We’re getting ready to launch the beta of the new awesome.net windows cloud hosting platform. I was showing the new awesome.net site to Will Strohl (DotNetNuke guru and all around good guy) and he said “Jess, make sure you get facebook on there and you integrate it with the open graph api so you can admin it and get analytics and stuff”. The URL he sent me to was: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/.

Now before you go running off to awesome.net, If it’s not after 4/11/11 then you’re not going to see much, but if it’s after 4/11/11 then go ahead and sign up for a beta account, it will be FREE until sometime in September.

Anyway, Will gave me the pointer to the Open Graph but how to integrate it just wasn’t as straightforward as you’d hope so I wanted to give you a quick start guide with this blog post because I think this is something everyone should be doing with their websites.

Quick Intro to the Open Graph API

The Open Graph API allows you to integrate your Web pages into Facebook making it equivalent to a Facebook Page.  This means, when someone clicks “Like” on your web page a connection is made between the user and your page and your page will show up in their likes and interests section on their profile.

Not only that but you can also push information on Facebook to people that have liked your web page. 

Basically, Open Graph will allow the Web to marry Facebook and the two to become one.

You can learn more about Open Graph at: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

How To Integrate your Site

What we’re going to do is add a like box to your website so that when visitors like your page it will create a small post on their Facebook page so that their friends will hopefully visit your site and like it too!

The first thing you’ll want to do is visit the open graph URL and give it a read.

1. Pick Your Title

Let’s decide what the title of our page will be. This should be human readable text and t’s going to be the title on the post that people will see.  In my case, I opted for “My Cloud is Awesome.net!” as seen below

so then I create meta tags in a text editor.  It looks like this:

<meta property="og:title" content="My Cloud is Awesome.Net!" />

One note on the title. You’ll be able to change your title up until you have 50 followers and then it’s locked in for good. So make sure you’re happy with the title you picked (I may actually be changing mine soon).

2. Pick your Site Name

Pretty simple, what’s your website’s name? I opted for the domain name in this case so it looks like this:

<meta property="og:site_name" content="Awesome.Net" />

3. Decide on your Type.

Now you’ll have a few options here depending on what your site is about, it could be about an actor, athlete, city, landmark, book, drink, food or it could be about a blog, website or company. In my case, it was about a company so I opted for company and the tag looks like this:

<meta property="og:type" content="company" />

4. Define your URL

This is the URL that will be used to identify your site/object and will be used as it’s permanent ID. I decided to keep it simple and use the main page as the URL so my tag looks like:

<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.awesome.net/" />

The result:

5. Define an Image

Facebook is all about the images. So you’ll want to get an image that’s atleast 50 pixels by 50 pixels in size and post it on your site.  In my case I used:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.awesome.net/images/mycloudisawesome.jpg" />

So the image shows here:

6. Define your Description.

This will be the text that shows up next your image and under the post title. I went with some marketing talk:

<meta property="og:description" content="Awesome Websites Deserve Awesome.Net Cloud Hosting. Experience the future of cloud hosting, for FREE!" />

Similar to the title you’re able to change your title at any time but eventually you’ll get enough followers that your description will be locked in permanently. How many? 10,000 followers.  Yes, 10,000. Let’s hope you hit that number (and please don’t do a Charlie Sheen to get there .. good actor, poor choices.).

Here’s how it came out:

7. Define your Admin

You’ll want to make yourself the administrator of your site. You have the option to allow an application to administer your site on facebook or you can have a person do it. I decided to do it myself. How do you pick the administrator? You have to know your Facebook User ID. No this is not your email address, it’s actually a numeric number.  Here’s the easiest way to figure it out.

1. Log into facebook go to your profile and click on photos
2. Next select any album under your photos.  in the url you’ll see something like this:
3. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?id=777777777&aid=269239
4. That number after id= is your facebook user id (in the above example it’s 777777777 and no that’s not really my User ID, I’m only using it as an example.

So your admin tag will look like this:

<meta property="fb:admins" content="77777777777" />

8. Define your Optional Data.

These you can find explained on the Open Graph API docs but I went with the following:

<meta property="email" content="sales@awesome.net" />
<meta property="phone_number" content="866-706-8691" />

9. Add it all to your meta tags in your web page’s <HEAD></HEAD>

So once you have all of these ready, go ahead and copy and paste them into your web site’s source code inside of the <HEAD> section. Ideally, place it all just before </HEAD>.

