The problem is simple; I wanted a method by which a model in my app could use a table from another MySQL Database (on the same server). The solution is equally simple:
class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
set_table_name "other_db.table_name"
end
Where other_db is the database name, and table_name is the table you want to use.
Building sites that both support and derive value from a community is one of our great memes at the moment, and one we have fully embraced when building Bouldr. One of the biggest problems, however, is how to break even; servers, bandwidth and development all cost money, and someone has to pay.
Thanks to the legions of advertising networks that have grown out of this rich demand for an easy monetisation method, there are plenty of opportunities to quickly and cheaply monetise a site (so long as you don’t end up unintentionally breaking it, that is!). Read More »
Advertising copy is the meat of your marketing campaigns – the actual information presented to your customers in order to get them to buy your products rather than a competitor’s.
If you create great advertising copy, your advertising campaigns can only benefit, bringing more custom to your business, however, creating bad copy can waste both time and money – it can even give your company a bad reputation in your target market’s eyes.
What I present here are a few points that I feel are vital to get right in order to produce marketing copy that is effective. These few points can be applied to many areas of marketing, whether it be creating a marketing brochure, a banner advertisement for a website or a point-of-sale display.
Most people will not read more than a single sentence or paragraph, so when it comes to writing advertising copy, it pays to get to the point as quickly as possible. Rambling on with details that have already been covered elsewhere in your advertisement will distract your potential customer, and in the time it has taken for them to read ‘Here at Syndicated System Solutions, our priority…’ they will have lost interest, and more than likely, will have moved on to the next item on the page.
Start your advertisement with a benefit of your product or service – something that will catch their eye, for example: ‘Kyotee is a leading UK business directory’. At this point, we have set the precedent for the visitor to read on – Why is Kyotee a leading directory service? What do they offer? What can they do for me?
Now that we have gained the interest of our potential customer, we now must provide the filler – a rich sentence or two describing the unique parts of our products and services that set us apart from the crowd.
Your product or service is worth talking about, unfortunately, you will normally only have a finite amount of space or time in which to tell your prospective customer about it.
Keep to the point – tell your customer how your product can save time or money, provide them with customers, increase sales margins, decrease costs, make a cup of tea in seconds – give the key features or reasons as to why they should come to you rather than a competitor. This is also a good place to add any current offers, sales or special deals you might have. Give the customer a reason to buy from you.
Always keep your advertising copy focused on the thing you are selling. Do not deviate to tell the customer that you have been in business 15 years if it won’t matter to them, but above all that, make sure you finish your copy with the most important statement – the Call To Action.
A Call To Action is a crucial part of most advertising copy; A Call To Action tells the user what to do next. Our advertisement copy ends with such a phrase: “Submit your advertisements today, and gain valuable exposure!” We want the user to sign up for our service so they can begin advertising, however, if we hadn’t included this important sentence, then we risk leaving the user in limbo. We have got them excited about our service, we tell them how we are unique, and then we walk away? No.
In order for an advertisement to be compelling, the user needs be told what they should do next in order to get to the thing that you are selling. Writing a good Call To Action will allow you to get your customers in line to make a purchase, but there is still one last detail to take into consideration: What happens when a customer does what you told them to do?
You have told your customer about your new, fantastic service or product, and they click on your web link or pick up the phone and dial the number in your advert. Unfortunately, the phone number you gave was a digit wrong or your Web site is not yet finished. Disaster!
There is a very high probability that your potential customer won’t try to get through to you a different way – they will just hang up and go to the next advert in the list. At best, they will forget about their experience in trying to get hold of you, but at worst, they will associate your business with that bad experience, and avoid you in the future.
It is imperative that the contact details you give in your advertisements are correct. Ideally, if you are advertising a particular service or product, then your web link should go directly to a page focused on it rather than your company homepage or contact form. If you give a phone number, then the person answering the phone should at least be the correct person, and even better, be able to help the customer to make a purchase or take the enquiry further.
Spelling, punctuation and grammar are all very important when it comes to writing copy of any type for your business – be it an email, brochure, advertisement or receipt. Lacking in any of these three areas gives a very poor impression of the level of professionalism employed within your business.
If you are not confident in any of these three key areas, then it is better to have your copy proofread and run through a spell-checker than to leave it to chance. Remember that your customers probably do not know you, so all they a judging you on are the words you have chosen to promote yourself with. If these words don’t make sense, then your customer will disappear.
Once you have set up your business, spent time and money promoting your services and products, you’ll need to think about how to convert your visitors into customers. I am going to look at methods by which you can improve your conversion rates by discussing some of the reasons that people will not make a purchase after visiting your advertisement or site.
If you are targeting the wrong market sector with your advertising, then it really doesn’t matter how successful in drawing the crowds it is – they are not going to be interested in your products or services.
