Tomorrow’s free NAA netcast – Internet Auctions

Posted on 15 March 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | 4 comments

National Auctioneers AssociationThe National Auctioneers Association, since early last October, has been offering a series of netcasts called Industry Insights. The presenters for these netcasts are sourced both from within and without the auction industry, and cover a wide range of topics. Each presentation lasts approximately 20 minutes, after which time there is a period of discussion and questions.

These seminars are delivered twice a month using Dimdim, which we covered last May. They’re free for NAA members, and it’s easy to sign up to participate. Simply email [email protected] to be added to the list of approved participants. The NAA website has both a list of upcoming netcasts on the members’ page as well as an archive page that lets any member view previously recorded seminars.

Tomorrow’s topic is entitled “Internet Auctions” and will be presented at 11 a.m. CDT by this author. We’ll cover 10 best practices good ideas related to the auctions themselves, the auction company and the company’s website. There is still time to sign up, so email [email protected] to reserve your spot now.

UPDATE: The seminar in question will be presented at 11 a.m. CDT on Tuesday, March 16.

Posted in announcements | Tagged , , , , , |

The iPad is not a computer

Posted on 14 March 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | 2 comments
SAN FRANCISCO - JANUARY 27: Apple Inc. CEO St...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

In late January, Apple finally announced their tablet device that they had been rumoured to be developing for years. Steve Jobs, in his presentation at the announcement, said that Apple was targeting the market between the smartphone and the laptop, and their answer was the iPad.

Immediately prior to announcing the name of the device, Jobs said that in order to justify its existence, a device in the middle ground between laptop and smart phone had to be better at tasks than both. He said, “Netbooks aren’t better at anything.” The problem is that they are, but we’ll get to that later.

What is a computer?

Laptops – including, at least for the moment, MacBooks – are computers. Many smart phones such as Windows Mobile and Android are computers as well. Any user can write and install software on a computer, without having to wait for approval or authorization by a third party. Multiple applications can be running simultaneously on modern computers, allowing tasks to be performed in the background while not requiring the user’s attention. A computer is customizable through unregulated software modifications.

What is an appliance?

We’ve used the term appliance to describe toasters, coffee makers and refrigerators. Other appliances include your cable box, Xbox, GPS, iPod and camera. While some of these appliances support apps that increase the functionality, these apps are generally regulated and only available through special channels such as an app store. Appliances can run one application at a time, as anyone who has ever tried to play two games at once on an Xbox knows.

What is the iPad?

The iPad is unquestionably an appliance. Like the iPod Touch and iPhone, a user can’t write and install software on it without going through special channels. It’s locked down and restricted, just like your cable box.

iPad’s place

The iPad isn’t a computer, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a place. Jobs is right that the device will be great for web browsing and reading email. It’ll be stellar for reading books and news. The biggest problem with laptops and modern computer monitors is the aspect ratio – news is much easer to consume when it’s in portrait mode, but monitors on laptops are nearly always wider than they are tall. The iPad will be able to view content in portrait mode, creating the perfect reading experience. The iPad will be an excellent content consumption device, crushing the Amazon Kindle in nearly way.

Apple has maintained its stance regarding Flash and Java, ensuring that the stability and privacy aspects of this device are maintained by preventing these two technologies from trashing the browsing experience like they do on computers. In fact, the lack of Flash and Java on the iPad will hopefully push acceptance of web standards to the point where these pernicious technologies fade away.

As a media and gaming device, the iPad looks beautiful. Viewing pictures, movies and videos will be a great experience. Lacking a camera, card reader and USB ports, viewing is about all it will be good at – without the additional, awkward USB adapters.

Where the iPad will fall short is in content creation. Jobs described the keyboard as a “dream to type on” just before he hunted and pecked for a few letters in his one-sentence email sent during his demonstration. Writing thousand-word blog posts will most likely be arduously possible but undesirable on a capacitive keyboard, aligned at 180 degrees with the screen. The optional keyboard dock is a head-fake towards solving this problem, but as anyone who has ever used a keyboard with a touch-screen device knows, a keyboard without a mouse is a very frustrating and unergonomic experience.

