I am a designer for a magazine that would like to explore offering content on Flipboard. I am not really an expert on RSS and I was wondering how I should set up my code? I noticed that on the Flipboard site it gives some examples of optimized feeds, but what does that optimization do?
Ive noticed that some RSS content does not have the same page flipping effect and custom fons that some of the big publishers like National Geographic or Buzz Feed. How do I get that page flip and custom fonts? Does that have something to do with the optimization? or is it just because they are big publishers?
Related
I'm an amateur so be gentle. I own a Shopify store and I am in the process of creating a product forum hosted outside of Shopify in Wordpress, using a subdomain. (Why? Because embedding a forum like Tal.ki, didn't quite work so well)
I want to make the transition as smooth as possible when navigating to the forum; ideally the customer wouldn't even know they have left the store. Problem is, my sexy liquid theme from Shopify doesn't play nice with php and wordpress.
Is there anything out there that will convert liquid, particularly for people without an enormous amount of technical skills, like myself.
Thanks in advance
W
I'm no liquid zen master myself, but if I wanted to do what you're describing, I'd take a look at the php port of liquid: https://github.com/harrydeluxe/php-liquid
Without having looked through that carefully, my guess would still be it's not going to be particularly simple to put together the specific solution you've described.
Fwiw, it looks like you can embed disqus in shopify product pages (and therefore elsewhere, I'd presume): http://docs.shopify.com/manual/configuration/store-customization/disqus
Presuming that you largely want customers to be able to discuss particular products, working at it from that angle would probably be an easier path. I can think of a lot of ways that could work well (beyond having disqus threads on specific product pages, you could create shopify pages with or without product collections on them to serve more as discussion hubs, and also integrate that all more easily with the native shopify blogging functionality).
Since you are doing nothing here but "Skinning a forum" to look like your Shopify theme, there is no Liquid for you to even deal with. Your forum HAS NO LIQUID. It is what it is. If you want your forum to look like your Shopify store, just copy your CSS over to the theme and hack at the theme of your forum.
Therefore, this question is off-topic and instead should be asking how to take a set of CSS for one application and apply it to another.
I am making a website which allows people to discuss news topics. I was looking to make like a news feed which shows the most talked about topics and topics followed by users however I am not sure how to do this? As in I can't think of a process to do this and I don't think Rss feed's are the answer, help would be appreciated.
Same here. I am developing a website too and learning how to develop an RSS engine of my own.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/rss/default.stm#mysite
http://www.wikihow.com/Create-an-RSS-Feed
But I need more information. What I know is- RSS feeder itself searches for latest content on the news websites or blogs (by looking at their dates perhaps) and it places the latest post on top. Now the problem is that I am not able to create that. I need to know a lot about RSS and specially XML.
But your problem is different I think. You want to show the trending post on the top. Then, I think you will need to create an algorithm to rank your pages/posts. And this algorithm should evaluate the real hotness of the content. For example a 20 days old post on your website might still be hotter than latest trending news and it might be searched in the top news.
But now the question is how would this algorithm decide whether a post hot or not? Well this can be done on the basis of likes or hearts give to it by users, comments on the page, links in the comments on the page, shares (you can track that), and external links to your post etc etc. Now it's up to you what you will prefer to make your post trending. You can give more weightage to external links or maybe comments or you could set limits to all of these which when reach gives a sign of full success of the post.
Sorry If you don't get it. I was just thinking of the solutions. I really don't know the solution to it already.
I am planning to build a website completely in Flex. All the contents will be static. No DB will be used. Unfortunately I am not building the website for PUMA or NIKE and so SEO is important. There is an overwhelming and confusing information out there about Flex and SEO.
The following is a piece of information I found on the web
" FLEX( Flash ) uses XML as a primary source of content, and XHTML is just a custom XML. The idea is to to use the HTML pages as XML content for the FLEX( Flash ) application. The XML can be read and indexed by the search engines, and it’s also the ideal content source for your FLEX( Flash ) application.' It goes on to explain how this can be done. Is this really that simple. "
Could someone give some credible links. SEO is important for me.