Be as specific as possible. If your market is a niche market, then put advertisements in magazines or on Web sites that serve your niche. Decide on your target audience, and bombard them with advertising. You will find that targeted advertising will pay dividends more than generic advertising – if you add your business to our directory, then make sure you add it to relevant categories. Adding your new Website Optimisation service to a ‘Website Hosting’ directory will get you very few interested parties. Add your business to a relevant directory, and you’re target market will find you!
People will not read everything on your Web site or marketing material. Most people skim read when browsing, and as such, need content that is easy to process and digest.
Always ensure that you have spellchecked your copy before posting it to your site; misspelled or grammatically incorrect passages will instantly give your visitors a bad impression of your business, after all, if you can’t be bothered to check your own marketing material for correctness, then your products and services are probably going to suffer from the same lack of professionalism.
Visitors will want to find out more about your products and services before they buy. By not explaining the features or specifications in full, you are leaving questions unanswered in the minds of your customers. If these questions are important enough, there is a good chance that your visitor will look elsewhere for answers, and end up purchasing from your competitors.
Make sure that you cover as much detail as possible when describing your products – ideally, you should aim to be able to explain enough about the product that the potential customer has no need to research further. They should be ready and willing to make a purchase based on the information you have presented.
There is no better way to lose the trust of potential customers than to provide obfuscated or inaccessable pricelists. If a customer is looking at your prices, then there is a good chance that they are either ready to make a purchase or are comparing prices. If you can present the price of your product or service on a page of your site in a way that allows a user to determine what it is within six seconds, then you’re doing well. Any longer, and you risk overloading the user with options, decisions and ultimately turning them away.
Navigation is arguably the single most important aspect of any website; if no-one can find what they want, how are they going to buy from you?
Getting navigation right, however, is no simple feat - books have been written on the subject that can cover it to a far deeper level than I can in a short post such as this. Furthermore, there are an endless number of sites dedicated to disseminating the best practices in navigation design that would make far better reading. For example:
I have discussed some of the reasons as to why people may come to your site and not make a purchase. If you can avoid some of these common mistakes, then you are effectively reducing the number of barriers standing between a browsing customer becoming a paying customer.
One final word of advice: Take a look at your site now – can you see any other potential barriers that may prevent a visitor from finding what they want and spontaneously purchasing it? If so, look at how you can remove these barriers – each time you do, you are effectively opening your doors further, and allowing more people to make purchases.
Just a quick bit of CSS that we came up with to display a percentage star rating that I’d like to share. This method requires two images - one with all of the stars highlighted, and one with them all greyed out:
Note that these images are both 100 pixels wide (for simplicity) .
CSS
.starCont {
width: 100px;
height: 16px;
display: -moz-inline-box;
display: inline-block;
background-image:url(/images/zero-star.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: bottom left;
vertical-align:text-bottom;
}
.stars {
display: -moz-inline-box;
display: inline-block;
height: 16px;
background-image:url(/images/five-star.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: bottom left;
vertical-align:text-bottom;
}
.stars span {
visibility: hidden;
font-size: 1px;
}
HTML
<span class="starCont"><span class="stars" style="width:<%= percentage %>px"><span><%= percentage %>%</span></span></span>
Serving Suggestion
Use as part of a voting system whereby the percentage values are injected into the page via the value of *percentage*. If your star images are larger than 100px in width, then you will need to adjust the value that is calculated by an amount proportianal to the actual width.
I recently had to create a cron job that controlled the delivery of newsletters to a set of subscribers. Unfortunately, the code required some refactoring, but up until it could be modified, the task still needed firing at specific intervals.
I had a little trouble finding much on this subject, so here is the code I eventually used:
./script/runner -e production "app = ActionController::Integration::Session.new; app.get 'account/send_newsletters'"
With any luck, this will help another person save a couple of minutes!
Since Rails 1.2, this method of executing rails controller actions has been throwing an “uninitialized constant ActionController::Integration” exception. Adding the following line to your environments.rb file fixes this problem:
require ‘action_controller/integration’
Thanks, Dimitry Hristov!
I came across a few pitfalls in my attempt to get my Textdrive account talking to my StrongSpace account over SSH without needing to enter my StrongSpace password at the prompt. I am setting out all of the steps necessary to get this working here so that others can avoid these same problems.
Prerequisites
You should be familiar with gaining access to and using BASH on your Textdrive account before you go any further - if you don’t then I suggest you go here for more information. I accept no responsibility for any damage or problems you may cause when using this tutorial. Make sure you take adequate backups and check any scripts before you run them.
Step 1: Creating the keys
To get started, we need to create a set of keys:
ssh-keygen -b 1024 -f ss -P '' -t dsaStep 2: Uploading the public key (ss.pub) to your StrongSpace account
Step 3: Test!
OK, you now have your private key on your Textdrive account, and the corresponding public key on your StrongSpace account. We are good to test.
Go back to your Textdrive shell, and type:
ssh -i ss SS_USERNAME@SS_USERNAME.strongspace.com
You should now log directly into your account without needing to enter a password.
Notes:
If you already have an keys on separate lines.
