PushON Ltd » James Sims

How to Socialise Your Product Page

James Sims — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:22:26 +0000

Integrating social media into your product pages is a great way to get extra reach from your store.

PushON are one of only a handful of Magento Silver Solution Partners in the UK

When someone chooses to share, like or tweet about one of your products it can be seen as a personal recommendation; it’s in essence a high quality lead generator. This in turn results in an almost guaranteed increase in conversion rates when compared to visits from search engines.

The obvious, tried and tested approach is to add a set of social media icons onto the product pages. There are a slew of plugins and extensions to do this, such as

• Social Share
• Social Sharing Buttons

Alternatively, you can manually add a system such as ShareThis to your site, or simply add the buttons yourself by putting the code directly onto your page templates – something like this would work great (Go to https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ to generate your own like button):


  Tweet

If your brand is regularly active on Facebook (and it should be), you should also consider adding other elements such as an activity feed and a recommendations box. See http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/ for more details on the many different widgets that Facebook provides.

Reviews

It’s also incredibly beneficial to allow users to review your products (that is, of course, if you have products that are good enough to attract positive reviews!). Not only does it give an excellent sense of trust for your customers, if it is done correctly Google will pick it up and show star ratings alongside your products on the SERPs.

Magento allows this functionality as part of its core (of course). To show the reviews section on your product page you will need code such as this into catalog.xml (paste this below your line):

Then to actually display the block, make sure you have the following code on your actual product view.phtml page:

echo $this->getChildHtml('reviews') ?>

Hopefully this will give you a head start in making sure that your product pages are properly socialised! If you have any questions or comments please do leave a reply below!

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OUYA BEAUTY!

James Sims — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 10:48:03 +0000

There’s a new console around the corner, coming from a completely different starting point to the big brand offerings we’ve been used to for the past few years. Whether it will be too different or not remains to be seen but it will definately be causing waves when it is released in April next year.

The Ouya (pronounced OOH-yuh) started as a Kickstarter campaign, raised its targeted goal in under 8 hours, and went on to be the fastest project ever to raise one million dollars. It’s currently sitting at $8,596,475.

What’s the dealio?

So, what’s so special about it? Mainly the price point – it will be released at $99 (or a shade under £65), if you pre-order it – and it comes with one controller. You’ll have to pay for shipping and any extra controllers, but it’s all pretty reasonable.

The key to managing this is that the hardware is actually based on what goes inside some high-end Android phones, and the fact it will run Android 4.0 ICS. This handily means it will support any apps developed for Android.

Oh and another nifty thing – it’s tiny, only about the same size as a Rubik’s cube!

The specs

Tegra3 quad-core processor

1GB RAM

8GB of internal flash storage

HDMI, 1080p HD

WiFi 802.11 b/g/n

Bluetooth LE 4.0

USB 2.0

Wireless controller with standard controls (two analog sticks, d-pad, eight action buttons, a system button), a touchpad

Android 4.0

Ethernet

Launch Titles

It has a fairly respectable list of launch games, which are all going to be free-to-play, but it also supports OnLive gaming service – meaning you can play from their extensive catalogue as well (including games that would usually require a fairly beefy PC to play). And if you need to know – yes, minecraft will be released for it eventually, if it takes off.

It will feature XBMC media player amongst other things, and also has apps like Twich.TV so you can use it to stream various things from the net.

Hack the planet

It all sounds pretty good so far, right? Well if you’re a bit of a hacker, you’ll be even happier to know it will be easy to root – and doing so won’t void the warranty. It’s even been designed to open up easily using only a normal screwdriver, so you can merrily mod it till the cows come home – if that’s your thing.

Roll on, April!

In case you didn’t notice I’m pretty excited about this little fella. I’m normally as neutral as possible when it comes to new products, but I can’t really think of anything bad to say about this. OK, it won’t be competing with the next generation of consoles from MS and Sony, but it won’t cost anywhere near as much either. Looking at the hardware specs suggests to me that it will be powerful enough to deliver a crisp and smooth gaming experience – for the same price as a couple of second hand games on the XBox.

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2,000,000 US Facebook users quit

James Sims — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 14:42:17 +0000

Looks like even Facebook can’t maintain a non-stop record of growth. Over the past six months, they’ve lost almost 2 million users in the US, as well as an unquantified decline in Europe.

