WordPress Based Membership Site

Since Brian’s Teaching Sells lots of people have been approaching me asking how they can make their blog into a membership site.

In the past I have had a straightforward solution, a combination of Amember and WordPress can work ok, and it is the basis for existing membership sites that I have built such as Performancing Hive, and so on.

Recently though I heard about a new WordPress plugin that aims to build out a WordPress blog as a member site directly.

Appropriately it is called “Your Member WordPress Membership Plugin“.

This I had to investigate!

Features include:

Obviously if you add this to an existing blog or site then you need to make sure a significant portion of it stays free to keep that search engine juice!

Admin Tour_demo

A word of warning to anyone who thinks of using this, take a look at what you see when you log in to their own site:

Cambridge New Media Services 203A Dashboard 2014 WordPress

Yup, the bog standard WordPress dashboard. Do customise the user experience otherwise you will lose the trust of your customer. This could set in some serious buyers remorse.

That aside, things look well with this plugin and at only $50 I will be trying it out for myself.

Testing Cuil

Cuil
The search world is buzzing with the new search kid on the block, Cuil. Self-declared “World’s Biggest Search Engine”

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

That’s fighting talk! I wonder what Google are thinking … as for me I am thinking “So what?”. After a certain size it is relevance that matters. It could only return one result from 10 but if it was the right result you would be happy.

Cuil is apparently pronounced “cool”. Hyeahright. Nobody I have shown the word has made that connection. “Kew-il” and “Quill” are the main attempts I have heard. Not quite “Go Google it” territory.

From the searches I have done, I don’t see that they are the biggest, but as the company is founded by ex-Google employees I guess they felt qualified to make that bold claim.

The service is brand new and therefore suffering many bugs and outages, but from what I see they have a pretty need search engine here. Most noticeable is the categorization of results, almost predicting what your next search would be.

Seeing as it is my birthday today, obviously my first search is for my own name.

chris garrett - Cuil

It does a pretty good job, obviously I would prefer my own site ranks first, but it hits the Chris Garrett’s I would expect to see. Strangely it mixes up and miss-matches the images. Bizarre.

Google has both mindshare and is sitting pretty built right into firefox. Microsoft is throwing millions at trying to reverse this very issue, even while having billions of desktops and IE installations as leverage. My guess is the company will go majorly on a PR offensive aimed at VC cash and big buyout exit plan. End users will just be a way to getting access to Silicon Valley wallets.

Obviously it is early days but it might well be a search engine to keep an eye on … at least until Microsoft or Google buy it.

More coverage:

What do you think? A danger to Google or just a dud?

Manage Your WordPress Database

One of the problems with blogging on self-hosted platforms is maintenance. While the platforms are designed for non-technical users to operate, it is only the geeks who understand things like databases that work behind the scenes until something borks and brings the whole thing down.

When I set up a WordPress-based blog or website I usually install the Backup plugin. This emails the user a copy of the database once a week. That coupled with a good FTP download of the files means that at least it is possible to recover to a week old version, and with some swift copy and paste from the most recent RSS download maybe more.

There are other database aspects you might need though and that is where WP-DBManager supposedly comes in to play, but I have issues with it. First a description of what it does …

This plugin gives you a whole bunch of features that otherwise would be off limits, hidden away from the user in scary places like PHPMyAdmin, or the command line.

wp-dbmanager

Just like the other backup plugins, this will allow you to take a backup and email it. It also allows you to optimize and repair, and more dangerously empty or drop tables. While it does have a facility for running SQL queries, you can not run anything that returns a resultset which seems pretty daft.

Now my criticisms:

  1. It should allow routine scheduled backups and maybe optimizations - right now need two plugins when one could do both jobs
  2. As it is you would not hand it over, it is too dangerous – integrate with Role Manager to remove dangerous features
  3. SQL Queries is useless for end users – Make it so you can run queries and show results?

The repair feature could be a life saver, but as for the rest, while an excellent plugin, I think it could be a lot better.

Do you know an alternative database plugin for WordPress?

Customize Your WordPress Admin Interface

As more and more developers and designers are using WordPress as a CMS rather than just as a blogging platform, the demands from users grow and change.

For many end users the standard WordPress Admin is both over featured and scarily complicated.

standard write page

The experience of an overly permissioned user destroying a site will be one that is only too familiar, as is the experience of sites going unmaintained out of intimidation even after training.

What is needed is a tailored approach, to give users what they need and no more.

Enter a bunch of WordPress plugins that aim to do just that.

Cloak allows you to remove elements from the write screens that your writers do not need.

Cloak Options


Flutter allows you to create custom write screens, optionally forcing the new content into a certain category.

edit write panel

This is not just useful for limiting the user, you might also have created a site with content areas such as sidebar, featured posts, etc. Using category logic and a specific write form you could allow the site maintainer to enter content for these featured spots in the theme without having to remember which category does what. For example, below shows a form I built to allow the user to input reviews.

new write panel

Finally Role Manager allows you to completely remove options for certain users so they can only do what you want them to.

Role Management WordPress

Added: JonnyA from WP-CMS tells me you might already know Flutter as “Fresh Post”

Do you know of any other plugins that make customizing WordPress admin easy?

Bring FriendFeed Comments Into Your Blog

FriendFeed has been steadily growing in popularity, and has been given the blessing of the A-List, but in all the support and cheerleading there has always been one problem.

One of the big complaints about FriendFeed is that it pulls conversation away from your site into their venue.

If you want to grow a community then first of all you want the community to exist on your own site, so it can not be held to ransom. Secondly you need to engage that community with conversation. If you can’t see that people have commented then you can’t reply to keep the conversation going, or worse you upset the commenter who then thinks you are ignoring them.

