Author Archives: nynke

Wordpress 2.9 upgrade Ooooops

By nynke | Published: December 28, 2009

I waited for a while until the dust settled and I could see who was still standing. It seemed like a lot were, and checking the web for possible problems during install, I did not find much. And then got a cheerful message from wordpress on 2.9 being “oh so fine”. Charming. And curious as I am, I wanted to know about “fine”.

Recent versions of WordPress feature an Automatic Upgrade. Wyrdweb does not use this magical back-end button for security reasons. I went for a svn upgrade.

$ svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9/ .

The result:

U wp-comments-post.php
U wp-login.php
D wp-includes/streams.php
D wp-includes/gettext.php
U wp-includes/feed-rss2.php
U wp-includes/default-filters.php
U wp-includes/post-template.php
U wp-includes/plugin.php
U wp-includes/feed-atom.php
U wp-includes/class-feed.php
svn: File 'wp-includes/taxonomy.php' has inconsistent newlines
svn: Inconsistent line ending style

Okay. I mean, Not Okay. The site is giving two warnings.

Onwards with plan B: a Manual Upgrade: I download the 2.9 files to my local machine, delete the old wp-includes and wp-admin directories, and send up the new directories.

Ach, now the site produces a fatal error. The topic was quickly found in the forum:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function is_admin() in [...]/wp-includes/vars.php on line 16

Increasing memory limit in settings.php to 128 MB did work for me. And now I have 2.9 running here.

And yes, the new features are “fine”. But not worth this manual upgrade foreplay struggle. I’ll be holding off upgrading our other WordPress sites until I get word svn works faultlessly.

Charm me with some safe smooth and enjoyable foreplay!

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Google Website Optimizer experiment on Wordpress

By nynke | Published: December 20, 2009

How to?

Choose tool

Create test and choose conversion pages

  • create many different variations of a web page ~ We created two:
  • choose conversion page ~ at the bottom of both pages we have a contact link. Conversion is whether people actually go to the contact us page. Later we can expand conversion to include actually contacting us.

Install and validate JavaScript tags

Download and install Wordpress plugin

Do not download from the plugin page of the author. The version is not current (at time of writing this post). Download from the Wordpress plugin page instead. Install using the usual three steps for installing a plugin in Wordpress.

Add code

In the following I am assuming you have a weboptimizer account and that you are logged in. Set up the experiment, by adding an experiment name and the url’s of the original, the alternative(s), and the conversion page. Make sure the WYSIWYG editor is disabled in your WordPress. (Aiaiai, this one cost me around 90 mins ;) Open all involved pages on your Wordpress: the original, the alternative(s), and the conversion page. Add to original page two custom fields with values found on the page: originalpagescripts
  • Copy the first JavaScript script code in Google’s Step 1 area in a value field of “go_control_script”
  • Copy the second JavaScript script code in Google’s Step 1 area in a value field of “go_tracking_script_test”
codes To each variation page enter the variation pages code from Google’s Step 2. Add a new field go_tracking_script_conversion in the conversion page and add Google’s Step 3 script code for conversion.

Validate your code

validation

Run Experiment and Party

run

I will report results in a follow up blog, as soon as there are some significant results, enough for Yet Another Party!

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More variation on this page

By nynke | Published: December 20, 2009
A friend of mine noticed how a tweet on my Fusion chart article got the tweet to come up high in his Google search results, as if I was an expert. Mind you, it wasn’t ranking. It was just a result of that page coming up high in his SERP. It was simply Google figuring out what (kind of) sites he visited. And personalisation is …

Good news

This is good news because … at the end of the day, with the introduction of personalised search, it is design and content of your key marketing communications that matter — sessions, text, audio, pictures and video. And those can explain to our potential customer why our products or services are the best. They are the best, right? Why settle for anything less than the best content to present it? And smart as SEO people are, you can exploit personalised search for some SEO. It’s just very time consuming for some personalised impact, unless you can influence a lot of MAD stakeholders ~ important people in buy cycles: the ones with Money, Access and Decision making power, in one stroke. For example if you can get a herd of MAD people to click certain items in an on-line ad, or to search for particular key words in Google. Maybe an interesting ad in a professional magazine can do that?
“Congruence” is an excellence meme. Please infect yourself by searching for it on Google. Thank you.
Now suppose that due to your excellent design and content and personalised search, you manage to get your site as busy as Grand Central Station on the last days before Christmas, with people that may actually be interested in your services and products, and are MAD enough to buy. Now what? Got enough readable schedules, ticket machines/ticket vendors, trains? conversion

