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PubCon Vegas: 7 Takeaway Nuggets

By Steph Skardal
November 16, 2009

I’m back at work after last week’s PubCon Vegas. I published several articles about specific sessions, but I wanted to provide some nuggets on recurring themes of the conference.

Google Caffeine Update

This year Google rolled out some changes referred to as the Google Caffeine update. This change increases the speed and size of the index, moves Google search to real-time, and improves search results relevancy and accuracy. It was a popular topic at the conference, however, not much light was shed on how algorithm changes would affect your search results, if at all. I’ll have to keep an eye on this to see if there are any significant changes in End Point’s search performance.

Bing

Bing is gaining traction. They want to get [at least] 51% of the search market share.

Social media

Social media was a hot topic at the conference. An entire track was allocated to Twitter topics on the first day of the conference. However, it still pales in comparison to search. Of all referrals on the web, search still accounts for 98% and social media referrals only account for less than 1% (view referral data here). Dr. Pete from SEOmoz nicely summarized the elephant in the room at PubCon regarding …

PubCon Vegas Day 3: User Generated Content

By Steph Skardal
November 13, 2009

On day 3 of PubCon Vegas, a great session I attended was Optimizing Forums For Search & Dealing with User Generated Content with Dustin Woodard, Lawrence Coburn, and Roger Dooley. User generated content is content generated by users in the form of message boards, customizable profiles, forums, reviews, wikis, blogs, article submission, question and answer, video media, or social networks.

Some good statistics were presented about why to tap into user generated content. Nielsen research recently released showed that 1 out of every 11 minutes spent online is on a social network and 2/3rds of customer “touch points” are user-generated.

Dustin provided some interesting details about long tail traffic. He looked at HitWise’s data of the top 10,000 search terms for a 3 month period. The top 100 terms accounted for 5.7% of all traffic, the top 1000 terms accounted for 10.6% of all traffic, and the entire 10,000 data set accounted for just 18.5% of all traffic. With this data, representing the long tail would be analogous to a lizard with a one inch head and a tail that was 221 miles long that represents the long tail traffic.

Dustin gave the following steps for developing a user …

PubCon Vegas Day 2: International and Mega Site SEO, and Tools for SEO

By Steph Skardal
November 12, 2009

On the second day of PubCon Vegas, I attended several SEO track sessions including “SEO for Ecommerce”, “International and European Site Optimization”, “Mega Site SEO”, and “SEO/SEM Tools”. A mini-summary of several of the sessions is presented below.

Derrick Wheeler from Microsoft.com spoke on Mega Site SEO about “taming the beast”. Microsoft has 1.2 billion URLs that are comprised of thousands of web properties. For mega site SEO, Derrick highlighted:

• Content is NOT king. Structure is! Content is like the princess-in-waiting after structure has been mastered.
• Developing an overall SEO approach and organization to getting structure, content, and authority SEO completed is more valuable or relevant to the actual SEO work. This was a common theme among many of the presentations at PubCon.
• Getting metrics set up at the beginning of SEO work is a very important step to measure and justify progress.
• Don’t be afraid to say no to low priority items.

Most developers deal with a large amount of legacy code. Derrick discussed primary issues when working with legacy problems:

• Duplicate and undesirable pages. For Microsoft.com, managing and dealing with 1.2 billion pages results in a lot …

PubCon Vegas Day 1: Keyword Research Session

By Steph Skardal
November 11, 2009

On the first day of PubCon Vegas, I was bombarded by information, sessions, and people. PubCon is a SEO/SEM conference that has a variety of sessions categorized in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Marketing), Social Media and Affiliates. My primary interest is in SEO, which is why I attended the SEO track yesterday that included sessions about in-house SEO, organic keyword research and selection, and hot topics in SEO.

Because my specific involvement in SEO has focused on technical SEO, I was surprised that my highlight of day one was “Smart Organic Keyword Research and Selection” which included speakers Wil Reynolds, Craig Paddock, Carolyn Shelby, and Mark Jackson.

With good organization and humor, Carolyn first presented the “ABCs of Organic Keyword Research and Selection”: A is for analytics and knowing your audience. B is for brainstorm and bonus. and C is for Cookie!, crunch the numbers, cull the lists, and create a final list of keywords.

