We use keyphraseology.com to help us with our SEO needs, and they recently completed another site audit for us. In the audit they did last year, they recommended we add a blog to our site to better communicate and help us attain long tail search results. Since we use the django framework, there were several open source blog apps to choose from, and we chose zinnia. The audit this year included some changes we could make to our out-of-the-box zinnia install to improve the SEO, and if you run a zinnia blog you should make the same changes, too ...

My wife, Mandy, and I were walking the dog today and Mandy mentioned that our house cleaner asked if we were still looking for people to sell coupons on the web site. I answered emphatically "Yes!" Mandy continued "Great, because she has two people who are definitely interested in selling!"

I replied, "In that case, what Carol (not her real name) should do is sign up as an Advertising Representative *hereself*, and then give her recommendation links to the two others. It costs Carol nothing. It costs her two friends nothing. And she never has to sell a coupon! But ...

We've offered the ability to "Like" a coupon on Facebook and Tweet a coupon, and today we've added the ability to "plus one" your favorite coupons on Google Plus. 

We use Facebook Likes as a signal of coupon popularity, and if it becomes prevalent enough we will certainly do the same for your +1s. If your are an advertiser, make sure you +1 your own coupons to share them on this new social network, now open to the public.

If you enjoy using coupons from this site, make sure you +1 your favorites so others can find out ...

Working on a start-up, you get used to a rapid rate of change. I've enjoyed the pace even as it's increased recently; conceiving an idea in the morning and deploying it by mid-afternoon. Some changes take longer than that, like refactoring code we wrote two years ago when we started the company, learning Python and then django as we went along. We've learned a lot since then. But sometimes the "biggest" changes are the easiest. After reading the headline of this blog entry, you may have noticed that the site is no longer in beta. That change ...

We've mentioned it various places, but many may not have come across the fact the founders of 10LocalCoupons were also the founders, way back in 1999, of RegionalHelpWanted.com, a network of over 300 local job websites across the US and Canada. We advertised on local radio stations as such names as HudsonValleyHelpWanted.com (our first site), DesMoinesHelpWanted.com, and CalgaryJobShop.ca; a local brand in every market.

Even though we sold that company several years ago, we still love those guys. So its great to work with them again now that we are looking for Independent Advertising Representatives ...

A question our customer service representatives are asked frequently from our advertisers is "How can I make my coupon appear above the other guy's coupon?" One factor we take in consideration when ordering coupons for display, either on the website or in our weekly coupon flyers, is when the coupon was created; newer coupons appear first.

But that's not the only criteria. We also promote coupons that have been shared more frequently on Facebook. Yes it is a popularity contest! We want to lead with our best coupons, and one measurement for that is how many people have ...

     I'm working on integration Solr full-text searching into this site, and so far I have to say django Haystack has made it far easier for me to do that it has even been before. In other projects I've used Verity (it was bundled in ColdFusion) and MS SQL Server's full-test search (non-)capabilities. I'd done a Solr integration before but had to roll my own POSTs to Solr and parse the xml response.

     We are all about testing here so once I developed a proof of concept view for my Solr installation, I began writing unit ...

     My son's t-ball coach asked me last week if he could get his coupons on his smart phone. The answer is "Yes!" We've worked with the guys at Shooger to provide our local coupons through their mobile app. It uses your current location to show you the coupons near where you are. It makes saving money at stores in your hometown as easy as, well, t-ball.

     The shooger app is available for iPhone and Android phones. See http://www.shooger.com/ for details.

When I imagined myself blogging technology related topics for 10LocalCoupons.com, I did not think that my first entry would be about a site outage. Sigh.

Like many sites, we were affected by an issue at one of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) availability zones yesterday. Our servers were in that zone, in Virgina, and although we had redundancy at the server level had not yet planned for redundancy across availability zones. So we had to scramble. 

Our database was still available so we increased the backup frequency of that from one hour to every fifteen minutes, since we ...