The tricky part was extracting the right info from the Reader page. The Delicious API makes it easy to post new bookmarks. It would be straightforward to mod the script to post Reader stars to other apps with decent APIs — perhaps Twitter (api), FriendFeed (api), Facebook (api), what have you.

Update: found really well done existing Google Reader To Twitter script: http://userscripts.org/script/show/10169
Update II: also check out JetPack, a just-released Mozilla project that promises to do what GM does, only slicker and easier: http://labs.mozilla.com/2009/05/introducing-jetpack-call-for-participation/. Looks promising.

Technorati Tags: api, Delicious, facebook, ffox, firefox, friendfeed, google-reader, greasemonkey, jet pack, jetpack, jquery, mozilla, twitter, userscripts

• GreaseMonkey: Hacking Web Apps So They Work The Way YOU Want GreaseMonkey lets you change how other people's web pages look and how they function -- just in your own browser,...

What this means is that GreaseMonkey lets you change how other people’s web pages look and how they function (but just in your own browser, of course).

I last played with GreaseMonkey (GM) about four years ago. Then, I didn’t find the idea compelling. Today, with ever more applications going online, GM is worth a serious look.

GM can increase productivity by making web apps easier to use.

Even more interesting, GM also lets you add functionality to web pages. Here’s a small example. I use Delicious to bookmark sites. I used Google Reader to read blogs, and I tag interesting posts with Reader’s “gold star” button. Via a few lines of GM code, Google Reader now sends my starred items to Delicious automatically. This improvement keeps all my interesting links in one place.

GM works on intranets, too.

Suppose you’re an online retailer and your merchants use an intranet app to enter product information for your site. Suppose that app had some UI annoying issues, like extra confirmation screens after entering each product (“Are you sure you want to add the following?”) If your vendor or your internal IT folks can’t (or wont) change the app, you could use GM to skip the unnecessary page.

Or perhaps your call center staff uses an intranet app for order entry. If they’re retyping or pasting telephone data from phone pop into the order entry app on each call, perhaps the phone app could write its data to a local file (maybe) which GM then used to prepopulate fields in order app.

A GM script could even prepopulate web app fields from database lookups (you’d need to expose the necessary data via some simple restful url, behind the firewall).

Certainly hacky, certainly not ‘beautiful’ engineering, but GM opens up interesting possibilities.

Here are the GM pros and cons as I see them.

Pros:

• Javascript. GM code is just Javascript code. Any developers familiar with Javascript and the DOM can write GM scripts.
• User scripts. If you’re seeking a common sense improvement to a popular site, someone probably has already written a GM script to do it. For example, here are popular scripts tweaking Google sites.
• Cross-site scripting. Unlike the security model in common AJAX, GM code can access the entire web: “Unlike the XMLHttpRequest object, GM_xmlhttpRequest is not restricted to the current domain; it can GET or POST data from any URL” (from DiveIntoGreaseMonkey). This is very powerful.

Cons:

• Scraping stinks. Fundamentally, GM is screen-scraping. Yuck. If your target site changes their design, your GM script probably croaks.
• Ffox preferred. GM runs best in Firefox. Some GM scripts run on Chrome, but some do not. (Specifically Chrome does not support the GM_ functions, including GM_xmlhttpRequest.). Here’s info on the “–enablegreasemonkey” flag in Chrome, and here’s info on GreaseMetal . I’ve not used it, but IE has GM4IE.
• Reality warp. If you forget you have GM turned on, or if you assume GM is on when it isn’t, or if you switch to a computer without GM, you can get confused when a familiar web page behaves “strangely.”
• Debugging. Sometimes it is hard to understand why a GM script isn’t working. Firebug is essential.
• Local install. The GM extension and scripts are installed locally, not in the cloud. Installing them on your laptop doesn’t put them on your desktop, etc. Script updates need to be maintained on each machine.

And here are some GM links I found useful.

• Get GreaseMonkey: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
• GreaseMonkey User Scripts Repository: http://userscripts.org/
• GreaseFire automatically checks userscripts.org for scripts for current page https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8352
• GreaseMetal is GM for Google Chrome, almost: http://greasemetal.31tools.com/
• JQuery. Easiest way to reach what you seek in the DOM: http://jquery.com/
• Firebug. Utterly essential FFox plugin for web development: http://getfirebug.com/
• “Dive Into GreaseMonkey” is a comprehensive, well-written, free online reference for GM: http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/toc/.
  Kudos to Mark Pilgrim for this great resource.

