Thursday, March 13, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The Answer to Adrian's Question
4 Stories about the resignation of Admiral William J. Fallon, the military commander of US Middle East operations.
Time Magazine
New York Times
Al Jazeera's version
The Intelligence Daily's analysis
Time Magazine
New York Times
Al Jazeera's version
The Intelligence Daily's analysis
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
History Lesson Of The Day
A brief history of world conflicts from WWII to Gulf War II enacted with the native cuisine of the countries involved. I think I just learned more watching a bunch of animated cheeseburgers than I did in an entire semester of high school history class.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Jennsweb's Excellent SEO Glossary
For anyone who's ever wondered what phrases like "pinging Technorati's rss feed for Diggs" mean.
Delicious: Del.icio.us is at heart, an online service that lets you bookmark pages on the web under a user name. Whenever you save a page's URL, Del.icio.us's user interface asks you to tag the page with keywords. These keyword tags are used to index the page in a searchable database. Entering a keyword such as "design" in a search will reveal all pages tagged with that keyword. The fun comes when you start checking out who else has saved the same page as you have and you are able to browse their collection of links.
Digg: Responsible use of Digg's services is like being your own publicist. Whenever you publish new content on your web site, you should submit the URL of the new information to Digg. There's a few steps to go through, but once your submittal has been checked for its spam factor and approved, the URL you have posted goes into rotation on Digg's site in the category you have chosen it to appear under. Also, if you run a blog and the posts are Digg-enabled, the posts appear in order of most Diggs when someone searches your posts.Permalinks: If you run a site with Wordpress, you have the option of using Permalinks to make your posts' and pages' titles more visible to search engines. Log into your Wordpress site's dashboard and under Options, choose Permalinks. If they have not been enabled, you will simply need to choose the format option and click Update Permalink Structure. Choosing the Date and Name based option will give transform the url of a Post or Page from http://jennmearswebdesign.com/p=23 into http://jennmearswebdesign.com/2008/03/jennswebs-excellent-SEO-glossary which is much more attractive title to a search engine that happens to be looking for SEO+glossary.
Pingbacks: Pingbacks are a way of knowing when someone has linked to a post on your blog. Imagine that everyone's blog is a little submarine traveling through the vast ocean of the web. The clever submarine operator would want to know when another vessel is in the neighborhood so they make sure that they have enabled their sub with Pingbacks. They can tell when another sub has "pinged" them vice versa.
RSS:Basically, RSS was developed to let websites syndicate their content using XML. If you picture the world wide web as an actual spider web, then imagine that your site is an insect stuck in the web. If it struggles/publishes new rss-enabled content a lot, then search engine "spiders" will notice it much more than an insect just sitting there. Creating an RSS feed for your site makes it a lot more attractive to search engines and they will index you more frequently. Also, if a visitor uses RSS feeds to keep up with sites, they will be much more likely to keep coming back if you make it easier to find out when you have new content.
Search Engine Spider: These are automated scripts developed by search engine companies like Google, Lycos and Yahoo that "crawl" over the web checking for new content. Much like an actual spider, these programs don't exactly have 20/20 vision. They react to things like page titles containing searched-for keywords and frequently updated content, "movement" on the web, if you will.
Technorati: The top ranked content syndication site out there. It's like "Reader's Digest" without the bad cartoons. If you resister your site with them, they will index your content via your post's tags. The indexed tags become part of their database so that when a Technorati user searches for a term like "SEO" your post tagged with "SEO" will show up in the results along with other blogs' posts tagged SEO.
Trackback: A trackback is notification that another blog has linked back to yours. Kind of like a "shout out", it works when both sites have enabled trackbacks. This way, when you publish a post and have enabled the trackback function, blogs that have sent you a trackback "ping" will be displayed in the comments section. And as Oscar Wilde said, "The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about."
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Free Stock Photo site of the day
The Stockexpert site is one of that rarest of breeds, a free photo website that is actually free! Well, some of their best photos are only available via their credit system, but it is clearly explained and they tell you right on the 1st pop-up window how much each photo is at each resolution. Having spent the good part of a rainy Saturday afternoon slogging through about 6 stock photo websites, this site was tops for selection, pricing (majority of pay-for-use images $1) and ease of use.
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