Most techies LOVE Google. They’ve taken on Microsoft, flipped the bird to Apple, and given away superior service for F-R-E-E. (With the exception of premium level Google Apps and a few other things.) On the other hand, most hardcore techies who were around to see Microsoft rise to the top, albeit illegally at times, will agree with me and say that Google’s slogan isn’t just a pile of regular shit, but full on bullshit. (I believe I’m paraphrasing Steve Jobs when I say that.)

That’s not to say that Google doesn’t have awesome stuff. I love the search, Gmail, analytics, and many of their other services, but when it comes to cloud computing, and storing ALL of our search data — and I do mean all of i t– Google has an ulterior motive. They leave the public completely in the dark about their snafus. Until just recently, Google had openly censored search because China just didn’t like the truth about their dark history to get out. So much for not being evil.

What does this have to do with Assault.it? You may have heard that as of about 16 hours ago Google decided to shut down several popular music blogs on their blogger and blogspot services. It’s understandable that Google would take down sites violating their terms of service, and they should do so. The only thing that is most surprising about the move is that no notice was given, and there was no opportunity for the site owners to backup their sites and old data. That’s years and years of archived work down the shitter.

Google’s response to the ordeal was basically, “Sowwy! Thanks for your cooperation!”Now it’s easy for everyone to love Google and not ask questions because of the quality of service they offer, but when we start trusting our network infrastructure to them, and trusting them with masses of search data, and with our cellular phones, and with our social networking, and email, and friendships, and ad services, well you can see where this starts to look less like a vague conspiracy theory and more like complete and total control of everything you do online.

One mention that I didn’t see from any of the posts about yesterdays, “musicblogocide 2010″ is that Google has started including Lala playlists directly in search results. I’m not entirely sure, but I have to believe that they are getting some sort of money out of having those songs indexed directly by the search engine.

Did no one make the connection between these sites offering mp3s and Google’s recent decision to include the ability to buy songs through their search? (Most of the mp3s were promotional, aka completely legal mp3s.) One would think that if they’re willing to put their commission on Lala music sales ahead of their hosted blogging platforms then why wouldn’t they remove Assault.it from their search directory because we’ve now posted a negative dissenting opinion about them? If we decided to turn Assault into an online mp3 download service who’s to say they wouldn’t revoke our Ad Sense account because we’ve gone in direct competition with them?

The one quote that makes the most sense to me in the article:

Decouflet sounds weary. “Google is treating bloggers like Big Brother,” he said. “Shoot first, ask questions after.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself, and I’m not the only one saying, “Fuck You” to Google.

My advice: get off of Blogger and Blogspot

That’s right, download and install WordPress on a hosting account that you pay $20 bucks for a month like Media Temple, or Host Gator and import your old Blogger and Blogspot posts–Wordpress does all of the above–it’s free and easy. That’s my advice to sites like Gorilla vs. Bear and anyone else still on hosted Google blogging platforms.

The one tool you need in your toolbox as a band (which basically makes you a small business owner) is to install and configure Analytics on your website. Do yourself a favor and get off of MySpace. At the very least MySpace should just be used as another avenue to reach fans, not your only or primary point of contact. For this particular tutorial, we use WordPress as our content management system of choice. I recommend WordPress to anyone who asks me simply because of how easy it is, and how easy it is to integrate Google Analytics.

If you’ve already setup Google Analytics you can skip down a ways on the page as I go into the aspects of Google that will mean the most to you. It’s a good idea to look over the initial setup to make sure you’ve done everything properly. The way I setup Google does enable tracking on a few more important items that you don’t get by just copying and pasting the code Google supplies to you.

Get WordPress or a something similar CMS

With WordPress you have two choices to setup your site:

1. Download the software and install it to your web host (Recommended)
2. Host your website remotely on yourname.wordpress.com (less freedom)

Some hosting providers like Media Temple have a one click install for WordPress. This helps things along considerably. If you can’t afford your own domain name and/or hosting. Signup for an account on WordPress.com. Your name will be YOURNAME.wordpress.com to start, but you won’t be able to have complete freedom over the look and feel of your site.