10. Test Before you Like

Before you go liking your site. Make sure Facebook is reading everything on your site. The easiest way to do this is with the Facebook URL Linter at: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/

Putting in http://www.awesome.net I get:

The reason this is important is that the first time I built my page, it didn’t pull my meta data correctly, I liked the page and then immediately had to remove the post from my facebook profile. So test first. Once you’re happy go ahead and like it.

11. Add the Like Code.

Next we need to add the like code to our site. In my case, I went with iframe code. Here’s a tidbit, when loading external javascript if you load it as a iframe it won’t slow down the site from loading in the event there’s a problem with the site you’re pulling the javascript from.

You can visit: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/ to see the different plugins you can integrate with your site. I used the like button builder: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ and copied in the iframe code to my site in the footer:

Why you’ll want integrate the Open Graph API

So you probably saw in the image above where I embedded I have links for an Admin Page and Insights. These are only visible if you’re an admin of your application and visit the site. Clicking on the Admin Page I can see:

So I can interact with my page there and if I go to my Wall I can post stuff that will show up to my fans, etc.

Next we’ll take a sneak peek at the insights page. Since this is a new app on facebook you won’t have any insights to display but it’s going to provide information like this:

Where to go next?

First I’m going to ask that you do me a favor and visit the www.awesome.net site and like the page (bottom left hand corner) next I’ll recommend you check out http://developer.facebook.com and start experimenting with what you can do there. 

Oh and if you’re wondering who that was in my Facebook page, that’s Lyza from www.acutevisibility.com their company does online branding and marketing, if you’re not comfortable integrating the Open Graph API with your site or want to learn more about it, I’m sure they’d be happy to chat with you on it.

1. Color
One of the most powerful subliminal visual tools is the deliberate use of color to influence the user experience on a website. Reds are “hot” colors and command attention. Blues and greens are “cool” colors and have a calming effect. Think carefully about the colors you choose for your background, headers, navigation and links. Test different colors methodically to determine the most effective palette for your audience and message.

2. Images
A picture tells a thousand words. But the wrong picture is a waste of precious real estate. Whether you use photography, diagrams or illustrations, be sure to select imagery that will be appealing to your audience and is also relevant and truly adds value to your message.

3. Textual Content
Unlike a slick magazine print campaign, a website needs to be populated with relevant, keyword-rich content. Use headings and subheadings (H1s, H2s, H3s, etc.) to organize the text and allow easy visual scanning. Use bold face and anchor text (intrasite links) to communicate important concepts. If your subject matter is complex, provide a glossary and link key terms to it frequently, so you don’t have to define concepts repeatedly on a page.

4. Navigation
Make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for. Give them multiple vehicles for accessing information. Provide a Search function, side navigation categories, footer navigation text links, top navigation buttons or tabs, whatever will make it utterly seamless for a user to move around your site, no matter where they start. Remember a website is not a linear thing. A new site visitor may land first on your home page, or on a product page buried deep within your site.

5. Alignment
Elements of your site should be visually connected and balanced. Stick to a limited number of page treatments; fewer if your site is small, more for larger sites comprised of multiple content types. A page that is frenetic and chaotic will have a much higher bounce rate. A page with a clarity of message, cleanly aligned visual elements and a clear call to action will have a higher conversion rate.

6. Consistency & Continuity
Be consistent throughout your site so that a visitor navigating from page to page will always know where they are and how to get to the next item of interest. Continuity is one of the single most important elements in conversion. When a user clicks to navigate to a new page, that page must match their expectations and deliver a consistent, continuous message.

7. White Space
White space is an often undervalued commodity. But it’s a concept used throughout design and aesthetics. Think of it as breathing room. It’s like listening instead of always talking. It’s a welcome break in a busy day. It will allow your visitors to focus on what’s important. If every pixel is vying for your visitors’ attention, you will never get your key message across.

Take an objective look at your website. Evaluate it using these 7 points of aesthetics. Is there room for improvement? Maybe it’s time for a mini makeover!

