The Blog Studio

It’s an exciting time to be a geek in Toronto! Social Media Week Toronto is headed your way, and of course The Blog Studio will be right in the thick of things. We’d like to invite all our old friends, new friends and friends we haven’t met yet to join us for a good time on at our offices on February 1, 2010.

Leave your pom poms and megaphone at home! We aren’t hosting a panel, we’re not giving a talk and there definitely won’t be a slideshow. There will be good eats, cold booze and Toronto’s smartest people (that’s you!) having an honest discussion about what is actually going on in social media. We aren’t selling anything, we don’t have an agenda, and social media ‘gurus’ and ‘mavens’ will be stopped at the door.

I’ll be your hostess with the mostess, while we all sit down for a chat about our industry that might end up anywhere. Submit your questions and RSVP beforehand to . I really hope to see you there. There are some more details below, and keep your eye on Social Media Week site to find out what else is going on during Social Media Week: Toronto.

No Cheerleaders Allowed: An Honest Conversation About Social Media

You ever get the feeling that the social media ‘experts’ are only telling half the truth? Do you get the distinct impression that the Big Time social media mavens and gurus are painting a pretty picture because it benefits them directly? We do to.

Join Managing Director of The Blog Studio, Lucia Mancuso, for an intimate, no holds barred discussion about the on the ground state of affairs in the wired world. Submit your questions anonymously beforehand. Then join us February, 1. 2010 at the The Blog Studio space in downtown Toronto for apps, booze and a rollicking discussion about what’s really going on. No punches pulled, no smoke and mirrors and no self-proclaimed experts. Just a diverse group of smart people who engage the social media space talking about their ideas and concerns.

Afterwards we’ll compile a list of the sharpest, wittiest, nastiest and most useful answers to see if we can make sense out of what social media is, and what it might become.

Please RSVP as soon as possible. Space for this event is very limited.

RSVP to

2010 is upon is. We’d like to thank all of our clients, co-workers, friends, freelancers, geeky colleagues, fellow tech workers and everyone else that we’ve met and worked with in 2009. You’ve made the last year absolutely wonderful for us, and we’ve enjoyed every interaction. The great people we talk to everyday are what makes everything worthwhile. We’re extremely proud of the work we’ve done in the past year, and we’ve had some brilliant successes. Thank you, thank you and thank you again.

We’re looking forward to the upcoming year. Thinking about our plans for the future, we realized that there is always room for improvement. We want to share some of the goals, ideas and improvements that we’re going to make happen immediately in the upcoming year. Everything we want to do comes down to one thing: providing you with best web presence to make your business successful.

Put You First
The most important thing we can do is improve our customer service. You, our clients are the sole reason we exist, and we want to treat you even better than we do now. We want to get things done more quickly, do them better and create the best sites that we can. We want you to be happy with us. In order to help things along, we’re expanding our team so there is more of us to go around. Your project always comes first. This is a promise we take seriously, and if something falls between the cracks let us know and we’ll make it right.

No Agency BS
We’re not an agency, and we’ll never be one. What does that mean exactly? We’re a boutique size business with small to large size clients. You won’t get your project passed off to an underling after we win your business, because we don’t have any underlings. We’re a team. We’re proud of every project we’ve done, and take it personally if something isn’t right. We don’t care about running up billable hours, that isn’t how we work. We’ll quote you for your project, and we’ll stick to that quote. Since everyone at The Blog Studio does a little bit of everything, you don’t have to pay for a bunch of unnecessary management costs. There aren’t a bunch of overpaid executives sitting in our office that need to keep the Lear Jet gassed up. We all get our hands dirty, so all the hours you pay for get your project closer to perfection. We’ll never pad your bills, we’ll never give you the runaround, we won’t bill you for vapor work, and we’ll make sure the work is done right. In short, we’ll treat your business the way we like people to treat our business.

Adding New Services
After we finish a site, many of our you have asked us for help getting the word out, creating content strategies, advice on copywriting and how to get a PR program started. We’ve got you’ve covered in 2010. We’re happy to say we’ve expanded our menu of offerings in these areas, and we’ve brought in some new staff with loads of experience in these areas. So whether you want to learn about how Twitter can help your business, what taglines work the best for your site or how to get your business featured in a big name magazine, we can help you build a program to expand your brand.