If you have no other choice, start with option 2. You can always export your data and import it to your own web hosted .com later.

Signup for a Google Analytics account using your Google account name

I’ve had a Gmail account for awhile now so all I had to do was go to Google.com/analytics and sign up for an analytics account.

Setup your profile

Setting up your profile is as simple as putting in your website address for each website you have. If you want to setup e-commerce tracking for your online store you have to enable this option later. For now, just enter in the basic information for your site.

Our site already has a profile so the additional site we just setup appears below that domain name. (assault.it.com) You’ll also notice that the status icon is a little alert. That’s because we need to actually setup the embed code on the site.

Click on the edit link on the right, and then click on the Check Status link over to the right

Now you’ll see what we need to get our hands on which is the Google Tracking code. (On the right) You can just copy and paste this into your site if you’re not using WordPress, but it’s better to integrate it with the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin so you can enable additional features not offered with just copying and pasting the code.

If you just copy/paste the code into your site you won’t get any of the additional benefits setup like goal funnels so don’t do that.

Leave this window open for now, and I’ll explain how to implement this code with the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin in the next step.

Download/Install/Activate The Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress to your blog

You’re better off using the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin for a 3 reasons:

1. The plugin will track outbound clicks to see where people are leaving your site and what links they are clicking on when they do leave your site.
2. The plugin will automatically put the proper code on all aspects of your site, and when an upgrade is available it’s as easy as clicking upgrade.
3. Your downloads will automatically be tagged as /downloads/wp-content/uploads/your-file-name.zip so you can get an idea of how many downloads you are getting.

To download the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin you can either add it through the administration interface by going into your WordPress Admin area: http://www.whateveryourdomainis.com/wp-admin and then click on the arrow next to the Plugins link and click “Add New”.

Then, do a search for “Google Analytics for WordPress” and it should be the first result. Install and move on to the next step or install it manually via the directions for installation on the plugins’ WordPress page which I have pasted below:

Input your Google tracking code

Remember the code we left open in another window from before? This is where we need that code again.  You just need the id off of your tracking code which I’ve highlighted below, not the entire copy/paste code that Google gives you.

Copy that part of the code and paste it into the configuration text box like I have below.

Set up your settings similar to how I have to ensure you’re tracking downloads as well as outbound clicks from your site.

Collect the data!

Gather several weeks worth of data before you really go in and analyze where people are coming from and what parts of your site are most popular.

What’s important?

Depending on how you are using your site there are a variety of things that could be of importance to you. (Besides just actual traffic of course)

If you’re using your website as a place where you can push your music to the fans with downloads then that’s going to be one of your most important areas to pay attention to. To view your download statistics go to the content report, and then “Top Content” section.

Then filter your content by downloads by typing “/downloads” into the text box as I have below:

Another thing to pay attention to is your  traffic sources. How are users finding you? Google searches? Reverbnation? MySpace? Twitter? Blog posts?

Want to increase/decrease the date range?

Been a few months since you installed the plugin code? How about increasing the date range from the past month to the past few months? Or past few days? Do that on the dashboard where you see the calendar:

Setup Goals (AKA Super Fucking important)

After you’ve ensured your data is being collected you’re going to want to setup goals.

Goals allow you to setup a flow on the site for how they find you up until they actually do something. (For istance,  download a file off of a specific page)

There are 3 types of goals you can setup, the most important to us being the URL destination which allows us to set a user path for a visitor coming to our site. Name the goal and select URL destination and you’ll see the rest of the Goal Details options that I have in the screen capture below:

“Goal URL” is the second have the the name of the page the user should end up on, and goal value is something to set up if you’re setting a monetary value for something like a digital download. For instance, if you have a file uploaded to your site as I have above, your goal URL would be downloads/wp-content/uploads/name-of-the-file-you-uploaded.zip

Note: You can take this link from the information in your Top Content section like I showed you how to do above.

If you want to track users from say, your homepage to your downloads page you can enter in the separate steps a user would take to get from your homepage to your actual file download.

If I had 4 pages I could enter them all in each field and name each step to determine how many users are able to make it through the entire goal funnel.

