We just launched My Business Info.

It’s a new Synaptic Systems initiative launched last night, July 17th 2011 at 8:50PM.

What’s it all about you ask?

Developing a web site can be an expensive proposition. For many, it is beyond their budget and the cost benefit or value proposition is pretty weak. Moreover, many people just don’t have the time to acquire the knowledge and learn the skill sets required to have an effective web presence, or build a web site!

My Business Info has been created to provide businesses and individuals an opportunity to have an effective web presence, in the form of a web page, at an affordable price. For as little as $60.00 per year (introductory price), we’ll easily take you through the process of creating your own web page with an aim to get it well listed with the major search engines.

My Business Info will soon launch some new features as well, like micro sites, and hybrid profiles. I’ll be posting about those soon.

Please surf over to My Business Info, have a look and let me know what you think!

http://www.mybusinessinfo.info/

Photo Credits

Image From The Microsoft Office Collection

First Posted At Synaptic Systems Inc. on July 18th, 2011

I have been trying to find an easy solution to this problem. One that would allow me to ‘cherry-pick’ stories and add them to a custom feed. A few weeks ago, I searched again and found a solution that I think works really well and is easy to implement.

It comes from the good folks at IceRocket in the form of a free service they call RSS Builder.

If you look in the sidebar on the right, you will see an RSS feed called “Custom Video Feed”. I’ve set it up as an example for this particular post. If you hover over each item in that list, you will notice that they come from different sites. Two are from YouTube and one is from Ted.com.

Sweet …a custom feed!  So .. how to do it? Just follow these steps. It’s really easy!

Build a Channel

1. Surf to http://www.icerocket.com/
2. Click on RSS Builder
3. Click on Register Now (This service is absolutely free of charge.)
4. Once you have completed the registration process, go back to that page and log in.
5. Click on Add Channel
6. Give the Channel a name – Like “Videos”
7. Give the Channel a link – Your Blog/WebSite URL goes here.
8. Give the Channel a Description – Like “Great Videos From Around The Web”
9. Set the “Minutes Until Channel Refresh” to 10 (more on this at the end of this article)
10. Ignore the rest for now and click “Save Configuration For Channel”

You will get a “Channel Was Added Successfully” message and then you will be sent to a page called “Channels You Have”

Add Entries To Your Channel

1. Click Add Entry – (I will use a Youtube video as an example.)
2. Entry Title – (Copy paste the title of the video ) – William Kamkwamba – Building a Windmill
3. Entry Link – (copy paste the link.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-wzpqE6HHo&feature=player_embedded
4. Entry Summary – (Either Write a short summary or copy paste the summary from youtube)  When he was just 14 years old, Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba built his family an electricity-generating windmill from spare parts, working from rough plans he found in a library book.
5. Ignore the other fields for now and click “Save Item”

There you go. Item 1 is entered. Enter as many as you like!

Publish Your Channel

Now – go back to your channel listings by clicking the “My RSS Channels” towards the top right of the page.

Here is a screen shot of what that screen looks like.

Click on Publish on the appropriate channel listing . This will bring up a screen with a bunch of different options. As this article is specific to WordPress, I’ll explain what you need to do next.

The first screen looks like this.

Just copy this part: http://rss.icerocket.com/xmlfeed?id=437360

Now all you need to do is go to your widgets, drag the RSS widget wherever you want to show your new custom feed. In the field that says “Enter the RSS feed URL here:”, enter the link you copied ( http://rss.icerocket.com/xmlfeed?id=437360 ) and set the widgets other settings to your liking. If you don’t give it a title, it will use the title you gave your channel.

I prefer to use the “Better RSS Widget by grandslambert“.  I do so because it has a few extra options including having the links in the RSS feed open in a new window which in my opinion is a must!

Now all you have to do is add items to it and they will magically appear at your site. That said, the default RSS refresh in WordPress is set to 12 hours so you will have to wait for 12 hours to see it appear.

