Monthly Archives: January 2017

Uncategorized

Identifying what’s crap in your BLOATED PHP site and what’s not

  1. Register a shutdown function ref: http://php.net/manual/en/function.register-shutdown-function.php
  2. Call “get_included_files”
    ref: http://php.net/manual/en/function.get-included-files.php
  3. Save the returned file list to a log somewhere on your server.

This shouldn’t affect the response times – but be warned, it WILL generate higher disk I/O (which might in turn bottleneck at peak usage times).

Don’t let the size of the log file go up too much. Ensure crons/schedulers or any background processes use this shutdown function.

 

<?php
function shutdown()
{
 $xyzzy="";
 $included_files = get_included_files();
 foreach ($included_files as $filename) {
 $xyzzy .= "$filename\n";
 }
 file_put_contents($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/shutdownlogger/incfiles.txt", $xyzzy, FILE_APPEND );
}

register_shutdown_function('shutdown');
?>
Uncategorized

Data doesn’t lie, and it tells us things like this.

Data and information are often used interchangeably; however, the extent to which a set of data is informative to someone depends on the extent to which it is unexpected by that person. The amount of information content in a data stream may be characterized by its Shannon entropy.

While the concept of data is commonly associated with scientific research, data is collected by a huge range of organizations and institutions, including businesses (e.g., sales data, revenue, profits, stock price), governments (e.g., crime rates, unemployment rates, literacy rates) and non-governmental organizations (e.g., censuses of the number of homeless people by non-profit organizations).

Data is measured, collected and reported, and analyzed, whereupon it can be visualized using graphs, images or other analysis tools. Data as a general concept refers to the fact that some existing information or knowledge is represented or coded in some form suitable for better usage or processing. Raw data (“unprocessed data”) is a collection of numbers or characters before it has been “cleaned” and corrected by researchers. Raw data needs to be corrected to remove outliers or obvious instrument or data entry errors (e.g., a thermometer reading from an outdoor Arctic location recording a tropical temperature). Data processing commonly occurs by stages, and the “processed data” from one stage may be considered the “raw data” of the next stage. Field data is raw data that is collected in an uncontrolled “in situ” environment. Experimental data is data that is generated within the context of a scientific investigation by observation and recording. Data has been described as the new oil of the digital economy.

Data, information, knowledge and wisdom are closely related concepts, but each has its own role in relation to the other, and each term has its own meaning. According to a common view, data is collected and analyzed; data only becomes information suitable for making decisions once it has been analyzed in some fashion.

Knowledge is derived from extensive amounts of experience dealing with information on a subject. For example, the height of Mount Everest is generally considered data. The height can be recorded precisely with an altimeter and entered into a database. This data may be included in a book along with other data on Mount Everest to describe the mountain in a manner useful for those who wish to make a decision about the best method to climb it. Using an understanding based on experience climbing mountains to advise persons on the way to reach Mount Everest’s peak may be seen as “knowledge”. Some complement the series “data”, “information” and “knowledge” with “wisdom”, which would mean the status of a person in possession of a certain “knowledge” who also knows under which circumstances is good to use it.

Data is often assumed to be the least abstract concept, information the next least, and knowledge the most abstract. In this view, data becomes information by interpretation; e.g., the height of Mount Everest is generally considered “data”, a book on Mount Everest geological characteristics may be considered “information”, and a climber’s guidebook containing practical information on the best way to reach Mount Everest’s peak may be considered “knowledge”. “Information” bears a diversity of meanings that ranges from everyday usage to technical use.

This view, however, has also been argued to provide an upside-down model of the relation between data, information, and knowledge.Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation. Beynon-Davies uses the concept of a sign to differentiate between data and information; data is a series of symbols, while information occurs when the symbols are used to refer to something.

Content

Essentials for Designing a Business Website.

Early societies relied on a gift economy based on favours. Later, as commerce developed less permanent human relations were formed, depending more on transitory needs rather than enduring social desires. Although such distinctions have no contemporary semantic weight, certain sectors prefer client while more stable, repeat business operations tend to prefer customer

The term client is derived from Latin clientem or clinare meaning “to incline” or “to bend,” and is related to the emotive idea of closure. It is widely believed that people only change their habits when motivated by greed and fear[3] Winning a client is therefore a singular event, which is why professional specialists who deal with particular problems tend to attract one-time clients rather than regular customers.