This news has hurt the share prices of both Facebook itself (0.6% decrease) and Zynga (a more noticeable 5.2% decrease).

shares of Facebook (FB) have struggled of late. After reaching the low $30s per share at the end of June, the stock today traded at $27 before closing down a half a percent at $28.09.
Tiernan Ray

When you take a step back though, with a market penetration estimated at or above 50% for many of countries it operates in, you have to wonder if it’s really feasible to continue growing – and with a claimed userbase of 900 million, maybe losing 2 million isn’t the end of the world.

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UK’s draft internet piracy laws revealed

James Sims — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 15:48:20 +0000

ISPs will be forced to implement a three strikes rule

Ofcom has published a draft of the code on internet piracy which will require the UK’s biggest ISPs to send out letters to web users who have been accused of downloading illegally. Users are to be allowed up to three letters in a year before their anonymous information is provided to the copyright owners who can then, with the help of a court order, reveal their identity and take legal action.

Due to the incredible amount of logistics required to handle appeals and information requests, we won’t see this going into action till at least March 2014. Up to 75% of the cost of all this will be met by the rights holders, and initial estimates are putting the cost of each letter sent at between £7.20 and £17. Initial data from the report shows that the rights holders are expected to send at least 70,000 copyright infringement reports every month.
I can only think that if they are paying millions of pounds to get their hands on someone’s data in the first place, they will definitely be going in for the kill on bleeding as much money from pirates as they possibly can.

The scariest thing from my point of view is just how far the government seems to be willing to go to keep the industry executives happy. Under the DEA (Digital Economy Act), if there is not a downturn in piracy after the first full year of operation, other measures will be considered such as slowing internet connections, blocking online access all together or suspending people’s accounts. How on earth they intend to police this in libraries, universities and internet cafes is beyond me.

As an aside to this (if you’re still not sure whether to dust off your pitchfork yet), the EU Commissioner, Karel De Gucht, has said that if the European Parliament rejects ACTA next week then he will simply ignore them. “If you decide for a negative vote before the European Court rules, let me tell you that the Commission will nonetheless continue to pursue the current procedure before the Court, as we are entitled to do. A negative vote will not stop the proceedings before the Court of Justice.” Source.

An unhappy internet user

This basically means that ACTA will be passed no matter what people think about it.

I’ve got a strong feeling that no matter what they do to the internet people won’t suddenly start buying CDs again like it’s 1999.

A different method

Times have moved on and the media industry needs to update their business model; we are already seeing pretty big artists like Louis CK skipping the fat-cat middlemen all together and selling their own material at a massively reduced price, whilst managing to keep hold of the rights to it at the same time.

To those who might wish to ‘torrent’ this video: look, I don’t really get the whole ‘torrent’ thing. I don’t know enough about it to judge either way. But I’d just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without ‘corporate’ restrictions.

Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.
Louis C.K.

By offering a genuinely better service than the big companies he managed to turn a $200,000 profit on the show, after paying for everything, including the website and the video production. This sort of approach works brilliantly for everyone involved – the artist, the video producers (Louis himself in this case), the people who built Louis’ distribution method (i.e. his website) and the consumer.

The only people who miss out are the big labels who would have been charging $20 a time for the same video . If they can’t see that they need to embrace ideas like this, and update their business model accordingly then I don’t think any amount of law-making and suing people will keep their industry afloat for very much longer.

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Book Burning – 2.0

James Sims — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:22:47 +0000

There isn’t much doubt that the internet has revolutionised the way we generate and consume information. Even when I was a kid in the 1990s, if I wanted to find out information for a school project I’d have to either hope it was on Encarta or actually (gasp) go to the library and read some real books. Now, with tools like Google and Wikipedia, we have more or less everything the human race has ever learned at our fingertips.

Not only that, but we can see things from a different perspective now. I can compare
what I read in the newspapers to what the media in other countries is saying, and even what individual people think about the matter.

I think that this almost ubiquitous access to information is a huge leap forward (and a fantastic equaliser) for everyone, but it wasn’t always here, and it’s not guaranteed to last forever.

Where did this all start?

