Real time search is getting to be a quite the buzzphrase in recent months. But what is it really?  The simplest and most familiar example is Twitter’s search feature, which provides almost instantaneous access to anyone’s tweets.  But given the recent implementations by the major search players, Google and Microsoft’s Bing, there appears to be some disagreement on the finer points. This article by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land analyzes the concept in a really nice way that I tend to agree with. It also delves into a lot of other specialized tools for real time search, but I’ll stick to the big names here (Twitter, Google, and Bing). Sullivan maintains that real time search is only truly “real time” when its sources come from microblogging services that provide a real time feed of the activity on their networks. For the most part right now, that means Twitter. There is just no single place for search engines to constantly look for updates from news sites or long-format blogs. So they have to depend on being alerted to updates by such sites, or actively crawling around the entire internet looking for new content. Neither of which is reliably real time in the up-to-the-second way that Twitter is.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Social Media, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

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I don’t have much to add to them, but I thought I’d put up some recent finds from around the web that have been really helpful in solving some of the many technical issues I encounter.

• Get WordPress Permalinks Working with Windows, IIS, and ISAPI Rewrite Got Wordpress running on a Windows server? Then you should have ISAPI Rewrite and the configuration described in this article to get your blog’s permalinks in a much more search engine (and human) friendly format. We also have ISAPI Rewrite working on our server to get pretty URLs working in Drupal.
• “301” Permanent Redirects Another link in the search engine optimization domain, this guide will show you how to set up these redirects in many different types of server technologies. If you host a site and are making changes to it that make certain URLs obsolete (porting the site to a new CMS, say), then it is really worth your while to set these redirects up for the old pages. Otherwise your search engine ranking could suffer.
• Preparing Your Website for Internet Explorer 8 IE8 came out at the beginning of this year and is gaining some traction. It is way more standards-compliant than previous versions of IE, which is great. However, most sites have IE-specific workarounds (read: hacks) which now pose problems for this new version. This concise guide breaks down everything you need to know about making your sites now work with IE8.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: How To, Technology, Web

The best thing a customer can do for your business is give you feedback — good or bad. The reality is that bad feedback greatly outnumbers good feedback. It’s just human nature. We love to complain when something doesn’t go right, and are often too busy to go to the effort to tell someone that something does go right. Even when complaints are justified, the business sometimes never hears them because the customer voiced his or her opinion in a private medium, such as telling a friend how awful the service in the restaurant was, and never giving the business a change to make it right. Word of mouth works for negative feedback even more powerfully than positive.

Mistakes happen. But even beyond mistakes, customers are a business owner’s objective barometer for knowing how well products and services are received. I’ve developed a mantra lately to help me remember this: you can’t argue with perception.

Social media provides unprecedented opportunities to listen in on some of those private complaints from customers that otherwise would never make it back to the business. You should make an effort to respond quickly to a complaint and do so publicly so that others reading the complaint can also benefit from your response. Think of it this way: the complaint will be out there whether or not you respond, so you’d better do something about it.

For large companies, the major cultural shift needed to effectively and genuinely reach customers through these channels may be more difficult than a small company who can do it with one or two people. The rules are the same in either case:

1. Engage people on their own turf. They’ll be impressed when you show up unexpectedly to help them solve their problem.
2. As with all customer service, keep your cool and “take the high road” whenever you can. Don’t get sucked into meaningless and unrelated tirades.
3. Remember how hard it is to control tone through text-based mediums such as email. Lean on the side of being extra nice.
4. Try to put a positive spin on the problem, so long as it’s genuine. Talk about future plans to remedy it.
5. Don’t discount suggestions, but also don’t over-commit to adding everything people request.

A few years ago Microsoft was getting a lot of public flak about its open source software initiatives. They stayed strong, responding to the comments on their blogs and others, and over a period of several months began to sway the tone of the comments. Eventually the community actually started sticking up for them. This took a lot of time and effort, but it helped to “humanize” Microsoft.

Comparing social media campaigns from Target and Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart failed so miserably that they chose to bow out not-so-gracefully in the face of hundreds of negative comments from students looking for roommates. If they’d stuck it out, I imagine they might have been able to turn it around or save face. Target got their campaign right from the start, creating a “party” for discussing dorm survival, which speaks to the culture and brand perception of the companies going into the campaigns.

The bottom line is to be true to your brand, your service, your customers, and your mistakes. The customer is not always right, but they always have the right to complain. Listening and responding will save you a lot of trouble down the road and probably lead to more business in the short term.

