Inside the mind of Seonyx

Identity theft - enemy number one!

I do not own an iPad or (anything else made by Apple). This is not because I do not like the products but because there always seem to be much cheaper alternatives.

It came as a bit of a surprise then when a friend mentioned she loved everything about hers, except that she could not log out of Facebook. Little did I realise that the iPad has the same app-mentality that persists on phones, that you set it up to begin with and then from which point, everytime you turn on the device your settings are still there.

My HTC Adroid works like that. It drives me nuts because in my old school Unix ‘sysadmin’ past, I got used to always logging out of sessions and never saving passwords.

I have screen/sim card/ and credential storage password on my phone so someone will have a hard time getting into it. But imagine your device is stolen and you have set any security at all.

The thieves will have access to your Facebook account, Gmail, Hotmail or whichever email service you use. Perhaps they can use this to reset the password on your online bank account or worse the pin for your cashcard!

You have been warned! While we are on the subject of security, offline backups are all the rage at the moment. Google has just released it’s long awaited ‘Google Drive’ which encompasses Google Docs. Drop box has announced this week a new feature enabling you to give an address for any part of your space.

Also useful to know is that another online backup system SpiderOak actually encypts your documents making them impossible for anyone else to read them without your password. Even the company themselves can not access your data, even if mandated by a court. Even more security surrounds your password which cannot be reset via a password recovery system so if your forget it your goosed!!

I read with dismay today that Google’s Blogger website is redirecting its blogs to domain names that represent the country of origin of the blogger.

I went to the Blogger website because I wanted to understand why Google felt the need to divide blogs into countries. I didn’t find the answer. My guess is that while the internet has an attractor which is to unite mankind, to dissolve petty sovereignty, to breakdown barriers to trade and make the world a fairer more equitable place to live for everybody regardless of how much money they had, Google instead are siding with the rich one percent who want to enforce local laws to persecute, victimise, stigmatise and quash the will of the common man.

The funny thing about this is that Google is an American company. Americans invented the Domain name system. Being that they considered America as the centre of the universe, the first domain names they though of were .Com which meant a company (an American company) .org (an American organisation) etc then as an after-thought they added foreign countries, so a company in England was .co.uk etc.

The upshot of this is that while on the face of it the domain name system is linked to geography, the implementation the geographical web has been a disaster since day one. Millions of people in countries all over the world have email accounts with gmail.com. Is the next step to redirect them to their country of registration?  I’m unlucky enough to be an English speaking user of Google products such as Adsense, Analytics, Adwords etc  living in Spain. You would not believe how often Google slips back and forth between English and Spanish as pages get fooled by its own Domain Geo positioning software. I hate to think what will happen if Google continues down the path of forcing people down the sovereignty path.

Having said that, I do know. I know that the market won’t take it. The Internet is the greatest levelling power known to man and if Google doesn’t behave the way the citizens of the world want it to behave they will move their non-paying clicking fingers elsewhere.

Posted by Stephen Gould, Seonyx CEO and Technical Director

I wasn’t exactly in short trousers but it was a while ago now when I first came across Technorati. This was back when the web design marketplace was full of talk of Web2.0 and everyone was banging on about it in the blogsphere.

Technorati was a pioneer in that it was taking on Google at timeliness. While Google was very good at archiving vast amounts of data and indexing it for quick retrieval, it was pretty crap at uncovering new stuff. The Technorati agenda was to monitor the blog-sphere and to deliver information as it happened. For a while it was unquestionably the leader in timely information and if you wanted to know what people were talking about, Technorati was the place to look. Then along came Twitter, Google got it’s act together monitoring sites the change frequently and so Technorati lost its competitive edge. Anyway it still works as a good place to list and disseminate the information in your blog. To join, sign up and then make a claim for your blog. When you do, you’ll have to post a code in your blog to prove you are the author:

TWQ7R499SYJX

After that appears in you blogs RSS feed, Technorati will accept you are the author and start returning your blog posts in its search results. A bit long winded in this day and age perhaps, but it does keep the riff-raff out which means a quick search on Technorati does bring forth inforamtion that has a certain depth and value.