Offering More Advice
We’re very proud of our blog, and the most popular posts are the ones where we share advice on how to get things done. In 2010 we plan to post more how-to’s, more software reviews, and more of the methods we use to get things done. We love to share our ideas and working methods with you, so you can make your business better. The ongoing conversation in our comments section teaches us a lot about what you want to know more about. From WordPress to Google Wave, we’ll try our best to cover it all. If there’s something you’d like to hear more about, please drop us a line and let us know. We’ll also be offering more advice and continuing to answer your questions on Twitter @TheBlogStudio, so stop by and say ‘Hello’ anytime.

Keeping Up With the Joneses
Technology wise, things are moving faster than ever. We keep up with the newest of the new, so you don’t have to. In the coming year we plan to work even harder to ensure that every site we build is compatible with the new best of breed browsers like Google Chrome. Our improved cross browser support and testing will make certain you don’t miss a single slice of your online audience. We’ll be extending this testing to all the software, plugins and code that we use. We want every site built by The Blog Studio to work flawlessly in every situation, every time. 

Thanks for making 2009 a great year, and here’s to 2010.

Cheers,

The Blog Studio

WordPress 2.9 ‘Carmen’ just hit the street, and this update has some really useful new features. We’ve spent some time with Carmen (named for jazz chanteuse Carmen McRae), and have written a short rundown to let you know what to expect when you upgrade, aimed at the everyday end user. This update is an especially big win for media heavy bloggers and inexperienced WP users.

The most exciting improvements can be found in the way WordPress handles images. While we love WP, we’ve always found the image handling a little clunky, and it’s the most common complaint we hear from users. Carmen adds a feature packed image editor to the WP dashboard. It’s now possible to resize, crop, flip and scale images right inside the program. This is a huge improvement that will save you time and trouble of having to edit images in a 3rd party app, and the fly them into WP.

The image editor works beautifully, and photos fit painlessly into the post. Images look the way you’d like them to look in your posts on the first try. Say ‘Goodbye’ to the old system of editing, inserting an image into the post, viewing the post, and going back to do it all over again. This feature is a huge win for bloggers that include many images in their posts, or users who aren’t familiar with image editing software.

Carmen also makes it dead simple to handle video embedding, which was a bit of a nightmare before.  Video embeds usually required a plugin, and many times the video formatting ended up looking funny in the post. Now, you just paste the video URL on its’ own line in the post, and the video will show up. That’s it’s. It couldn’t be simpler. WordPress 2.9 supports most popular video upload services including YouTube, Google Video, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler and many more. We gave this a quick test this morning with some videos from YouTube and they went up without a hitch. This is a big time saver, and will let users add video with zero hassle or technical skill required. If you can paste a link, you can embed a video in WordPress 2.9.

Though not as flashy, Carmen overhauls the WordPress Plugin upgrade and compatibility system. One of the best things about WP is the staggering amount of useful plugins available, and most users have at least a few installed. The new system allows you to update your plugins as a batch, up to 10 at a time. It also improves the way WP checks plugins for compatibility with WordPress updates. As time goes on, the feature will become more useful as more plugins, and WP itself continue to release new versions. You can upgrade without having to suffer through plugin/WP compatibility issues.

At one point or another we’ve all accidentally deleted a WP post, and lost some sleep because once it’s gone, it’s gone. Not anymore. Carmen includes a powerful Global Undo feature. Now, when you delete a post or a comment, it goes into your trash, where it can be resurrected. As developers we LOVE this feature, because we no longer have to tell clients that the post spent hours working on is gone into the ether forever.

There quite a few less glamorous technical improvements going on in the background too. The most useful is that WP now supports rel=canonical, which is nice bonus in the SEO arena.