This content creation role is where netbooks excel. Laptops aren’t very portable. Netbooks nearly fit in your coat. The physical keyboards on netbooks are very usable – indeed our 10″ EeePC sports a keyboard that is so big it’s almost a downgrade from the smaller keyboard we loved on the 9″ Eee. Netbooks are computers and can run multiple, custom software applications simultaneously.

The iPad is going to be a great appliance. It’s going to be a Kindle killer. It’ll work great for browsing auction inventory and for Internet bidding – so long as the bidding provider doesn’t rely on Flash or Java. It’s truly a living room device, and we’re going to be making space on our coffee table for an iPad – right next to the netbook.

Posted in gadgets | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , |

Subdomains and multiple web hosts

Posted on 13 March 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | 6 comments

We mentioned subdomains in our recent series about branding. We’ve discussed DNS before, but we’ve never looked directly at subdomains and how they can help us as auctioneers create a better experience for our users. The first part of this post, like any good figure-skating routine, has a technical component, but stick with us because there is cake waiting at the end.

URI

A Uniform Resource Identifier, or URI, is a string of characters that can be used to identify a name or resource on the Internet. Sometimes used interchangeably with URI, a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL, is a subset of URI and is used to describe where a resource is located and how to get it.

URL parsing

A URL consists of several components. We’ll use the following example.

https://auctioneertech.com/auction-podcast

The first part that you see is the scheme, or protocol. http tells us that we’re going after an insecure web page. Other schemes include https, ftp. This is the part of the URI that tells our browser how to get the resource.

Everything in the URL that’s after the first foreslash tells our browser the resource to request from the server. In this case, it’s going to look for the /auction-podcast page.

The remaining  part in the middle, between the two consecutive foreslashes and the first single foreslash, is the domain name. This consists of several parts. Our browsers actually parse these domain names in reverse, looking first at the right-most part, then moving left. We’ll work from right to left in our explanation.

The right-most part, as you’ll remember from the last episode of the Auction Podcast, is the top level domain. In our case, it’s .com. It could be .net, .org, .us, .info, or one of many other TLDs. Establishing the TLD tells our browser the kind of domain it’s looking for. Once it knows that it’s looking for .com, it doesn’t have to worry about the many other possible domain types.

The second-most-right part in our example is auctioneertech. This is the primary domain name which, when combined with the TLD of .com, is enough for our browser to be able to contact the appropriate name server. Each domain has a name server, which houses all relevant information about a domain name. This information includes the IP addresses of the server, the email records which dictate where mail gets delivered for the domain, as well as information regarding subdomains. This information is stored in the name server in a zone file.

Armed with the information from the zone file, our browser now continues to move left in its parsing of the domain name. Left of the primary domain name auctioneertech, it finds a subdomain called www. The www subdomain has become essentially a default subdomain. Most zone files specify that the www subdomain is an alias of the primary domain, causing them to serve the same content. In our case, www.auctioneertech.com and auctioneertech.com are treated the same by our server. However, they don’t have to be. We’re finally to the fun part. Get ready for cake.

Subdomains

Because subdomains are DNS records, they can point to anything. We could, very easily, tell www.auctioneertech.com to serve one page and have auctioneertech.com serve something completely different. It wouldn’t be advisable since it would likely confuse our readers, but we could do it.

Subdomains are free, and we can define an essentially unlimited number of subdomains. For example, to make it easier for our employee users, we could set mail.auctioneertech.com to point to Google Apps so it would show the Gmail login screen. We could make calendar.auctioneertech.com point directly to our company calendar. We could set dev.auctioneertech.com to point to the computer in our living room that’s running a development server so we had a real domain name to use for testing purposes.

Now that we’ve established that subdomains can point anywhere from Google to our living room, let’s look at some specific examples relative to us as auctioneers.

