Web Publishing Group

Google offers free Google AdWords for nonprofits:

Google Grants provides eligible organizations with in-kind keyword advertising using Google AdWords so you can connect directly with your target audience. Through simple, short text ads that run on Google.com, thousands (or even millions) of people can learn about your organization online as they are searching for related information. When someone enters keywords (short phrases specifying a particular search query) into Google.com, ads targeted to those keywords appear alongside the search results.

For more information, go to the Google Grants page.

I like to use contact forms on websites because I think forms encourage users to respond more often than a simple mailto: link. The problem with forms is that they’re abused by spambots. The form I have on w8pgw.org, for example, is spammed so often, I’d say that the ratio of spam to real messages is easily 100:1.

Fortunately, there are a couple of things you can do. One of them is to use Captcha. Basically what you do is to create a small image that contains a code consisting of letters and numbers that is human-readable, but not computer readable. The person using the form must enter that code properly for the form to be processed. There are many PHP Captcha implementations on the Net, so it’s relatively to set up and use.

One drawback is that it makes the form bigger. This could be a problem when you want to keep the form small.

One idea that was just floated on the Drupal support mailing list is to add a drop-down menu to a form and require the user to make a selection other than the default. The reasoning behind this is that the spambots aren’t smart enough–at least not yet–to actually make a selection.

I’ve just implemented this on w8pgw.org and am hoping that this works. It’s certainly simpler than adding a Captcha.

Is there nothing Google doesn’t do? Their latest is the Google Website Optimizer. Using this tool, you select sections of a Web page that you want to test and then develop options. For example, you might try three different headlines to see which one works best.

After you choose which section to test, you also choose a link that, when chosen, constitutes a success. For example, if you’re selling a product, you might select “add to shopping cart” link.

Then, you set up the page so that one of the three headlines is selected randomly. Google will keep track of how many times each headline is displayed and how many times a user adds a product to the shopping cart. So, after a time, you’ll know which headline works best.

Even if you’re not selling something, you can use this tool. Perhaps you’re trying to get people to sign an electronic petition, or you might be trying to get them to volunteer for your non-profit group. You can use this tool to help you tune your website to get the best response.

ANN ARBOR, MI – The Web Publishing Group (WPG), an Ann Arbor Web development company, redesigned and launched a Web site for Commercial Buliding Products, a trade magazine serving architects, owners, and contractors in low-rise and mid-rise construction. The URL for the site is www.cbpmagazine.com.

The new website makes it easier for users to access information on a wide variety of products, including lighting, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, security, roofing, and siding. For example, users can now search for products in several ways, including searching by product category or by keyword.

The website also has features that make it easy to maintain. The redesigned website includes a custom content-management system that allows the magazine’s editors to quickly add new product writeups to the product database. The system also allows them to add articles to the website once they have published an issue.

The Web Publishing Group has been developing and maintaining websites for trade magazines, scholarly journals, and high-tech companies for more than ten years. For more information, contact Dan Romanchik at 734-930-6564 or by e-mail at danr@webpublishinggroup.com.

While PHP has enabled even the most novice programmer to build Web applications, the result is often poorly-coded websites that are a bear to maintain. I should know. I’ve worked on this kind of project myself.

The problem is that building a proper software infrastructure for each project is a time-consuming process, and the cost of doing this is prohibitive. Enter PHP frameworks. Frameworks aim to provide this infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on the application code and not the underlying code that makes it all work.

The way they do this is by using the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture. Models are representations of your data structure, i.e. how your data is stored in the database. Views are template files that tell the framework how to display the data. Controllers are the code that retrieve and modify the data in your database and cause data to be displayed in a view.

There are many different PHP frameworks, but I’m only going to discuss two here:

1. Cake. Cake is perhaps the most widely-used PHP framework to this point. This framework has been in development for quite a while and the website has quite a bit of information to get you started. The Cake Showcase lists many websites—some of them quite complex—that use the Cake framework.
2. MODx. The MODx website describes this software as “equal parts custom web app builder and content management system. It lists a couple of features that I think might make it more useful for the application that I have in mind—a trade magazine website. These are:
   • Rich text editors, which should make it easier to add articles and other content.
   • Custom content types, which the website says allows you to transform your content into XML, PDF, and other formats. I can envision using this feature to offer RSS feeds.

Both say they support AJAX, another requirement for this project.

I’m a bit concerned about the learning curve associated with basing this project on an application framework, but if I can use this approach in the future, then I should be ahead of the game. We’ll see.

There are several good content-management systems or publications, such as Vignette, that will satisfy just about any content-management need that a publishing company could come up with. The problem? They’re expensive—both to set up and to maintain.

These are definitely not solutions for small publishers. A friend of mine worked for a publisher who installed Vignette, and his company spent tens of thousands of dollars for the software and then tens of thousands more on consultants to help them install and configure it.

An Open Source Solution
That being the case, wouldn’t you like a solution that’s proven and powerful, but most of all cheap? Well, how about free? I’m talking, of course, about one of the many open-source (read: free) content-management systems currently available.

My favorite is Drupal. I’ve used it on several sites, including the IEEE Southeastern Michigan website and the ARRL, Michigan Section website. Unlike many open-source projects, Drupal has a lot of momentum behind it, the developers are continually improving it, and it’s relatively easy to get support should you need it.

theONION is a magazine that uses Drupal to publish an online version.

