general

MarketingFan site updated to Drupal5, fresher design and GERMAN

root — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 13:17:37 +0200

MarketingFan.com finally moved to Drupal5 .... the only main reason waiting was that my own plugin for comment notifications on Drupal was not ready until recently...

All german readers can now switch to the german version by clicking on the language flag on the right. However not all posts will be translated to german - as well as not all german posts will find their their way into the .com site ... that just doesn't make sense all the time.

The first german post is here at MarketingFan.at ...

130,000 trackbacks gone... automated spam problem heats up

Marketing Fan — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:24:54 +0100

Today I implemented the AKISMET to Trackback.module bridge for Drupal…

why?

I had 130,000 trackbacks in my queue here… still unmoderated… and the damn Drupal plugin didn’t interface with Akismet…

well – I didn’t even bother to send all 130,000 to Akismet, but deleted the last 90,000 via SQL ...

then I banned the top ten hosts (russian elite proxies obivously) directly on the firewall…

The automated spam war heats up… and there’s more to come… just one clue – Forum and Blog spammer software is cracking captcha ... and it only costs about $400 (currently) ...

so at least I know my enemies :-)

DB - Double Blog Tag (part 1 - five marketing era secrets about me)

Marketing Fan — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 20:03:06 +0100

It seems like I’m not the only guy busy in pre-xmas time… others are too, and some are not, so they invented this chain mail like game called

blog tagging

...

and the sweet difference is that you don’t have to be afraid to break the chain because of some wild ancient curse, no loss of stamina or libido and no other crap that those mails usually threaten you with – it’s just a nice plug for social self-promo to tell people five things about you … a possible conversation started at the next conference… good stuff.

Two friends already tagged me from their posts

Dave Zuls the Hawaii SEO

and

Marcus Tandler aka MediaDonis (the Dancing Allstar SEO with a cool dance performance on German Tv and Greg Boser’s birthday )

So since I got tagged twice to my tech blog and my marketing blog and already got listed twice in SoloSeo’s tag tree I think I need to write 2 × 5 secrets plus select 2 × 5 people … let’s see if I can manage THAT

So here are

five things you didn’t know about me

(5 more are here )

I am into programming , a lot more into programming than reader’s of this blog, friends or clients from the online marketing world would expect … in fact I’ve been programming software for the last 20 years – and still do, just a bit different type of – more details here
I am studying marketing in a night university in Vienna … among tons of other projects I’m currently research on online Community User motivation – i.e. that plugs that are required to create a striving, organic online community … will do online surveys in a couple of famous webmaster related online communities/forums – stay tuned for an update on that
I really enjoy electronic music – you can call it Technoid, Raver, Geek, whatever… I started listeing to KOTO and Synth’s of Jean Michelle Jarre in the early 80ies when I was 12 or so – continued loving all those synth tunes that the C64 spit out and after additional influences of grunge and indie it came over me in a strong and already decade long techno, acid and house obsession… in fact I spent days and nights raving thru cities of germany, the LoveParade (when it was still good and original in Berlin in the 90ies) ... today I really favor Progressive Trance and Goa, Paul Oakenfold style for home and some parties, while I prefer Progressive House when going out and dance…
I really enjoy dancing to funky house music at parties … especially when I had some good shots and beers – and some good friends arounds … at least those Euro House parties here in Vienna or Europe in general…
I really enjoy travelling for leisure and took a couple of great shots during my recent travels that you can find in this online community

Ok – enough for this post…

I’m tagging the following online marketing folks definately still missing in the blog tree

ladies first :-)

Becky Ryan AKA Webmoxy , previously at Bruce Clay, now with Trellian – very nice meeting her at Greg’s bday..

Laura Lippay SEO Program Manager for Yahoo – met her in August/San Jose but didn’t see her around in Vegas… she actually stepped ahead and created a 7 reasons to an SEO at yahoo … yeah, you definately figured out how to create the most freaked out url for a blog post “dCEvf5I9erMfIZjmM54ajhgYAw—?cq=1&p=447” and made Google index it even tough... well done :-)

and now some german spammers (cough cough – online marketers) to continue the Euro line that Marcus started

FridayNite this german blogger recently started that english blog I linked, and Marcus told me they live side by side .. so he must be just as cool as Marcus :-) in fact Friday co-produces the SEOFM show – a german SEO podcast

