Dubbed The ‘Fastest browser on Earth’ the beta of Opera 10.60 is 50 percent faster than it’s predecessor in selected JavaScript tests. However, while Opera’s speed is grabbing headlines it also boasts a host of new web-standard features. These include Geolocation, WebM support for HTLM5 video and new interface. Geolocation detects location and maps the user in the middle of the action, ideal for accurate location-specific search results.

The high-quality, open video format WebM is now built right into the browser, making viewing videos online even easier. Other features include HTML5 AppCache which allows you to use different applications – such as word processor, image editor, spreadsheets and much more – in a web browser even when offline. Web developers can now also use HTML5 Web Workers for doing heavy calculations without making the browsing slower for the user.

Chief development officer at Opera Software Christen Krogh said, “Opera 10.60 beta is so fast it will blow you away”. He added, “Beyond the speed boost, the latest version improves on our robust HTML5 support and provides more options for quick and efficient web search through your preffered search engines. By combining raw speed with easy-to-use features, Opera places you among the fastes internet users on the planet.” Download 10.60 at http://www.opera.com/browser/

Run Level Media is an Atlanta Web Design Firm, for information about us please visit us here.

However, the free app allows accoutn holders to access and manage stored files and save files for future viewing. It also allows files to be email to clients, collegues and friends. On top of all that it allows contributing artists whose work is sold on in iStockphoto to track their sales and view donload statistics.

COO of iStockphoto Kelly Thompson said, “Inspiration and ideas often strike when least expected. This application lets us be there for our community whenever and wherever that happends.”

The iStockphoto iPhone app is available as you might expect, from the Apple iTunes store @http://bit.ly/d6pzMe. Alternatively, more details and a Sign Up button that redirects you to http://www.apple.com/itunes can be found at http://www.istockphoto.com/iphone.

We think this is a fantastic direction for iStockphoto. Often times we are with clients and do not have our laptop readily out and available but for creative direction we can launch a quick app to pull up some stock images to paint a quick picture. Check out the App and let us know what you think.

Cheers,

Josh

Run Level Media is an Atlanta Web Design Firm, for information about us please visit us here.

So here at Run Level Media, we have a plethora of reading materials. Mostly are technology focused to keep up with the latest web trends and development environments. Most recently we have been purchasing either a combination of the book online along with the e-book or web book version. With using the Kindle, and Kindle for Android as well as iPhone apps, there seems to be less and less a need for storing and using the actual physical paperback version of the book.

Having a digital copy is much easier to keep track of as opposed to a book that we have on a shelf, taking up room. In this day and age where the phone in my pocket has more than 1000 MHz of processing power, is it necessary to continue the practice of buying actual books? Now, there is something to be said about rolling up to your local book store, buying a coffee, pulling some periodicals or books off the shelf and perusing through them as you get your caffeine fix.

New York Times bestselling author and marketing guru, Seth Godin vows to never publish traditionally again. After over 12 books with a legacy publisher, Godin says he’s had enough.

According to an interview with Seth Godin conducted by Media Bistro he can reach 10 to 50 more times the amount of people and spread the word about his book using online outlets than the effort it takes to get readers into a store to pickup his latest work. I tend to agree with him on this extreme as it may be.

As we develop websites and understand the human behavior for how one finds information, a service or product, it is important to realize that the traditional methods used for gaining knowledge for the purpose of advancing our understanding or just pure entertainment, are changing. This is becoming seemingly more apparent with the widespread use of social networks to share information. With all of the different ways we now obtain and consume music, news, movies is it just natural for books to follow in step? We’d love to know your thoughts, feel free to ping us on twitter or email!

Cheers,

Run Level Media (An Atlanta Web Design Firm)

Often times being a web design company here in Atlanta, we have clients that are competing in a small demographic or geography with several other companies in their industry. We have found that they have purchased at times up to 20 or 30 domain names in hopes that they will rise to the top for search, or at the lest that their competitors wont be able to register the same domain name. Well, what do you do after you have purchased all those domains? That’s what we are going to determine.

