Follow the Leader
Posted by Teeg on December 10th, 2007 filed in UncategorizedComment now »
I love the DoFollow movement. Forget Page Rank, an idea whose time is rapidly fading anyway (yes, I do have a site with good page rank, and I still think that the end is near for it), there are way too many other ways of measuring a site now, and they don’t require you to hurt your readers in order to do it.
But, how can you tell if a blog or other site really is DoFollow like they claim? Or how can you tell if your own plug-in/page editing has resulted in successfully removing all the nofollow stuff from your blog?
I’ve discovered two ways. The first one is very simple, the second a bit harder, but the second one is my favorite.
I should say that both of these are for Firefox. It might be possible to edit the second one for IE, I’m not sure.
1) There is an exceptional Firefox tool called SEO for Firefox. I recommend this program for all the information it gives you about websites, and it also includes the ability to highlight (in whatever color you prefer) nofollow links. Very simple, add the program, restart Firefox, right click on a page, choose options, and put a checkmark beside “nofollow” links: Enable/Disable highlighting.
2) I need to find the link to the page where I first discovered this code. Unfortunately, the code also highlighted the nofollow links and I wanted something that would mark them, but in a way that didn’t draw my attention from other parts of the page. So what follows is my modified code and how to use it.
First, you need to be able to edit the userContent.css. I use MR Tech Local Install, but there are other add-ons that also allow you to edit this.
Second, at the end of the userContent page, add the following:
a[rel~=”nofollow”] {
border: thin dashed firebrick ! important;
}
Save, and restart Firefox. Now, every link that is set to nofollow on a page will have an unobtrusive thin red dashed box around it. It doesn’t stand out when you’re reading content, and is easy to spot whenever you want to see whether the links on the page are followed or not.
Using ScribeFire to Enhance Memory
Posted by Teeg on November 16th, 2007 filed in Blogs, Mike Mendel, TDCComment now »
I’ve had a problem for a while. I’d be working on an article and think up another while I was in the middle of writing the first one. I’d try to remember it, but of course by the time I finished the article, I couldn’t recall the new idea at all.
Today I was talking to a friend and the conversation sparked a couple blog ideas. So I opened up ScribeFire and typed the first one, intending to jot down some notes for the article (I prefer writing the actual articles on the blog because there’s not a way to set links to open on a new page using ScribeFire (or if there is, I haven’t found it yet)). Before I had one word written for the new article, I remembered another article I’d been wanting to write. So I saved the page, cleared the screen and added the second article’s title and notes.
I think this is going to work well. It will help my Mommy brain at least - mothers lose half their mental facilities as soon as a baby is born. Seriously! Oh, okay…we don’t really lose them, but it’s a major switch from being able to focus on one thing at a time to having to keep 1 thing (the baby) foremost in your thoughts while you’re still trying to do remember all the things you could before. So, a Mommy brain is a mind that is multitasked to the limit and can’t hold a thought more than a few minutes. 
Okay, back to ScribeFire. I first heard Mike Mendel mention that he used it when he was doing the transcripts of the Thirty Day Challenge. Curious, I downloaded it (it’s a free program) and I’ve been using it ever since. It sits on your taskbar (the bar at the bottom of your browser) and pops up a resizable screen that acts like you’ve enlarged the taskbar (so it doesn’t actually cover any of the webpage you’re looking at, it just gives you a smaller viewing area). Since it’s attached to the browser, you can go to any webpage and still have what you’re writing sitting right there in front of you. Great when you’re researching information! Plus, you can drag and drop pictures in.
Copyright, Copyleft, Copy Commons
Posted by Teeg on November 6th, 2007 filed in Business, CC, Clipart, Copyleft, Copyright free, Free, Graphic art, Public DomainComment now »
I love doing graphic art. It didn’t take me long at all, after I got my first digital camera, to realize that was where my passion was. So, while my husband was walking around with his camera trying to take the perfect picture of a duck taking off from the water or catching the beauty of a bed of tulips, I was setting up my tripod and catching pictures of waffles or frying pans or pointing it up at the sky and taking a shot so I’d have the perfect color of blue later.
Lately as I’ve been working on web designs, I’ve had an excuse to do more graphic art work…and one thing I noticed quickly was that it’s really nice to know where to look for copyright-free, copyleft, public domain, or certain creative commons material to use. To that end, I’m working on a list of places to find free artwork. Some of these will be traditional picture sites, but the pictures can be from any site, as long as they are free to use for any purpose.
Here is one I found this morning, while looking for a “thumb up” picture: http://www.wpclipart.com/index.html.
From the page: “WPClipart is a collection of high-quality public domain images specifically tailored for use in word processors,
and optimized for printing on home/small office inkjet printers. There are thousands of color graphic clips
as well as hundreds of illustrations and photographs. As of Sunday, 11/04/2007 there are 18,931 images.”
As a side note, if you are looking for architectural details or maps, add .gov to your search terms. All (or nearly all) government documents are in the public domain, and free for commercial or non-commercial use.
Do you know of a good, free site that you use for images? Share the link, and I’ll add it to the list.
Technorati Tags: Copyright, copyleft, public domain, graphics, free
Is Google Overstepping Their Bounds?
