The Mountains and Rivers Order and its mainhouse, Zen Mountain Monastery, is one of the more significant Zen Buddhist training centers in the West. Ranked first on Google for searches such as “Zen buddhism” and “Zen meditation,” the Order also maintains a strong presence on the web with large archives of teaching material, web radio, an online journal, and an online store.

This is an excellent opportunity for the right candidate with the technical knowledge and project managerial skills to coordinate a team of designers and content editors who will be working closely with a religious organization. See the full RFP and please contact me for further details.

Behind the scenes, both sites use the same WordPress instance and the same database.  I managed to do this by using the Domain Mirror WordPress plugin.  It allows a WordPress instance to be accessible from multiple domains.  I could sniff out the domain requested and serve up a different header, footer and stylesheet for each of the sites.

I also sorted the jobs list on the home page of each site to favor recent jobs that are local to each site.  I laid out the plans for this here.  Various widgets, contact emails, featured post prices, and site copy are also unique to each site.

Hopefully this jobs board will gather momentum and will help to support the news reporting on EdNews Colorado as it is doing for GothamSchools.  I also hope that partnering both sites like this will be an added incentive for people to post their listing, knowing that it will show up on both jobs boards.  Perhaps in the future we can roll this out to other education news sites across the country.

It has been a long time now since I’ve experienced any chronic pain and I’ve almost forgotten what it was like back then, searching for a cure to my condition.  I continue to be grateful for the groundbreaking work done by Dr. John Sarno.

Design

It’s conceivable that someone looking for a job on the EdNews Colorado board may be interested in a posting in NYC and vice versa, so we wanted to integrate both of these boards in a way that added value to each of them.  The trick to do this is to list the jobs in a way that is most relevant to the particular board.

Here is what I think it should look like for the GothamSchools Jobs board.  The EdNews Colorado version would be the same, except centered around Colorado:

As a future idea, once we have more cities represented, we could expand the design to have a map showing the locations of all the available jobs.

Hosting

Both jobs boards will be hosted on one server and hitting the same database.  I’m hoping we can get the jobs.ednewscolorado.org to hit an appropriately themed copy of our WordPress code.

Pricing

Both jobs boards will need to use the same base price for listing a job.  To feature a job, we can charge different amounts.  The GothamSchools jobs board has recently upped its prices due to the increasing numbers of jobs posted.  The Featured Jobs premium listings become more valuable to people the more jobs get posted on the board as regular job listings get lost faster.  So we would want to price the Colorado jobs premium listings at a rate that the market could bear.  This would initially be lower than on the GothamSchools board.  We could also offer a discounted rate to allow people to feature a listing on both boards.

Deployment

We’d like to deploy the new EdNews Colorado board in a similar way to what we did for the GothamSchools jobs board.  For that, we offered the first 40 listings free.  This was useful to get an initial burst of activity on the board.  Even though the EdNews Colorado board would begin already populated with NYC job listings, the same principle would apply.

As an example, let’s take a look at the Streetfilms‘ report.  First, we should note that Streetfilms gets about 30% of its traffic from Google search.  The Search Engine Optimization reports are nested under Traffic Sources in Google Analytics.  For Streetfilms over the last month we get this information:

So most of our clicks come from “streetfilms” and “street films,” as we would expect.  It’s interesting to see “mazda lorax” and “lorax mazda” sneak in there.  They result from of an anti-campaign that we are running here.  What’s really interesting is that you can animate the performance of the keywords over time.  Here is how “mazda lorax” and “lorax mazda” behaved over the last month:

You can see that on 2/25 we got 400 impressions and 70 clicks on the “mazda lorax” search in Google.  That spike came 3 days after this post was published.

Apart from analyzing old data, we can identify keywords that we want to increase our traffic from.  For example, Streetfilms ranks 14th, on average, for the keyword “livable streets” and got less than 10 clicks over the last month.  It is odd that this rank is so poor since the content of Streetfilms lines up quite well with the meaning of “livable streets”.

What can we do to increase our search engine rank?  Google ranks sites based on their content and on the clout of their incoming links, so improving both of those will make the site rank higher for the relevant keywords.  In the meantime, play around with these new Google reports to get a better appreciation for the traffic that comes to us through Google search.

I just came across the way Gothamist does this with what they call a News Map:

I think this would be a great way to list stories on Streetsblog.org, Streetsblog.net, Streetfilms and also GothamSchools as an alternative to the reverse-chronological blogging format.  The map could position itself by default at the location of the user to show them stories immediately surrounding them.  The sidebar could display a reverse-chronological list of blog posts.  When you click on a title it will highlight the blog post on the map.

Just recently when we upgraded to version 3.3.1 this process didn’t go as smoothly as it normally does and I’d like to briefly document here what the issue was for the benefit of other people and to remind myself of what happened here for future reference.

After deploying the new version, things looked fine.  Over the next few days, however, problems started to arise.  Scheduled posts were not getting published on time and the local comment sync from Disqus was not working automatically.  This only was occurring on the Streetsblogs, however, and not on GothamSchools.

The short story is that I found that all the problems were related in that they relied on the wp-cron.php script to initiate them.  This is a background process of WordPress that manages all scheduled and routine tasks.  I found by rolling back to the old version of wp-cron.php, everything would start working again.

I have now rolled back all instances of the Streetsblog WordPress to use revision 13725 of wp-cron.php.  The reason why I suspect the GothamSchools blog not to have this problem is because it is running on the standard apache web server while the Streetsblogs run on the less common lighttpd web server.

The next step would be to investigate exactly where the bug is and why it is failing.  The place to start for that is by studying the differences between the old a new versions of wp-cron.php.  I’ve also reported the problem to the WordPress developers.

What’s Messi up to these days?

Streetfilms produces short films showing how smart transportation design and policy can result in better places to live, work and play.  Its goal is to inspire action and behavioral change to make the cities of the world more livable.

So how do we measure Streetfilms’ success at achieving this goal?  If we look at how people engage Streetfilms, we can draw a few rough categories of increasing degrees of user engagement:

Grazers

• watch a film, or part of a film
• read the accompanying write-up, transcript, subtitles, or comments on a film

• watch streetfilms on a regular basis
• subscribe to streetfilms updates in RSS, facebook, or twitter

• comment on films to discuss with other community members
• translate subtitles into different languages

• embed streetfilms in their own websites
• buy dvds of streetfilms and hold screenings in their community

1. Log in to Twitter and click on Resources in the right sidebar
2. Choose Widgets and then click “My Website”
3. Choose the Search widget or any other widget
4. Customize then embed!
5. You may want to add some css on the page to customize the look of the widget. I had to here because my styles were interfering with it a bit.
6. Edit the settings to set interval: 5000.  This will make the widget update every 5s instead of the default 30s.  You can also adjust the width and height.