In the last year or so I’ve seen a rise in the popularity of social media contests that go a little something like this:

The Nth person to like (or follow) X page wins Y prize.

Problem

This sort of social media strategy for amassing fans or followers is flawed:

1. The rule for winning said prize is far too simple.
2. Has the potential to alienate some of the fans who did not win.

Also as a result of the popularity of these simple schemes its probable that some people have written scripts that automatically determine when the ideal moment is to register and win the contest without requiring any active participation from its author.

Solution

Here is an example of a much better strategy:

First N persons to like (or follow) X page will be automatically added to the draw for their chance to win Y prize.

(optional) If N number is reached by X time/date all fans receive a token prize.

As a result of this:

1. You can not build a script that helps you win
2. People have an incentive to become a fan and encourage their friends to do the same
3. Everyone has a sense that there’s a chance they can win something.

The only concern at this point is with weeding out people who have entered more than once.

After some discussion and analysis we decided to build off of Bandzoogle.com’s existing platform and that it was possible to fit it to our design needs.

By the way, Bandzoogle for those of you who do not know is a web hosting platform with a slew of features catered primarily to independent musicians.

Anyway it was challenging as there is no templating language to use at this time.  The analysis work itself was based on CoreySmith.com, an atypical Bandzoogle hosted site.  After looking at the source code with Firefox’s Firebug I realized the following:

1. The custom elements on the page were being loaded in the footertext div.
2. Those extra html elements were being managed by the custom styles.css.
3. A lot of the images were being hosted on a server other than Bandzoogle’s.

If you happen to use or are considering to use Bandzoogle and are looking for inspiration on how to customize it, or just curious, read on.

The setup:

1. Since editing your site live on Bandzoogle can be slow and potentially aggravate your fan base in the process I recommend that you mirror the site to a local drive.  You’ll work from this local drive.
2. Open up the local html source and browse down to <div id=”footertext”>, this is where you will want to place all of your custom HTML elements.
3. If you don’t have a custom styles.css file yet, create one and place it after all the other CSS files.
4. Keep track of any extra images you decide to use as you’ll need to upload those to a third party hosting platform.

Once you’re finished with your new design:

1. If you do have any extra images upload them to a host of your choosing and link them appropriately into your css and html.
2. Login to your Bandzoogle account and navigate to Design & Options.
3. Copy the contents of your styles.css and browse down to Custom Stylesheet and click on the here link to paste your CSS.
4. On your html page compress the footertext class down to one line and on the left hand menu of Design & Options click on Footer Text and copy/paste that line into the provided field.  Make sure to omit the footertext div from that line.
5. Save and voilà!

Thankfully there is no max length set for the footertext field.

If you’d like to hear about tips and tricks on leveraging Bandzoogle.com’s platform or have any questions please leave me a comment.  Thanks!

As I was looking up on ways of doing Single Sign On I discovered Dr. Nic’s article about Zero Sign On.  The premise is simple: that users have a digital certificate that they use to authenticate their session instead of a username and password.

Since I work in a corporate environment I was thinking about how this could possibly be implemented and came up with the following:

1. New employees would receive both a swipe card and USB key.
2. A copy of the employee’s certificate and a copy of Firefox configured to use the certificate.
3. The user inserts the key and the Windows or Linux login screen auto-detects its presence, logging the person in in the process.
4. When the employee browses to the sites they need to access on the intranet they are also automatically authenticated by the certificate store on the key.

This may not be at all possible and I am also unfamiliar with the components behind Windows or Linux’s login process.  Maybe there’s something in Active Directory’s Certificate Services?

Similarly some (music) software already employ a similar scheme in which you need to have a USB key plugged in to authorize your use of it.