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How Twitter could pack your restaurant, bar, or cafe.

swmcsimov — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:17:33 +0000

Here are some links to the tools we like to use for twitter…

Tweetie 2 for iPhone: http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/

Seesmic for Web and Desktop Application: http://seesmic.com/

Tweetdeck is another popular tool: http://www.tweetdeck.com/

Twitter Search: (This is where the power is at) http://www.search.twitter.com

If you are new to twitter or need to know more about setting it up, you should read this guide put together by Mashable. Really, the possibilities are endless and it is only limited by your imagination. Just start talking and building new relationships, that is what it is all about. Use twitter search to find people talking around you. Simple as that. Start Talking.

We build websites. We customize blogs. We do all that backend stuff so you don’t have to. We pretty much do anything web. We are also passionate about talking with customers and business tools to streamline how you do things. Please call us anytime at 309-453-8175 or subscribe to our feed via RSS or Email to receive notifications on new business tips and dev tools. You can also follow m2volt on twitter or join our fan page on facebook.

This post was recorded by Shane Mac and Cameron Plommer. Read more about shane or follow him on twitter here.

You can follow Cameron on Twitter Here.

Do business like a prostitute?

swmcsimov — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:31:23 +0000

(sorry if offended by title, I mean no harm but it got your attention…)

Prostitution. Horrible. Disgusting. Illegal. Not Always… Wait! Before you leave, did you know that prostitution is considered the oldest profession in the world? With that said, I think we can all learn something from the oldest model of business if you forget about the morals. Here are 3 things I believe all of us can learn from the business of prostitution.

1. You know where to find them.

It seems so obvious. We tend to assume that people know where to find us. Small and medium size business owners, myself included, tend to think that because we know exactly where to find ourselves that everyone else does too. While people may be able to find you if you are bad ass at PR and marketing, but the truth is that it’s much easier to find the street corner where other businesses are standing and setup your shop there. Think about McDonald’s, Hardee’s, Burger King, and other large chain restaurants, they are usually built within blocks of each other. The same can be said for automotive dealers, bars, online networks, and any other business you can think of. It is usually easier to be where people are looking rather than making them take a detour. If you do take the “build it and they will come model,” you had better be worth it. Go find your corner, work it, and make sure you take the time to look better than all of the others.

2. You know what they are selling.

I can’t tell you how many times I talk with businesses, especially online, where I find myself thinking, “what are they trying to sell.” Once people find you on the street do they know what you have to offer? They should be able to look at you from head to toe and know exactly what you do. Content is more important than you think. I find many companies who assume that because you found your corner that people will know what you are selling. Don’t ever assume and make sure you dress the part, walk the walk, and realize that no one will know what you do unless you show them.

3. You know you’ll have to pay to get more.

This is where you have to be good. If you suck, you are not getting anyone to pay for more. If you are good, then you can keep them wanting more and more and more and more and more and… you get the picture. Have confidence that you can give a little bit up front and that people won’t be able to resist what you have to offer. This is especially important online and you should have enough confidence in your product that you can offer it up for free knowing that people won’t be able to resist wanting to use it more. Perfect example is Basecamp by 37signals. They tease you for 30 days and get you to bring in all your buddies for the party and then right when you are about to get off they ask for the money. You can’t resist and you keep coming back every month because it is good, really good. There are technology companies across that board that forget this point and try to run out the door selling shit. Build something of value, give a little taste of it, listen to them tell you how they like it, then only give it all up if they want to pay. The secret is figuring out how to charge for each little pleasure you give. If you are no good then you will get kicked to the curb anyways so focus on building kick ass stuff. Do your clients know where to find you, what you offer, and how much it cost to get their lips wet? Ask yourself… Are you “Down on the corner?” We build websites. We customize blogs. We do all that backend stuff so you don’t have to. We pretty much do anything web. We are also passionate about talking with customers and business tools to streamline how you do things. Please call us anytime at 309-453-8175 or subscribe to our feed via RSS or Email to receive notifications on new business tips and dev tools. You can also follow m2volt on twitter or join our fan page on facebook. This post was written by Shane Mac, co-founder of m2volt, and he only ‘interviewed’ a few prostitutes for this post, a while back. Read more about him or follow him on twitter. Photo Credit: ricardo.martins

CSS hacks and filters

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 01:21:59 +0000

You should rarely use CSS hacks for different browsers, but sometimes you find yourself in the situation where there is no other choice. Over the years I have come across some CSS hacks and filters that can come in handy when building websites.

As web developers we all know about Internet Explorer and how it can be a pain when developing, especially IE6 and below. Here are some of the hacks I use for Internet Explorer.

Conditional Hacks

If you would like to target a specific stylesheet to a certain version of Internet Explorer you wouls use the following:

This conditional statement will target IE8 only, to use on any other version just replace the “8″ with the version you would like. Say your site needs a stylesheet for All browsers below IE7, so IE6 and below, for this you would use:

The “lt” stands for less than the version specified. You could also use “lte”, this would target the version specified as well as the versions below, so this code would produce the same result as the previous:

Filters

Sometimes you find yourself only needing to change a specific style or two, in these cases you would use the same stylesheet, but add a filter below the line of the original. For instance, say you run into the IE6 double margin bug. When you float and element and give it some margin, IE6 will double this margin in some situations. If you run into this, this is what you can do:

#sidebar
{
float:left;
margin-left: 10px;
}

Once you realize that IE6 is adding a 20px margin to the left side, you can add the filter below your original line:

#sidebar
{
float:left;
margin-left: 10px;
}

*html #sidebar
{
margin-left: 5px;
}

So in this case, *html followed by your CSS id or class will be applied to IE6 and below. This is how all the following filters should be implemented:

*html #code { your css here}

Applies to IE 6, 5.5, 5 and 4 for windows. IE5 on mac OS X, IE5 on Macintosh and IE4 on Macintosh.

*+html #code { your css here}

Applies to IE 7 and 5 on Windows.

Now that you have an idea of how this works, you can look up the rest in this chart I found at centricle.com

I want to emphasize that you should never develope using these hacks and filters first, this should be a last resort option. Develop, validate your code and if you find yourself stuck, then use the hacks and filters sparingly.

-Mario Edgar, Web Developer. Follow me on Twitter here.