Unless you do this

Change the WP RSS Widget Refresh Rate:

I found the solution to this at Joe Casabona’s blog Casabona.org. Read the post titled:  QT: Increase the WordPress RSS Widget Refresh Rate

All you need to do is add a line of code to your theme’s functions.php file. It’s pretty easy!

So there you have it! Your own custom RSS feed. I hope you have found this useful. I am sure that this is not the only way to this. If you have seen other ways, please share them with us .. we’re all ears!

Photo Credits

RSS Icon – Aaron Ovadia

As I was walking our Chocolate Lab Jazz, a thought came to me. It was not a new idea but something I had thought about a year ago and promptly forgot to write about.

What Can I Do With One Hour?

I want a beautiful yard, with great flower beds, nicely pruned trees and shrubs, a pond, a shaded sitting area and perhaps a few pathways. That’s the ‘vision’. On a ½ acre, that sounds like a ton of work right. But what if I ‘committed’ 1 hour every day of ‘focused’ time towards that vision? Rather than think about it as a huge job, what would happen if I approached it in 60 minute increments? Have you ever done the math on this?

(1 hour a day) times (365 days) divided by (a 40 hour work week) equals 9.13 weeks.

Yep, that’s right, over a one year period, a one hour a day commitment gives you a little over nine work weeks! I could get a LOT of yard work done in nine weeks.

What about 15 minutes? What could I do in 15 minutes? Well, I could practice a certain technique on my guitar or maybe work on a kata for karate. That would yield the equivalent of 2½ work weeks of practice which would have a profound impact on my playing or my kata.

Interesting, don’t you think? If you have a vision, and you commit focused time to it on a daily basis, you will see that vision become a reality. Deepak Chopra gives us another way to think about this when he suggests that we take control by “putting our attention on our intention.”

We reap what we sow!

This is really not a new idea mind you. Many have written about this and if you look at people who have accomplished great things, they all had a vision and committed focused time towards the realization of that vision, often, one small piece at a time. I believe that if we have well defined and realistic visions, the only things that will prevent us from reaching them are a lack of commitment and focus on our part or the chaotic nature of the universe throwing us a curve ball. We have no control over the latter. If it happens, we get back up on our feet and start over!

So with all of that said, I will re-frame the question. What Will You Do With One Hour? Or fifteen minutes?

If you cant think of anything, give me a call. I have lots of yard work to do

Photo Credits

Image from the Microsoft Clip Art Collection

© Gil Namur, 2010

A few years ago, I started blogging. Almost immediately, I signed up for a Google Analytics account. I soon discovered that there was an enormous disconnect between what Google Analytics reported vs. my server stats. The reason for this disconnect can be explained by differences in the way they measure traffic.

WordPress, Google Analytics (and others like Quantcast & ShareThis) all capture data through the execution of a script, or page tag or some similar mechanism that runs whenever a visitor loads a page at your blog or website. The problem with this is that an increasing number of users now have script and java blocking enabled on their desktop-based browsers. They also block cookies. Many mobile devices are not captured by these mechanisms for the same reasons. Consider this as well. Most government offices and medium to large sized businesses block cookies and java script by default. Whether people at work should be surfing to your site is an entirely different issue. The reality is; they do!

The server side stats on the other hand capture everything. They miss nothing (well actually they can miss the ‘odd’ thing due to caching).  The problem with the sever stats however is that they report every search engine, spider and bot that hits your site.

What does this disconnect look like?

Here is a snapshot of the Life As A Human traffic for April 22^nd as captured by WordPress Stats and by our sever stats.

Look at the enormous difference in page-views. Our Google Analytics stats reported similar numbers of page-views as WordPress did. The lion’s share of the difference between the two is due to spiders, bots and also the way that pages are loaded within the WordPress framework. Reality is much closer to what Google and WordPress reports. By the way, Life As A Human  had 184,951 hits that day! Ahhh .. for the good old days!

So how close are WordPress and Google to reality?

I have been experimenting with the use of StumbleUpon Advertising to drive some traffic to the site. I started using StumbleUpon for advertising at synaptici.com many months before we launched Life As A Human. In short, it costs 5 cents per referral to your website or blog. So, for $5.00 you can buy 100 page-views and target a specific demographic/geographic. It’s a great service and companies like Warner Brothers, The Huffington Post and NBC, use it, with much deeper pockets than ours!