Posted by Teeg on October 30th, 2007 filed in Blogs, Business, Page Rank1 Comment »
As I’ve been striving to learn how to build a profitable website, I’ve been following the recent debacle with Google.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Google. I’ve been using their search forever, and it would take me a while to recover if something ever happened to g-mail. But even so, the purpose of a search engine is to give me as many possible web sites as they can find for the subject I’m looking up. If a search engine doesn’t do this, then what’s the purpose of using them, especially with so many other options out there.
Also, I’m not talking about Page Rank. Page rank is a purely Google invention, and although it’s become a nice indication of how a web site is doing, there are other things I can use, and I’m most definitely not going to stop visiting my favorite sites just because Google drops their ranks.
Many sites have articles trying to figure out Google’s plan behind the recent rank drops. I found Search Engine Watch’s article today to be especially interesting:
Links can get a value placed on them by a variety of other means. However, I would be very cautious about being complacent about this. Google has demonstrated in the past a willingness to send a warning shot across the bow before taking greater action. For example, many people have seen 30 day penalties (removal from the index) applied to their web site, only to bounce back.
When I discussed this with Matt Cutts , he made it clear that Google uses this approach to provide warnings to webmasters to repent their sins and repair the problems that Google detected. Perhaps this is more of the same. It may be that web sites who continue to leave their paid links up will then be subjected to a greater penalty, such as removal, or a rankings drop comparable to the PageRank drop. Only time will tell us how this will unfold.will tell us how this will unfold.
What do you think? Is Google making a mistake? If they start removing blogs from their listings because the blogs refuse to remove their “follow me” links or do any of the other things that Google may be trying to correct, will people start turning to other search engines instead? Does this move have the potential to affect Google at all?
The Fast and Easy Way to Make FavIcons
Posted by Teeg on October 26th, 2007 filed in BlogsComment now »
I LOVE favicons. Probably in large part because I use firefox and often have upwards of 100 tabs open in two or three windows, favicons are a must have in my opinion. Since many companies still don’t use favicons, creating one is a great way to get that extra bit of recognition.
What is a favicon? Well, if you’re using Firefox, they’re the little pictures that are on each tab (a site that doesn’t have it’s own favicon will have a picture of a blank sheet of paper with the corner bent). On IE, favicons show up on the address bar, and in the favorites menu.
A little while back I found a program that makes it extremely easy to make a favicon. You just select the picture on your computer that you want to turn into a favicon and this program does all the work. I’ve uploaded gifs, jpgs, and pngs so far and all have come out great!
Address Checker
Posted by Teeg on October 19th, 2007 filed in Blogs, E-mailComment now »
Found a neat little site today. It lets you put an address in and see if it’s real or not. Especially nice if you have a comment that seems to be on the edge between real and spam. I don’t think it’s very well known, I was the first one to thumb it up in StumbleUpon.
Checking Things Out
Posted by Teeg on October 17th, 2007 filed in Business, TDC, VideosComment now »
Going to the TDC site for the first time is an experience. There is a LOT of information there, and it can feel a bit overwhelming. I finally found the link to the summary of preseason content (sounds like something from football, doesn’t it…instead it’s all the stuff you should do ahead of time in order to finish the TDC in 30 days).
Still no hook and baits anywhere, so I started looking at the daily lessons. The first think I realized was that Ed and Dan love videos. The second thing I realized is that with a 4 yr old running around the house, videos without captions aren’t necessarily the optimal format for SAHMs (stay at home moms). Thankfully, Mike Mendel came to the rescue! On his blog, he wrote out a transcript of each TDC entry. It was very nice being able to catch all the things I’d missed on the video.
The Start
Posted by Teeg on October 16th, 2007 filed in Business, TDC1 Comment »
I want to have a business. A successful, prospering business, either online or off. I’ve had the business plan for the off-line part drawn up for about 12 years. For the on-line part, I’ve had it about 1.5 years.
Getting married and having two children can put dreams on the back burner sometimes. Amazingly, this has been my year to start working on dreams. In April, I started a novel. I still have a long ways to go on it, I seem to average about 2 chapters a month overall, but I hope to finish sometime next year. If I can have something come from it, I’ll be thrilled, but the best part is discovering I can do it. That I can sit down and write something more than a few lines of a poem or a couple page long short story. Writing a novel has been a goal for as long or longer than starting a business.
Something else happened this year. Earlier this summer, a friend sent me a note asking how you earn money with a blog. She’d had a blog with a decent amount of visitors for over a year without gaining any income from it, and wanted to know how to change that.
This blog is a direct result of trying to answer that question.
In the process of trying to learn how you do make money from blogs, I discovered some fascinating sites. One of my favorites is ProBloggers. It’s a great place to start if you’re trying to learn about blogging professionally (ie making money from your blog). Probably the most important thing I discovered was information about something called the Thirty Day Challenge (TDC for short) which was being run by Ed Dale and Dan Raines.
Now, I have a confession. When I first discovered the TDC in the middle of August, my first impression was that it looked like one of those sales sites that tries to hook you and then asks for money. But I had read that it was good, so I filled out the sign-up…and promptly forgot about it.
It was only a couple days later that I got the first real e-mail from Ed (I ignored the sign-up e-mail, leaving it unopened for over a week in my mailbox). It sounded interesting, and there still wasn’t a money request anywhere, so off I went to check out the site.
And in a round about way, that’s how I finally set off on my adventure to have a business.