Sidewaysgravity Blog

Well it appears I have finally got a somewhat functional way to get google voice (text messaging) and my iPhone to play nice together. The best thing is that I have to a degree, a form of push notification for text messages.

Since I am writing this from my iPhone, I will try to make it brief.

1. You need a gmail account, preferably one that doesn’t get any email.

2. You need an iPhone with iOS 3+.

3. You need to be able to add a Microsoft exchange account onto your iPhone. I think in iOS 3 you only could add one but in iOS 4 you can add multiple.

From there all you need to do is set your google voice numbers to forward text messages, and voicemails for that matter to the gmail address in step 1. Also make sure to tell it not to send the text. It should be a checkbox for if it’s a mobile number. Just check no and it will only email and not text it to you. The purpose is to avoid using text you have to pay for.

Then you will just need to set up your gmail account as an exchange account mail.

Use the following link to set that up.

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740

Once you have you email setup, you can set your options to enable push for your gmail. Anytime you receive a text message, it goes to your gmail which pushes it straight to your iPhone. On average there is about a 10-20 second delay from when it is sent and when I receive it.

But wait, how do you send messages you ask. There are two answers for that. First, the easy way to send a message is to reply directly in gmail inbox to the email/text. Google will figure it out and forward it on as a regular text message and the receiver will never tell a difference. Second, if you are initiating the text for the first time, unfortunately the only solution I have is to use the google voice web interface through safari. You can add an icon to your home screen to take you straight there to make the process easier, but after the first text it’s all handled though mail and super easy.

One last note, in email, it just shows the number and not the name. There is sort of a way to get around this although not fully tested. When you are viewing the actual email, the from address should be the phone number, if you click on it then it will show you the entire address which is a google voice address. You can select to add to an existing contact and then select who you want. This adds it as an potter field and then it will show the persons name when viewing the email.

The down side is that it still does not show the name when viewing the list of emails.

All in all I am loving the new setup. Would I give it up for a native google voice app? Yes. But for now, I get instant push notifications for all my google voice texts, I can easily reply, and I don’t have to pay for sending and receiving text messages. I will note that instead of text, it does use data, but so far and at least in my case it is much cheaper this way. Since I am not using fetch to constantly check mail and having it pushed instead.

Let me know if you decide to give it a try and how it works for you.

Happy texting.

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Over the past week a friend of mine has endeavored to increase his presence on the web with his blog. He decided to completely rework his blog from the ground up, geared toward better search engine optimization (SEO).

A big change that he has made is in the frequency of his postings which average 1-3 per day. Over the past week he has gone from a unknown page in google search to page one. Currently he has focused mainly on people who search his own name (Chris Keefer). It will be interesting to see how his blog continues to grow over the coming weeks and months and to see what other directions he will be focusing his SEO attentions.

If you would like to get a little idea of the inner workings of Chris, take a gander at his rebuild blog.

http://mynameisreef.com/

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The google analytics site went down today. Their is a quick and easy work around. It is really only the sign in page that is down right now.

Sign into regular old google.com. Once signed in, then type in the url google.com/analytics/reporting and you will be able to access your dash board.

Your Welcome!

Re-tweet or post a link to help get the word out!

Fix thanks to Colt…

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I recently had a problem where all the users added to expression engine would post to weblogs with a closed status and they did not have the option to change it to open even though they had permissions to do so. It took me a while to figure this one out, but like many things with expression engine, I have found that their are simple solutions to almost all of the issues that I have found, it was just a matter of finding the solutions.

If your having problems with other members publishing as closed status and cant figure out why, try checking the following setting. Select publish and then edit weblogs. For the weblog that you are having problems with, and this could be all of them, you will need to select to edit groups, and from there you will need to make sure that the default option is NOT None, but set to either the Default Status Group or a custom one.

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This is not so much a tip for what to do but what not to do. I recently had an RSS page that was giving some strange errors in expression engine. The fix was simple, when you create your template, make sure you select it to be an RSS page. Seems simple enough, but if you select it to be a webpage, everything will look as it should with the exception of just one thing.

When I created the template, I would get the following error in the safari web browser, and would not get results in other web browsers.

The error was: “The feed could not be loaded because the content is not in a known feed format.” (PubSub:2)

After looking at the source code, the only thing that I could see which was different than that of a standard RSS feed was the following line of code.

<ee:last_update>

Why expression engine adds that line, I dont know, but if you see this, be sure to check that your template is set to be an RSS template and not a webpage.

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After only a few hickups along the way I finished updating the blog to the latest version of wordpress. The main issue I had, and due to not following the upgrade instructions was that after the install the screen would be totally blank, with no error messages. I finally realized that since I had not kept all of my wp-contents files, the theme I was using was not in the new version and so it was causing a blank screen to appear. After I uploaded the theme I use, it worked great. If you want to avoid this problem, you can set the theme to the classic or default theme that come with wordpress, that way when you upload the latest version, it will already have those two themes standard.

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Today I had a simple question of how to find what the current version or build of wordpress I am running is. When I login, it is easy to see if there is a new one available as notices are put all over, but I did not see anywhere that it stated what the current version is. After poking around the only place I have come across is the source code of my blog in the head section. For those who may have their own templates that do not show the version number, you can also find the same information within the souce code from the admin section.

