From the monthly archives:

January 2008

Google Reader and the Dupes

January 31, 2008

I’m sure this has to do with the way things are published, like the times are different, but it’s still annoying to have to mark things read I’ve read already, only to see them appear later on

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Suggestion for Yahoo Shortcuts Wordpress Plugin

January 26, 2008

Hey Yahoo Shortcuts Wordpress Plugin People, here’s a suggestion for improving your plugin, give me a checkbox to let me toggle the “Creative Commons” AND “OK to use commercially” settings.
For example if I was writing about my upcoming trip to say Hawaii and wanted to drop an affiliate link or two, while being perfectly legal, [...]

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Calling out the Spam on Propeller

January 26, 2008

You know there was a time I held out hope that Netscape/Propeller was a viable alternative to the lost boys club of Digg, however those days are long gone. Right now propeller is nothing more than a sham used to promote the most worthless spam and is completely infiltrated and overrun with manipulation. Case and [...]

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Google Reader Still Doing the Dupe Thing

January 25, 2008

sigh ….

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Prisoners of War in the Battle for Paid Links

January 25, 2008

Yesterday I came across a post from Dazzlin Donna entitled Matt Cutts, Why Am I Still Being Punished, there are several points in that post worth noting and discussing in more detail.

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Shameless Friend Promotion

January 24, 2008

If you’re into comics please check out Urban Monsters written by one my friends, you can also check out his blog where he talks about storytelling and lore surrounding video games. He also was involved in writing for Bat Thumb.

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Privacy and Security Aren’t Opposites and Google as Tool

January 24, 2008

You know I speak against the Google machine a lot, sure some of it is good theatre, but deep down our Google overlords and the church of google can get two powerful. Here’s and article from wired that knock it out of the park:

You can see it in comments by government officials: “Privacy no longer [...]

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Google The Double Standard of Being an Authority Website

January 20, 2008

If you’ve ever been to search engine conference and attended a site review session chances are you’ve heard panelists mention duplicate content penalties and filters. For “normal” people these problems are real, however with Google a double standard exists for trusted authority websites.

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Hey Match.com Trying to Hide Some Text Below the Fold

January 19, 2008

Look at this screenshot, looks an awful lot like match.com is trying to put a lot of text down below the fold …
If you don’t believe me try coming up with a reasonable explanation for putting the H1 tag “ONLINE DATING AT MATCH.COM” below the “Copyright 2008″ …

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Wanted Amazon Wordpress Plugin

January 15, 2008

I’ve been looking for one of these myself for a while but have never found one. A plugin that lets me put in my amazon aff id and then appends it “automagically” to all previous and new amazon links that get created.
All of the amazon plugins I’ve seen work with a search mechanism requiring you [...]

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The Semmys 2008 – Why I Want to Win

January 15, 2008

Since the writers have been on strike now for ever, and they’ve managed to all but eliminate anything interesting from TV (except of course American Gladiators and Gossip Girl) what can you do to keep yourself occupied on winter nights … check out the Semmy Awards!

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Elite Retreat Returns in April

January 15, 2008

So my buddies Jeremy and Aaron have got the elite retreat conference back off the ground and are holding one April 3rd and 4th in San Francisco. While I haven’t been to an elite retreat I have talked with a few people who have, and they’ve had nothing but good things to say about it, [...]

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Using Stats and Goal Tracking for Your Blog

January 11, 2008

I was reading Matt’s post today about stats and it reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write about. What are the goals you have for your blog, if it’s a commercial blog and not a personal one where is your ROI.
Is it making a sale (direct or affiliate)?
Is it clicking on ads?
Is it [...]

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Hey Network Solutions Sniffing Domain Searches By Chance …

January 8, 2008

People have been making accusations that domain companies have been sniffing customers searches for quite some time now. No one has any hard conclusive proof, but you have to admit it’s hard to make a case why network solutions might have registered this one, check out the whois
http://www.youguysseriouslyregistereverythingisearch.com/

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Want an Editorially Approved Link Become a Google Partner

January 8, 2008

in this mornings post I chastised Google for giving straight links to partners, However now I’ve found a whole bunch more
Here’s a Google adwords customer Happy Hounds getting an editorially approved link from Google, lets not forget twiddy.com or cordarounds.com not to worry while they may keep other robots out but they let googlebot in [...]

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Google Gives Free PR8 Links to Paid Partners, and Doesn’t Follow Their Own Guidelines

January 8, 2008

One of the more entertaining aspects of the entire paid links debate is Google is pretty quick to dole out the punishment, even though in many cases they haven’t taken the time to get their own house in order.

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Optimizing Wordpress Page Titles, Post Titles and Page Slugs

January 7, 2008

While wordpress is one of my favorite CMS platforms, out of the box it isn’t search engine optimized. Combine this with people who aren’t SEO aware, and publish a blog, and you almost always end up with an implementation that’s sub-optimal. Here are some tips to help you get things on track and moving in [...]

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Excessive Length URL’s and Social Media

January 5, 2008

Most CMS systems today are capable of generating clean URL’s. Unless you are dealing with newspapers or magazines where existing legacy systems it’s almost a non issue. However I came across two incredibly horrible URL’s in the same day
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/commercial_aviation/TowersAndTarmacs/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog%3a8427003a-9a63-4261-aa47-5e4b356bb224Post%3adc1b7f60-ab5d-4d6b-85cc-b81b43775a97
and
http://blog.stylehive.com/index.php/weblog/entry/everyones-got-posh-spices-bob-and-youre-next
while these URL’s are bad for search engines they are also bad for social media. Most social [...]

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Firefox Extensions

January 4, 2008

Here’s a list of Firefox extensions I have installed, if you know of anything cool I’m not using drop it in the comments below:

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Organizing and Prioritizing Your Feeds

January 3, 2008

A few weeks ago I saw a post on Sphinn about organizing your feeds with a three dimensional approach. I use something similar but with a trick I learned from GTD.

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