Any readers out there using GreaseMonkey for business purposes?

Technorati Tags: chrome, Delicious, diveintogreasemonkey, enablegreasemonkey, ffox, firebug, gm4ie, GM_xmlhttpRequest, greasefire, greasemetal, greasemonkey, jquery, mark pilgrim

• GreaseMonkey: Google Reader Gold Stars Automatically Post To Delicious Mentioned earlier, the GreaseMonkey script which pushes starred items from Google Reader into Delicious....

This is isn’t a big deal for online retail yet, but it will be, in the next 6 to 18 months.

Today, HTML markup is about how data should be presented. By tagging elements on a HTML page with standard class names, microformats are about what data mean. Microformats will form the foundation of “Web 3.0″, aka the Semantic Web.

Google is starting with microformats for people (hCard) and reviews (hReview).

It seems clear Google support for the SKU microformat (hProduct) is coming soon, as there’s already documentation for it on Google WebMaster Central.

What will this mean to online retailers long-term?

• The first retailers to add hProduct tags to their product pages will enjoy an early sales advantage, as Google will present their products first because of the extra data.
• The advantage will be short-lived, as large retailers and standard e-commerce platforms will quickly jump on the band wagon.
• Retailers will chafe at the simplicity of the format. hProduct doesn’t encompass shipping, tax, bundled pricing, or even UPC. Argh. When Google miscategorizes or misprices your product atop their SERP, get ready for additional customer service calls.
• hProduct markup is essentially a product data feed, albeit with limited fields. Google’s current product search hasn’t gained much traction, but widespread hProduct data will help Google disintermediate the shopping comparison engines.
• Long term, hProduct markup will increase consumer perception of Google-as-store, eroding weaker retail brands (see “search engines atomize retailer brands”, halfway down this post.) Building a strong well-defined brand is key.
• When Google presents more SKU-centric multi-merchant data on the top left of the page, paid search on the top right becomes more crucial to get your link in front of shoppers. The paid search core competencies –optimal bidding, extensive keywords, and solid “why-shop” copy — become even more important.

What should online retailers be doing about this today?

I’d recommend keeping a close eye for mentions of hProduct on the WebMaster Central Blog.

I’d also recommend planning to add hProduct tags to your SKU pages, probably by late ‘09 or early ‘10. (Here’s the link the Google hProduct documentation again.)

For better or worse, this is where online retail is heading, and your marketing and merchandising teams will benefit from being there at the beginning.

Technorati Tags: data feed, Google, hcard, hproduct, hreview, microformat, online-retail, upc

• Geographic Impact of PPC Part 2: Retail Chains Part 2 of our study: much of the conventional wisdom around paid search driving store sales may be wrong....

There are many different types of Paid Search agencies. Some rely on the engine’s UI and spreadsheets to do their work, the more sophisticated have either built or rented a tool set to use for bidding, ad management, etc. Some in this last category expose their UI to their clients, while others, like RKG, use their proprietary tools on behalf of their clients.

The tool providers call around and offer tours of their products and I usually take them up on it…once. It’s always interesting to see where others are in the evolution of the industry. Most of these tools do the basics very well and would be a huge help to an agency just wading into the space.

That said, on the all important analytic front the best of these systems is about where RKG was in 2005 — not bad, but nowhere near where we are today. Sometimes they ask: “what would RKG need to see in this tool that would make you seriously consider switching?” “A reflection of my corpse.” is my honest, but not so helpful response.

Without going into the underlying statistics, the data architecture, methodology and other important differences the biggest weakness is perhaps in the limitations of the UI. I’m not talking about specific features that are missing, I’m talking the limitations inherent in any UI.

I’ll show you a screen shot of the most powerful piece of RKG’s UI:

Yep, it’s just a blank query window. In that nothingness, our analysts have the flexibility to find and do anything and everything. The power to custom-craft any data, any analysis, any bidding enhancement to fit just the ads and data you intend cannot be hard-coded into a UI.

The drawback to infinite flexibility and that power that comes with it is that we can’t expose our UI to our clients, and we have to hire remarkably sharp people who can learn to be power SQL users and train them. We’ve had to grow slowly relative to others — still 315 on the Inc 500 list, but — and only recently moved from having one full-time sales person to having 2.5 FTEs on Marketing/Sales/PR.

