How to: Google Image Search on iPhone

How to: Google Image Search on iPhone - Photo / montage T.Bortels/cpu20.com

Google Image Search is great for finding images of all kinds – it just works well. And of course Google Image Search works also pretty well on an iPhone. But people seem to miss that they can use Google Image Search on an iPhone almost just as they use it in a regular desktopn browser. That’s why I compiled this short How to: Google Image Search on iPhone.

First you obviously need to open your browser – in my case that’s Safari – the default browser on the iPhone. Then you simply enter what you are looking for in the URL bar – this will forward your search request by default to google.

Just above the top search results you will find a couple links: ALL, MAPS, NEWS and IMAGES. Click on IMAGES and you will be forwarded to the the Google Image Search results page.

On the Google Image Search results page you can either start browsing the images, or refine your search for alternative results. Also Google Image Search suggests various filters to refine your search results. You can focus on the latest results by clicking “latest” or reduce the results to only show clip art or gifs. And then there are often also a few popular search terms listed that could help you to narrow down the amount of images. Once you have refined your search query you can start scrolling down– and down… and most likely even further down.

How to save Images from Google Image Search on iPhone

Once you find the image you were looking for you can either load the high resolution version of the picture (if there is any) or even save the image to your iPhone for later use. You may for example look for a portrait of one of your contacts to add it to your address book – of send an image via imessage or email to one of your contacts.

To save images from Google Image Search all you have to do is first open the image by clicking in the search results, then click on the three dots you find on the right side just below the image. Next you choose “View original image” and last but not least click the image, hold your click for a moment and choose “Save image”.

How to save Images from Google Image Search on iPhone

Save Images from Google Image Search on iPhone – Screenshots / montage T.Bortels/cpu20.com

The image will then appear in the photos collection on your iPhone for later use. Instead you could also click on “Copy” and then paste it in whatever app you want to paste it in.

Reverse Google Image Search on iPhone

Instead of searching for images, you may want to search by image. The so called reverse image search lets you search by image via Google. As far as I know this is a feature or actually an extension on Android phones – but on iPhone / iOS this is not yet supported. Instead you will have to install a small app that will do the trick. The iOS App Search by Image Extension is supposed to do exactly this. I haven’ tried it myself so at the moment I can neither confirm nor recommend this. But it might be worth a try.

How to remove images from Google image search

Let’s define Content Marketing and what it means to you and your business

Define Content Marketing - screeshot/montage T.Bortels/cpu20.com

Leave a reply

Is this going to be yet another definition of what Content Marketing actually is? Not quite so. There are indeed enough websites out there that try to define Content Marketing. But do these definitions really help to understand, what Content Marketing is? And what it means to you and your business? It very well depends a lot on the actual situation, on the audience – on you and your business, what Content Marketing can mean – and what it can do for you. That is at least what I recently found out when discussing with a client, how her website ranking could be improved.

Her situation was like this: she had a pretty good looking, compact website, describing her business. She’s in the coaching business, so competition is high. But she had enough returning clients – so her company is actually doing fairly well even without new clients. However – new clients are always good for business.

There were two ways how she gained new clients: either through recommendation by happy clients, or through her website. Since competition in the coaching sector is quite high and her business’ website is rather compact, she found herself spending a three digit number for online advertisement on a monthly basis. So far so good.

One day we were talking about how she found new clients, and how difficult finding new clients sometimes can be. She mentioned that she basically didn’t like the idea of paying for advertisement. She would herself never click any ads online – and she found that the clicks she paid for didn’t actually convert into new clients. So she began wondering if there were different online marketing approaches available, than going down the rather expensive road of online advertisement.

I know my client – and I know me – and I know that throwing buzzwords around doesn’t really help, unless you know what they actually mean. Sometimes you have to define things first, before you can actually talk about them. You need some common ground. So we basically went down the long road and started analyzing, what could be done, what should be achieved, and what each of us could do to actually get there, to ‘improve’ the website – or actually to improve the website’s performance.

We first had to write down some goals to figure out, what we were actually hoping for and what “improvement’ meant to us. This was quite straight forward: she wanted to gain more clients. In other terms: more visitors that would turn into customers – the ‘findability’ and the conversion rate had to be improved.

