It is “The Cloud”

I started hearing about The Cloud around seven years ago, at that time it was mostly a term for online file storage.  Online computing power purveyors like Amazon Web Services hadn’t arrived yet.  And The Cloud wasn’t the ubiquitous buzzword that it is today.  So what is it?

Speaking very generally, The Cloud is any computing resources that you use that are hosted by another company that you access via a network connection.  Boiling that down for the lay-person, and to use a specific example – when I use the online file hosting service Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com) I might connect to their servers through my web browser, log-in to their system, and upload or download files on my own personal file storage space on their servers.  My files exist on their servers, which might reside in a server in a vast server farm somewhere in California, or Washington State, or who knows, even Norway.  The import thing to understand is that Dropbox has as it business model selling space on it’s servers for your files.  And that I use their servers as if they were my own.  This is cloud storage.

But it’s not only about file storage.  Amazon Web Services (and numerous other companies) provides computing services via the cloud.  What this means is a developer or systems administrator could provision a server to use to power his or her web application, or to provide backup resources to use.  This type of technology makes heavy use of virtualization.  Virtualization is where one can have many virtual servers on one physical server.  Amazon may have dozens of virtual servers on one physical server.  In this way they can easily create servers for companies to use to provide their own web services to others.  Some of the biggest web applications in the world run on Amazon’s Web Services.

The other use of The Cloud is syncing all of the devices and computers that we work on these days.  It is very much a first-world problem, but I need to keep my iPad software in sync with my Macbook and with my PC at work.  Cloud enabled software will allow me (for example) to synchronize my calendar at work, to my calendar at home, to my calendar on my iPad, hopefully without require too much work from me except for the setup.

One advantage of The Cloud for the consumer is that with the growing ubiquity of Internet access and wifi accessibility, that you can access your files and services anywhere, anytime.  No longer do you have to worry about if you remembered to bring your USB flash drive with your files when your files are available in the Cloud.  As long as you have Internet access, then you have your files.  I use Dropbox religiously, I have use project management software online to keep track of what I need to be doing, and I use Apple’s iCloud to keep all my Apple devices in sync.

A couple of downsides of The Cloud are privacy and security.

When you are storing your information in the Cloud you are storing it on someone else server, which probably means storing it another country (most often the United States).  There are privacy issues to this, do you want to store your sensitive data on someone else’s computer?  And there have been several mayor incidences of data theft from large corporations recently, where servers and networks were broken into and individuals critical personal information was stolen, most probably by hackers attached to global crime syndicates.  Aside from theft there is also the concern that if the company where you are storing your data goes belly-up, then what happens to your data?  Some better companies allow you to back up your data locally, but they are actually few.  It is a concern that has to be taken seriously, and one that I usually try to hedge by only dealing with well-established companies.

Once these concerns are heeded, then you can have a lot of success with Cloud services.  They are here to stay, and for good or for bad will become so ubiquitous and invisible that we will hardly know that we are using them soon.

Twitter revolves around little 140 character messages typed up and sent out to the world, these are called “tweets”.  These tweets can be anything, from “I had toast for breakfast this morning”, to “Canadians can’t afford housing, is density the answer?”.  Why would you broadcast your thoughts to the world like this?  I will get to that.

First some Twitter terminology and concepts:

The Twitter Stream

You don’t see everyone in the worlds tweets in your twitter, that would be overwhelming.  Instead you see the tweets of people you follow.  By following someone you will see all of their tweets in your twitter stream.  People you follow can follow you back, this is how Twitter becomes a relationship builder.  The basic rule of them is that you should follow everyone who follows you.  There are some exceptions to this rule, for example for spam accounts, more on this later.  What I always do is check out everyone that follows me, if they are not a spammer, or I disagree with their viewpoint or what they tweet about, or they are a raving lunatic, then I follow them.  You do have to be picky; follow too many people whose tweets are not of interest to you, and you run the risk of “polluting” your twitter stream with tweets that are of no interest to you.

The Retweet

You can retweet other people’s tweets.  By retweeting something you send out a tweet by someone you follow, to all the people who follow you.  The original person who you are retweeting will be sited in the new tweet, and will see that you retweeted him or her.  You want to get your tweets retweeted, because you can potentially reach a much wider audience in this way.  For example if something you tweet is retweeted by someone like Rebecca Bollwitt, and prominent local blogger, your tweet will then be seen by more than 30,000 people who follow Rebecca.