Posted by Tarquin Sykes-Roebuck Seonyx general Manager

Mojoportal is the CMS of choice of Seonyx

Seonyx have been building websites for many years using our own in-house content management system. Today though, this is becoming increasingly expensive to support, and since there are so many free 3rd party content management systems  with so many additional features that we decided to test all of them and then choose the best one to take over from our own ageing system.

We reviewed the marketplace and whittled down the competing CMS software to a short list of six, then built websites using each one, because we figured we really needed to get our hands dirty to know which one was going to work best for us.

And the winner is (roll on the drums…..) Mojoportal.

Why Mojoportal? Well firstly ease of use. Unlike some more popular CMS offerings, Mojoportal installed first time with no error messages. It is intuitive to use and the bare-bones of the first website we built with it was up in an afternoon.

Also very important was that  Mojoportal appears to have  been constructed with a great deal of common sense.  There is no evidence of the bad design decisions that plague the competition (like ‘Gee we wrote it in VB.net but wait that was wrong so we’ll rewrite the whole thing in C#’ or ‘Shucks you know nobody really likes our XSLT breadcrumbs so we’ll change them to Razor syntax’)

We also found that Mojoportal was the easiest CMS to skin.  Skinning is such a fundamental issue for a CMS that it is amazing how wrong some systems get this. We’re working right away on converting a bunch of templates that we use most frequently to work under Mojoportal.

The final thing I’ll mention here as a big plus that really swung it for Mojoportal is that the API documentation has been written by a human being in plain English.

Mojoportal ticks all our boxes and so far we have found few drawbacks so we look forward to incorporating it into many future web design projects.

Melissa Russell Principal Analyst

Get windows out of the equation

2012 may or may not be the end of the world, as propounded by countless new age pundits jumping on the end of the Mayan caledar bandwagon. However it should see one signifcant event – the end of Windows XP as the world’s most widely used operating system. Market share dipped below 50% during 2011 and the adoption of Windows 7 has been gradually growing. The latter should overtake the former in the first or second quarter of 2012.

There is no hope of Windows XP making a sudden recovery. In 2014  support Microsoft officially ends support of the ageing operating system, so advisories, bug-fixes or crucially security updates will all come to an end. This is bad for Windows XP users and there are a lot of them.

The desktop itself is in decline. Though the trend is slight, mobile devices are increase and desktop usage decreasing. It seems logical to us that much of the migration will be with personal rather than business users. Businesses need document creation and data input all which will remain on the desktop until voice recognition gets 99% accurate.

What this further suggests is that the decision to make the latest version of windows more like a touch phone is of no interest to such business users. With free credible alternative Linux distributions to choose from, this is an ideal time for corporations to break free of the commercial tyranny of windows and finally get in to open source solutions.

Posted by Seonyx planning and metrics officer Sophie Greenhalgh

They don't have to be black and white!

Love them or hate them, QR codes are are boon to marketers because they provide the equivalent of a one click hyperlink on the printed page. All the rage in Japan, their country of origin, these strange little boxes are now being seen in advertising campaigns all over the world and are surely destined to become mainstream very soon.

One thing not being seen quite so much yet are stylised QR designs. There are now quite a number of online QR code generator websites e.g. http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ but none that I’ve seen do anything other than create the basic black and white blocky design, not much unlike a supermarket barcode.

QR code artwork

Infact as you can see from the one I’ve made here, there is quite a lot that can be done to jazz them up.

Firstly you can use any colour scheme you like. Even gradients can be used if you are careful to keep the data relatively dark to the light back ground.  A certain amount of license is available to round the corners of the boxes.

The data itself can be erased to an extent that depends on the amount of redundancy the code was created with. The codes can be created with up to 30% error correction, which means 30% of the code is there purely to enable any missing information to be  recreated from a calculation.  So you can delete an area, add a logo or design and the code will still scan properly.