When thinking about ways how to get more visitors to a website, the first thing that may pop up may be Search Engine Optimization or short SEO. We had talked about Search Engine Optimization before – but looking at her website I knew I had do dig a bit deeper than simply pointing out “SEO will do the trick!“. Remember: only things that are there can actually be found. So we also had to talk about content and content creation. In the good old days we used to say “Content is King!” – and so I did. She knew exactly, what I was talking about – and agreed. Yes, of course – only Content can do the trick! But what did I actually mean? Was this already basically the underlying concept of Content Marketing? Was it that easy? What if everybody already knew, what Content Marketing was, but was confused by the buzzword itself? So maybe it would be a good idea, if everybody would first try to define Content Marketing for herself, and then see, if this DIY definition was not too far off of the more established definitions? This route looked promising – so we gave it a try…

Introduction to Content Marketing

First things first: What is content? You probably have a website – so you probably have at least some kind of content online. Be it a blog, a catalog, the story of your business or simply an ‘about us’ page – it’s content. And the reason you have that content online is probably that you want to present your services, your products, your company, your story to the world. Maybe you just want to find new clients online, maybe you’re offering some online service, or maybe you are presenting some precious information about a technical device that nobody in the world can manufacture as precise as you can. Maybe you’re not even sure what the actual goal of your online presentation is – no matter what: if you have a website online, you have content online.

Define Content Marketing for yourself

Marketing on the other hand is basically the art of making people aware that you, your company, your service and/or your product actually exist. You may think you are not actually into marking, since you are not actively trying to find new clients. Maybe your clients actually do come to you and you don’t have to spend anything on advertisement – but chances are, you are still doing marketing. You’re handing out business cards? That’s marketing. And Online Marketing is doing marketing on the internet.

There are different marketing channels. Advertisement is one. Content Marketing is basicaly marketing with or through content – making people aware that you, your company and/or your product exist through content. And content can be what ever content is for you – be it messages, stories, images, video clips or whatever you’d like to put in the ‘content’ box. So let me allow this wild guess: you are presenting content online and by doing this you are already doing Content Marketing. Welcome to the jungle.

How do people find your website?

Just like in the offline world, on the internet things can only be found if they are there. Websites can only be found, if they have at least some content – content can only be found, if it are actually exists. Many people seem to think that having a website would be enough – like putting up a fast food booth booth next to a busy motorway. But online basically every booth is right next to the busy motorway. Actually the motorway only exists because there are so many booths. So maybe this image is misleading.

There are basically only two ways how your precious content can be found: either you pay for advertisement, or your website is found for its content. Both options require at least some investment. You either need to spend some money for paying ads, or spend some time for producing content. In most cases you will need to invest both time and money.

Conclusion: So what is Content Marketing really all about?

In the past months or even years Content Marketing has become a buzzword – and a promise. Can this promise be kept? I don’t know. You decide. At least there are many promising definitions out there – some of them written by marketing experts, some by SEO experts, others by advertisement agencies. Reading some of those definitions I sometime get the feeling, Content Marketing is one of those trains nobody wants to miss. But what is Content Marketing really all about? Is it a magic trick that will drive drive hords of customers to your website? It sure has the potential.

I suppose everybody has to find out for themselves, has to define content marketing for their very own use case. You are publishing an “about us” page? That can be content marketing. You are handing out business cards? That is advertisement. You upload a video on YouTube or Vimeo? That is probably Content Marketing.

Just uploading a video or publishing a few lines of text will however not bring masses of visitors and/or potential clients to your website – it takes a bit more – for example some basic SEO activities. In my honest opinion Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of doing things right.

Let your content work for you – Content Marketing done right

If your content IS your product, then things may be different – then you could define Content Marketing as marketing for your content. But in most other cases Content Marketing is doing marketing with content.

People are searching the internet – and they do it a lot – all the time. People are looking for answers, for information, for products, for services – and for entertainment. Offering an answer to one of those questions can be the missing link between you and your potential customer. Should your content be informative or entertaining? In this article I can’t really go that far, so that’s something you will have to find out yourself. And if you find yourself lost or stuck, you can of course hire somebody to take a closer look at your situation. You may not need to hire a Content Marketing Expert or a Content Marketing Agency – sometimes somebody with a fresh pair of eyes like your web designer, your webmaster or somebody else with at least basic SEO knowledge and a feel for your content can help seeing the obvious.

Just one last argument for Web Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing: the experience of finding something you are actually looking for is in most cases perceived way more positive than the experience of being talked or tricked into something. Which brings me to another buzzword I won’t discuss in this article: User Experience (UX). So if content is king, let your website be the kingdom that people are eager to visit.