A retweet is also seen as an endorsement of the content of the tweet, so you have to be careful about that.  But retweets are a great way of broadcasting an issue and gaining public support, or creating discussion around an issue.

The Reply

You can also reply to tweets.  Your reply needs to be 140 characters in total and will be seen by all of your followers, and the followers of the person you are replying to.  Replying is important in twitter because more than twitter being a broadcast medium, it is also a conversation place.  The beauty of twitter comes in when you can connect with people you don’t already know and have a conversation.  This concept is still catching on and many prominent twitterers still simply treat the service as a broadcast medium.  These people have 50,000 followers and don’t follow anyone.  But unless you are celebrity then these people don’t keep their following because they don’t engage in the conversation. This brings us to the next concept.

The Unfollow

You can unfollow someone.  If you don’t agree with what someone is saying, or they are spamming you with an endless stream of tweets about boring personal details, or always tweeting about the book you should buy from them.  These people get unfollowed.  Unfollowing happens, you will lose people if you don’t keep up your twitter feed and provide quality tweets.  You need to feed the twitter beast at least 3 times a week to keep your audience, many twitters tweet multiple times per day.  What to tweet?  That’s coming up.

The Direct Message

You can also send direct messages to people who you follow and who in turn follow you (this reciprocal relationship has to exist for the DM to be allowed).  Sending a DM is like sending a 140 character email; it is a private direct contact to a person.  Using DMs shouldn’t be abused, too many unsolicited DMs will get you unfollowed almost immediately.  DMs can be very useful for communicating with your followers privately, and usually are used for personal communications between two twitterers.

So what do I tweet?

So now you say, fine I understand all that, but what do I tweet?  Nobody cares what I ate for breakfast?

True, nobody cares what you ate for breakfast.  But if you had the best “eggs bene” of your life and got awesome service from the mom and pop breakfast place down on the corner, people just might care.  This is the difference; is what you are going to tweet about of any relevance to anyone else?  Some ideas about tweets:

1.  Tweets can be about information – thousands of people follow CNN Breaking News because they want to get the latest news through Twitter.  I find out about news events sometimes faster than the local news stations through Twitter.

2.  Tweets can be to let people know about upcoming events.  Or sales, or shows, anything timely that you think someone else might be interested in.

3.  Tweets can be to share a personal opinion.  This is what most tweets are in fact.  I am very careful about opinions that I share on twitter, because they are literally there for the whole world to see once you tweet them.  And most importantly, you can’t ever take them back.  Always think twice about the opinions you tweet.

4.  Many tweets are to share an article you read in a publication.  In this case you will link to that article, usually with a headline attached to the link so that your reader can get an idea of what the link is about.  This is a way of sharing information that you found interesting.  Be aware though that a link to an article can be seen as your endorsement of the article and it’s contents.  Thus you will want to make sure to read the article carefully before tweeting it.

5.  Any finally tweets can be just humorous anecdotes.  Light-hearted judgements of society and people are common.  Jokes about pets or ones personal habits are common.  But like with anything, be careful about your jokes, make sure they are clean.  Also, in general stay away from profanity.  Though there is profanity on Twitter, and I am not a prude I don’t criticize it, since your audience is wide-ranging, you should be sensitive to the fact that they may be offended by profanity.

So get out there and setup your Twitter account and start following people.  You will find it is actually quite fun, and addictive.

What is all this about: In the old days websites would pack their meta tags with keywords that should have described their respective websites. Search bots would then crawl the site and pick up on those meta-tags and would use that to define what the site was about. The problem was this got abused – and websites that had no relevant content at all would pack their meta-tags with the most popular keywords just to get searched. The result was that Google stopped searching this information because of the abuse. Some search engines still use this information, but Google does not use it for determining search ranking.

Two of the meta-tags in a site which are the most critical and searched and indexed by Google are the Description meta-tag and the page Title tag.

The Description meta-tag should be just that – a short description of the contents of the page, don’t make it long than 150 to 200 characters long because it will be the text that will be shown on the Google search page. And here is a key thing: In your description use the keywords that describe your site – because that will be what Google actually searches for relevant content.

The Title tag is also important, and is in fact one of the most important places to put your keywords and phrases. But don’t overload it, that will just annoy people, it should be kept to less than 12 words, and often much less. The title tag will be the main heading on the search results page, and it is what we humans will look for in deciding whether or not to click on that link. A good practice for Title tags is that they take the form:

<title>page title | organization or site name | short keyword rich phrase</title>

This gets the important information to the front the title – where we humans will read it. Then the keywords are at the back of the title – where the bots will read it.

