The new Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is a super upgrade, and I highly recommend it. You can read about all the wonderful features here. The main interest for marketers will be Geo Location or Location Aware browsing. As Mozilla describes it : “Websites that use location-aware browsing will ask where you are in order to bring you more relevant information, or to save you time while searching”. You can read all the details here or see the demo here. Info on how to implement it on your site is here.

Another cool feature will be what is the fact Firefox 3.5 is the first browser to support open video and audio formats. This means web pages can be developed to display media without requiring a plug-in or a proprietary software download.

Finally, we also wanted to point out an issue with the upgrade to Mozilla 3.5 we encountered. You will need to make sure to upgrade your Google Toolbar. You have no choice, otherwise it will not work. You can download the latest Google Toolbar here. Make sure you are using Version 5.0.20090324W

A couple of weeks ago we spoke about Google Local. We hope you took note and implemented this as part of you marketing strategy. This past week Google gave you another good reason to make sure  your business is listed they announced the release of Google Maps “What’s Here”.

How does it work? When you go to Google Maps, you now have a new option when you right click you have the option “Whats here”:

As Google describes it:

This feature takes into account the zoom level you’re looking at, and gives you the most appropriate geographical entity at that point. For example, if you’re zoomed in closely on Manhattan, you can get the full address of a point by clicking on “What’s here?”. Additionally, by combining this with the “At this address” feature that you may have seen in the left-hand panel, you can also see a list of the businesses located at that place.

I have added the emphasis in bold to make sure its clear. When someone is in the neighborhood, and looking for a flower shop, they can click “Whats here”. Bedsides getting photos and user generated maps, the customer will get places around that location. Not only that but the user will have the opportunity to “Explore this area” or search for something local around them (in this case flower shops). Now more than ever it is important to make sure you are listed with Google Local. Don’t let you competition steal way all your customers because you’re not in the game.

We have finally released the May report for the “Best Free Web Analytics“. In short, we can confirm (for the most part) Google Analytics is the best freely available web analytics. The downside of the Google solution, such as lack of real-time stats, is compensated for by the richness of features the other companies lacked in their free offering. We also discovered some some of the companies we choose to rate were in an unfair competitors. In following months, we have decide to refocus on the following companies only:

BLVD Status
Clicky
Google Analytics
Quantcast
StatCounter
W3Counter

We will be open to other companies joining, but we now have a better baseline of what can be considered worthy of comparison.

WordPress yesterday released  WordPress 2.8 and I love it! The upgrade process was easy, and no errors (unlike the last time). I used to have fears with WordPress upgrades, but it really isn’t something to fear. WordPress has this handy guide you can follow and we also have our super handy (paranoid edition) below. Please note this works on the assumption, you are moving to just previous version, not jumping from a really old version to the latest release.  So here it is Mark8t’s WordPress Upgrade tips for the paranoid:

First, if you don’t have it get the handy Maintenance Mode Plug-in. Activate it after customizing it with your own message. Then go into your PHPAdmin (or MYSQL Admin), and download a backup of your whole database via the export commmand. You can use the DBManager Plug-in, but I like to get it straight from the source. This is  the curcial step, because if you lose your database, you lose all your work.

When I export, I choose the SQL format in GZIP format. it’s the qucikest way to restore your blog if you need to. Next copy all the files on your host from your WordPress site via FTP to your hard-drive. Why? In case everything goes wrong you can easily revert back to 2.7.1 or whatever version you have. The next step is then to disable all active plug-ins except for Maintenance Mode Plug-In. Now you can select “WordPress 2.8 is available! Please update now.” at the top of the screen. You then need to click Upgrade automatically. Wait until the upgrade is fully complete.Go get a soda from the fridge an relax until you see the below:

Click to go back to the dashboard. You will need to log back in. Got to the dashboard again. Make sure everything looks okay. Head to the Plug-Ins and activate them quickly by selecting “Recently Active ” . Use the bulk action to reactivate. Surf to your site, log in, log out, search, etc….Everything should work. If something does not work, it will likely be a conflict with a plug-in. To troubleshoot this, disable all plug-ins and re-enable one at a time. Test the site after each activation to pinpoint the issue. You can then identity the issue of the plug-gin and possibly address the issue with the plug-in creator. If all else fails, upload your backup files and import the old database. Have fun!

***Update***
Users with free hosts with banner ads (such as GoDaddy free hosting option), might face an issue. Regular paid hosting has not been an issue on 12 upgrades we have done so far, including on GoDaddy.

Mark8t has finally upgraded the WordPress default search on this blog. We had been suffering from bad search with this theme. If you think about it, though, that’s pretty funny for a blog about Search Engine Optimization and Marketing. Truthfully, though, we were focused on content more than anything. And besides, it is well known that WordPress Search isn’t that great on any blog. Just some of the issue include: searches are listed by date and not be relevance, there are no images or native thumbnail support, there is no ability for  suggested searches or spell check and there is a limit of 10 results per page. So how did we fix it? Use of a couple of plug-ins, and some helpful Bloggers. Being that this blog is about learning too, we thought we would share these resources with our users. So if you WordPress search sucks, we recommend highly the following posts:  David’s post on Improving WordPress Search and Joost’s post Make WordPress’ search function suck Less. Don’t forget to get his Search Suggest Plug-in. You should also consider these Plug-Ins: Kenny Katzgrau’s WpSearch,  Scott Yang’s  Search Excerpt WordPress Plug-in and for excerpts with thumbnails, look to Radu Capan’s Plugin Thumbnail for Excerpts.We hope the above list of resources saves you much time in upgrading your WordPress default search. It took a lot of work/reading to finally get our search to a respectable level. But don’t fear, the above articles will make it a lot easier/quicker for you. Trust us, finding the help was harder then implementing it. Good luck!