PS: Yes, Content Marketing can be considered Inbound Marketing, while Growth Hacking is probably more technical. But let’s define Growth Hacking and Inbound Marketing another time…

So what do you think? How would you define Content Marketing? Got a different approach? Please feel free to leave a comment below… Thank you!

Task Management with Things – How to do To Do’s the right way

Leave a reply

I have been using the handy little helper app Things for quite a while now, both on my Mac OS computer and on my iPhone to manage all the little things I need to do. First I was simply looking for an efficient way to organize tasks. Of course I also wanted to synchronize the tasks with my iPhone from the very beginning – so it had to be an app that had both: a desktop client and an iOS app. I was checking on different reviews of task management apps – Things caught my eye. So I invested a few Euro and a few moments later I downloaded and installed the program on MacBook and iPhone.

For a couple of years I used Things on a daily basis – and it was indeed quite useful indeed. I added To Do’s as I liked – and I got some things done. Things was helpful. But somehow I was always just a bit too lazy to go the extra mile and read the handbook – or at least some introduction. I found the program useful the way I used it – and the interface appeared to be very intuitive. So instead of using the software the way it was meant to be used, I used it the way I thought it was useful. And that was not actually not very effective.

How did I actually use it? Well – I basically only used it as a simple task list. For every new task / To Do I added a separate entry to the list – no matter if the thing I added was a simple task like “call the janitor” or a complex project like “Relaunch Website XY”.

To become a bit more effective in getting things done I actually added everything to the “Today” list. Good plan, I first hought. So I found myself with a looong list of things I had to get done – sometimes that list would consist of hundreds of different tasks. The task manager was close to being un-managable. Not very effective. Just writing down the words describing how I used to use the program actually kind of hurts today: Always! All the Tasks! In one list! No wonder that I never really felt satisfied with my results – I never really had the feeling that I got anything done. The list would just sit there and either be slightly longer, or slightly shorter. Finally I realized I had to change the way I used the program – change the way I managed my tasks.

When purchasing the program I already knew it was designed around the ideas of “Getting Things Done” – an action and time management method based and a book by David Allen. So I should actually get all the tasks out of my mind – out of my way. But instead I was facing a list that felt like a wall. I realized for too long time I was too lazy to work on a way of making things easier for me.

Finally I took the time to have a closer look at the various features built into Things. And finally I came to the conclusion: I had missed a sea of options that could have saved me a lot of time and stress in the past. So what did I change – did do I use Things today? Well – it’s not that complicated. I just use it as it is probably meant to be used.

Good for Productivy AND Motivation: How to use Things the right way

A project is a project – and not just a task

Every project can consist of many different that need to get done before a project is completed. In other words: in Things a project can have as many tasks as you like. Rule of thumb: every task that needs more than 20 minutes to complete could be / should be split into two tasks. Whether you follow this rule of thumb or not is up to you – but don’t try to stuff everything into one task. This way you will also build some kind of documentation of all the little things you actually needed to do to get the project completed. Very handy.

When all tasks are completed, the project can be closed – or marked as “done”. The project will then disappear from the project list – but it will still be available from the archives / logbook for later reference.

Work on continuing and/or recurring tasks inisde the “Area of Responsibility” list

For continuing and/or recurring tasks that may feel like projects, but actually are not projects, there is another section in Things: Area of Responsibility. An Area of Responsibility can be something like “Office” or Home” or “Car” or something the like. An Area of Responsibility can by nature not be “done” like a project. But you can add again as many tasks / to do’s as you like.

I have to admit it took me some time to understand the difference between a Project and an Area of Responsibility. Once you’re over that things (and Things) may become much easier to handle.

When to get things done? Today, Next, Scheduled, Someday…?

It is recommended to only add as many tasks to “today” that you actually can get done on that very day. But of course I still tend to add too many tasks to basically every single day, leaving behind a virsual trail of tasks that are constantly moved from one day to another.

However I also do manage to add tasks to either specific days / dates – or to the more blurry sections Next and Someday. All of those sections do make sense – and there is no need to fear you would lose your tasks somewhere in time and space. You’ll just have to click on the Project or the Area of Responsibility – and – voilà – all the tasks are listed.

I hope this short “review” may be helpful for somebody some day. I can just again recommend to actually use Things (or any other time / task management software) and start getting organized. It may help you in the long run. A lot.