The first thing I do is go to the source. What does Google have to say about redirecting domains to a specific domain or particular website. According to their article it is the best use for identifying to your visitors that you have moved your website, or you want the initial landing page to load from a new location.

Thanks to the the .htaccess file we can actually manipulate all sors of requests. The primary reason for doing this is to build the rankings for your preferred or (canonical) URL. Maybe you have moved your site to a new domain, or merging two sites together. You want to determine which site will be your preferred domain. Once this is done you can start by either redirecting all content, or pair it to specific content you would like redirected.

For instructions on how to create 301 redirects to preserve your SEO (search engine optimization) these two resources will guide you through step by step instructions. You will want to know what type of web server you are running on. Most web hosts run on Linux using Apache. Some might be running IIS on Windows. Whatever platform you are on you can easily achieve your Search Enginen Optimzation goals and preserve your rankings without being penalized for duplicate content.

IIS Redirect

• In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.
• Enter the redirection page
• Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”
• Click on ‘Apply’

Cold Fusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode=”301″ statustext=”Moved permanently”>
<.cfheader name=”Location” value=”http://www.new-url.com”>
PHP Redirect

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://www.new-url.com/”
%>

ASP.NET Redirect

<script runat=”server”>
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”;
Response.AddHeader(“Location”,”http://www.new-url.com”);
}
</script>

JSP Java Redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/” );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

Ruby On Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers["Status"] = “301 Moved Permanently”
redirect_to “http://www.new-url.com/”
end

CGI-BIn Perl Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect(“http://www.new-url.com/”);

Change HTACCESS to redirect to WWW

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name

Change HTACCESS to Direct Old Domain to the New Domain

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

Feel free to reach out and contact Run Level Media – An Atlanta Web Design Firm for all your web services!

So, you have probably heard a few things about Search Engine Optimization and at the moment you are trying to study more about SEO. Well, your primary goals in the SEO are to boost your web sites position in the search engine results pages and raise web site traffic.

Google Page rank presents how significant your web site is compared to other web sites and Alexa Rank is how many people gets in relation to other web sites on the Internet. You are aiming to obtain a high Google PR and a low Alexa Rank.

What is Google PageRank?

Google Page Rank is a tool designed to rank a web site that is listed in the Google index. A Page rank of a web page is given on a scale of 0-10. 0 is the lowest possible score for a web site and 10 is the highest .

High Page rank is defined by the amount, relevance and importance of webpages which link to the webpage. When a webpage links to other webpage, Google believe that to be a vote for the page. There is a formula related to how Page Rank is. If you are interested in the theory of the PageRank then a quick exploration on Google will provide productive.

Current PR is updated very often. It is really updated much more frequently than PR toolbar. Many people believe that when the toolbar PR updates their websites will either gain or lose visitors. It is not true.

Only algorithm updates will increase or decrease your web site visitors, which are done just about every day. The algorithm is the utterly complicated formula which Google uses to rank Web site pages.

What is the Alexa Rank?

Alexa Rank is different to Google PageRank. Alexa rank based solely on to the web site. Alexa rank is based in descending order towards 1, where highly visited web site is given a rank of 1. Alexa Rankings differ from 1 to a billion. All websites in the world are included in the Alexa Rank, so Alexa ranking is continually varying in relation to other web sites.

Alexa traffic ranking has an image for being inexact. But, commonly a Web site with an Alexa traffic ranking of 100,000 or less gets good traffic.

How can you improve your Google PageRank?

1. Create search engine optimized website. Your website must be complete of worth. Try for a keyword density of 3-7% and make certain that all keywords and content are relative to your website’s idea.

2. Use META and title tags properly. One of the largest factors in SEO are META and title tags. You should make sure that title tag is accurate and that the META tag describes your website well.

3. Submit your site to the Google sitemap. Do so when the website is fulfilled.

4. Build targeted traffic to your website.

How can you improve your Alexa Rank?

