JoshuaEric.com

The AdMax SEO Toolbar is officially released today! After months of development and testing, the SEO toolbar is now ready to download.

Get the Mozilla Firefox AdMax SEO Toolbar now!

I wrote this plugin in JavaScript and XUL by improving upon existing tools and building out my own unique features. The goal was to create a single plugin that could do all the things that I needed on a daily basis. It was also created to prevent my browser from crashing because with all the current SEO plugins installed, my browser was crashing at least once a day.

One of the most valuable aspects of this toolbar is the mobile seo tools. With this toolbar, you can check the rankings of a website in Google’s mobile search engine. You can also build links to a website by viewing a list of mobile directories that is continuously updating.

My future plans for this toolbar is to build out the mobile seo functionality as more tools make themselves available. I also plan to build out the link building portions to help facilitate the link building process.

You can view a more detailed writeup of the AdMax SEO Toolbar on AdMax Media’s blog.

As many of you know, I work at AdMax Media here in sunny Santa Barbara.

We use Jira to track tickets, new projects, new feature requests, and to provide feedback on our projects. Initially I was hesitant in using Jira because I thought it was far too complex. But once you commit and spend the time to customize your dashboard in Jira, it is actually a huge help on productivity and gives a great overview of projects to see where they stand.

However, we were using comments in a Jira ticket to provide feedback on designs and development.

The work flow was as follows:

1. Design team submits a site/landing page for review to the project owner.
2. The project owner clicks a link to our internal test server to view the site.
3. The project owner then types a comment on the ticket for their adjustments and assigns the ticket to the next person to provide feedback.
4. They add their comment to the ticket.
5. Once all feedback is received, it is assigned back to the design team.

Now, that works, but is extremely inefficient and if you have ever done development or design, you know that is not a great way to receive feedback.

Now cue the entrance of DoDraw.com.

I built DoDraw.com quickly to allow everyone in the company to provide feedback on a single project by literally adding notes to the actual design and drawing on the design. Multiple people can provide feedback on a single design, and it all exists literally right on-top of the website.

Checkout this example I created. This is simulating two people providing feedback on the website CollegeMatchingService.com.

http://dodraw.com/KQtbpUmrkcmvtcV

One of the most innovative aspects of this is that it utilizes HTML5′s canvas feature with an iFrame. Yes, you read that right, an iFrame. That means the site you’re seeing is actually the real site in an iframe, not a website turned into an image.

Why would you want to do this? Well for one, taking a “screenshot” of a website isn’t exactly easy. I tried, and I found multiple ways to do it and they both rendered sites differently. Using Safari’s webkit was by far the best out of the bunch. I also utilized xbrow.se as well. As of this article, their API isn’t public, but if you’re interested in it, let me know.

Back to the iFrame. An iFrame allows you to edit a website that is located on an intranet. Many companies have an intranet that is only accessible from inside the building or through a VPN. Using an iFrame allows any company to use the service DoDraw.com as long as they use it from inside their company building or when they are connected via their VPN.

This is the case with AdMax Media. We cannot view sites on our test servers outside of the building. And using a 3rd party service to generate screenshot images is not an option because they cannot generate images of our test server websites.

Thus the magical iFrame!

I could write all day on the technological feats of DoDraw.com, but I will cut it short. Keep an eye out for a mobile version here shortly, I am just working out a couple kinks and it will be made available. We already have a killer domain for it

Stay tuned!

I purchased an iPhone 3GS a while ago. I am writing about it now because I always wanted to write about it, but never got around do it.

I always find my blog as a hot-or-not type of thing. Sometimes I get into a groove where I blog constantly, and other times I feel as though blogging is just wasting my time and that my ideas and thoughts are better recorded somewhere else. I think you can guess how I am feeling today.

To get to the point, the iPhone 3GS has changed my entire outlook on what a phone can do. I went from a Treo 600, to a Treo 650, and then to the iPhone. It felt as though I went from a Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme to a BMW M3.