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One question that I get asked a lot is about bounce rates. Most programs that track your website statistics will show your bounce rates. Google analytics, which is what I use will show the entire site average and also the rate for individual pages. I said that it was one question I get asked about, but it is actually two.

First, what is it?

The bounce rate is a ratio of people that visit one page on your site and leave, compared to people who visit one page on your site, and then visit another page on your site. Image you have four pages on your website “A, B, C, D”. A is your home page, while B and D are product pages, and C is a contact page. Each of these pages can be an Entrance page and an Exit page. Entrance and Exit pages are any page “A, B, C, D” that a visitor first visits your website with or leaves your website from. Imagine searching Google for YourCompany.com. You might get a result of page A (your homepage) as a result. This would be the entrance page to your site. Now imagine that you search for YourCompany.com and Product B. Now instead of Google returning page A, it might return page B since it better represents what your searching for. This time page B would be the entrance page. So what does this have to do with your Bounce Rate? When a visitor enters your site on page B, and doesn’t visit any other page, and leaves your site (closes their browser, returns to Google, etc.) then this counts toward your bounce rate. The higher it is, the more people are viewing entering and exiting your website from the same page.

Second, should it be high or low?

Now that you know what your bounce rate is, you might be curious if it should be high or low. There are various responses to this, some say it should be low, and others will tell you it doesnt matter. My view is a mix of the two. It depends on your content, and also what you want your website to be. Lets return to the example pages mentioned above. Lets say that you created page C, your contact page, with the purpose of displaying the address and phone number of your company, and really want people to call instead of just browsing the site. If this is the case, when people search for YourCompany.com and Contact info, they might get a search result that takes them directly to page C. This becomes their entrance page, they see your phone number and call you, and then close the webpage. That means they also exited on page C, so the bounce rate for page C is now higher. In this example, your purpose was to get people to call you, page C provided them the information they needed and they called you. Page C served its purpose, but has a high bounce rate. Your bounce rate in this case is not as important. Lets now imagine that page A, your homepage, is setup to welcome people and direct them to your products, which intern direct visitors to your contact page. If some one “enters” your website on page A and then “exits” your website without visiting any product pages then again your bounce rate will be high. This time it does matter, because the purpose of A was to direct them to look at your product pages B and D. So while your bounce rate on page C could be high, it may not matter, but having a high bounce rate on page A will matter.

Time on Site.

There is one thing that you should check to help you decide if a high bounce rate is something to be concerned with. I recently posted an article giving a solution to a common problem people were having. The bounce rate was almost 100%. Was this good or bad? You can take this two ways: 1. it is bad, people entered the site, didnt find what they needed and left, or 2. people entered the site, got exactly what they needed on the first page they visited, and then left as a satisfied customer. How can you tell the difference? While not a perfect method, the average time on page is a great indicator. If it is number 1, most likely your average time on site will be very low, they opened the page, looked and didnt see what they needed and left (10 seconds). For number 2, the found what they needed, read the full article and left a happy customer ( several minutes). Luckily for me, my situtation was the latter.

Google has a quick synapsis of what bounce rate means, in a little less detail, here. If you are still have questions feel free to drop a comment.

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There have been several complaints about the mediatemple grid server (gs) since its original launch over a few years ago. Since then there have been several changes to the way that they maintain their grid server accounts. Since I recently moved all of my sites over to the grid server, I have been keeping an eye on its performance. So far I have not had any issues.

In a recent article that mediatemple posted, they discussed some of the ups and downs they have had over the years with getting the grid server to where it is today. One thing that stuck out to me in their article was the fact that customers who are located on the original cluster servers 1 and 2 are still running on the original architecture. The grid clusters after one and two are using the newer architecture and have greater improved stability.

Getting to the point, if you would like to check which grid cluster that you are on, you will need to login to the account center. Click the admin button on the overview page, and then click on Server Guide. This page will have a lot of you grid server information and at the bottom you will notice the cluster section and it will contain your grid cluster number. As you can see, I am on Cluster 4. So far so good.

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Over the weekend our printer once again ran out of black ink… A common occurance since my wife and I are still in school. About a six months ago we decided to give the ink refills a try and bought a kit ($14). We previously had bought new cartridges and had two black ink cartridges at empty at home. One cartridge we have already refilled two or three times without incident while the second cartridge just sat around being empty.

A couple weeks ago we ran out of ink yet again and my wife decided to be brave and refill the cartridge herself. She did a great job, but the cartridge didnt work. When I got home I checked the fill level, tried cleaning the head, but after several tries I could not get it working. So I decided to try my luck with the second cartridge… which had been sitting around (without ink) for about 6 months. After filling the cartridge (following the instructions) and cleaning the print head, to my amazement… it didnt work. I tried a couple tricks, setting the head on a papertown that has been dabbed with rubbing alcohol, which helps to loosen any hardened ink in the print head. After both cartridges sat for over an hour I gave them a try, and still didnt work.

To get the ink flowing you will need to clean the top of the cartridge with alcohol and made sure there is no ink on the top of the cartrige. Very carefully and while holding the cartridge level with a paper towl on the print head you will need to create a seal over the opening where you fill the cartridge with your mouth and create a fairly strong air pressure to help push the ink through the print head. Be very careful not to inhale any ink or get any on your skin as it will stain and could be toxic. This trick worked like a charm for both cartridges, and now I have two topped off cartridges which have many more uses in them.

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