You’ll find a low rumbling in the hacker community about how email is broken 1, 2 (or not broken 3, 4). Email is still the main communication medium on the planet besides Facebook, SMS, and the web’s attempts to change that. The problem is that it is still relatively unsecure, it is generally heavily filtered at the server and local level, and can’t do advanced (yet simple) things like embed video.

Attempts to *fix* email have resulted in new platforms like Google Wave or Facebook Messages, but people are so heavily invested in their current email readers (Outlook, Gmail) that making a new platform for email is not really wanted. So what I’m proposing is to make new systems for the people who DO want it and NOT for the masses.

I’m a web marketer. I want to be able to send out cool emails. I want my clients to be able to send out cool emails too. I define “cool” as being able to easily create and manage your own custom email signatures and be able to send active content like embedded videos (a la BombBomb email). This can be done through various services and programs today, but it’s piecemeal.

I’m envisioning creating a marketing portal like Salesforce.com for managing your online marketing. It’d be a cloud platform for people to login, send marketing messages, add to or edit their blog, manage their marketing message response rate, and other CRM-like functions from a marketing-centric side of things – instead of a sales-centric side of things. Maybe it’s not needed. It’s just an idea.

Read about my other idea of creating a reputation service for the Internet.

Last night at the Agile Indy meeting I learned a little bit about what Agile is. At it’s core it’s a focus on people and teams power to get things done by communicating. Agile facilitates that movement from the individual to the team and from idea to implementation. It’s similar to lean principals when it comes to short, iterative product development cycles.

Retrospectives

We did what they call a “retrospective” which involves these steps:

• Brainstorm
• Cluster
• Prioritize
• Action
• Commit

For the brainstorming session, we were looking for topics the group wanted to discuss or cared about. We used the default star-pattern of, “What do you want to…

• = Stay the same
• > Do more of
• < Do less of
• - Stop doing (it’s hurting us)
• + Start doing

The brainstorming is done with a “one-in-hand” post-it note process where everyone writes one thing, then puts it on a wall or board. The “Cluster” process then uses the team to sort the post-it notes into categories using the same “one-in-hand” method. Seven random people are then asked to assign the clusters into seven different categories. The group then is allowed two dots each to assign importance to the categories. One dot on two categories or two dots on one is allowed. The two most popular categories then go into discussion and from that discussion, 5 action items are created. The last step is to commit these action items to being done and completed.

This is just one part of Agile. There are terms like SCRUM and SPRINT, neither of which I know what they mean (yet). I recently wrote about the Agile meetup as part of the broader category of what meetups mean to me, but I felt there was enough material from last night’s meeting that it deserved it’s own post.

The most popular book on Agile in Amazon doesn’t even mention Agile in the title. Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, is a book about achieving breakthrough results by, “methodically taking small, experimental steps in order to discover and develop new ideas.” The author, Peter Sims, researched what went on behind the scenes of some of the great achievements and innovations we witness in today’s world. He said, “Most of them weren’t the epiphanies of geniuses, but instead the result of masters of a specific type of experimentation. To find out the common elements of their experimental approach, I reviewed empirical and neuroscience research about creativity and innovation, and interviewed or observed dozens of people about their approach, including Army counterinsurgency strategists, architect Frank Gehry, agile software development teams, stand-up comedians, entrepreneurs who had self-financed billion dollar businesses, the rapidly growing field of design thinking, and musicians like John Legend, as well as executives inside a range of organizations such as Amazon, Pixar, Procter & Gamble, Google, 3M, General Motors, and Hewlett Packard.” As one reviewer wrote, “Constant experimentation (‘learn by doing’) is fundamental to this approach – and I would add, fundamental to Agile.

In January of 2005 I started my first Meetup called Indy Game Dev. One person joined and together we started to code a game. I didn’t know how to code a game. I had just graduated college with some Computer Science classes where I had to make a few small games in Visual Basic.NET, but I didn’t really know how to make a game.

We started out meeting once a month, and then weekly at his house in Noblesville. He didn’t even have his own computer so we had to use the computer in his mother’s bedroom. I researched gaming engines and different programming languages, but we ended up going with a type of game similar to the NES game, Shadowgate.

