The alternative is using non-WordPress third party services of which there are many. There are some impressive ones out there such as SurveyMonkey, Urtak and ProProfs. They are simple to use, have various styling options and are easy to sign up for, with reasonable pricing. But there’s too much detracting me:

- I want to keep it lowcost and not be perpetually tied to a cost model.

- I don’t want a third party to hold my data, I’d rather have it completely under my control / housed on our own  hosting servers

- I want to be able to create complex forms and modify them when most services – while flexible – have their limits.

- I need the ability to apply weighted scoring

- I need to customize the types of scoring methods

- I want to have different choices in the way a form is processed ( create a report with processed feedback for example )

- I don’t want to rely on a service that can disappear overnight, change their terms of services on the fly or access my data.

So naturally I’m looking at WordPress and I’ve decided to start development on a powerful form plugin to handle complex surveys that can be used for researchers, psychologists, coaches, talent hunters, assessment processors, lead generators and just about anybody that requires advanced types of surveys.

The benefit of creating it as an Open Source WordPress plugin is that users can run it on their own websites and make their own changes.

Currently, we would love to attract funders, partners or developers to aid the development by contributing financially or with ideas. If you are interested in being involved let me know. As of yet, I haven’t decided whether this will be an inhouse plugin only or if it will be released to the public, commercially or otherwise. If you become involved you will have a say.

A sneakpeek at some of the attractive features that will highlight the plugin:

- Facebook integration: run surveys inside facebook
- Advanced weighted scoring
- Mobile Friendly
- API for creating and processing forms dynamically
- Easy to use interface

Much needed improvements in the way excerpts were handled headline the latest update. I have added the ability to set a character limit for the excerpt to be used for this widget. The great thing about this is that designers can make sure an excerpt fits within the right dimensions, as cutting an excerpt off by words is clumsy. Another benefit is that you can vary the excerpt length as this plugin uses a custom field to store the excerpt (although it can display the regular excerpt field as well).

Another area I concentrated on was getting the plugin to work well with the magnificent Front-End editor. The front-end editor makes it even easier to manage the widgets. Having said that, you can control some of the widget’s display from the edit post/page screen as well.

A helpful addition is that my plugin adds the post or page id into the columns on the ‘manage pages’ and ‘manage posts’ screen. That way it is much easier to quickly identify the id needed for the widget.

What I’m going to concentrate on next is putting up more documentation and example uses.

There was a lot of code added so some small bugs might have crept in, even after testing. Version 0.5 shouldn’t be far of to take care of any issues users are having. If you find any bugs, or have feature suggestions, let me know.

Do I need an indexing tool or software like Traffic Bug to get my website indexed by the Search Engines?

In the Thirty Day Challenge, a popular internet marketing course , a tool called Traffic Bug is recommended to facilitate fast indexing of webpages. Traffic Bug claims to do many things, but basically is aimed to automate a host of activities internet marketers want to perform, like social bookmarking, article submission, rss submissions and more. It does so by submitting your articles and information to a wide array of social networks and directories automatically and cuts out the time needed to create individual profiles and perform manual submissions for each website.

While the Traffic Bug website claims to build your website back links on autopilot, which has been a hotly debated promise in itself, the Thirty Day Challenge Team lead by Ed Dale encourages the use of traffic bug simply as an ‘Indexing Tool’.

The theory is, if you make enough noise on a number of websites, you will get noticed quickly and Google & co will index your website fast.

But really, do we need a solution like Traffic Bug just to get our websites indexed? Do we need a sophisticated automation tool that sends out our content to a massive array of websites, just to get noticed by Google? And do we need to pay for a tool like this?

Do we need all this noise, just to get a page indexed?

Answer: NO

Saying otherwise is a ‘Bastion Of Bullshit’. Sorry Ed Dale.

It’s really dead easy to get indexed and found by Google if you have a brand new website. You can cough and your site will get found. All it really takes is a one decent link pointing to your website from a place that is already indexed and that gets crawled regularly.  In half the time it takes to enter your information into a tool like traffic bug, you could have placed a link on the web which would have done the same job with a great deal more elegance, without having to get close to the grey area of spam – which a tool like Traffic Bug is easily abused for.

So why does Internet Millionaire and Internet Marketing Guru Ed Dale and his loyal 30DC crew promote Traffic Bug as an indexing tool?

I have NO IDEA.