At Assault’s online clothing store, we use goals to track our user’s sticking points in our shopping cart check out process. If we find there are a lot of users abandoning their carts after they get to a specific step in the checkout process, we know there must be some sort of usability issue.

One of the coolest aspects of the goals and e-commerce tracking is that you can determine where your actual converted sales/downloads are coming from most. (Meaning the websites that send you the most downloads and money!)

Google analytics goals are critical when determining what social networks to push your music to the hardest, which blogs to keep pimping your free gear to cause their audience buys digital music, which twitter users are giving you shoutouts, etc. etc.

I say again, setting up Goals and Goal Funnels will give you visual proof of where you are having success with getting your music downloaded. I can’t stress this point enough!

If you find most of your users aren’t getting to your music downloads, then you need to give them a clearer call to action on all your pages.

If you’re users are bouncing after :20 seconds and only visiting one page, then they’re not finding what they came to your site for.

There are HUNDREDS of things you can learn from all the data Google gives you. Are your fans primarily hitting the page on the site with your pictures? Are they coming to the free download of a song you offered them that got plugged by a blog? Are they looking at your bio because you have a hot chick lead singer and they want to see if she’s single? (Assault‘s top viewed page on our store is for our zombie t-shirt. Go figure.)

Analytics is the key to your online strategy. It tells you what you’re doing right, and what you’re doing wrong. It’ll also tell you what your fans want more of, and if you’re getting them to the right place in the fewest amount of clicks.

Want more info? Did you get stuck at a certain point? Want some one on one advice? Send me a message on Twitter or post in the comments. I reply to just about everything that comes my way.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to get to check out the New Music Seminar in Chicago, and a question was posed to the speakers, “What iPhone applications should I have?” There was a bit of confusion, and some suggestions–none of which that I felt were really helpful applications for touring bands. Links open up in iTunes.

I’ve put together a list of the 5 applications that I have used in the past that I feel would be incredibly helpful to any touring musician, without including the obvious like Google Maps, Facebook, or Myspace.

Loopt

Want your fans to see where you are without having to update via Twitter? Loopt lets your fans see where you are in the country at the time, and allows you to update your status with what you’re doing there.

Cost: Free

WordPress

Need to write a message to your blog directly from your phone and include pictures? WordPress is by far the most popular blog platform, and this application integrates seamlessly with it.

Cost: Free

iSwipe

Want to take credit cards at your merch booth? Have a Paypal account? No need for a bulky credit card terminal, iSwipe integrates directly with several popular payment gateways and is great for a band on the go. It’s easy to use and easy to setup. (We used it at all the Assault Shirts live Summer Events.)

Cost: $0.99 (UPDATED!)

Pixelpipe

Taking lots of video and photos with your phone, and need an application that integrates and uploads media to virtually every service on the net? Thought so. Pixelpipe easily integrates with just about every major service out there and is great for publishing on the go.

Cost: Free

Tweetie 2

If you’re in a band, then you better be on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter, you better have Tweetie. It’s the best application out there for interacting with your Twitter followers, and it’s affordable too!

Cost: $2.99

Know of any applications I missed? Post them in the comments. Like lists like these? Follow me on Twitter here. I’m always posting helpful tips and links.

I don’t want to add to the already long list of great iPhone application round ups, so I’ve decided to add some applications that I use on a regular basis that seem to have snuck-in under the radar. Some of them are games, one keeps me from driving drunk, and another helps me post images to my photo blog. All the apps have at least one thing in common, they’re free.

Last Call aka, “How drunk am I iPhone?”

This handy little app has prevented me from driving under the influence more times than I can count. In the last 3 days alone it has helped me keep track of my drunkeness at least 3 times. The way this app works is, you put in your sex and weight, and throughout your night of drinking you enter in all your drinks and it will provide you with an estimated BAC as well as a timeline for how long it will take you to get drunk, as well as to come back down below the .08% thus allowing you to operate a motor vehicle again.

The best part, you can compete against your friends in an accurately weighted BAC competition rather than purely based on the amount of drinks you have had!

