Wyrd Web » nynke

Wordpress 2.9 upgrade Ooooops

nynke — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 10:56:33 +0000

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!

Google Website Optimizer experiment on Wordpress

nynke — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:33:01 +0000

How to?

Choose tool

we are using Google Website Optimizer for this first experiment.
we are using an A/B Experiment for starters because A/B experiments are the simpler version of testing with Website Optimizer and we have a low amount of traffic and want results fast. And A/B testing does allow for experimenting with advanced scenarios later, if we want that.

Create test and choose conversion pages

create many different variations of a web page ~ We created two:
- Want More Customers? ~ the original
- Want Even More Customers? ~ the variation page, the header attractor slogan and the image are different
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:

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”

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

Run Experiment and Party

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

More variation on this page

nynke — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:30:26 +0000

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?

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!

Useful statistics for improving your WordPress

nynke — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:05:24 +0000

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.

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?

Power of Foswiki

nynke — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 12:17:32 +0000

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?

Contributions 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.

Twiki and FosWiki: Ship of Fools

nynke — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:39:00 +0000

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not naming you fools. The name “Ship of Fools” comes from agile organisational sculpting, and we have named it such to lighten up, and make it easier to try some of the “other” roles, or try out something crazy in the role we are in. I am using WhyThisFork as my guide, and welcome more and other perspectives. Please check my statements and assumptions below? It’s all appearances? What it seems?

Boatswain – Quality

The quality of Twiki is amazing. It still is as far as I know. No doubt so is FosWiki as a branch. I set up and used a Twiki in 2001 for InterRaven. It was a tank. But not mature yet. Now it’s years later: Twiki became “New, New, New” yet “Old enough” to attract VC’s or to self-capitalise and commercialise. And it did. In May 2007 TWiki.net was established for the express purpose of commercialising TWiki. The community response is generally positive. People on board have faith in the outcome of this new journey based on previous journeys with this cap’n having been successful. Trust levels are still high. And the ally block attracted is a venture capitalist group. Who that is and what the deal is, I don’t know. I haven’t seen the business planning and I prefer not to interpret “nothing”. One of the things I already have a T-shirt for. Several.

Lookout in Crow’s nest – Self and World concepts

I often liken open source communities to Pirate ships. The captain is chosen by consensus or majority vote, and he (or she) can be replaced by another if the journeys do not deliver enough loot (results, like enjoying ourselves). Likely oligarchies emerge. In August of 2007, there’s a problem. Apparently not all Pirates voted.

… some disagreements followed due to the summit not having a formal mandate to make decisions in camera that affected the absent community.

Cap’n – Forward feedback loop

A captain isn’t necessarily a person. “Captain” is a function. The forward feedback loop. Navigation, risk management, … Twiki was originally Peter’s child? Spiritual father so to speak. And many people have put in hours and energy and made it their own. This function requires being able to deal congruently with spirited discussion from all functions and pirates aboard the ship, and if need be, conflict. I would say the January, February 2008 period when conflicts first arose was key and the following an excellent response:

Any decision on the governance model was postponed to the third summit (held in Berlin). Peter Thoeny was to make a proposal on twiki.org, so community members could discuss it in public.

Sailmaker – Reward system

This is the heart of the matter. Monies are often mentioned, but under water the need for and resistance to acceptance, belonging, conforming, fitting in, being loved and liked, all play a part here for many involved.

Peter Thoeny wrote a proposal for a new TWiki governance model. In short:

Peter Thoeny is a Self Appointed “Benevolent Dictator for Life” (BDFL) — spiritual leader of the TWiki project. The BDFL appoints members of the Technical Board.

The TWiki name and brand, as well as the twiki.org domain name, are the property of the project founder Peter Thoeny; he has sole discretion in decisions related to these matters.

This proposal met considerable opposition from the community. It seemed to go against some already established and more democratic decision structures. The role of BDFL met some strong resistance, although some members acknowledged the need for leadership.

Cabin boy – Sales

This is where blaming often plays a role. Blaming of self, life, others, the system, and even God, Bananas and Flying Spaghetti Monsters can be called to come into the game.

As RafaelAlvarez writes: The community wanted to make explicit the permissions that were implicit before, that is, that the community can use the TWiki ™ brand the way it has been done before without having to pay or relicence TWIKI.NET. This means that any community member could make a TWiki(tm) pakage (taking the core, add some plugins and a nice installer on top) and call it TWiki ™. This means that I could have a company named “Global TWiki Consulting Services” that provides TWiki related services, and that siltes like twikirules.org, twikigurus.org and such can spawn. Today, for all that you need a written permission from the trademark holder, and if there is even the sligthes disagreement between you and him, you run the risk to get sued (a site called twikisucks.org could not exists, for example). In the same vein, a consulting company that is seen as a heavy competitor to TWIKI.NET is not likely to get the permission to have TWiki ™ in its name. Alternative governance proposals were then made. The community agreed that a final agreement on the matter would be finalised at the TWiki Community Summit in September.

