First, anyone have a guess as a unique agent string that could be used to detect an iPad?

Now.. who else here thinks this “device” is 2 years too late, and lacking Too many features?

I think if it had a camera, it could have revolutionized the industry, and become the defacto standard for video confrencing and webcam, both porn and non porn. (I guess it is an add on, which might be good, allow to upgrade to better quality camera, swivel mount, 3rd party etc). Then it would look like something out of a science fiction movie from the early 70’s, talking to a board with a camera etc.

I don’t see why you could have used it with a bluetooth headset to make calls? Yes I wouldn’t put it up to my head to talk, but speakerphone or headset would be nice.

Specs taken from Apples site:
> 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology
> 1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch (ppi)

Compare that with Droid Phone:
* 3.7″; WVGA (480 x 854 pixels); 265 ppi
* 16:9 widescreen

4×3 for the ipad is bad for the movie industry, where laptops, tvs, theaters are going wider and wider.. and then apple says o, we like boxed screens. Now, I wouldn’t want a 16:9 ipad, it would look even more ugly. But, you have to choose, render the movies back to 4:3 to take advantage of the full screen or have the black bars, pretty sure I would want content I’m paying for to be full screen on a device. Now comes the problem, as a production company who has invested heavily into widescreen HD, what to do?

Thoughts? Anyone actually going to stand in line for one?

Brad

This is not my first blog, hopefully not my last. I have blogged in the past on a few different topics, but my primary blog which I spent over 3 years building up, writing content on and publicizing was in a completely different field. What I learned while blogging in the computer industry is that well written original content will draw the most traffic and show the most positive return on time invested.

How does this translate to adult industry? It is very unlikely that an affiliate will spend the time to write custom blog posts about an affiliate programs site to generate traffic, it probably isn’t worth it. What does work, is using the content to build it’s own links. Take 1 video, per day, or per hour, and offer it for free in exchange for writing a short 300 word review of the video when done. If they write a good review, send them an invite code for the next days video, and allow them to get unlimited free porn for writing good quality reviews. Using these reviews, build a simple rss feed which contains links back to the content, and allow bots and scrappers to go hog wild with the content. A good rss feed could easily be scrapped and republished hundreds of times and every time making quality deep links back to your original content. Time invested, minimal, return potential is very large. If you look at Amazon, the reason why they have an API which allows webmasters to build tools which contain the customer reviews, product details and descriptions is because it all leads back to sales!!

The next tool is an rss to post plugin for wordpress. It is feasible that one could generate 1000’s of pages of content on a single domain or even a collection of domains all pointing back to a primary site, this offers very little value. Google will easily ignore a whole domain, or collection if they feel there are just a link farm back to a single domain. What works better, is use free adult blogging services to host the blog, and point the links back to your site. These free adult blogs while maintain more value, as there are many more inlinks pumping link juice into the domain then if you where to try this on your own. If you choose to do this on your own domain, don’t be surprised to be swings in the number of indexed pages you have in major search engines. As they adjust their algorithms, there is a high likely hood that your content may loose favor and possibly be delisted all together.

Blogging is a great way to socialize. Companies who you would never expect are blogging now, to get information out there and allow customers to contact them and act as part of a community. By building a community, where people can interact, you will have more satisfied customers and this leads to more renewals. It can also lead to connections in the industry. Making it easier to contact individuals directly, through icq, blog comments or twitter makes direct link sharing much easier. Instead of blasting an e-mail off to some support@example.com address it is possible to build up an associationg with an individual and have a repor with them prior to asking for the link swap. These real world connections are very valuable and can lead to unforseen potential down the road. Talking to an individual on twitter, even just a few back and forths might be enough for them to recommend you speak to someone else or even push some business in your direction. For some people in the industry, where you are selling a service to support mobile adult sites, maybe hosting, validation, billing, etc being trusted and having a good repuation in the industry is critical.

Most everyone has heard of, used and is comfortable with Google Xml Sitemaps, but very few people have taken advantage of Google Video Sitemaps. Video sitemaps are a great way to get Google to index video content, generate traffic and earn income. The results of a well built sitemap is premium ranking in search results in Google Video Search Results. The advantage is the newness of the video search is that it can accelerate you past the competition and into the 1st page of results.

For for the complete specifications according to Google, including Video Sitemap, News Sitemaps, Mobile Sitemaps, and Geographical Sitemaps. Check out Google Page here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=10079

For the exact sitemap specifications go directly to the source: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php, Now this specification doesn’t include the video format, as this is something particular to Google and not widely supported. It is not recommended to replace your primary sitemap with a video sitemap, but in addition to it.