And I have no idea why they endorse Traffic Bug despite an obvious trail of legitimate misgivings around the service. All I know that it makes them look foolish and it definitely helps confuse internet marketing beginners.

There a dozens and dozens of better, cheaper and faster ways to get indexed than Traffic Bug (here are a few great ones), save yourself the time, money and the risk of getting your site noticed in negative ways. You don’t need ‘special tools’ to get your webpages indexed.

In other news, I pushed out an update to the Super Post and Page Widget plugin to fix two bugs. The current version is v0.3. and can be downloaded from the wordpress plugin repository.

How does Google Social Search impact search engine marketing?

While it’s still early to tell here are some initial impressions:

1) Google is competing with facebook and utilizing the social web in a very clever way

2) Social Search is another opportunity for ordinary people, social media mavens, experts and marketers to influence who ever they can connect with.

3) In search engine optimisation world, it is evident that:

Saying you are #1 in google is not what it used to be….

Now that search results pages are becoming increasingly varied depending on who is searching, where they are searching, what they have searched before and what their social connections have voted on, it is harder to talk about static search positions and near impossible to track reliable rankings for webpages.

Organic search ranking positions outside the top 3 are more and more liable to be replaced by richer search results coming from video search, news results, blog results, image results and social circle results.

4) The value of creating high quality content is more lucrative than ever. With search results being influenced by your social network and by social media activity in general, crappy content will sink to the bottom and hopefully great content will float to the top more reliably than before.

5) Marketing and promoting without a presence on relevant social networks is not to be advised. Find out where your customers are online and be a participant there!

6) People with huge networks and followings just gained a lot of potential influence… too much influence?

Once the new design of this site goes live you will be able to see why this plugin is so good.

update notes:
= 0.2 =
* added automatic themesupport for thumbnail features introduced in wp 2.9
* added automatic page excerpts support
* added functionality to give links a name tag
* improved overall functionality
* option to enable or disable title link
* option to use custom field as the content
* updated 01/31/2010 23:39

Read more about the super page and post widget plugin here

I have been wrapping up a website audit for a restaurant and geolocation services are a hot topic in that field. In my report I mention possible developments and before I even publish, these developments are already taking place. Loopt just stepped up the competition in geolocation. It’s competing with Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla and has made a big move by tightly integrating with Facebook. This is a huge move by Loopt with a real chance at creating a big advantage in the geolocation realm because they leverage facebook which already has over 300 million users. If you are a local business, now is the time to investigate and invest in a presence at Loopt.

Quix is compatible with just about every browser so supplying a keyboard shortcut out of the box might be tricky. I favour Chrome for browsing so I went to look for a keyboard shortcut I could use with that browser. I found the chrome extension Bookmarks Bar Keyboard Shortcuts , which gives you keyboard shortcuts for your bookmarks bar’ first ten bookmarks.

If you want to get really fancy, you can even map it to a hotkey if you have a keyboard with hotkeys. I personally use the logitech g11. It’s labelled a gaming keyboard but it’s a fantastic keyboard for web professionals because of the multitude of short keys that you can map out to perform various functions. I haven’t seen a keyboard with more hotkeys than the G11. It’s a huge time saver and so is Quix. I can bring up Quix at the click of a button, with that Quix becomes even sweeter.

Spam at the speed of thought

It’s very hard to prevent and police the spam with the technologies that now operate the searchengines and social sites. If we want instant updates, we also live with the danger that some will take advantage of it. If you search for certain haiti related terms, there are some malware sites ranking incredibly high. Some links on sites like twitter go to sites that will try to trick you out of money. How low can you go? Even well meaning people can have a negative effect. A Facebook post in my stream ‘said 3 million dead’, which is a gross overstatement and can induce stress by it self. Our collective emotional response to such traumas will amplify uncertainty, but on the long term, as we become used to it, something even worse might happen: we might actually become dull to events like these.

The better question is what we can do to somewhat improve the matter

There is one thing I can think of that addresses the issue of shortened links that are often used to conceal destinations with inappropriate intentions. Link shortening services should start crawling the destinations of these links and checking for the most common forms of spam and risk factors in real time. Link previews aren’t good enough.

The other way to counter spammers making use of trends is to actively employ people to monitor the real time results so we can much quicker get rid of bad links and bad websites. That shouldn’t be impossible to do since the amount of trending topics are within a manageable range.

one bookmarklet to rule them all!