First Mate – negative feedback loop

The place of confidence if all went well, and of doubt if not. If in doubt, depending on what’s happening “inside” we humans can produce non-confrontational and/or tuned out responses, procrastination and/or emotional freezes, code white victim syndrome symptoms, or a total panic response.

Just before the TWiki Community Summit September 2008 in Berlin, the community learned that Peter Thoeny was not willing to discuss the role of BDFL or the TWiki brand. Moreover, Peter would not be able to join the summit; instead, Tom Barton would be attending.

Constable – Operations

We’re getting to the crunch. Twiki has quality. Version control. A healthy Boatswain to support and drive the Constable. The weapons were looked after, and the ammunition was kept dry.

At the summit, the attending TWiki community members (present physcially and by conference call) expressed the following:

The BDFL position is not needed or appropriate for the community. The majority position was that this would not be an acceptable element of governance.

The participants expressed very strong reservations about TWIKI.NET’s control of the TWiki brand whose value, the participants felt, is primarily based on the volunteer contributions of many individuals.

At the end of the day, the group summarized its position on these questions as follows:

The license on the brand name “TWiki” should be a free (as in free beer and free speech) Public License given to the entire community, without having to sign an agreement.

Peter Thoeny is considered the Chief Evangelist, but he will not have veto right, nor will he have the right to overturn community decisions.

If TWIKI.NET did not agree with this position, then the community would create a fork.

Swabbies – Development

And there you have it. Mutiny. Revolution. A fork to FosWiki. It is clear to me from the above, the community did see other points of view. Did not lack mental authority and responsibility. The cap’n wasn’t killed, or made to walk the plank. He could stay on, but the crew wanted a more democratic structure in response to an autocratic projection by the cap’n, even if it was originally intended as a joke (with a VC group behind it, it becomes much less funny).

Organisational development warnings

FosWiki

The larger your crew, the harder it becomes to make difficult decisions in a democratic structure. And if not all crew members are experienced and educated players, that can become a major problem and the ship goes nowhere and everywhere fast. It simply dissolves as the experienced players walk off while faster ships start feeding on what’s left. But if you have a critical mass of experienced players, and you intend to self-capitalise, or not commercialise at all, the ship and its crew has no problem going nowhere and everywhere. Likely we get to see unexplored territory and unexpected treasure. The seas and oceans are big enough … just mind the reefs.

TWiki

Even if you are not intending and projecting autocracies, your actions can be interpreted as such by crew members. And autocracy may make a ship fast for a while, but in the long run, such crews tend to fall apart because too many members build up resentment from each occasion a decision wasn’t in their best interest, or was even to their disadvantage. We’ve been there, done that, and that’s why open source is such a success. Cheers to finding other, new mistakes. And if on top of that the projected autocracy displays signs that can be interpreted as corruption, an increasing number of people will feel the autocrat is getting that at their expense, and will start to walk way or revolt or start a mutiny. And all of that can also happen while you intend an oligarchy.

My conclusion

I was about to install one or two wiki’s for communities. In both cases I work closely together with users. For one, the person I could ask is already contaminated by the illusionary pushes and pulls of this revolution. The other is still clean. I will ask him to pick Twiki or FosWiki based on their descriptions for his purpose. Which software speaks to my customers? Code is poetry, and the software alive. Actually, it had a child? The real Treasure Chest for me is making my customers happy, whether they are paying customers or not. I always do my best. We all do. And we’re all just humans. We just need to see it like that for both self and others, and everything changes. While commercial is not a dirty word in my book (I do like to be able to pay my bills, and have a vacation now and then), I want to guard it with some excellent professional ethics.

Feedback is very welcome …

Charting the unknown

nynke — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:45:33 +0000

I wanted to be able to chart some simple survey responses, make it look good, and easy to regularly update as responses come in. With that “desired state” firmly in mind, I embarked on a journey, meeting many on-line mashables and chart generators difficult to integrate in Wordpress, and even coding some solutions underway. And all were just not good enough for my purpose. Running out of time I had set aside for this, I came across an open source tool, Fusion Charts, and I pulled it off in the nick of time. 1. Download a version of Fusion Charts. FusionCharts Free and FusionCharts v3 are two different products with entirely different licensing schemes. FusionCharts Free is completely free and covers all basic charting needs. FusionCharts v3 is a paid product with a wider variety of chart types and a host of advanced features. It is also free, as long as you don’t mind a small addition in your charts that the chart is made with Fusion Charts. I think my below solution for embedding graphs in a wordpress blogpost will work for v3 version as well. 2. Do not have to upload the whole shebang to your blogserver. Uploading only the relevant files works: FusionCharts.js from the JSClass directory, and the for you relevant .swf files in a Fusion Charts directory. You can re-use these .swf chart files for any number of charts on posts. I created a FusionCharts folder in a FusionCharts folder that contains all .swf files and the FusionCharts.js file. 3. The .swf files are linked with .xml files that provide the data for and configuration of the chart. FushionCharts provides this utility for generating .xml files. Use the “Convert to XML” button to get the data .xml. I created a folder MyFirstChart in my top FusionCharts folder to hold chart data, and uploaded Bar2D.swf. [caption id="attachment_431" align="aligncenter" width="520" caption="Manual"][/caption] [caption id="attachment_433" align="aligncenter" width="520" caption="From Spread Sheet"][/caption] [caption id="attachment_432" align="aligncenter" width="520" caption="Generated code"][/caption] 4. Now click the “Configure Chart” button to open the “Chart Properties” window. You can provide settings for your chart like caption, axis titles, design palette, etc. [caption id="attachment_435" align="aligncenter" width="520" caption="Configuring the chart"][/caption] 5. Copy the .xml to clipboard and paste it in a new file called Data.xml (or any other file name of your choice). Upload this file. I uploaded to the folder MyFirstChart in my top FusionCharts folder in the root of my wordpress installation. Mind capital sensitivity. 6. Put this string in your header file (Appearance -> Editor -> header.php)

