One trackable element that seemed to escape our tracking data was when our links are shared using our Tweet button and capturing event tracking data from those user actions. Questions such as whether or not visitors are sharing links from our blog homepage or the individual post, where to properly place the tweet button to get the most clicks, how much traffic is our site receiving from our posts being shared on Twitter, etc. were yet to be answered.

To solve this problem, we implemented Nicolas Gallagher’s WordPress modification “Custom Tweet Button for WordPress“. The Custom Tweet Button modification consists of adding two php files to your WordPress configuration and making several edits to your theme’s functions.php and styles.css files. The Tweet Button created by this add on is simple HTML and the webmaster has full control over the exact call sent to the Twitter service. Since the webmaster has full control over the call, it is possible to easily embed Google Analytics campaign tracking information.

You will need a bit.ly API key to use the modification. When we signed up, bit.ly API key generation was a manual process and took a few days to complete. Once you have your full API key you have everything you need to implement this custom modification to your own WordPress setup.

After you have made the appropriate file modifications and uploaded the files included in the modification package, adding the tweet button is a simple matter of calling the function tweet_button in your desired template file (for an individual post, you will call the function in your single.php file).

Adding your own custom tweet button gives you full control over the HTML/CSS of your Tweet button, saves all of your click/referrer data to your bit.ly account, speeds up your page loads since there’s no need for javascript or iframes and makes it simple to add in Google Analytics for even more data.

Do you have your own blog? Do you use WordPress? Are you currently tracking your Twitter data in anyway? Share your data tracking experiences in the comments.

Richard Ward

Richard Ward is a Sr. Web Applications Developer for OurChurch.Com. Richard’s professional background is in LAMP style web development. Richard is also a technology enthusiast with a strong interest in emerging technologies. You can reach him at richard@ourchurch.com or on Twitter at @OCCRichard.

www.OurChurch.Com

The post How to Track Twitter Referrals from a WordPress Blog appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

I recently discovered a relatively new extension for Firefox and Chrome (No Internet Explorer support) that makes adding a screenshot, file, or other attachment to an online form a breeze. How familiar is this scenario? You fill out a support ticket on a company’s website and realize you would like to illustrate your problem with a screenshot, then you realize that the company doesn’t allow screenshots to be uploaded as part of its online form. The Drag2Up extension allows you to drag a screenshot (or any other file) to a textbox then immediately places the link to the image in the box while the file uploads in the background. Just think of the time this could save with sharing pictures on Twitter from your computer!

Drag2Up is available as a free add-on for Firefox or Chrome and is definitely a time saver. In the past when I have needed to illustrate something with a screenshot, I have had to open up a new browser window, go to an image uploading site (or use FTP), find the file, upload it, find the auto-generated URL of the uploaded image and copy the URL to the textbox. With Drag2Up, I can now simply drag the image to the box where I want to share the file and the rest of the work is done for me. I like the simplicity!

Large file? No problem. If you’re uploading a large file and the receiver visits the link before the file has completed its upload process, the page will utilize the Google App Engine Channel API to deliver real time upload status to the viewer so they know exactly when it will be done and when they should check back.

There’s quite a bit going on under the hood, so jump over to the developer’s site and scroll down to the Technical Information section to see exactly how the plug-in works.

Richard Ward

Richard Ward is a Sr. Web Applications Developer for OurChurch.Com. Richard’s professional background is in LAMP style web development. Richard is also a technology enthusiast with a strong interest in emerging technologies. You can reach him at richard@ourchurch.com or on Twitter at @OCCRichard.

www.OurChurch.Com

The post Save time uploading images and files with Drag2Up appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Children and the young at heart can visit https://www.noradsanta.org to play holiday games and activities, that change daily, prior to the big day. On December 24, the site goes into full tracking mode and will stream videos, captured by NORAD’s “Santa Cams”, from various cities and locales along Santa’s route. In addition, beginning at 2 AM EST on Christmas Day, visitors to the NORAD site can watch Santa check his list, ready his sleigh, and make final adjustments to ensure he has a successful trip.

