Northern Developer

Social Bars For the Win!

2010-01-15T20:23:00.003-05:00

Ok, so in my last post I introduced the Meebo Bar. I thought it was really cool and it is, but I should have done a little more searching. I have found a few more media bars that offer a few different features and excel in different areas. In this installment I will be presenting to you the Sharebar by AddThis!, Wibiya and Skysa as well as revisiting the Meebo Bar. We will be investigating a few different areas that may be of concern to webmasters: Signup, Installation, Customization and Administration.

Signup
Of all the bars only one lets you use it on your site without the need to signup to their service. This would be the Sharebar from AddThis! I really like the option of not signing up for anything, that way I don't have to worry abut my inbox being inundated with spam. All of the others though have an easy interface to guide through the required signup process. The perks of signing up for all three social bars are the same though: Analytics and Customization (Except the Sharebar which can be customized without signup but doesn't have analytics).

Installation
The installation of all four bars are extremely easy, it is literally cutting and pasting very few lines of code. The easiest to install are Wibiya and Skysa with literally only a single script tag to place at the end of your HTML, thats it. The Sharebar is also extremely easy to install: one script tag and one div tag at the end of the HTML. The meebo bar is a bit bloated and actually goes against common practices, it requires a block of javascript just after the opening body tag and it requires another small piece of javascript just before the closing body tag. This makes the Meebo bar the hardest to install, but it is still pretty easy.

Customization
All four bars allow some degree of customization, but some allow more then others. The Meebo Bar allows for basic customization only, you can add and remove apps and thats about it. There are only about a dozen apps to choose from but only a couple are unique to Meebo. It does have an API to develop new buttons but it doesn't host third party buttons on its site so there is no central place to share these things. The Meebo bar has been running on my website How to Program, but I will probably be changing it later. I simply wasn't impressed with the Meebo bar after doing a little research. The Sharebar is only slightly better then Meebo, you can customize the buttons and the look and feel, but its customization must be done within the code itself with a special syntax, making it kind of tedious and error prone. The Sharebar doesn't support an API so you are kinda stuck with only the buttons that AddThis! provides, which is a lot but they essentially all do the same thing. Next on the list is Wibiya, currently it has about 20 applications for it's bar and roughly 30 themes. The themes can't be tailored but there are enough to satisfy most. Wibiya is currently running on this blog, it does it's job and overall I'm satisfied with it.(Switched to Skysa, it took all of two seconds to change it). The last social bar is simply the best, Skysa is an amazing piece of work, it has about a dozen apps and four themes. That doesn't sound like much but they host third party apps, so that list is sure to grow quickly. The four themes are really just there to get you started because Skysa allows for full customization of it's tool bar including how round your corners are and which background image to use. Skysa was simple to use and because of the customization it was easy to fit anywhere.

Administration
The administration for each bar was fairly similar except for the Sharebar, as noted earlier it takes code fiddling to have it act any differently. The other three though all have a fairly simple administration system at their respective websites. After you log in it's a simple matter to click and select which applications to display. The changes take effect to the bar immediately in all cases except for Meebo, the changes can take up to 15 minutes to reflect on your site. Although a 15 minute wait isn't long its just annoying to know that all the others can do this immediately. The analytics for Meebo and Wibiya are extremely basic, they count how many clicks per button. This information isn't completely useless but they could have put a bit more effort into it and gave me at least some browser stats. Unfortunately, Skysa wasn't much better. The analytics are built into each button so you will have to rely on the author to make those available.

Conclusion
So thats my short round up of social bars, I hope some of this was helpful. I would like to say definitely check out Skysa. They impressed and showed me the most promise. The other bars feel extremely limiting after enjoying the freedom of Skysa, but that's not to say that the others are horrible they simply aren't as good as the new kids in town.

Is SEO Dead?

2010-01-05T21:14:00.000-05:00

I have to ask the question, although I know that the answer is a big NO! SEO has definitely evolved from just keywords and description attributes though. I have been seeing big gains in the SEO department due to social media. The basics of SEO is still relevant but it has taken a twist. After you have put all that work into creating a beautiful site that validate as HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1 we still need inbound links. This is where social media plays it's role in a big way.