Clients who habitually return to a seller develop customs that allow for regular, sustained commerce that allows the seller to develop statistical models to optimize production processes (which change the nature or form of goods or services) and supply chains (which changes the location or formalizes the changes of ownership or entitlement transactions).

A customer may or may not also be a consumer, but the two notions are distinct, even though the terms are commonly confused. A customer purchases goods; a consumer uses them. An ultimate customer may be a consumer as well, but just as equally may have purchased items for someone else to consume. An intermediate customer is not a consumer at all. The situation is somewhat complicated in that ultimate customers of so-called industrial goods and services (who are entities such as government bodies, manufacturers, and educational and medical institutions) either themselves use up the goods and services that they buy, or incorporate them into other finished products, and so are technically consumers, too. However, they are rarely called that, but are rather called industrial customers or business-to-business customers.Similarly, customers who buy services rather than goods are rarely called consumers.

Geoff Tennant, a Six Sigma consultant from the United Kingdom, uses the following analogy to explain the difference: A supermarket’s customer is the person buying milk at that supermarket; a not-customer buys milk from a competing supermarket, whereas a non-customer doesn’t buy milk from supermarkets at all but rather “has milk delivered to the door in the traditional British way”.

Before the introduction of the notion of an internal customer, external customers were, simply, customers. Quality-management writer Joseph M. Juran popularized the concept, introducing it in 1988 in the fourth edition of his Quality Control Handbook . The idea has since gained wide acceptance in the literature on total quality management and service marketing; and many organizations as of 2016 recognize the customer satisfaction of internal customers as a precursor to, and a prerequisite for, external customer satisfaction, with authors such as Tansuhaj, Randall & McCullough 1991 regarding service organizations which design products for internal customer satisfaction as better able to satisfy the needs of external customers. Research on the theory and practice of managing the internal customer continues as of 2016 in a variety of service-sector industries.

Content, Uncategorized

How it is being used by brands

During the baby boom era, Kellogg’s began selling sugary cereal to children. With this change in business model came sociable animal mascots, lively animated commercials and the back of the cereal box as a form of targeted content marketing. Infographics were born in this era. This represented a new approach to make a brand memorable with the audience.

In the 1990s, everything changed for marketers. The arrival of computers and the Internet made websites and blogs flourish, and corporations found content marketing opportunities through email.

By 2014, Forbes Magazine’s website had written about the seven most popular ways companies use content marketing.
In it, the columnist points out that by 2013, use of content marketing had jumped across corporations from 60% a year or so before, to 93%[20] as part of their overall marketing strategy. Despite the fact that 70% of organizations are creating more content, only 21% of marketers think they are successful at tracking return on investment.

The supply chain of digital content marketing mainly consists of commercial stakeholders and end-user stakeholders which represent content providers and distributors and customers separately. In this process, distributors manage the interface between the publisher and the consumer, then distributors could identify the content that consumers need through external channels and implement marketing strategies. For instance, Library and document supply agencies as intermediaries can deliver the digital content of e-books, and e-journal articles to the users according to their search results through the electronic channels. Another example is when consumers pay for the acquisition of some MP3 downloads, search engines can be used to identify different music providers and smart agents can be used by consumers to search for multiple music provider sites.

In a word, the digital content marketing process needs to be conducted at the business level and service experience level because when consumers are accessing digital content, their own experience depends on the complex network of relationships in the content marketing channels such as websites and videos. The consumers interact directly with distributors in the big supply chain through various digital products which have an important role in meeting the requirements of the consumers. The design and user experience of these channels directly decides the success of digital content marketing.

Electronic services refer to interactive network services. In the electronic service, the interaction between the customer and the organizations mainly through the network technology, such as using E-mail, telephone, online chat windows for communication. Electronic services are different from traditional services and they are not affected by distance restrictions and opening hours. Digital content marketing through electronic service is usually served together with other channels to achieve marketing purposes including face-to-face, postal, and other remote services. Information companies provide different messages and documents to customers who use multiple search engines on different sites and set up access rights for business groups. These are some channels of digital content marketing.