During my research for this article, I came across this resource: Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0, Basic Guidelines, W3C Recommendation 29 July 2008

Here is an example from a standard web sitemap:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=“http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iphods.com/movie/2/crash-pad-series-episode-17-dylans-solo/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-07-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iphods.com/movie/3/traditional-college-punishment-2/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-07-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iphods.com/movie/4/rick-savage-slave-training-101-tit-torture-caning/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-07-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
……..

This is a single video listing on a Video Sitemap:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=“http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″ xmlns:video=“http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1″><url>
<loc>http://www.iphods.com/movie/524/secretary-thing/</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.iphods.com/videos/a…672bc.m4v</video:content_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.iphods.com/clips/thumbs/a…672bc.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Secretary Thing</video:title>
<video:description>2009 AVN Award Nominee for Best Vignette Release Special Note: This Is Movie # 100,000 In Our VOD Library!!!
Patrick Collins proudly presents, It’s A Secretary Thing, a collection of stunning superstars dressed up as seductive secretaries. Watch the curvaceous Shyla Stylez, alongside Jenaveve Jolie, Karlie Montana, Carli Banks, Ashley Blue, Evie Delatosso, and Jamie Lamore. >
</video:description>
<video:rating>2.5</video:rating>
<video:view_count>12</video:view_count>
<video:publication_date>2009-08-13</video:publication_date>
<video:category>Mature Adult</video:category>
<video:family_friendly>No</video:family_friendly>
<video:tag>play</video:tag>
<video:tag>orgasms</video:tag>
<video:tag>porn</video:tag>
<video:tag>female</video:tag>
<video:tag>movies</video:tag>
<video:tag>original</video:tag>
<video:tag>100%</video:tag>
<video:tag>blue</video:tag>
</video:video>
</url>
……..

When creating your Video Sitemap, keep in mind the following:

• A Video Sitemap should contain only URLs that refer to video content. Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site. If Google cannot discover video content at the URLs you provide, those records will be ignored by Googlebot.
• Since each video is uniquely identified by its content URL (the location of the actual video file) or, if a content URL is not present, a player URL (a URL pointing to a player for the video), you must include either the <video:player_loc> or <video:content_loc> tags. If these tags are omitted and we can’t find this information, we’ll be unable to index your video.
• Each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 10,000 video items and must be no larger than 10MB uncompressed. An individual video file or thumbnail (specified in the <video:content_loc> and <video:thumbnail_loc> tags, respectively) can be no larger than 30MB. If you have more than 10,000 videos, you can submit multiple Sitemaps and a Sitemap index file.
• Google can crawl the following video file types: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv. All files must be accessible via HTTP. Metafiles that require a download of the source via streaming protocols are not supported.
• The URLs included in the Sitemap must have their robots.txt file set appropriately for User-agent “Googlebot”.
• If you have multiple videos embedded on the same html page, use separate <video:video> entries for them with different <video:player_loc> or <video:content_loc> information.
• Google web crawlers will verify that the information you include in the <video:title> and <video:description> fields matches your live site. You should view your play pages in a browser such as Lynx to make sure Googlebot will be able to find them.

You very quickly noticed how easy it to make these complete sitemaps. Here is an example of how powerful the http://videos.google.com/ can be, look at how well it display the thumbnail videos provided in the sitemap:

Videos.Google.com Search

If you want to watch a fun video on Google, check out this video on Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/116372/cnbc-originals-inside-the-mind-of-google

Recently I had the opportunity to put the recently released Motorola Droid head to head with an Apple iPhone 3gs. Because of the location, the iPhone was on the edge network, while the Droid was on a full speed 3g network. Testing out each phone, I ran a few different tests to compare, and realized how slow edge network really is compared to 3g. I put each phone through the paces, and have to say overall the Verizon 3g network was very impressive. What I realized is that not everyone is on a high speed 3g network, and there is no real safe way to detect on the server side the connection type for a user. This means it is important to provide the best quality experience while maintaining the solid optimized content for those who may be on a slower network.

The average download speed for the US is pretty dam fast, where not compared to Japan, but still over 5 megabit per second. The chart is over 2 years old, so we can only assume the speeds have increased.