WordPress 2.9 Carmen has only been out for a couple days, but we’re already deeply impressed with the new features. Carmen takes two of the most frustrating aspects of WP, image and video handling, and completely overhauls them to make your life easier. The next time you create a post, you’ll immediately notice a difference in how simple it is to get media into your posts. The next time you accidentally delete a post, and can recover it, you’ll want to kiss Carmen on the mouth. The other improvements, while aren’t as obvious will become useful over time. As usual the brilliant people working on WP have cleaned up the code, stomped out some bugs and tightened things up all around.

Should you upgrade? Absolutely. The only reason not to upgrade would be if you rely on a certain plugin that is currently incompatible with Carmen. Other than that, you should switch over as soon as you can. It will simplify your blogging, and make using WP an even better experience.

If you’re currently using a previous version of Wordpress, you’ve got a lot to gain from this update. At The Blog Studio, we’re currently offering an upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress for $150! The service includes a backup of your current site and database (an essential, yet often ignored step), as well as performing the upgrade itself.

If you are comfortable performing the upgrade yourself, upgrading to WordPress 2.9 couldn’t be easier. Login in to your WordPress Dashboard, and you’ll see a link that asks if you’d like to upgrade your installation. Click it, and in 30 seconds you’ll be ready to go. We didn’t have any issues at all, and the process was ultra fast and painless. You can also go the more technical route and download the package and perform the upgrade manually.

As always we’d like to take a second to extend a huge ‘Thank You’ from The Blog Studio, to the wonderful people who write, update and improve WP. You’ve done another excellent job and we appreciate your efforts. 

Google Chrome, has recently become available for OSX, and we’ve spent some time taking it for a test drive.

The first thing you’ll notice is how fast Chrome opens and launches your homepage. It starts noticeably faster than Firefox or Safari. The address bar, is by default, a Google search box. You can type in what your looking for, and Google will start displaying results in the bar. The search also feels extremely snappy, and it’s a nice convenience to be able to search without having to open an additional tab.

Chrome supports tabbed browsing, and when you open a new tab you’ll be brought to a favorites page that displays your most visited sites and recently closed tabs.  The tabs can also be dragged visually to arrange them in any order, and you can pop them out to start a tab in an entirely new window. This seems to offer a nice combination of the way Safari and Firefox handle tabs.

In our completely unscientific tests, Google Chrome does seem to load nearly every page much more quickly than Firefox, and is about as fast as Safari. Plenty of people have done head to head browser tests for speed, and Safari seems to show up as slightly faster in technical tests. We found Chrome very fast overall.

The user experience with Chrome is fantastic. It’s clean, uncluttered and very easy to find and tweak the settings. There is no fluff in the user interface, and Chrome seems built for simplicity. Either choose a favorite site from your thumbnails, or type what you’re looking for into the search bar. It all happens in one place, so you don’t need to jump around.

The Preferences pane is the most well organized we’ve encountered. It has three tabs: Basics, Personal Stuff and Under the Hood. You can change every setting that matters right here, and each setting is clearly explained. The preference panel here is much more user friendly than Firefox or Safari, where you sometimes need to dig a bit to find the setting you’re looking to change, and the function of these settings can be somewhat confusing for inexperienced users. Google has done a solid job of highlighting the setting most users need to change, and eliminating some of the more confusing setting you find in other browsers.

There’s one feature we really love and have been getting a lot of mileage out of. You can set Chrome to open up a few sites in separate tabs whenever you start the browser.  When Chrome launches, Google Wave, Co-Tweet and some of the other web apps we use open automatically. Basically, you can pop open the browser and get ready to work.  This is especially helpful when you’re trying to get used to using a new app, like Wave.

There’s also some interesting technical stuff going on under the hood as well. Each tab in the browser is it’s own separate entity. What’s going on in one tab, doesn’t effect the others, which is an added layer of malware protection.  If you have the bad luck of opening up a data stealing site in one tab, and happen to be purchasing something or looking at your bank account in another, your personal information is safe. It’s a solid security feature that is built right into the design of the browser.

The one place where Chrome for OSX fails, at least for now, is with addons. Firefox and Safari have an enormous amount of plugins, addons and hacks available that can make your life much easier. Chrome doesn’t currently support any extensions, although this is set to change in the future. If you’re a power user, who has a suite of plugins you can’t live without, Chrome isn’t the browser for you. Yet. We’ll reserve our judgement in this area until Chrome starts adding extra functionality, but it will be difficult to replicate the large hacker community surrounding Firefox, that are always adding new functions.