For these reasons many people have avoided fully jumping into the FriendFeed pond, but worry no longer, an excellent FriendFeed Commentgs plugin has arrived.

What it does is pulls any comments or “likes” you gain in FriendFeed and publishes them onto your blog.

There are various options to configure and a tag to place in your theme so it knows where you want to display the comments, but essentially once the plugin knows your FriendFeed nickname the rest is pretty cosmetic.

friendfeed plugin

Get more details at the authors plugin page.

Reputation Management Software Tools Roundup

In my last post I put out a call for Reputation Management sites and software tools. Here are the recommendations that came back.

Andreas Gohr suggested a fun site called EgoSurf. It’s probably not going to tell you much that a simple Google search wouldn’t, but it is a nice way of presenting the results
egoSurf - ego surfing without the guilt


Joel Falconer uses Summize to search Twitter then serve up the results in a feed
chrisgarret - Summize

Tom recommended his own tool, Distilled which has free trial available.

Melissa let us know about a tool that allows you to search multiple sites called keotag.com. Results can be saved as a feed too.

Wagner Fontoura uses a blog search engine called blogblogs.com.br

Mark linked to a honking big list of sites over at linkbun.ch that will take you all day to get through!

Stefan Deak found this list over at mashable

Finally a great suggestion by Dean Hunt

create an “about-me” or “media” page, and link to all the mentions of yourself that you like.

If you see stuff in the searches that are not what you want people to find, then you need to create or promote the good stuff. Dean reminds us that linking out to the best stuff as much as possible is a good start!

Software Tools for Managing Your Online Reputation

Reputation Monitor Tool - Maintain and build your reputation by monitoring what people are saying about you online.

I just got tipped off about a new reputation management helper developed by Strategic Profits.

What it does is creates an OPML file containing search feeds for popular online services based on your search terms.

This is pretty cool because setting up the feeds individually is a bit of a chore, especially if you have plenty of phrases to monitor. And monitor them you should if you care about your online reputation.

Feeds featured are your pretty standard fare:

… along with some I didn’t recognize. Sneakily they also add in Rich Schefren’s own blog – naughty! Nice way to pad his subscriber count, heh :)

If you really want to monitor your reputation though you also need in addition at least Google Alerts, and a good Twitter search. In fact you need to be involved in the social media in an active and engaged way.

You can try the Reputation Monitor tool here.

Any more tips for how you might monitor your online reputation? Please share in the comments and I will highlight the best comments with links.

FaceBook Finally Gets Customer Focused

FacebookI am glad to see FaceBook is starting to slap down the worst offenders of their applications.

They are targeting developers who cross the line with unacceptable behavior. You know all the spam you get on FaceBook? Most of it is from overly aggressive “invitations” from these widgets aiming to grab as much market share and spam database as possible.

Yes, a lot of the spam is also people “throwing sheep” and other such mindless drivel, but it’s a start. The more contacts you have the more spam you are going to get, so your “friends” need to take as much blame as the developers, but it is the developers who create the tools that make it easy for your contacts to abuse your relationship.

When many people refer to viral marketing, what they mean is “name grabbing”, that is getting each person to offer up as many of their friends contact details as possible. These applications push users into mining their contact lists, often making it mandatory to invite all your friends, or seem to be.

OK, hearing that SuperWall and RockYou have been slapped down is not going to make me use the service again, but it is encouraging to know that the company knows its application developers are giving them a bad name.

Run DOS Software on Your Phone?

Emulators are not new. Playing old games is something of an internet obsession, especially arcade games under the MAME system. When a couple of friends emailed me saying their workplace had ground to a halt since discovering a x86 emulator I was interested but not shocked.

I was more intrigued when I found out it was Java based. Most often these things will not work on a Mac.

x86 Emulator Running on Macosx

x86 emulator on macosx


If you go check out the demos you can see a fully functional version of DOS running in your browser window. DIR and check out the games you can play.

JPC - mem:dosgames.img


They are the full, original PC versions, not conversions or rip-offs, the actual binaries running in your browser.

prince of persia on macosx

It’s not all fun and games. This will be useful for anyone who has an old proprietary utility or application they need to run. You can even have a play around with Linux, how cool is that?

This is cool enough to warrant talking about but it was only when I discovered that apparently it should run on your phone that I just had to look closer! Sounds like just the thing for my vacation. You can be sure as soon as I have posted this I will be finding out why it won’t currently run even though they clearly show a n95 working. Next step will be every old DOS game I can. Wouldn’t it be cool if by the time you read this I will be sat on the beach playing Duke Nukem? :)

Get the download here or go to the online demos to have a play!

Easily Copy Music from iPod to Your Mac

While making arrangements for my vacation this week I really needed to sort out my iPod library. Since moving from PC to Mac my mp3 collection was in disarray. The only trustworthy set was on my iPod, and I was very worried I was going to lose it through a disk crash or worse.

What I wanted was a software tool to pull my music back off my iPod onto my Mac, and I found it in Senuti.

Copy MP3 Files off Your iPod with Senuti

Hunting around the intertubes there were various tutorials and tips for how you can grab the files off the hard disk, but this solution was the most elegant.

copy files from ipod to mac with Senuti

The main benefit of the application is it talks directly to iTunes and can work with your library to incorporate your music.

It is intelligent enough to know when you have the file already on your hard disk, and to ignore those, even when creating a play list.

Feature List

The only hiccups I found are it seems to not like certain tracks, and an annoying dialog that pops up every now and then for now apparent reason

Senuti

I would love to know the cause of that, it’s not dialogs open on iTunes as it suggests.

If you have a Mac and want access to your music locked away on your iPod, Senuti is the tool for you.