General

Well most of you who run blogger blogs (blogspot) have heard about blogger.com moving out of beta and requiring all users who switch to start logging in with their google account or gmail account. I was quite skeptical of this at first and did not want to switch over because I didn’t see the point. Being part of a community blog however forced me to switch because one of the other participants switched and that required everyone that was apart of the community blog to switch. I was not happy.

After switching over (blogger.com makes you switch every blog you own) I noticed on one of my blogs that the nofollow attribute was added to every single link on my bog. Nofollow is the search engines way of trying to control spam by not allowing valuable pagerank to be passed on to spam sites, that is after all why spammers spam your blog,, to get some of your pagerank and to have their site quickly spidered by the search engine bots. Anyway, after viewing one of my blogspot blogs (after switching) revealed nofollow links on everything,, my post titles, my blogroll etc. I have a firefox plugin called “searchstatus” installed (which btw is a great tool for viewing pagerank and alexa rank as well as a host of other details about any site you are on) allowing me to see who is using nofollow links and to my surprise every link on my blog had the nofollow attribute on it. Btw, here is what nofollow links look like when using the searchstatus plugin.

If you install the searchstatus plugin for firefox you can easily see if your blog has these nofollow attributes applied by simply viewing your blog with the “highlight nofollow links” selected in the toolbar. Here is a screenshot of it:
Nofollow is bad if you want to pass some of your google pagerank onto other sites you own. So I immediately looked at the source code of my bog (right-click and view source) in firefox. I noticed in the meta tags there was a noindex/nofollow tag who was the culprit. So I went into blogger.com’s control panel and viewed the template for that blog. There is a tag called {metadata} or something similar in the head of the template. To fix the nofollow problem I copied the meta info from the source code of the blog and pasted that where the {metadata} tag was and removed the noindex/nofollow part. That fixed the problem and I was much happier.

Before I found this fix I wanted to move all my blogs off of blogger.com altogether. I had already installed the latest version of wordpress on another site of mine to get ready for the import.. which worked on the old blogger btw. Now, after looking into it wordpress is no longer capable of importing all your posts from a blogspot blog into your new wordpress blog. This looks like blogger.com’s new way of keeping people from moving away from blogspot. Hopefully wordpress can come up with a fix for this because I never recommend people start blogging with a blogspot domain (even though it’s free) simply because they will never own their blog, blogger.com will. If you build up a popular blog on blogspot you will always have to succumb to blogger.com’s user interface and their rules.

I’m sure there are more bad things about the new blogger.com coming out of beta and if you know of more please leave a comment about it. Or if you have something good to say share it.

Update: March 22nd.

I’ve been notified by Mark Wilson who kindly enough shared a new blogger import plugin you can use to import your blogger blog posts into wordpress. Read more of Mark’s post Bye-Bye Blogger Hello Wordpress. Thanks Mark!

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Wordpress 2.1 has just been released! You can download it here. It has a lot of new great features and includes… Amazingly enough “over 550 bug fixes!” Which is a lot of bug fixes. Some other features include:

• Autosave
• New tabbed editor
• Lossless XML import and export
• Spell checking
• New search engine privacy option
• Upload manager
• and more!

Think I will have to upgrade soon.

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This is off topic but probably the best thing I’ve found in a long time. I’ve been wanting to stream media off my computer to my xbox 360 since I got it last year but haven’t yet because I don’t have Windows Media Center. I’ve been just waiting I guess and haven’t put much work into finding an alternative method, till now.

I stumbled on this great article while searching Google for “play xvids on xbox 360″ and it totally opened my world to a whole new entertainment experience, one that I’ve totally embraced,, haha.. Can you tell I’m excited?

The great folks over at Tweaktown.com have put together a great article for playing divx and xvid files on your xbox 360 from your computer. It totally opened my eyes and introduced me to Tversity.

Tversity is the media streaming software you’ll be using to stream/play movies on your xbox 360. And man does it work great! I followed the article exactly as it said and I was up and streaming movies and mp3’s in a snap.

Of course there are system requirements that need to be met if you want everything to work smoothly and they are pretty basic. Basically the faster your machine the better. I’m running a p4 3ghz dell with 1gb of ram and it works really well. Here are the requirements you need to meet quoted from Tversity’s site:

# The minimum requirements will allow real-time transcoding of media files with bitrates up to 300-400 kbps. Higher bitrates will require faster machines.
# Media files that do not require transcoding, i.e. can be played by the media hub as is, will work well on systems meeting the minimum requirements, disregarding their bitrate, and in fact can even work on slower machines.
# Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz with support for Hyper Threading and with 512 MB of memory is recommended for real-time transcoding of standard definition video (e.g. WMV 720×480 1.5Mbps).
# Dual core or dual CPU systems with 1 Gbyte of memory are required for real-time transcoding of high definition video.
# Non real-time transcoding of any bitrate video can be done on any machine, with the speed of the machine determining the time it takes to complete the transcoding.

