ted serbinski – a blog about drupal, macs, productivity, health, and bmws

MothersClick is a flourishing site that is growing very quickly. As such, tracking user behavior with Google Analytics is becoming very important as it helps to determine how to adjust the site to better meet the needs of our users. And now, as we prepare to launch our full ParentsClick Network of sites, we need to track what they are doing across our network of sites.

Well thankfully Analytics makes this easier through its ability to track outbound links and cross domain links. But the problem then arises, who is going to update all of those hardcoded links with Javascript code? Is there an easier way?

MothersClick placed 1st in the Niche Social Networking category for SEOmoz’s 3rd Annual Web 2.0 Awards. I’m very pleased with the result as myself and the rest of the MothersClick team have really been working our tails off launching version 3 of our platform just a few months ago. Expect a more detailed look at this new version (including information about our brand new community API for Drupal to be released late summer/fall) in a future blog post.

Congratulations to other Drupal winners on this list including imbee who placed 3rd in the niche social networking category, NowPublic who placed 2nd in social news, and to our friends at jQuery who placed 3rd in WebDev.

Just in time for Mother's Day, the 2nd Annual "Cookbook for Moms" is now for sale! This year we have teamed up with Missy Chase Lapine, author of "The Sneaky Chef" in helping us raise money for the Boys and Girls Club.

Moms have submitted their recipes and the community has voted for the top 40. From there, those recipes were exported from the site and into the Blurb publishing system, where they were meticulously edited, laid out, and designed up for an awesome looking cookbook.

From the press release:

The 2nd Annual "Cookbook for Moms" is an original publication, featuring a unique collection of family recipes and personal stories that have been submitted and voted on by moms online.

"As a mom who understands the importance of family mealtimes, it's great to have Missy contributing to our efforts," said Andra Davidson, president of MothersClick. "This cookbook is our Mother's Day gift to the members of our online community and moms everywhere. The concept of sharing recipes is very much in line with MothersClick's overall mission of exchanging parenting information and advice between moms. And most satisfying of all: this purchase truly gives back, as all of our proceeds will support the kids being helped by The Boys & Girls Clubs."

"This is a unique collaboration of community and a novel fundraiser," says Roxanne Spillett, President, Boys & Girls Clubs of America. "We appreciate the ongoing charitable efforts of MothersClick on our behalf."

Featuring over 40 original recipes, the "Cookbook for Moms" offers a treasured collection of family favorites, contributed by moms from across the world, recipes that are quick and healthy for busy families and dishes that can be prepared with children. These are recipes that have been voted best by moms online, and selected entries include a personal description about the dish and each contributor.

Last week when I was in NYC for MothersClick meetings, I met for an interview with Jerad Bitner and Dave Burns, both developers at SonyBMG. These guys run a site called DrupaLMAO, a Diggnation inspired site that posts weekly videos talking about the Drupal community.

Today, we announced the official launch of our new widget and API system for Mom Blog Network, the "sister site" to MothersClick. We're excited not only because these products are great new features for our users, but they also highlight the successful development of our community application.

As an extension of our custom, Drupal-based white-label solution that powers the ParentsClick Network, our widget system ties in directly to new content being generated across our network of sites. In the case of Mom Blog Network, as moms vote on various posts making them popular, our widget system catches this data and sends it to a custom PHP processing engine that dynamically builds and serves the widgets. The advantage to this system is it allows us to support millions of widgets without invoking Drupal each time to serve them -- we like our servers :)

Continue reading on for examples and more...

Today, I am proud to announce that MothersClick has acquired the domain MothersGroups.com. This strategic acquisition allows us to improve our online presence for helping moms to find local groups and activities.

“MothersGroups.com is a perfect example of a unique keyword domain that leverages the power of direct search while simultaneously driving increased SEO results within a highly targeted customer demographic,” says Pete Lamson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of NameMedia’s marketplace properties.

The domain MothersGroups.com is our first direct search, SEO optimized, parenting portal and we plan to launch many more sites this year as we build out our network, pulling from over 150 parenting-related domains in our portfolio.

notextile..

p. That's right, the all new Mom Blog Network has finally launched!

This site is a very similar to Digg and allows moms to submit interesting links around the internet and/or add their blogs, allowing other members to vote on the content, determining what's hot and what's not. There are RSS feeds and email updates, delivering the latest mommy news to you each day.

And I must say, the site is highly useful. I visit it everyday to check on it but find myself clicking around and reading about all sorts of interesting things. Quite cool to see it being adopted so fast :-)

For this project we wrote some custom modules that control a proprietary system of algorithms to reveal hot topics, blogs, and users, both by time based, vote based, and category based filters. It's an extensive system and it's been written to be extremely high performance in mind---very noticeable as you click around the site.

Mom Blog Network also joins MothersClick in becoming part of our all new platform, ParentsClick Network, Inc., a new digital media venture to serve the needs of parents. It's going to be a busy 2008 that's for sure :-)

Stay tuned for updates!

So we like to have a lot of fun at MothersClick, and our latest joke certainly takes the cake.

Everyone seems to think I am indeed Matt Lauer‘s long lost twin, so much infact to post it on Digg.

So what do you think? Leave your comments and Digg the story if you agree :-)

One of the most popular features on MothersClick is our geo-mapping system for mothers’ groups—-a mashup of Google maps and mommy groups (created with the organic groups module).

NOTE: This project has been superceded by the most excellent jQuery Calendar. All development on this plugin will now be merged with that project.

I am pleased to announce that my jQuery date picker is now ready for consumption, check it out here:

http://tedserbinski.com/jcalendar/index.html

This plugin was originally written to improve the interface for adding activities on MothersClick.com and will be working as the new input widget for date module. Initial mom reactions have been extremely positive (from a couple beta testers) and we hope to roll this into production after we iron out the kinks with Karen to get this into date module as the new default widget.