Normally there is not much to say about someone changing jobs, but in the case of Bruce leaving Oz Experience I thought it only right to say that working with him in a client-supplier relationship has been a great pleasure and a ball of laughs for all of us at Xebidy.  Bruce has moved to Melbourne to be closer to his family and for anyone who cares hunt him down, then employ he - we certainly rate him here at Xebidy.
Bruce, thanks for support, thanks for the fun and laughs and the very best of luck with whatever you do next.  You have left three great website in Oz Experience, Adventure Tours and Wayward Bus.

We have in the past month or so been migrating many of our clients away from our XEFEED product to Google products. I don’t know how good this necessarily is for our product, however, Google is just simply better, and they have a few more developers working on their stuff than we do.

XEFEED was developed as a feed reading/Internet monitoring service. We used it in a number of ways to scan the Internet for stories, blog posts, new articles, even images and videos etc about particular companies. We then monitor those masses of data for our clients looking for bad news that needs to be dealt with and simultaneously we develop strategies around this (see my posts on Oz Experience bad news).

In many cases we took this data a step further and re-fed it out to our client sites in the way of comments (Base) and independent travel stories (Wayward Bus, The Park and Backpacking Queensland). We use XEFEED to receive a whole host of data and then go through accepting or denying the information based on relevancy. In this way instead of simply displaying the feeds directly on the sites we are able to remove any spam or porn site links etc.

In all cases we are still offering this service, however, we have now set all this up using Google services and in particular Google Reader. Google Reader can handle hundreds of feeds which we can quickly scan for relevancy. We then tag the information we want with relevant tags and pick up the RSS feed for those tags displaying them on the client websites. We are even doing this for random regional images from Creative Commons (Oz Experience) and Videos from You Tube, Google Video and Truveo etc (Base).

One of the other advantages of using Google Reader instead of our own XEFEED product now is that we can use multiple accounts. XEFEED was our own product and was designed to be run in-house and in this way it did not have multiple users and the interface was not the most friendly in the world. Using Google Reader however, we are able to give alot of the power of deciding what is shown on the websites back to the clients - this will be particularly relevant in multi-company sites such as Backpacking Queensland where all members will effectively be able to control their own content (we are in the process of updating all these feeds now).

So, what does this mean for our XEFEED product. Unfortunately, the end of the software - but fortunately no-more development needed. We still offer our Internet monitoring services which continue to be as popular as ever. This service is in fact even better as it is transparent with the client who can log onto the Google accounts we set them up with and actually see the data themselves there too. We have not stopped developing and we have still setup a number of feeds that go into Google Reader from sites that don’t have RSS so as we can capture the necessary data - I guess this is a big asset of our service.

At the end of the day - I guess you have to say argh Google, we do love you!

This project is the brainchild of Greg Zammit from Adventure Tours and is an amalgamation of over 25 Australian operators to produce an awesome 90 page brochure for the European market. By all accounts the brochure which was launched earlier this year has been a roaring success and we hope this site follows suit.

At the moment only agents can book online using the recently launch Tourdesk product from Respax. It is expected that we will integrate a customer booking interface with Respax next week and hopefully then in the next few months Xebidy will redevelop the booking interface using webservices.

In it’s first incarnation the site is pretty much a replica of the brochure but over the next few months new content will be written for an Internet selling perspective and also new functionality. The target market is a slightly older market so we have not gone for the more Web 2.0 functionality that you see on sites like Base, Backpacking Queensland and the new Oz Experience site (coming next week).

A big thanks to the crew in the office here at Xebidy who have pulled some really long hours getting all the content into the site. It was a really hard site to work out navigation, content and design as there is a huge amount of information and each product is so vastly different. I think they have done a great job.

Click here to check out Australian Adventures website.

It may have taken some time coming and many feel like they have been waiting too long - but SwuzzleBucket was launched in its’ entirety on Friday.  Xebidy has been lucky enough to be involved in this project since the beginning.

