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Enhanced comment system for phpLD

Posted by Noel on May 21, 2010

If you’re run­ning a phpLD direc­tory script, you prob­a­bly know that its com­ment sys­tem leaves a lot to be desired. You can’t edit com­ments for one. You can only approve or delete com­ments. There is also very lit­tle spam pro­tec­tion. You can require users to reg­is­ter before leav­ing com­ments to min­i­mize spam, but doing this would also min­i­mize the com­ments itself. In this day and age of social media, there’s not going to be a whole lot of peo­ple will­ing to take the time to reg­is­ter and  login just so they can leave a cou­ple of lines.

For­tu­nately though, there are free com­ment­ing sys­tems out there that you could use on your direc­tory or any web­site for that mat­ter. E.g. Intense Debate and Dis­qus

I chose to imple­ment Dis­qus on my direc­to­ries.  If you want to see it in action, you can see it here and here.

If you are dis­sat­is­fied with the cur­rent com­ment­ing sys­tem on your direc­tory or web­site, here’s why you really should give Dis­qus a try.

  • Dis­qus allows you to man­age com­ments for ALL your web­sites in one place.
  • Dis­qus allows you to reply to com­ments via email
  • Dis­qus uses Akismet to fil­ter comments
  • Finally, Dis­cuss allows your users to option­ally log in using their Face­book, Twit­ter, OpenID, and their Yahoo cre­den­tials allow­ing your users to eas­ily spread the dis­cus­sion all across the social web.

Imple­ment­ing Dis­qus on your web­site is easy. Just signup for their ser­vice, fill in your web­site infor­ma­tion, and fol­low the spe­cific instruc­tion for your plat­form. For exam­ple, for a self-hosted Word­Press blog, you will need to install Dis­qus’ Word­Press plu­gin.

For phpLD, you’ll need to copy Disqus’  generic JavaScript code and paste it where ever you want to place their com­ment form.

If you want to install the com­ment form on the detail pages of your links, edit your detail.tpl file and paste the JavaScript code there. phpLD uses the Smarty tem­plate sys­tem so make sure that you enclose the JavaScript code with a {lit­eral} tag. This will allow your JavaScript code to be taken “literally”.

For exam­ple,

{literal}
YOUR JavaScript CODE HERE
{/literal}

Also, you prob­a­bly don’t want to con­fuse your users with two com­ment form sys­tems so make sure you dis­able phpLD’s com­ment sub­mis­sion in its admin panel.

Filed under SEO & Web Publishing Tagged ,
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Chickens in The City

Posted by Noel on May 13, 2010

My neigh­bor decided to start rais­ing his own chick­ens and built a back­yard chicken farm of sort in the Bronx. Appar­ently, it is legal to raise chick­ens in New York City as long as they’re all hens. No roost­ers allowed. Chick­ens are actu­ally con­sid­ered pets under the Health Code. Who knew?!

I think they’re cool but I prob­a­bly wont try this at home. The only farm­ing I ever did was in Face­book. Check this web­site and see if urban chicken farm­ing is allowed in your city.

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I’ve moved!

Posted by Noel on May 11, 2010

This is about five days late, but for those few that fol­low my blog, I apol­o­gize for the domain name change from Gotham Bytes to Noel360.

To be hon­est, I like the name, Gotham Bytes. But I changed the name because I didn’t want this blog tied to one place (New York). I’ve always had a love-hate rela­tion­ship with New York. I’ve actu­ally moved in and out of the city in the last 25 years. Five years in Dal­las, three years in Palm Springs, etc. What I’m say­ing is, with my track record, there’s a good prob­a­bil­ity that I might not be liv­ing a New York in five years time. I thought it would be a bit silly to have a blog called Gotham Bytes if I end up in say… Jersey.

Any­way, that’s my story. I changed the name while my blog is still rel­a­tively young. I know it would be vir­tual sui­cide if I change my domain name once it gets trac­tion, indexed, and have many, many link backs. (You gotta have pos­i­tive atti­tude, right?)

Hope you like the new name. I chose it because I know I won’t be chang­ing my first name any­time soon. I also chose 360 because the num­ber has a few good con­no­ta­tions and very easy to remember.

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WordPress as a CMS for small business

Posted by Noel on May 4, 2010

Val­ley Children’s Med­ical Center

I have built and been main­tain­ing a web­site, valleycmc.com, for a pedi­atric prac­tice in Indio, CA. It’s a small site of  about ten pages.

I orig­i­nally cre­ated the site in 2006 using only a text edi­tor. I knew it was going to be a small site with sta­tic pages. I of course antic­i­pated that some web pages will need occasional updating.

