Yearly Archives: 2010

Anyone recommend WordPress hosting providers that give out IPv6 addresses?

Can anyone recommend affordable hosting providers for WordPress that currently provide IPv6 addresses?

As I’ve written about before, I’m working on moving all my sites from TypePad over to WordPress and am currently evaluating several hosting providers. One new criteria I added to my list recently is this:

I would like my blogs to be available over IPv6.

Why? Simple. I tend to write across my various blogs on “emerging technology” issues. Much of the audience for my writing are the “early adopters” who are working with new technology, new toys… and generally working on the bleeding edge of communication.

As some of those folks (myself included) either move their networks to IPv6 or at least experiment with IPv6, I would like my sites to be natively accessible over IPv6 like many other sites are now available including Google, CNN, Facebook and more. Call me silly, but when I’m doing IPv6 testing, I’d like to be able to get to my own sites without going through a IPv6-to-IPv4 converter.

I also want to do this move once, because it’s going to be a big enough pain-in-the-neck as it is, between the initial migration from TypePad and then pointing all the domains over, mapping them, etc.

I’m currently testing out Bluehost and in talking to their support team, they are looking to have some IPv6 options available next year… but I: 1) don’t want to wait; and 2) want to be sure IPv6 addresses will be available. A2 Hosting offers IPv6 addresses, but only for their more expensive dedicated hosting offerings. I’m looking for someone who can provide more of a web hosting or Virtual Private Server (VPS) offering with IPv6.

SOLUTION?

SixXS offers a great list of hosting providers offering IPv6 and some of those look quite interesting… I just don’t personally know anyone hosting on them.

There is, of course, one of the strong proponents of IPv6, Hurricane Electric, who offer a traditional web hosting offering… which might be okay, although I admit that I’m more partial to a system that gives me ssh access with ideally full root access. I can get that root access – and IPv6 – over at someone like RapidXen that goes to the other extreme and just gives you bare bones hosting, i.e. here’s your server, here’s your command line… have fun. (Which I can be fine with, although I’m not overly interested in being responsible for all the system admin of my system.)

So… with all that, anyone out there have recommendations for hosting providers where I can run WordPress with IPv6? (thanks in advance)

P.S. And yes, it’s not 100% clear to me if WordPress plays well with IPv6, but then again, I know some people are doing it!

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Have You Claimed Your Facebook Community Page Yet? Here’s How…

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As a company or brand, have you claimed your Facebook Community Page yet? Did you even know you could?

One of the supreme annoyances with Facebook for companies/brands has been that back in April Facebook rolled out the ability for users to create “community pages”… essentially “unofficial” pages for companies or brands – or any other topic.

But what was most annoying was this:

In many places on the site, Facebook linked to these community pages instead of the pages that companies had already invested time and money in developing.

For example, on the Info tab of my Facebook profile, the word “Voxeo” is a link to a page:

Here’s my problem as the person most involved with Voxeo’s social media marketing. That “Voxeo” link does NOT go to our “official” page at:

http://www.facebook.com/voxeo

But instead goes to the community page at:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Voxeo/112160428800521

which only has information pulled from Wikipedia. That page does not have our most current info… has no contact info whatsoever… and all around is just a pretty useless page!

It’s been a rather frustrating and aggravating situation for many folks out there… particularly those who spent a significant amount to build out very detailed Facebook Pages… only to have Facebook point their name in many occurrences within the site over to this new “community page”.

How To Claim Your Community Page

Today, however, it seems that we may have an option. B.L. Ochman published an article in Ad Age today titled “Facebook Community Pages Are a Confusing Mess. Time To Fix Them” that points to the recent addition of a “Is this your page?” link at the bottom of each page:

BL Ochman also references an AllFacebook post about this issue from back on November 8th, so this link has been around for the past month or so. (Did you notice it? I certainly didn’t… and I’m on our Facebook page pretty much every day… but I’m not necessarily scrolling all the way down to the bottom!)

Going through the process is fairly straightforward. First you must assert that you are indeed the “official representative” for the page:

Next you have to somewhat bizarrely click through another screen that tells you that they now need to verify what you just asserted:

[NOTE TO FACEBOOK: Sooo… why couldn’t you have just put this text on the top of the NEXT page and killed this dialog box?]

Clicking through this useless box then gets you to this big long form where you “declare under penalty of perjury” that you are indeed the authorized representative:

After that you are rather unceremoniously dumped into Facebook’s Help Center with a message up on the top saying that you will receive an email where you have to click a link to validate this new address.