All you need to do is pick up your traffic to your website. Do not go for submission to 450,000 search engines, this is the worst thing you can do. Participate in many webmaster forums which let you put your web site in your signature. Web masters often have the Alexa toolbar installed.

For a FREE SEO Website Evaluation, Contact Us and we’ll let you know!

Since high-quality, keyword-rich content is one of the primary components of search engine optimization. It’s no small wonder that Google acquired Blogger, a popular blogging platform, early in the evolution of the channel.

There is a panoply of reasons to integrate blogging into marketing and communication initiatives. This evidenced by the fact that blogs have been embraced by the marketing community. Blogs have another recognized and relevant function where SEO is concerned: Blogs are an invaluable tool for building up links, both in- and outbound.

Blogs are literally built to attract search engine crawlers and spiders. Their architecture and design are structured for clear navigation, with every page setup to link back to other primary pages. It is no surprise that in recent years many successful and profitable publisher have built editorial products entirely on commercial blog platforms.

Get Your Blog On

A blog can easily be setup to repeat target keywords in the titles, of individual posts, category names, URLs, in tags and in the links that appear as footers on each post. The RSS feeds generated by a blog are automatically picked up by search engines at regular intervals, as are the pages themselves.

Register your blog feed URLS with Technorati.com   http://technorati.com

Links In Blog POSTS

The most potent link juice blogs can offer are the links in actual posts. When writing blog content, link early and link often, particularly to other blogs. Bloggers are highly aware of and sensitive to the power of link love and will often reward inbound links with links back to your blog without being asked to return the favor. In the case of a blog that exists to promote another website or business, remember that spiders crawl links, and all this additional linking servers the purpose of creating additional pathways – some direct, and some indirect – back to the target of the optimization effort.

Just be sure to blog about something you can speak to, and that is relevant to the content of your site. For instance, don’t write about building barbie houses if your blog content has a heavy focus on rebuilding race car engines. It’s ok to exchange links and link when relevant but don’t get crazy with just focusing on volume. Focus on relevance and quality.

Recently, Mike Schinkel split the old Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs into Startup Atlanta and Atlanta Web Marketers (AWM), with AWM concentrating on small or medium-sized businesses, non-profits, and government agencies who want to use the web to market their products and services. Obviously, this is right up RLM’s alley.

At an AWM planning meeting, Mike mentioned the possibility of recording the expert roundtables which happen outside of the regularly scheduled monthly meetings. The roundtables are a chance to get topic experts together to identify the best agenda and meeting format to cover the topic during the main monthly meetings. Each roundtable will be a couple hours long, with experts discussing all the important details that folks need to know about the topic.

And Run Level Media will be recording it all!

We haven’t  quite flushed out all the details on how and where the videos will be available, but we plan on making each video available fairly quickly after the tapings. The first roundtable to be recorded will be next week, on using WordPress at a marketing platform.

Stay tuned for more details!

Camera source

We use a lot of wordpress here at Run Level Media so I thought I’d compile a list of the basic wordpress plugins we often use out of the box. Please feel free to share your favorite set of plugins as well.

• All in One SEO Pack: Optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines.
• Google XML Sitemaps: Notifies search engines of updates to your site.
• NextGEN Gallery: Easy to use image gallery with a Flash slideshow option.
• WordPress.com Stats: Provides detailed visitor statistics, optimized for blogging.
• WP Super Cache: Accelerates your blog by serving 99% of your visitors via static HTML files.
• Contact Form 7: Provide contact forms with spam filtering, CAPTCHA, and Ajax submit.
• Sociable: Promote your content by adding links to social sharing and bookmarking sites.
• Viper’s Video Quicktags: easily embed videos from all the major web video sites.
• Simple Tags: automatically adds tags and related posts to your content.
• WP-DB-Backup: easily backup your core WordPress tables.
• Google Analytics for WordPress: track visitors, AdSense clicks, outgoing links, and search queries.
• WP-Polls: Adds an easily customizable AJAX poll system to your blog.
• podPress: Adds features to make WordPress the ideal platform for hosting a podcast.
• WP-PageNavi: Adds more advanced paging navigation.
• Ozh admin dropdown menu: Creates a drop down menu with all admin links.
• MaxBlogPress ping optimizer: Prevents blog from being tagged as a ping spammer.

