Its been a long time coming but we’ve finally got our new site design finished for Onomojo. We’ve also expanded our services to include graphics design, logo design, web design, and a whole slew of other graphics related services. That’s in addition to the services we already provided which were primarily programming, seo, and marketing related. Here’s a screenshot of the new design.

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 reached my limit of frustration with current keyword trackers. The technology is simple enough that it baffles my mind why so many keyword rank trackers are for profit. There doesn’t seem to be a single decent instance of an open source keyword tracker out there that I could find. I want something open and that can run in Linux of course but my searches have left me empty handed.

I’ve started designing my own keyword tracker as a result. I will release it under the GPL because I like to keep it real like that. It will be a Rails application and I will host a version for people to use free of charge (with some limitations so it doesn’t kill my servers). Basically, you can extend the app by creating a Rails plugin for it for different search engines. I will just write one for Google for starters. Hopefully I can get some community support to get more search engines working for it. I’ve got the database mostly planned out and will be starting the project in the next week or two. I will make an instance of Trac to help the collaboration and issue tracking.

Basically, I’ll be creating something that will have multiple users. A user can login and enter a new site or track an existing site. Each site has a set of keywords which the app tracks over time. I want graphs of the keyword activity over time and I want the ability to import keywords and export the rank history. If anyone is interested in helping me out on this project just comment on this post to let me know and I’ll set you up with a Trac account so we can get started.

I just stumbled on a strange difference between submitting multiparts forms via Firefox and Safari. When a file isn’t selected and the form is submitted, Firefox sends the variable name with an empty string as the value. Safari doesn’t send the variable at all. This caused an unexpected problem in Rails when I was checking if the variable was an empty string or not. I honest would prefer to check if the variable is nil or not and if its not nil I’d know the file was sent. I checked for an empty string because Firefox sends the variable. Not my code has to also check if its nil and if not then check if the filename is not an empty string. Lame.

I’ve started doing more web design work lately and as such am in frequent need of decent color palettes for my sites. Unfortunately I’m not keen on developing them myself. I can tell which ones I like and which ones I don’t but creating the palette is difficult for me. Luckily there are people out there that are good at blending colors together so they look good. I did a quick search and came up with a nice site that I really like. Its not spammy and it has tons of palettes to choose from. They are searchable and easily display the hex for each color in the palette so its a simple matter of copy and paste into my css file. Colour Lovers is the site and I suggest you take a look if you’re interested in finding some good color palettes.

I was working on a site design for a project of mine and had a specific font in mind for part of it. I googled around and had some trouble finding a decent site with free fonts until I found DaFont.com. This site has hundreds of free true type fonts you can download. It was painstaking to manually searching through all these fonts for what I was looking for but I eventually found it. At least this site had enough fonts for me to look through to find what I was looking for and they’re all free too.