I did receive that email, clicked the link and then got a message saying that I would receive additional information, presumably as they examine my claim to the page.

We’ll see what happens next.

Merging Pages?

What was strange to me in the process today was that I did not receive the message that both BL Ochman and the AllFacebook article mentioned, namely this:

“Once you have submitted the request to merge the Community Page(s) to your authenticated Page, Facebook will review your request and verify that the merge request is for two similar entities. For example, the Community Page for Nike could merge with the authenticated Nike Page, but a merge request for Nike Basketball or Nike Shoes to merge to the general Nike Page would not be approved.

Please keep in mind that the review process may take a few days, and that we may contact you if we need additional information. If we approve the request, anyone who has “Liked” the Community Page(s) will be combined and connected to your authenticated Page.”

I would like to merge the pages… in truth I’d really just like to eliminate the community page and have people go directly to our main page… but if that is accomplished by a “merge”, so be it.

Is this the next step? After I have been granted admin access to the community page will I then be able to request a merge of the two?

I don’t know… but I’ll update this post as I find out more in my own process. And if you have already gone through this process, I’d love to hear about it in the comments – please do leave one!

I’m pleased (I think) that Facebook is appearing to offer companies a way to potentially gain a bit more control over how they are represented within Facebook. I’ll be curious to see how it all really pans out… (Sorry, do I sound a bit skeptical? 🙂 )

What do you think about this? Are you going to go claim your community page? Have you already done so?

P.S. Hat tip to Donna Papacosta who posted BL Ochman’s article to, where else… her Facebook wall! (and from there I saw it)

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One Day of Content Creation: Dec 1, 2010 – 16 blog posts across 14 sites

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Building off of something I did the first time back in July, I decided to see if I could fit in writing across as many of the sites where I can write as possible. Why today? Partly to celebrate C.C. Chapman’s new book, “Content Rules”, and partly because… well… it’s December 1st and so it seemed a good way to kick off the last month of 2010!

How did I do this time?

Today’s tally is 16 blog posts published across 14 sites. And, unlike last time I did this, today was not only about writing. Today’s content also included a set of photos uploaded to Flickr and a video podcast. (And in the time it took me to create, edit, render and publish the video podcast I probably could have cranked out 2 or 3 written posts!)

With that… I’ll get this post up in the final minutes of the day… and put this “One Day of Content Creation” theme back on the shelf for maybe another six months or so. 🙂

For the record, here are today’s posts… (and yes, the VoiceObjects Developer Portal post is listed as December 2nd because the server goes off of the time in Germany – and it was already “tomorrow” when I posted the piece there)

Personal Blogs

Disruptive Conversations:

Disruptive Telephony:

Now We Know What Happens When The Skype Group Video Free Trial Expires…

Code.DanYork.com

Python heading up O’Reilly’s recent book promotion?

DanYork.com

Photo Set: Autumn 2010 in New Hampshire

Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks:

Read the book? How about posting a review on Amazon?

Voxeo Blogs

The Tropo Blog

Voxeo Talks:

Want to speak at eComm America 2011 in San Francisco in March?

Speaking of Standards:

Internet Architecture Board (IAB) Seeking Comments on “Evolution of IP Model”

Unified Self-Service:

Slides available for yesterday’s Jam Session on building Twitter apps

Voxeo Labs:

Want to understand Phono? Tropo? Voxeo Labs? Listen to this podcast!

Voxeo Developers Corner

Miss our webinar on building Twitter apps? View the recording and get the slides and source code

VoiceObjects Developer Blog

How to link VoiceObjects to IMified to create apps for Twitter or IM/chat

Phono Blog

Using the WordPhone plugin for WordPress? Upgrade to version 0.2

Emerging Tech Talk (video)

Emerging Tech Talk #58 – Book Review: Pragmatic Guide to Git

Blogs I did NOT update

And as the day draws to an end, I see there are still more blogs/sites that I did NOT update… simply not enough hours today: 🙂

Next time…

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At What Point Do We Just Stop Caring About IE6 Visitors?

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Flickr credit: elisfanclub

As I’ve been working more with CSS3 and HTML5 (and starting to write about it), a common theme I’ve found in CSS books, websites and other material is this:

“… and then you have to do this to make it look right in Internet Explorer 6…”

… and then you do this for IE6… and then you do that… and then you add this kludgey hack… and then you add that kludgey hack… and then you click your heels three times while sacrificing a goat on the eve of a full moon in order to get your 2010 web page to look good in a browser that came out in 2001!

