The Progress Bar

Last night I went to the Boston Web Innovators Group.

WebInno is continuing to emerge as a key event in Boston for web and mobile innovators to connect with other entrepreneurs, visionaries, and creative thinkers in the space.

Three demos, then beerworking. Good format, although maybe a few more demos next time. After the PaidContent mixer a few weeks ago (serious media, finance and power brokers in the room), I’m starting to feel like the Boston scene is heating up again.

They made the usual mistakes new events do. Get people to raise hands to self-identify. Who’s new, a startup, a VC, media, etc. How about tags that identify what you’re looking for?

Speaking of tags, what’s the official even tag?

It was great to see all the people and feel the energy in the room. Where have these people been hiding the past few years?

I used to host salons in the early 90′s, a few technologists and geeks, some designers, a money guy and maybe a philosopher, add lots of red wine and you had an engaging afternoon.

Adam Green from Grazr presented, I’ve been using their widget for months, always cool to see the people behind the services.

City Squares is doing Citysearch right. Ben and I will be getting together soon.

I mentioned to Ben that Myspace is charging companies $30k for a page. Nobody seems to know this fact. Today I read that Yahoo is doing something similar.

I have a few clients that could benefit from the Startup Business School. Richard Banfield gave me a demo, impressive first impression. Great to be able to focus on knowledge transfer and leave the business plan writing to the client, as I’m a firm believer that you shouldn’t hire out biz plan writing, at least the first draft.

FineTune reminded me of Pandora / Last.fm with the Hype Machine thrown in for good measure.

OfferTrax looked good and I enjoyed talking to the founders, My concern for them is that the product recommendation market is so tight, everyone has a Myspace widget for it and the differentiators are not clear to me. Who’s really going to subscribe to a feed of what their friends buy? Interesting idea but I don’t see it really taking off. f they have experts on board, thats another thing but then again how do I know to trust the experts (think sketchy CNET video reviews of products the reviewer hasn’t seen until 5 minutes before the shoot.)

More from Ronin Marketeer and check Technorati for the tag webinno.

I hate how designers (are often forced to) create tiny form fields on we pages. I end up writing blog comments in BBedit, Word or Apple Mail and then pasting into the form field, an annoying extra step.

FormTextResizer is a bookmarklet that allows you to resize any textarea or text input on any webpage. This way, you won’t be confined to a teensy little comment box or e-mail field. Just activate the bookmarklet, then click-drag on the textarea or text field that you want to resize.

This venn diagram looks like a mix of a McKinsey consultant telling Hugh Macleod what to draw on a cocktail napkin.

I was perusing Business 2.0 and came across an article about LinkedIn, the popular business networking site. Behold, a quote from my neighbor and new acquaintance Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. When it comes to Linked In, Jan is the man, having spent quite a bit of time behind the scenes there.

I’m cataloging the installation of a new WordPress blog I’m launching. I figure some of this may be of interest, there are lots of tutorials out there and I’ll try to cull the best of the best, because searching Google for 3 hours debugging plug-ins is not my idea of a good time.
Download latest version of WordPress.
Mark on WordPress has a good site, including patches for previous version so you don’t have to do full reinstall and risk overwriting all your customizations.
Start install. the WordPress documentation is fine, read it.
Have your database username and password handy.
Image uploading is kind of broken. Fix it here.
Upload outside of WP directory
Edit functions-post.php in wp-includes
// Added to upload outside of WP
// http://wordpress.org/support/topic/68702?replies=5
$siteurl = get_settings(‘home’);
$path = get_settings(‘upload_path’);
$dir = trailingslashit($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']) . $path;
$url = trailingslashit($siteurl) . $path;
Make sure to put /images in default upload directory in Options:miscellaneous.
Keep “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders� unchecked unless you are super-organized.
Good Plug-ins to start with:
I will keep updating this as new plug-ins are introduced or I find out about improved/better versions of ones I already use.
Activate the following included plugins:
Spam Filtering via Akismet, which is built into WordPress by default. Turn it on in the Plugins menu. Why? Because 93% of all blog comments are spam.
Live Coment Preview, because it’s fun to see your comment appear on the page without reloading.
Activate Database Backup unless you feel lucky.
Learn about business blog plug-ins at Business Blog Hive.
Download and Install:
Widgets for sidebar.
Intouch contact form
Google Analytics. You’ll need your Analytics account number or sign up.
Related Posts. List a few posts similar to the post people are looking at.
WP-Websnapr. Show thumbnails of the sites you link to. Super helpful. Based on Websnapr, there are new versions coming out often. Check the Websnapr site.
Try XSDSnapper version, which is a plug-in for WordPress.
Hint: Replace “home� with “siteurl�.
//$Snapr_pluginpath = get_settings(‘home’).“/wp-content/plugins/XSD_Snapr/â€?;
$Snapr_pluginpath = get_settings(‘siteurl’).“/wp-content/plugins/XSD_Snapr/â€?;
Search Hilite. The Search Hilite Plugin highlites Search-Words, from external Searches over Yahoo,Google, Lycos and Baidu, as well as WordPress internal Searches, on the Search Results-Pages.
Optimal Title. Optimal Title is a WordPress plugin that mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ‘separator’ to after the title rather than before. This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first.
Home Page Redirect. This plugin allows users to have more control over the uri in which their users access their blog. By doing so, you’re giving search engines and users a consistent link for accessing your content.
Many of these plugins have settings in the Options page.
Thinking about using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS)?
Filosofo Home-Page Control creates
Technorati Link Count.
Want to pick up some extra cash?
Read Perry Marshall to get started with Google Adwords. Then sign up for Adsense.
AdSense-Deluxe is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.
I wrote about Adisem over at my other blog. If you have even a passing interest in optimizing yourAdWords spend, you should read the post.
Google Sitemap generator for WordPress.
Pages: single.php is used to display single posts.
Underscore Permalinks. Converts spaces to underlines.

The Complete Post-Install Checklist

Over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, a story about a woman who sold advertising space on the cover of her laptop. In exchange for $150 toward the purchase of a new machine, she offered local companies one square inch of advertising space on the back of her MacBook. Pretty cool idea, although I prefer stickers.

I wrote about Adisem over at my other blog. If you have even a passing interest in optimizing yourAdWords spend, you should read the post.

Some videoconferencing applications are better designed than others. This one take up 50 MB to store a handfull of saved messages. Thankfully, they have designed a compression optimizer which at the click of a button reduces the overall datastore size to less than 1 megabyte. Talk about broken, why not fix the source of the problem once and for all instead of providing a fix for each version? <shakes head>.

I noticed that Yahoo has started offering personalized anti-phishing seals. The seals are linked to each computer, not Yahoo! IDs. Looks like they started offering the service back in September.

How does a sign-in seal protect me?

A sign-in seal is a secret between the computer you set it up on and Yahoo!. So when you sign in to Yahoo! from this computer, your sign-in seal tells you that you’re seeing a genuine Yahoo! site, not a phishing site.

Why do I have to set up a seal on each computer I use?

Your sign-in seal is associated with your computer, not your ID. It is a convenient way to instantly recognize a genuine Yahoo! sign-in page and be sure that you’re not on a page created by fraudsters attempting to steal your Yahoo! ID and password. Because we associate your sign-in seal with your computer, after you create a seal, there are no additional steps to signing in. Even if a phisher knows or guesses your ID or other personal information, they cannot use it to discover your sign-in seal. Note: Yahoo! will never ask for your Yahoo! ID or password in order to set up or display your sign-in seal.

I was going to show what the final seal looks like but that would be counter-productive to say the least.

An interesting presentation at TED about life extension.