Facebook finally came up with a business page search and directory, so you can find business pages without knowing the URL.

However despite saying that all pages are automatically added to the directory, there are many comments about people not being able to find their site, unless they are logged on.

At least not being included in the official Facebook business directory doesn’t exclude your page from being indexed at search engines. But a link from an external site is still recommended.

So to help things along, here are a few links to Facebook business pages I’m a fan of:

webqem
MyDogSpace
Sydney Web Design

We’re renovating at home. So I’m spending a lot of time sanding, preparing and painting, and listening to the radio more than usual.

Last night I heard what Google would surely classify as aural spam.

As an SEO, it’s a balancing act when building web pages, to make sure that I don’t trigger spam filters at Google. That means not using the targetted keyword phrase too many times on a page, making it appear “natural”.

Last night there was an ad on the radio that was true aural spam. I forget what it was advertising. Let’s assume it was “blue widgets”. Within the space of a 30 second ad, they used the term “blue widgets” about every 5 seconds. It was definitely unnatural. It sounded unpleasant. And that’s what copywriting is supposed to avoid. This ad treated the audience like a dummy. It’s like they were trying to improve their ranking on my internal search engine, but instead it turned me off.

But it did make me think of one of the other ads we unfortunately hear on the radio all the time in Australia, in recent years.

For AMI, with their much hyped “nasal technology delivery”, to help you last longer.

There’s nothing worse than being in the car with kids, and hearing those tacky ads. About how to make your woman happier by making you last longer in the sack. Just plain tacky, and shouldn’t be played during daytime hours.

Here’s a byline I made up, that I’m surprised they haven’t used yet:

Just a whiff, and you’ll be stiff.

What do you think?

The standard code provided by youtube has a width of 425 pixels.
Historically videos were converted for display at 320 pixels, although the new beta version for newly uploaded videos apparently goes up to 480px.
This post is a temporary experiment at embedding it into wordpress at 480×400pixels. It does break this layout, but it’s just an experiment.

The video used in this sample was captured from an 800px display, as any smaller than that would make navigating through xcart too annoying. The appearance is still pretty pathetic, which just reinforces the need for a voiceover. So I’ll add that later, and reupload the videos.

I guess we’ll let clients ask for the swf to be sent to them directly, at the original high quality resolution, and 800px width.

Just for fun, I’ll also embed the 425 version, to see how the quality differs.

Feedback so far is that the code provided by youtube makes it look clearer. So it must be extrapolating the larger screen size, making it blurry. Oh well.

We’ve made some sample training videos about using WordPress, recorded them using Adobe Captivate, which creates Flash SWF files.

But to upload them to YouTube, we had to convert them to .AVI files, as YouTube won’t let you upload .SWF files.

And then the actual encoding process used by YouTube is pathetically low quality, traditionally 320×240 pixels. Which makes everything so blurry that you can’t read the text.

I experimented with recording my training sessions at 640, 800 and 1024, to see if it made any difference. They were all still blurry.

YouTube has recently increased the quality slightly - up to 480×360, which is still pretty poor.
Initially you could only view the higher resolution versions of newish videos, by appending a parameter to the end of the address - &fmt=18. However they have now placed a link underneath videos that have the higher resolution version available, so that if you have a slower connection you can view the old 320px version, but with a high speed connection you can view the improved Beta version.

Still not really good enough for use in training though. For clients we will probably stick with hosting Flash videos through Adobe Connect, and avoid the double conversion process.

Or investigate other free video hosting solutions.

I finally upgraded this blog to version 2.5.1, from 2.1.2. So there was a database upgrade, introduction of draggable widgets, and a few other things.

I also changed hosts, moving from a Canadian company to an Aussie host. Rather than get the new host to copy from the old one, I did it myself, unloading the database, copying the code, and reloading the database, and changing the domain delegation. Amazingly it worked first time. I let the host change settle in for a few days, before doing the WP upgrade.

I didn’t widgetise my template. To do that, I probably would have had to override too many sidebar headings, or learn how to use SIFR, so I avoided the fuss. Although we did widgetise the old template used for the blog at work, the other week.

The main reason to widgetise, IMHO, is to easily take advantage of new widgets. Duh. It just avoids having to add specific new code for things like the tag cloud, search box, calendar, and the piece e resistance, the text box. I like the fact that you can have an admin-driven text box added to your sidebar. It’s useful for making announcements, or other generic text.

My template, which is really really old, was a bit butchered. It was my first piece of PHP modification, and it still doesn’t have a link back to the home page if you click on the logo. And I can’t remember what font I used in the sidebar, so the Tag heading doesn’t match the others. But that doesn’t really matter.

The other cool bit, is refreshing the plugins. Lots of useful plugins have been created since I first wrote it, in particular, wp-cache, xml-sitemaps, sociable, and all-in-one-seo. I ditched the four separate seo plugins I had been using, and replaced them with all-in-one-seo, although it did mean losing the tags I had created with the old plugin. Tough.

At work we (I) am creating tutorials for updating WordPress, for use by clients that we build WordPress blogs for. Although so far, the tutorials are a bit blurry. Stay tuned for an announcement on when they are ready.

cheers