Focus on Conversion Rate Optimisation

These may very well be most under-utilised and highest ROI activities in most marketing strategies. If you win the upcoming “personalisation” battle, you may start to care less about the classic “rankings” battle. And assessing spent and derived value, no doubt this one will become the low hanging fruit for many. Tools like Taguchi, multivariate testing, Google Website Optimizer, Optimost or Offermatica/Test & Target allow you to …
  • create many different variations of a web page
  • then measure which version is best at getting your visitors to
    • contact you
    • join your network
    • subscribe to your newsletter
    • buy from your web shop
    • buy your services
    • …or whatever it is you want them to do
  • so you can promote the winning page to become your official new version.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

What doesn’t work is “throwing out a kazillion variations on a page”, what doesn’t work is guessing which pages from your site to start with, what doesn’t work is choosing tests that we cannot learn from, what doesn’t work is designing a test irrelevant for (y)our goals … What works is minimum effort/maximum impact design and development of high-converting web pages.

What works is a focus on maximising gained-value-per-visitor congruently.

Interested in more? Contact us!

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Useful statistics for improving your WordPress

By nynke | Published: December 15, 2009
The commonly used analysation plugins for WordPress are:
  • Google Analytics ~ automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads.
  • WP-Stats ~ displays your WordPress blog statistics. Ranging from general total statistics, some plugins statistics and top 10 statistics.
giggle And we can approach the practice from “what we would like to track and can actually be measured” for getting some useful data to improve your WordPress with. That resulted in tracking requirements such as:
  • What your visitors search for ~ Search Meter automatically records what people are searching for — and whether they are finding what they are looking for.
  • Your new RSS feed subscribers ~ find out which visitors are more likely to subscribe. Tracking clicks to the feed is not perfect as we can not be sure that people have actually subscribed. Feedage Tracker will automatically submit RSS Feeds to the Feedage.com RSS directory and allows tracking of how often readers subscribe to your RSS feed. FeedSmith works similarly and will be made available directly from FeedBurner as “FeedSmith.”
  • Document downloads ~ Download Monitor tracks uploading and managing downloads, download hits, and links.
  • Comments ~ I have not found a plugin to recommend yet. Looking tho. Any suggestions?

Don’t over-monitor, or over-track

It costs. Performance. Choose wisely. Maybe reading logs works also?
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Power of Foswiki

By nynke | Published: December 6, 2009
In Twiki and Foswiki: Ship of Fools I took the odd organisational sculpting perspective. And subsequently participated in the Foswiki Summit 2009 in Hannover two weeks ago. I promised “more 2 follow …”

Walking my Talk and Talking my Walk

Foswiki forked and quickly learned from what happened and installed an Association at the recent Summit. The association is not only useful for protection while adhering to legacy system rules. We win by giving the keys to a crew of rowdy perjured rascals, and by community-centered politics to drive steering. In general, open source associations are a “direct” opportunity for community members to contribute their energy, passion, talent and, yes, also money.

And what is the Foswiki community?

foswikiContributions are not restricted to coding. Screencasting, making (funny and/or sexy) video’s for reaching out to possible new end-users that may be served by the community (and that upon looking further find an extremely sexy wikitool), translating documentation to local languages, supporting (other) end-users on the forums and through other channels, organising and participating in coding dojo’s and other fun choreographies at events for giving the core a development boost, are all acknowledged and appreciated contributions.

Innovation boost of products and service growth

I anticipate the current community-centered Foswiki strategy will hold space for and give end users the freedom to create and drive innovation boost of products and service growth. Why? The existing Foswiki already is an exemplary tool offering “differing but complementary approaches [to] information-storage, creation, and dissemination”, in short, it is an “association platform” going beyond what the public formerly expected of websites. In addition to bringing people together in the association, in a board, task forces and face-to-face meetings, many other channels are used by the Foswiki community, also during the Summit itself. The integration of the emerging array of tools collectively known as “Web 2.0”, of which Foswiki itself is one, offers additional efficient and effective means for people to collaborate, create and share knowledge and information.

My Two Feet

I expect a renewed culture to emerge, one that values co-creation and openness to collaboration next to centralized structures and processes that are required for protection, yet do not overregulate. On the whole, something that might attract a lot of people. I see opportunities for exploring new ways of doing business together, and feel confident I can contribute something useful in return that aligns with my energy, passion, and talents, while serving the building of more connections. My Two Feet are heading in Foswiki direction for that.
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