The biggest difference is that the Internet is actually usable. I never once, not even ONCE, used the browser/Internet on my Treo. Nor did I ever sync it with my computer because I could never get the Palm software to play nice. I did love the Nintendo Emulator though. Excitebike? Super Tecmo Bowl? YES!

The iPhone has an epic browsing experience. I always loved how smooth the website browser Safari is, and it shows on the iPhone. I can visit multiple websites with ease. The onscreen keyboard is not the smoothest to type on, but it gets the job done. I could just be bad at it too, who knows. The most amazing thing is that the browsing experience is very similar to the experience on my Macbook Pro.

If you would have told me a phone could give me this experience I would have called you a liar! Words just cannot express the joy I experienced in my first few days owning the iPhone.

As far as integration with my Macbook Pro goes, the syncing of the two is smooth as silk. My iTunes syncs my music and playlists, bookmarks, notes, and much more. Everything I need on my Macbook Pro is on my iPhone as well.

That coupled with a few killer services such as Dropbox, Evernote, and my financial apps, I can literally keep tabs on everything that is important to me 24/7 365 days a year.

If only AT&T would let me out of my contract so I could purchase the iPhone 4… They want a cool $400 to upgrade to the iPhone 4. And with my new found interest in being financially responsible, I just can’t bring myself to waste that kind of money on an upgrade.

I wish health food tasted the same as ice cream, pizza, or chocolate.

I noticed something interesting though, and that is if you can prevent yourself from buying anything unhealthy at the grocery store, you can eat healthy by way of force. Of course you also need to swear off any type of fast food, but for the most part, not buying unhealthy food is the trick.

My problem is drinks. Often times I will stop at a Rite Aid, CVS, Walgreens, Gas Station etc, and purchase an energy drink. I can’t even count how many ways an energy drink is bad for you. The best way to handle this urge is to never carry cash with you and only make completely necessary stops.

When thinking back to my own eating habits and trying to analyze how to correct them, I found myself eating unhealthy in moments of opportunity. So I started to plan ahead and remove those moments of opportunity. If I didn’t bring a lunch to work, that created an opportunity to go out to a fast food restaurant rather than purchasing a deli sandwich.

I just saw an interview on Mixergy with Mark Magnacca, author of “So What?”.

The video can be viewed here: http://mixergy.com/so-what-magnacca/

It was an interesting interview. He talked about how to make a presentation that will engage the audience. There are two great examples in the interview.

Mark talks about how he went in to give a presentation, and did a run through with an associate, someone whom appeared to be someone of importance. At the end of the presentation, he was simply asked, “So what?”. Which is a difficult question to answer if you are not prepared for it. He explained that he was embarrassed that he could not answer the question. And this was the basis of the book, “So what?”.

Mark uses three questions to help you prepare for any type of a presentation:

For what?

So what?

Now what?

The questions are a bit ambiguous but they can be molded to be relevant to any presentation.

A great example given is from a friend of his that did a presentation that he was going to be sitting in on. Before the presentation started, he asked him to give him his introduction. He talked about how he had 4,000 employees and had been in business since 1846. And Mark asked him, does that mean that a company with 10,000 employees is twice as good as yours? His point was, he was not engaging the audience. He recommended he discuss that the company has been around since 1846 because it has weathered two World Wars, the Great Depression, and many other difficult obstacles for a business. Which would segway into the fact that he had created a financial investment process that can be replicated for repeated success.

Sometimes we need someone to ask those brash and difficult questions such as, so what?

I am looking forward to reading his book.

http://sowhatbook.com/

I have installed wordpress hundres of times. I currently write for multiple sites running wordpress. So I figured it was about time to install wordpress for myself.

When you write for a site that is not your own, generally there are certain guidelines to the articles that you can write. However, I wanted an area of the web that was all mine. And that is the purpose of running your own blog.

So here we are.

Let the games begin!