Average Broadband Speed Chart

Now compare that with these speeds for typical mobile phone bandwidths:

results from http://i.dslr.net/iphone_speedtest.html

Examining these results, it is easy to see why it is critical to compact images, and content to generate a very zippy page. Lets exam a few popular mobile sites, and see how well they perform on edge or 3g bandwidth connections.

For those sites which are designed for mobile devices, such as Nokia N70, Samsung z105, Motorola v3i, check out this great resource:

http://ready.mobi/

Here is a screenshot of a report on an undisclosed popular mobile site:

Ready.mobi Sample Report

Once you have run the report, and have an idea what your site loading times are like, you may want to know what you can do to improve the results. Here are 3 great resources to help you speed up your mobile site:

1. Yahoo! YSlow + Firebug Firefox addon + Yahoo Developer Network Blog Post
2. Google Speed Tools
3. Pingdom Web based Speed Test
4. WebSiteOptimization.com

Yahoo Developer Tools

YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 34 best practices divided into 7 categories.

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Google Speed Tools

Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

For firefox: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux).

For Chrome: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/speedtracer/

Pingdom Web based Speed Tools

The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

http://tools.pingdom.com/

Here is a screenshot from a sample report on Pingdom:

Pingdom Sample Report

Website Optimization.com Tools

Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. The script incorporates the latest best practices from Website Optimization Secrets, web page size guidelines and trends, and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.

http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso

Here is a screenshot of a report on WSO: (this is only a portion of the results, try out the tool to generate a full set of results)

WebSiteOptimization.com Tool Output

If you don’t know your stats, you are loosing money. Every person I talk to who doesn’t know their traffic stats, click through rates, conversation rates and rebill rates is loosing money. They probably think they are doing pretty well, but without being able to examine their statistics to see trends, popularity, and to be able to test ideas they aren’t making the optimal amount.

I know mine pretty well, and I know them well enough to be able to predict the outcome with changes, in traffic volume, search engine rank movement, or adjustments in banner placement on the site. I saw a direct drop in traffic after redirecting my Google search traffic from the mobile site to a similar desktop site, Google toolbar users are constantly feeding back data to Google and they know how long visitors are at a site, and this can affect your actual ranking. Because mobile devices can’t yet have toolbars thank the lord, Google can’t collect this data from mobile users and is forced to rely on what their desktop users are doing.

Now, you are probably thinking I’m going to talk about Google Analytics or other web stats programs. Not today, today is going to be about Banner and Advertising Statistics.

Spankwire Mobile Footer Banner

If you have made the mistake of hard coding in ads directly into your site, please read this post and immediatly go fix it. Using a good ad rotator will allow you to “test, test, test” (Shoemoney quote). People get banner blindness, and if you have the same footer ad on EVERY page, people won’t even notice it after scrolling through the first 4 pages of your mobile tube site, yes spankwire I’m talking about your ZZ ad. Banner rotation has 2 huge advantages, you can try multiple banners without editing your code, and you can start and stop banner which aren’t performing well or leading to sales.

These are very rough numbers, some factual, some guesses, but want to show the importance of using a banner rotation script on all ads.

Spankwire.com has a estimated daily traffic of 1.5 Million visitors per day to their primary site, according to both compete and quantcast.com. With an estimated 10% of traffic being mobile, lets say their mobile site gets 200,000 visitors per DAY. With the average number of page views for a tube site around 6, we can estimate that banner has an impression rate of 1.2 million. Based upon testing of the same banner on a mobile property of my own, I know the click through rate of that banner is around .05%, which means about 7500 clicks per day. Using numbers provided by Brazzers affiliate program, which show an expected conversion rate of about 1:800 on average would mean a conversion rate of ~9 per day. At the standard price of $25.00 per day generates an income of $225.00. Now lets see what happens if we change the banner. I have tried a different banner and found the click through rate to be around .09%.

Different ZZ banner with a .09% CTR

Looking at the same numbers for spankwire we can see a noticable profit increase by changing banners. 1.2 Million impressions at .09% would be 13,500 clicks and 16 sales translating to $420.00 a difference of $195.00 additional profit by changing a banner. Who wouldn’t want to be making an extra $195 a day by just changing a banner ad?

Now for the How

There are a few ways to handle this. The advantage we have is that mobile devices doesn’t really support flash so we can safely say most ads will be static images or iframes. If we stick with the static image example it is pretty easy to dump banner impressions and clicks into a database table and perform some queries to generate reports. This maybe ok for a low volume site, but doesn’t allow any control over which ads are show when and to whom. When I started my mobile site, I just had a array of banners and shuffled them in php and printed out the first banner, it worked but provided no stats.