Adapt path to the location of your FusionCharts.js file. 7. Copy-paste in your blogpost the code below and replace the paths with the locations where your .swf, .js and .xml files are located, and replace the names of the data files with the names of the data files you have uploaded.

7. If all went well, you now have a result like this. I. Love. It. Thank you, Fusion Charts, and @sanketnadhani for suggesting this path.

2009 Nonprofit Software Development Summit

nynke — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:35:18 +0000

The 2009 Nonprofit Software Development Summit will be the third annual convening of people and organizations developing software tools, web applications and other technology to support social justice causes. Dates: 18 November, 2009 – 20 November, 2009 Location: Oakland, California

Goals of the Dev Summit

The Dev Summit will have as its primary goals the following:

To convene and strengthen connections between the networks of stakeholders in the nonprofit software ecosystem, providing a fun and creative environment for celebrating successes and leadership in the field.
To share skills and knowledge in a highly collaborative, peer-to-peer fashion.
To map and discuss what is available and what is missing across the nonprofit software landscape in specific software “verticals”, and to posit solutions for addressing the gaps.
To offer a point of entry for software developers interested in offering their skills to nonprofit sector.

For more information, and for registration, go here

Payment gateways

nynke — Fri, 15 May 2009 18:56:27 +0000

A gateway facilitates on-line payments by connecting our checkout with our specific merchant account at the processing bank. The gateway takes the data and presents it to the processing bank. When it receives a response from the bank, it sends that return data back to the checkout for appropriate handling.

Payment gateways offer a variety of (sub)services, and for each fees can be charged, next to monthly fees. The bottom line, monies, is certainly a dimension to take into account when choosing a payment gateway. Knowledge of current and previous sales, website traffic, and projected sales, are worth gold for that decision.

Non-seamless payments

PayPal will redirect the customer to the PayPal website to process the payment and will redirect the customer back to the online shop after this has been completed.

Non-seamless payment gateways such as PayPal Standard can negatively affect the successful completion of on-line shopping transactions. Customers can be put off when redirected to a 3rd party website and terminate the transaction.

Google Checkout	?
PayPal Standard	Most countries

Seamless payments

A seamless payment gateway is one that processes credit cards directly on your on-line shop website without redirecting the customer to any 3rd party website. For setting up a seamless payment gateway we will need to have a “Merchant ID” or “Customer ID” with the chosen payment gateways. And for that, we need an Internet merchant account from our bank which is subject to strict terms and conditions, and requires approval.

DPS	US, UK, AU, NZ, ZA, SG, MY and Pacific Islands
PayPal PayFlow Payment Gateway	US, CA, AU, NZ, SG
PayPal Website Payments Pro Payment Gateway	Most Countries

Reviews of payment gateways

Tagged: wyrdweb

The simplest web shop

nynke — Fri, 15 May 2009 18:56:11 +0000

Suppose you wanted to develop a web shop. We can build on some tried and true patterns, our imagination, and some existing open source tools.

A basic web shop development story

Minimally we need:

Customer information {customer number, title, first name, last name, street, number, zipcode (many formats depending on residence), place of residence, country, phone number, email address, password}
Product information {product number, product name, price}
Order {number ordered, order number, order date}
Ordering {order number, product number, number ordered}

And around these, we need at least one shop window that displays products with a handle for customers to add products to their shopping cart, and that the shop manager can remove a product or add to (using cookies, session or temporary table as transport medium).

When looking in the shopping cart, the customer can see all products and prices in an overview including taxes and shipping costs, if applicable.

Oh, and we need a checkout. Our checkout interfaces to payment gateways. This is never going to be a straightforward thing to do and it is important that when signing up to a gateway service we are sure that they can interface to the software we use, if any.

Payment gateways are great because the sale goes through (almost) instantly, and both web shop manager and customer receive feedback that the payment has been received. Processing payments off-line is the simplest gateway: the customer’s credit card details are sent to the web shop manager who then proceeds further using off-line payment interfaces in his/her own time.

And I can easily imagine some next refinement stories …

Including price in ordering, so that when the web shop manager changes the price of a product, existing orders (made before the price was changed) maintain the old price.
Have a separate delivery and payment address. This makes gifting possible, and corporate customers will also be thrilled.
Add the address to Order, so that when customers move and address changes, the historical data remains intact (is not rewritten).
Addition of stock overview
Category products in separate shop windows
Do more than the above …