We think the benefits far outweigh these inconveniences. As I’ve argued before, you can’t lead in this space if you’re using the same core technology as others; the ability to add features and tools as needed is irreplaceable, and the power and flexibility gained by having thoroughly trained sharp analysts with the power to code anything they need into the system cannot be supplanted.

It is easier to follow a different path, but we think we’ve found the right one for our firm.

Technorati Tags: Automated PPC, Paid Search analytics, PPC bidding technology

We ran an analysis to show the year over year performance trends over the last 7 months or so. We took data from our 40 largest retail clients, and tracked the median of the year over year performance differentials in several different areas. For comparative purposes, we simply divided this years’ numbers by last year’s. 100% represents the previous year’s performance level that week. As the graph shows, the numbers are discouraging.

While a number of our clients asked us to sacrifice efficiency for top line sales in the early part of the downturn, most have chosen to pull back at this point and protect the bottom line.

We hit a wall around Week 37 of 2008 at about a 20% Year over Year drop-off in sales and costs, and those numbers have gotten slightly worse since Christmas.

Let’s peel the onion to figure out exactly how the economic downturn has impacted paid search.

Pretty clearly there are three possible mechanisms that contribute to a decline:

1. Decline in Sales per Click: if a smaller fraction of visitors through PPC ads make a purchase or the revenue per sale drops, or both then a retailer will generate fewer sales.
2. Competitive Pressures: if declining sales per click force an advertiser to lower its bids more than its competitors, the advertiser will drop down the page and get fewer clicks per search.
3. Fewer searches: tightening wallets may affect user behavior in another way. In addition to potentially lower Conversion Rates and AOV, one may well see fewer searches in general.

Take a look at the following graph showing YOY Conversion Rates and Average Order Values on competitive search. For consistency we’re just comparing Adwords to Adwords.

There’s some fascinating stuff here. First, note that late in the Holiday season, AOVs were pretty close to ‘07 numbers for most of our clients, but the conversion rate suffered. Since the start of the new year the problem has reversed: conversion rates are about where they were in early 2008, but the AOVs are off 10% or so.

Revenue per visitor is part of the problem, but by itself it’s not the whole picture.

Could it be the competitive landscape? Are our clients having to pull back more than their competitors hence getting a smaller share of what’s available?

This suggests that our clients were about half a position lower than the previous year for much of the holiday season, but are actually higher on the page than they were last year at the same time. Averages lie, and medians of averages are a pretty squishy measure, but this suggests to me that our clients (and our analysts) have reacted appropriately to the landscape and efficiency needs, and that they’re not totally out in left field compared to their competitor’s reactions.

Competitive pressures may have impacted Q4 slightly, but don’t explain the YoY drop in Q1 at all for our client set.

This leads us to the last explanation: traffic volume. Are there just fewer people out there searching for our clients’ goods and services? Unfortunately this is among the hardest factors to gauge. Because of match-type and network partnership shenanigans, impressions aren’t an accurate measure of anything. Click volumes are impacted by position on the page, so that’s not the right measure either.

Instead, we picked “brand” traffic as a proxy. Figuring that our ads are in position 1 on our client’s trademarks always, the traffic and sales volumes coming off of brand search may indicate general levels of demand as well as anything. This is far from perfect. Probably very far. Brand search is largely a function of other offline marketing efforts as well as loyal customers, so as our clients pull back on those efforts Brand sales may fluctuate. Also, customers may be more inclined to latch onto those organic links to affiliates promising discounts on retailer’s brand names.

With those caveats understood:

This suggests to us that the main cause of decline is simply fewer people shopping. The people who are shopping are spending less, but the biggest dent has come from traffic.

We remain optimistic that these numbers will turn this summer and we’ll start seeing growth again in Q3, but it could be a rough ride between now and then.

We wish everyone the best of luck in these trying times.

Technorati Tags: PPC Q1 performance, PPC-Benchmarks

We’ve followed the principle that one great programmer is worth 100 mediocre programmers. That approach has borne tremendous fruit, but it does make finding folks challenging.

We’re a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl) shop, and while we prefer folks with some Linux background and some database skills, primary language is not a concern. A great programmer can learn perl.

We practice Object Oriented design and test-driven development.

If this sounds like you, or someone you know, please drop us a resume! Charlottesville Virginia is a beautiful place!

Also, have any of you had success hiring engineers through head hunters?

