Let’s face it. Marketing in the digital age is hard. Where will you put your efforts? How do you know it will pay off? The Isobar 50 is our list of the top 50 challenges that online marketers are grappling with today, and our recommendations for dealing with them. If you’re an online marketer, this is the place to get answers to your most pressing marketing and online business questions.
I provided answers for three of the questions and I even sound like I know what I’m talking about: Read the rest of this entry »
HTML5 is the latest version of the language that serves as the foundation of the web. It’s the first major revision in over 10 years and as it’s gotten closer to its final form and more and more browsers begin to implement its features it’s become a source of intense interest and contention in the technology community. This article hopes to explain the realities of HTML5, dispel a couple of myths and shine some light on the future of the web.
To begin we’ll need to define what we’re talking about when we say “HTML5.” There is a specification to refer to and much of what falls under the HTML5 name lives in that spec. In addition, there are several related specifications and APIs that are lumped together and called “HTML5″ when people talk about these things informally.
So, conversationally, HTML5 consists of the following:
New Semantic Elements
HTML5 has introduced several new elements. They aim to introduce more meaning to markup and codify existing web development patterns. Some examples of these new elements are nav (for navigation), article, header and footer.
Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path talks up analytics. Don’t I feel like a smart guy with all my fancy analytics experience?
That’s probably something I don’t talk enough about here- analytics. I’ve got a ton of experience with both Omniture and Google Analytics, doing some pretty advanced work. I should share that.
Anyway, good article talking about the UX benefits of analytics data. Check it out.
This is a little resource page from one of the WordCamp Boston Ingite talks. WordPress Short Codes are clearly awesome and I don’t use them enough. I aim to change that.
There’s a back story to this one. I once failed to get video progress tracking working with a Flash video player and Big Expensive Analytics Company™ code. It was a real pain in the ass. We missed the deadline, wasted about 8 hours and eventually just dropped the feature. A frustrating experience for all involved.
With that in mind, then, it should come to no surprise that I returned to the problem when exploring the <video> element and related APIs. What was a fruitless 8 hours of hoping the Big Expensive Analytics Company™ code would “just work,” turned out to be about 30 minutes of light hacking to get it up and running with Google Analytics and HTML5.
By the way, between you and me the Big Expensive Analytics Company™ code never “just works,” even though that kind of feature is one of the reasons they get the big bucks for their product. I don’t really like working with Big Expensive Analytics Company™. I’m much happier with GA. It behaves as expected and is a lot easier to “get” right out of the box.
I’m going to be posting a series of notes on the production of my first HTML 5 demo page. I’m doing a presentation on it at work (to be shared here, of course) and I want to capture my thoughts as I have them in the process of producing some fully formed HTML5 content.
One of the things I’m looking at with interest is the new Video element. Anything that simplifies embedding video on a web page gets a thumbs up in my book. Read the rest of this entry »