The one key element that many of us share, is the dislike for bloated software. Bloated software is synonymous for Microsoft. Apple has always locked on to this very same philosophy – simple is better – and has managed to edge into the PC market by large percentages. Yet still, the PC giants continue to “candy color” their wares and hope the new world would buy their products. When will they learn?

So Bing came into the market, due to it’s marketing efforts, it earns some users and now the world is crying Google is Dead. Bing’s pretty – I’ll hand that to them, but like all Microsoft Products, this one will end up bloated and broken. In the end, this girl will stay with Google.

Sure! I can hire some guy out of India to manage these menial tasks. But why? With some simple bash scripting and a little bit of Sed knowledge – I can create multiple web pages within a minute. Here’s my little secret:

With some simple bash scripting, I create a simple template copied from a content page on the website. Replace content with specific tags (i.e. Change the page title to _TITLE_) this way I can determine parts of that page I want to overwrite with my bash script. Once I have every part of the template tagged, I write my bash script.

#/bin/bash
echo Page Title
read TITLE
echo File Name
read FILENAME

#copy over the template
cp template.php $FILENAME
echo Writing $FILENAME Done.

#replace those tags
sed -i “s/_TITLE_/$TITLE” $FILENAME
echo Writing new title to $FILENAME done

echo New Web Page $FILENAME created
echo Done.

save the file
chmod +x your script
./run your script

That’s it… You can see how easy it is to utilize the above script to create new web pages quick and easy. It saves me a ton of time with older websites. Hope you like it!

Here are the simple steps to Pwning your First Gen iPhone:

1. Download PwnageTool 2.0.1 here
2. Download the required Bootloader files here
3. Start up iTunes and Restore Update your iPhone to 2.0
4. Unzip the PwnageTool 2.0.1 and Bootloader to your Desktop. You will need to unzip the Boot Loader files within the new Boot Loader folder. Do this now.
5. Once your iPhone has been updated (in Emergency Mode) start up PwnageTool
6. Choose the iPhone and click the Next Arrow.
7. Pwnage should recognize the new 2.0 ipsw, click Next.
8. Pwnage will now ask you for the new Boot Loader files. Click “No” when prompted to search the internet. This will give you the option to search for the Boot Loader 39 file. Locate this in the Boot Loader folder on your desktop. (Do this once again for BL 46.).
9. 9. Click Next. Sit back and allow Pwnage to build you a fresh 2.0 ipsw.
10. 10. Once the new ipsw file has been written to your desktop. Place your iPhone in DFU mode. You can follow the PwnageTool’s interface or simply do the following:
    1. Click and Hold both the “Power Button” and “Home” Buttons on your iPhone.
    2. Wait 10 Seconds. Release the “Power Button”.
    3. Continue holding the “home” button for another 5 seconds
    4. iTunes alerts you that the phone is in DFU mode, and asks if you want to Restore your phone. Click Cancel!
    5. Hold down the “ALT”, “Option” key on your Keyboard at the same time click the “Restore” button on iTunes – You can now search for the new ipsw created by Pwnage.
    6. Sit back, relax and get ready for 2.0 Goodness!

I love the Open Source Community!

Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK | CaseCrown iPhone 3G Soft Polycarbonate Slim Fit Case – Red

The Juicy Clicky

Clicky offers an API system for more advance users, but can be used quite simply by adding a bit of code to the bottom of your web pages. The beauty of Clicky is the individual visitor tracking system, that allows me to determine where, when and how the visitor reached any of my websites. Clicky offers a very simple interface where I can sort my users by date, page etc. but the one predominant reason I utilize Clicky for my websites, is to get detailed information on any and all conversions, immediately. To be much clearer, the moment I receive a conversion, I simply click a link and immediately get the precise pathing of the user that lead to the conversion.

Clicky Image #1: Web Logs on Steroids

The image above shows one of the conversions we received just this morning. The visitor details give me precise information about the individual who has completed a conversion, below this, is the information on the users actions while on the website, along with the search engine or referring page, and the keywords utilized to find our website, this is the information that I want and need to help me determine the value of those keywords if I wish to purchase them via one of our PPC campaigns.

Actions, help me determine how the user got to the conversion page. In this case, the user traveled through 4 pages within the website prior to converting, by clicking the Action link, I can see these individual pages. I can get further information on the individual keyword or phrases as well as look at the referring page quickly and easily.

Why Tracking User Information is Important to Marketing Efforts

We recently launched three additional landing pages to a clients website. At the end of the day or week, I determine whether the landing page was a success or whether it required some changes. What funnels appear predominantly with the landing page will help me decide on changes needed to avoid any unnecessary click-aways.

Why the user left and where they went, are all fundamental to determining what changes need to be made.  Because you get this information much quicker than alternative sources, you can make the changes necessary to improve performance immediately, verses waiting continuously and losing money.

Better Control over User Funnels Equate to Higher Conversions

It’s not uncommon for clients to get trapped into the “more visitors equal more conversions” way of thinking. But what if you could show them that it’s just as important to funnel current visitors onto your landing page, to increase conversions? Clicky is perhaps the most powerful tool to utilize in your quest to funnel users onto landing pages.

Funneling users is often overlooked by many, with most webmasters concerned about higher visitor numbers. It’s not uncommon for websites to see a notable number of visitors to their front page verses other pages within the website, but where the user goes from there, is much more important than the number of visits.

