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WordPress Plugin for Omniture SiteCatalyst

By Steph Skardal
November 18, 2009

A couple of months ago, I integrated Omniture SiteCatalyst into an Interchange site for one of End Point’s clients, CityPass. Shortly after, the client added a blog to their site, which is a standalone WordPress instance that runs separately from the Interchange ecommerce application. I was asked to add SiteCatalyst tracking to the blog.

I’ve had some experience with WordPress plugin development, and I thought this was a great opportunity to develop a plugin to abstract the SiteCatalyst code from the WordPress theme. I was surprised that there were limited Omniture WordPress plugins available, so I’d like to share my experiences through a brief tutorial for building a WordPress plugin to integrate Omniture SiteCatalyst.

First, I created the base wordpress file to append the code near the footer of the wordpress theme. This file must live in the ~/wp-content/plugins/ directory. I named the file omniture.php.

  <?php /*
    Plugin Name: SiteCatalyst for WordPress
    Plugin URI: https://www.endpointdev.com/
    Version: 1.0
    Author: Steph Powell
    */
    function omniture_tag() {
    }
    add_action('wp_footer', 'omniture_tag');
  ?>

In the code above, …

Test Fixtures for CakePHP Has-and-Belongs-to-Many Relationships

By Ethan Rowe
November 17, 2009

CakePHP, a popular MVC framework in/for PHP, offers a pretty easy-to-use object-relational mapper, as well as fairly straightforward fixture class for test data. Consequently, it’s fairly easy to get into test-driven development with CakePHP, though this can take some acclimation if you’re coming from Rails or Django or some such; the need to go through a web interface to navigate to and execute your test cases feels, to me, a little unnatural. Nevertheless, you can get writing tests pretty quickly, and the openness of the testing framework means that it won’t get in your way. Indeed, compared to the overwhelming plethora of testing options one gets in the Ruby space—​and the accompanying sense that the choice of testing framework is akin to one’s choice of religion, political party, or top 10 desert island album list—​CakePHP’s straightforward testing feels a little liberating.

Which is why it was a little surprising to me that getting a test fixture going for the join table on a has-and-belongs-to-many (HABTM) association is—​at least in my experience—​not the clearest thing in the world.

One can presumably configure the fixture to merely use the table option in the fixture’s …

Port knocking with knockd

By Greg Sabino Mullane
November 16, 2009

One of the best ways to secure your box against SSH attacks is the use of port knocking. Basically, port knocking seals off your SSH port, usually with firewall rules, such that nobody can even tell if you are running SSH until the proper “knock” is given, at which time the SSH port appears again to a specific IP address. In most cases, a “knock” simply means accessing specific ports in a specific order within a given time frame.

Let’s step back a moment and see why this solution is needed. Before SSH there was telnet, which was a great idea way back at the start of the Internet when hosts trusted each other. However, it was (and is) extremely insecure, as it entails sending usernames and passwords “in the clear” over the internet. SSH, or Secure Shell, is like telnet on steroids. With a mean bodyguard. There are two common ways to log in to a system using SSH. The first way is with a password. You enter the username, then the password. Nice and simple, and similar to telnet, except that the information is not sent in the clear. The second common way to connect with SSH is by using public key authentication. This is what I use 99% of the time. It’s very secure, and very convenient. …

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 …