However, there is a hacker build of Chrome, called Chromium that addresses some of these shortcomings. Chromium has a full suite of extensions available, features daily updates and removes the Google branding from the browser. Chromium is a good choice for tech savvy power users, and does a great job of showing the future potential of Chrome.

Chrome does offer some very cool themes to change the look of the browser, including ones by Jeff Koons, Karim Rashid and Anna Sui. These are wonderful looking, but just window dressing. Very cool attractive stuff, but they don’t add any functionality.

Overall, Chrome is a very light, solid and fast browser. Safari users may be tempted to jump ship, as it seems more stable and nearly as quick. Firefox users will enjoy the speed increase Chrome brings to the table, but without the plugins, Chrome won’t be the best choice for geeks who live inside their browser. Our feeling is that Chrome is a great choice for casual web users, especially those that aren’t very tech savvy.

Chrome is still in beta. When the community expands, plugins become available, and Google tightens things up, we imagine Chrome will become the number one browser on the web in the near future.

When you’re building a new site, it’s common to spend considerable time brainstorming, planning, wire framing and conceptualizing. You want your site to be perfect. So do we. When it comes to hosting your site, you probably give a hundredth of the amount of consideration to the company you use. This will make your developer grouchy because it makes their job much more difficult. Choosing poor hosting companies is extremely common. Sadly, we deal with substandard hosting outfits on a daily basis.

Choosing the right hosting company will make all the difference in the development and success of your site. A bad hosting company can cause the development process to drag on much longer than it should, knock your site off line for extended period of time and cost you lots of money with little return. Bad hosting can turn your dream site into a nightmare in a few seconds.

Here are the three most important factors to investigate when looking for a hosting company for a new site.

Support
What type of support does your hosting company offer? Ideally, you should be able to get someone on the phone who you feel comfortable communicating with 24/7. When you are first developing your site, there are numerous minor tweaks and changes that will need to be made to your hosting account to get things up and running. Most aren’t very time consuming. Having to send an email, get a ticket number and wait for someone to contact you can severely cripple the development process. Having to wait 4 hours or 3 days to have a change made that should take a few minutes is unacceptable. You may need to put your hosting provider in touch with your developers directly, so enquire if they are comfortable and capable of working with developers. They should be. In the best case, you will have one or two support people that are assigned to your account, that understand your site and become an extension of your development team.

Reliability
If your site goes down, you are temporarily out of business. Most hosting companies will tell you they have ’99% Uptime’. This isn’t always the case.  Things happen at even the best hosting companies, and sooner or later your site may go offline for one reason or another. Ask about the safeguards your hosting company has in place to prevent this. More importantly, find out how they have handled outages in the past.  Get a reference from other users, and get a first hand account of their recovery procedures.  A really solid hosting company will admit when they have had issues in the past, and will be proud to discuss how quickly and how well they have corrected them. If a hosting company tells you they never have issues, and have never had a server go down. Run away. Quickly.

Pricing
It’s really, really easy to get ripped off when you are paying for web hosting. Unlike many other things in the world, the most expensive hosting companies aren’t necessarily the best. Strangely, we’ve had nearly the opposite experience. Many of the less expensive hosting companies are some of the best we’ve dealt with. This is economies of scale in action. Larger hosting companies can offer very competitive pricing because they have so many clients. Some smaller hosting companies charge exorbitant prices, but not necessarily superior service, features or support. Take advantage of this, and shop around. Don’t make a decision based solely on the lowest price you can find, but there is no need to pay through the nose either. Investigate the amount of disk space, data transfer and other extras that are actually included in the available plans. In many cases, a low price upfront can easily soar out of control with data and transfer costs, or other fine print extras.

You do the research for every aspect of your business. Please do the same with your hosting company. It makes the job of a developers much easier, and in the long run it will benefit your pocketbook, your business and the people who visit your site. We’re always happy to help with any suggestions, so get in touch or leave your questions and favorite hosting companies in the comments.