Plugins are great, we use a number of them, but are they always neccessary ? A lot of plugins just replicate functionality that you could just as easily build directly into the theme itself. This comes in handy for client sites, they dont have to stay on top of updating the plugins when new versions come out, which could break the existing functionality. If you are releasing a theme publicly then it should work “out of the box” with no need for plugins.With this is mind, Im going to be looking at 20 hacks, tips and tutorials for replacing plugins by adding the functionality into your WordPress themes.

via 20 WordPress Theme Hacks to replace the need for Plugins.

Barcamp is an unconference which means there are no set speakers or agenda till the day it starts. The idea is to bring together the top minds in design, development and entrepreneurs to create sparks that may lead to the next big web 2.0 company. Florida ironically is the 3rd largest tech state behind Texas and California, but it is so spread out people can’t find each other.

The same isn’t true for silicon valley. There are bars at either end and all the great minds from all of the startups just find themselves there. talking having fun with people in divergent companies and markets. This allows them to introduce new ideas to their peers brainstorm or just have someone understand them. Tech people often are the sole hero at a small startup with no one else to collaborate with.

Sometimes you get the right people in a room and you have a new company or a new idea, with all the players to make it happen. So barcamp is a spark of magic, to ignite the local economy like it has done around the world. Much like the TedX talks it has become something the world is talking about. As for Barcamp Sarasota and our Technology Festival, its similar to other Barcamps but different in the way that we bring small business and clients to the table and make it an opportunity for learning and teaching. Barcamp isn’t commercial but alot of business gets done in the hallways.

Register for Barcamp

The online marketing company Epsilon was hacked, exposing thousands of its clients’ names and e-mail addresses. Now authorities are trying to make sure that no harm comes to the clientsThe online marketing company, Epsilon got hacked recently showcasing the vulnerability of the internet.

Epsilon is an internet marketing giant that had many famous companies as its clients, and now all of them have been exposed to the risk of information theft.Some of the companies which are the clients of Epsilon are Citigroup Inc, College Board, Walgreens, TiVo Inc, Capital One Financial Corp, HSN Inc, J.P. Morgan Chase, Disney and Kroger.All these companies have stepped forward to warn their customers about the Epsilon hacking, so that they are aware of any mysterious actions which may take place over the next few days.

As yet, it has not been established who hacked Epsilon, however, one thing is for sure and that is that the hacker was not an employee of the company. The information which was stolen just consisted of people’s names and their e-mail addresses and thankfully, no credit card information or social security numbers were stolen.The Epsilon hacking incident is being considered to be one of the biggest internet security breaches in the history of the United States and it shows how sensitive this data is – and how easily it can be lost.

Epsilon also manages the accounts of some students affiliated with the US-based College Board. College Board administers the SAT aptitude tests and this particular organization is in contact with more than 7 million students. The students were also contacted about Epsilon’s security breach and were asked not to open links pointing to suspicious third parties.

Law enforcement authorities have already started investigating into the matter and in this regard, Epsilon has volunteered to lend its full support. “While we are cooperating with authorities and doing a thorough investigation, we cannot say anything else,” said Epsilon spokeswoman Jessica Simon. “We can’t confirm any impacted or non-impacted clients, or provide a list of companies at this point in time.”

via Online marketer Epsilon gets hacked.

The shares are down $16.42, almost 3%, at $571.26, in an otherwise up market, at slightly less than average volume, despite there being no one news item that would seem to pressure the shares,There are, however, some possible reasons. For one thing, Bloomberg’s Jeff Bliss and Sara Forden wrote this morning that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is considering “a broad anti-trust- investigation into Google’s dominance of the Internet search industry,” citing industry sources.

The company also lost one of its execs today, Jonathan Rosenberg, who’d been with the company for about nine years.Yesterday, of course, was the day that Google’s Larry Page took over the CEO spot from Eric Schmidt. Some jitters, perhaps?

AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski writes today

that it looks like Page may be eliminating some of the middle management at the company:The main theme that seems to be emerging: An elimination of Google’s more centralized functional structure–where Rosenberg was one of several manager kingpins–to one in which the individual business units and their engineers, such as its most independent Android division, rule more autonomously.

via What’s Up With Google? – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com.

The reactor situation in Japan suffered yet another setback today, with water levels in Unit 2 registering 10 million times normal levels. The radiation was so high that workers fled the reactor rather than take a second reading. Radiation levels were an astonishing 1,000 msv/hour which will cause radiation sickness within an hour and even deaths starting at 6 hours. Given this near-lethal radiation field, workers evacuated Unit 2.  One question is: where did this radiation come from? Most of it was in the form of iodine-134 with a half-life of 53 minutes and iodine-131 with a half life of 8 days. This indicates that the radiation came directly from the core at Unit 2, rather than the spent fuel pond where most of the iodine has already decayed. So there seems to be a direct path way from the core to the outside, meaning a breach of containment, similar to the situation in Unit 3. In other words, there could be a crack in the pressure vessel surrounding the super hot uranium core, as well as a crack in the outer primary containment vessel surrounding the pressure vessel. These cracks may allow radiation to escape from the core directly into the environment. At the very least, this means continued leaks of deadly radiation from the core to the outside world. But in a worst case scenario, it could be a preview of the day when radiation levels are so high that a complete evacuation is necessary. This means that the cores, without cooling water, will heat up and eventually cause an explosion, via a hydrogen gas or steam explosion. Remember the only thing preventing this worst case scenario are brave firemen shooting hose water into the cores and spent fuel ponds. Once they are evacuated, then simultaneous meltdowns at 3 nuclear sites is inevitable. Then a steam or hydrogen gas explosion may crack open the pressure vessel, leading to a catastrophic release of radiation, perhaps worse than Chernobyl. So it is a race against time. On one hand, we have the brave workers trying desperately to keep thecore and spent fuel pond covered with water. On the other hand, the reactors are deteriorating every day, with the possibility of cracks, pipe breaks, secondary earthquakes, which could easily tip the accident into the worst case scenario. At that point, when all the workers have to evacuate, lets hope that the utility took my advice to prepare the Chernobyl option i.e use the air force for bury the reactors in concrete and sand. However, I doubt that the utility has thought that far ahead.

via Another Setback at Reactor Creates Race Against Time | Dr. Kakus Universe | Big Think.

Football and Basketball

Whether you love football, basketball, or both, these apps will help you learn the latest scores, connect with other fans, get stats, and much more.

• College Basketball Live!. Not only can you get the latest information on college basketball with this app, you can also track scores on live games, connect with other fans, and even boo or cheer teams.
  
• College Football Live!. Get live play-by-play action, scores, and more for your favorite teams with this app. Just like with the basketball version, you can boo, cheer, and talk smack with other fans.
  
• Fumble U. Stay updated with the latest happenings surrounding your favorite college football team by using this app.
  
• I Love College Football 2008. Get rankings, standings, news, and much more with this app that also provides support for both the big and smaller conferences.
  
• iFanNCAAB. Get all the latest information on Men’s Division 1 basketball leading up to March Madness with this app that only costs $0.99.
  
• QB Rater. Enter your favorite quarterback’s ratings into this app, then as the game is played, tap the correct button each time a pass is made to have automatically updated season and career stats immediately.
  
• StatFix. Get daily stats for all NCAA basketball teams with this app.
  
• NCAA Basketball – InGameNow. Get scores, analysis, and fan interaction with this app that will keep you updated with all the NCAA basketball information.
  
• NCAA Football Scores. This free app provides you with all the NCAA football scores with just a simple tap.
  

Specific Teams and Conferences

Here’s a sampling of the many apps for specific college teams available. If you want to find out about a specific conference, those apps are available too.

• Go Longhorns. University of Texas fans will get the latest information, news, and scores on football, men’s and women’s basketball, and baseball with this app.
  
• UNC Hoops. Tar Heels fans will love this app that provides schedule information, game results, TV information, and news.
  
• Duke Hoops. Find game dates and times in your local time zone, TV information, news, results, and more with this app especially for Duke basketball fans.
  