This year, NORAD/Google have included social media. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have all been tapped to be a part of the tracking effort. Simply enter noradsanta into any of the site’s search utilities to start following the journey through your favorite social media application.

Google has provided full integration with its existing products, including Google Earth and YouTube to broadcast videos of the trip. Tracking will be available to users who have Google Earth’s application installed, providing 3D views of the trip and allowing users to see Santa’s most recent status update. Additionally, YouTube will be utilized to broadcast videos prior to the trip as well as in trip video utilizing the aforementioned Santa Cams.

General Motors’ OnStar service has also joined in the effort this year and will be providing its subscribers with live Santa tracking updates as they travel in their OnStar-equipped vehicles on Christmas Eve. OnStar subscribers can press their blue button to get live updates on Santa’s location.

NORAD has also staffed a call center to field calls from boys and girls as they track Santa Claus. Beginning at 6 AM EST on Christmas Eve, boys and girls can call 877-HI-NORAD (877-446-6723), or e-mail no**************@gm***.com if they wish to receive live updates from the trackers themselves.

Will you and your family be tracking Santa via Google Earth or social media this Christmas?

Richard Ward

Richard Ward is a Sr. Web Applications Developer for OurChurch.Com. Richard’s professional background is in LAMP style web development. Richard is also a technology enthusiast with a strong interest in emerging technologies. You can reach him at richard@ourchurch.com or on Twitter at @OCCRichard.

www.OurChurch.Com

The post Track Santa Claus this Christmas Season with Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Then, came the security holes, the frequent crashes, the slowness.

Suddenly, I found myself searching for an alternative and found Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Being a developer and system administrator by trade, anything that can be easily modified and extended to suit my browsing needs is right up my alley, and Firefox was the perfect browser.  Using Mozilla’s Add-ons library, Firefox can be customized to match your browsing needs perfectly. Need insight on your web development projects to quickly debug and monitor CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc. live on any web page? There’s an app for that. Need to check lots of links to ensure they are valid and working? There’s an app for that. How about an add-on to allow you to save screenshots of all or portions of your Firefox window as an image? Yeah, there’s an app for that, too. As you can see, Firefox can be extended to do most anything you want a web browser to do and all with very little effort.

However, my biggest complaint with Firefox was always about its memory usage. It’s no secret that Firefox likes to use your computer’s memory. Depending on what you’re doing and how many tabs you have open, it’s not uncommon for Firefox to want to use 1GB+ of memory. That’s a lot! Of course, you could close Firefox and open it up again to alleviate the problem, but if you use a lot of Tabs at once that doesn’t help in the efficiency department.

I have recently started using Google Chrome and found it to be much more efficient at handling multiple tabs, multiple operations, etc. without utilizing near the amount of RAM that Firefox requires. Chrome’s architecture is vastly different though — each tab runs its own separate Windows process. Chrome also includes its own Task Manager that lets you see (and close) individual tabs and their associated memory usage.

Chrome also seems faster overall. Chrome’s startup time is noticeably faster than Firefox, and pages seem to render faster. Speaking of faster, the download operations in Chrome seem faster in terms of efficiency. Firefox’s download procedure did not make finding documents easy. Chrome downloads start in the task bar at the bottom, and the user can easily open the file or right click to do a number of things with it.

Finally, Chrome is rivaling Firefox with its Chrome Web Store, a take on Firefox’s Add-ons library. While Firefox still has more add-ons available than Chrome, developers are quickly closing the gap and rapidly releasing Chrome-capable add-ons. That’s no surprise since Chrome has already claimed 20% of the browser market share, inching ever so closely to Internet Explorer’s 28.6%.

What browser do you use? Have you tried Chrome? What do you like/dislike about it? Share your browser relationship in the comments.

