POV (Point-of-View) Marketing

There are many different types and ways to marketing something, and I’ve read many books on the subject, including “buzz” marketing. Two categories of marketing are advertising and PR. Advertising is expensive. Getting mentioned in a popular blog can be expensive (to hire good PR people) but it doesn’t have to be. Pitching news to a journalist to write about your story / information is usually where people get things wrong. I just came across this article on what the author calls POV marketing. It’s a pretty nice summary with examples of how you should pitch your stories to bloggers if you want to get a write up.

Why Your Marketing Campaign Sucks

 

mRemoteNG: Better Than Plain Putty for SSH

I can’t stand using Putty for SSH on Windows. It’s ugly and very non user-friendly. I even got a Mac laptop which I often use for just SSH using Mac Terminal. But, yesterday I discovered mRemoteNG from a coworker, which is a wrapper to Putty, supports tabs, and offers a much better overall SSH experience from Windows. If you need a terminal on Windows, I’d recommend Putty + mRemoteNG. Learn more and download at

http://www.mremoteng.org/

In addition, to fix the ugly color scheme that comes with Putty, use one of these custom themes.

http://www.igvita.com/2008/04/14/custom-putty-color-themes/

Setting Up PHP to Support UTF-8 / i18n International Characters

Instead of specifically writing string manipulation code that is multibyte-safe, e.g. mb_substr() instead of substr(), you can configure PHP to do this automatically.  Just update the following lines in your php.ini.

mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
mbstring.func_overload = 7
mbstring.strict_detection = On
zend.multibyte = On
zend.script_encoding = UTF-8

mbstring.func_overload will automatically cause any non-multibyte-safe functions to use their multibyte-safe counterparts.

URLs with UTF-8 / Non-ASCII Characters

When determining the URL for a web page, you often want to use keywords that accurately describe the page’s content. Sometimes, these keywords aren’t in English and contain accented characters. One thing you can do is choose one URL to be the canonical URL and create a redirect to that URL from another that contains the ascii-equivalent version of the words, e.g.

Canonical: http://www.somedomain.com/nǐhǎo

Redirects:

  • http://www.somedomain.com/nihao
  • http://www.somedomain.com/你好
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