• KU Hoops. Jayhawk fans can also get these same benefits to stay on top of the latest KU basketball information.
  
• iFanACC. Don’t let any of the basketball news and scores coming out of the ACC pass you by when you use this app.
  
• iFanKentucky. Get news, scores, and the schedule for the Kentucky Wildcats as well as updated top 25 national rankings.
  
• iFanLouisville. This app will keep Louisville Cardinals fans updated on the latest news and information about the basketball season.
  
• Big Ten Highlights. Get 3-minute video highlights from all the Big Ten basketball games with this free app.
  

News

You will never miss out on any college sports news with these apps.

• College Sports News. This app offers real-time college sports news to bring you the latest on most sports from football to lacrosse to rowing.
  
• USA Today. USA Today allows you to filter your news to receive the latest on college football and basketball or even your favorite conference.
  
• College BasketBall Live. Get the latest NCAA college basketball news from Yahoo! Sports, ESPN, and Fox Sports with this app.
  
• College Football Live. Just like the basketball version, get NCAA news from these same sources to stay on top of what’s happening in college football.
  

College and Pro Apps

These apps provide scores, stats, news, links, and much more for fans who love both college and professional sports.

• ScoreMobile iPhone Edition. While this app doesn’t focus only on college sports, it does offer scores, stats, previews, recaps, and more on pro sports and college football and basketball.
  
• Sportacular. Get scores, standings, stats, and news for both college and pro teams with this free app.
  
• InGameNow. Not only can you get live sports scores for both professional and college sports, but you can also interact with other fans.
  
• Hockey Links. Use this app to get all the hockey links in one place for both college and professional leagues.
  

Predictions and Friendly Wagers

If you live for your March Madness bracket or predicting the bowl games, these apps are for you. There are also apps to help you get the leading edge on your friendly wagers with your buddies.

• iOdds. This app provides current scores refreshed every 30 seconds for live games as well as automatic updates every five minutes to get the latest information on lines and score before, during, and after the game.
  
• iBracket – March Madness Live Score Bracket Tracker. Import your bracket from popular sports sites or create your bracket with this app, then get real-time scores to track your picks and even share with others.
  
• Pocket Bracket: March Madness. Create and manage your bracket with this app so you will be ready for March Madness the easy way.
  
• Bowl Picks ’08. Although it’s a little too late for this version, download the updated version next year to be ready to track your bowl picks with this easy-to-use app that helps you track your picks and monitor your success.
  
• Fantell. College football fans predict winners, then Fantell.com averages these predictions and averages them out to provide live predicted data, predicted spreads, results, and much more.
  

Show Your Spirit

See if your school has an app that plays school songs, supports your side of a rivalry, or just makes strange sounds to help you support your team.

• Ball State University Chirper. This app lets Ball State fans “chirp” at the opponents with their iPhone.
  
• Boomer. Oklahoma Sooners will love this app that plays Boomer Sooner, Oklahoma, and the OU chant.
  
• Clemson Tigers. Listen to Tiger Rag with this app. It also includes the 2008 football schedule. Hopefully they will update with new information for 2009.
  
• GigEm. Texas Aggies can use this app to play War Hymn, Noble Men of Kyle, and Spirit of Aggieland. Future releases will have features such as background options from personal images and team schedules and rosters.
  
• HookEm. Not to be left out of the Texas A&M/University of Texas rivalry, UT also has an app to show their loyalty that can play the Texas Fight song, The Yellow Rose of Texas, The Eyes of Texas, and the Texas Chant.
  
• iRivalz-BYU. Here are two apps to show your support during the big game. BYU and Utah fans can register a vote for their team by downloading the appropriate app, then tap the school logo to hear your school’s fight song. If your team exceeds 100,000 votes, iRivalz will donate to your school’s athletic scholarship fund. Choose this app for BYU.
  
• iRivalz-Utah. Here’s the companion app. Choose this app for Utah.
  
