I came across an interesting post that outlines 5 warning signs of a weak social media strategy. These signs consist of:

• Lack of Focus on a Few Social Networks
• No Responsibility for Executing Social Media Activities
• Daily Tasks are Not Aligned with Social Media Strategy
• Metrics Are Not Being Measured
• There is No Social Media Strategy in the First Place!!

There are some interesting points that you need to look out for, especially if you’re hiring someone to do the job for you. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling ballet shoes or weight loss success stories, you need to make sure you know what you’re jumping into, otherwise you’re just wasting your money.

Actually, speaking about money, the most important part of your Social Media Strategy should always be an expectation of the ROI you’re targeting. You need to keep measuring the positive benefits of your campaigns to make sure you’re getting value from your activities.

Ever been stuck trying to figure out a connection string for a system you need to code against? It’s usually not a problem because once you figure it out, everything just works, but when you’re working on something new you could find yourself stuck. This is where ConnectionStrings.com comes in. It’s a reference site with connection string samples for any database you can image (and then some). Worth bookmarking in case you need it in the future. It’s great that you can find references to anything you want online. Whether you’re looking up catalog printing or just price options for different products, you can pretty much find what you need online.

This is a must-have for developers of any online system. Book mark it now.

I had a bit of a problem today trying to get an 8Mb backup uploaded into MySQL. The problem was caused by the fact that phpMyAdmin was timing out when I tried to import the database. I tried breaking it down into smaller sections but a couple of the tables just had too many rows in them. Just as I was about to bang my head against the wall, I came across BigDump, a MySQL upload tool that staggers the uploads allowing you to upload dump files up to 50Mb in size.

Now that that’s done, I can go back to looking through Disney vacations to see where we may be going on our next holiday. This was holding me up, but now that my MySQL restore is done, I have the evening to myself.

• base64_encode
• base64_decode
• htmlspecialchars
• ip2long
• long2ip
• md5
• crc32
• nl2br
• sha1
• str_rot13

There are others, but those are the fun ones. So, instead of staying up all night and ending up with dark circles around eyes, just bookmark the site, and you can pull it up when you need.

You can go over the top too. For example, I think this site: No5 Ltd is a bit too much, but if you look at this Outer Banks rentals website, adding a picture would really help to the front page.

• Check out Handy Backup as one way to backup your website.
• SiteShelter is another website backup tool
• There’s a great website on free backups here
• Here’s some information on backing up WordPress

Make sure you always keep your backups up to date!

The one thing that I noticed was that they use a dynamic favicon, the icon that your browser uses next to the URL or next to bookmarks of a page. Reading about it, it turns out you can change your favicon dynamically use AJAX (see here). However, what they were using was an even simpler technique. Apparently if you rename an animated .GIF to .ICO, you can use this as your favicon and you get the animated effect. You live and learn huh ?