Some really cool things I learned at PodCampSLC were:

• The Zoom H4 is a dynamic and superb little podcasting tool.
• The Sure SM58 is a common mic you can get for ~$100.
• The AT4050 is a great mic (three mics in one: cardiod, omni & figure 8) that retails for $999, but you can probably get it for around $550.
• The biggest problem with lower end video cameras is hum from the tape.
• Vegas is a really great professional podcast editor that also does video.
• VisualHub is great video editing software.
• I really like startcooking.com (mentioned by Doug from Podango).
• 50,000 downloads/month is not enough reach to attract sponsorships, 50k might be enough for niche advertisers.
• If it takes 1 hour to create a 13MB audio podcast, it probably will take 10 hours to create a 50MB video podcast.
• Blogging is a great search engine tool. (I knew that one!)
• The best mic situation for a group setting (i.e. users group meeting) is a Zoom H4 type device to record the speaker plus two table top mics for questions from the audience.

Unfortunately, and to the dismay of individuals who couldn’t make it, the only thing PodCampSLC was lacking in… was podcasts, which I’m sure will be remedied in 2009.

PodCampSLC 2008
Learn, Share, Evolve.

If you attended PodCampSLC 2008, there is a survey you can take.

From url canonicalization to link bait, Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP hits all the SEO basics a php programmer could need. Billed as a book written for the php developer or tech-savvy marketer, this book attempts to debunk a few myths and protect you from the black arts of black hat seo while offering up a healthy dose of code examples and tool suggestions.

Co-authored by American Jaimie Sirovich and Romanian Cristian Darie, Pro SEO with PHP has a unique flair for foreign language SEO. Also included are tactics for avoiding (im)proper cloaking and the basics of geo-targeting. Rounding out the book are chapters on an e-commerce case study and SEO for WordPress including several lovely plugin suggestions.

Finally, there’s a hidden piece on regular expressions in the appendix, which goes quite nicely with the chapter and code examples about url re-writing. Matt Cutts, Google SEO extraordinaire, is quoted quite a bit along with a few other books and blogs and including a sprinkling of tools and WordPress plugins throughout to please any SEO. Overall, I really liked the book.

I couldn’t sum it up better than Cristian Darie himself, so I’ve borrowed his summary of the book which just so happens to be a great example of copy complete with all the right terms in bold, optimized for both humans and machines. To spice up the list just a bit (and add a bit of SEO myself), I have added in various links to relevant sites and articles.

• Understanding the criteria that influence search engine rankings
• Building keyword-rich URLs using PHP, Apache, and mod_rewrite
• Using the HTTP headers to properly indicate the status of web documents
• Relocating content using the proper HTTP status codes
• Coping with duplicate content effectively to avoid penalization
• Avoiding being the victim of black hat SEO techniques
• Implementing geo-targeting and cloaking using IP delivery
• Promoting your site using web feeds and social bookmarking
• Optimizing your web pages using better HTML and JavaScript
• Enhancing existing web sites
• Using search engine and traditional site maps effectively
• SEO for WordPress blogs
• Building a SE-optimized E-Commerce catalog case-study

Restructuring page source order has become a recent phenomenon due to CSS layouts that allow developers to create visual presentation using stylesheets that break out of rigid inline, structurally ordered html. Separating presentation from content leads to this question: is placing content first more accessible?

Roger Hudson and Russ Weakley set out to answer three questions in their presentation, “Page Source Order and Accessibility”:

• Is source order important for screen reader users?
• Are skip links a waste of time?
• What are structural labels and do they help?

The study offers up user expectations and observed behavior of screen reader users and text browser users. The conclusions (or recommendations) that result are interesting and not necessarily what the average web developer might expect.

Study Results

• The majority of screen reader users EXPECT navigation to be presented before the content.
• Research showed no clear overall PREFERENCE of source order.
• Inexperienced users may find presentation of content before navigation disorientating.
• Experienced users did not use skip links while moderately experienced users used them extensively.
• Overwhelming support for structural labels.

Recommendations

• Place navigation before content to benefit some screen reader users
• Include skip links
• Use meaningful headings
• Use descriptive links
• Use structural labels to identify navigational components of web pages.
• Use semantically correct and valid page code.
• Adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

The outcome of this study shows that more user testing would be wise. And, even though the expectations of screen reader users is dependent on the overall adoption of accessibility-minded practices (or not), the ability to successfully use a site also depends on that site’s own adherence to coding best practices within the context of it’s own unique layout.