I noticed when I started to do this that when the campaign was done, StumbleUpon would report having sent 100 referrals. My WordPress stats however showed only 90 or 95. As mentioned earlier, this is due to users using script blocking. I wasn’t really that worried about a 5 or 10% discrepancy. Recently however, I noticed this delta was growing. I decided it was time to run a simple test to see if I could measure the difference.

The Test

This is a very simple test that any one can run from their blog or website.

• I created a hidden page. I called mine ‘hidden test page’. Pretty original eh!
• I set it to: no index / no follow – so that search engines, spiders and bots could not see it and affect the test results.
• I e-mailed 50 people and asked them to participate in the test by surfing to the page (once) and letting me know via e-mail when they had. I also asked them to let me know if they had surfed to the page on a desktop or a mobile (or both) so I could capture the difference between the 2. Alas, this part of my test failed as I forgot to ensure I was capturing that data on the server side. Dang! However, this did not affect the main results.
• I let the test run for 5 days then took the page off line.

Here are the results

That’s a pretty significant delta, don’t you think? The server data contains no spiders or bots. It lines up ‘exactly’ with the number of e-mail replies to the test.

Ok, so what does that mean to me?

• If you have no intention of monetizing your site, other than the morale boost of realizing that you are getting more page-views than you thought, probably not much. According to this test, if you take your WordPress reported page-views and add 33.33% to them, you will have a more accurate total.




• If you are a small to medium size publisher (website or blog) and you are monetizing through ad placement mechanisms, then, at least according to this test, you ‘might’ be leaving 33.33% of your impression ad revenue on the table. I don’t believe there is much you can do about that but knowledge is always empowering. Certainly, the advertiser won’t be in a hurry to see this change. They‘re getting more bang for the buck! Why change that? If you have some ideas, please, share them in a comment.




• If you are a larger publisher with your own marketing team and you are handling your own ad placements, you probably already know about this and have taken steps to make sure you aren’t leaving that much on the table by using your own, more sophisticated analytics tools. If you haven’t, you really should.

From a bigger picture point of view, I believe what this trend shows is that in the coming years, this issue will most certainly need to be addressed. There are several solutions but none will be perfect. Please understand, I am in no way suggesting that there is something nefarious about this. This is not a conspiracy to keep dollars out of our pockets. It is simply an artifact of current traffic measuring methodologies.

Likewise, this is not a shot at Google Analytics or WordPress Stats! If you don’t have a Google Analytics account, you really should. They have done an amazing job of developing a very powerful tool that can provide you with a wealth of information about your traffic. Not using it is to deprive yourself of data that can help you grow in ways you might not have even imagined. That people and companies block cookies and scripts is not their faults.

Another  Test – Part 2 – Google Analytics

As I mentioned, this was a simple test and it is in no way conclusive. Further and much more robust testing is needed to more accurately quantify the actual delta between the traffic measuring mechanisms mentioned in this article. This is simply a snapshot. I just happen to believe it is indicative of the current realities associated with the measurement of website traffic, and I know I am not alone in this belief.

I will be running another test sometime soon. I will be looking to capture the difference between how mobile devices and desktops are captured. I suspect that we will see a much higher percentage of missed mobile devices. This test will compare Google Analytics data against the server and WordPress stats. Actually, I did include Google Analytics in the first test but the test data yielded +/- 12% inaccuracies so I am not comfortable presenting that data. What I can tell you is that like WordPress, the Google Analytics results were significantly below the actual total.

• A huge thank you to everyone who participated in this test. I hope that you have found the results interesting and more importantly, useful. I also hope you will participate in the second test!




• If you would like to be a part of the test group for the next test, please leave a comment indicating that you would like to participate.




• If you have run these types of tests yourself, please, share your knowledge and let us know.

