wekadesign

Friends last Saturday night started talking about how they were using Google AdWords to help drive traffic to their old-school business websites. We’re talking a locksmith and a moving company here – not a web savvy SEO or Web 2.0 developer in site!

Discussion turned to how much they were each spending on their AdWords campaigns and both were on the low side, in fact the same amount, $30. Now that is a small amount but probably typical of those dipping their toes into web marketing for the first time. It would be interesting to see some figures from Google about what the average spend was compared to site rankings. The internet search and advertising giant didn’t get US$11 billion by ignoring their customers.

Some of the comments at the dinner table also echoed the feelings I have toward established media outlets, especialy those in the print business. The locksmith had run ads in large newspapers over the last few years but recently had been coming up dry on leads from their not inconsiderable spending.

As trade across the internet becomes more accepted and traditional business embraces the new advertising services the old media methods will struggle and die. No one wants to spend an hour searching through the classifieds when they can run a global search or visit an online auction site and find and purchase what they want within minutes.

Sellers can target a certain audience easily and then get a range of metrics on how many viewed their ad and then followed through. Further marketing can then be narrowed again to increase the quality of the investment. Well targeted ads benefit both sides, buyers see things they’re interested in and sellers and more likely to see a purchase.

So if you’ve been thinking about doing some business on the web, now is a good time to invest some time and maybe a little money. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I’d been given the task of setting up two Windows print servers with a touch over 300 print queues. The queues would be split between the two servers, with one holding all the even numbered queues (they’re named things like CityA094 or CityB031) and the other the odd names.

Well, it gets rather boring doing this via the GUI. The process of creating the TCP/IP ports, then the queues and entering the location information takes a fair number of clicks and typing. With only the queue name, location and description changing between each, it’s a good task for a script.

You need three VBS files that already exist on a Windows XP system, a target server and a logon to that server. The three VBS files are prncnfg.vbs, prnmngr.vbs and prnport.vbs which should be in your (windows root)\system32 folder.

Then use the following in a batch script to call them to do the work. It’ll create the port (using RAW mode), then the queue and then configure the queue.

WordPress really doesn’t like the script syntax and is getting a little confused so here it is in a text file: AddPrinter Script.

Note that I’m only using the Generic/Text driver for all queues, so the
usefulness may vary if you’ve got lots of different models.

I’ve been using the Firefox browser addon called FireBug for a while now and am amazed at how helpful it is. If you’re a web developer, and especially if you use JavaScript and AJAX methods, you should be using it.

For example, while developing I like to add in timers to PHP based pages to show how long things are taking. This way if a SQL statement needs some fine-tuning or a change slows things down I can see it happen. FireBug extends this to the entire page and the HTTP traffic. Here’s what happens when I load a page that has a few JavaScript calls, small images and a single CSS link in it,

Straight away it’s obvious what’s taking up the bulk of the time – those two library calls. Once I take those out of the equation the load time drops to under a second. And through all this the PHP timer function only shows me how long the server-side work is taking.

With FireBug I know who (in a geeky code way) is doing what and with who and I can act on it. Now that’s helpful.

Last night the Auckland region was rocked by three earthquakes which did little or no damage. They were the biggest quakes in close to 40 years in a normally stable area. All three hit after the evening TV news had aired so people were looking for news on what happened. Where did they turn to, why the Web of course.

Only a few years ago, a news event like this would have gone largely ignored by what passed as online news agencies. Last night however, the NZ Herald (large daily paper) had a story on their site within 15min and the local GeoNet site listing recent earthquakes was unavailable due to high traffic volumes.

By this morning interest in the story will have waned and the traditional paper and TV media will not be seeing that many more sales or viewers than normal. You can bet though that hits on web news sites last night went through the roof and those inconspicuous page ads started paying good money.

Those media agencies that have been slow on the uptake of what their audience wants and where they are now going for their information, need to move now before they get left behind for good.

I recently found myself needing to convert a date/time in a Windows vbs script to UNIX time and struggled to find an example of how to do this. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be any built-in function to change 20070109161723+720 to 1168359443.

