Plexus Web Creations - Recent Blog Posts

Plexus Logo Featured in Lands' End Catalog

Team Plexus * — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:35:26 GMT

After ordering some Christmas gifts from Lands' End, the company asked if they could showcase our logo in future promotions - low and behold they did.

Check out the latest catalog to see the Plexus featured logo. Thanks to Matt Forshee & Amanda Fields from Fayette County Development Authority for spotting it!

MSNBC Offers Video Embed

Natalie Rittle — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:46:30 GMT

MSNBC just began offering embed capabilities for the video footage they post on their site. You can include a clip in your blog by clicking on the embed button and copying and pasting the code into your blog just like the clip below on breast cancer:

Engines vs. Rails, Part the Second

Colin Jones — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:54:32 GMT

So we're upgrading to Rails 2.0 for our new sites, and I found a problem with the way Engines (even the latest version as of today) interacts with Rails 2.0.

First load of my Rails Engines page (in a development site):

[machine] Everything works great!

Second load:

[machine] A copy of ApplicationController has been removed from the module tree but is still active!

[me] Crap.

Enter some help from the interwebs: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/137733

[me] Hooray!

Basically, I just had to add this to the init.rb file in each Engines plugin:

load_paths.each do |path|
  Dependencies.load_once_paths.delete(path)
end

Plugged In....Skitch.com

Team Plexus * — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:53:13 GMT

Skitch makes it easy to capture and share images via email, chat and Web. Instead of typing a message to describe an image or screen, you can pull the image into skitch and enhance it on screen to convey your thoughts. Once you have worked with the image – adding text, using draw and paint tools, etc, you save it or drag it out of the Skitch window into your email, chat, desktop, etc. There is a setting called Webpost for you to save the image Web ready for upload to your Skitch.com page. From here, you can copy the url to pull it into a Web site or blog. Check it out at skitch.com.

Here is an example of Skitch - we used it to convey some thoughts about the Plexus home page.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Plexus is Dishing Out Some Support

Natalie Rittle — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:34:00 GMT

Today marks the start of Plexus' online support ticket system, support.plexusweb.com. It's a great way for clients to submit tickets for any issues they are experiencing with their site or to let us know of any quick text changes or minor site updates you would like to make. Be sure to check it out and use it the next time you have a problem or need a change.

Optimizing Our SEO Knowledge

Natalie Rittle — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:47:45 GMT

Stephanie and I are in Boston. We just finished our day at High Rankings learning more about search engine optimization. It was a great experience and not only did we meet SEO guru Jill Whalen but other industry professionals from the Boston area.

(This is a picture I took with "Photo Booth" during the day).

The conference served to further our knowledge of search engine optimization in order to provide more comprehensive SEO services for our clients. We discussed the practice of SEO in depth and evaluated several of our client sites who are looking to rank for specific keywords.

We are looking forward to heading back down south with what we've learned and put it into practice for our clients.

PS - Stephanie tried to order sweet tea several times while in Boston - needless to say she got some interesting looks!

Junior Leagues of Georgia Day at the Capitol & Legislative Reception

Natalie Rittle — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:37:57 GMT

On February 26, 2008, the Junior Leagues of Georgia held its annual Day at the Capitol and Legislative Reception. The Junior League of Athens was privileged to serve as host of this year's event.

The twelve leagues in the state of Georgia each have a Public Affairs committee that are members of a state organization entitled State Public Affairs Committee (SPAC). SPAC organizes this event each year and serves to coordinate public affairs activities of member Leagues to assist Leagues with their public affairs programs; study and disseminate information to the member Leagues on state and national issues germane to the interest of the Junior Leagues; to provide a channel for possible mutual action and to represent the Junior Leagues of Georgia at the state and federal levels on public affairs issues.

The events included a private meeting with Attorney General Thurbert Baker, Secretary of State Karen Handle, and Lt. Governor Casey Cagle. In addition, we toured Grady Hospital and the Capitol.

The day commenced with a reception we hosted for Georgia legislators at Central Presbyterian Church located directly across the street from the Capitol.

Here are some photos from the day.

High Rankings gets a high ranking from me

Stephanie Sharp — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 02:55:22 GMT

Attended a small Search Engine Optimization (SEO) training session hosted by Jill Whalen at High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Firm. We tried to attend a conference in Denver in 2007 but our flights were cancelled so Jill and her staff were kind enough to let us apply our tuition to her smaller training session.

I highly recommend this session to anyone who has an interest in learning how to gain rankings on competitive keywords. Jill is a goldmine of information and can tailor the learning to any level of knowledge.

The Plexus SEO staff have had great success with all of our SEO clients, but we wanted to validate some of our thinking and gather a few more helpful tidbits to give a little more boost to our clients.

We came away from the session with everything we hoped.

Small Steps with Big Results in Search Engine Optimization

Stephanie Sharp — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:03:33 GMT

The main strategy of your web site if you are focused on optimizing it for certain keywords in search engines should be focused on content building and link building. In and of themselves both of those strategies are beneficial for your site and your customers, but they provide an added benefit of making your site more search friendly. I have identified several tips as Content Building or Link Building tips. I will add to this list as I find new opportunities for either.

Content Building: Add a blog to your site. Blogger is a free tool for creating a blog and it has the capability to publish your blog to your web site with FTP. If you are a client of Plexus, you can also purchase pxBlogger and have a blog built into your site.
Link Building: Get your blog added to Technorati
Link Building: Buying words at The Big Word Project. $1 per letter. Make sure to buy words that you are trying to get ranked on. While this site is new and has no google Pagerank yet, it has promise considering the viral aspect of it, and that it is being linked to from many sites.
Link Building: Check out Andy Hagans list of Social Media sites to consider when trying to build organic links.

undefined method `last' for {}:Hash

Colin Jones — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:20:39 GMT

Sometimes you hate the things that make your life so easy, because you have some problems with those things that make it temporarily more difficult. But then you fix the problems, and everything's back to being cool again.

In this case, I'm using Engines with Ruby on Rails, and there seems to be a conflict between my version of rake and my version of engines. So I did a rake db:migrate and got the ugly-looking:

undefined method `last' for {}:Hash

on line 10 of the rakefile. Well, after some Googling and clicking through, I found that all I needed to do was update a few lines of the engines code. In /vendor/plugins/engines/tasks/engines.rake, change the redefine_task method to read as follows:

def redefine_task(task_class, args, &block)
   task_name, deps = (RAKEVERSION >= '0.8.0') ? resolve_args([args]) : resolve_args(args)
   task_name = task_class.scope_name(@scope, task_name)
   deps = [deps] unless deps.respond_to?(:to_ary)
   deps = deps.collect {|d| d.to_s }
   task = @tasks[task_name.to_s] = task_class.new(task_name, self)
   task.application = self
   if RAKEVERSION >= '0.8.0'
     task.add_description(@last_description)
     @last_description = nil
   else
     task.add_comment(@last_comment)
     @last_comment = nil
   end
   task.enhance(deps, &block)
   task
end