Blogs

We mentioned in our Internet branding series how your blog needs to be located on your website to be properly branded. Some of us, however, don’t have access to our website – or its managed by a third party. Maybe we want to use a different hosting company or allow other users access to the blog while not giving them access to our primary server. In all of these cases, we can use a subdomain to host a blog on one of the many inexpensive providers, while not affecting your primary web host. You could be up and running in under an hour with a starter plan from Lunarpages for $2.95 per month – including an automated WordPress installation. wordpress.com allows subdomain mapping for under $10 per month, allowing you to make your existing blog on wordpress.com look like it’s located natively on your website.

Internet bidding

Maxanet is a popular Internet bidding service that many auctioneers prefer because of its low cost, ease of configuration and private branding abilities. Because it’s a service, it runs on its own servers. Some auctioneers have implemented it through the use of frames, but we’re seeing more and more implementations with subdomains. Subdomains are much better for branding, as we recently discussed in a podcast.

Media hosting

Web hosts have strengths and weaknesses. While there is certainly a positive aspect to using one web host for all our needs, it’s rare that such a service can be found that will do everything we need for under $30 per month. Some hosts pride themselves on speed and reliability. These hosts often charge more or have limits on storage or bandwidth. Other hosts pride themselves on value and offer unlimited storage and bandwidth, but may not be very fast. Subdomains let us use multiple hosts to get the best of both worlds. You can host your primary domain on a server that runs your scripts or houses your bidding, while using a subdomain to host your media. This approach is especially valuable for auctioneers who need to store thousands of pictures for their auctions. If we were running an Internet bidding site, we’d grab an unlimited storage plan from a company like Lunarpages or Bluehost for under $10 per month and put our pictures there, using a subdomain like img.auctioneertech.com as  the way to access them.

Putting it all together

Here’s a real-world example of using multiple servers for an auction company with the domain aaronauction.com. The most important website rule for an auctioneer is to put the auction calendar on the front page. In our example, we’re selecting Maxanet for our Internet bidding and auction calendar management. We’ll house our primary domain, aaronauction.com, as well as the default subdomain, www.aaronauction.com, on the Maxanet servers. This way, Maxanet houses our auction calendar, auctions and Internet bidding from our primary site so our users don’t have additional clicks.

We love WordPress, and it’s going to handle both our blogs as well as all static pages – it truly is a great content management system. We love (mt). The (mt) grid service offers 100 GB of storage for $20. 100 GB isn’t enough to serve as our media warehouse for our years of images and video, but (mt) is super-reliable and will work great to house our WordPress installation. We’ll point web.aaronauction.com there, since it will house all our web pages that aren’t part of Maxanet. It’s also the place we’ll install our bulk email package, phpList.

We’ll need a place to put our pictures. Maxanet doesn’t support storing a ton of content, and our (mt) account is fast and reliable, but won’t be enough storage for us in the long run. We’ll need an unlimited storage solution, and for this need we’ll select Lunarpages at $4.95 per month. As with any cheap, unlimited storage provider, we’ll keep local backups of everything just in case something happens. Should something happen, we’ll be able to put what we need up to (mt) until we find a different host for our media. We’ll point media.aaronauction.com at our Lunarpages account.

Cake

The cake may be a lie, but we’ve got a very robust three-server website, all correctly branded with aaronauction.com. We’re not beholden to any single company, Google Analytics will track all three servers under the same account and our users will neither notice nor care that they’re actually pulling content from three different locations.

Do you have other tricks or tips to using subdomains? Did we bork some of the details about subdomains or zone files? Are you skeptical that a distributed web host system is better than having only one web host? Are you excited about Portal 2, too? Let us know in the comments.

Posted in services, design, websites, theory | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Speccy tells you what your computer has in it

Posted on 23 February 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | Leave a comment

Speccy tells you what's under the hood

Speccy tells you what's under the hood - image via piriform.com/speccy

Frequently, in the act of diagnosing computer problems or deciding which parts to order for upgrades, we find ourselves wanting to know about the hardware components inside a computer. A new program aims to make it easy to know as much as possible about the innards of your machine.

Speccy is a product from Piriform, the makers of CCleaner and Defraggler, and is currently in public beta. Here’s their product description from their website.