Several magazines already use Drupal to publish online. They are:

• Linux Journal
• Snowboard
• theONION

Drupal even a module that is geared towards making the basic content-management system into a publishing system: E-Publish. E-Publish lets you organize a group of nodes into a publication, your publication can have multiple editions, and you can organize each edition by topic. I haven’t used E-Publish yet, but it looks very good. One of the sites that currently uses E-Publish is PR Watch.

Camping Out
Another open source package—one specifically designed for publications—is Campsite. It has features specifically needed by publications, including the ability to accomodate multiple contributors, editor review, issue publishing, and subscription management.

A site currently using Campsite is the Post-Herald Online, a publication in western NY. Another is el Periodico, a Spanish-language newspaper in Guatemala.

I haven’t used this software, either, but I’d love to give it a try. One project I’m currently considering is establishing a community-based online newspaper here in Ann Arbor, and I think this software would fit the bill nicely.

System Requirements
Both Drupal and Campsite are built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) technology. These are all open-source software projects, and many web hosts support it. What this means is that you can easily find both a web hosting company to host the site. And since many developers (including Web Publishing Group) also support this technology, it should be easy to find a web developer as well.

Of course, as Heinlein pointed out, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL).” You will have to pay a web developer to install and customize the software, and you will have to allocate resources to maintain the website. In the end, however, you’ll be way ahead of the game. These solutions are easier to install and easier to maintain—and a lot cheaper, too.

If you’d like to explore one of these options, please feel free to phone me at 734-930-6564 or to e-mail me at danr@webpublishinggroup.com.

If you run a website for very long, either you or your client will want to do a survey. Magazines, for example, often want to do readership surveys to see how well their content is meeting readers’ needs. Organizations like to ask questions about their services.

Many of them sign up with a service like SurveyMonkey. This online service does make it easy to set up and run a survey, but beyond a very basic survey, it costs money. Fortunately, there are a couple of open-source software packages that will do many of the same things.

The one I’m most familiar with is phpESP. Like many open-source projects, the design is quite spartan and the documentation could be improved. BUT, it does work.

Not only does it have the tools to design a survey, it will generate reports for you. It will even do cross-tabbing. This latter feature is very useful for analyzing a survey’s raw data.

Another open-source package that I’ve seen recommended is PHPSurveyor. I just recently found out about this package, and while I haven’t used it, it looks to be a little bit more finished product than is phpESP. I think I’ll try this out on an upcoming project.

I was recently asked to quote on a project that involved determining a person’s:

1. ZIP+4 code from a street address and five-digit ZIP code and
2. the Congressional district from the ZIP+4 code.

My first thought was to contact the U.S. Postal Service to see what they offered. They offer something called the ZIP+4 Product, which is a big text file, that you’d have to import into a database to use properly. It costs $900 for a one-year subscription.

The client thought this was kind of expensive, so they suggested that we make the user responsible for inputting the appropriate ZIP+4 by adding a link that would pop up another window with the appropriate USPS.Com page. This is definitely a low-cost solution, but it might turn away people who would otherwise complete the form. It’s also more prone to human error.

Both of these approaches require yet another database to determine the person’s Congressional district.

Another solution is the ZIP+4 database from Zipcode Download. For $250, they’ll sell you the current data. For $400, they’ll sell you a one-year subscription, including quarterly updates. The cool thing about this database—at least as far as this project is concerned—is that it also includes the Congressional district number. A very similar product is ZipInfo.Com, although for a slightly higher price ($500 for a yearly subscription with quarterly updates).

Both ZipCodeDownload and ZipInfo also sell zip code databases with latitude and longitude information. With this information, you can calculate distances between zip codes or find zip codes within a certain radius of a zip code. These are very useful functions for many Web applications.

Despite my earlier bad experience with Firefox, on the PC, on the Mac it runs great.  So much so that I might start using it as my default browser.

One reason for this are the cool extensions that are available for it. Here are two of them, written by Kevin Freitas, that are very simple to use, yet are also very useful for website developers:

• MeasureIt. This extension lets you measure the area in pixels of any area on a web pages. Very useful for measuring the height and width of images.
• LinkChecker.T This extension, as the name implies, will check all the links on a page and color code them: green=good, red=bad, yellow=forwarded. This tool will save you a ton of work and really improve the quality of your websites.

Thanks, Kevin!

I’ve been blogging for quite a while now. My  amateur radio blog, for example, has been online for nearly four years now. In addition to my ham radio blog, I also  blog on automotive testing at AutoTestNews.Com.

But even though I’ve been at it so long, there  are always new things to learn. For example, I’ve recently discovered to cool, new tools: Performancing for Firefox and Zookoda.

Performancing for Firefox is a Firefox plug-in that lets you edit entries using your Firefox browser.  I’m using it right now to edit this entry, in fact. Now, using a single window, I can edit entries for all my blogs.

Zookoda is a web service that lets you set up e-mail lists for your blog readers who don’t want to bother with RSS feds. What Zookoda does is subscribe to your RSS feed , format the data and e-mail it to subscribers.

Once you register on the site,  it guides you through the setup. You can tell Zookoda how often to send e-mails and when to send the e-mails. Zookoda will even create a bit of JavaScript that, when added to your blog, displays a subscription form. I think this is a great way for you to keep in touch with your readers.

You can subscribe to this blog right now by simply entering your e-mail address into the form at right. Thanks!