But as time went along, how­ever infre­quent these updates were, the process was always not as easy as it should be.  Fur­ther­more, there’s always a delay in post­ing changes because my client usu­ally either calls me or send me an email about the changes. I would then usu­ally fire up my ftp client then work or sift through lines and lines of HTML and php codes. While it’s not really that big of a deal, I knew my own process can be a lot less painful if I rebuild the entire web­site using a Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem or CMS.

I’m a com­plete noob at CMS so I nat­u­rally turned to Google for a lit­tle research on what avail­able free CMS scripts are out there. One quick search and Google quickly pointed me to the direc­tion of Dru­pal, Joomla, php-Nuke, and other usual sus­pects. But too be blunt, all of them are a lit­tle more com­plex than what I need. I need some­thing light with a very user-friendly interface.

WordPress Reading SettingsIt wasn’t until I came across this Read­ing Set­tings in Word­Press that I real­ized I could use it as a CMS.  I knew I could cre­ate pages but I did not want blog posts on my home­page and this set­ting options solved that issue for me. It enabled me to have both a “home­page” and a “blog” at the top of the nav­i­ga­tional menu to go to sep­a­rate pages. I thought the “blog” sec­tion would be a great page for impor­tant news and updates about the med­ical practice.

WordPress WYSIWYG editor

Word­Press Editor

WordPress’ WYSIWYG edi­tor is also every­thing I needed. It’s light, flex­i­ble, and uncom­pli­cated. I, and more impor­tantly my client, can now update, add, or delete pages and posts in real time.

In the end, the deci­sion to use Word­Press as a CMS was a no-brainer for me. I’m already very famil­iar with its back end. It’s also sup­ported by a big com­mu­nity so knew I’d find every plu­g­ins that I would ever need for my small web­site. After this project, I can’t think of any rea­son why I wouldn’t use or rec­om­mend Word­Press: not just for med­ical prac­tices, but for any small busi­ness websites.

 Check out my client’s web­site, ValleyCMC.com, and let me know what you think.

Filed under SEO & Web Publishing Tagged 
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Music’s Influence on Society

Posted by Noel on May 1, 2010

I wrote this arti­cle in 1995, way before blogs were pop­u­lar, even before Google, and when every site seemed to have a Netscape icon on it.

I recently found it buried in my hard drive and thought I’d share. You can tell it is dated but I think the mes­sage of this arti­cle still applies today and for years to come.

Music has influ­enced the life of man since the very begin­ning. It has made its home in palaces and cab­ins. It has given courage to sol­diers and endurance to slaves, hope to the oppressed and sor­row to the greedy.

Apollo

Many peo­ple believe that music is God’s gift to human­ity. Some even believe that music has powers.

Greek mythol­ogy ascribed to music a divine ori­gin and named its ear­li­est prac­ti­tion­ers gods, such as Apollo and Orpheus. The Old Tes­ta­ment has sto­ries of David cur­ing Saul’s mad­ness by play­ing a harp.

Today, man can still call upon music to lend wings to his inner feel­ings when­ever he has delighted greatly, grieved sorely, loved deeply, laughed freely, or prayed sincerely.

How man makes music is still a mys­tery but, as long as he is capa­ble of reach­ing this spir­i­tual heights and depths, man will always make music.

The power of music rests upon the truth under­ly­ing all human life, the basic kin­ship of peo­ple. If a song by John Lennon writ­ten over 25 years ago moves the youth of today, it is because they dis­cover a kin­ship between the long-dead singer and them­selves. Beethoven’s Ninth Sym­phony, after 200 years, with Schiller’s set­tings of “Ode to Joy” and its refrain “All Men are Broth­ers,” still moves thou­sands of peo­ple to be more involved in the shap­ing of our soci­ety. It is again because of this kin­ship. Lennon and Beethoven, like all the other great com­posers and song­writ­ers – Bach and Mozart, Eric Clap­ton and Bob Mar­ley, Kurt Cobain and Bob Dylan, just to name a few – have great influ­ence on our soci­ety. Their music reflects youth’s eter­nal con­cern with sex­ual aware­ness, drugs, and polit­i­cal mat­u­ra­tion. Their music reflects love and hate. Their music reflects the good and evil in our soci­ety. Their music reflects humanity.

It is this self-reflection of human­ity that shapes our own future, the very future that every song­writer and com­poser has the power to shape. One can only won­der about the state of the world had Lennon and McCart­ney not writ­ten hun­dreds of songs that affected the lives of bil­lions. “Imag­ine all the peo­ple, liv­ing life in peace.” Are just some of Lennon’s words that have given mil­lions of peo­ple hope that per­haps world peace is pos­si­ble. Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet Over­ture” has cer­tainly made mil­lions of peo­ple aware of the heart-rending beauty of love. Song­writ­ers like Bob Dylan and Neil Young have made mil­lions of peo­ple aware of their human and civil rights.