SwuzzleBucket is an online advertising network aimed exclusively at the New Zealand and Australian ‘backpacker’/adventure/budget travel market.  SwuzzleBucket has signed up a network of high profile websites and Internet Cafes to display SwuzzleBucket advertisements.  The first sites to be launched are the BASE Backpackers Global Gossip Internet cafes and the Backpackers World Travel Global Gossip Internet Cafes.  Together these alone account for over 500,000 unique customers annually across 275 computers.  The next site expected to be displaying ads online is the new Oz Experience website that is currently nearing completion in the Xebidy studio.

SwuzzleBucket has immediately started serving over 1 million ad impressions per month and has some great advertisers on-board committing to 3 and 6 month campaigns.  By advertising with the SwuzzleBucket network an operator, accommodation supplier etc can increase their exposure directly to their target market at a fraction of the cost of alternative advertising media.

Xebidy developed both the new website and the ad serving software based on the Open X Open Source solution.  The branding and launch design was completed by Fluid Designs also in Queenstown.

Last week we released a new look and feel of the Base Backpackers website and it looks cool.

The site was given an upgrade in February but was in beta and we added more functionality last week. Some of the things we have introduced are:

• A cool accordion menu that Mat developed in Javascript himself
• Latest photos feed from Flickr
• Magnetic Island Full moon Party booking engine
• A new map
• New comments section that allows us to pull comments from a variety of sources including Hostel World, but also other sites and blogs. We run the blogs through our XEFEED product which can filter the comments for relevancy
• A news section to track all the news media for each of the hostels
• And, some updated content

The site is still in development and Xebidy is contracted to continue development through to late in 2009 so expect lots more things to be released soon - in fact, we have some cool You Tube video scanning and destination wiki stuff coming in the next month that we will announce soon.

On a serious note, however, the Xebidy SEO and Internet Marketing team has just grown by two more.  Joaquin joins the crew after recently graduated with a “Credit of Honour” in a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  He focuses on a lot of the technical side of Internet Marketing, data-mining, analytics, CSS and HTML; plus a very thorough marketing background.

Emer on the other hand is a bit of an old hand with a B.A. (Hons) Degree in Communications Studies from Dublin City University and a Masters Degree in Public Relations & Marketing with Advertising and Event Management from Fitzwilliam Institute in Blackrock.  Emer has previously worked with two leading new media companies, Athena Media and Digital Audio Productions, both in Dublin.  Here she was involved in a host of media production suchas weekly radio shows and podcasts and online marketing such as e-Zines.  Emer researched and produced a National PPI Award winning six-part series on Computers and Internet for RTL, the Irish State Broadcaster.  Emer has been in Queenstown for a year now working with the cast of the new Wolverine movie.  (And even better her partner is the manager at our favourite bar!)

We are really happy to have these guys on board and have searched for ages to get people of this caliber into this team at Xebidy.  I am a bit late in getting this post out as both have pretty much settled in now and are running rings around me (more time to blog though)!  Please feel free to ring either Joaquin or Emer for a chat at anytime they have some pretty interesting ideas on the whole marketing area and are already building up new strategies for existing clients that I am really excited about.

What a great day it is!

Silver Stripe has been working for some time on their release of version 2.2 and today Gally completed the integration of our Bootstrap drag and drop platform to that version. Currently we have upgraded only a couple of sites - all which are in development as opposed to live, but we expect to roll out the full version over the next few weeks.

• Some of the upgrades that the new system handles are:
• Much better drag and drop of the site tree menu
• Much nicer looking interface
• Way better handling of uploading and managing images
• A to do list on every page and then a report to identify what needs to be done
• Advanced security settings such that user access can be restricted to certain pages
• Page version history to see what changes have been made with version rollback
• Integrated basic analytics
• Search functionality
• Batch actions to delete or publish multiple pages
• The ability to save and publish a page at the same time

As you can see I am pretty excited. I spend a lot of time working in Bootstrap alongside our clients and just the look and feel upgrade has given me warm fuzzies.