For more information go to this LINK at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

One can detect this problem by using the Google Page Rank tool in the Google toolbar and go to each site and note the page ranking; if the page ranking is different the Canonical Problem is probably the issue.

You can use a redirect to remedy this problem, but that too can negatively effect your page ranking, as Google sees redirects as a possibility that the site is not legitimate.

Another way to solve this problem is to use mod_rewrite (in Apache, and ISAPI filter in IIS). Mod-rewrite is an Apache module which can rewrite URLs when specific patterns are detected. What we want to do is that when a request comes in for the URL without the WWW that we force the web server to send the browser to the URL with the WWW. We do this by writing the following code to the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

All of that cryptic stuff is regular expressions, and all you have to worry about is that it is for pattern matching, the Apache module is looking for a particular pattern of URL request, which it will then re-write. Apache reads the .htaccess file each time it sends out a response to a request. (This also means that it is a very critical file to your web server, so be careful to not screw it up).

Once you have edited the file restart Apache, then whenever you go to the site without the WWW on the front of the URL Apache will re-write your request to add the WWW.

Well now they have gone a step further and made it even easier. Now they have added the Google Font Previewer, what this adds is the be able to see the effect of letter, word and line spacing changes and similar changes, live in your browser. Additionally the preview tool will create the CSS necessary for you to add to your stylesheet to get the effect you have tried out. (It’s also easy to tweak it further after Google gets you started). But the most important part is that you can copy and paste a line of code from the Font Previewer which will retrieve the font from Google’s servers.

To back up for a minute and explain to the non or new designers: When designing a web page you need to be careful about what fonts you use, as just because you have some fancy font that came with Photoshop that doesn’t mean your users will. The result will be that the font will be replace with another more standard font like Arial and your design will not look the same for your users. In the past we got around this by using things like Cufon, but it is tricky to implement.

What happens with Google’s Font API is that the fonts are always pulled from their servers – and are thus available across the web, to everyone. Pretty cool.

Client Testimonial: “I am pleased to highly recommend Scott Robarts of Blink Designs for website and software design. Scott provided our business with outstanding customer service attention and was patient in answering the many questions that we had. He responded to our emails very promptly and always made himself available to work with our busy schedules. Completing the website project on time and on budget was important for us and Scott definitly came through.

The website is awesome! We have received lots of positive feedback from our customers complimenting the design and ease for which one can navigate through the site. The software that Scott created and customized for our company is professional, easy to work and has exceeded our expectations! ” –Katrina, Raeyco Lab Equipment Systems Management

Also implement for Raeyco was an on-line reports system (featured below) and a e-commerce procurement site, which can be seen at http://www.raeycoequipment.com

• Fully secured password protected interface
• Easy web-based client administration
• Easy web-based file uploads
• File backup to server
• Information Reports Production Interface
• Sorting, pagination and filtering ability
• Client self-service for password recovery and changes
• Client and user management interfaces
• Detailed administrative interface

Client Testimonial: “I am pleased to highly recommend Scott Robarts of Blink Designs for website and software design. Scott provided our business with outstanding customer service attention and was patient in answering the many questions that we had. He responded to our emails very promptly and always made himself available to work with our busy schedules. Completing the website project on time and on budget was important for us and Scott definitly came through.

The website is awesome! We have received lots of positive feedback from our customers complimenting the design and ease for which one can navigate through the site. The software that Scott created and customized for our company is professional, easy to work and has exceeded our expectations! ” –Katrina, Raeyco Lab Equipment Systems Management

• Schedules
• Score Tracking
• Yellow Card / Red Card Tracking
• Game Report
• Standings Reports
• Referee Administration
• Player Administration
• Game Administration
• Roster Reports
• Team Contact Information

All features are database driven and dynamic. The site is presently written in classic ASP with an MS Access database back-end. Blink Development will be undertaking an upgrade of the site to implement it in ASP.net and MS SQL Server 2005.

The site features a CMS backend built on WordPress, making it fully editable by the client, and also features a built in blog.

Client Testimonial: “Dear Scott, Just a note to say thanks again for all your hard work on our website. It is such a big improvement! Your creativity, professionalism and patience are much appreciated. Thanks for making our business flourish – may yours do the same!” –Kirsten