I’ve been working on a link exchange management service lately and its now ready for production. There are still things that need to be done on it but its now operational and ready for public consumption. The service is called, LinkLuna, and you can use it to manage your link exchanges. Best of all its a free service that anyone can use. It integrates easily into your existing site using our simple api and I even had a WordPress plugin built to save you time integrating it into your blog. Try it out for free and let me know how I can improve the services.

UPDATE: Project dead.

I was surprised to come up empty handed when searching for a Google Base Rails plugin. I wanted something that would allow me to easily create a feed into Google Base using their API. I didn’t find anything so I took the quick and short term solution and created my own Google Base xml feed. Its based on RSS 2.0 so its not incredibly difficult but I could have saved a few minutes if it was already written for me so here it is. My Google Base xml generator in Ruby on Rails. Its not complete and only has the fields that I specifically wanted for my products. Your feed will likely contain other fields so check the Google Base docs for more information on customizing it. You’ll notice that I thought Google Base was going to pull my xml feed when I initially wrote this but it turns out I have to use the API and this is just good for generating the xml file which you then have to manually upload to Google Base.

First, I added this to route.rb
[source language=":ruby"]
map.connect ‘google-base.xml’,
:controller => ‘google’,
:action => ‘base_feed’
[/source]

Then I created controllers/google_controller.rb
[source language=":ruby"]
class GoogleController < ApplicationController
def base_feed
@products = Product.find(:all)
end
end
[/source]

And finally, I create views/google/base_feed.rxml
[source language=":ruby"]
xml.instruct! :xml, :version=>"1.0"
xml.rss(:version=>"2.0", ‘xmlns:g’ => "http://base.google.com/ns/1.0"){
xml.channel{
xml.title("My Site products")
xml.link("http://brianmcquay.com/google-base.xml")
xml.description("My products are better than yours. You can touch them but I have to charge.")
xml.language(‘en-us’)
for product in @products
xml.item do
xml.title(product.name)
xml.link(product_url(product.id.to_s))
xml.description(product.description)
for photo in product.pictures
xml.tag! "g:image_link", photo_url(photo.id)
end
for category in product.categories
xml.tag! "g:product_type", category.name
end
xml.tag! "g:price", product.retail_price.to_s
xml.tag! "g:id", product.id.to_s
xml.tag! "g:payment_accepted", "Visa"
xml.tag! "g:payment_accepted", "MasterCard"
xml.tag! "g:tax_region", "Hawaii"
end
end
}
}
[/source]

There are obviously calls to helper methods in the base_feed.rxml file like product_url and photo_url. I use those so I can easily generate pretty seo urls anywhere I need them. You’ll need to replace those with however you create your urls.

This should suffice for at most 31 days when all the products I just added will expire in Google Base. I doubt I’ll bother creating a Google Base Rails plugin unless I see a noticeable increase in traffic and sales so don’t hold your breath.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite a long time but somehow never seemed to get around to it. I started a SEO, online marketing, and web development company called Onomojo a while ago. I’ve just been so busy since its conception that I found it hard to find the time to blog about it. I’ve decided to take a break from the hustle and bustle of the routine and say a few words about us.

We offer a complete marketing package for online businesses who are looking to increase their exposure and increase their revenue. A lot of businesses throw money at expensive marketing firms and end up with little to show for it. We found that in most cases the marketers weren’t developers and the developers weren’t marketers. Onomojo is different. We are all programmers, designers, and marketing professionals. This gives us an edge and the ability to offer complete marketing packages that complete the necessary learning loop to achieve success.

Any successful business must learn from what it does right and learn from what it does wrong. When your marketing agency has to communicate their wishes to developers the intentions are often lost. Programmers aren’t typically interested in the marketing aspect of development. Marketers usually have no clue how to program or design. We are different. Our developers have a passion for SEO, marketing, graphics design, and everything else it takes to make a company successful. Our feedback loop of what works and what doesn’t is extremely short with a complete package. We learn from the marketing and SEO and we directly apply that learning to your site design and content. We take learning from CPC ads and traffic analysis and we apply those lessons learned to make your site more effective. Onomojo offers complete online marketing packages for business looking for a competitive edge. Visit our site at http://onomojo.com and fill out the contact form for more information on what Onomojo can do for you and your company.