Photo Credits

Thumbnail – Digitage Web 2.0 – Creative Commons – Maureen Flynn-Burhoe

© Gil Namur, 2010

Within a week of that idea, our team was built, and we have been working hard ever since to turn that idea into something real. It has been an honor and a privilege to work with this vibrant and dedicated team. Six months later, this is the fruit of their labor. It’s February 1, 2010 and our doors are finally open.

Life As A Human has begun!

Please surf to this link to read the rest of this post!
http://lifeasahuman.com/2010/laah/life-as-a-human-has-begun/

Photo Credits

Public Domain Photo – courtesy of PDPhoto

Not far from the shores of Cortes Island, there is an ancient and mysterious mushroom pictographs. Beside it, high on an old-growth fir tree, is a giant fungal growth that may hold the key to curing the world of tuberculous. Coincidence? Renowned mycologist Paul Stamets thinks not. Join us on a journey we took last summer to unravel the mystery of the Mushroom Man.

From Bill Weaver – Across Borders Media

Length: 7 minutes 5 seconds

About Bill Weaver

About Across Borders Media

Whatever your faith or belief system may be,
I want to wish you all great joy and health always!

May your new year be filled with many blessings!

All of my very best wishes and hopes!

Be safe &

HAVE FUN!

Gil

Early on in our conversation, he began to tell me about an exciting prospect he was hoping would come together for him. It involved working with a very interesting and accomplished man on a fascinating project overseas.

Eric: This guy is amazing Gil! He has enjoyed a tremendous career and is a Prophet Western.

Me: (thinking .. huh.. a Prophet Western?) Excuse me Eric, a Prophet Western?

Eric: Yes, that’s right! I am really hoping that we get the opportunity to work together and that ….

Me: (totally befuddled now) I’m sorry Eric. I don’t understand! A Prophet Western? As opposed to an Eastern Prophet?

Eric: (now laughing heartily) Nooooo .. he is a Professor at the University of Western Ontario! A Prof at Western!

Me: (blushing a bit) I knew that!

As silly as this may seem, I have witnessed this type of misunderstanding on many occasions. Worse, I have also witnessed the results of not having the misunderstanding clarified. In the example above, had I not asked Eric to shed some light on my confusion, I might have assumed that Eric was embarking on some kind of deep spiritual journey. A Prophet Western evokes a very different mental image than does a Prof at Western!

Whether the word is spoken or in writing, if you don’t understand it, ask for or seek out its actual meaning. I have seen seasoned executives make catastrophic errors in judgment due to such misunderstandings often leading to loss of business and huge embarrassment. As happened with Eric, I would much rather blush a little bit by asking a question than to go off telling our mutual friends that I believe he will soon be working with a Prophet!

So, what does this all have to do with orange sandwiches you ask?

Some years ago, my wife my super fantastic and wonderful wife Colleen and I were discussing some things we needed to accomplish over the next few days. Neither of us was feeling very energetic as we were both fighting a cold at the time. When I suggested that we look after one of those things right away, the ensuing conversation took place.

Colleen: Why don’t we do that tomorrow?

Me: We should do it now. Tomorrow will have its own challenges.

Colleen: (beginning to laugh) What did you say?

Me: (wondering what’s so funny) I said, tomorrow will have its own challenges.

Colleen: (now in hysterics) Please .. umm .. HUH???

Me: (now laughing very hard but still not understanding why!) I said, tomorrow will have its own challenges. What’s so funny about that?

Colleen: (barely able to speak for laughing so hard) I thought you said, tomorrow we’ll have orange sandwiches!!!

Since that day, whenever we know that there are difficulties ahead, we lighten the moment by saying, “Yes, tomorrow we’ll have orange sandwiches!”

Postscript:

This is the first article I write since September 25th. Some of you have asked about that. I had been writing at least one a week, usually two! Well, let’s just say that there have been many days from then to now and many of them had their orange sandwiches!

Oh .. and speaking of orange sandwiches, just for fun, I thought I would see if there were any pictures of orange sandwiches out there before I sliced one and placed it between slices of bread for a photo shoot. Who knew! They actually exist and they look good too. Now, I’ll have to try to make one. I’ll let you all know how that turns out!