Frank Ristau who already visited me in Vienna last April with some other friends (and that was a nice party) ... nice Adsense placement there in his blog :-)

Pascal Fantou AKA tiktok – very nice and experienced online marketer from Munich as well, met him last August and in Vegas again… funny thing is that we only met so far when flying intercontinental first, so I guess we need to schedule a meeting in Munich or Vienna soon – that’s just crazy … :-)

MarketingFan down for 2 days

Marketing Fan — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 12:41:04 +0200

Just today I noticed that 2 days ago on the weekend my blog at http://www.marketingfan.com/ with an ugly MYSQL fatal error

I filed a bug with drupal as I believe such fatals should be reported via email and/or SMS pager …

However we are back up again and Drupal didn’t lose it’s charm

Meanwhile you want to read about some gerat reasons for Drupal

Drupal logging – the error target I have on my wishlist there is exactly what could have helped me here…

Flexible Data modelling

Multi Site Management

and there are more to come like Internationalization, unique community features and many more…

MarketingFan switched to Drupal

Marketing Fan — Tue, 23 May 2006 21:29:50 +0200

Today I finally switched the first of my weblogs from the super-old MovableType 2.65 to Drupal … I upgraded the last MT installation back in 2003 I think :-)

the main reason?

SPAM

MT blacklist – the spam plugin I used simply didn’t work with the new 64bit server I am using… and before I would upgrade to MT3 I thought I need to consolidate everything in Drupal…

other reasons? yes…

Multilanguage Features

Flexible Generic content data mode

Community Features

and….

PERFORMANCE!

it took me some time to choose Drupal over Wordpress, as it is much more complex, yet even more flexible… and actually I reviewed both applications for 1 year now… Drupal rocks – at least for all the things I have on my mind it will be the right application…

The old layout went as I didn’t migrate that… not sure if I will stick with the current one tough, but it should be sufficient for some weeks :-)

Please let me know about all current site problems you may encounter – I’m already blind from all the testing.

Thanks, Christoph

[new]

Update 1am: Thanks to brian I noticed a bug in the CAPTACHA image config… user signup should work fine now! :-)

Ian Turner found

Marketing Fan — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 17:40:33 +0200

Ian lost his passport, was arrested in Atlanta, Homeland security, etc... brrr

Great that all went fine!

full story here
more comments

Where is Ian Turner?

Marketing Fan — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 15:52:08 +0200

Search marketer Ian Turner, pictured left, has been missing since Sunday after attending the WebmasterWorld Conference in New Orleans last week.

If you've seen Ian, or have any information about him that might be useful (anything at all, at this stage) please contact Ali Turner (ali.turner (at) hot-smoke (dot) com) or DC Cole at Woking Missing Persons unit +44 (0)1483 655081 or email him cole10437 (at) surrey.pnn.police.uk - please do not contact the US authorities - Ali has asked that all information goes through UK for the time being.

His wife Ali is going crazy trying to figure out what happened to him. Apparently, he never got on his flight back to Atlanta.

The american and english police are working together to find out where he is, and we'd all really appreciate any help you might be able to give. If you were at the wmw show, and saw Ian on Sunday, please tell us!

More info to be found at Threadwatch

New Layout live

Marketing Fan — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 12:38:24 +0200

Finally Elli's redesign for MarketingFan.com is now put live... enjoy :-)

2004 AD SPENDING TO INCREASE 9.3% OVER LAST YEAR

Marketing Fan — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 20:18:48 +0200

2004 AD SPENDING TO INCREASE 9.3% OVER LAST YEAR says Mercedes at AdAge.com in a forecast that U.S. ad spending will grow 9.3% for the year over 2003.

Totals will be helped by a record $1.5 billion in political ad spending and $850 million in ad spending related to the Summer Olympic Games in Athens.

First-half spending will grow by 9.4%, while second-half totals will rise 9.2%, according to the CMR forecast. Mr. Fredericks said the second-half slide is due to a slowdown in Gross Domestic Product growth expected by economists during the fourth quarter, but it will be partly offset by the Olympic and election spending.

What are Loss-Leaders ?

Marketing Fan — Sun, 20 Jun 2004 22:06:55 +0200

Loss Leaders sell goods so cheap that the company makes minimum of profit or even losses to draw customer´s attention to the shop and to convince them to enter the shop and maybe to buy another product.

This strategy is a wonderful way for the "big-ones" to undermine the competition, altough selling beneath profitability is illegal in some countries.