• Go Pokes. Oklahoma State University fans can show their spirit and play Ride ‘em Cowboys, The Waving Song, the OSU chant, and the OSU alma mater with this app.
  

Quizzes

Test your knowledge of college sports with these trivia apps.

• College Football 101- Quizner’s Sports Trivia. Find out how much you know about college football trivia with this quiz. For more fun, compete against friends or play together to find the answers.
  
• College Basketball 101 – Quizner’s Trivia. If you know more about college basketball than football, then give this freshman version of the quiz a try.
  
• College Basketball 201 – Quizner’s Trivia. After you have mastered Basketball 101, move up to the more difficult trivia in this quiz that’s rated a sophomore level.
  
• Absolutely Trivial – Football. This quiz will test your knowledge on college football as well as pro football with trivia ranging from bowl games to facts about stadiums to rules and regulations.
  
• Absolutely Trivial – Basketball. Test your basketball knowledge with this app that covers college and professional basketball facts.
  
• Buckeye Classics DVD Trivia Game. If you think you know all there is about Ohio State football, get this free app and test your knowledge.
  

Miscellaneous

These apps offer everything from wallpapers to help finding a radio station that airs your team’s games.

• iTeams.mobi. Create your own iPhone app at this website that will allow you to follow your favorite college sports team and even share with other fans.
  
• College Football Logos. Get your favorite team logos for your iPhone here. For $1.99 you can download four wallpapers.
  
• DaysTo Game. This straightforward app helps you count down the days until the big game.
  
• Air Ball!. Use these basketball sounds to enhance your game-watching experience.
  
• Local Radio Finder. If you like to listen to the college games on the radio and are on the road, use this app to find local radio stations. You will never miss a game on the air again.
  
• Tailgate Games. If you are too busy consuming your tailgate drinks and eats to actually participate in the tailgate games going on around you, use this app to play the same fun tailgate games on your iPhone.
  

from Online College Sports

]]> http://www.tracyingram.com/march-madness-top-50-college-sports-apps-2/feed/ 0 http://www.tracyingram.com/patent-office-struggles-to-catch-up-with-technology/ http://www.tracyingram.com/patent-office-struggles-to-catch-up-with-technology/#comments Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:33:15 +0000 admin http://www.tracyingram.com/?p=151 WASHINGTON — President Obama, who emphasizes American innovation, says modernizing the federal Patent and Trademark Office is crucial to “winning the future.” So at a time when a quarter of patent applications come from California, and many of those from Silicon Valley, the patent office is opening its first satellite office — in Detroit.Add to Portfolio International Business Machines CorporationGo to your Portfolio »That is only one of the signs that have many critics saying that the office has its head firmly in the 20th century, if not the 19th.Only in the last three years has the office begun to accept a majority of its applications in digital form. Mr. Obama astonished a group of technology executives last year when he described how the office has to print some applications filed by computer and scan them into another, incompatible computer system.“There is no company I know of that would have permitted its information technology to get into the state we’re in,” David J. Kappos, who 18 months ago became director of the Patent and Trademark Office and undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property, said in a recent interview. “If it had, the C.E.O. would have been fired, the board would have been thrown out, and you would have had shareholder lawsuits.”Once patent applications are in the system, they sit — for years. The patent office’s pipeline is so clogged it takes two years for an inventor to get an initial ruling, and an additional year or more before a patent is finally issued.The delays and inefficiencies are more than a nuisance for inventors. Patentable ideas are the basis for many start-up companies and small businesses. Venture capitalists often require start-ups to have a patent before offering financing. That means that patent delays cost jobs, slow the economy and threaten the ability of American companies to compete with foreign businesses.Much of the patent office’s decline has occurred in the last 13 years, as the Internet age created a surge in applications. In 1997, 2.25 patents were pending for every one issued. By 2008, that rate had nearly tripled, to 6.6 patents pending for every one issued. The figure fell below six last year.Though the office’s ranks of patent examiners and its budget have increased by about 25 percent in the last five years, that has not been enough to keep up with a flood of applications — which grew to more than 2,000 a day last year, for a total of 509,000, from 950 a day in 1997.The office, like a few other corners of the government, has long paid its way, thanks to application and maintenance fees. That income — $2.1 billion last year — has made it an inviting target for Congress, which over the last 20 years has diverted a total of $800 million to other uses, rather than letting the office invest the money in its operations.Applications have also become far more complex, said Douglas K. Norman, president of the Intellectual Property Owners Association, a trade group mainly of large technology and manufacturing companies.“When I was a young patent lawyer, a patent application would be 20 to 25 pages and have 10 to 15 claims,” Mr. Norman said. A claim is the part of the patent that defines what is protected. “Now they run hundreds of pages, with hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of claims.”Lost in the scrutiny of the office’s logjam, however, was the fact that the number of patents issued reached a record last year — more than 209,000, or 29 percent more than the average of 162,000 a year over the previous four years. Rejections also hit a high of 258,000 — not a measure of quality, Mr. Kappos said, but a sign of greater efficiency.Between the backlog of 700,000 patents awaiting their first action by an examiner and the 500,000 patents that are in process, a total of 1.2 million applications are pending.

