Receive an e-mail notification of new posts on this site:
|
|
|
Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
September 28th 2007 17:44
A good deal of our time is spent in trying to please the Search Engines: Google, Yahoo et al. But we also need to be careful not to upset them!
Obviously the search engines aren’t human, but they’ve been set up so that they’ll weed out attempts by webmasters to push their pages up the ladder by unfair means.
You can actually get banned or dropped from the search engines, so it’s worth noting some reasons why this might happen.
Rosemary Donald, of Rank1 Website Marketing has a number of suggestions to make.
I’ve selected a few that I think are particularly relevant.
One no no is to create pages that install viruses, Trojans or ’badware’ on other computers. Obviously people reading this won’t be sending out viruses (surely!) but badware is another matter. Badware can be defined as spyware, malware or deceptive advertising that tracks a user’s movements on the Net, and reports this information back to an unscrupulous marketing group. The latter can then bombard the unfortunate user with unwanted advertising. This kind of malware is often attached to online games, or information that’s downloaded from the Net.
At the other extreme is the silly process of loading your page with irrelevant words. I’ve sometimes wondered if using the information I’ve picked up from HitTail might come into this category, but I think not.
Keep away from link farmers as well. While they’re not illegal, they can overdo the link approach to improving your stats.
Something else to avoid - both for the SE’s sake and your readers’ is to have pages with next-to-no content. Opening pages that have a logo and nothing else are annoying to people looking for information. They may look good, initially, but having to click yet again just to find out what you want is annoying. The Internet is complicated enough as it is: readers like to find things simply.
Equally, don’t duplicate information on your site just for the sake of it. If you can’t provide extra content, then scrap the duplicated page.
Cross linking is another issue. There may be some disagreement over how useful or useless this is. What it means is when you have a number of sites all hosted on the same server and each of the sites is ‘cross-linked’ to each other, sometimes over and over.
I received this information via a regular ezine. Rather surprisingly, at one point Ms Donald does exactly what she tells us not to do: repeats the information!
September 26th 2007 21:35
I’ve mentioned on my travel blog about how good it’s been over the last couple of days to be back in normal beds, under a normal roof. Tenting has its points, but comfortable sleep isn’t really one of them, though I must admit that the air beds we had were very solid and didn’t have any tendency to lose air during the night.
We actually had a duvet with us as well as a couple of sleeping bags. This ensured that we were kept warm on the colder nights, of which there were an increasing number while we were away.
Previously I’ve found that the duvet covers we’ve had on most of the beds we’ve slept in have been too hot for my liking. I remember years ago hearing that duvets were supposed to be cool in summer and warm in winter. Well, the second part of that is correct, but not the first. I find duvet covers are just too hot in the
summer. At home, we tend to put our duvet away for a good deal of the summer and just go with a single blanket.
I see on the Net that one firm advertises quilted duvet covers. That sounds to me just too much to have on top of me at night, even in the winter. When I was younger I found it difficult to keep warm at night; these days I find it difficult to stay cool enough. Strange that the body makes such an adjustment over the years!
September 25th 2007 19:28
The paid post sites come and go, and some of them don’t seem to be going anywhere – and then suddenly get their act together and start moving.
One ‘small’ one called has been going for some months, but has been offering very little in the way of work to its bloggers. For most of that time it had only four opportunities to choose from; not many if you’re a lean and hungry blogger looking for a bit of spare cash.
Anyway, someone at Smorty has got their act together, and now the paid post opportunities are coming thick and fast. So thick and fast, that most posties won’t be able to keep up with them, I’d suspect. Still, it means that there is work out there. Furthermore, you don’t have to keep checking back into the site only to discover nothing has been added since your last visit, because Smorty are emailing their long-patient bloggers and letting them know when a new opportunity has arisen. That’s a service I haven’t seen on any other paid for posting site.
Of course, where there are people getting paid to blog there are people paying them to be able to advertise on blogs. They make an interesting mix: some of these advertisers are ones you'd never hear of otherwise. I find it's an intriguing way to discover businesses on the Net.
I'd love to know where they came up with the name, Smorty. It doesn't exactly strike any chords...but at least it's alive and kicking.
September 25th 2007 19:17
A Harvard student was asked to leave the Harvard Co-op Bookstore, because he was taking down notes of the ISBNs and the prices of books he required for his course.
The Harvard Coop (as it seems to be generally known) claimed the ISBNs were intellectual property, and that the student was committing a form of theft.
ISBN means International Standard Book Number
[ Click here to read more ]
September 23rd 2007 19:11
One thing I forgot to mention in regard to the digital picture frame is that it’s very easy to load your pictures onto one of these devices/tools/machines - toys.