Photo Credits

Prophet from the MS Word Clip Art Collection – tweaked by me
Orange sandwiches – © Mourner / Vladimir Agafonkin

© Gil Namur, 2009

Until recently, I thought that the most difficult language to understand was legalese. Apparently, legalese is allowed to break all grammatical rules. Some of these documents have sentences that ramble on for an entire page without a period. Check it out sometime. Take a legal agreement, paste it into your word processor, and see what kind of reaction you get from your grammar checker. Mine complains by underlining everything!

Have you ever read the fine print on the back of credit card agreements? Holy Moley! Legalese outdone? I heard recently that a Professor of Law had given a copy of her credit card agreement to her second year students. She gave them all 20 minutes to read it and answer one simple question; what is my interest rate? Not one of them could figure it out. It’s no small wonder that the general population can’t figure it out either.

A few days ago, much to my amazement, the bewildering language of both lawyers and financial institutions were outdone by who I would have thought would be the least likely of culprits, philosophers. My wife Colleen and I were watching a show on TV that featured eight philosophers talking about the meaning of life. I love philosophy and have eagerly explored it all my life. I believe I have a good vocabulary and a reasonable understanding of many philosophical concepts. In all honesty, I understood perhaps 50% of what I heard in that show. Four of the philosophers were easy to follow. The other four, well, Colleen and I looked at each other with blank expressions and asked; “what are they talking about?”

The problem is the overuse, or perhaps, the abuse of vocabulary. While I understand all of the words they used, the complexity of each spoken sentence will require me to watch this show several times to get a handle on what they are saying. This is unfortunate, as I really don’t have the time to do this but would love to know what they were presenting. Instead, my lasting impression is that it was all gobbledygook.

Let me give you an example. Which of the following two sentences do you prefer? Which one conveys to you all you really need to know?

The meandering and nebulous nature of the homily expounded by these cerebrally inclined orators initiated intracranial cephalalgia.

or

Listening to and trying to understand these well-educated thinkers gave me a deep headache!

I have mentioned lawyers, financial institutions and philosophers. Marketing departments often speak in confusing language as well. For example, in the article Product knowledge is essential to your success, I talk about ‘toning down the jargon’.

When speaking with your clients, please, tone down the jargon. Don’t expect your clients to know all the buzz words. Use simple words and avoid acronyms. For example, avoid this: “We use a SCSI drive backplane architecture with RAID level 5 to provide your enterprise with systems that are fault tolerant thus providing built in redundancies to ensure the availability of your mission critical applications twenty four seven.” Please, find a simpler way to say that. Don’t go too far to the left though. “Dude, our storage solutions really rock” is not a great choice either!

My point in all of this is simple. When trying to communicate an idea to someone, it is my humble opinion that using the simplest language possible is the best option. Showing off your great intellectual prowess is not the point. Successfully communicating the idea is what counts.

The other side of this is even more important to your personal growth and/or the success of your business. When someone says something that you don’t understand, don’t be afraid to say so. Ask for clarification. If none is offered, get advice from a friend or a colleague. Too many people in this world are guilty of pretending to understand things in order to avoid embarrassment. That’s just silly. You are depriving yourself of an opportunity to increase your knowledge. From a business perspective, in order to make good decisions, you need to understand what you are signing, before you sign it. You need to understand your strategies and business philosophies before you state them to your staff and potential clients.

All of that now said, I have a decision to make. Seeing as I recorded the show on philosophy, shall I go back and watch it again or shall I move on to the next article, which is also about communication and how we often misunderstand things because we heard them incorrectly? I already have a title for it…

‘Tomorrow, we’ll have orange sandwiches!’

I think I’ll write more, my cranium will appreciate the break!

Photo Credits

All pictures from the MS Word Clip Art Collection

© Gil Namur, 2009

Steve Hartman revisits the Chandler Family Reunion, 30 years after Charles Kuralt, who found this story one of the most inspirational of his career. – From CNET TV

What a wonderful story!

Length: 3 minutes 2 seconds