1. Google Analytics
Probably the best-known analytic tool out there, Google Analytics provides invaluable insight into your website traffic. It helps you identify targeted keywords and determine which pages are receiving the most traffic and yielding the best conversion rates. Trace ecommerce transactions to PPC campaigns and keywords. You can even perform basic benchmarking and compare your site with others in your industry.

2. Google Webmaster Tools
This is a great tool for maximizing your site’s visibility on the search engines. See how Google crawls and indexes your site. Identify specific problems the spiders are having accessing your site. Find out which Google search queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there. Tell Google about your pages with Sitemaps: which pages are the most important to you and how often they change. You can also specify you would like the URLs Google indexes to appear. You can connect your Webmaster Tools account directly to your Google Analytics account.

3. Yahoo Web Analytics
Yahoo’s answer to Google Analytics, YWA is a powerful analytics tool that goes an extra mile since integrating Index Tools, a recent acquisition. Its claim to fame is that it now provides insight into the demographics and category interests of your website visitors.

4. Alexa
Alexa provides free traffic metrics, search analytics, demographics and a variety of other metrics about any site – not just your own site! So you can gain invaluable insights into your competitors and industry leaders.

5. SpyFu
This site enables you to legally spy on your online competitors by giving you insight into competitive keywords and AdWord campaigns.

6. Compete
Compete allows you to get a site profile for one site, or to compare up to 3 sites for free (5 if you sign up for a free MyCompete account) providing metrics on unique visitors, referring sites, destination sites and top search terms.

7. Website Grader
One of the newest free tools to hit the web, HubSpot’s Website Grader gives you a detailed look at numerous variables for an overall assessment of how well your site is working. It identifies some basic SEO problems and measures your popularity in social media.

8. Open Site Explorer (formerly SEOmozRank)
This free tool is a link popularity checker and backlink analysis tool. Run your site through it and see what you learn.

9. Smarter Stats
Bundled FREE with every Applied Innovations hosting plan, Smarter Stats from Smarter Tools is a robust analytic tool you can access right from your control panel.

And for Social Media, we have a few more to add:

10. Klout
Billed as the Standard for Influence, Klout allows you to measure the overall online influence of a given Twitter account.

11. Twitalyzer
Although it used to be completely free, Twitalyzer is now largely a paid service. You can still get some interesting, basic information for a given Twitter account, such as their Impact Score, others in their network and commonly used hashtags.

12. Tweet Effect
This free tool allows you to find out which Twitter updates made people follow or leave a given Twitter account (yours or someone else’s!)

13. Tweet Psych
This creates a psychological profile of any public Twitter account and compares it to others in its database. It only works if the account in question has tweeted enough to be measured.

14. TweetMeme
A service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter and organizes them into categories, making it easy to filter out the noise and find out what you’re interested in.

Now occasionally it may make sense to switch hosting providers, but more often then not, it’s painful, expensive, risky and completely unnecessary.  Not to mention, usually the developer just wants to maintain more control over your website and this could become costly and painful if you ever decide to switch developers.  So I thought, I’d help you out when you’re in this situation and provide a few responses when this comes up.

So let’s pretend you just switched web development firms or have just hired a new hot-shot in-house web guru and the first thing out of their mouth is “We need to switch hosting providers” here’s a few scenarios

• Reason #1:  I have a great relationship with hosting company XYZ because I’ve been with them so long! 

  Response: That’s great but have you ever actually contacted Applied Innovations support? Did you know they’re available 24×7 365 via e-mail, live chat and telephone support and 9 times out of 10 the person you speak to is actually the person that’s going to resolve your issue for you? Not to mention, your time is certainly valuable to me and I want you dedicated to getting things done. With AppliedI support most customers never experience a hold time on support and those that do, wait less than 90 seconds. So because we both want you to be spending your time developing my site and not managing hosting issues, that’s why I want to stay with AppliedI.

• Reason #2:  Your new application needs to be hosted on Linux, Applied Innovations only offers Windows.