I’ve been ranting and raving lately about how Google’s search sucks. There are numerous reasons but lets just focus on relevancy of the results for this rant. Anyone using Google lately has seen the spammy websites that come up on search results. By spammy I mean those sites which are nothing more than screen scrapers, web directories, google adwords pages that use search results to generate static pages with scraped content mixed with more adwords, and on and on. Most of these junk sites have tons of Google adwords all over them and so of course why would Google care if they are ranked #1? They don’t and that’s precisely the problem.

I’m rambling on about Google because anyone with a profitable website knows that Google is your primary traffic driver (most of the time of course). Google used to weight external links to your site very heavily. As a result, people started creating link farms and easily getting around that. External links still count of course but more for going from one tier to the next in their ranking scheme. Yes, there are multiple tiers. Relate that to primary and secondary indexes and you’ll know what I mean. Since everyone realized how easy it was to fool Google with external links to your site they altered their algorithm ever so slightly over the years to make internal linking much more important. That’s why you see all these junk sites now a days. They’re is a very straight forward way to create a site with a good internal linking structure. Think of tags, relevant tags, and similar concepts along with your traditional site hierarchy type linking structure as the way to create a well connected internal linking structure. Google will eat this up and the junk sites that employ this sort of design are proof that they rank internal linking much higher than external links to your site.

Now what’s one to do about all this mess? People and business are always going to find ways to get ranked high in search engines. Its the name of the game in online commerce. As a result, there will always be junk sites like the millions that Google is indirectly creating (because their algorithm favors them). The solution that I see is a combination of ideas that are already present in their own forms in one way or another. Search results need to learn who I am and what I mean when I use certain word. For instance, searching for the word ‘rails’ might mean I’m looking for trains or it might mean I’m learning about Ruby on Rails. A good search engine of the future would learn from my search behaviors and somehow be able to pick the context out of the words I’m using. It needs to learn what sort of sites I favor over others. I hate Google adwords junk sites yet I get them all the time. This sort of site structure along with its abundant links to Google’s Javascript for adwords could easily be understood as something I would rather not see. Learning will be key to the future of search.

I mentioned understanding the context of my words without me providing context (rails). That implies that search engines will need to figure out some type of semantic meaning from pages other than just words and what words are near them. That’s a problem that some are already attempting to solve. Its a huge scalability problem though since parsing semantic meaning takes much longer than a simple dumb indexing of words like Google does. The future of search will definitely include semantic meaning whether it just be a more sophisticated word indexing that effectively achieves semantic understanding or one that truly parses out sentences for parts of speech and such. Combine that with a little machine learning and you have yourself a pretty good search.

Finally, some suggest that social bookmarking and rating sites such as Reddit are the future of search. I disagree. Mob rule is never good. However, if it were to create a hidden set of like minded individuals for me (based on who means what with their search terms) it could get a better understanding of who I am and what I mean when I say lisp. Then again, what happens when I’m a geek all my life and I suddenly have a kid who has a lisp. Will it always be up to the user to figure out how to find their results? Will businesses and individuals always be able to ruin search engines with junk sites that have figured out the algorithm? So far that’s the case. A little learning and a little semantic understanding should do the trick though.

Microsoft has a spam filter that once it thinks you’re a spammer will pretty much never allow you to send legitimate emails. For any internet based company, emails are critical to the operation and need to get through or there’s no business. Microsoft has developed an approach through Sender Score Certified where they’ll let you pay them to be whitelisted. Its pretty much the only way I found to get off their shit list. The cost is about $1500 in all and has taken me 3 months or so to complete. The whole process was a big run around over and over sending me to different people and sites to do silly tasks. People rarely responded to any emails or phone calls I made and I had all but given up on it when they finally responded with a few minor changes I needed to make to our site in order to complete the process. Email has always been a free thing to deliver. It seems to me that Microsoft has found a way to capitalize on the fact that online companies must be able to send emails by forcing them to pay to get added to their whitelist. Basically, if too many people click on this is spam then you’re learned as spam and you’re screwed. You’ve got to pay to get whitelisted at that point. Sucks for online companies but its a great, albeit sleazy, business strategy for Microsoft to make some extra cash.