Richard Ward

Richard Ward is a Sr. Web Applications Developer for OurChurch.Com. Richard’s professional background is in LAMP style web development. Richard is also a technology enthusiast with a strong interest in emerging technologies. You can reach him at richard@ourchurch.com or on Twitter at @OCCRichard.

www.OurChurch.Com

The post Google Chrome – the new Firefox? appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

However, a recent interview with both Google and Bing lends credibility to the overall impact Facebook, Twitter, and social media in general have in your SEO activity. SearchEngineLand.com reports that Google uses over 200 ranking factors when deciding where a page should appear in the search engine results pages, or SERPs.

Specifically, Google stated in the article that they pay attention to the data found in the Twitter “firehose”, that is a constant stream of what people are tweeting about in real time. In that data stream, links do not carry nofollow attributes as they do on your regular Twitter page. Google stated that if an article is retweeted or heavily referenced on Twitter, any included links are included as a ranking signal despite being listed as nofollow on the users Twitter page. Awesome!

Your Twitter reputation matters as well! Google and Bing both said they take into consideration the authority of the author when calculating ranking signals. Google specifically refers to it as author quality, while Bing mentions making associations with known public figures or publishers. Google and Bing also said that a link will carry more weight for the ranking calculation depending upon the person who tweets it.

Facebook is a little more obscure. Google and Bing both say they treat links shared on Facebook just like tweeted links, although getting specific user data might be a bit more difficult is the link isn’t marked to be shared with “Everyone”. The major difference here is while Bing calculates authority data on Twitter based on the individual Twitter user, the same calculation is not made on Facebook based on the individual Facebook user. Google, on the other hand, claims to extend the same treatment to Facebook as they do to Twitter with respect to user authority.

This is a very interesting interview that I would recommend any Webmaster to read. OurChurch.Com also has an SEO Tools and Tips section on our website which provides additional resources for increasing traffic to your website using Search Engine Optimization.

Will Google and Bing’s acknowledgment that links posted to Facebook and Twitter influence search rankings impact the way you use social media?

Richard Ward

Richard Ward is a Sr. Web Applications Developer for OurChurch.Com. Richard’s professional background is in LAMP style web development. Richard is also a technology enthusiast with a strong interest in emerging technologies. You can reach him at richard@ourchurch.com or on Twitter at @OCCRichard.

www.OurChurch.Com

The post Facebook and Twitter help with SEO? You bet! appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Xeon Processors

The Xeon brand of computer microprocessors are manufactured by Intel to support the high demands and fast outputs necessary for web server environments like OurChurch.Com has. The Xeon processor line brings significant advantages over its desktop counterparts. The multiprocessor and multi core features of the Xeon line make pages load faster, uploads and downloads to our servers faster, and database operations faster.

OurChurch.Com has partnered with WiredTree to deliver a custom designed solution to meet OurChurch.Com’s specific needs and requirements. The all Xeon hardware provided by WiredTree will increase server durability and result in fewer service unavailability periods.

Gigabit Connection

The internal connectivity between all of our servers has been upgraded from a 100Mbit connection to a 1000Mbit connection. With the addition of 1000Mbit connectivity, or Gigabit Ethernet, OurChurch.Com is able to enhance and optimize internal server-to-server transfers resulting in faster loading sites for our customers.

RAID Backup

For reliability and performance, OurChurch.Com utilizes RAID in all of its servers.  In server environments, hard drives are a single point of failure since they are constantly in operation unlike your desktop computer where your hard drive can idle when not in use.  A RAID system includes a second hard drive in each server and a special hard drive controller that writes to both hard drives simultaneously.   By utilizing RAID in our environment, we have removed the single point of failure; if a single hard drive malfunctions or stops performing, a backup hard drive immediately takes over without interruption.

Backup Server

A dedicated backup server has been added that performs hourly snapshots of all client data on all OurChurch.Com servers. OurChurch.Com’s friendly support team can restore backups quickly and easily. In addition, Bronze, Silver and Gold customers will notice an R1Soft Icon in their cPanel account which provides you direct access to your hourly backups with the capability to restore the data yourself should you choose. The backup server also has a RAID system to increase reliability and performance.