We had agendas and a group logo. We created the first screen in the game and started working on the story line, but then that’s when things started to fall apart. In April of 2005, Meetup began charging group owners a fee for hosting a group and the bottom sort of fell out as far as my desire to make games. What I realized is that I didn’t want to make games, I wanted to learn how to make games. Once I did that, my interest level was gone. My partner continued the group and the game for a while after I left, but I didn’t really start going to Meetups again until three years later in 2008.

A Brief History of My Career

I worked full time for the last two years I was in college and then immediately after helped a friend start a computer repair business on the side while continuing to work full time. It was during this time that I started going to Meetups, but I didn’t start going again until I left that job I had through college, started my own business, and got a new job in IT in October of 2007. This is when having a day job and going to meetups felt like I was living a double life. During the day I was a computer technician for an IT company and by night I was a web designer wanting to learn more about Adobe products or PHP.

Through web design and SEO work, I was introduced to the world of affiliate marketing and started making money that way too. Eventually my web design customers started using me more for their technical needs and I began acting as their outsourced IT firm, or simply, their “computer guy.” Eight months after doing IT full time, I became a business analyst at a mid-sized, regional bank. By August of 2011 I was making enough from all of my side ventures to go at it alone so I quit my day job and went full time on my own. That’s when I really started to take advantage of meetups.

Why Go to Meetups?

To Socialize

When I worked for other companies I was around other people all day long. We had meetings. I sometimes got to go places on the company’s dime. Some of these times were good. Most of them were not noteworthy. However, once they were gone, I started to miss that in my life. Sure, I met with clients occasionally, but for the most part I stayed in my office at home. While my family is a joy to me, there is a certain need to go beyond that and meetups can help with that. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m lonely, but there is a certain amount of Edward Norton’s Narrator that goes through my head when I visit a group for the first time.

To Form an Identity

What consistently meeting new people does to you is to help define who you are. This is partly because of the amount of times you have to explain who you are and what you do to new people, but also because simply by going to a particular group, you are associating yourself with that type of person. I’m currently a member of 16 meetups: Affiliate Freelancers Indianapolis, Affiliate Summit Indianapolis Meetup, AgileIndy, Central Indiana Entrepreneur’s & Vendors, Coaches, Consultants, Authors, Speakers & internet marketers, Esri Dev Meet Up Group – Great Plains, Geeks with Swag, Indiana Small Business Networking, Indianapolis Lean Startup Circle, Indianapolis Marketing Group, Indianapolis Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing, Indy Cowork, IndyDevHouse, TechLunch, Verge, and the WordPress – Indianapolis Meetup Group. I recently spoke at the affiliate marketing group, which gives me credibility with the speakers group, even though I already am a consultant.

To Learn

While I have been encouraged to get my masters and have gone back to school for Microsoft, A+, and Network+ certifications, meetups allow a different type of continued education in a wider array of fields. They are also the fields you’re most interested in learning about, or else you probably wouldn’t have signed up or gone to the meeting. Even though I’m profitable with affiliate marketing I still learn things from my affiliate marketing group, but a better example may be the Agile Indy group I attended last night. I had no idea what Agile was, but I kept hearing it and seeing it so I wanted to find out more about it. I wanted to learn. I can’t say I’ve gone to a traditional classroom much with that mentality. If you’re interested in what Agile is, review the Agile Manifesto or visit David Christiansen’s blog, Technology Dark Side. Speaking of affiliate marketing, David makes $2000 a year from advertising Rally Software on his blog. Rally sponsored last night’s meal, which brings me to my next reason.

To Eat

Most meetups either serve food or meet at a restaurant where there is an opportunity to eat food. If you enjoy breaking bread with your fellow man around a topic you love, what better place than at a meetup. The early Christian church would call this their communion time, while the modern church might call it “small groups”. What are meetups, if not small groups of people, passionate about a topic? One exception to “small” may be Verge Indy, which currently has 1,280 members and regularly has to limit members to their events at Developer Town. Most meetups who serve food serve pizza and most of the time it’s free, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch so be prepared for the corporate sponsor to pitch their goods to you. Don’t worry if you’re not interested, maybe one day you will be. Maybe one day you’ll be the sponsor.