ENOUGH ALREADY!

How much time, energy and other resources are we going to continue to waste?

At what point do we in the communication business just stop caring about IE6 users?

Yes, yes, I know that the “proper” answer is that “it depends” and you need to look at the visitors coming to your website. And yes, I can see from those stats that one of the sites I work with actually has about 7% of its visitors using IE6.

But seriously, folks… are we going to continue to design for the lowest common denominator simply because either organizational inertia or organizational incompetence is keeping people using a ~10-year-old browser???

I mean… upgrading to a newer version of IE is FREE! There aren’t any of the cost issues associated with, say, Office. (And yes, I recognize that some of those companies still using IE6 are probably also still using Office 97!)

Yes, I realize that some internal apps or sites may break… but come on, how long has it been? And think of how many security issues you would address simply by moving away from IE6!

MY VOTE…

I know my vote… I’m in the process of redesigning some sites and I am NOT going to care about IE6 visitors. Now, maybe I have that luxury because the sites involved are around “emerging technology” and if you are interested in that topic it’s pretty certain you are NOT using IE6 (and the stats show that)… but I’m also considering taking that option for some other sites, too.

Enough!

P.S. Hey, Facebook stopped supporting IE6 back in August… can we get other large sites to do that, too?

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How Do You Scale Your Corporate Usage of Twitter? (Free Webinar Nov 30th)

CSS3 Generator – A Great Way to Quickly Get CSS3 Code

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If you are, like me, experimenting more with Cascading Style Sheets version 3 (a.k.a. “CSS3”), you may find this site very helpful – CSS3 Generator:

From the drop-down menu you choose one of the CSS3 elements for which you would like the code. Enter in some values … see the preview change… and watch the CSS3 code be created:

Now, I found a few quirks with the site. In Google Chrome the preview didn’t always work while in Firefox it did. The Shadow Color field on this particular “Box Shadow” element also never actually put the color into the code (It would be the final value for each of the “box-shadow” lines.)

Regardless of those quirks, it’s a neat tool to help you see how you can use CSS3 to introduce new design elements for browsers that support CSS3. Check it out!

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Apple: Masters of the Tease…

Creating “Tweetable Moments”: Public Speaking In the Age of Twitter

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Flickr credit: Duncan Davidson

When you are preparing to give a presentation at a conference or other event, do you think about how your message will appear on Twitter?

In writing a comment the other day to Mitch Joel’s great post, “9 Ways To Elevate Your Speaking To Black Belt Level“, one of my points was that you need to think of “tweetable moments“.

The reality is that we live in the age of Twitter and for those of us who speak publicly, we have to pretty much assume that there will be those in the audience who are “live tweeting” out whatever we are saying. This is obviously particularly true for “social media”-related conferences, but I’d say it’s true for most all the events I’ve been to recently.

So as a speaker, the question is:

If you were to look at the Twitter stream AFTER your talk,
what would you want it to say?

Are there particular catchy phrases you can work into your speaking that tie into your message and would be easy for someone to type into Twitter? Are there particularly dramatic stats that you can provide? (And not only speak but perhaps emphasize through a well-done slide?)

Dan York, Director of Emerging Technologies, Voxeo

Flickr credit: adunne

I remember a very clear direct experience with this concept back in June 2009 at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I was on a keynote panel, “The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise“, with among others, Marcia Connor (a.k.a. @marciamarcia). We all said our various pieces during our conversation, but Marcia had some clear, concise zingers that, sure enough, were the major items that were tweeted and retweeted.

Ever since then, thinking of “tweetable moments” has been something I’ve given thought to in advance of every presentation. Naturally it doesn’t always work… we can only hope that people will pass along our message… but it’s definitely been something I’ve thought about.

For those of us who have been around for a while, we always used to think in terms of the “sound bite”… what’s the one memorable phrase or part of an interview or news conference (remember them?) that would get picked up for radio or TV? (remember them?) You crafted your patter in part so that there would be those moments in your talking that you would hope would be the ones to be picked up and played. Now it’s the same thing… only we’re talking about “Twitter bites”. It needs to be WAY under 140 characters… and something someone can type really fast since they are live-tweeting out your talk.

What about you? Have you given thought to how your message will appear in Twitter? What do you do to prepare?

P.S. If you are seeking a speaker on a topic related to social media, communications/PR, the “cloud”, the open Internet, telecommunications or other topics, I’m always interested in presenting to new audiences. Give me a shout!

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