If you can load photos onto your computer, you can load them onto a digital photo frame. The only difference is that instead of transferring your data to the computer, you transfer it directly to the memory card. You can also add videos that you’ve taken on your digital camera, and you can add music as well (there is built-in stereo). The possibilities….!
For those who want to get technical, you can work in a wide variety of formats: JPEG, MP4, DivX, AVI, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, MP3, WMA, WAV. That should be enough options to satisfy the most fussy user. And because nothing comes without a remote control these days, your digital photo frame has one too. Just don’t get it confused with all the other remotes around the house. (Please someone, make all remotes the same
[ Click here to read more ]
September 23rd 2007 18:53
Since we’ve been in England we’ve come across people with digital photo frames in their houses. Surprisingly, not many of them are using them. They seem to be something that many people buy and then never get round to loading. Well, maybe it’s the people I know who don’t use them.
Personally I think they’re a great idea. The alternative to the digital picture frame is to have an ongoing slide show on your computer, and since you’re more likely to be doing something else with that machine, it isn’t very convenient when it comes to someone wanting to look at the photos you’ve taken. (And believe me, we’ve taken a huge number since we came to the UK on holiday.) Whether they want to look at them is another thing, of course. We all know how boring other people’s holiday photos can be (not ours, of course!)
Anyway, even if your relatives don’t want to look at the photos, it’s a nice way to see them again yourself while you’re sitting having dinner, or watching boring tv, or listening to music
[ Click here to read more ]
September 17th 2007 19:59
Years ago I had a phrase in my mind, though whether it related to a movie or a book, I can’t remember. The phrase was The Bespoke Tailor. Being a child at the time, I had no idea what bespoke meant, and hadn’t really thought about it again until today when I saw on an English home improvements site that they offer a bespoke service. Of course it’s an English site - you can’t really imagine that appearing on a US one (though stranger things have happened).
This site, which hosts Anglian home improvements, actually explains the word, bespoke, and suddenly after all this time, I know what a bespoke tailor would be.
Anglian says: you won’t find prices on this website, because all our products and services are bespoke. And what does it mean? It means that they don’t offer you an estimate in advance. They will work out what all the windows and doors in the job cost, and price them accordingly. And this quotation stands for the duration of the job. That’s a pretty good offer
[ Click here to read more ]
September 14th 2007 20:20
As someone who’s made great use of Skype since we came to England, it’s a concern to hear that the program can be used to transmit a virus.
The virus uses a typical instant messenger (IM) approach to hijacking: it grabs contacts from an infected machine's Skype software, and sends messages to those people who are currently on their computers. People on the list who click on the URL - it looks like a JPG image but is in fact a download to a file with the .scr extension - then wind up with the infection themselves.
Skype users will only become infected if they download the link and run the malicious software
[ Click here to read more ]
Since we’ve been in England we’ve been making great use of Skype to call our family and friends at home - and even to talk to family that are here. My brother-in-law bought a webcam to use with Skype and had an awful lot of trouble installing it. Finally his son managed to get it to work by downloading a driver that wasn’t included with the original machine!
Drivers can be an absolute pain. It’s okay if you have a disk with all the guff on it, and can just slot it in, but when you get something that should just work and it won’t it takes considerable trial and error to get it functioning.
On the plus side, we bought a flash drive today, a 4 gig one, because the smaller pen drive we brought with us from NZ was running out of room - all these photos we’re taking. This flash drive slotted into the computer and was up and running in seconds. It’s a Kingston USB2.0 DataTraveler, for anyone who’s interested
[ Click here to read more ]
I'm not usually at events where they give away t-shirts, so I'm proud to show you the one I got at PodCampUK. This photo taken somewhere random near the NTI Centre, Birmingham,
where the camp took place.
The problem with trying to sum up anything I learned at the PodCamp at Birmingham (UK) I went to last weekend is:
a. I don’t entirely understand what some of my notes mean.
b. I don’t entirely understand what some of the words that I can read mean
[ Click here to read more ]
Much of the first part of my experience of being at the PodCamp in Birmingham on Saturday was meeting people and talking to them and just getting to know what they’re doing - particularly in the podcasting field.
So, in no particular order, here are the ones who left me some information in terms of getting in touch with them on the Net.
Richard Rudin, who pointed out that his business card has a proofreading error on it: instead of broadcaster, he has broadaster. Richard has a bit of a webpage under his name, but he also has podcasts available. There aren’t many podcasts on the podcast section yet, but that’s because most of his work in this field in done in his role as teacher in journalism
[ Click here to read more ]
More Posts
213 Posts dating from January 2007
Email Subscription
Receive e-mail notifications of new posts on this blog:
Mike Crowl's Blogs
13012 Vote(s)
199 Comment(s)
284 Post(s)
|
|
|
Add Comments
Read More
Comments (2)