Every site now is served by a local install of OpenX. Probably my top 3 used php opensource projects right behind wordpress and mediawiki. You can download it from http://www.openx.org/. There is also a hosted solution, but I don’t want to add the extra overhead to the mobile browsers, it is easier to serve everything from a single domain for faster page loads and cuts down on the javascript. I currently use the local php method, which write the banner codes right into php, so less worries of javascript errors or conflicts.

Taken from the OpenX Terms of Service 4.2.

Prohibited Content. Company Web Site shall comply with all applicable Laws during the Term. Company shall not use the OpenX Hosted Service to: (a) upload or otherwise transmit any Advertisements that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; (b) harm minors in any way; (c) impersonate any person or entity; (d) forge headers or otherwise manipulate identifiers in order to disguise the origin of any Advertisement transmitted through the OpenX Hosted Service; (e) upload or otherwise transmit any Advertisement that Company does not have a right to transmit under any law or under contractual relationships (such as inside information, proprietary and confidential information learned or disclosed as part of employment relationships or under nondisclosure agreements); (f) upload or otherwise transmit any Advertisement that infringes or misappropriates any Intellectual Property Right or other proprietary rights of any person; (g) upload or otherwise transmit any material that contains software viruses or any other computer code, files or programs designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer software or hardware or telecommunications equipment; (h) interfere with or disrupt the OpenX Hosted Service, OpenX Demand Service, OpenX Supply Service or the OpenX Market or networks connected to the OpenX Hosted Service; or (i) violate any applicable Law. OpenX shall not be responsible or liable for the deletion, correction, destruction, damage, loss or failure to store any Advertisements or other materials submitted by Company to the OpenX Hosted Service. OpenX reserves the right to withhold, or remove Advertisements from the OpenX Hosted Service without notice for any breach of this Agreement.

You can decide if that applies to the content you may want them to serve as part of your banners. I recommend using the hosted solution, to avoid having to agree to additional terms of service, but if you want to have assitance or high level of assurance go with the hosted package.

OpenX Hosted Interface

They have gone through a few major versions of the software over the past few years. They started out as phpads, went to openads, and not sure why recently jumpted to openx. I’m sure they probably have a blog post about it but not important.

The other option for hosted banners is Google, who’s team of lawyers has come up with this lovely fine print:

Site Content

While Google offers broad access to a variety of content in the search index, publishers using the Ad Manager service may only do so on sites that adhere to our content guidelines, unless authorized to do otherwise by Google.

Ad Manager may not be used to display ads on pages with the following types of content:

• Violence
• Advocacy against any protected group (e.g., racial or ethnic origin, sexual orientation/gender identity, age, disability, sex, religion, color, national origin, or veteran status)
• Pornography, pedophilia, incest, bestiality or child pornography
• Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia
• Online casinos and gambling
• Hacking/cracking content
• Sales of weapons or ammunition (e.g., firearms, fighting knives, stun guns)
• Sales of hard alcohol
• Sales tobacco or tobacco-related products
• Sales of prescription drugs
• Sales of products that are replicas or imitations of designer goods
• Sales or distribution of term papers or student essays
• Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site’s search engine ranking as outlined in the webmaster quality guidelines posted at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.
• Content protected by copyright law unless a publisher has the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.
• Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity, or infringes on the legal rights of others

Pretty sure they make it clear, they don’t want to be used to serve porn. But if you are reading this and not doing porn, feel free to check them out here: https://www.google.com/admanager/login/en_US/index.html

I do need to wrap this up, and get back to real work but wanted to add a little bit more.

OpenX is confusing

I have been lucky enough to watch openx grow up and mature over the past few major versions. It has come a long way, but I think the hardest part is getting started. Even having done it a few times, still takes me a few minutes to decide how to layout the names of advertisers, banners, campaigns, websites, zones, etc. They have gotten better, and is much easier to edit mistakes and typos, but there are somethings that once set are a pain to reverse. The temptation is to just make 1 site, and use the same invocation code on every site, and use the same advertiser for every company. This laziness will come back and haunt you once you learn the system and start working with reports and stats. The extra time spent in the beginning will be worth it over time.

Today is a 2 for 1 special, since I already a day behind I decided to include 2 similar topics in 1 post. Today I’m going to talk about how to use both Google Trends and Twitter Trends to best optimize keywords and domain names.