  Response #2:  What makes you think my application needs to be hosted on Linux? If it’s based on PHP & MySQL it will run fantastically on Windows. In recent years Microsoft and Zend have worked together to make PHP run as fast on Windows as it will on Linux. And if I stay with Applied Innovations, not only can I run PHP applications but I can run ASP.NET, ASP and use both MySQL and MS SQL for all of my applications.  I value that flexibility and you’ll benefit from a winder range of tools for the job so that’s why I want to stay with AppliedI.

• Reason #3:  I want to host your new site on my Dedicated Server and I’ll become your new hosting provider

  Note:  DANGER! Don’t fall for this one!  This is the #1 mistake many companies make. They move their hosting to the developer and then when they want to severe the relationship with their developer, they aren’t able to and are held hostage.

  Response #3: Thank you and I appreciate that you want to oversee (read control) all aspects of my website but I prefer to keep my hosting and development relationships separate.  I also prefer that we keep our production and development environments separated and with AppliedI I can do that, that’s why I want to stay with AppliedI.

• Reason #4:  I want your development and production environment to be identical so we should move your site to keep any problems from arising.

  Response #4:  All of the hosting account Applied Innovations offers include hosting for more than one website at no additional charge! We could easily setup staging.mydomain.com or even stagingdomain.com at no additional charge and accomplish this. So with the ability to host multiple websites for free and maintain separate websites for different needs, that’s why I want to stay with AppliedI.

• Reason #5: You need to be on more than just a shared hosting account, you need to move to my dedicated server where I can give you more resources for your site.

  Response #5:  With Applied Innovations I have the flexibility to move across 3 shared hosting plans each with additional memory and resource limits, a semi-dedicated shared hosting plan as well as several cloud server and dedicated server options.  Migration within the Applied Innovations family of services will not impact my business nearly as much moving hosting providers and I can rely on the experts at Applied Innovations to help us move quickly and without issue.  Not to mention that most often the change requires merely an application reset for the new changes to take place.  So I value the flexibility and choice of a wide range of service options and that’s why I prefer to host with AppliedI.

So those are the top 5 most common reasons we hear a web developer tell a website owner that they need to switch hosting providers when they switch development companies.  It’s really most commonly not necessary to switch hosting companies and if you’re unsure we’re always open to having a conference call with you, your new development company and one of our sales engineers to discuss your website plans and needs.   Now to be honest, on some rare occasions it may make sense to switch hosting companies and believe it or not, if that’s the case .. we’ll tell you!

Have you heard a different excuse? If so feel free to leave a comment

There are many issues that can cause a site to fail a PCI scan, but one of the most common reasons is having SSL version 2.0 and weak SSL ciphers enabled on the server. This is the standard default behavior on Windows Server 2003 so corrective action must be taken to disable these items. Weak SSL ciphers should already be disabled on Windows Server 2008 by default but you still have to disable SSL v2.0. You should ensure you have a full working backup of your server’s system state (which includes the registry) before making any of the following changes.

To disable SSL v2.0 (necessary for Windows Server 2003 and 2008):

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and click OK.
2. In the Registry Editor browse to the following location:  HKey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Protocols\SSL 2.0\Server

* For Windows Server 2008 you first have to create the Server key so browse to this location:  HKey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Protocols\SSL 2.0
a. Right click on the SSL 2.0 folder, select New, and click Key.
b. Name the key exactly as shown: Server

3. Right click on the Server Key, select New, and click DWORD Value (the exact name on Windows Server 2008 is DWORD (32-bit) Value)
4. Name the key exactly as shown: Enabled
5. Verify that the key is set to type REG_DWORD with a Data value of 0×00000000 (0)
6. If you have a Windows 2003 Server you’ll need to follow the procedure outlined below for disabling weak SSL ciphers. If you have a Windows 2008 server you still need to reboot your server to force the changes to take effect but you are done making all necessary registry changes.

To disable weak SSL ciphers (necessary for Windows 2003):

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and click OK.
2. In the Registry Editor browse to the following location: HKey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Ciphers
3. Right click on the DES 56/56 key, select New, and click DWORD Value.
4. Name the key exactly as shown: Enabled
5. Verify that the key is set to type REG_DWORD with a Data value of 0×00000000 (0)
6. Repeat steps 3-5 for the following keys: RC2 40/120, RC4 40/128, RC4 56/128
7. Reboot your server to force these changes to take effect.

