Betcha Didn’t Know – Canada’s Web Shop & the MCA Men’s Curling Bonspiel are Like This!
It’s Manitoba, it’s -30, it’s Curling Season, and Canada’s Web Shop is in the house! (Sorry for the blatantly obvious pun…)
Here at Canada’s Web Shop, we pride ourselves in being part of Winnipeg’s community. For the past 3 years, we have sponsored an event at the MCA Men’s Curling Bonspiel which is held all over Manitoba. Tonight, at the Granite Curling Club, at 7pm, the final of this event will take place.
The Key Problem: Context
As someone who always tries to see both sides of a debate, I understand where people are coming from that support these bills. The internet is a medium through which it is more easy than ever before to facilitate theft of intellectual property such as music and movies, and it makes sense that a good way to prevent this kind of theft is to eliminate the people, (or in this case, websites,) that make the theft possible.
At our last Social Media Manitoba Tweetup we were lucky to have Susie Parker present to the group on the pros and cons of Google Plus. This lead to some great discussion and some surprisingly varied views on the service. Some of the group expressed feelings of being underwhelmed loving its potential but mourning its lack of innovation; they’ll never beat Facebook. Some feel the service isn’t intuitive and others just see it as another search engine tool primarily of interest to techs, geeks and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) folk. Overall I was surprised at the lack of love for Google Plus, I know I fall squarely in to that tech/geek/SEO category, but I think Google Plus offers something positive to every kind of user and as events this we prove, we have only seen the tip of the iceberg. Why do I think this? Am I just a hopeless Google Fanboi? Here’s my two cents on Google Plus:
Today, John is speaking about the importance of implementing Online Marketing tactics that have a direct benefit for your business’ bottom line, as opposed to tactics that simply are “hip” and popular at the moment.
With the news that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 has – finally – fallen to 1% of U.S. browser share, the modern internet is now turning to face a new problem from the folks down in Redmond.
Until recently, the technology to include fonts and also the permission to use them has prevented web sites from deviating beyond generic typefaces like “sans-serif” or “serif”. To get around this, many people banked on the popularity of Microsoft Windows to leverage their default font library. Which eventually came to include the famous and well entrenched “Verdana” font.
“It’s a little skinny, can we make it wider?”
More and more these days our clients are coming back to us after viewing a new design mockup on their modern high-res, wide-screen 16:9 displays, and have a common simple request. Make it wider. We are big fans of the 960.gs grid system here at Canada’s Web Shop, and often recommend against heading out into areas wider than 960.
Many of us are used to text messaging speak or instant messaging our friends in some form of shorthand, some of it made up on the spot. Facebook is full of terrible grammar. Take a look in many IRC channels and you’ve got plenty of people not using capital letters and dropping punctuation at every opportunity. Bizarre abbreviations and acronyms pop up everywhere.
In dealing with various technologies and services on the internet, one thing that my experiences as a developer have taught me is that open is better. You can use this rubric for just about any online or IT concept, and you’ll find that in the long haul, you’ll be better served. Whether it’s by using open software, hardware that communicates using standards or using a service that isn’t afraid of letting your data get away from them. Examples are all around us and the majority of successful tech companies have banked on the quality and transparency of free software. Even Microsoft and Apple have leveraged the quality of free and open – despite what their marketing departments might want you to think about it! In the grand scheme of things, open solutions tend to be longer lived, easier to work with and overall cheaper.
Google’s PHP client library for their GData API hasn’t received as much love as their client libraries for other languages. Despite the lack of high level service classes for Google Analytics’ Core Reporting API it is possible to work with it using google-api-php-client.
The below is a quick and dirty self contained example based on a Google+ example to get a report. Before you get started go to the API Console and enable access to the Analytics API and generate a client id, client secret, and to register your redirect uri.
Here at the Web Shop, we like to take advantage of existing tools, whether they’re free or reasonably priced. One tool that we opted to not roll on our own is a site search. From time to time clients require them and the first third party search tool so used was Google Custom Search. It’s pretty expensive considering how much traffic site searches tend to get and it behaves oddly, especially with sites that aren’t well indexed.
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