Dotnet Thread: February 2009

A web community is a web site (or group of web sites) that is a virtual community. Web communities in recent times commonly take the form of a social network service, such as Facebook, Upcoming and Last.fm, an Internet forum, a group of blogs such as WordPress.com and Blogger, or another kind of social software web application.

But what makes up a web community; what makes them successful? Below I discuss the four C’s of community: Content, Context, Connectivity and Community.

Content

A current meme when organising or building a website is the catchphrase Content is King. A big shift in the web in recent years has been the way websites are constructed. Today it’s a necessity, and indeed best practice, to separate form from content. In one hand you have the compelling content, whilst in the other you have the presentation, be it in the form of HTML and CSS, Flash or RSS, amongst others.

Quality content is one way in which you can make your website stand out. It is also a great way to attract the people who are needed to form the elusive community that your brand is hoping build. When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask: Where will the content come from; for example community driven or syndication? Does it provide indisputable value; does it have a unique selling point (USP)? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained? Even pre-Web 2.0 initiatives have to focus on keeping the content itself fresh and relevant.

Web accessibility and search engine optimisation are also vital, so having content completely separated from presentation means a number of assistive technologies can make better use of the content, whilst the web robots can also readily consume the information.

Context

Context means understanding how people use your website, where they are in the user-journey and serving them the right experience at the right time. Well-designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context.

For example, FriendFeed’s iPhone version, which is simply a re-worked web interface, is perfectly designed for contextual usage on the go. Similarly, Remember The Milk updates the interface explicitly for mobile and iPhone users, whilst also syndicating the content to applications such as Google Calendar. (It is questionable whether user-agent switching is good practice, but that is a whole new blog post.) Conversely, Delicious makes no attempt at changing the user interface for iPhone or Nokia N95 users since the iPhone and N95 have full web-capabilities through their respective web browsers.

In some instances the context in which the content is displayed will require reduced functionality. For example, the Last.fm mobile site does not allow you to play music, but simply search music listings, view recommendations, events and friend listings, and edit settings. However, through its API, Last.fm is able to offer its data and platform to third party developers to aid the building of new applications and communities, thus changing its context.

Connectivity

Connectivity is the ability of a system, whether that is a web-based community or a device like the iPhone, to connect with little or no modification. In the realm of communities, the ability to easily connect to your peers is the Holy Grail of the application.

Successful communities thrive on fluid, hard-to-measure activities that are, in the purest sense, relationship-based. It’s not all about mass communications — although Twitter and YouTube are both bucking this trend — but more about the micro-interactions. Designing experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions means that the community is able to function, unhindered, almost indefinitely. Facebook lends itself expertly to micro-interactions through the user’s ‘wall’.

Companies are turning to communities as the new customer relationship management (CRM), but this requires people to mind them. Organisations such as 37Signals and WildBit very effectively use Twitter to broadcast service updates and sometimes apologies, whilst the BBC and The Guardian online use it to broadcast links to new content.

Continuity

People often don’t like change, but communities that thrive often do so though evolution to meet the needs of users. Communities need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained. Too much of a radical change will almost certainly have a detrimental impact upon visits, at least initially.

Building communities is the new marketing for a brand, whether that is through wholely-owned properties or 3rd party social media services such as Twitter, WordPress or Ning. The starting point to any community is finding a niche that is currently underserved and serving that community better than anyone else. But Brands need to know a few things before they head down the community path. The web is saturated with communities. Some are thriving, while others have come and gone. Creating a community is not like your average marketing campaign that you can ditch it is a failure. If the community is successful the four C’s of content, contect, connectivity and continuity will have to be maintained and indeed, developed.

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An increasingly popular technique among websites and in particular, blogs, is the idea of making URLs search engine friendly, or safe, on the premise that doing so will help search engine optimisation. By removing the obscure query string element of a URL and replacing it with keyword rich alternatives, not only makes it more readable for a human being, but also the venerable robots that allow our page content to be found in the first place.

For example, the following is WordPress’ default URL configuration for a post:

http://www.domain.com/?p=1635

However, buy using a URL-rewriting available in the Apache webserver, we can achieve a far better result, such as the following:

http://www.domain.com/search-engine-safe-urls

NB. It is also possible to achieve a similar result with an ISAPI rewrite for Microsoft’s IIS webserver, but this topic will not be included in this post.

To get your website working with SES URLs you need to enable both the mod_rewite module and AllowOverride directive in the Apache configuration file.

Uncomment (remove #) from the following to enable the re-write rule:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Change the AllowOverride directive from none to all

<Directory />     Options FollowSymLinks     AllowOverride all     Order deny,allow     Deny from all </Directory>   <Directory "C:/WebRoot">     # Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",     # or any combination of:     #   Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews     #     # Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"     # doesn't give it to you.     #     # The Options directive is both complicated and important.  Please see     # http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options     # for more information.     #     Options Indexes FollowSymLinks       #     # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.     # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:     #   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit     #     AllowOverride All       #     # Controls who can get stuff from this server.     #     Order allow,deny     Allow from all </Directory>

On Apache webservers, .htaccess (hypertext access) is the default name of directory-level configuration files. An .htaccess file is placed in a particular directory, and the directives in the .htaccess file apply to that directory, and all its subdirectories. It provides the ability to customize configuration for requests to the particular directory. In our case, enabling search engine safe (SES) URLs.

By setting the AllowOverride directive to All in effect defers configuration settings to the .htaccess file.

An example .htaccess file could include the following code to rewrite the URLs:

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L,QSA]

Search engine friendly URLs are implemented with Rewrite engines. The rewrite engine modifies the URL based upon a number of rewrite conditions and rules.

The RewriteBase directive explicitly sets the base URL for per-directory rewrites. The RewriteCond directive defines a rule condition, so in this case handling missing files or directories. Finally, the RewriteRule directive is the real rewriting workhorse. In this example, we’re getting everything in the URI — i.e. not including the protocol (HTTP/S) and domain name — based upon a regular expression. This is then appended to the default file reference — index.php — as a back reference. The [L,QSA] refers to the rule being the last rule and append any query string parameters to the default file. It is important to note that this is all done on the server side, the user will never see the website address changing in the browser’s address bar. Furthermore, simply transposing the index.php filename with your default file name — e.g. index.cfm, default.aspx — will have the same result. Indeed, the above rewrite rules are becoming a de-facto standard for web applications.

To fully understand mod_rewrite rules above, look at the Apache mod_rewrite documentation.

Once you have your SES functionality in place on the webserver, it is then the responsibility of your application framework to understand the URL construction and handle it accordingly. Fortunately, frameworks such as ColdBox and Fusebox for ColdFusion, Zend and Symfony for PHP, all contain functionality to do this, but that is the subject of an entirely different post.

Users of web applications prefer short, neat URLs to raw query string parameters. A concise URL is easy to remember, and less time-consuming to type in. If the URL can be made to relate clearly to the content of the page, then errors are not only less likely to happen, but our good friends the search engine robots are able to draw a stronger assumption of the pages’ relevance and content.

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The Four C's of Community

Content

Context

Connectivity

Continuity

It's Always Six O'Clock

Enabling Search Engine Safe URLs with Apache and htaccess

Originals Enjoy

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Content

Context

Connectivity

Continuity

Originals Enjoy

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