MadLab Media is here for you because, while social media marketing is simple in concept, you’ll need some serious know-how put into the job to make your company stand out . . . (and a few little tricks some mad scientists can cook up are helpful too). So let us help get you past that wall and onto better things.

Get in touch with us about that job that’s just over your head and we’ll get back to you shortly.

We’d love to hear from you!

While paid advertising is essential, social networking is a new and exciting opportunity to further develop your business. Did you know more than 800 million people are active users of Facebook, more than 50 million actively use Twitter and you can connect with them about your company and products? That’s millions of potential customers! Learning how to use these new opportunities now gives you a competitive edge over your competitors who wait until later, or choose not to join in.

Simply create a profile page for your business on Facebook and sign up for a Twitter account. It’s fast, easy and free.

Click here to create your page on Facebook and sign-up for your Twitter account here.

One important aspect to the strategy of successfully using social networking to your advantage is content. Quality and quantity are important. By consistently adding content to your Facebook or Twitter page you will constantly be flickering through the minds of passers-by. Catch their attention. Hold it. Make them remember you. If they like what they’ve read from you in the past they’ll take a moment to read your new update or status in the future.

Much of the social marketing world is an online version of word-of-mouth advertising, which is the most powerful kind — powerful because it’s based on trust. If your friend “likes” a hair salon on Facebook or follows them on Twitter and you’re unhappy with the salon you’ve gone to for years, won’t you consider trying theirs out because you trust and value your friend’s opinion? I thought so.

While social networking is an effective outlet for you to tell the world about your services remember that the effectiveness in the long run is solely dependent on your service. News about your company will spread whether it’s good or bad—it will spread the quickest if it’s exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. When companies treat their customers remarkably well and offer great products the talk going around will match the outstanding service.

It’s a general rule for me that if I’m installing WordPress on a host I’m not familiar with, I will not use the automatic script but instead will opt to install manually.

Side Note: When at all possible, we try to use WebFaction for hosting – we’ve been using WebFaction here at Mad Lab for all our hosting for a few years now, and especially for our Django and WordPress projects, WebFaction has been nothing short of fantastic. If you’re looking for a host, give them a try. Their control panels aren’t exactly the most intuitive as they’re geared towards the more tech savvy customer, but their customer support is second to none. Final disclaimer: if you do sign up, please.use one of the links in this paragraph, and Mad Lab gets a tiny cut of what you spend. In closing, USE THIS LINK.

So back to it. Network Solutions forces WordPress into a subdirectory, which can wreak havoc with your .htaccess rewrites (I know it can be done, but why complicate matters?). So in order to put WP into your domain root, you have to do it manually. Not going to walk you through this… the part that’s a bit of a bear is the wp-config file. Normally, you’d put in ‘localhost’ as the DB server. In this case, Network Solutions needs the IP to the database server. So you need to go to your Network Solutions control panel, find the DB you created (manually of course), and find either the host alias or the IP to that DB server, and when creating your wp-config file, replace ‘localhost’ with that value.

Simple little fix, but knowing this will save you all sorts of time looking for the right way to connect the database to the WordPress installation.

That’s right. We fix IE, since IE is too helpless to fix itself. Now I’m not a huge fan of browser hacks, but our analytics show that we still see between 40 and 60% IE users across our sites. That’s too significant to ignore.

Along comes CSS3Pie.

CSS3Pie is a little javascript and browser behavior file that takes all the CSS3 behaviors that we are learning to know and love, and jams them down the throat of IE (well, technically, IE8 and earlier, since IE9 supports many of these properties), allowing a more consistent cross-browser user experience. That’s right – so all your rounded corners, linear gradients, box shadows, all at your fingertips to all browsers. It’s just a couple extra lines of code. So THANK YOU to the folks at CSS3PIE. Give us a hollar if you’re ever in town, we’ll take you out and buy you a slice – of the traditional kind, the kind Homer dreams of.

So if you don’t think you can help, you’re wrong. Even as a user, by filing DETAILED (the key here is detailed!) bug reports when you find a problem in some open source software, you’re helping out big time.

(stepping off soapbox now)

In an application I was using the other day I was getting a strange failure. In my case one of my variables I was setting to one, and then after calling this other application, the value was suddenly False (not even an integer).  The offending application had the following code:


if x == True:
x = False


Unfortunately 1 evaluates to True in this situation. The code should have been:


if x is True:
x = False


The new website is up. It’s still not completely what we hope it will be, but it’s progress, and certainly better than that silly “coming soon” page we’ve had up for a while now.

I’ve learned something in the last several months though… rebranding can be frustrating. Especially when you start with grand visions and what seems to be an attainable timeline, and then you land on a concept, then it just plain doesn’t work out. Then you are left to start over, and … well, I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining. I’m happy with what we have, and I’m confident that with this process (mostly) behind us, we can return our focus to building awesome web applications for you, our clients.

So thanks for stopping by – check out the new site, we’re particularly proud of our portfolio of work. We’ll be adding some more stuff soon (like tweets. We are really going to tweet more, I hope).

Today, I noticed an strange anomaly. To keep the video in full screen mode while working in the other monitor do the following.

1. On the video right click and bring up the settings for flash. Then close the settings box.

Now when you go to the other monitor, and click on the browser the video STAYS FULL SCREEN.  This is just what I wanted.

Will this work for you? I don’t know. This may actually be kind of a “bug” with my current software setup .   So FYI my configuration

Ubuntu 11.10

Chrome  17.0.928.0 dev

Flash 11,0,1,152

The site was ESPN360 (needs to be tested with other sites).

MODIFY THE MERCURIAL SETTINGS:

Change to the .hg directory for the project. Edit the hgrc file and change  the path to

default = ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/username/repositoryname/

It is is critical that the username here is “hg”

CREATE YOUR SSH KEYS:

This I had to do in few steps. You maybe able to do yours in one step.  The following commands did the trick for me.

ssh-keygen
chmod 644 ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
ssh-agent bash
ssh-add

The ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub is your public key

Now we need to add the public key to BitBucket

1. Log in to Bitbucket.
2. Click the ‘Account‘ tab
3. Under the ‘SSH keys‘ pane, do one of the following:
• Copy and paste the text from your public key file (~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) into the text input box and click the ‘Add key’ button, or
• Click the ‘Choose File‘ button, browse to your public key, then click the ‘Upload key‘ button

Enter the ‘slideout tab’ – It’s nothing new, you’ve probably seen it before, mostly used as a “feedback” tab. But in this case, I used a little jQuery plugin called tabSlideOut. The jQuery has several parameters you can set, including size, speed of animation, and position on the screen. In this case, I was using WordPress and just pulled in a form using the WP get_template_part(); function. But you could just as easily code in your html, or use ajax to load in something dynamically.

What you end up with is a nifty little “drawer” style tab that you can slide out from a fixed or floating position on either side of the screen – and it’s cross-browser compatible.