Permanent or semi permanent make up, as it is sometimes called, is an exciting, revolutionary treatment to enhance facial features. It is a highly skilled, state of the art form of cosmetic tattooing also known as Micro-pigmentation or intradermal cosmetics. Annalou is one of the UK’s leading clinics and with a quickly expanding client base they called upon Miromedia to design and build a new site complete with easy to use CMS and a powerful SEO redesign.

Utilising the new Miromanager 2 Content Management System for the new Annalou site, Miromedia where able to create a faultless and intuitive backdoor solution for Annalou. It is a CMS that will serve Annalou for the foreseeable future, allowing for effortless updates and image changes. Along with the search engine optimisation redesign, which is due to begin this week, Miromedia have also added a Facebook portal to keep fans of Annalou up to date with company and industry developments and gossip.

Well we got you to on to our website with one click, so Miromedia e-mail marketing does!

Miromedia deliver thousands of e-mails a week for our clients. They are driving new sales and creating new business. Don’t miss out on your opportunity to stand out from the crowd and avoid the dreaded junk email button.

Miromedia e-mail marketing campains are extremely effective, find out more by clicking here.

The vi command in Linux provides the most basic of text editing capabilities from the command line. It is both useful and at the same time extremely clunky without the proper command knowledge. Most of my searching on the web has resulted in many pages assuming that if you know the vi command then you must also know how to use it… I Linux therefore I am, or some such.

However to someone that generally doesn’t need to use the editor that often it can be frustrating trying to make a single character change in a file only accessible via SSH without having to copy the file to a desktop machine, change and copy back. Luckily I have found the following command cheatsheet for the editor:

ctrl-F :Page down
ctrl-B :Page up
$ :Move cursor to end of line
^ :Move cursor to beginning of line
:1 :Move to first line of file
:$ :Move to last line of file
/ :Search for a character string
? :Reverse search for a character string
x :Delete the character at the cursor
dd :Delete the current line
p :Paste data that was cut with x or dd commands
u :Undo

a :Add text after cursor
i :Insert text before cursor
R :Replace text starting at the cursor
o :Insert a new line after the current

esc :Switch from Input mode to Command mode

:w :save without exiting
ZZ :Save and exit
:q! :Exit without saving

So far this small but concise list has proved extremely helpful, all of a sudden the linux vi editor has become a very handy tool to have.

Never forget that a disabled form field value will not be passed in PHP when posted. Consider the following:

<form action=’ ‘ method=’post’>
<input type=’text’ name=’enabledField’ value=’value_1′ />
<input type=’text’ name=’disabledField’ value=’value_2′ disabled />
</form>

When this form is posted retrieving the two fields will return as follows:

<?php echo $_POST[enabledField]?> returns value_1
<?php echo $_POST[disabledField]?> returns nothing

This is always worth remembering to save you time trying to work out why your post values are not being passed. Of course they are ways around this e.g. duplicating the field with a hidden text field, or simply not disabling the field in the first place.

Purchase of MySpace four years ago by Rupert Murdoch heralded a new dawn for social media and social networking. Suddenly these sites were big business. With a 330m price tag many scoffed, but critics were later silenced when a 670m advertising deal with Google for three years was agreed!

Soon however that deal will come to an end and with it more than half of MySpace’s entire revenue. But there are far more important concerns for MySpace and for British born Bebo. Bebo was purchased at a staggering 640m in March of last year by AOL. Those concerns are the decline of these once all dominant sites at the fickle hand of social media users.

The Losers
Surely such big sites can’t just head to obscurity and disappear? Don’t be so sure, British social networking site Friends Reunited enjoyed a 120m purchase from ITV four years ago and was recently valued at one sixth of the figure. The decision to swap from a paid model to a free one came way too late. Users have voted with their feet, the brand is damaged and they won’t be coming back.

Bebo’s traffic dropped 24% this year and now stands at 9 million. As original Beboers come of age they migrate to Facebook suggesting a digital coming of age, Bebo’s biggest problem is that new younger school kids aren’t replacing them below. By Hitwise’s estimates, Bebo’s unique users have fallen 18%, from 8.5 million in April 2008 to 7 million one year later, while Facebook has seen 63% growth to 23.5 million unique users.

Further problems are predicted for MySpace and Bebo, both sites are in comparison very expensive to run and a decline in traffic is hitting their cash flow hard. Add to this MySpace’s deal with Google which is about to end and Bebo’s financial backing in doubt following AOL’s disbanding from Time Warner.

The Winners
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are enjoying massive increased popularity however. Twitter for example, has seen a 4,000% increase in new users since the start of this year to 2.5 million unique users a month. Add to these 3rd party apps which add another half of this traffic leading to an even greater impact! Facebook now control 45% of all social media activity on the internet World wide.

Most interestingly it is those social networking sites that have refused to sell to large greedy corporations that have ultimately succeed. Twitter more recently refused a huge deal with Google to advertise on the site.

And while large companies scratch their heads wondering what happened, it seems to me obvious that the reason for the decline is the worst marketing sin of all: assuming your audience are mindless fools, incapable of resisting advertising messages. MySpace is advert saturated, Bebo is advert saturated, and Friend Reunited charged you to watch their adverts. We are savvy, we don’t like adverts, and if the site is advert saturated we leave.

Even facebook fell into the trap, changing its simple and appealing interface for a multi-paged and advert heavy profile. An exodus I’m sure would have taken place had Facebook not been the best of a bad bunch. This could still see the end of Facebook in the next few years?

Ric McHale

Miromedia’s latest and greatest version of its Content Management System, Miromanager2.0, was officially presented to its very first customer earlier this week.  An overview training session had been arranged to demonstrate the various new capabilities and user interface. This brand new version of our Miromanager builds on the solid foundations created in earlier versions of the software and incorporates many changes that have been requested from existing clients who either use our CMS or have experience of other systems.

The training session demostrated the various new aspects and enhancements added to Miromanager2.0, including:

• On page inline editing
• Robust navigational drag/drop manipulation
• XAJAX data updating
• Brand new User Interface
• CSS based page content template

As with all software demos the developer always their fingers (or more likely, toes) crossed, hoping that they will not stumble across any issues that were not previously fixed during test passes. In this case though their proved to be no hidden gotchas, testament to out internal QA process so a big thank you to our testers.

After the session I was very pleased to hear that the client was impressed with the functionality and usability; it would give them much more control over their site than the previous CMS they used. This was one of our main aims when designing Miromanager2.0; to make the process of editing web site content as intuitive as possible thus giving the client ownership of their site and content. They are free to spend more time updating content and less time battling with a confusing or cumbersome content management system.

Miromanager2.0 has arrived…

…i shall put my R&D trumpet away now and get back to the code face.

With a multi-million marketing drive, Bing.com has officially gone live. Should Google be worried or is this the dying groan of the Microsoft Live giant?

A large rotating image library of grand landscapes leaves users no false interpretation that Microsoft means business with Bing.com. Something they are particularly good at just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last 15 years!

So once the smoke and mirrors have been cleared what is left? Well the search results screen is definitely familiar, in fact it looks just like a Google search page. However if you move the pointer to the right side of the search item a snap shot of the website copy appears and links from the site are also visible. Another nice addition is video search engine which is a nice tip of the hat to the newer YouTube generation now coming of age.

Bing is designed to provide all information related to that keyword in one page in a similar fashion to the Wolfram Alpha, the difference being the Wolfram Alpha is far more intelligent in its computations.

The questions to ask are search engine users as fickle as British weather and has the boat already sailed for search engine dominance? Only time will tell. One thing is for sure a search engine would have to be pretty good to knock Google of its perch.

Ric McHale