Google Trends, methods to find keyword rich domain names

Years ago I remember spending hours picking out domain names, where generally you could get your first or 2nd choice. Now that is very rarely the situation. Often you end up settling for less desirable top level domains, such as .net or .biz. Avoid .info at all costs, They scream scammer, and don’t instill any faith in the visitor. If you are just spamming, go ahead and buy the .99 domains from Godaddy, but don’t make it your primary domain.

Using Google Trends:

If I had to buy a new adult domain to start on, here is what I would do. First find the list of suggested keywords, Google Adwords has a very nice keyword suggestion tool. Here are a few from the search for”iphone porn”, but you soon realize that Google filters out porn.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

So next idea? Well how about examing the affiliate program you wish to promote, for example http://www.brazzersmobile.com/t1/ and run it through a keyword density analyzer: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

Here are the results for using the seochat keyword density tool:

Results for: http://www.brazzersmobile.com/t1/

Some of them look ok, and might be available for domains, for example brazzersmobileporno.com is available, please read affiliate terms before registering any domain with copyright terms in it. But really, we want to know how well which term gets search for the most often. This is when Google Trends comes in, we can take a few terms and see which would get the most natural traffic, if we can rank for the term. The following “brazzers mobile porno, brazzers mobile porn, porn on brazzersmobile” didn’t generate very good results, so we need to alter our approach. Most likely if we take out the brazzers we can get a more realistic trending. Using these terms “mobile porno, mobile porn, porn on mobile”, we can see a more pronounced trend.

Google Trends for mobile porno, mobile porn, porn on mobile

Mobile Porn is a great business to be in. Growing extremely fast, but maybe you are thinking what about HD? Lets compare these terms “mobile porn, hd porn, streaming porn, dvd porn” we see a very interesting trend, A) dvd sales are dropping, and streaming is taking over, much faster then mobile. So we know we want to focus on streaming and mobile, these keywords might do really well.

Google Trends for mobile porn, hd porn, streaming porn, dvd porn

So wait, but how many search results are there for these terms? Are we competing against 20k results or 5 million?

25,500,000 for mobile porn

2,000,000 for streaming porn

So, great the high search term has a lower result, should be easier to rank on that term. Now to look for some domains. One easy way to do this, is with the Godaddy bulk domain tool, combined with a keyword randomizer, If we take and shuffle around the order of the desired keywords, and get possible domain names, so keywords we might want to use are as follows:

movies, adult, porn, mobile, iphone, video, streaming,

http://mytexttools.com/Permutation-Generator.html#KWPG

Here is a sample of the output:

adult.com
adultporn.com
adultvideo.com
adultmobile.com
adultstreaming.com
adultpornvideo.com
adultvideoporn.com
adultmobileporn.com
adultpornmobile.com
adultmobilevideo.com

which can be fed into the Godaddy.com Bulk Domain Name Registration Tool (limit to 500 domains)

So, out of that list, there are still many gems which are keyword rich and very likely to do well:

MOBILEPORNSTREAMING.COM
MOBILEADULTSTREAMING.COM
MOBILESTREAMINGADULT.COM
MOBILEADULTPORNVIDEO.COM
MOBILEADULTVIDEOPORN.COM
MOBILEPORNADULTVIDEO.COM

Some are better then others, but they contain the rich keyword strength needed to compete against brand name sites, and other mature sites which have been around for years with hundreds of thousands of backlinks.

Part 2, Trending and Spamming on Twitter

Twitter provides almost an too easy tool to collect followers. The trending topics. This is a small bit on the sidebar which shows hot topics which are contained in thousands of tweets? Now you ask, so what? Well it is guarenteed that people are search for those terms. So carefully use them to gather followers. Don’t include spammy links inside of trending topics, instead be creative, say something original and get retweeted or better yet get a few new followers. Here is a great example of a trending topic which could collect followers, promote keyword value, but also not get noticed as spam: “#willgetyouslapped” possible ways to use it? Check out these tweet examples:

“Watching porn on my ipod during church, yeah #willgetyouslapped”

“Getting caught with porno movies on my blackberry, not of my wife #willgetyouslapped”

“Getting busted red handed watching porn on my new android, #willgetyouslapped”

These are all keyword rich, spam safe, and might be enough to have people connect to them and want to follow you. Android and iPhone users are curious folks and want to know what others are saying about their prized possesions.