Today, song­writ­ers like Melissa Etheridge are mak­ing us aware and maybe more accept­ing of homo­sex­u­al­ity. Kurt Cobain and Eddy Ved­der have helped cre­ate Generation-X. From the ear­li­est gen­er­a­tions, com­posers and song­writ­ers have been touch­ing each and every one of us. With mes­sages like world peace, love, human rights, and human sex­u­al­ity, they have been shap­ing our soci­ety with music.

Filed under Music
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How to add Facebook’s Like button on phpLD

Posted by Noel on April 30, 2010

Yes­ter­day, I blogged about imple­ment­ing Facebook’s Like But­ton on this web­site. It’s fairly easy. There’s already tons of Word­Press plu­g­ins for this button.

Unfor­tu­nately, com­pared to Word­Press, phpLD is a bit smaller com­mu­nity so this is prob­a­bly the first Face­book like mod for phpLD.

Any­how, the eas­i­est way to imple­ment Facebook’s Like But­ton on phpLD is to go to Facebook’s plu­gin page, fill in your URL, then copy and paste the code pro­vided to your footer or wher­ever you might want to imple­ment this but­ton on your directory.

The only prob­lem with this easy solu­tion is that it only ‘likes” the URL, most likely your home­page, you’ve given. You can’t share or “like” indi­vid­ual list­ings or arti­cles like what I’ve done here.

For­tu­nately, imple­ment­ing this but­ton on indi­vid­ual list­ings is fairly sim­ple. Just copy the fol­low­ing code on detail.tpl of the tem­plate you’re using.

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fyourwebsite.com/detail.php?id={$ID}&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=420&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:420px; height:100px"></iframe>

Replace yourwebsite.com with your URL. As you can see, you can manip­u­late the width and height of the plu­gin. If you dont want to show Face­book users’ pho­tos, just set show_faces to false.

If you wish, you can also place this code in your link.tpl but you’ll neeed to replace {$ID} to {$link.ID}

NOTE: I installed this on phpLD ver­sion 4.0 but the mod is so sim­ple I’m sure it works on ver­sion 3.x too and maybe even 2.2

Filed under SEO & Web Publishing Tagged 
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Facebook’s New Like Button

Posted by Noel on April 29, 2010

Face­book, just added a new “Like But­ton” to their list of social plugins. The Like But­ton lets users share pages from your site back to their Face­book pro­file with one click.

Yes­ter­day, Face­book reported that 50,000 web­sites have already imple­mented this new like but­ton a week after release.

Not bad for for a first week!

Oh and in case you havent noticed, I’ve also just imple­mented this “like but­ton” on Gotham Bytes.

C’mon, click it. You know you want to.

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What not to do when choosing a domain name

Posted by Noel on April 22, 2010

I wish that every time I post, it would be about suc­cesses. But that’s just not the way this blog­ger goes. Suc­cess or fail­ures, here I post. Read on and maybe you won’t have to repeat the same mistakes.

I’ve been strug­gling with the domain name of one of my web­site. This web­site was orig­i­nally called, PaypalDirectory.com. I was happy with the domain name for years. It was the per­fect descrip­tion of what the site was and more impor­tantly, the site was doing well. But there’s one prob­lem, I had become aware I was infring­ing on Paypal’s trademark.

So I sent Pay­pal an email inform­ing them of my site, ask­ing if it’s ok, but received no response. Wish­ful thinking, I took that no response as an ok from Pay­pal and con­tin­ued work­ing on my site.

Pay­pal Directory.com con­tin­ued to grow along with my uneasi­ness with its domain name. My worst fear was that after all this hard work; I’d get a cease and desist notice from Paypal.

I finally decided to change the domain and this time I was deter­mined not to use the word Pay­pal, or any other trade­marked word, in the domain name itself. And since this direc­tory would not be tied to Paypal’s ser­vices, I fig­ured this is my chance to expand the direc­tory to all stores that accept alter­na­tives to credit card pay­ments. But there’s a prob­lem, I couldn’t think of a good domain name that is available.

I thought of the name, No Cards Required, but both the .com and .net are taken. To make mat­ters worse, both domains points to free porn. The .org is avail­able but I didn’t want my unsus­pect­ing cus­tomers to end up on free porn sites. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with free porn. I just don’t want it to be asso­ci­ated with my website.

I set­tled on the name CardOptional.com.  The site was doing well under this name. It was receiv­ing about 3,000 unique hits a month and had a PR rank­ing of 4, all within a mat­ter of months.