To Travel

You probably can’t just walk into Miles Design or Allegient‘s offices, but that’s exactly what I did when I attened Joomla Indy and Agile Indy, respectively. While Joomla Indy isn’t an official meetup, it still meets regularly, in-person, around a topic, which is what meetups are all about. Tonight I’ll be attending the Lean Startup at Green is Good off 86th and Zionsville Road and the Esri meetup at Harry and Izzy’s on Illinois Street, downtown Indianapolis. When I was a business analyst I got to visit the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce’s board room once, now I’m visiting new board rooms every month.

To Network

If you’ve ever been told that you need to get out of comfort zone to grow, meetups are a great way to do that. Most of the people at the meetup I attend, I don’t know before attending. In fact, it’s actually rare for me to know someone there at all. However, once I’ve gone once, I do at least recognize them and can start to get to know them. Networking is a natural result of getting to know other people and meeting new people. Sometimes business cards are passed around and sometimes they are not. Meetups that are specifically setup to network don’t seem to be as popular as ones that are setup around a specific topic. What makes Verge so popular is that it brings together inventors, startups, and venture capitalists with those interested and willing to help. The energy there is intense and the barriers to entry are low. There is no fee for most events, food is provided, and those attending get the chance to pitch and network with others. It’s a great mix.

To Succeed

Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, there is probably a meetup out there to help you do it. Whether it’s meeting like minded people for encouragement or collaboriation, or learning from others who have paved the way before you, meetups can help you become a success. As Eric Willke, agile adviser and speaker at Agile Indy said, “Know you can succeed,” and to that I add – “and you will.”

How I went from being a map blogger to a map maker by just realizing that I love to make custom maps for myself and others.

I always thought of myself as an urban planner anytime I encountered something while driving that didn’t make sense. I used to wish I could change city streets the way you can in Sim City or Sid Meier’s Civilization.

When I worked for other companies I’d make maps of where people sat, where restaurants were located, or branch locations. I was rarely, if ever asked to do these things. I just did them.

As a business analyst, I created many intricate spreadsheets to turn data into usable information that could be shared. Our output was often compared to a map, maps being Edward Tufte’s standard of visual simplicity and design. When I visualized spreadsheet data, I was really making customized maps.

As an IT worker, I created intricate network diagrams of all of our client’s computer setups, which were really just customized maps.

When I finally came to realize that making maps was what I was most interested in, I learned that it was also the lens through which I viewed the world. I created maps in my mind to help me understand the world.

This past weekend I attended The Combine in Bloomington, Indiana. Merlin Mann of 43 Folders was the headliner. Before I left I created the map you see below:

It’s nothing special, just some information from a schedule laid over a Google Map screenshot. The reason I’m showing it is because no one told me to make it, I made it for myself to use at the Conference. I made a map so that I could better understand the material. It’s the same thing I did when I was a business analyst in the banking industry. I made maps of information so executives could make better decisions. In IT I made maps of information so that problems could be solved faster and so everyone could be on the same page as to how a system was setup. No one argues that the United States is located in between Mexico and Canada because maps tell us this is true. Maps make data obvious. They tell a story. They matter. And I care about them. That’s why I like making custom maps.

Map Design Resources

For those interested in map making design, you might enjoy reading Gretchen Peterson’s blog. Gretchen also wrote GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design. I’m currently in the process of learning TileMill from MapBox, but may also try MapTiler.

If what is happening to you is like what happened to me, the Optimize menu got switched to JPG instead of GIF and I couldn’t save my Photoshop document (PSD) as an animated GIF.  It simply wasn’t an option.  I had to Google it, searching for terms like “adobe imageready not showing gif” until I found this quote, which saved me:

To create the GIF from the psd or even the jpg file, you have to have the Optimise palette open in ImageReady, and have GIF selected under the Format tab. You can then tweak the colour table, transparency, dither etc on the same palette. Then save as optimised…

I had to figure out where the Optimize menu was in Adobe ImageReady, but once I did that, I changed it to GIF and I was golden!