For those not too savy and don’t want to play with a json api, check out http://tweetstats.com/trends otherwise go right to the source and try the twitter trends api http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-Search-API-Method%3A-trends

Welcome to the first in a series, entitled “The 12 Days of XXXmas”, bringing you the reader 12 little gifts to help in your mobile website development.

Here is a hint of some of the great posts I’m going to try and get published between now and Xmas:

topics:

Android Phone Simulator, pros and cons

Iphone Application: Hello World

Photoshop Vs Gimp, $$ vs Open Source

Speedtest Your Mobile Site

Know your customers, with real time stats

Rank on Google, hidden traffic sources

Top Sites Ranking Secrets

Free Content, which can make you money

Pay Per Click Ads, which pay, which don’t

Hopefully there will be enough time between now and Christmas to get all these posts written, maybe some might be rough drafts, but I will try and get 1 published each day.

I’m working on my demo site and needed to capture a screenshot of the iphone simulator running Safari with my demo site mobile version open. I figured I would do the standard mac thing:

Command-Shift-4

Results:

iPhone Simulator with "dirty corners"

But, that would capture the square corners of what is behind the simulator and also would possible lead to the loss of the clean drop shadow when cropping, so I decided to see if there was any other options?

To capture a specific application window, press Command-Shift-4, then press the Spacebar. The cursor will change to a camera, and you can move it around the screen.

Results when copied and pasted into Adobe Photoshop:

iPhone Simulator with "black corners"

Great I figured, this should be smart enough to be aware of transparencies, so I should be able to paste directly into Photoshop. (by the way to copy directly to clipboard, instead of creating a new file: Add Control to the two shortcuts above to place the screen shot on the clipboard instead of saving it to the desktop. )

About to give up, I decide to try one more time, this time without the Control button pressed, to have OSX generate a new file. Low and behold, I open up this last resort, and it is a prefectly transparent with drop shadow png.

Results:

iPhone Simulator with "perfect transparency"

In conclusion, if you want to capture iPhone simulation stills use Command-Shift-4, followed by Spacebar to get the camera cusor, select the simulator and open the newly created png ready for use.

Final Image:

iPhone Simualtor, Perfect Cutout

Resources:

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/screencapturemac/ht/macscreenshot.htm

Here is a quick and dirty rotation script, I have edited down for simplicity but expect that it can easily be expanded on to suit your needs:

There are 2 parts, the first is the additional attribute to put into the body tag, as seen below:

<body onorientationchange="updateRotation();" >

Next there is a simple Javascript file which needs to be included, Along with a Basic Css File and added in a metatag for viewport zoom settings, in the head of the document as follows:

<head>
<title>Sample Page</title>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0;">
<style type="text/css">
@import url("/css/iphone.css");
</style>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/rotation.js"></script>
</head>

Here is the sample Javascript file: ( “/js/rotation.js” )

window.onload = function initialLoad(){
		updateRotation();
	}

	function updateRotation(){
		var contentType = "";
		switch(window.orientation){
			case 0:
			contentType = "layout_normal";
			break;

			case -90:
			contentType = "layout_right";
			break;

			case 90:
			contentType = "layout_left";
			break;

			case 180:
			contentType = "layout_flipped";
			break;
		}
	document.getElementById("content").setAttribute("class", contentType);
	}

Pretty simple So far, check back later this week for the rest of the details, or visit the working demo at:

http://mobile.prisonbang.com/

Something I have seen is a growing number of “landscape” mode websites. The majority of the web, from an iphone users perspective is done vertically, probably as this allows the most amount of reading before a scroll needs to happen and also because the device is slightly easier to hold in this fashion. Along comes the android, who’s screen is super high density pixels and has the same narrow dimension as the iphone has longest side.

Here are a few quick screenshots taken using the Apple iPhone Simulator as part of Xcode, to try and explain my point.

Screenshot of Mobile Spankwire.com (vertically)

Screenshot of Mobile Spankwire.com (horizontal)

Screenshot of Brazzers Mobile (vertical)

Screenshot of Brazzers Mobile (horizontal)

And now a site coded to adjust for the rotation, see how it spreads out to fill the width of the screen?

Screenshot of TouchiPorn.com (vertical)

Screenshot of TouchiPorn.com (horizontal)

There are even a few which look really clean horizontal, which orientation you aim for isn’t critical but make sure you are optimizing the viewing area for both. I have more to say on this subject, including the sizing of content for the newly release android but I need to finish this up as my battery is about dead. Until next time.