Cheers,

Josh

Social Communities

This morning I read an interesting blog article titled “Social Media: A Train to Nowhere?”

As I started to write a comment on the post, it turned into more of a blog post. So rather than write a book in the comments section, I decided to post this.

I think that the world as we know it online will begin to shrink over the next several years. There is so much noise, advertising, social networks, media and static online that eventually the small niche’ communities are what will make people feel connected. I don’t think Social Media is “new”. I think that the internet and mobile platforms are finally catching up to a pace of the human desire to feel “connected”. Today I believe that people will put more stock into a review, or recommendation over most advertising campaigns and jingles.

The question isn’t necessarily how do you define and reach goal, I believe it’s broken into parts:

-How do you maintain customer loyalty?

-What methods are you using to trend not only what people are saying about you, but what they want from your competitors.

-Being innovative in making it as easy as possible to resolve customer complaints.

-Having the appropriate metrics to trend, and make wise business decisions.

Intelligence is what will ultimately keep a business profitable and successful in the area of marketing and advertising. A brand that has the ability to make consumers excited enough about their products or services to write comments, reviews and click that “become a fan” button will ultimately be driving the train to success. It doesn’t take much right? Or does it?

Facebook Fan Page

What does that mean exactly? Take for instance the brand of RVCA which is a surf / skate / Artists culture clothing company. Ah, not just your average clothing company though. They are a company focused on a “community” of consumers who are not just buying into the hype of their ad campaigns, but are engaging back with the company as well as their fellow consumers. The description on their Facebook fanpage is “RVCA, it is about today, tomorrow and life as the big picture. It is about inspiring our generation, providing something of substance and culture and above all doing it with integrity and as a united family, a close-knit community.” RVCA Fan Page

I think the key to creating the portals, and platforms for consumers not only to talk with the brands themselves, but also fostering debate and conversation with other fans, consumers, customers is the key. Why? Because, that is building loyalty, and .. It’s FREE marketing.

It would be equivelant to you referring the AC repair man to your neighbor because he did such a fantastic job, didn’t overcharge and was friendly. Having that same conversation with your neighbor online though only exponentially increases the footprint for that AC repair mans company name / brand to virally be spread through sites such as Yelp, Angies List, Kudzu, Yellow Pages, as well as many other review sites.

If you can harness, foster and drive those conversations through using different social media outlets such as Facebook Fan Pages, Youtube video channels, Twitter, Website posts and comments, then you will be working towards building a family, and not just talking but conversing.

“A close-knit community” is what will determine the future success of small and medium businesses and even large corporations. If you can harness the power of a community and build loyalty, then that is a measurable marketing success. Human nature is to feel wanted capturing the feeling that you belong to something gives one a feeling of exclusivity. If a clothing company can do that, imagine what you can do?

Cheers,

Josh

Searching for images that you have created on the web is easy. There is a a great handy little website called TinEye. If you are a photographer or designer, it is important to know if your images are being used without your permission. Depending on the licensing for your work, you may want to follow up with individuals or businesses who are using your work without your expressed permission.

What TinEye does is a reverse images search on the web to find out which sites are using the image, even if they have a different name for the image.

Take for example the image we use on Run Level Media.

This image is called “rlmhome.jpg” Not very SEO friendly, but I wanted to show how incredible this was with the search. So I entered the URL http://runlevelmedia.com into the query box, what it does is grabs all the images from the page of the URL that you enter. Then you simply click on the image that you want to search.

As you can see from the screen shot below it yielded 4 other websites using the same image that I’m using. Since this is stock photo it also displays on the originating source. In order to stay original, or keep people on their toes about using content against the respective licenses, it’s a great resource for any image creator.

For more information visit the TinEye website where they have over one billion images cached, and let us know in the comments if you found any of your own images.