WordPress: edit Flexslider Interval “auto rotate” (Visual Composer Element)

Leave a reply

Very practical: many WordPress Premium Themes come loaded with lots of mighty plugins that you don’t have to pay extra for. But sometime adjusting these plugins can become a bit difficult – and suddenly you find yourself with little or no support.

If you buy for example a license for the popular Theme Stockholm, then the drag’n’drop editor Visual Composer and the slider plugins Revolution Slider and Flexslider and many others are included. So with little extra investment (mostly time) you can build pages with the visual page builder and even add sliders or slideshows to those pages – almost as easy as drag and drop.

But – oh no – the Flexslider interval (“auto rotate”) that is defining the timing when the images are changed offers only four steps. The pulldown menu, where you can actually set the interval, features only options for 3 seconds, 5 seconds, 10 seconds and 15 seconds. Alternatively you can disable the “auto rotate” option.

In most cases these 4+1 options would probably be sufficient – but sometimes it’s the little details that make all the difference. And when you’re used to coding your own settings in milli-second-steps, adjusting a slider through the Cisual Composer interface can be a bit frustrating, to say the least.

Wordpress Visual Composer Slider edit interval Helping a friend / colleague to set up a WordPress website, based on the Stockholm Theme + Visual Composer + Flexslider I recently had to find out that finding support for that kind of combination plugins can be a bit hard. First I turned to the Theme Developers – but they told me I should either contact the CV staff or try the API. Long story short: I didn’t get the support I needed. So I had to find my way through – which turned out to be easier than expected.

The slider is wrapped by a div that should look like this:

<div class="wpb_gallery_slides wpb_flexslider flexslider_fade flexslider" data-flex_fx="fade" data-interval="10">

If I choose “5 seconds”, the “data-interval” has a “5” – so I suppose the interval is actually defined by the number I see inside the “data-interval” and is then passed to the slider component.

So instead of hacking the interface of the Visual Composer, you can basically just switch to the source code view and make you adjustments right inside the shortcode / source code.

First you have to switch to the “Classic Mode” by clicking on the blue button above the editor. Then I would recommend to switch to the source code – although it is very wenn also possible to make the adjustments right in the classic editor window. But I prefer to make such adjustments where they belong – in the source code.

You will then probably see quite a number of different shortcodes, depending on the number of VC elements you already added to that page. You will have to look for a shortcode that looks like this:

[vc_gallery interval="10" images="22390,23006" img_size="full"]

Inside this shortcode you can set the parameter interval to whatever you prefer – for example 7 – so that the slideshow images would change every 7 seconds:

[vc_gallery interval="7" images="22390,23006" img_size="full"]

The Flexslider or actually the Visual Composer Interface for the Flexslider (as part of the Stockholm Theme) can not really handle this input – but the clideshow itself will anyways respect your input. If you later on decide to add or remove images from the slider, chances are that the interface will reset that option to 3 seconds. Then you’ll once again have to look up that piece of shortcode and add your prefered interval once again.

Dedicated Hosting: good reasons to rent a Server

Dedicated Web Hosting: Web Server alley at All-Inkl – Photo / Copyright: ALL-INKL.COM

Leave a reply

It’s not a secret: I do like Dedicated Hosting – and so we do rent a server – and not just server space. We have a so called Managed Server on which we run all our and our clients’ websites And we are very happy with it. because to me first of all renting a server means paying for stresslessness. Is that an actual word? Well – I hope you know, what I mean anyways.

Of course that server is not right here next to me in Berlin – instead it’s taken care of by the fine people of All-Inkl in Friedersdorf, Sachsen, Germany. We have been with All-Inkl for quite a few years now and we are still very pleased to be. First of all, this means less stress – or actually no stress for us, regarding the hosting details. Second we get good value for our money – and last but not least: everything is no fuss. It just works.

Why Dedicated Hosting? Because Web Design is bit like cooking

I’m not really a talented cook – or at least I’m not a very experienced cook. But I would still like to compare designing websites to preparing food. The quality and the taste of a good meal depends on different aspects: the ingredients are of course crutial, but so is the team, the environment where you are cooking – and the tools you have at your disposal.

When you’re preparing a meal, the kitchen and its appliances is usually your environment – the infrastructure of cooking. When designing and/or running a website, your infrastructure probably consists of at least a desk, a computer, some programs – and a Web Server.

Of course every cook can basically work in any kitchen – and every web designer could could basically work on any web server – as long as vertain conditions are met. But of course both cook and web designer feel most comfortable in their own environment, where they know how things work and where everything is. There’s no place like home.