Content, Uncategorized

Content Marketing News & Analysis

Content marketing means attracting and transforming prospects into customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. The purpose of content marketing is to help companies create sustainable brand loyalty and provide valuable information to consumers, as well as create a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future. This relatively new form of marketing does not involve direct sales. Instead, it builds trust and rapport with the audience.

Unlike other forms of online marketing, content marketing relies on anticipating and meeting an existing customer need for information, as opposed to creating demand for a new need. As James O’Brien of Contently wrote on Mashable, “The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return. Instead of the commercial, be the show. Instead of the banner ad, be the feature story.” For content marketing, continuous delivery of large amounts of content is required, preferably within a content marketing strategy.

When businesses pursue content marketing, the main focus should be the needs of the prospect or customer. Once a business has identified the customer’s need, information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, email newsletters, case studies, podcasts, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, blogs, etc. Most of these formats belong to the digital channel.

Digital content marketing is a management process that uses digital products through different electronic channels to identify, forecast and satisfy the content requirements of a particular audience. It must be consistently updated and added to in order to influence the behavior of customers.

During the baby boom era, Kellogg’s began selling sugary cereal to children. With this change in business model came sociable animal mascots, lively animated commercials and the back of the cereal box as a form of targeted content marketing. Infographics were born in this era. This represented a new approach to make a brand memorable with the audience.

E-commerce adaptations and digital distribution became the foundation of marketing strategy.

Internet also helped content marketing become a mainstream form of marketing. Traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, radio and TV started to lose their power in the marketplace. Companies started to promote and sell their products digitally.

The phrase “content marketing” was used as early as 1996, when John F. Oppedahl led a roundtable for journalists at the American Society for Newspaper Editors.

Metrics to determine the success of a content marketing are often tied to the original goals of the campaign.

For example, for each of these goals, a content marketer may measure different engagement and conversion metrics:

Businesses focused on expanding their reach to more customers will want to pay attention to the increase in volume of visitors, as well as the quality of those interactions. Traditional measures of volume include number of visitors to a page and number of emails collected, while time spent on page and click-through to other pages/ photos are good indicators for engagement.

Businesses want to measure the impact that their messages have on consumers. Brand health refers to the positive or negative feedback that a company gets. It also measures how important a brand is for consumers. With this companies want to find out if brand reputation influences their customers to make a purchase. For businesses hoping to reach not only more – but also new – types of customers online, they should pay attention to the demographics of new visitors, as evidenced by cookies that can be installed, different sources of traffic, different online behaviors, and/or different buying habits of online visitors.

Businesses focused on increasing sales through content marketing should look at traditional e-commerce metrics including click-through-rate from a product-page to check-out and completion rates at the check-out. Altogether, these form a conversion funnel. Moreover, to better understand customers’ buying habits, they should look at other engagement metrics like time spent per page, number of product-page visits per user, and re-engagement.

Content, Uncategorized

Content Marketing Industry News and Trends

Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It is often used by businesses in order to:

Content marketing means attracting and transforming prospects into customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. The purpose of content marketing is to help companies create sustainable brand loyalty and provide valuable information to consumers, as well as create a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future. This relatively new form of marketing does not involve direct sales. Instead, it builds trust and rapport with the audience.

Unlike other forms of online marketing, content marketing relies on anticipating and meeting an existing customer need for information, as opposed to creating demand for a new need. As James O’Brien of Contently wrote on Mashable, “The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return. Instead of the commercial, be the show. Instead of the banner ad, be the feature story.” For content marketing, continuous delivery of large amounts of content is required, preferably within a content marketing strategy.

When businesses pursue content marketing, the main focus should be the needs of the prospect or customer. Once a business has identified the customer’s need, information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, email newsletters, case studies, podcasts, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, blogs, etc. Most of these formats belong to the digital channel.

Digital content marketing is a management process that uses digital products through different electronic channels to identify, forecast and satisfy the content requirements of a particular audience. It must be consistently updated and added to in order to influence the behavior of customers.