To be able to play/stream all your different media types you will need the codecs for each one.

Transcoding of some file formats require the installation of third party directshow filters that are compatible with TVersity. TVersity recommends:

* ffdshow - for MPEG2/4, H.264, Divx, Xvid, AAC, FLAC, Vorbis, FLV, and many more
* Haali Media Splitter - for better MP4 and H.264 support and for OGG/OGM and Matroska.
* Real Alternative - for Real audio and video.
* Quicktime Alternative - for MOV.
* MP4 Source/Splitter* - for better MOV support.
* FLV Splitter* - required for FLV playback.
* AC3 Filter - recommended for better AC3 support (in which case AC3 should be disbaled in ffdshow).

After you’ve installed Tversity and installed all the required codecs, hooked up your xbox to your router you’ll be ready to start watching and listening to all the media on your computer without having to fork over more money to Microsoft for Media Center.

You can share whole folders in Tversity or just single files and you can even stream media to your xbox that is online… Image Feeds, Video Feeds or Audio Feeds etc. So you can listen to your favorite podcasts while lounging on the couch, browse your Flickr photos and watch Youtube videos all while relaxing. You simply have to tell Tversity where to grab the feeds and your set.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate Tversity for producing this software. As the article from Tweaktown says, once you set everything up it only takes about 10 - 15 seconds for a movie to start playing on your tv, and it plays back flawlessly. I first thought you couldn’t fast forward your movie because it didn’t work for me the first time, but when I tried it a second time it actually worked. I can fastforward now fine which is something I thought you couldn’t do with streaming media. Again it all depends on the machine you are running.

To sum it up go get Tversity if you want to play and stream DivX, Xvid, WMV, AVI, MOV, RSS Feeds, Podcasts, MP3 Files on your xbox 360. It’s freakin sweet to say the least.

Oh and Tversity is totally FREE!

Update: has Xbox360 stopped seeing your videos?

Microsoft has released today a new firmware update for the Xbox 360 and this broke compatibility with TVersity. Tversity as cool as they are quickly fixed this and made some cool improvements to the interface.

Go download the Tversity patch.

Instead of having to view all your files in one long flat list (quite annoying if you have hundreds of videos to scroll through) they now allow you to create folders and tag your videos for easier browsing.

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I found this great script for creating short urls or hiding affiliate links without the need to edit your .htaccess file. I normally use the .htaccess file to redirect long affiliate urls to smaller more memorable ones but I ran into problems on another site when the site used wordpress. Normal redirects in htaccess look like this:

Redirect /shorturl/ http://superlong-affiliate-link.com?=go.php+affiliateID-etc-etc-etc

or

Redirect /url/ url to redirect to

I couldn’t get this to work when using wordpress on the root of another site and I searched all over google to find a fix but I couldn’t find anything till I found this cool script that gives you a way to do this without having to edit your htaccess file. So if you are using wordpress or you don’t like or know how to edit your htaccess file (some hosting companies don’t give access to the htaccess) you can use Get Shorty. You will need one free mysql database and installation is a snap. Just upload the entire folder to a new folder on your site. Log in and start creating your short urls. I would suggest using it if you promote affiliate programs as it hides your affiliate ID and also makes your affiliate links not look like affiliate links. So instead of a long amazon.com affiliate url you can have something like www.yourdomain.com/go/amazon/

Get Shorty gives you a complete admin section to log into to create your urls and works very nicely. You can create as many urls as you want and even counts the number of times a link was clicked, something that you don’t get when using your htaccess file. If you ever use tinyurl then I would suggest switching to using links on your own domain as you will now be seemingly deep linking into your own site instead of linking to tinyurl’s domain. Also if tinyurl ever goes down, so does your link. Anyway, check it out if it sounds like something you might be interested in. I think it’s a great script. Oh and it’s free.

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JavaScript links on all of ValueClick’s properties creates the technological framework to power a massive, behavioral targeting network

I posted about CJ’s LMI awhile back and finally read this. They finally make it clear what their motive is behind making everyone change their links to javascript. I probably won’t stick with using CJ because there is just too many things wrong with using javascript for affiliate links. You can read some good points about why using javascript is a bad idea. Anyway, I’m hoping Google’s upcoming CPA program offers something better to encourage people to switch. Below is quoted from the original article.