If I'm really worried about SEO, I'm not building my site using Flex, Flash or Silverlight. A large part of SEO comes from the search engines crawling the content on your site's pages and analyzing the links into and out of your site. When you create a site using Flash or Silverlight, you're making it a lot harder for search engines to crawl your content.
If you're determined to use Flex for your website, I would recommend reading:
Revisiting Deep Linking with Flex from Jonathon Campos's blog
How to make your hot new RIA friendly to search engines from Josh Tynjala
Search Engine Optimization Technology Center by Adobe Developer Connection (Lots of resources here)
You'll also want to make your URLs as SEO friendly as possible (ex. http://www.yoursite.com/articles/my-article-about-flex/).
I wrote a trivia game in Flex (flash). The site is written entirely in Flex. Almost all of the text is pulled from a database. It also has a fair number of images. The image file paths are pulled from the db.
My site's not getting any hits. If I check on google site:mysite it the url appears only. I know that inbound links are important and I'll try to get some. At the moment, I don't have any inbound links. In google webmaster tools, if I look under the site's keywords, there are 0. My sites been up for about a month.
Any suggestions on how to improve this situation?
(I've seen a few people ask for help with Flash SEO and the comments tended to be of the "don't use Flash" variety-- which aren't too helpful if you've written something in Flex/Flash).
Thank you.
-Laxmidi
Check out this article: Read Here
SEO FLASH PROGRAMMING
My recommended Flash SEO method uses a
DIV with search-engine-accessible,
primary content, and an open source
Javascript function called swfobject()
to detect when browsers are capable of
viewing Flash. When an appropriate
version of Flash player is present,
the Javascript manipulates the page's
document object model (DOM) to replace
the primary content with the Flash
movie. Most search engine spiders
can't handle Flash, so they will elect
to view the primary content. The
primary content may contain links,
headings, styled text, images—anything
we can add to an ordinary HTML page.
With SEO copyediting and coding skills
applied to the primary content, Flash
becomes a non-issue.
Flash accessibility programming isn't
spamming, as long as the primary
content and the visible movie are
essentially the same. The World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility
Initiative (WAI) specifically states
that multimedia content should have an
alternative representation available.
Accessibility programming creates the
benefit of presenting visual
information without losing the
visitors and search engines who depend
upon textual content.
As of July 2007, I discussed this
method with Dan Crow of Google. He
warned that this programming method
could draw attention because of the
possibility for abuse. If you use this
method, make sure the alternative
content is a faithful representation
of the Flash content, and avoid
combining this with other coding
methods that could be abused. While
this SEO method is not abusive, it is
aggressive because there is a small
risk that the search engines could
mistakenly decide that the primary
content is a form of cloaking.
I would also create a sitemap and link to multiple keyword rich landing pages about your game with a link back to the game. The more content google has to bite into the better changes someone will find you.
You also need to market your site...just because you build it doesn't mean they will come. Use twitter, facebook and any other form of social media to get the word out. You may also try buying a few bucks worth of ad words to start the ball rolling.
The solution to only the url appearing in Google is probably as simple as adding a meta description tag.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=79812
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/improve-snippets-with-meta-description.html
It would also probably be beneficial to provide a description or instructions for the trivia game in HTML alongside the Flex part of the website, if this is possible.
I have a real estate agent client who wants a website to list the properties he's selling. Although there are great 3rd party web apps out there that do this, he adamantly demands that I recreate a simple and custom website for him.
I can do this quickly with a php framework like Code Igniter that comes with MVC, data access objects and data bind controllers. The database would be straightforward:
t_page: generic content pages
t_property: for each property on the market, has fields like address, price, #of bed rooms etc..