We had to do a bit of development work to bring the Silver Stripe version 2.2 alongside our Bootstrap module, especially as we are using Prototype version 1.5 and Silver Stripe still uses 1.4 - but it seems we have got rid of any bugs as we don’t seem to be getting any Javascript errors etc.

The one bit of development work that we were hoping for from Silver Stripe was the language translation tools. This is pretty major but was broken in the Silver Stripe release. It is an important element for many of our clients so we will look to fixing this in the next few weeks ourselves and will release it back to the community.

For now though Bootstrap version 2.2 is out. We have not upgraded the demo on this site yet, but will do soon. In the meantime test the old demo here and feel free to contact us if you have any queries about Bootstrap and want to have a proper look and play with it.

The lack of posts last week is a direct outgrowth of how busy we are here at Xebidy.  Things are going along great and we have many projects bubbling away under the hood and new features being added to our current live sites almost daily.  For example, at the end of last week we launched a Wiki component that integrates into the Bootstrap CMS using the MediaWiki API.  MediaWiki is the same platform that Wikipedia is built on.  Look for its’ first use in the new Oz Experience website for destination information.

The increased workload means that we are currently recruiting and have three positions available to join the team.  The first is for a developer with PHP and Javascrript experience (PHP 5 preferable).  The second is for a front end designer/developer who must be able to demonstrate very good XHTML/CSS skills and  preferably with Flash and Actionscript experience.  If you want to play with all the latest Open Source technologies and have lots of scope to do cool shit while working in a fun relaxed environment then contact us.

Finally, we are looking for a marketing chick (but you don’t have to be a girl) to join in the office where the real work is done.   This role is extremely diverse, but obviously with a heavy focus on Internet Marketing and executing some of the Search Engine Optimisation strategies we work on.  There is real opportunity to apply your own creativity with some of the unique projects we have underway including a massive magazine publication.  Journalism experience or training would be very welcome.  There would also be some administrative support to the MD.

We are cool fun to work with - love a drink in the sun on Friday (well any) afternoon  - and have a flexible powder policy.

We recently upgraded the look and feel of the Base Backpackers hostel pages and introduced a feature we had been developing for awhile (those who have seem the Adventure Tours Australia website would have seen it before) - that is, the displaying of images onto the website that sit on Flickr.

The idea here is that we take an RSS feed directly from our these pages and then display the most recent 20 or so images. This works fantastic for a company such as Base which has 14 hostels across Australia and New Zealand and a continually growing mountain of images that are taken almost daily by staff, customers and friends.

A lot can change in a week in a hostel and there is just so much going on from regular parties in the hostel bar to activities and local events. By using a Flickr account we can give access to all the hostel and bar managers who can easily update their photos in real time without the need to continually go back to the website content manager to get new photos. It keeps the images fresh and gets everyone from the crew to the customer buy in - hey that’s me in the bar the other night!

I have said this before in my articles etc, but Flickr also provides a parallel marketing medium. For example someone looking for images on Magnetic Island on Flickr might come across Base or the Full Moon Party and subsequently be enticed to investigate Base Magnetic Island hostel as the place to stay.

We are currently in the process of extending the functionality such that we also pull in the description and tags of the images as they appear on the Flickr site and are displayed on Base, Adventure Tours etc websites.

Well, as you can see the new site is launched - this was completely unintentional. I was supposed to upgrade Wordpress to 2.3 so that we could enable tags for the new site and have the tag cloud at the top of the page, which you will see manifest itself. Unfortunately, the new version of Wordpress made the old site look all over the place and it seemed like it was going to take me a month of Sundays to fix the mess. So, with so much outstanding to do on this site, and with all the real web boys busy on proper projects, I opted to put the site up as is and try and get it going as soon as I can. So for those of you looking at the site right now, that is the story, the blog posts are still there and as you can see I have been active there this week. The normal selection of articles will be back soon and the rest of the functionality resolved in the next few days also. Maybe we can have a glass of bubbles then; bit premature now!