But yet again, I have one big prob­lem with the site. I could not get it to show up on SERPs for the key­words that I wanted. I feel the site could do so much bet­ter if I could just get it to show up on SERPs. I feel that the site is doing ok on the weight of its con­tent alone. Con­tent really is king but the king needs help.

The key­words or phrase that I want is “shop with­out credit cards”. After all, my web­site is a direc­tory of online shops that offers alter­na­tives to credit card pay­ments. And what bet­ter way to help my web­site show up on SERP with these key­words than to include the key­words on the domain itself. I would also be able to use the key­words on the title and con­tents. So there it is. It’s decided. The new domain name is ShopWithoutCreditCards.com.

To be hon­est, I had thought of using this domain name before but thought it was too long. In hind­sight, I should have just used it to begin with. I still think it’s a bit long but what’s the point of hav­ing a short domain name if no one can find your website.

I know I’ve lost a lot of indexed pages and valu­able PR rank­ing but I feel chang­ing the domain name would help my web­site in the long run. At least now, I know the key­words I’m opti­miz­ing my site for.

So what have I learned with all of this?

  1. Do not infringe on anyone’s trade­mark. Yes you can get away with it bit you will never be com­fort­able with your domain name.
  2. A short .com domain name is impor­tant but not if that short .com domain name is mean­ing­less. Try incor­po­rat­ing your key­words into your domain name. It would help you in SERPs in the long run.

There’s an exemp­tion to num­ber 2 of course. I think that a short brand-able mean­ing­less name can be suc­cess­ful but you’ll need to spend a lot of resources (resources that I don’t have) into pro­mot­ing it.

Thank you for let­ting me share; or vent. Maybe my fail­ures can help you in choos­ing the right domain name for your website.

Filed under SEO & Web Publishing
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Are anti-virus products worth it?

Posted by Noel on April 17, 2010

Before I answer this ques­tion, I would like to divulge that I used to work for Net­work Asso­ciates from 97 to 03 (Now McAfee). I was a Tech­ni­cal Sup­port Tech­ni­cian, then pro­moted to a Tech Lead, then Global Sup­port Engineer.

That being said, my past con­nec­tion to McAfee has noth­ing to do with my opin­ions on anti-virus prod­ucts. It has more to do with how all anti-virus prod­ucts work in gen­eral. I’m also pretty sure that McAfee and the entire Anti-Virus indus­try does not share my views.

Back on topic.

Are anti-virus prod­ucts worth it?

NO. My answer to this ques­tion is no. It is not worth it to use anti-virus products.

Anti-virus prod­ucts are reac­tive. Mean­ing, a virus had to be cre­ated first before an anti-virus com­pany can cre­ate a “vac­cine” for it. This is why you need to keep updat­ing your anti-virus software.

On top of that, anti-virus soft­ware are always active in the back­ground. This takes up valu­able com­puter resources, mak­ing your PC slower, for some­thing that is only “reac­tive.” And since it’s always run­ning in the back­ground, it also has a poten­tial to con­flict with other programs.

So no, IMO it’s not worth it. Anti-virus prod­ucts are ask­ing too much giv­ing way too lit­tle. There is still no sub­sti­tute for com­mon sense and safe com­put­ing habits. Don’t go to free porn sites, don’t open attach­ments from peo­ple you don’t know, etc., etc.

Basi­cally, what I’m say­ing is, backup your data reg­u­larly, watch where you go, watch what you click and you’ll be just fine.

How­ever, if you get anti-virus prod­ucts for free, maybe from you ISP or some­where else, then by all means, please use it. Com­put­ers nowa­days are fast enough to han­dle the extra load that anti-virus prod­ucts puts on your PC with­out sweat­ing. And most of all it’s FREE!

It is also impor­tant to note that my intended audi­ence for this post are home users and small busi­ness own­ers. For cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment, where there are many users, it is very hard to reg­u­late user com­put­ing habits. It is imper­a­tive that com­pa­nies deploy anti-virus products.

Filed under Computers & Technology Tagged 
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Cameras on the E train

Posted by Noel on April 15, 2010

I dont usu­ally take the E train but I just found out that they’re now putting cam­eras on the E train.

It’s cur­rently exper­i­men­tal but I like it. I hope they imple­ment it on all sub­way lines. NY sub­ways, or NYC for that matter, has and will always be a tar­get for extremist.

I know that some will cry about pri­vacy but really… If you need pri­vacy on sub­way cars, then you’re prob­a­bly doing some­thing you shouldn’t be doing on sub­way cars.

Just my take on this. What’s yours?

oh, and uh, Happy Tax Day!

Filed under New York
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