How can I open a specific web shortcut in Windows in a specific web browser?

The trick is not to do it as a HTML shortcut, but as a program “switch”.  You can even copy and edit an existing shortcut to a program just by adding a space and the Internet address after the program path.  Here are some of the most common program paths:
Firefox
“C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe” http://erichstauffer.com

Internet Explorer
“C:Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore.exe” http://erichstauffer.com

Safari
“C:Program FilesSafariSafari.exe” http://erichstauffer.com

Chrome
“C:Documents and Settings%username%Local SettingsApplication DataGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe” http://erichstauffer.com

Dentist’s web sites have become increasingly more advanced and colorful as competition increases and more dentists are fighting for the same number of patients. Indiana has one of the highest distribution of dentists in the nation and so competition for top Google rankings for the most popular search term, “Indianapolis dentist,” is an ongoing battle. Once the dentist’s website makes it to the first page of Google, then it also has to look good to attract patients. That is what we are discussing today – how spa dentistry, dental studios, and sedation dentistry are hot design and service elements used in dentistry web design.

Spa Dent plays on the dentist-office-as-spa genre and uses the white flower as an accent. It features crown molding features around the outside edges, giving it a unique web design. The frame of the site is beveled with a drop shadow. The background has a mixture of solid colors and textures. The call to action is the contact box on the middle-right, exactly where it should be.

Austin Dental Spa uses long-arc graphic backgrounds and a kind of half-file folder tab, half-crown molding graphic outline to the web design. The arc is centered behind the main page and continues on out no matter how wide your monitor is. The blue and white colors remind the patient of a medical environment, but the khakis and oranges warm the site up to make it more spa-like. The bending lines in khaki are probably more intended to by file-folder tabs than crown molding once you view the featured video, which definitely features the file-folder tab top. The call to action here is the contact us area, which instead of a form like Spa Dent, requires the user to click on the nice envelope icon.

This site has a textured background with a mix of solid and textured backgrounds inside the main content of the page. This Indianapolis dentist‘s web site features a flash banner, much like Spa Dent’s and Austin Dental Spa. Indianapolis Dentistry is a dental spa and dental studio which uses sedation dentistry. It encompasses all three of the major trends in dental web sites today. The call to action on this website is generally missing, so I would suggest adding a button or graphic somewhere in the middle-right asking the user to “Make an appointment by calling…” or something along those lines. I like the mix of grays, khakis, blues, and whites in this web site. It is clean and well put together.

In Spa Dentistry features a nice green background with a black text background, but the site is made to expand to fit your window, which changes the positioning of the contents of the page and generally stretches things out unless the user is still using an 800×600 resolution. I don’t particularly care for the design, but wanted to include it for comparison against the next two dental web sites which use either green or black backgrounds. Like Indianapolis Dentistry, this website has no real call to action. And like Spa Dent, this dental web site also makes use of the white flower with the yellow stamen.

Ora Dentistry’s web site is more of what you would have found circa 2003 on the web. It’s got the video, the structure, the flash, but it’s all very old looking. It seems like it hasn’t been refreshed in a while, even though it may have been. Sometimes web designers can get stuck doing something the same way because it has worked for them in the past. This may or may not be the case, but in general the flash animation is a bit fuzzy. If Ora didn’t have all the movie stars appearing on the web site, he may not have had as much success on the design alone. There is no real call to action, but it does seem like the designer wants us to watch the movie. Perhaps the call to action lies within the video.

Studio Dental is a dental studio, like Indianapolis Dentistry, and also features a flash banner as well as the white flower with the yellow stamen. It has a piano-black background on top of a gray background, which really makes the site pop. This is a really classy design which lines up the pages across the top and the services along the left side. For those who just want to know the location or the hours, that is along the top and for those who want to know what is going on in that location, that information is down along the left-side. The web site if littered with attractive women, even featuring Mrs. Globe, so like Ora Dentistry, famous people don’t seem to hurt your business much, but unlike Ora Dentistry’s web site, this one is very nicely done. The call to action is to “call to make an appointment”, but it is located in the middle-center, which is not the prime location. It should be moved to the right – in between Mrs. Globe and the video featuring his guest appearance on TV.