Why should I rent a Web Server? Advantages of Dedicated Server Hosting

For our clients we are basically offering ‘everything’ you need to run a website. First of all we are of course designing and building websites – including a Content Management System that fits the clients needs. But ovr the years it has proven to be a good idea that we also can take care of much more: from researching and registering domain names to hosting – to support concerning email accounts, web statistic etc. – basically everything you need to actually run a website. Our clients can take care of their pressures content – we can take care of the technical details.

So basically – and technically we are Hosting Providers ourselves, while our core business remains designing and buildings websites. As designers we see ourselves as ‘problem solvers’ – service providers that take care of our clients needs.

For us Dedicated Hosting has quite a number of advantages. To sum it up very briefly: we know our Web Server – and our Web Server knows us.

Running a website on Shared Hosting or actually a Shared Server you would instead share one server with X neighbors – that means mostly websites you probably don’t know. One of your neighbors could run a script that would eat up the server’s processing power – another neighbor could run a website that would eat a lot of bandwidth – you just don’t know. Slow server response time? Try to find out, who is to blame, Sherlock!

I suppose such worst cases won’t actually matter, even if we had a shared server at All-Inkl since already the cheapest shared server account would only allow a maximum of 100 clients per server. but that’s still 99 neighbors. Anyways – I recently read that most of the hosting providers tend to stack their shared servers to the limit. Try a reverse IP-look-up and you’ll see, what I mean.

With Dedicated Hosting / a Managed Server you usually also gain a lot of freedom to configure things the way you want to – in ways that would never be possible on a Shared Server. You want to allocate more memory to a certain directory? No problem. Need a special PHP version? Got it.

Do you really need a Managed Server?

Of course not everybody needs a Managed Server – for most people / most websites that be probably a little over the top – and renting a Managed Server can also be a bit costly. The costs can easily add up and at the end of the year you’re facing a four digit invoice or the like.

But for us it was never the question if we could afford renting a Managed Server – the advantages clearly outweigh the odds / the costs. But it is a good feeling to have everything up and running – it is actually running very smoothly. As I said in the beginning: no fuss. Our server has more than enough space and processing power than currently needed – we are happy and content – and our clients (hopefully/probably) too.

So maybe Dedicated Hosting on a Managed Server is not something for everybody, unless you are running a resource-hungry monster of a website. But if you happen to be a web designer / web developer that love’s to take care of things, wants to be in control and prefers to cook in his/her own kitchen, then you should probably consider renting a web server for you and your clients. I personally can only recommend it.

How to check the execution time of a php script

Leave a reply

You have the feeling your website is slow? Some process is taking too long, something is not loading fast enough? Of course, there might be a script or maybe just a few lines of php slowing it down – but which part of the script is it? If you are witnessing for example speed problems with a WordPress Plugin, chances are that the plugin runs some loop inside a loop and/or maybe sending too many database queries. Reducing the number of database mySQL queries can dramatically speed up your page load time – but that will be subject of a different article. Anyways – all we need to know now is that there are ways to find out, which script or which plugin is executing slow – and how long it actually takes, to execute that particular piece of code.

Debugging or optimizing a script can be a time consuming task to do – so we’ll focus on those parts, that are the ‘most expensive’ ones – meaning the slowest ones. To find ‘time bandits’ inside your code all you basically have to do is start a timer before the suspicious script / plugin / module is executed – and then stop the timer once the script has done its job. And with PHP at hand it is not really complicated to measure the time that has past executing a piece of code – PHP code that is. Microtime to the rescue!

First you need to define a variable for the timer and start the timer before the script is executed like this:

$start_timer = microtime(true);

Then you stop the timer, after the script is executed like this:

$time_passed = microtime(true) - $start_timer;

You could then print the time that passed with a simple echo command:

echo("The script needed ".$time_passed." seconds to execute.");

If you want to round that number off to two positions behind the decimal point, you simply add the round command like this:

echo("The script needed ".round($time_passed, 2)." seconds to execute.");

So if you put everything together, it could look like this:

$start_timer = microtime(true);

// the suspicious code goes here
while … {

}

$time_passed = microtime(true) - $start_timer;

echo("The script needed ".round($time_passed, 2)." seconds to execute.");

PS: You may ask if speed optimization pays off? Is loading speed a SEO criteria? Is a slow loading website bad for SEO? And/or is a slow site bad for UX? All these questions can be answered YES. Good luck!