What’s in your computer?  If you’re like most of us, you can probably name the processor (Intel or AMD, Celeron or Pentium), maybe how much RAM it has, and maybe how big the hard drive is.

When you go to a computer store and see all the bright shiny PCs laid out next to each other, most will have tags or stickers indicating the:

  • Processor brand and model
  • Hard drive size and speed
  • Amount of memory (RAM)
  • Graphics card
  • Operating system

Two or three years later, when it comes time to upgrade your computer, that tag or sticker may be long gone. Speccy was designed as a free electronic “what’s inside” sticker for your PC.

We’ve found that, while the basic information is available from Windows Device Manager, Speccy goes above and beyond by providing crucial details that Windows doesn’t. For example, Speccy will provide the clock speed of the memory installed, allowing you to know exactly what kind of memory upgrade to purchase. Speccy gives you the exact model of the motherboard so you can find correct and current hardware drivers.

It’s important to remember that Speccy won’t be able to report on anything that isn’t provided to the operating system by the hardware. For the computers we’ve tested, it provides an exact temperature of the CPU but not the graphics card, since not all graphics cards report their temperature. Also, since the motherboard doesn’t provide the name of the audio chipset to Windows, it can only tell us that the sound card is a “high definition audio device”.

If you want a quick way to tell what’s under the hood without popping the case, or need to know the temperature of your processor, Speccy is a fast and small utility that stays out of your way until you need it.

Posted in software | Tagged , , |

Auction Podcast Episode 21 – Internet branding

Posted on 18 February 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | 4 comments

See the bottom of this post to play this episode directly or subscribe using iTunes or Zune or your favorite podcatcher on the Auction Podcast page.

Hello and welcome to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. Today is Thursday 18 February 2010. My name is Aaron Traffas and today I’m going to examine branding as it relates to a web presence, looking at the best ways to configure websites, email and blogs. This content originally ran as a three-part series in January on auctioneertech.com and began with part 1, domain names.

The choices you make for your domain name begin begin to build your brand before you think about designing a logo or writing a word of copy. There are some rules to follow when choosing a domain name for your site, and the first is to select a .com top level domain. A top level domain, or TLD, is the last part of the website address. .com, .net, .org were among the first and are still the most common TLDs in the United States. Unlike some other TLDs like .gov and .mil, anyone can register new domain names with .com, .net and .org without restriction. The .com TLD is for companies or commercial endeavors. .org is for non-profit – you guessed it – organizations, while .net is for more personal projects that aren’t as official as .com or .org. There are now many other TLDs, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is planning to begin to allow essentially an unlimited number of new TLDs soon, increasing the number from perhaps 100 current TLDs to possibly thousands.

The problem is that nobody remembers websites that don’t end in .com. Now you’re going to object, reminding us that the new domains offer specialization. “But .pro would be a great choice since I’m a professional!” No it wouldn’t. Professionals choose .com. “But .ca is available and I’m located in California!” Your location doesn’t matter. If you’re in the United States and selecting a business or commercial website, .com is for winners.

The second rule when selecting your website is to own the domain that matches your company name. “We’re a US company and someone already has aaaauction.com,  .us works just as well, right?” No it doesn’t. If someone already has the .com name for your company, you absolutely need to change your business name. That’s how important it is that your domain name exactly matches your company name. If your website is kansasbid.com, make sure that your company name is Kansas Bid and vice versa. If you try to get cute with your domain name, or add hacks like hyphens or underscores, few will remember it.

Rule three is that shorter is better. If your company is named for you, your first and best bet is your last name. In other words, if my auction company is called Aaron Traffas Auctioneers, I would look for traffas.com. It suffers from being difficult to spell, but I’d get around that problem by registering travis.com, traffis.com, trafas.com and so on, having each of the alternate misspellings point to the main account. However, since traffas.com is taken, I’d settle for aarontraffas.com, knowing that it was a little less desirable than traffas.com but not quite a deal breaker.