Technorati Tags: Charlottesville IT jobs, virginia software engineers

We have an old Windows XP computer at home which suddenly crashed this weekend, booting directly to the infamous “blue screen of death”.

The computer held many of our family’s digital pictures and my wife’s ITunes. Ouch.

Just restore from a recent backup, right? Yeah, right. Ouch.

And most of the online advice for dealing with this problem begins, “Boot using your Windows Recovery Disk…” No clue where those OS disks went. Ouch again.

So, I tried the Linux recovery disk approach and it worked great.

Here are the steps, should these notes help someone else:

1. On a working computer, download an ISO burner. I chose the free open-source InfraRecorder.
2. Download a Knoppix Linux ISO. Pick a mirror near you, and grab the most recent image. I took this one: KNOPPIX_V5.1.1CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso. The file should be big, roughly 700meg. Downloading it could take a few hours, so do something fun meanwhile.
3. Use the ISO burner to burn the image to a new CD. Don’t copy the file to the CD; you need to burn it as an image. With InfraRecorder, choose Actions >> Burn Image. Label the CD “Knoppix Rescue CD”.
4. Boot the sick computer. While it boots, quickly hit F12 (if a Dell, otherwise follow the instructions on the boot screen) to reach the Boot Device Menu.
5. Put the ISO disk in the sick computer’s CD ROM drive.
6. Select the “Boot from Onboard or USB CD-ROM Drive” option on the Boot Menu, and hit return.
7. If all works well, in a few minutes the computer presents a knoppix desktop environment.
8. You should see some harddrives on the screen. In my case, it mounted the tiny Dell rescue partition as /dev/sda1, and it mounted the sick Windows XP C: drive (NTFS) as /dev/sda2.
9. I could then click into sda2 >> Documents and Settings >> Alan >> My Documents
10. My initial plan was to plug in a USB 250gig external harddrive into the sick computer, then drag the photos and music files we wanted onto that external drive. No luck — Linux insisted on mounting that drive as read-only. I tried to fiddle with /etc/fstab but gave up pretty quickly.
11. Instead, I started up Samba through Knoppix. Leftmost bottom navbar Knoppix Icon >> ‘KNOPPIX’ submenu >> Services >> Start Samba Server. Pick a simple password for the ‘knoppix’ samba user.
12. When asked, “Export all harddrives so they can be mounted, read, and written from the remote machine?”, choose “yes”
13. Pull up a shell (the black monitor icon on the bottom navbar).
14. Enter “ifconfig” to determine the sick computer’s IP address. It will likely be something like “192.168.0.xx”. Write down that IP.
15. On the healthy computer (on the local network), go to Windows Start >> Run and then enter the IP address from the prior step.
16. You should then get a request for a user name password. Enter “knoppix” and whatever password you choose.
17. If everything worked, you can use the healthy computer to drag important files from the sick computer onto the healthy computer, or onto an external harddrive. Whew!
18. With your files safe, now get the sick computer fixed — reinstall Windows, replace the harddrive, whatever.

Good luck!

Technorati Tags: blue screen of death, boot, dead computer, knoppix, recover, windows xp

These (and many other well-engineered sites) have been compromised by XSS and CSRF attacks in the last 18 months.

Here’s an excellent technical powerpoint discussing these newer categories of security threats.

Whether you are running home-brew code or using a third party platform, your site faces these dangers.

Marketing folks, check with your technical teams to ensure your site is doing all it can to avoid these vulnerabilities.

Technorati Tags: Business, Code

If you didn’t see this yet, check it out: Google Webmaster Tools (free and highly recommended) now provides a report of inbound links pointing to nonexistent pages to your site.

Inbound links drive traffic and rankings. Inbound links are precious. Allowing inbound links to fail on nonexistent pages is a marketing crime.

Once you’ve found your inbound broken links, you can contact the site linking to you to fix them. Smarter: handle it on your side, routing the traffic where you want to send it by (re)creating the appropriate page. Smarter still: issue a 301 permanently moved redirect and flip the traffic to where it should go.

Ignore broken inbound links long enough and they’ll go away. Bad. Sad.

Thanks, Google engineers, for these valuable data.

Link: Helping Website Owners Fix Broken Links, GoogleBlog

Technorati Tags: Code, SEO

November 14 through 16, 2008, in our beautiful home town, Charlottesville, Virginia.

If you’re in the area and advanced database topics quicken your pulse, check it out.

Link: OpenSQL Camp

Technorati Tags: Code, mysql, open-source, opensql