Let’s go back in time a bit to get some context about what I’m talking about. In the Middle Ages the Bible was written in Latin, and the Catholic Church were the ones responsible for interpreting it all over Europe – giving them the power to define suitable solutions to almost every problem of society. Suddenly someone had the bright idea of printing them, and then it was freely available to almost anyone (and in French, not Latin). This snatched a lot of power away from the Church – anyone could now read their own copy of the Bible and interpret it in a manner they saw fit.

Unsurprisingly, the printing press was blamed for this new avalanche of “disinformation”, and eventually its use was outlawed in France under penalty of death in 1535.

Also unsurprisingly, trying to make this new technology illegal didn’t work. The modern printing press is still used to print millions of Bibles the world over, as well as other media that billions of people consume.

Now let’s fast forward to the present day (you can see where I’m going with this eh?). Not only are the governments of the world doing their best to stop people sharing media, they are using this motive – amongst others – to tighten their grip on the internet in general. Moving towards tighter control of this revolutionary freedom we have at the moment to both publish and consume information freely, no matter what the topic.

Pirates Ahoy

Consider the case of MegaUpload, which was completely shut down by the US government, meaning even legitimate users could not access their files. A great example of attacking the underlying technology rather than trying to actually embrace it.

MegaUpload offered to join up with content providers: “If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch.” but to no avail. Instead the whole website was shut down.

Recently the Pirate Bay was blocked in the UK, a move I personally found rather shocking. Once we accept it is OK for the government to force ISPs to block sites, where do we stop? I look at the list of websites blocked in China (one of these is Pirate Bay, by the way) and wonder if the UK will have a similar list in five or ten years time.

I agree with Jim Killock – director of the Open Rights Group – when he says that blocking sites in this way is “pointless and dangerous” and “will fuel calls for further, wider and even more drastic calls for internet censorship of many kinds, from pornography to extremism … Internet censorship is growing in scope and becoming easier. Yet it never has the effect desired.”

But it’s not just piracy…

The government already considered shutting down sites like Twitter and Facebook during the riots of 2011 to prevent it being used to organise and rally groups of people – which is, by the way, the exact same reason that the Chinese government has blocked the site altogether within its borders.

Here in the UK we are seeing that the Government is planning to pass legislation that will allow GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) to access information about internet traffic in real time and on demand. This includes email, chat, VoIP, the sites you visit and the files you have downloaded.

The Queen herself has even weighed in, saying “My government intends to bring forward measures to maintain the ability of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies to access vital communications data”.

And where are we going next? A rapid-fire volley of various bills and acts that would try to control internet traffic are being leveled at us now, one particularly scary one being CISPA (the Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act). This would effectively allow countermeasures to be used by private companies in the US – meaning a Network Administrator could legally install spyware like keyloggers on your computer if they thought you might be trying to break into something. It wouldn’t even be “Big Brother” watching you, it’d be an employee of a private company.

It all adds up to a pretty bleak outlook – one where what we can and can’t read on the internet is defined by governments and private companies. Whether we trust them to choose the right content for us isn’t really the point in my opinion – that fact that our freedom of access to the internet is being rapidly diminished is the worrying thing – as is the fact that we would be breaking the law if we tried to circumvent these measures.

I’d like to close with a quote from Loyd Blankenship, a notorious hacker since the 70’s:

“We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.”

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Easy fix for "the right syntax to use near ‘Usage: mysqldump"

James Sims — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:06:28 +0000

Recently when I was moving a database from one server to another I did the usual mysql dump from command line, then tried to import it on the new server, but what’s this? An error:

ERROR 1064 (42000) at line 1: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘Usage: mysqldump [OPTIONS] database [tables] OR mysqldump [OPTIONS] –databa’ at line 1

To fix this, simply open the sql file in a text editor and remove the first four lines, namely:

Usage: mysqldump [OPTIONS] database [tables]
OR mysqldump [OPTIONS] –databases [OPTIONS] DB1 [DB2 DB3...]
OR mysqldump [OPTIONS] –all-databases [OPTIONS]
For more options, use mysqldump –help

Once these had been removed the database imported just fine. Happy days!

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Malware in Google Image Search

James Sims — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:50:34 +0000

Just in case anyone isn’t aware – Google Image Search has a lot of malware on it at the moment, so be careful when using it.