Our servers are utilized by thousands of people and serve tens of thousands of websites every single day. It’s very important that our infrastructure be fast, reliable and available. For that reason, we monitor our servers constantly and make upgrades and adjustments where necessary to ensure we can provide a constant level of service to our clients.

If you’re not hosted by OurChurch.Com now, ask your host how often they review their hardware and make upgrades. Also, ask if your data is protected in a RAID environment, with hourly backups to a RAID 10 environment. The answer might surprise you.

We’re excited to announce this major infrastructure upgrade. The upgrade is complete and you should pages loading faster than ever on our website and the sites we host. If you have any general questions about the upgrade, post a comment and ask away. For any questions specific to a site hosted with us, please contact our support team.

Richard Ward

Richard Ward is a Sr. Web Applications Developer for OurChurch.Com. Richard’s professional background is in LAMP style web development. Richard is also a technology enthusiast with a strong interest in emerging technologies. You can reach him at richard@ourchurch.com or on Twitter at @OCCRichard.

www.OurChurch.Com

The post What’s Under the Hood at Your Web Host? appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Markup.io is a tool that works in your browser. Just drag the Markup.io icon to your toolbar and you’re ready to draw on any web page with no plug-ins or applications to install. Markup.io’s editing tools layer themselves over the site you are visiting and allow you to draw shapes, add text, borders and lines.

Once you’re finished with your drawing, simply click the Publish button and share the unique URL with your team members, colleagues, friends or anyone else you wish to share your thoughts with. When visitors view your drawing they will have the option to view your notes and choose to respond by either adding notes to your existing drawing or creating a new drawing. The easy and user friendly part of the process is the individuals who you share the link with don’t need to have the bookmark to get started — Markup.io will provide a summary and load the editing tools once the visitor chooses to either overlay their drawing onto your existing drawing or start fresh.

Markup.io will certainly make it easier to share visual ideas between two individuals or among teams. Have you ever used this or a similar virtual whiteboard service? Did you find it helpful in the design and concept process?

Richard Ward

Richard Ward is a Sr. Web Applications Developer for OurChurch.Com. Richard’s professional background is in LAMP style web development. Richard is also a technology enthusiast with a strong interest in emerging technologies. You can reach him at richard@ourchurch.com or on Twitter at @OCCRichard.

www.OurChurch.Com

The post Web Page Mockups Redefined appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Google just released a product called Chrome Frame that has been in beta for the past year and it will certainly change how web pages are developed and eliminate the specific workarounds necessary for older versions of IE. Put simply, Google Frame is an open source plug-in that integrates Google Chrome’s WebKit rendering capabilities (combined with its efficient JavaScript handling) into Internet Explorer. Google Chrome Frame allows HTML5 content, including the wonderful <canvas> tag, to be viewed seamlessly in IE 6, 7 or 8.

Google Chrome Frame was originally developed to support Google’s communication and collaboration tool Wave. Wave, while on the schedule to be discontinued, was revolutionary in how it provided real time collaboration with groups of people all over the world. Unfortunately, many of the features did not work or did not render properly in IE. Enter Google Chrome Frame, the solution being to simply have the user install a plug-in replacing the IE Trident rendering engine with the open source, HTML5 friendly and JavaScript speediness of Google’s Chrome browser.

To use the plug-in, web developers simply add a single tag to the page to detect whether or not the user has the Google Chrome Frame plug-in installed. If it is not installed, the users can be directed to the installation page to install the plug-in which installs just like any other third party plug-in (Adobe Flash, Adobe Shockwave, etc.) If the tag detects the plug-in is installed, the Google Chrome WebKit rendering engine begins rendering pages automatically.

While it is generally accepted in the web development community that IE 6 should be sunset because of its noncompliance with today’s development technologies, it’s an obvious fact that this won’t happen anytime soon. Using Google’s Chrome Frame can solve many problems a web developer will face when developing for IE which will lead to a more positive user experience.