After fine-tuning a few Google queries I found using the DateDiff function the easiest way and came up with,

Function WMIDateToUNIX(strDate)
ConvertedDate = CDate(Mid(strDate, 7, 2) & "/" & _
Mid(strDate, 5, 2) & "/" & Left(strDate, 4) _
& " " & Mid (strDate, 9, 2) & ":" & _
Mid(strDate, 11, 2) & ":" & Mid(strDate,13, 2))

WMIDateToUNIX = DateDiff(“s”, “01/01/1970 00:00:00″,ConvertedDate)
End Function

Not the prettiest code I’ll admit, but if someone else can use it that’s all well and good.

I headed along to Microsoft’s latest “Business Value” presentation this morning on their latest products – Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007. The keynote was headed by Microsoft CFO and New Zealander Chris Liddell who, along with business journalist Rod Oram, spoke about the need for NZ companies to step out of old roles and processes, stay original and aim higher.

On show were the new abilities of messaging and enterprise communication that Office and Exchange will bring about. You’ll be able to update you calendar, clear your voice messages and respond to emails all from your mobile phone. For those in the office you can see when others are at their desks or their reasons for being away and Instant Message (IM) them with Office Communicator.

Communication blockers across business are also being worked on in the new products. With Outlook 2007 you can email a copy of your Calendar to any recipient while specifying what info they see and if it’s today’s items, this week’s or this month’s. If the two companies are joined by a Federation then you’ll also be able to use the IM and presence tools of Communicator.

Overall if you’re a Microsoft based medium to large sized business, the upgrade path for you is better and more feature packed than ever before. And honestly, this time, you might even use most of the new features rather than wondering how that guy down the hall makes the boss happy with his awesome PowerPoints.

The latest version of Internet Explorer is out and about now and reaction seems to be mixed.

Most feedback on forums and in newsletters so far are of problems with the last Release Candidate (RC). The IE7 installs I’ve experienced have ranged from a single reboot for the last RC to two reboots when I installed the production version. Mozilla’s competitor browser Firefox has never needed a reboot. IE7 does work as advertised though and once people move to the new browser there should be fewer problems and less security holes.

Overall IE7 is a huge step forward from Microsoft, combining security fixes, tabbed browsing, a new UI, speed increases and a host of rendering improvements. But is it good enough to combat the hordes or techy folk who have embraced Mozilla’s Firefox browser? The latest 2.0 version of Firefox makes it’s own improvements and in my experience remains faster and most importantly handles standards based code better.

Nice work Microsoft, but you’re not quite there yet.

Scrybe looks to be the next big thing for web-based organisers. Have a look at their pre-beta release video which shows some very cool ideas.

There’s the usual linking and moving of events in the calendar with day, week, month, year views but keep watching. How about dropping in data from Excel that actually formats itself correctly. Want to link to those documents for that 3pm meeting – no problem. It also adds in some Diigo/del.icio.us bookmarking features of it’s own so you can save all those great ideas for your Mum’s birthday from the web into the event reminder.

As mentioned at engtech there’s no show and tell of the synchronisation features yet, but I’ve signed up for a beta account. Once they can tie into Outlook and maybe Notes (we must forgive) people have a really good reason to get involved.

Kudos to engtech for the link.

Edit: I forgot the best bit. Scrybe will print out your schedules and to-do list onto a sheet of paper with fold lines that turn it into a neat little booklet. This has to be the first example of Web2.0 origami.

Every now and again you stumble across a handy little tool that’s worth sharing with everyone else. In this case it’s Microsoft’s Print Migrator 3.1 that allows you to backup all print queue, driver and port information on one windows server into a CAB file and then restore it on another.

I currently use this for a client that uses two print servers for redundancy. They’re being feed from a UNIX system and one holds the even numbered queues and the other the odd. If one fell over the UNIX admins just alter their software to point at the working server. Each night the Migrator backs up the queues and new queues are created once and then copied over automagically.

Twenty ways to make sure that the 10 year old script kiddie down the street does not mess with your Apache Web Server.

Peter Freitag – 20 ways to Secure your Apache Configuration