One interesting aside that I would interject is a comparison of these recommendations with search engine optimization best practices. I read a later blog by Russ Weakley quoting advice from an SEO seminar where, “hiding text was described as a bad practice – regardless of the purpose or CSS method used.” Unfortunately this unsubstantiated rule pairs structural labeling using off-left text and the sIFR method against SEO recommendations. With regard to source order, my current assumption is that placing content first is best as long as the content contains links with descriptive link text. I suppose the very best source order would be title, short global nav, content with descriptive links, local nav, other cotnet, then footer.

In my opinion, accessible code leads to better search engine visibility. After listening to this podcast and reading the study, I have concluded that balancing SEO and accessibility will continue to be a challenge depending on both current coding practices (good or bad) and ever evolving search engine optimization guidelines.

I was impressed and intrigued by the best practices Matt Mullenweg presented despite the hardware-heavy titled presentation, “Scaling for Your First 100k Users.” As the founding developer of blog software WordPress, the Jazz musician turned blogging software developer has garnered world-wide recognition and a following of blogging elite. The Q&A after the session was equally as interesting and tech-filled with lots of questions from the audience about infrastructure and hardware. If you would like to start a blog, you should sign up at WordPress.com.

“The first 100k are going to be your most passionate users, your most unique users, and they’re also going to be the hardest for you to get to. The first 100k are like rolling the rock up hill, and after that you’ve got enough momentum that you’ll be fine.” -Matt Mullenweg

Mullenweg’s 12 Rules:

1. You have to be your most passionate user.
2. The act of writing things on paper frees the creative juices.
3. Obsess about the details. Pay attention to every single part of the interaction. See what the experience is like for the people using it.
4. Do your own support. Feel the pain of your users. Track the number of support requests, time spent, how much time you’re spending on it, document as you go along. Don’t bother making a lot of documentation before people are asking questions because it’s not going to match their mental model. Make it as easy as possible for people to contact you in every single way.
5. Blog every step of the way. People will root for you. People will help you. It’s a good way to find people to work on what you’re also working on. People will cut you a lot more slack.
6. Have a great tag line. If you can’t describe what you do in 5 words or less, simplify what you’re doing. Create contextual tag lines: Gutenberg for the web for librarians, the democratization of media for politicians.
7. Frame everything you’re talking about in a context for your users. People want to know what you’re going to do for them. “We make it easy for you to do what you want to do.”
8. Get out version 1.0 as fast as humanly possible. User feedback is completely impossible to duplicate. The people who give you a hard time will push the limits of what you’re doing. Be able to listen to the silent majority.
9. Measure your success. Identify your core metric and watch it religiously.
10. Know what to do if you are successful. Does your business model scale with the number of users?
11. Start strong and end strong. First impression is very important. Lead with the most compelling point for why people should use your product or service.
12. Be a pain killer, not a vitamin. Everyone has things in their life they care about more than you. Address a real need that someone’s having. People really love Aksimet because it’s a pain point.

The Q&A following Matt’s WV06 presentation was equally interesting. Here are some snippets:

• WordPress.com is stateless, it’s all php talking to the database. It has no load balancing it’s all round robyn DNS.
• A fantastic book to check out for scaling is Building Scalable Web Applications by Cal Henderson of flickr.
• Models that Matt looked to: flickr and LiveJournal.
• Matt learned that eventually you are going to have to partition the user data. It’s more and more painful the longer you wait, so if you do it from the beginning, you’ll be set.
• Uses four replicating boxes instead of one box.
• Recommended myISAM instead of innodb because of file system and memory issues. Matt said he would highly recommend using innodb for running a single blog, the file system is fat but fast.
• Get out of that one box mentality from the very beginning. Start with two boxes. Instead of buying on $150 box, start with two $75 boxes. Go with the cheapest boxes you can possibly use. It’s always to have more. Everything that will possibly fail on your system will, so just plan for it.
• A mistake Matt said he made in the beginning is that they spent a lot of money on their first servers–they were big expensive boxes that weren’t well optimized for what they were doing.
• A little background: Matt started out as a musician and then claims to have gotten side-tracked into “all this awful web stuff.” He used to trade web design services for music lessons.
• Start with fewer features that you think you’re going to need because you can always add features–people can’t stand removing features. It’s better to start with less than you think you need.
• Matt says, “pretty much every web host worth it’s salt has a WordPress installer.”
• You have a very real responsibility to make sure that data is never ever ever lost, and if you have any problems you will loose that trust.
• If it wasn’t hard, then it wouldn’t be worth doing.