New Website Protects Usernames From Social Media Identity Theft
April 20, 2009 | Barry Wise | Press Releases, Social Media
29 Comments
KnowEm.com launched a new web service today which monitors hundreds of popular websites for social media identity theft. By entering a username, which can be a brand name, internet identity, or vanity URL, KnowEm.com allows you to instantly monitor the availability of that username on over 120 popular social media websites such as Twitter, MySpace and Digg.
The April Google PageRank Update and Why I Don’t Care (But You Do)
April 2, 2009 | Barry Wise | Search Engine Optimization
50 Comments
Over the course of yesterday and today Google updated it’s Toolbar PageRanks for websites. I would like to say that’s awesome, because BarryWise.com is now a PageRank 5, but the truth is I really don’t care. When I first started working on this blog in May of last year the PageRank was 0. That was a little less than a year ago; I said I would raise the PageRank and I did. But the truth is the traffic and exposure which this blog has gotten over the course of the past year has not correlated with the PageRank increases.
Completed Another Social Networking Tool: CheckUserNames.com
February 27, 2009 | Barry Wise | News, Press Releases
21 Comments
This one is (a little) more useful than TweetWasters. My new site, CheckUserNames.com, allows you to check the availability of your potential new username across dozens of popular social networking sites (MySpace, Delicious, LinkedIn, etc.). Due to the increasing demand for staking your claim on your brand name across the interwebz, this little tool should come in handy for some of you.
ITCN Releases Youtuber2 Plugin for WordPress
February 9, 2009 | Barry Wise | News, Press Releases
12 Comments
Today ITCN announced the release of their new modification to Roy Tanck’s Youtuber, which we’ve decided to name Youtuber2. It is heavily based on his code, and works very similar. In order to embed a Youtube video in your Wordress posts, it uses the same syntax, but has several more options.
Global Find and Replace In WordPress using MySQL
February 4, 2009 | Barry Wise | Code Samples, Database
28 Comments
In case you ever need to find and replace a text string in every post or page of your Wordpress site, this SQL code will help you out. I recently had to move a client’s website from staging into production, and just when I was getting ready to publish the new site I realized Wordpress’s HTML editor had hard-coded the URLs of every image in every post to the address of the staging server. This is actually a feature of Wordpress; when you upload an image into a post or page it uses an absolute URL, not a relative one. This really helps you out if any of your posts get picked up via RSS and published elsewhere, since the images will remain intact thanks to the absolute URLs.
My Top 10 SEO Techniques for Small Business Website SEO/SEM Success
January 8, 2009 | Barry Wise | Search Engine Optimization, Web Design
81 Comments
I’ve been getting a lot more requests from small businesses for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and I seem to be repeating most of the same advice to every new client. Put simply, it is more difficult for small businesses to compete on a global level for competitive terms with high profile companies, especially on a small business budget. But that doesn’t mean with hard work and determination that you can’t be competitive and build and market your brand successfully.
So presented here are the top 10 suggestions I make to just about every new SEO or SEM small business client that comes to me looking for online marketing assistance:
Google December Pagerank Update for the 2009 New Year
December 31, 2008 | Barry Wise | News, Search Engine Optimization
30 Comments
Since I’ve put up a blog post every other time Google updated it’s toolbar PageRank, I might as well not make tonight’s any different. The final quarterly PageRank update for 2008 is here, and (for me, at least) it’s been extremely friendly. I no longer have a client or a site with a PageRank of less than 4, and I’ve helped several sites up to 5 or 6.
But PageRank is Pointless
For All You Twitterers: We Launched Tweetwasters.com Today
December 12, 2008 | Barry Wise | News, Web Design
17 Comments
Whew, it’s been a hectic morning! Sugarrae, Streko, Reese and I have been working together to launch Tweetwasters.com, and we just shipped it out the door a few hours ago. It’s a pretty simple application – it just polls the Twitter API to count how many status updates (ugh, do I have to call them “Tweets”?) you’ve posted to Twitter. Then we do some high-end mathematical computations to figure out just how much time you’ve wasted on Twitter — assuming you spend about 30 seconds on average every time you send in a new a tweet.