via Patent Office Struggles to Catch Up With Technology – NYTimes.com.

Google has just soft-launched its latest browser experiment, the Google Body Browser, which is basically Google Earth for the human body.

Think of it as a three-dimensional, multi-layered browser version of those Visible Man/Woman model kits. Or a virtualized version of Slim Goodbody, if you will.

Google (Google) showed off the app at the WebGL Camp. WebGL is a cross-platform low-level 3D graphics API that is designed to bring plugin-free 3D to the web. It uses the HTML5 Canvas element and does not require Flash, Java or other graphical plugins to run.

If you visit bodybrowser.googlelabs.com in a supported web browser, you’ll get a three-dimensional layered model of the human anatomy that you can zoom in on, rotate and search.

from:http://mashable.com/2010/12/16/google-body-browser/

WordPress.com (http://www.wordpress.com)

• LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com)
• Xanga (http://www.xanga.com/)
• Windows Live Spaces (http://spaces.msn.com)
• Performancing (http://www.performancing.com)
• Jeeran (http://www.jeeran.com)
• Tumblr (http://www.tumblr.com/)
• MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/)
• b2Evolution (http://b2evolution.net)
• Splinder (http://www.splinder.com/)

In addition to the hosted services mentioned above, ScribeFire also supports custom blogging platforms which are usually blogging software hosted on your own server.

The currently supported blogging platforms are:

• WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org/)
• Movable Type (http://www.movabletype.org/)
• Drupal (http://www.drupal.org)
• Textpattern (http://www.textpattern.com/)
• Roller (http://www.rollerweblogger.org)
• Blogger (http://www.blogger.com)
• MetaWeblog API (Any blogging software that implements this API)

As mentioned above, any blogging software or blogging platform that implements the MetaWeblog API is implicitly supported by ScribeFire. From: http://www.scribefire.com/help/supported-services/

Specifically, MarketingSherpa found that short URLs get clicked on twice as often as long URLs (given that the position rank is equal). As you can see in the heatmaps below, experiment participants spent more time viewing the long URL, but less time viewing the entire listing. You could conclude from this that the long URL distracts the searcher from viewing the listing’s title and description. Not a great outcome.

Caption: MarketingSherpa eyetracking heatmaps showing impact of long URL length on listing viewing. Used with permission.

Worse yet, long URLs appear to act as a deterrent to clicking, drawing attention away from its listing and instead directing it to the listing below it, which then gets clicked 2.5x more frequently. It’s open for debate, of course, as to what is a “short” URL or a “long” URL. But it’s the first data I’ve ever seen attempt to quantify the affinity searchers have for the URL component of natural search listings.

For us, these MarketingSherpa findings confirm that success at SEO still requires more than just Google Sitemaps, and that an unoptimized URL is money left on the table. Just because algorithms have evolved to handle dynamic URLs with multiple parameters, avoid session-based spider traps, and even fill out forms on occasion, we shouldn’t be lulled into a false sense of security that our URLs are “good enough” and don’t need work. You should be on an unending mission to find and execute on opportunities to test and optimize URLs for both rankings and clickthrough.