Zombieville USA

This is by far one of my most favorite games to kill some time with on the iPhone. Simply put, you walk around the levels and go house to house getting money and supplies, while being attacked by zombies on the outside! For someone who sucks at most video games like I do, this is a great game. It’s fun, easy, and totally addicting.

One more great thing to note is that the game is most fun with the sound on. Plus, Zombies are so in right now, more in than bacon.

WordPress

If you take alot of pictures and want them on your FFFFound WordPress photo blog like I do, then you may want to install the WordPress application. It allows you to blog on the go, as well as take pictures, preview, and post blogs to your live website.

It has support for multiple blogs, blog preview, drafts, publishing blogs, tags, categories, and just about anything you can do with your normal WordPress Administration area. It’s one of my favorite applications along with Tweetie to do my social networking and photo uploading on the go.  (I’m sure you’ve heard of it so I excluded it from the list, plus it is not free.)

Easy Wi-Fi

Logging in everytime you get to a free AT&T wireles access point is a major pain in the ass. Enter Easy Wi-Fi. Easy Wi-Fi takes care of all the heavy lifting making it easy to connect to free wifi spots without the signup and text message process that can be a major pain in the ass to do.

You can also make Skype calls on the iPhone now as long as you’re behind a Wifi connection making this application even more useful.

Bump

Rather than type in all the contact information of someone you want to add to your phone, why not just bump them? It’s the easiest and fastest way to exchange contact information. Check out the video below to get an idea of how it works.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZudLSKaBgM

Lex and Terry Morning Radio

My favorite morning radio show, the Lex and Terry Show is now available 24 hours a day 7 days a week on a freebie iPhone application! The application is simple, click the icon, listen to the show, pause, and resume playback. Playback streams live from the Lex and Terry Live stream during the show, and then plays repeats the remainder of the day.

If you haven’t heard of Lex and Terry I highly recommend installing this application and listening to it on your morning commute. I personally can’t stand morning radio, but this show is always entertaining and interesting.

Skype

I know Skype is vastly popular, but it’s new and it kind of came in under the radar for me. (At least when it came out I was only twittering 10 times per day so I may have just missed it.)

Currently, there’s no video, but I have heard rumors on such notable podcasts as TWIT with Leo Laporte that with iPhone 3.0 Skype will work with video too! Unfortunately, it only works when you’re near a Wifi connection. (Good news if you’ve installed the Easy Wifi application mentioned above as it will do all the hard work for you!)

Know any other applications that I missed? Feel free to post them in the comments.

I’ve been a daily visitor of ffffound for some time now, but I have never been lucky enough to receive an invite to actually use it. It’s a GREAT source of inspiration for all types of design, and I constantly refer to it and the QBN pic of the day thread for some good laughs and beautiful pictures. After realizing that I had a spare domain name I decided it was time to try and hack together a WordPress theme with a few plugins that would emulate ffffound, and its related images feature.

Download the theme and necessary plugins: VNovember_ffff.zip
To see the final working version of this theme+plugins: VNovember Image Bookmarking

Preface – What this theme + plugins will/will not do

I knew my version wouldn’t function exactly like the real thing, because I don’t really know how it works, and because I am somewhat limited to what WordPress has to offer. There were a few key elements of ffffound that I felt were the most important and useful part of its service, and I’ll be trying to replicate that functionality with WordPress and a few Firefox addons:

• Related images and recommendations based on post content and tags
• Displaying related images on homepage and post pages
• Displaying tag counts on the left side of the page
• Come up with an easy way to post the images via iPhone, Scribefire (direct from Firefox) and an easy way to thumbnail the images. (CSS for now)

***I recommend using a blank, fresh WordPress installation with no posts. (Not even the Hello World post) Or else you’ll have to go through your database and unpublish all your content posts or else they will start showing up in your related posts section when we only want images to show up

Upload the theme + plugins

I was able to accomplish most of this with some fancy CSS for IE and a few workarounds. For the most part the site is very easy to post to and looks very similar to ffffound. All you need to get this theme working is the VNovember_ffff.zip which contains the WordPress theme and the necessary plugins. To get these plugins individually you can go to their respective homepages:

• Yet Another Related Posts plugin (This one you’ll have to take from my zip as it is modified to work with images instead of using only text)
  
• Configurable Tag Cloud plugin
• SEO Friendly Images plugin

After downloading the zip do the following to get your files in the right place.