However, the client has heard many great things about Wordpress, and strongly advises that I build his real estate site with it. I've only used Wordpress to create blogs and relatively straightforward websites. SO I dont know how effective it is as a real estate property content management system or how effective it is for users to search for real estate properties based on attributes such as "# of bedrooms, square footage, is basement finished etc..."
So my question is, is it a good idea to build a real estate agent website with Wordpress? Or should I try harder to convince him to build it with web framework like Code Igniter?
Rather than argue with your client about the future platform or CMS or listen to people for/opposed to WP out of principle, sit down with your client and map out exactly what he/she wants to do in terms of the site. How do they want to add material or blog posts? How easy should it be? How do they they want users to be able to search: by price range, location, etc? Get them to show you on other sites how they want things to work.
Then look at the capabilities of various CMS's, frameworks and the like. Investigate search and MLS plugins, property XML feeds, maps. Determine what other real estate sites use (esp. his/her competitors).
Then explain your decision with evidence as to what they want to do compared to what's possible with different systems. They may talk themselves in or out of systems without your help.
It's called working with a client so they get what they want in terms of usability and end-user functions, not imposing what you want on their project. Sure, you know what you are talking about in terms of getting things to work, but they don't care; they want it to work in a certain way: their way.
(And see what's already out there in terms of Real Estate WordPress Plugins and WordPress Real Estate Themes).
I've developed several real estate sites using Joomla and openRealty, and I have tried to create a decent real estate site for my wife using Wordpress due to it's ease of use for end-users, but unfortunately programming a real estate site in Wordpress is tricky. It's a blogging engine and not terribly good at "directory" based information. So I find that the ease of use goes out the window as you try to hack together real estate functionality. Then you are asking your end-users to create custom-fields, etc and it becomes a pain and you end spending too much time managing your end-users.
I love WP. But, a directory style site is not it's highest and best use.
If the client is so adamant that you use WP for his site then let him do it. Then wait till he comes crawling back to you when he can't get it to do what he wants and you can build in properly in CI.
You wouldn't tell a plumber to fix your toilet with a socket set...
Check out ExpressionEngine, it's perfect for this as you can create custom fields (# bedrooms, square footage etc.) and retrieve content by any of these custom fields using the {exp:channel:entries} tag.
So basically you'd create a channel for these listings and then use "custom fields" for the data about each of these listings (specified by the needs of your client).
If you need design for this site "City Guide" from WooThemes will be available for EE as of tonight ;-)
And since you mention CodeIgniter - EE 2.0 is built on CI and if you need some custom functionality it's all CI so that should feel like home.
Wordpress custom post types would work well for this sort of site.. A custom page template and modified WP_Query would provide the basis of the site.
As mentioned by everyone else, WP probably isn't the absolute best tool for the job, but it would not be a bad choice. I've done weirder things with it.
Old question but still relevant. My opinion is that WordPress is not a good option for creating real estate listing sites. The main reason is that it is designed primarily as a blogging engine so it requires a lot of work to set up and is susceptible to getting hacked. More detailed explanation here:
https://smallbusinessforum.co/why-an-alternative-to-wordpress-is-needed-for-real-estate-websites-ff82de096d93#.j2cduk4xs
I think that using Wordpress is a plus, not because it is the best program to use, but if you make the site properly, and he wants to add/change something, you (and many other people out there) can mold it to his needs.
There are a lot of plugins you could extract some php code from and make a good listing. You also have the option of using post_types (which are saved as posts), custom fields (which all the fields are saved in one table but indexed), or creating your own tables (adding tables function or using a plugin like PODS).
I think you will save time on coding if you go with Wordpress, and customization is pretty okay (not anywhere near decent, but I am pretty sure this site will be the next craigslist). Wordpress is the 1995 Toyota Tercel of CMSs: it won't be great, but it gets the job done, and almost everyone has worked on it at some point in their live.
If the money is good, then try to wow him with a CI demo. But with WP, could probably accomplish your task in a few hours. There are ways to set up CI around Wordpress, but that is beyond me.