Taking the above steps will correct PCI scanning issues related to having SSL v2 and weak SSL ciphers enabled.

It can be caused by creating a new application under your ASPDNSF root folder, or by turning the “admin” folder into an application.

Here’s the partial error message (the one that is common to everyone):
[HttpException (0x80004005): Theme 'Default' cannot be found in the application or global theme directories.]

If you run into this issue on ASPDotNetStoreFront, please follow the steps below:

1. Download a copy of the App_Themes folder by clicking here.
2. Unzip the file and upload the whole “App_Themes” folder into your ASPDNSF’s root directory.
3. Reset your application pool.
   
   TIP: You can force a reset by renaming your web.config file to web.config2 and then renaming it back to web.config – this will force ASP.NET to reload your configuration file.

This operation should make your ASPDotNetStoreFront accessible again.

The new browser introduces a slew of fundamental improvements, including security, ease of use, and support for RSS, CSS, and Ajax. Most noteworthy in IE8, however, are the significant changes in the way pages are rendered. In contrast to previous versions of IE, Microsoft has made a gallant effort in IE8 to render pages in greater conformity to web standards.

Although standardization enables consistent development across browser platforms, sites designed for older versions of IE may not display as intended in IE8. (Learn about rendering in IE at Microsoft’s IE Compatibility Center.)

To mitigate display issues, Microsoft has introduced in IE8 a “compatibility view” that enables sites to revert back to IE7 rendering. It’s a quick fix that enables webmasters to punt on the IE8 rendering changes. To force display in compatibility view, simply add the following meta-element to your pages:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />

Since other browsers will ignore this code, Microsoft suggests this approach has the best blend of allowing web developers to easily write code to interoperable web standards while not causing compatibility problems with current content.

You can also address this issue by adding HTTP Response Headers in IIS6 or IIS7 [read]. This is very convenient for any web developers that have static sites.

Here’s the Hot Tip!

Do you own domain names that are just sitting and not being hosted? Have you been wondering what to do with them? Maybe you’re currently building out a site for them? Maybe you’re waiting to build them out?  These domains are the perfect opportunity to utilize a blog!

By putting a blog on your domain while you are in the process of building out your site, you will cut down on the time you spend in the ‘Google Sandbox’. Then when your site goes live, you will be ready for ranking.

It is also a good idea to put up a splash page on your main domain, www.domain.com. You can say ‘Coming Soon’ or ‘About Us’ and add a link to your blog. (Don’t forget, be sure to place your blog in a subfolder with a keyword like: /keyword-blog/).

Remember, you must use the blog and post to it regularly. At first, the content does not matter so much as you are really using it to escape the dreaded ‘Sandbox’. This is a great way to use those domains that you have thought about but haven’t decided what to do with yet.

It’s Simple but Effective.

This tip is simple but it can make the difference between launching a successful site that starts to rank in organic searches or one that waits months for FREE traffic.

Where to go now?

In Conclusion, If you have a domain not being hosted it is not benefiting you in any way. Hosting the domain and putting up a blog adds value to the domain and gets it ready for when you want to use it. You can also monetize off this domain immediately. By implementing something like Google Adsense on your blog.  By building traffic, this also makes it much more desirable if you are thinking about selling the domain down the road as you can show revenue and traffic. We will take about buying/selling domains and monetizing your blog in future articles.

So what are you waiting for? Dust of those domains that are just sitting dormant and get them hosted! For the small investment in a shared hosting account will give you big returns in the future. Best of all your shared hosting account probably includes support for multiple domains already.

This past week at MIX one of the presentations I sat in on was Advanced SEO for Web Developers by Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager for Live’s Webmaster Tools. Although it’s titled Advanced SEO I think it provides a good introductory overview of certain things you should and should not be doing with your search engine optimization efforts and encourage everyone to watch the video (linked to below).

Another great video is by Matt Cutts titled, Whitehat SEO tips for Bloggers, given at wordcamp 07 in San Francisco and was recorded by Jeremy Pozadzides . The video is geared towards blogging but is a great overall video for solid, clean SEO advice.