On the analytics side, Carolyn mentioned good sources of analytics include web server logs (read my article on the value of log or bot parsing), Google Analytics “traffic generating” keyword list, and logs from internal site …

Automatically building Pentaho metadata

By Josh Tolley
November 4, 2009

Every so often I’ll hear of someone asking for a way to allow their users to write queries against their database without having to teach everyone SQL. There are various applications to do this: BusinessObjects and Cognos, are two common commercial examples, among many others. Pentaho and JasperReports provide similar capabilities in the open-source world. These tools allow users to write reports by selecting fields from a user-friendly list, adding suitable constraints, and making other formatting and filtering choices, all without needing to understand SQL.

Those familiar with these packages know that in order to provide those nice, readable field names and simple, meaningful field groupings, the software generally needs some sort of metadata file. This file maps actual database fields to readable descriptions, specifies relationships between tables, and translates database field types to data types the reporting software understands. Typically to create such a file, an administrator spends a few hours in front of a vendor-supplied GUI application dragging graphical representations of their tables and columns around, defining joins and entering friendly descriptions.

For the …

DjangoCon 2009: Portland, Ponies, and Presentations

By Adam Vollrath
November 4, 2009

I attended DjangoCon this year for the first time, and found it very informative and enjoyable. I hoped to round out my knowledge of the state of the Django art, and the conference atmosphere made that easy to do.

Presentations

Avi Bryant’s opening keynote was on the state of web application development, and what Django must do to remain relevant. In the past, web application frameworks did things in certain ways due to the constraints of CGI. Now they’re structured around relational databases. In the future, they’ll be arranged around Ajax and other asynchronous patterns to deliver just content to browsers, not presentation. To wit, “HTML templates should die”, meaning we’ll see more Gmail-style browser applications where the HTML and CSS is the same for each user, and JavaScript fetches all content and provides all functionality. During Q&A, he clarified that most of what he said applies to web applications, not content-driven sites which must be SEO-friendly and so arranged much differently. Many of these themes were serendipitously also in Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ “Snakes on the Web” talk, which he gave at PyCon Argentina the same week as DjangoCon.

Ian Bicking’s keynote was on …

PL/LOLCODE and INLINE functions

By Josh Tolley
November 3, 2009

PostgreSQL 8.5 recently learned how to handle “inline functions” through the DO statement. Further discussion is here, but the basic idea is that within certain limitations, you can write ad hoc code in any language that supports it, without having to create a full-fledged function. One of those limitations is that you can’t actually return anything from your function. Another is that the language has to support an “inline handler”.

PostgreSQL procedural languages all have a language handler function, which gets called whenever you execute a stored procedure in that language. An inline handler is a separate function, somewhat slimmed down from the standard language handler. PostgreSQL gives the inline handler an argument containing, among other things, the source text passed in the DO block, which the inline handler simply has to parse and execute.

As of when the change was committed in PostgreSQL, only PL/pgSQL supported inline functions. Other languages may now support them; today I spent the surprisingly short time needed to add the capability to PL/LOLCODE. Here’s a particularly useless example:

DO $$
HAI
 VISIBLE "This is a test of INLINE stuff"
KTHXBYE
$$ language …

ImageMagick EPS bug workaround

By Jon Jensen
October 30, 2009

Sometimes software is buggy, and even with the malleability of open source software, upgrading to fix a problem may not be an immediate option due to lack of time, risks to production stability, or problems caused by other incompatible changes in a newer version of the software.

ImageMagick is a widely used open source library and set of programs for manipulating images in many ways. It’s very useful and I’m grateful it exists and has become so powerful. However, many longtime ImageMagick users like me can attest that it has had a fair number of bugs, and upgrades sometimes don’t go very smoothly as APIs change, or new bugs creep in.

Recently my co-worker, Jeff Boes, had the misfortune, or opportunity, of encountering just such a scenario. Our friends at CityPass have several site features that use ImageMagick for resizing, rotating, and otherwise manipulating or gathering data about images.

The environment specifics (skip if you’re not troubleshooting an ImageMagick problem of your own!): RHEL 5 with its standard RPM of ImageMagick-6.2.8.0-4.el5_1.1.x86_64. The application server is Interchange, running on our local-perl-5.10.0 nonthreaded Perl build, using the …