1. Unzip the theme
2. Upload the files in the “plugins” directory to your wp-content/plugins directory
3. Activate Configurable Tag Cloud plugin, SEO Friendly Images plugin, and Yet Another Related Posts plugin via the WordPress Plugins page
4. Upload the theme files to wp-content/themes so that the vnovember_ffff directory resides in yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/vnovember_ffff

Configure the plugins

Now that you have all the files in place you need to configure them. The Yet Another Related Posts plugin has settings, but I’ve made custom function arrays for them so you should not have to modify the settings page for this plugin. If you would like more/less related images to show up you can edit the functions in the single.php file and the index.php  file included in the vnovember_ffff theme directory.

From your WordPress Administration you need to add the Configurable Tag Cloud plugin to your sidebar. There are two sidebars with this theme, one on the left column and one in the bottom above the footer. Add the Configurable Tag Cloud plugin to your sidebar1 and apply these settings:

Tags, Uploading Images, making it work

The way this theme works is by using the tags you apply to each post to determine which images are somewhat alike. Every time you tag something the plugin will search through your posts and find other images that are similar and display the closest matches.

The easiest way to get images posted quickly is by using the Scribefire Firefox plugin. It takes just a few seconds to upload an image, add the tags, and publish the post all from your browser window. (You can still post from the WordPress Admin if you’d like) You can also snap pictures with your iPhone and use the WordPress iPhone application to post images directly from your phone.

If you decide to use the Scribefire Firefox plugin I recommend turning off the max image with option so that Scribefire isn’t trying to put inline styles in your image tags.

Some important things to remember:

• This theme does not have any commenting or trackbacks enabled
• There’s no need for multiple categories-just use tags
• This theme will only work and display properly if you only post images in your post body section
• You can hot link to images or upload them. I recommend uploading images to your own server and putting them in your posts rather than stealing someone else’s hosted images.
• This theme assumes your WordPress blog only has images, no textual, content related posts. If you want to have content related posts as well then I recommend using pages.

Plans for the future

A couple of plans for the future of this experiment (hopefully with some help from others!) would be to:

• Automatically pull the images src attribute for creating a link to the full size image from individual post pages using JQuery. (I haven’t quite gotten this to work yet)
• Create and cache thumbnails to related images on the fly with phpThumb. (not quite sure how to get this done either)
• Keep thumbnails to their proper aspect ratio (currently the related thumbnails scale improperly if they’re too tall)
• Possibly port this to WordPress MU so you can actually have user accounts with their own image bookmarking

A head start on the JQuery solution that I couldn’t seem to get working:

$(function() {

var imageSrc = $(“div.entry-content p img”).attr(“src”);
$(‘<a href=’+ imageSrc +).prependTo(“div.entry-content p img”);
$(“</a>”).appendTo(“div.entry-content p img”);
});

This seemed to get the proper image source URL, but it would never append the proper link href to the images. Please let me know of any problems you are having as well as bug reports in the comments, and if you can offer solutions to any of the three items I outlined above.

Happy image bookmarking!

The Assault Shirts Blog is looking better than ever. Bloody spatters, zombies, and those fancy swirly things–my favorite combination of photoshop brushes. I will eventually be supplying a huge amount of custom brushes that I have gathered over the years, but for now you’ll just have to settle for a testing version of this blog’s WordPress theme in a .zip file. I offer no support for this file, and it is a testing version of a modified theme called Dark Water by AntBag.com.

I repeat, DO NOT ASK ME FOR SUPPORT ON THIS FILE AS I BARELY HAVE TIME TO FIX MY OWN SITE’S PROBLEMS. I recommend checking out the Official WordPress site for any blog related issues not pertaining to our fabulously designed shirts.

Assault Blog Theme download 1.0