Adobe Flash CS4 Professional software is the industry-leading authoring environment for creating engaging interactive experiences. New object-based animation tools make working in Flash easier and more intuitive for beginning and expert designers like myself, while powerful design tools expand your creative possibilities. Flash is the place to bring it all together and deliver to audiences regardless of platform or device. According to Adobe, Flash players are installed on 99% of desktops, so you know that the content is usable most everywhere, but it still won’t work on Apple’s iPhone.

Adobe Flash CS4 Professional contains hundreds of enhancements over CS3, including an easy-to-customize user interface consistent with other components within the Adobe Creative Suite 4 family of software. I’ve been messing with Flash the past few days, and the IK (bones) tool is my favorite added feature. It makes creating walk cycles easier, and also makes animations more interesting. One thing you should note is that the arms and legs all have to be on separate layers. If you try using the whole body shape, the movements get messed up.

The 3D tool is nice, but some of the 3d stuff can be done by using the free transform tool. Overall it is a useful feature for what can’t be done with the free transform tool.

The spray brush tool is also a nice feature. It allows you to not just spray pain with colors, but with symbols also. There are some really cool things that can be done with this, such as backgrounds.

Overall, this is a very good product that I recommend.

Last night I had a dream that I went to a restaurant with a couple of friends and we all ordered a strawberry cake pie.  It was served in a “taco salad”-like pan with a friendship bread, cake-like base.  The topping was similar to a strawberry pie, but the kind with strawberry glaze mixed in.  That was our meal.

In the morning I called my friend on the way to work and he thought the idea was fantastic, but then he took it to the next level.  He said, “Why not take strawberry cake mix, churn cold butter into it, and make that the crust instead.” BRILLIANT and DELICIOUS-sounding.  I’ve got another friend who makes exceptional deserts (such as the 7-layer bar) who is going to do the testing.

Analyzing Facebook

During our conversation I had mentioned that I was so excited about the strawberry cake pie that I had posted it to Facebook first thing in the morning.  This led to a discussion about a recent Facebook “analysis” I had done on this friend’s Facebook profile.  I had noticed that his wall posts were down compared to a month ago so I mentioned that his Facebook wall posts were down 83% compared to last month.  I hadn’t really done the analysis, but he thought I had, which made me think that Facebook is ripe for analysis.

A while back a different friend of mine did a quick study to find out how many wall posts one of his friends made before and after a point in time. He was able to go back through all of his wall posts to discover that, even though they had been Facebook friends, before the event there were no wall posts, but after the event, the wall posts were near-spam levels.  The metric in that analysis was wall posts, which inspired me to use the same metric for what I call the Facebook Coefficient.

The Facebook Coefficient

The Facebook Coefficient is the number of wall posts you make compared to the number of wall posts received.  This is a measure of your popularity on Facebook  (or how big of a jerk you are, which a friend of mine pointed out).  The coefficient takes into account the last time the user logged in, not counting incoming wall posts until after the user logs back in.

The coefficient can be computed manually, but would best be done by a Facebook App.  I am a member of the Facebook Developers community, but I have yet to produce a Facebook app.  This is in part because I never had a need to or an idea of what Facebook app to write.  If you are a developer, feel free to use or adapt this idea.  I would be interested in using it.  For more ideas, check out this blog post about wanting Facebook Statistics.

What Facebook apps would you like to see? On May 19th, 2009 I posted about using Twitter as a business research tool. If you are a Facebook developer I would consider doing something similar.  Here’s why: the following two wishes have been granted.

WISH there was a way to permanently hide any news feed info relating to those “What kind of blah blah are you” quizzes on facebook.

wish there was a way to opt out of getting messages from some people in facebook. Seems like whey need a spam filter.

But this one still has not:

wish there was a way to post PDFs in #Facebook messages…

So if you are a developer who wishes to develop a popularity app like The Facebook Coefficient, then you may have already developed Popularity.  Popularity is a, “fun and rewarding ranking game that calculates how interactive people are with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr,” but when you try to use it on Facebook it errors out and says

There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of Popularity are trying to iron out. We appreciate your patience as we try to fix these issues. Your problem has been logged – if it persists, please come back in a few days. Thanks!