However, let’s say that I run John Smith Auctioneers. Obviously smith.com is taken. Obviously johnsmith.com is taken. Do I look for johnsmithauctioneers.com? Now I’m getting into the problem of a lengthy domain name. The longer the name, the more difficult it is to predict misspellings, the harder it is to fit on business cards, the harder it is to read on billboards, and – worst of all – the harder it is to get customers to remember the site. They’ll ask themselves if it was it johnsmithauctioneer.com? Was it johnsmithauctions.com? They’ll never think to ask if it was .net or .org or .us or .idiot.

Rule four – own your domain name. This problem is rampant within the auction industry. Many auctioneers are approached from an upselling [read:predatory] website hosting company with a sales pitch that goes something like this. “We’ll host a website for you and even register your domain name so you don’t have to deal with a registrar or mess with any of that techy stuff.” I really like it when they use the word techy, by the way. The company then registers your domain name for themselves and creates your website. Should you ever wish to leave, you can’t simply point your domain name to another provider because you don’t own it, they do.

Find out if you own your domain name. Go to http://www.whois.net/ and enter your website. Sometimes, as in the case with Network Solutions, it will tell you you have to go to the registrar used to register the domain name to see who owns it. Stay with me. This exercise is important. Your website provider can be listed as the technical contact, but you must be listed as the registrant or you don’t own your website.

Rule five is that CamelCase isn’t for websites. This rule isn’t necessarily about selecting your domain, but it’s about how you present it to your users. It will probably generate some opposing comments, but I feel it’s both true and important. Websites are case-insensitive. That means that auctioneertech.com in all lower case is just as valid as AuCtIoN – you get the picture. Why don’t I write my website using CamelCase with the A of auction and the T of tech capitalized since that’s the way it looks in my logo? Because websites should ALWAYS be written exclusively in lowercase. Writing your site using intermittent capital letters may make it seem easier to read, but it also makes you seem a little less – to use the word from our patronizing, predatory salesperson from earlier – techy than the competition. Your customers notice the details, don’t give them the opportunity to think less of you or your company because of something as simple as how you write your domain name.

In summary, your website is the most important marketing component to your business. While many people will come to your site by clicking a link, far more will visit your site because they saw your website in an ad or because they’ve been there before. Make it easy for them not only to remember, but to guess. The first thing we web users do when trying to load a site is to type the company name and add .com. If that doesn’t work, if we’re interested enough we may look it up to see what it was supposed to be, either by referencing the ad or searching in Google. In this case, it’s already a strike against the site and the milk is a little more sour before we’ve even arrived at our destination.

Now that we’ve selected our domain name, let’s look at how we can use our email address to strengthen our brand. An email address has two components; the first part is the user name and the second part is the domain name, which usually matches either your email provider or your website.

The worst mistake you can make to turn customers away is to use something other than your name for the user name. This mistake was the at the top of the list in a recent survey, the link to which is available in the transcript for this podcast at auctioneertech.com. sxygrl47 and ladybug_lover worked great for user names in college, but now it’s time to use first.last or firstlast or just your last name. If you have an address that is checked by more than one person, such as a generic company address, then it’s okay to use something like auction or info as your user name, but don’t use that catch-all address for your official company account unless it is actually checked by more than one person. That’s also not the address you should put on your personal business card.

Outside of the above offense, few other concepts seem more obvious than the importance of having an email address that matches the domain name of your website. Nevertheless, I still see some auctioneers who advertise to their customers a generic, free addresses from email providers such as AOL, Hotmail, MSN, Live, Gmail – or worse, from their Internet service providers such as Cox, SBC Global or Comcast.

Using one of these free providers for a personal email account is okay, though it’s much more fun to spend the 10 bucks and register a domain name for yourself or your family to use for your personal email needs. Using an email address for commercial purposes that doesn’t match your domain name is simply unprofessional.

Your website IS your brand. Why on Earth would there be any benefit in advertising an address that doesn’t include your brand? Reasons I’ve heard cited for using a generic email account for business include the following.