If you’re using GIS and get a fake anti-virus security warning, DON’T CLICK ANYTHING – especially not “[OK]“. Instead, press Ctrl+Alt+Delete and kill the browser window completely from there.

There is quite a bit of talk about this at the moment, you might want to read the following blog posts:

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/05/scammers-swap-google-images-for-malware/

http://blog.unmaskparasites.com/2011/05/05/thousands-of-hacked-sites-seriously-poison-google-image-search-results/

http://infotech.srg.com/2011/05/google-image-search-virus-leads-to-av.html

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WordPress Contact Form 7 – Intelligent Thank you pages

James Sims — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:15:12 +0000

I have been developing a site that required the “thank you” page after the user submits a form to be aware of the options submitted. “Easy!” you say, “just grab the data from the $_POST or $_GET array”.

Unfortunately this isn’t really an option in CF7, as the data is emailed out (or stored in the database depending how you have it set up) and then the user is shown a confirmation message. I used this method to get the user redirected to a thank you page, but by that point all the data from the form is no longer available.

My solution: grab the data as soon as it is submitted and store it in the user’s session. To do this I added an action (in my theme’s functions.php) to get fired when the ‘wpcf7_before_send_mail’ event happens, and store it in the database, like so:

function set_sessions($cf7){
$_SESSION['formdata'] = $cf7->posted_data['menu-848'];
return false;
}

add_action( ‘wpcf7_before_send_mail’, ‘set_sessions’ );

‘Menu-848′ is just the one piece of data I wanted to grab. If you want to store the whole set of data, just use

$_SESSION['formdata'] = $cf7->posted_data;

instead.

Once it’s stored, you just have to get it out of the session array wherever you want.

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions.

Edit: Just a note in case it’s needed – you should also ensure that you actually have a session open, as WordPress doesn’t do this automatically.

To do this, add the following to your wp_config file:

/**
* Enable sessions
*/
if (!session_id())
session_start();

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Schema.org – what's the deal?

James Sims — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 11:35:19 +0000

SEO Guide to Schema.org – An Introduction

If you’ve been following events in the web development and SEO world, you’ve probably heard that there is a new standard for marking up data so that search engines can display rich data. It’s called schema.org.

We’ve already seen this sort of thing with the Microformats that are around at the moment, but this standard will be normalised across the main search engines. The plan is to also allow a standard format for other tools to read as well – allowing a much easier flow of data between websites, web services and even more exotic tools such as mobile apps.

In this post I won’t be going into specific examples of code (that’s all listed over at the schema.org website, so there’s no point duplicating it here), but I will be addressing some of the questions that I think you might have about it.

Schema.org – who are these guys anyway and why should I listen to them?

Schema.org is rather unique, in that it is a collaboration between the three biggest players on the search engine market – Google, Yahoo! and Bing. This kind of thing hasn’t really been seen since 2006, when they came together to provide a common standard for sitemaps.

That in itself should also answer the second part of the question – you should listen to them because they are giving us, as web content writers and SEOs, the perfect opportunity to mark up our web copy and data in a way that is effectively guaranteed to be read properly (i.e. optimised) for almost every search happening today.

What is wrong with Microformats – and why do we need this?

One problem with Microformats and the other ways of getting meaningful data straight onto the SERPs is that they are not standard; what works for Google might not work for Bing, and vice versa. Using the schema.org scheme will work across all search engines. There is a good argument that using these will eventually be essential for getting the best SEO performance from a website, just reading the FAQ drops some pretty strong hints at this: “using on-page mark-up [will] help you to surface your content more clearly or more prominently in search results”.

As you might already know, Google Microformats can be inconsistent. Different sites (and even different pages on the same domain) will sometimes show up with rich snippets, and sometimes they won’t – even if they use identical mark-up. Schema.org mark-up should be more easily trusted (and hence displayed more consistently) by the search engines than current formats, such as hProduct and GoodRelations.

On top of all that, webmasters will now have an “SEF mark-up bible” to refer to – i.e. it will have all the information they need in one place, and with much less ambiguity than patching together bits from here and there.

How will schema.org change SEO?

The change won’t be fast, but once this standard is widely adopted, we can expect to see a lot more rich data on SERPs. Plus, this rich data will be more accurate and relevant than what we have at the moment.

