recent posts as a cover.
- Upload a logo to showcase your brand or personality on the cover.
- Upload an image to be used as a loading graphic when visitors add your site to their home screen.
- Switch fonts.
- Choose from 9 different skin colors, to best match the feel of your site.
- Enable or disable the whole thing.
When you tap to view a post, you get to see the full content with a slick commenting interface and social sharing tools for Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress.com literally at your finger tips. It’s a lot of fun browsing sites with Onswipe.
On WordPress.com we’re seeing about 750,000 page views a day from iPad visitors and it continues to rise. New tablet devices seem to be coming out every time you turn around. In the coming months we’ll be expanding to work with other popular tablet devices, but we chose to focus on the iPad first because… well it’s cool.
The beauty of the perfect implementation of good code that separates the content from the presentation- as WordPress does so well, is it is easy to reformat your content multiple ways- and for multiple devices (the exact opposite of sites built in Flash). Due to the huge installed base of WordPress sites- the developments and goodness come all that much quicker than they do for other open source CMS systems- and blow the doors off proprietary code bases.
I’ve installed it on www.esrati.com for a test – so if you have an iPad, go check it out. Of course, if you don’t have an iPad, you won’t get the dreamy effect.
This is just one more reason- that looks of your site- aren’t as much of an issue as content. So get busy- install it- and write some new posts.
The user interface geniuses decided to remove a button from Firefox 4 that was a critical tool for anyone who reads feeds- the feed icon on the right side of the address bar.
Luckily- there is a Firefox addon that puts it back:
Adds the old FF 3.X RSS Icon behavior back into FF 4.Specifically, when a page contains link tags in it’s header with a type of application/atom+xml or application/rss+xml it places the orange RSS icon into the right side of the location bar a.k.a. urlbar, awesomebar. If one and only one feed is detected, then clicking on the icon invokes your feed-handler see about:config browser.feeds.handler. If multiple feeds are detected, it popups up a little menu to allow you to select which feed to add.This addon DOES NOT look for links to rss/atom files in the body of a document.
Overall, Firefox 4 has been an adjustment- the moving of the tabs to the top is still a new behavior to learn. Manage bookmarks isn’t there anymore- you go to Show all bookmarks in order to edit your bookmarks and manage them.
The best part- is that Flash in one tab can’t crash the whole browser- like Google Chrome. I’m not feeling the promised speed from Firefox 4- but, I am much happier that the browser no longer crashes when bad code behaves badly.
The New York Times has an excellent article on why you should use video as part of your online strategy.
Online video is becoming a first stop for many customers. It is akin to what the Web page was a decade ago — something that can give early adopters an edge over competitors. It gives them a channel to talk directly to customers in ways previously accessible only to large companies that could afford TV advertisements.
This guide to using online video focuses on YouTube, which is by far the dominant player with two billion views per day — but many of the principles also apply to the other hosting services, including Vimeo, MetaCafe, Facebook, Viddler, Brightcove and Blip.tv.
A summary of their tips:
- Show your products
- Create a destination- a video channel.
- Use analytics and tools to analyze your video performance.
- Advertise with it- using preroll ads, banner ads etc. on video sites.
- How to or instructional video- we’ve always said utility is a leading reason to post online.
We’d also add that video reviews or comparisons of products are an excellent tool to gain customers. If you sell competing brands- do a product comparison that helps people make a choice.
Be personable- people still buy from people they know. It helps to put a face on your company- from the sales reps to the repair guys, these are the people your customers will be meeting or doing business with- showcase them.
To create video isn’t that difficult or expensive anymore. We’re big fans of the iMovie software that comes free with every Macintosh. For a camera- we really like the Kodak ZI-8 ($100 on Amazon) which has a mic input, removable SDHC memory card (which you’ll need to buy with the camera) and a replaceable battery. It’s High Def- and even has a direct to YouTube setting- although we always think a little editing helps.
We also suggest you always use a tripod- for the best quality compressed video, keep the backgrounds simple and non-moving, use lots of lighting if indoors, and at least superimpose your web address and phone number on the video.
There are no excuses to not use video anymore. Remember, after Google, Youtube is the second leading search engine.