“JavaScript links are the linchpin to making a move like this by ValueClick work. JavaScript text links can set a cookie when the script is called from the server to display the link while with HTML the user must click though the link to the advertiser’s site for a cookie to be set. This is a key difference. In other words, with JavaScript every user on a site with a CJ affiliate link can be cookied and NO click is needed. (And yes, I know that a 1×1 pixel can set a cookie, but a 1×1 pixel takes time to load on a bad server or overwhelmed server. Also, affiliates remove 1×1 pixels all the time because they feel, and rightfully so, that their traffic data is their business alone. Finally, an HTML image ad can set a cookie, but moving forward advertisers want the flexibility of video and other fancy ads.)

Now think about the reach of CJ’s affiliate network combined with the ValueClick Media network (13,500 publisher/partner sites reaching reaching over 68 percent of U.S. Internet users each month, according to comScore Media Metrix), WebClients, and ValueClick’s smaller brands. Together these ValueClick properties create an intergraded ad network with a giant reach drilling deep into the Internet’s tail due to CJ’s network. Moreover, off the top of my head, the only other Internet powerhouses with this much reach on the head and the tail are search engines combined with their contextual networks such as Google and its AdSense network - not even the Advertising.com’s many headed hydra reaches down into the tail like CJ.

With the cookie being set on impressions alone throughout all of ValueClick’s properties, the company can build a giant database to target users’ behavior that is worth billions of dollars to advertisers. That database is worth all the pain and upheaval this issue has caused in the affiliate marketing community and I would suspect, it’s even worth loosing some affiliates over which might happen.”

Read the entire story

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If you’ve ever wanted to make your blog a little more personal you can use a cool itunes plugin from Brandon Fuller which will display what you are currently listening to in itunes.  It costs $10 to register it and it is pretty easy to install and use.  I’ve had the plugin for awhile but since I change wordpress themes so much I never got around to including it on newer themes.  Anyway I’ve installed it again and am using it here so you can now see what I am currently listening to.  I think it’s pretty cool.  I am a huge music fan and listen to music a lot when I’m working.  If you are not a itunes fan (why not?) then he has made the plugin for windows player and he also has a version for mac users.  If you are interested check out his site at http://brandon.fuller.name/archives/hacks/nowplaying/index.html

If you need any basic help when installing it leave a comment and I will try and help you.  The one problem I had was getting the path to the files correct.  If you don’t know the correct path to the root of your site it is usually /home/username/public_html/

You need to include this path to your root when editing the now_playing.php file.

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Watch this video! Enforce Net Neutrality! - Sign this petition and let your local congressman know that you believe in net neutrality. Also try this petition.

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Google Analytics is finally available to everyone, with no waiting for approval. In essence, the program tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors came upon your site and their behavior once they’re there. With the free data provided by Google Analytics, you can direct your resources to marketing initiatives and strategies where they count the most. Without a doubt, Google Analytics is highly recommended.

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I stumbled upon this cool little flash photo gallery script that allows you to run a cool flash slideshow on your site. It is super easy to install and use. It’s basically a few files you have to upload and change the permissions to. Then upload your images and it will create the thumbnails for you. You do need GD library installed on your server for the image resizing feature so make sure you have that installed first. I installed it on my Photos of Norway site in just a few minutes. There is also a cool flickr script which you can also use to create a cool flash gallery from your flickr photos.

The simpleviewer script is great for showing off your photos and is perfect if you are a photographer and need to easily display your photos on your website. Because it is flash though it’s not the best for search engine optimization purposes. I would suggest putting your photo gallery either in a subdirectory or if you do add it to your homepage that you do it in a way that leaves some space for static content.

I added a table to the top of my photos of norway site that includes static links to other sections of the site that the search engines can see and I could of added more text content to the lower section of the page if I wanted but left it out since I am not running an seo campaign for my photos of norway site. But if you are concerned with using flash for your photography site then there are ways to do it where you can still create an seo optimized page mixing flash with static content.

If you are looking for a more advanced flash photo gallery script be sure to check out my photo slideshow page where I display a very nice looking flash gallery that can be embedded into any site.

If you want more information or need help installing this or any script on your website please contact me. I’m a professional web designer that can help you with your business website.

If you’d like to take a look at a cool non flash website for your photography website then check out that link. You don’t need flash for a spiffy looking site.

If you need any help designing or optimizing your website please contact me.

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