Sites that do not have any structured mark-up are already less effective in SEO terms, but this is likely to become even more pronounced as more and more sites begin to offer this rich data to the search engines in the way that they “like”.

On the flip side, it will become easier than ever to “scrape” very rich content from sites that are using schema.org data structures. Because of this we might see a rise in automated content aggregation sites and the wholesale lifting of data from one site to be copied by another – effectively reducing the percentage of the web that is good quality, original content. That said, we can only wait and see how effective the search engines are at detecting spam (my money is on them being pretty good at using the new structure to accurately decide if the content on a page is legit).

What will stay the same?

This won’t change any of the underlying SEO methods you currently use. If you have a tried and tested method for improving the SEO performance of a website, then it will still be effective.

Pigeonholing data – what if my data doesn’t fit?

Schema.org covers most of the data types you might come across, but if you need to you can extend the vocabulary. There is no guarantee that this will appear in SERPs but it is fully endorsed by schema.org. For example, you can extend a class with a / character, such as: “Person/Engineer”. Over time, it is possible that these extensions will be moved into the core schema.org vocabulary, if they get used widely enough.

How will it affect the SEO community?

Schema.org is likely to become a natty buzzword amongst anyone with a website who wants to be on the top of SERPs. It should be quite marketable, and widespread coverage in the web world should help to underline the importance of search engine friendliness in general. It will no doubt soon appear on the “what we do” lists of countless SEO agencies, under the “on page SEO” section.

A lot of SEOs might be quite defensive of the methods they currently use to provide rich data (and those methods will continue to be effective), but in the end you can’t fail to adopt a standard that has got the backing of all the main search engines.

My client heard about all of this and wants it right away. What should I do?

There is nothing wrong with implementing this now – even though the schema is only in draft form, and won’t be finalised until later on this year. The FAQ at schema.org assures us that as the schema evolves over time, everything currently listed will continue to be fully supported by the major search engines.

If you don’t have any sort of structured mark-up to your copy, it’s probably logical to implement the schema.org structures rather than any of the others that are floating about – it’s not going to go away anytime soon!

On the other hand, the FAQ also says that all current data formats which “work” and are read properly by Google, Bing and Yahoo! will continue to be supported – so if you already have your data marked up properly and the search engines like it, there is no official sign that they will perform any worse than competing sites that use schema.org data formatting. Of course the acid test for this is in the SERPs – we can only wait and see what happens next, but personally I wouldn’t go rewriting great swathes of copy just yet: if you have any other SEO related work to do on a site, it should probably take priority over implementing schema.org formatting.

You haven’t answered my question! I don’t agree with what you say!

If there is something I haven’t covered in this SEO guide for schema.org, or something you don’t like the sound of, just leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be responding to every comment!

Further Reading

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Introducing schema.org

What Schema.org Means for SEO and Beyond

Schema.org: Google, Bing & Yahoo Unite To Make Search Listings Richer Through Structured Data

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Campaign Monitor API: PHP Wrapper, Error 400 Failed to deserialize

James Sims — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 14:21:36 +0000

Well here’s a problem that had me scratching my head for a few hours today. I integrated the Campaign Monitor API into a website for a client, by following the instructions here, only to find that it wouldn’t add a new subscriber even though the code I was using was correct.

It insited on giving me the following error:

Failed with code 400 object(stdClass)#117 (2) { ["Code"]=> int(400) ["Message"]=> string(112) "Failed to deserialize your request. Please check the documentation and try again. Fields in error: subscriber" }

After trying about 15 ways of passing the data into the API, I posted on the forum and contacted the support team at Campaign monitor…and got no luck from either of these.

That means it was time to roll up my sleeves, get my hands dirty and see what makes this whole thing tick…

I found that the issue was the use of json_encode, which isn’t supported by PHP 5.1.6.

To resolve this, I added this custom json_encode function to the class/services_json.php file, and then modified the serialise function in class/serialisation.php to this:

function serialise($data) { if (phpversion() > "5.1.6") return json_encode(@CS_REST_SerialiserFactory::check_encoding($data)); else //use the “compatibility mode” json_encode function instead return __json_encode(@CS_REST_SerialiserFactory::check_encoding($data)); }

Once this was done, everything worked as expected, so if you’re running anything less than PHP 5.2 and you’re having issues with the Campaign Monitor API you might want to give this a go.

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