In this example I deleted the data an area in the middle and inserted the name of my company in text.

While it is possible to calculate which parts of the QR code can be replaced, the best thing is to experiment. Make some changes to the original code, then point your scan app at it and see if it still works.

Once you are happy with the design you can use it on business cards, flyers, T-shirts or what ever printed media takes you fancy, and hopefully you new eye catching design will encourage more click-throughs!

Posted by Stephen Gould, Seonyx CEO and Technical Director.

Google+1 Button fails W3C xhtml validation - solved!

The tag for Google’s new Plusone button is incredibly short (<g:plusone size=’small’>) but it fails xHTML validation.

Seonyx have a zero error policy for HTML validation so we had to solution this one really quickly. Fortunately it’s a problem we’ve overcome many times before. The easiest way around this is to write the tag to the document in javascript, then mask the javascript with a CDATA tag…

<script type="text/javascript">
/*<![CDATA[*/
document.write("<g:plusone size='small'></g:plusone>");
/*]]>*/</script>

This validates at validator.w3.org with the document type we use most often here:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN"Â
"http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
xmlns:fb="http://developers.facebook.com/schema/" version="XHTML+RDFa 1.0" xml:lang="en">

(The rdfa is useful for validating Facebook markup)

Posted by Sophie Greenhalgh, Seonyx Web designer

I’m one of nature’s sceptics. I’m usually very pessimistic when something new comes along, especially if there is a lot of marketing with it. Google Buzz was one I never warmed to. Google+ is different.

Most of the opinions I’ve seen in the media about Google+ have been fairly negative so far. The reason is that nobody can imagine why the man in the street would go to the bother of re-inviting everyone when everyone is already on Facebook.

I think this is a shallow view. Inviting people isn’t a problem – tools will mature for automating that.

The reason I think Google+ will become very popular is the benefit it has for SEO. Google’s FAQ on the PlusOne button that simulates the Facebook ‘like’ button for the Google+ community will affect search results.

Seonyx have already started to add +1 buttons to all our client sites and I expect most SEO companies will be doing the same and building communities to to and bolster rankings.

This time next year, Google+ will be as big as Facebook.

Posted by Melissa Russell

Rest in peace plain old websites.

A report published in America this week would have you think so. Apparently more than half of the measured online activity of those surveyed took place on mobile devices rather than conventional desktop devices.

Facebook’s press release on the 5th July 2011 that it is going to provide video chat over Skype contained the news that the social networking giant now has 750 million users. Previously Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asserted in a T.E.D talk that 50% Facebook users log into facebook every day.

Looking at these facts one could be given for thinking that future online consumers will largely access their media via phone apps and the media they find will be largely linked to Facebook. On the face of it them one could make the conclusion that the chances of a stand-alone website for a a small organisation ever being found by the palm-commandoes of the future are very slim.

We at Seonyx totally refute that argument. According to Alexa Google’s visit statistics have almost doubled over the last 18 months. Searches from mobile devices are increasing steadily as smart phone ownership increases. So there is no indication that people are using Facebook as ther center of their online experience to exclusion of other sites.

There is also another trend which is defficult to measure but is is the use of Facebook as an formal business promotion tool. Facebook’s preferred method is to set up a company page and to keep private accounts for individuals non-commercial. Anyone who uses Facebook knows that the lines are blurred on this and comoanies regularly mix there personal and business pages on Facebook, sharing one from the other. I recently worked on a project for a company in Spain who belonged to a trade association. As well as providing an online presence in the form of a web site I was specifically asked to set up the company on Facebook because everyone else in the trade association was on there. But because Facebook has limitations about what can be put on there (without going through the rigmarole of making a fully fledged Facebook) the cheapest thing for most companies is to have a standalone website and to think of Facebook as a promotional tool from it.

So despite the proliferation of phone apps and social media, I don’t see the end of the web anytime soon.

Posted by Seonyx planning and metrics officer Sophie Greenhalgh