 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
This week on NPR’s On The Media:
“The cover of the September issue of Wired, the technology magazine with an incredibly strong web presence, declares that “The Web is Dead.” Chris Anderson, Wired Editor-in-Chief and co-author of the cover story talks about what comes after the end of the web.”
Visiting on mobile? Click here to listen.
Pandora is the internet radio jukebox that enables you to create your own personalized radio “stations” based on your likes. Its inner workings are founded on something called the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome Project is a taxonomy of musical information that looks at more than 400 musical characteristics of a song. This information is used to create the Pandora radio stream custom tailored to your taste.
This past week on Studio 360 – one of my favorite NPR weeklies – Kurt Andersen got to chat with the founder of Pandora about how the whole thing works. For a geek like me, it was an interesting interview…
If you’re on an iPhone or non-Flash device, here are some helpful links:
Studio 360 August 13, 2010 episode
Studio 360 Podcast Feed on iTunes
I’m a freak for mobile these days. One only needs to take a look around and see that the number of people using the web on their mobile devices is growing exponentially. And if one is smart about his or her web presence, the mobile audience is of utmost importance and cannot be ignored.
I spend a lot of time with my blog, and it is imperative to me that I provide the optimum experience for my visitors on mobile devices, whether they are reading my text, looking at photos or using the multimedia that I integrate into my web content. I built my blog with WordPress, my platform of choice which enables me to add “plugins” to the blog to make it do just about anything from video integration, photo gallery management, contact forms, spam protection, e-commerce, or whatever. My absolute favorite plugin, however, is the WPtouch plugin from a company called Brave New Code.
WPtouch Pro: my Home page, the menu, and the "share" screen, enabling the mobile visitor to share the content.
The WPtouch plugin automatically converts my WordPress blog in to a gorgeous interface that is specifically designed and optimized for touch-based smartphones. It automatically detects that the visitor is coming from an iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Blackberry, or Palm Pre/Pixi. What’s best? The standard WPtouch plugin for WordPress is absolutely free, with some nice customization options in the admin panel. Just install it into WordPress and activate it. The plugin does the rest.
WPtouch Pro
But if you’re anything like me, you want more options and more aesthetic control. Going further, the boys at Brave New Code developed a premium version of the WPtouch plugin called WPtouch Pro. The pro version enables me to customize just about every aspect of the plugin, giving me the ability to provide the best user experience I can for my mobile visitors. Among the astounding features, my favorite is “Web-app mode,” which enables user to bookmark my site, get a “GH” app button for the iPhone screen, and then use it like a fullscreen app. Thrilling.
Futureproof
WPtouch is also “futureproof,” which means that it is “built to handle newer technologies, including newer WordPress versions.”
The pro version is just $29 per website, $59 for 5 website licenses, or $199 for unlimited website licenses. Very reasonable, I’d say.
My hat is off and my gratitude is extended to Brave New Code partners Dale Mugford and Duane Storey for building the smartest, most useful, most thrilling and thoroughly-supported WordPress plugin I’ve ever worked with. I’m spending more and more time on WordPress for myself and for my clients, and this plugin is a total game changer.
If you’re serious about your website, then you need to be serious about your mobile visitors. And if you’re working with WordPress, get WPtouch. You’ll be glad you did. (And if you’re reading this on an iPhone, you see what I mean.)
When I was about 10 years old, my father took me to New York City for the first time. Throughout his life, he had a great deal of business in New York, and since it was on the company dime, the accommodations were always of the Central Park South variety. On that first trip, and on several others, it was the two of us – just me and my dad.
Those trips gave me indelible memories that I will cherish for the rest of my life. I remember my first New York City restaurant experience (Sea Horse Grill, Rockefeller Center), my first Broadway show (A Chorus Line), and my first New York everything. I was in love with this town from Hello, and I knew from a very young age that this is where I was going to live. This town was a knock-out to me (still is) and had a distinct vibe that we didn’t have at home. A town without an inferiority complex. There were cool impressions of New York on televisions and in movies, but I owe all those important first real-life impressions of NYC to my dad.
These days, “Uncle George” (that’s me) gets to pay it forward and show NYC to my nieces and nephews when they come to visit. View full article »
In addition to the website, blog, Facebook and Twitter, YouTube is an essential piece of the whole networking operation. A YouTube channel is completely free – perfect for those on a budget. It seamlessly sends a “shout-out” to your other social networking properties. Very helpful for branding and, if you have the right idea, can be a lot of fun. Embedding and sharing the videos is ridiculously easy and a vital tool for any shameless self-promoter like myself. My digital recommendache: get a YouTube channel.
