A Huge Thank You to the Rails Community

On Monday, the Marketing for Mavens web application will be going live as a limited beta. The past 4 months have been filled with development work that couldn't have been accomplished without the help of the Ruby on Rails community. I'd like to thank everyone who has helped out along the way and those that have created some wonderful resources for speeding development time and finding the answers to various questions. In no particular order, these resources have been a life saver:

• Finding Hosting: http://www.railshostinginfo.com/
• Restful Authentication: here and here
  
• The best forum for finding and answering questions: Rails Forum
• Integrating tags into your application: acts_as_taggable_on_steroids
• How to videos: Railscasts
• Tutorials and Getting Started Guides: Akita on Rails, Rails on Edge, Hivelogic, and Loud Thinking
• Create, Read, Update, and Delete information from you database using simple table structure: ActiveScaffold
  

I'd also like to thank James at MarginLeft for his help with JSON integration in Rails.

And for those interested in all of the resources I've compiled for Ruby on Rails, they're available on my del.icio.us link.

Developing for IE6, will this nightmare ever end?

We've moved. Please visit us at www.marketingformavens.com/blog.

Over the last few days I've been troubleshooting some CSS styling issues with IE6. This is no different than much of the design and development work I've done on web sites and applications over the past several years but this time, I seriously considered not supporting IE6 any longer. I've become spoiled but the ever increasing amount of standards compliant web browsers that all render very close to each other with the exception of some minor tweaks. Then we have IE6.

Yesterday, as I ran into a very frustrating bug, it led me to wonder how many wasted hours do web developers spend per day trying to code for IE6? It has to be hundreds hours per day worldwide. This is a browser that is well past it's life span but for whatever reason continues to have 40% to 70% market share depending on your audience. Is IE6 good enough for that many people that they refuse to upgrade or do they just not know that at the very least IE7 is available to them? Either way, at some point, I think we need to move on with or without these people. For now, I'm going to continue to put fixes in place for IE6 but my patience for this browser is wearing thin. Hopefully sometime soon we can move on from the IE6 nightmare and for me, and I'm sure most web developers/designers, this can't happen soon enough.

Launch Update

Launch day is shaping up to be Monday, June 30th. We'll be opening this up as a limited beta to start before rolling it out to everyone who has registered. If you've registered for the beta, you will receive an email when your account is ready to be opened. More people will be added through the month of July so if you don't receive notification right away, you should be added shortly.

If you're haven't registered for the beta but would like to or if you would like to learn more about Marketing for Mavens, please visit www.marketingformavens.com.

Launch Day Approaching

It looks like we're on track to launch our new targeted web content service at the end of the month. If we can wrap everything up over the next few days then the limited beta will begin. More news coming soon.

Firefox 3.0: So far, I'm Impressed

Well the Firefox 3.0 launch time came and went but it now appears ready for download. I've been using 3.0 release candidates for the past few weeks without a problem so I took the plunge and downloaded the new release. So far, it's been a pleasure to use. Most of my add-ons were available and the speed difference on the Mac is great. I also really appreciate that the Firefox team took the time to make Firefox now feel like an official Mac application. Simple and beautiful. If you're interested in the latest version of Firefox, download it now, and be part of what Mozilla hopes will be a record breaking event.

Build Dynamic Web Content Without Costly Upgrades to Your Site

Building a site with dynamic content can greatly improve the user experience. It keeps your content fresh and it ensures that the right information is delivered to the right person when they want it.

When it comes to moving from a static to a dynamic web site there are several approaches that you can take...everything from an open source content management systems to very expensive enterprise systems to hand coding your own solution. Any of these solutions, depending on the size of your site, company, and budget, could take several months to a year to accomplish. I've gone down each of these paths in a corporate environment and can confirm that there are no short cuts.

As an alternative, I've been building Marketing for Mavens, a micro-content management system that allows you to add JavaScript code to your existing web pages (html, php, asp, etc.) giving you control over the parts or sections of a page where you want to display dynamic content.

The advantage to this is that Marketing for Mavens can assist you in the distribution of your content and promotions. It tracks your visitors similar to how any web analytics system collects visitor information. This information is then used to distribute your content based on the previous pages the person visited. In addition to this, anyone in your company can be setup with an account to update and control your dynamic content and web site promotions.

If your interested in trying out Marketing for Mavens on your site, please visit sign up for the beta coming at the end of the month.

New Videos Now Available: Build Custom Content & Determine Best Potentential Customers

I've created two new videos. The first is a new overview video showing how to setup a new account, create new promotions, and integrate them into your web site. This is very similar to the previous overview video but it has been updated to show the latest interface and coding changes.

The second video shows how you can use web forms to send visitor data to you Marketing for Mavens (MfM) account. This is important as MfM can help you determine your best potential customers. MfM scores and tags each visitor based on the pages they visit and the content they view. This not only helps you to market the most appropriate content to your visitors but also helps you determine each visitor's level of interest.

Watch the new videos.

If you have any questions regarding the new videos, please send me an email.

New Videos Coming: Overview Demo, Sales Lead Demo & New Content Distribution Demo

The plan for this evening is to record a new demo video. This will incorporate all the tweaks and updates that have been made since the previous demo was recorded. For those who watched the first demo, there won't be much new information but you will see that recent changes have simplified the setup process and reduced the amount of code that needs to be added to your site. The plan all along has been to make this as simple as possible to use and I really think we've delivered on this promise with these changes.

If I have time, I plan to record a short demo showing how you can use forms to populate visitor information in Marketing for Mavens. Most companies use forms to gather sales leads. Marketing for Mavens works off this same concept but it takes it one step further to help marketing to further qualify leads and send the top prospects on to the sales team.

Finally, I'd like to do a third demo which shows off two new features that have been added in the past couple of weeks. This demo will show off how you can setup promotions which change depending on how often someone has visited your site and how you can display unique promotions or content to individual visitors.

Running Multiple Versions of Firefox

Recently, I've been testing the latest version of Firefox 3. I had held off on the testing version 3 because it overwrites previous installations of Firefox. You would think that Mozilla would find a better solution so they have a larger install base for beta testing but maybe this is by design.

Well the other day I came across this nice little application for the Mac which lets you keep your default Firefox installation while also testing Firefox 3. It was writen by Dave Martorana and the full details can be found at dangerouslyawesome. If you have the need to test Firefox 3 before it comes out or want to see what's new with Firefox without the risk of losing everything, check out this application.

New Look!

I hope you enjoy the new look. I've always thought that the product pages should be blogs and I think over time you will see a convergence of social web apps with company web sites. I'm still finishing some of the design details. If something doesn't look right in your browser please let me know chris@marketingformavens.com.