We’ve utilized countless tests on Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer to try and perform quick visitor funnel changes, but due to the 24 hour wait on results, we decided to utilize Clicky. Within minutes we can easily determine what users are doing and why, this gives us a better understanding of how to place marketing material on our leading web pages so the user can quickly find what they need faster. Giving the users what they want is the ultimate goal of any website – take this advice straight from Google.

With the power of tracking user visits with Clicky, we dropped our bounce rate by 30% as reported by Google Analytics. We saw a significant increase in sales and leads at the beginning of the 2008 quarter and currently out sell any of our clients competitors by a large margin – all during a down economy.

How to Use Clicky to Track Your Website Visitors

First, sign up for an account at Clicky and add the tracking code to your website. Once done, edit your conversion alerts to include a link to the following URL. Conversion alerts, meaning the final sale alert you are sent after a conversion is made.  Make sure you do this just for your Conversion Alert, and not the response sent to the customer:

http://www.getclicky.com/stats/visitors?site_id=[Your_Clicky_SITE_ID_Number]&ip_address=[IP_ADDRESS_OF_THE_USER&referer=&search=&order=newest&x=Apply+Filters+'

Replace the following:

Your_Clicky_SITE_ID_Number:  The Unique Site ID Number assigned by Clicky
IP Address of the User: With PHP you can easily use the global variable $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]

That’s it! Wait for your conversions, click the link on the alert you are sent and you gain more knowledge about that user quickly and easily.

NOTE: I just read the Clicky blog, and they are offering a referral based on a review of their product. Please note that I (Linux-Girl) am not an affiliate of Clicky. I utilize the tool and this review is honest and based on actual utilization of Clicky on our clients websites. This is not paid nor was it instigated by the creators of Clicky or their blog post.

After moving to Hawaii back in 2000, I was just learning the basics of Linux Server Management and had very little knowledge of Vim or it’s existence. But I could certainly find my way “somewhat” around a Linux Box – go me! I landed a web developers job at a travel company – Travel Hawaii , my job was to assist the owner and lead programmer with web graphics and design – mostly HTML and basic CGI installations. I started working alongside Chris Bopp, the lead programmer, Bopp (as I call him) is perhaps one of the most sane creatures there are in this world. Here’s a guy who exerts the geek persona to the nth degree. The man could solve any programming issue that was directed to him, you name it – he had the answer – or would find it within minutes.

Chris taught me everything I didn’t know about Linux, I still occasionally run back to Chris for assistance, mostly because, he’s just that smart! During this time, Dreamweaver had entered the market, Danny Sullivan had begun his first or second SEO conference back in the old days when Search Engine Watch was king. I remember the day John, the owner at Travel Hawaii handed me a big white binder he had gotten from one of Danny’s conferences – It was my bible I was told. Every secret there was to landing #1 listings on search engines was found in that binder – ah the good old days. I utilized Dreamweaver for everything – basic HTML the WYSIWYG interface was phenomenal. But again the delays of FTP, change permissions, errors in code with no real way to determine what line in the code was producing the actual errors. It reported line 26 but if you utilized SSI or PHP includes, there just wasn’t a way to really find the errors, so frustration continued.

Then Bopp introduced me to Vim and even today I wonder, how the hell did I get through the past without it. For those of you who still utilize basic notepad and other fancy doohickies to mark up your code – I pity you!! Vim is the answer to every coders dream. What used to take me 4 hours, now takes me 30 minutes. The simple find and replace commands, easy access to the shell itself, full utilization of primary keyboard keys and the best darn WYSIWYG “your browser” makes it unbeatable for developers. With my little experience using “less” and “more” and with the power of “grep” and “fgrep” learning Vim was easy.

PHP Code became easier to manage, with the ability to quickly find beginning and ending brackets of code ( { and } ). CGI Scripts were similarly easier to debug, a simple refresh of the browser would help me determine where the errors were in the code. Whether I needed to delve further into the server such as permissions or was I missing a simple quotation mark. Regardless of the problem it took mere seconds to fix and I was well on my way to my next project.

The best thing about Vim is the formatting, I’m able to format code and HTML with simple commands and eventually these commands came as easy to me as typing “ASDF JKL;”. CSS Stylesheets are easier to compose and HTML became less of a hindrance with my Vim skills – anything code, even the new AJAX and JavaScript libraries are easy to debug through Vim. Scriptkiddies – can stick to dreamweaver and frontpage, I’m going to keep my old school Vim and produce more work in less time. That way I can do what I enjoy doing most, shop to my hearts content.

To give you an idea of how fast I work with Vim and SSH – last week I redid a entire website of 100,000+ webpages with new CSS and some additional code. I had the entire site completely upgraded and redone with fresh CSS stylesheets, new Google Sitemaps, new code to render MySQL queries faster and all under 4 work hours.

My design team sends me a brand new PSD file, and I am able to write up the CSS, HTML and supporting PHP scripts, as well as JavaScript all within minutes. Now, Dreamweaver can do this as well – but you will still have to clean out that code to make it search friendly. My way, is simple and easy and the changes are made directly to the server and web host environment with no hiccups to stop the progress. I can minimize mark up to work with different browsers on the fly and never miss a beat. I don’t work on test directories, everything is done and pushed live within seconds. Can you say the same with your current style of code? I never trust software that promises to make Search Friendly Websites, I do however trust the simplicity of basic text editing through Vim. Happy Coding!