Have you used Google’s Chrome Frame in your web development projects? Do you plan to in the future?

Richard Ward

Richard Ward is a Sr. Web Applications Developer for OurChurch.Com. Richard’s professional background is in LAMP style web development. Richard is also a technology enthusiast with a strong interest in emerging technologies. You can reach him at richard@ourchurch.com or on Twitter at @OCCRichard.

www.OurChurch.Com

The post Google Chrome Frame and its Internet Explorer 6 revival appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Late last week, Google released a new major feature to Google Analytics: In-Page Analytics. Previously, when looking at Google’s pie charts, graphs and reports, it proved to be tedious to convert their text data into visualizations to see how visitors would navigate a particular web page. To make the process easier, some Webmasters would open a version of their website and click through by mirroring user behavior with information pulled from Google Analytics reports.

The manual work involved to fully understand user click behaviors proved to be a time consuming task for Webmasters. As a result, Google has addressed the problem and released their new In-Page Analytics feature in beta mode. With In-Page Analytics, the analytics data is now displayed right on a given website so a Webmaster can see actual analytics data as they browse.

To access the new In-Page Analytics feature, just look in the Content section of your Google Analytics account. Do you think this new feature will make analyizing your traffic data and click behaviors easier as a Webmaster? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Richard Ward

Richard Ward is a Sr. Web Applications Developer for OurChurch.Com. Richard’s professional background is in LAMP style web development. Richard is also a technology enthusiast with a strong interest in emerging technologies. You can reach him at richard@ourchurch.com or on Twitter at @OCCRichard.

www.OurChurch.Com

The post Google Analytics, now with visual in-page indicators! appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

The original deadline is quickly approaching and the lingering question is: Is HTML5 ready for prime time?

According to W3C, the answer is no.

Philippe Le Hegaret, leader of the W3C Interaction Domain and the one responsible for HTML5 development, was quoted this week admitting to video interoperability issues in a cross-browser environment causing delays.

Le Hegaret said, “The problem we’re facing right now is there is already a lot of excitement for HTML5 but it’s a little too early to deploy it because we’re running into interoperability issues including differences between video on devices.”

HTML5 is already being used in some cases, though. Specifically, web services are using it (mostly in beta modes) for its animation features where previously, third party plug-ins like Adobe Flash Player were required. You read that right — HTML5 will have full video support without having to rely on third-party proprietary plug-ins or codecs. With HTML5, adding video to a page will be as simple as adding an image today and there will be built-in controls to manipulate videos with volume adjustments, image rotation and more.

Another game changing feature is the canvas element which will allow rendering images on the fly. Just think — being able to implement instantaneous graphics rendering without having to rely on a third-party plug-in. An excellent example of the new Canvas feature is this drawing board. Another good example is this first person grifter, all accomplished using HTML5’s canvas feature. Both of these examples work in Firefox 3.5+, Chrome or Opera only.

The possibilities are limited only by the imagination so there’s certainly a lot to look forward to with HTML5 from a development perspective. The good news is some browsers already support most of the features proposed in the original HTML5 draft. Firefox, Opera and Chrome are very pro-active with implementing the new features. Internet Explorer is a bit slower to implement, but is making progress.

While HTML5 isn’t ready for prime time because of the lack of total browser support and interoperability issues, it’s certainly something to look forward to. What will HTML5 do for your website? Will you use it to replace Adobe Flash and any other multimedia applications that previously required a third-party plugin?

Richard Ward

Richard Ward is a Sr. Web Applications Developer for OurChurch.Com. Richard’s professional background is in LAMP style web development. Richard is also a technology enthusiast with a strong interest in emerging technologies. You can reach him at richard@ourchurch.com or on Twitter at @OCCRichard.

www.OurChurch.Com

The post Is HTML5 ready to be released into the wild? appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.