One of the best ways to get inbound links is to get users to share our web pages with their friends, and the easier it is the better it gets. I have found two noteworthy tools that do just that. Both are extremely easy to implement and extremely easy for users to share bookmarks. I can't even count the number of sites that have several different buttons cluttered together to enable sharing. This often looks pretty bad but they serve there purpose. But there are better ways!

AddThis
AddThis is an awesome service. It allows for anyone to put a small amount of Javascript on to their site and automatically allow users to share bookmarks on over 250 different services. It shows up as a single customizable button and expands a new frame when clicked so that the user can pick from several different services. It is also important to note that if you register for a free account you can receive analytics data for the button. Now you know which services you are being shared to most and can start targeting users of these services! The API is also great, it is easy to use and lets you customize absolutely everything about the button. I fully recommend using this service and I am starting to see it more and more.

Meebo Bar
Meebo Bar is very similar to what you find at the bottom of Facebook. It is very customizable and has some good features. What I like best about it, is that it allows for your users to chat to their friends in real time. If they are chatting to friends while on your site there is a good chance they will mention it to their friends. Although it doesn't have as many options as AddThis for sharing, the providers are working on ways to improve this. The API for the Meebo Bar is also very detailed and I am planning on integrating the AddThis button to it. After I am finished I will post a tutorial on how to do it, then I can have the best of both worlds! The Meebo Bar also includes analytics for your perusal, they are a bit slow to populate though but the bar is still in beta at the time of this writing. The last point is the absolute best feature though, you can link the bar to your Meebo account! This gives your users the ability to instantly message you about something on your site. I do a lot of work for real estate agents and many have asked for this feature, now I can finally get back to them and say "Yes we can do that!". If you want to try it out go to my personal site How to Program and give it a try (I am not online during the day as my current employer doesn't like that). The only draw back is that each account is only limited to one site right now, but I am hoping that after the beta this will change.

Piwik Analytics

2009-12-10T22:16:00.001-05:00

So I have been implementing a new piece of analytics software named Piwik, and what do you know it's really good! Piwik markets itself as the alternative to Google Analytics, and although it is really good it still doesn't have all of the bells and whistles that Google Analytics has. It is easily extend able though, I have been working on a Piwik plugin that uses the Max Mind GeoCity Lite database and Bing Maps. As a side note, Piwik has horrible documentation. It is probably the worst documentation I have ever seen. What makes this worse is that it is backed by a company called OpenX, their main product is an open source ad server by the same name. So in my mind they should have much better documentation, Code Igniter is a free open source product with phenomenal documentation. This lack of documentation has kept me away from this particular package for some time but I finally decided to take the plunge, and I am glad I did!

Ok, so how does Piwik compare to Google Analytics? Well, it has all of the same information that Google has save the geocoding, but there is a GeoIP plugin that fixes that. Although it has all of the same information that Google has, it's reports are quite primitive. For instance, although all of the information is available to you the interface seems a bit lacking. The plugins are limited in horizontal real estate so sometimes the information can be cut off unless you are using a high resolution. But that is a minor gripe and I am sure it will be fixed soon. The main selling point is that all of the data collected sits in your own personal database, this is extremely cool. As a former junior admin for a fairly large data warehouse I see a lot of potential in the data mining. I have already set up a few tests and was able to quickly generate SQL queries that reported on different trends such as highest bounce rates across different sites, most visited sites and also tally up exactly how many page views were generated from an internal site link and which page that link came from. This is all important stuff that web masters like to keep track of. Google Analytics will only show you stats about a single site, but with Piwik it is possible to track trends across multiple domains and compare that data. Very Cool stuff.

So far after about two weeks of testing it is becoming apparent that the information that Piwik provides is awesome, but the power lies in it's ability to be expanded and used by other applications. Just imagine the possibilities of using your Google analytics data on the fly in your own applications, this could be extremely useful for e-commerce, geo-targeting, accessibility and even navigation. I would suggest to check it out, it takes about five minutes to install and about another five minutes to setup.

I just hope that better documentation becomes available because plugin development can get tedious with only about a third of the API documented.