You may have heard the expression, “There is no such thing as competition.”  No matter how good of an idea you have, if you can’t execute it, then it is not worth much.  Execution is really the name of the game and whether you are baking a strawberry cake pie or a Facebook app, you must deliver the goods – otherwise, it’s just a half-baked idea.

I don’t know about you, but the OS’s that live inside my Virtual PC feel like little pets to me. I just love to take care of them, update them, install software on them. Sometimes I give them treats (more RAM) or a bigger hard drive. They are fun to take care of and they are helpful tools too. I use them to test software out before running it on my “real” PC. I can also use it to load images of CDs without actually having to burn a CD first. Of course, I can load real CDs too.

I loaded the same Virtual PC on two of my computers. And like two twins separated at birth, each one has changed looks over time, but they both contain the same DNA at heart. Just like a good dog, they don’t complain, they just love to be played with. They can be good workers too. I’m sure as time goes on I’ll find new uses for my virtual machines and there will be new ways for them to be used. Companies are already using virtualization technology with thin clients to reduce hardware overhead. I wonder where virtualization will head next.

I wondered if VMware could be installed on a virtual machine being ran inside Virtual PC 2007 and the answer is yes. The program itself runs, but I haven’t tested whether another virtual machine would run inside a virtual machine. What do you think would happen? Do you think we’re in a virtual machine now?

The Simulation Argument says that (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

Regardless of whether or not we are living in a simulation (like The Matrix or The Thirteenth Floor), we do enjoy manipulating simulations in both games like The Sims and in movies. On a side note, check out the similarities between these two movie covers:

Comcast Users Experiencing CONNECTION INTERRUPTED at Google Video

Comcast users trying to upload video to Google Video lately have experienced a CONNECTION INTERRUPTED message. If you are upset about this, please contact Comcast. It is not Google, it is Comcast or your Internet service provider.

But just to be sure, in Windows XP, check your “hosts” file located in: C:WINDOWSsystem32driversetc
Replace “C” with whatever drive you have Windows installed on. The Windows host file should look like this:

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a ‘#’ symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

127.0.0.1 localhost

I was reading an article in WIRED magazine about Open-Source Hardware and how it is the newest trend to hit the open source market. It was mostly about the Arduino circuit boards, but towards the end began to mention David Rowe. I hadn’t remembered hearing his name before, but thought I may have used his products or been introduced to them in the past. A quick Google search and I am staring at this minimalist, humble-as-pie, mac daddy of projects. Check out this list:

Current Projects

Previous and Inactive Projects

The short answer is, you can’t.  According to Digg.com:

In searching Google for “small business”, sba.gov is the number one hit, but the description contains a misspelling.  It reads “e-newaletters”. Notice the ‘a’ instead of the ‘s’?

This can be found and changed in the header of the web site’s code under the META tag, DESCRIPTION.  The description is what shows up under Google search results.

Erich

We are undergoing a makeover here at erichstauffer.com.  Please bear with us as we make these changes and we hope you enjoy this new web site design, brought to you by Indianapolis web design company, Watershawl, Inc..  [Update 8/16/2009: This blog is now maintained by Watershawl, Inc.]

I’ve been experimenting with the query string parameters after the main Youtube address. Some people may refer to them as “Youtube codes”, but the easiest way to explain them is that they are the ampersands and snippet of text at the end of the web address. This string of of code, the Youtube query string parameters, adds functionality to what is presented. There is no real comprehensive guide on the Internet for this, but I’ve compiled a short list of the Youtube codes I could find here so that when you need them, you’ll be able to find the Youtube codes or “query string parameters” faster than I did.

Update: If you’re looking for query strings for Youtube or Google Maps, you might try Map Strings if the other link isn’t working.

Thanks to sysop073 for the heads up on Reddit.

I recommend this extensive post on Youtube plugins and tools for more information and for advanced users, check out the Youtube Reference Guide. Also, check out this Google Maps Parameters Guide from MapKi and Youtube Query String Arguments.