General Musing

I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something” again.In a similar way to the last time I did it in Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form

As I explained before I have set up a system to automatically mail somebody when the enter their address in the form, my issue was that I wanted to add a unique blogpost which they would only be able to get by signing up. Naturally I wanted to style it in the same way the posts are styled in this blog. Again I turned to the documentation, specifically the Class MailApp which I was using to send the mail. Using this documentation I had a starting point. I wanted three changes to the current script:

1. keep the plain text
2. add HTML message
3. add inline images

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I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something“. I want to build a list, and offering something which adds value for the subscriber is a good way to do this. There is a host of good material which you can use to help, so I won’t elaborate on that in this post.

I have a hosted WordPress.com blog, which means that I can’t run a local script to collect the mail addresses and mail them, so I turned to Google Docs’ Form functionality for the entry form, naturally I give them the option to download the booklet there, and I wanted to send the subscriber a message to thank them. In the Google tutorial: Simple Mail Merge they explain how to do a mail merge using the Script Editor. I wanted to go a little further and have it send a mail with thank you note and a link to each subscriber as soon as they filled in the form.

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Last night’s Cinch about:

• HandPick.me
• TwitSprout
• Google Analytics
• Blogging
• WunderKit
• Social Media Job Trends
• and more…

Source: me

Image source: Cinch

Last night’s Cinch about:

• MyPermissions.org
• kred.ly (me)
• CloudFlare and Google Analytics for WordPress.com

Source: me

Image source: Cinch

You can set up you DNS to point to cloudflare, although it’s far more powerful you can view this functionality as a High Availability proxy. Cloudflare then accepts the connections for http and requests the requested page from wordpress.com. This file is manipulated to inject the GA script into the site. There is NO need to perform any modifications on wordpress.com.

As it says in the blog:

Since CloudFlare is optimizing and delivering your site’s content to your visitors, it inserts the Google Analytics JavaScript tracking code in the proper place as your site’s visitors pass through our network. Your site now benefits from both WordPress.com site analytics and Google Analytics.

Source: Enabling Google Analytics on Your WordPress.com Blog

Image source: CloudFlare

As you may know I use WordPress.com for my blog, and although I complain about it lacking some features it does regularly add new features. Which is what it did with the new Publicize feature.

Publicize gives you the ability to post items to Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo! Updates and Messenger Connect.

I’m quite happy with this addition to the WordPress tool chest.

Using the online version of WordPress is sometimes irritating, no scripting is allowed and when I want to do some kind of testing in my website itself I am limited by what functionality is permitted. So I decided to muse on what I do have:

• make a post sticky on top
• use the right sidebar
• limited css

What can I do within the limits?

I decided to create an image and link block, due to the limits of WordPress they must contain fixed values. So the dynamic portion is handled by the code backing the link and image. Once the image is displayed the cookie which is associated with the image and link is set. This cookie is used when the link is clicked to 302 redirect the user to the page to which the image refers.

The data which can be extracted are:

• Campaign
• Referring Page
• Specific Placement

The tests you can run:

• A/B Tests
• Segment Tests
• Multivariate Tests

I’ll be posting more on A/B Tests and a script for you to try in the coming week.

Image source: Daniel Eizans

I’ve been sick all week, flue. And it hasn’t stopped me for thinking big thoughts.

I was reading “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” and suddenly stopped when I noticed that the author was using a Wiki as a blog, then I thought about it and a picture of the advantages of combining a blog and wiki together. Besides from the obvious wiki markup which can be used in the blog, also the ability for updates to wiki/blog items to be posted into the blog stream for RSS, it’s also possible to use [[wiki markup]] to create a backlog of items you may wish to blog about. I naturally googled it and discovered that the Bliki already exists as an idea:

A bliki [...] combines features from both: as with blogs, posts or articles appear in reverse chronological order on the front page, with the most recent one at the top; but editing is done in wiki style, with a version history for each page and special markup tags.

With the power of hindsight I think that the original creator missed a feature, which is also sidelined in this article. My love of folksonomy obviously requires me to question whether the addition of articles related from curation, folksonomy, tagging or social bookmarking sites would be a perfect addition to creating an all inclusive curation environment. Quora has moved fora into the bliki field, although as with a wiki it relies more on created content than on external content.

Image source: Raphaëlle RIDARCH