That said, there are many ways to encode H.264 video. Even if you use traditional encoding methods and stick to common tools like QuickTime 7 Pro, Adobe Media Encoder, Compressor… you will quickly notice creating one H.264 file that works in both iOS and Android is not very easy.

If you use QuickTime X and export for the iPhone – something that seems obvious – the file extension will end in .m4v which may cause playback issues in web browsers and non-iOS devices.

The solution?

Go ahead and use that Save As… iPhone option from QuickTime X. Then change the file extension to .mp4.

If you need something to help you embed the video in a webpage and help with delivering the right format to the right browser (egg Ogg to Firefox and Flash to IE8), give VideoJS a try.

That’s how WooThemes handled their forum, until recently. Although their official responses were fairly common, users could still help users. Now WooThemes has overhauled their backend (dashboard), along with their support forum.

Users can no longer help users.

Why? Because WooThemes saw people were often posting to resolved threads trying to get answers. This is really common on forums. In fact, many forums will ban you if you start a new thread instead of reviving a recent one on the same topic. WooThemes thinks this doesn’t work well for them. (They also mentioned sometimes posts were creating confusion.)

WooThemes has gone and done two thing in opposition to the status quo. And you know what? It’s for the better.

Better WordPress Theme Support

The reason WooThemes has done this is because they want each and every forum question to get an official response. I don’t know of a single other product support forum that does this. Not even big companies like Intel offer this sort of support.

There are quite a few companies that promise quick response times from customer support. Really those are quite pointless. Often they’re canned responses that are sent simply to get back to you quickly. My least favorite are the one that ask you information you just provided them with like “What browser are you using?” And you already told them “Chrome 15.0.874.15, extensions off, cache flushed.”

WooThemes does things differently. Their responses are always useful. Sometimes they remind users they need more info, but sometimes that’s needed. They offer simply awesome support and not only that, but now they’ve streamlined it as well.

In the end my only complaint is that I can no longer give them a hand by answering questions or help confirm issues.

Atop their page they have a link to the Schedule. The link is broken. It’s a target:

<a href="#SCHEDULE">SCHEDULE</a>

Later in the page we see:

<a id="Schedule and Application"></a>

Clearly that should be:

<a id="SCHEDULE"></a>

Sites do go down, even if just for schedule maintenance. I wanted to see just how reliable my hosts were. Some of my hosting is supposed to be much more reliable than other hosts, and I wanted to see if I was getting what I was paying for.

When searching the first thing I realized were most all of the free or free trial offers were limited to the point of being useless. The next thing I noticed was that the paid options seemed rather expensive.

But then I came across Uptime Robot. They provided monitoring up to 50 sites – for free. They offer a number of configuration options, as well as uptime checking every five minutes which is much better than the 10-30 minutes other services offer. (I mean, really. If a service is only going to check every 30 minutes, that’s pretty much worthless. I’m going to have received a call by then.)

I’ve exchanged some emails with Uptime Robot. They helped me discover a problem with one host’s email, and they also implemented a feature I requested. They’ve been monitoring away on about a dozen sites of mine for about a year now, and they’ve done a very good job at it.

Of course, this problem repeated itself a few years ago when MS released it’s docx format. Sure it was supposed to be “open” but as many have pointed out, even MS didn’t follow their own standard. Not only that but the tools they released were flaky if not flat-out dysfunctional.

Apple has created a similar incompatibility with their Pages application. While you can “save as” a Word Document, if you make a change and hit save, it again saves it as a Pages document. Not only that, but without Pages nothing on a Mac (or PC) can even open the document.

The common “solution” suggested is to tell the user who sent you the file that they suck should send you the file as a PDF (or Save As… a .doc.) But they already have…

The Solution

1. Take the .pages file and change the file extension to .zip – so if it was Document.pages rename it to Document.zip
2. Now extract the file. On a Mac or in Windows, double-clicking the file should start the process
3. Next, in the newly extracted folder (directory) locate the QuickLook directory and you will find Preview.pdf

With this PDF, you can open the doc and copy and paste the content into something more useful.

Error reading file

Make sure you’ve plugged your USB drive into a port on the motherboard. Even if case ports work well for everything else, you might find your motherboard can’t read the BIOS update file when using a USB header (that then connects a front or case USB port).

In Intel motherboards, as well as some others, this applies to the F7 BIOS Flash process.

The latest refresh (came out yesterday): Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image

I’ve noticed that TV stations are joining the ranks of content providers trying to exploit businesses with bad online advertising options. After talking with one, I discovered they don’t even collect the data needed to give their customers a truthful representation.

There are great options out there. Google AdWords isn’t that bad. With the powerful data they give you, they also give you the power to shoot yourself in the foot if you like. But there is an extreme opportunity there, as with other several other providers.

Here’s a great AdWords case study that demonstrates five huge problems advertisers can run into, as well as a before and after comparison.

So with the same budget, a more organized and tightly themed account, and a strong smart phone bidding strategy we saw an increase in clicks of 181%, while reducing cost by 3.3%. As expected, when you remove statewide GEO and the content network, we saw a drop in overall impressions of 93.6% but the quality of the traffic was so much better that our Click Through Rate increased 45x, from .21% to 9.47%. This increase in CTR also improved our Quality Score, so our AVG CPC dropped 65.6%. The conversion rate increased 75x from .49% to 36.88%, and the cost per conversion dropped 99.5% from $184.03 to $0.84. From 19 conversions for the period before we took over, to 4,036 in the period after we took over.

Read the full story: Paid Search success story from Online Performance Marketing

Over the years I’ve heard many reasons on what motivates us. This one does a great job of explaining why some of those reasons don’t always work. Better still, it gets to the core of the issue rather than creating superfluous reasoning.