  • I’ve always used this address
  • I have multiple domain names
  • Using Gmail makes me seem cutting-edge and hip
  • I don’t know how to set up email for my domain name
  • I like the tools offered by this provider
  • I want synchronized Outlook but don’t want to host my own Exchange server

None of these reasons justifies letting customers see an email address that doesn’t include your brand. The only reason listed that doesn’t involve lack of configuration or simplicity is the idea that customers somehow perceive Gmail users as advanced. This is true, but only in comparison with other free email providers. We all like to make fun of AOL and Yahoo users, but consumers equally ridicule Gmail users who use Gmail for business. It’s assumed that these users are either too lazy or don’t know how to set up their own, branded email addresses.

The solution is simple. Use a service like Gmail – Google Apps for your Domain is a particularly excellent choice – or use a company that provides hosted Exchange server to allow you to have one powerful interface to check all your email accounts. It’s very simple to configure addresses from one or many domain names to have email delivered to one location. Through the use of rules in Outlook or filters in Gmail, you can easily keep track of all your emails from all of your accounts in one central location. When properly configured, each email you send will appear to come from the appropriate account. The methods to this configuration are outside the scope of this podcast and will depend on your registrar and your web host, but there are many free tutorials available to make your email do what you want it to do for you.

I’ve actually met auctioneers who have removed the website from business cards, relying on different colors to make the domain in the email address stand out, thereby conveying both an email address and a website on one line. This leap of faith that customers will recognize this strategy isn’t for the weak-of-heart, but it’s an innovative idea, nonetheless.

When is it okay to use an email address for business that isn’t matched to your domain name? There are two scenarios.

  1. You’re unemployed
  2. You don’t have a domain name yet

If the first is true, you’re probably not using it for commercial purposes unless it’s to send, and receive responses from, resumes. In this case, a Gmail account – or, better yet, [email protected] – will lend the most professional impression to a prospective employer. If the second case is true, press pause, think about what I said in the first part of this episode, and buy a domain name. The first year’s registration costs less than having your logo embroidered on a shirt, and it’s many orders of magnitude more valuable and important.

Your domain is your brand. Your email address is an obvious and easy way to promote your brand and show your customers that you run a professional organization.

Now that I’ve discussed domain names and email addresses as they relate to your brand, let’s take a look at your weblog. The same concepts that apply to your domain names and your email addresses absolutely apply to your blog.

Like email addresses, it’s really easy to get a free blog. Free blog providers include WordPress and Blogger. These free blogs assign a subdomain, which is the part of the domain that comes before the primary domain name, lik e yourauctionblog.wordpress.com. Some, like WordPress, even allow you to assign a custom domain name to your blog. This free blog approach is really great if you’re blogging about your grasshopper collection or you want to keep a diary of your trip to the museum of bad marketing tactics, but if you’re blogging for business, you need to have your blog hosted professionally.

Your blog should be branded. Your domain IS your brand. Your blog needs to exist on your website in order to be properly branded. This rule means that the free sites are out of the question – unless you actually work for WordPress, your blog shouldn’t include wordpress.com in the domain name. Assigning a separate domain name to your blog is certainly better, but it still misses the target of hosting your blog on your primary domain.

But wait! I’ve been singing the praises of WordPress for years, why would I say WordPress is bad? The answer is that wordpress.com is a commercial service that will host your blog. wordpress.org is a site that hosts the WordPress software that you can download for free and install on your own website. By installing the software, you can leverage the power and ease-of-use inherent to the WordPress package while allowing your customers to go to yourwebsite.com/blog or blog.yourwebsite.com. By having a custom WordPress theme created, the user experience can be seamless among your auction calendar, your static pages and your blog.

WordPress isn’t the only blogging software that you can use on your website, but it’s certainly my favorite. Your web host may have different software that can just as easily and quickly be installed and configured to allow you to post your articles and news by simply logging in and typing.

Internet branding is simple. While it may be easier to simply grab a free account from somewhere, it’s by far more professional to have a comprehensive, congruent presence that is consistently branded to provide a seamless user experience.

That’s it for episode 21. Did I miss something? Am I wrong about something? Leaving a comment on auctioneertech.com is much better than replying on Facebook or Twitter to tell me about it. Remember, it’s all about unification of the brand.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the Auction Podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening, now go sell something.

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