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  • Lightbox for Cforms II plugin on WordPress

    So when exactly did the lightbox craze hit? I’m not sure exactly, but everyone seems to love lightboxes! They are indeed a visually attractive way to create a modal window within a browser which has a nice ‘set off’ from the background page without opening a new browser window or popup window.

    Recently I needed to use the powerful Cforms II plugin to create some interactive forms on a WordPress site and I needed to make some of the forms appear in a lightbox. Much to my surprise, it seems no one has combined Cforms II and a lightbox for some reason. Or if they have, they didn’t write about it.

    So I tried to write my own shortcodes to get Cforms to work with a certain lightbox plugin. Only had marginal success, in that the lightbox popped, but the form would not render on the screen. Plus the shortcode processing caused WordPress to try to render the lightbox in Admin. Not cool. I quickly abandoned this effort when I found the Form Lightbox plugin. Form Lightbox was flexible enough to work with the special Cforms II tags as follows:

    Perhaps others will find this info useful. WordPress is a fantastic CMS platform and it has spawned many excellent plugins. I’m very grateful for WordPress and the vibrant WordPress developer community.

  • Minty fresh web analytics

    You’ll get a minty fresh feeling when you try Mint, a rather new kid on the web analytics block. The pricing is reasonable at $30/site. What I like is that it appears to be an easy to use, self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics or AWstats. Ever tried installing AWstats? Well, maybe I had some extra fun trying to make it run on IIS6/Windows, but ease of use really means a lot these days. Give it a spin – it may exactly what you’re looking for, without giving away the store to Mother G.

  • Tracking Campaigns in Omniture SiteCatalyst

    Yes, I realize that Adobe bought Omniture more than a year ago. But you’ve got to admit, Omniture is a cooler product name than Adobe. Adobe is what desert houses are made of.

    But I stray from the point of the post. (yes it is getting late)

    This article nicely summarizes tracking campaigns with SiteCatalyst. I mention it for selfish reasons of helping me to remember how to find this article.

    Enjoy!

  • Real-time analytics application

    Wow – how time flies. I’ve gone too long without posting!

    New Relic appears to be an interesting performance and app monitoring package with a modern interface and great tools. I came across it the other day looking for some other web analytics information. A free trial is available, so I may give it a run and write about it here.

    Until next time…!

  • Taxonomy and Information Architecture

    I’m still keeping lists of useful sites as I learn about information architecture (IA) concepts, taxonomy, user experience (UX) and knowledge management. The Taxonomy Guide at the University of Toronto in Canada contains many useful links and resources on these topics.

    The University of Minnesota, Duluth is not to be outdone by UToronto – there are dozens of links to IA materials at their site. This site digs deep into IA methods such as card sorting, content inventory methods, prototyping and wireframing.

    Here’s another site chock full of IA links.

    Something for everyone…
    There is definitely a site out there for everyone. This site is all about site indexes and there is even a special index group (SIG) dedicated to building a site index for any site.

    Picking up again on the taxonomy topic, I found that Heather Hedden has written and spoken extensively about taxonomies, indexing and search. Her site contains links to numerous whitepapers, articles and presentations.

    There’s even a Taxonomy Bootcamp (gasp!) in D.C. this November. It is co-located with some other related events such as the Knowledge Management World conference, the SharePoint Symposium and the Enterprise Search Summit.

    Before getting too deep into a new information architecture, it may be time to chill out and take a content inventory.

  • What’s running that site?

    It isn’t pefect, but the Scritch CMS detector tool is very useful when you need to know what CMS is running on a certain website. If you need to know where the site is hosted and what https server responds for the site, Netcraft is excellent. Need to know what web analytics is in place for a particular site? The Vendor Discovery Tool at Web Analytics Demystified can help.

  • Are URLs the next generation of Cookies?

    Yeah – I bet that headline got your attention for a second. How could a URL be compared to a cookie? It takes a moment to get used to the idea, but that very concept was suggested by a couple articles I read today.

    It all started when I got a spam with a short bitly URL embedded within. I became curious to know if there was a such thing as a bitly decoder, and surely there was! So that bitly URL mapped to a Twitter t.co URL. That was when I decided to delete the spam altogether. But I found this article about t.co URLs being useful for web analytics, and that article lead to this article which raised the question of this post’s headline. Read the articles and judge for yourself. Go through your own Tweets and web analytics and prove it out for yourself.

  • Scratchpad post

    Here’s a scratchpad post to help me remember to look further into Composite C1, a free open-source CMS based upon Microsoft dotNet. The other day I was searching for some alternative .Net CMS tools and it is good to know some exist! Check this Wikipedia entry for a complete, platform-independent list of content management systems paid or free.

    Here’s another random item: ain interactive marketing ROI calculator. It is a neat toy for Business Intelligence geeks.

  • Ultimate Bounce Rate Infographic

    Bounce Rate EquationWhen I bring up the term ‘bounce rate’ in meetings and presentations, I often get the strangest stares from people unfamiliar with the term. The folks at Kiss Metics and Bime Analytics have provided a fantastic infographic which explains Bounce Rate quite nicely. Enjoy and click the graphic to make it appear full size in your browser.

  • Easy Web Site Analyzer

    I read about WooRank just today and I like it. Of course a paid offering exists, but the free offering covers a lot of ground when you need a quick read when evaluating a new website. It quickly summarizes traffic, search engine ranking, SEO qualities, server and other info to get you started quickly. If you need some background history on a site or domain, supplement the WooRank data with info from Netcraft.com.