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | Other ePiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

OK well I only have two hacks actually, but i wanted to use this cool lasso dude image. Hence roundup. And notice how this text is wrapping around it? Well that’s hack #1. A client wanted to know if/how they could achieve this effect in their blog posts, and it actually took a little bit of doing. This Wordpress support page deals with the issue. From there I got the CSS code (see below) I needed to add to my theme’s style.css file in order to make it work. Newer themes might already have it.

In any case, once it’s there you can set the text wrapping in your blog’s web console. When editing your post there, click an image, then the little picture icon that shows up in the upper left, and set the alignment as desired. I draft and publish my posts via MacJournal, and unfortunately as far as I can tell I still have to go into the web console to set text wrapping for an image.

Here’s the CSS code needed to make text wrapping on images work:

img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}

img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}

img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}

a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}

a img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}

a img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}

Now, hack #2. We run on Windows web servers, which for Wordpress is not entirely straightforward. But it seems to work just fine with a little tweaking. Still, I had a problem with auto upgrades and theme editing from the web console. And I put off looking into since it was just an annoyance. This support topic describes the problem’s symptoms and solution. Indeed, granting the Network group write permissions on the blog directory made auto upgrades and theme editing work.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Social Media, Technology, Web

Another Microsoft headscratcher solved, thanks to another blog. But I only got past my sticking point with the help of a comment about halfway down a slew of comments on the post. So hopefully highlighting that helps someone else. Or if you’re still stuck, pour over the rest of the comments. Problems like these rarely have one neat solution for everybody. Here’s the text of the post reproduced:

Ever seen this error when debugging a web app in the VS.NET IDE:

Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging on the web server. You do not have permissions to debug. Verify that you are a member of the ‘Debugger Users’ group on the sever.

Well, search the net and you’ll get 100s of hits talking about .NET debugging options, IIS configurations, permissions, admin access, etc…. In my case everything checked out and still no luck. Well here’s another cause of this error: adding http://localhost to your Trusted Sites list…. Yup that’s right. Sounds simple, but that’s what did it in my case….

And the comment which got me debugging again:

Just wanted to share an additional tidbit. After trying everything listed here without success, I tried moving localhost from the IE “trusted sites” zone to the “local intranet” zone – and voila! Not sure what the difference is, but it worked.

Note the remarkable similarity, yet frustratingly subtle difference between the solution to this problem, and the one I posted about here.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology

Here’s a couple quick tips for things I recently figured out in IIS 6. Sidenote – I just saw whatever IIS version Vista has, and it’s TOTALLY different. Not sure what’s in Microsoft’s latest server OS, but if it’s along the same lines I hope all the differences add up to improvements and are relatively easy to figure out. Wouldn’t hold my breath about that. Anyway, here are my version 6 nuggets:

1. By default, the referrer log data type is not selected. So your logs won’t include that unless you specifically enable it. Seems like you would almost always want to know that.
2. In order to get those kinds of settings applied by default to newly created sites, set them on the properties of the folder in which your sites are created in IIS.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology, Web

I needed to create a service with Visual Studio 2005. I had done this with 03, and apparently there’s some new stuff in 05 that’s not entirely intuitive. I had some significant head scratching and googling until I finally saw my new service show up in the Windows service control view. In my research this blog post turned out to be the most complete and helpful set of instructions on how to actually get a service installed:

http://www.grinn.net/blog/dev/2008/02/windows-services-in-c-part-2-adding.html

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology

Here’s one of those posts I hope someone finds a-googling in search of the stupid little solution that has eluded them for hours. If you’re implementing your own signout button in an ASP.NET site (as opposed to using the built-in LoginStatus control), be sure to follow this pattern:

Session.Abandon();
FormsAuthentication.SignOut();
Response.Redirect(…);

You MUST do that redirect immediately after the SignOut() call. I had some other database calls, unrelated to any ASP.NET framework web stuff, between the two and a subsequent call to Request.IsAuthenticated() in my Global.asax was returning true. Taking out those intervening calls made Request.IsAuthenticated() return false. So any other custom operations you need to happen on signout must happen before the above code.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology

I’ve long criticized Microsoft for rolling out half-baked software and expecting their enormous embedded (and often unwillingly compliant and loyal) user base to do their beta testing for them. Common wisdom says wait for the SP2 (Service Pack 2) release of any of their major pieces of software.

But in the social media world, where new sites are popping up all over the place, the trend is to slap a “beta” label on it to reduce expectations of reliability, then push it out and encourage feedback from the people who are most interested–the early adopters.

Here is a good 101 write-up of launching a tech startup, including a break-down of alpha, beta, and general public release lingo.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Technology, Web

Bill Gates shows us why geeks hire professional models in all industries, including computer software sales.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Technology