So even though URLs you’d never have dreamed of getting indexed a few years ago are now regularly making it into the index, this doesn’t mean that suboptimal URLs are going to rank well or convert searchers into clickers. Here at Netconcepts, we’ve conducted countless tests using our GravityStream platform, proving to ourselves and to our clients that optimized URLs consistently outperform unoptimized URLs. Given that, here are some general best practices for URLs that we believe hold true:

• The fewer the parameters in your dynamic URL, the better. One or two parameters is much better than seven or eight. Avoid superfluous/nonessential parameters like tracking codes.
• A static looking URL (containing no ampersands, equals signs, or question marks) is more search optimal than a dynamic one.
• Having keywords in the URL is more optimal than no keywords.
• A keyword in the filename portion of the URL is more beneficial than in a directory/subdirectory name.
• Hyphens are the preferred word separator, although underscores are gaining acceptance over times past . So if you have multiple-word keyword phrases in your URLs, I’d recommend using dashes to separate them.
• Stuffing too many keywords in the URL looks spammy. Three, four, or five words in a URL looks perfectly normal. A little longer and it starts to look worse to Google, according to Matt Cutts.
• The domain name is not a good place for multiple hyphens, as it can make your URL look spammy. Although that said, sometimes a domain name should have a hyphen, as the domain faux pas ‘arsecommerce.com’ demonstrates (you may not get this joke if you don’t recognize Queen’s English!).

Given the above, it’s absolutely worthwhile to rewrite your dynamic URLs to make them appear static and to include keyword phrases with hyphens separating the words (done within reason). So a targeted search term of “blue widgets” would be represented as “blue-widgets” in the URL. Bare spaces cannot be used in URLs, so some “white space” character needs to be used—either the + (plus sign) or the character encoding for a space %20. I’m not a fan of using the character-encoded version, as it’s not quite as pretty: “blue%20widgets”.

The above best practices are generally accepted. It gets a lot more contentious when talking about stability/permanence of your URLs. The general school of thought is that stable is better. In other words, decide on an optimal URL for a page and stick with it for the long haul. We have a different view: URLs can be as fluid as a title tag.

In our view, URLs can be experimented with and optimized iteratively over time, just like any other on-page factor. Why would you “set it and forget it” when it comes to your URLs when you don’t do that with your titles, H1 headlines, page copy, and internal linking structure? For example, all the following hypothetical URLs follow best practices—with the exception of the first URL, of course, which is actually the real URL; now which one will perform the best?

• http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Navigation? storeId=10051&N=10000003+90401+525285&langId=-1&catalogId=10053&Ntk= AllProps&cm_sp=Navigation-_-GlobalHeader-_-TopNav-_-Appliances-_-Dehumidifiers
• http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/stores/50364/100053.html
• http://www.homedepot.com/Appliances/Dehumidifiers/
• http://www.homedepot.com/Appliances/Dehumidifiers.html
• http://www.homedepot.com/Appliances-Dehumidifiers.html
• http://www.homedepot.com/Dehumidifiers-Appliances.html
• http://appliances.homedepot.com/Dehumidifiers.html

The only way to know for sure is to test.

If your CMS or ecommerce platform supports having URLs that are malleable, then why not exploit that capability and embark on a regimen of testing and continuous improvement? WordPress supports this fairly well by automatically 301 redirecting requests for old permalink URLs, once the “post slug” for that post has been changed in the admin. Unfortunately, most ecommerce platforms do not support such a capability. When sites are stymied by their platform, the only options are to replace your CMS with one that supports malleable URLs, customize the CMS to support it (assuming you have access to the source code), or put a layer on top of your CMS by using an SEO proxy technology like GravityStream.

Regardless of how you accomplish continuous URL optimization, the MarketingSherpa study shows complacency when it comes to iterative testing and improvement of your URLs (or any other on-page factor, for that matter) results in more traffic going to your competitor’s listings. This is fatal to your natural search program.