Mugo Web's blog

In the realm of digital publishing, there’s no shortage of creative ideas, but not every business idea is suitable for magazine publishers. Sometimes it’s prudent to stick with tried and true innovations, or to emulate those who have had proven success.

Like many magazine publishers, Habitat Magazine has a long history of creating quality content targeted to its specialized audience: property managers and condo board members in the New York area. But, with its potential audience maxing out at about 7,500 subscribers, Habitat has had to get creative with digital media opportunities that have enabled it to repurpose and leverage its content in order to grow. 

If you deliver print content such as a magazine or newsletter to a subscribed user base, you should be targeting a digital solution.

As a project manager on a web project, you have to be the hub for editors, marketers, developers, designers, IT staff, clients, and a plethora of other stakeholders as the team works together to plan, build, and launch the website or application. While managing the people, scope, timeline, and budget, you need to find the most efficient way for everybody to get things done. The best way to achieve this is to make unblocking others your primary responsibility.

For most content-based websites, success comes down to a trio of critical metrics: traffic, engagement, and revenue. These success metrics can also be expressed as a conversion path: you drive traffic to your site via content and marketing strategies that engage your audience, and this converts to revenue via ads, sponsored content, paid subscriptions, or otherwise.

Dealing with permissions and security systems such as Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is an issue that seems to challenge many developers. Some enterprise Linux distributions like Red Hat and CentOS come with SELinux enabled by default, but not knowing how SELinux works can lead developers to disable it. This is a mistake.

I recently did a performance review for a server setup running more than 200 websites. The infrastructure is hosted at Amazon Web Services (AWS). It contains multiple web servers behind multiple Varnish caching servers, uses Relational Database Service (RDS) for database storage, and uses Elastic File System (EFS) for storing assets like content images and documents. There were several areas of performance optimization to be done, which was a good development exercise and resulted in an improved user experience. Most importantly, though, the results also saved bandwidth; reduced the number of servers, number of CPUs, and amount of RAM required; and saved money! A faster site also improves SEO, which will drive more visitors / customers to your site, and will increase conversions.

Mugo Web puts emphasis on keeping its employees connected -- through good times and bad.

Building a relationship with a web development partner can be a lot like dating. In the early days of your relationship, you’ll be talking to your web developer frequently, getting to know their strengths and weaknesses, and hoping they’ll be reliable, trustworthy, and ultimately live up to your expectations.

We’re often asked which content management system we would recommend for small businesses, non-profits, enterprise clients, magazines, book publishers, etc. We’ve written a lot about our favourite content management system (eZ Publish / eZ Platform), which we’ve used for countless sites of various sizes and levels of complexity in a wide variety of sectors.

But we know there are a lot of content management systems that you’ll likely consider when launching or redoing your website, and we understand that every organization wants to ensure they get the best fit for their particular vertical and needs.

Writing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is critical to effectively describe how HTML elements must be displayed on a web page to define styles, design, layout, and everything you need to create a stunning website. But when you start working with large, complex sites, you might start to wonder if CSS could be better. If you are having these thoughts, congratulations! Your SASS time has come.

Intended audience: developers

Unix-like operating systems power the majority of the Internet, and if you’re a web developer, chances are you interact with them daily. Whether you’re using the Linux or macOS command line interface, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, a Vagrant box, or connecting to a remote server via SSH, here’s a list of five command line techniques to be more productive.

We recently used OneAll to develop a feature that allows user generated content to be created, submitted for review, published, and then automatically posted to the creator's social media channels without additional effort on their part. Here's how we accomplished this.

Imagine thousands of Canadian kids’ books, located in one place. They’re here, complete with a database you can search by genre, age range, grade level, and theme. Add to that hundreds of classroom resources for teachers, librarians, and educators to explore by type, subject, and grade level and you've got the perfect match.

ReaderBound is a powerful website platform that helps publishers easily showcase and sell their books online.

It combines sophisticated content management and e-commerce solutions, client support, website hosting, and maintenance into one convenient package.

We often explain the ReaderBound benefits in terms of what it enables you to do. However, one of its key benefits is what it takes off your plate: a number of site maintenance worries.

Whether you're a B2B publication such as Habitat Magazine or a B2C publication such as The Christian Science Monitor, you've likely been facing challenges around advertising, the erosion of print dollars, and intense competition for reader attention (both in print and digital) for years. To stay competitive and be able to thrive, you need to innovate digitally. Carol Ott, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Habitat Magazine, states that "without digital, we would no longer be in business". Is your digital platform and website enabling or hindering you?

Words like innovation and digital transformation tend to be sprinkled liberally in discussions about digital publishing and online revenue models these days. But stories about publishers that have actually implemented new digital strategies resulting in positive revenue streams are not nearly as common. One of our clients, The Christian Science Monitor, however, has done just that, reinventing itself online to better resonate with its readers, and generating a critical new stream of subscriber revenue.

Facebook's solution to speed up mobile web page loading is called Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA), and it's only available to Facebook app users. Here's a look at how to integrate FBIA into eZ Publish / eZ Platform.

On content heavy sites, it can be useful to inject snippets of code into CMS data before display (for example, into the body copy of an article). These snippets could be automatically generated glossaries, tables of contents, or ad units, placed mid-content.

Let's explore a general approach to getting such snippets into place.

Giving association members the ability to submit insurance claims online saves time and money for the Alberta Gymnastics Federation. Here we'll take a look at the insurance claims submission web app we built in eZ Publish / eZ Platform. 

In an effort to engage its audience, our client, FindaTopDoc, wanted to integrate a custom Q&A platform into its site. They chose Oracle + Bronto as the accompanying marketing automation tool. Here we outline how we integrated Bronto with eZ Platform to build a robust Q&A and newsletter system with the capacity to send customized e-mails to tens of thousands of users.

The content business used to be the exclusive purview of media outlets, book, and magazine publishers. But today, the maxim “everyone is a publisher” has become more relevant than ever, particularly online, where audiences are not only wary of ads, they may not ever see them.

Intended audience: technical managers, senior developers

Agile developers must constantly strike a balance between building solutions for a known existing case and building solutions that can scale to handle unknown future cases. On the one hand, Agile philosophy encourages us to build and iterate as necessary: Move Fast and Break Things. On the other, various programming best practices encourage us to build in an extensible and modular way from the start: Do One Thing and Do It Well. On smaller projects, these two goals can be achieved simultaneously; but on larger projects – especially given time and budget constraints – it is sometimes necessary to prioritize one over the other. 

Project managers and full-stack developers face such choices almost immediately, during the initial development, staging, and deployment phases. For instance, a project may begin with a narrow scope and require only a single developer’s time. In this case, it often makes sense to forgo provisioning a dedicated development virtual machine (VM) or staging server, and instead, to use generic or shared environments. But as the scope of the project grows, for instance with caching or proxy layers, it often makes sense to implement better development, staging, and production parity.

It’s not every day you hear about lucrative new revenue streams opening up for magazine publishers. In fact, most media outlets prefer to paint dark doomsday pictures when it comes to the future of magazines.