Dave Tips

How to Make Any Page Your Homepage

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:33:00 +0000

How to make example.com your starting page (these instructions were written about 5 years ago and may be too old for some systems).

Netscape 4.0-6.0

Select "Preferences" from the "Edit" menu.
Click on "Navigator."
In the "Navigator Starts with" section, select "Home page."
In the "Home page" section, type "http://www.example.com/" in the text box.
Click "OK."

Internet Explorer

Select "Internet Options" from the "Tools" menu.
Click on the "General" tab.
In the "Home page" section, type "http://www.example.com/" in the text box.
Click "OK."

America Online

Make sure you are on the page, http://www.example.com/.
Click the link below with your right mouse button and select "Copy URL to Clipboard." (If the "copy" option didn't appear, highlight the following address: "http://www.example.com/" then go to the "Members" drop down menu and select "Preferences")
Click on the "WWW" icon.
Click on the "Home Page" box at the bottom of the pop-up window and then depress your "Control" and "V" keys (at the same time) and paste in the address. If the address does not appear in the box, simply type in what you tried to paste from above.
Click the "OK" button.

Internet Config (some Mac OS configurations)

Open the "Internet" control panel (in the "Control Panels" folder in your "System Folder").
Select the set for which you want to change the home page.
Click on the "Web" tab.
Within the " Default Pages" box, in the "Home page" section, type "http://www.example.com/" in the text box.
Save your changes ("Save Settings" in the "File" menu, or type "command-S"), then close the "Internet" control panel.

Valid HTML Code is Better Than Invalid Code

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:02:00 +0000

Valid HTML code will look better more places, function as designed more often and be well liked by things like search engines. The W3C Markup Validation Service is a good one since they are the organization that maintains the specifications.

Badge for Your Site Your Visitors Can Use on Their Sites

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 03:32:00 +0000

How to make a "badge" available to others who like it and want to display it on their sites/blogs.

upload the badge so it can be accessed by everyone on the internet
create code that people can use to use the badge on their sites, like this: <a href="http://www.example.com/"><img src="http://www.example.com/badge.gif" alt="a badge"/></a> where example.com is your site, and the "a badge" is a short text alternative text describing the badge for those who do not load or see the image
tell the people who want to use the badge about the code

Conditional Comments in Internet Explorer

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:17:00 +0000

Conditional comments allow you to have one block of code for some versions of IE and a different block of code for everything else. I've found that IE 5.2 for mac, for instance, does not support conditional comments, but IE 5 through IE 7 on windows seem to support conditional comments.

This code loaded in a browser will tell you whether or not it supports conditional comments:

<!--[if IE]><p>You are using an Internet Explorer that supports conditional comments.</p><![endif]-->
<![if !IE]><p>You are not using an Internet Explorer that supports conditional comments.</p><![endif]>

I recommend using it on live sites sparingly.

Redirecting Web Pages Using PHP

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 22:32:00 +0000

You can redirect the root level of your site http://www.example.com/ to a lower level webpage like http://www.example.com/directory1/directory2/filename.html ) in many ways.

One way to make such a redirection, if you have a Linux hosting plan with GoDaddy, is to make a text file named "index.php" and have the file contain:

<?php 
//Redirect browser 
header("Location: http://www.example.com/directory1/directory2/filename.html"); 
?>

Place it in the root of the "web/" directory in your hosting space and, barring a lot of complex configuration changes that may have been made previously, it should gentle redirect web visitors from http://www.example.com/ to http://www.example.com/directory1/directory2/filename.html .

Get Twitter Direct Messages as txts

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:27:00 +0000

You can have twitter send DMs to your cell phone as text messages (SMS). Go to http://twitter.com/devices and set-up your phone. Remember to set up the times you do not want texts (or else it may wake you, interrupt work, etc.).

You can also have people's tweets come to your phone as texts (their public tweets, in addition to DMs). After your phone is set up, go to their twitter page (http://twitter.com/[their twitter name]) when logged in, and below their name on the left, change the "Device updates" next to where it says "following".

Canonical Link Element

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:33:00 +0000

There is a Google Webmaster Central blog post about the presentation about canonical link elements made at SMX West and talked through in a video:

PageRank is Dead, Long Live Page Rank

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:49:00 +0000

Go to Google and enter "find Chuck Norris" then press I'm feeling lucky. It's a Google Bomb.

The number one result for "find Chuck Norris" beats out about 8,750,000 other pages, but only has about 136 sites linking to it. What's notable is that these sites that link to the number one result do not have particularly high PageRank. One linking site has PageRank 5, and there are a bunch of PageRank 1, 2 and 3s; most seem to have no PageRank at all.

This does suggest that many links from high PageRank sites are not needed to be a number one result on a fairly competitive keyword. Google returns results we [Google] believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page (from Google's support page about how they crawl, index, and serve the web).

PageRank is not the be all end all of high search rankings it may have once been. It is still one factor Google uses, even if only 0.5% of the factors used. However, Google has also publicly said that the PageRank publicly displayed by Google's systems is not current (usually 3 months old) and is not the private one their systems use to decide rankings.

Is PageRank dead? Or useless? No. PageRank is convenient. When discussing Google rankings with people who aren't focused on or don't have knowledge of search marketing, PageRank is a deceptively concise number that is often used to express success and value regardless of whether either actually exist. It suggests a page is good if the PageRank is high, and bad if it is low. But PageRank does not tell you how successful a site will be at ranking highly.

More important than ranking, PageRank has no relationship with whether a site will be successful; A page's purpose (selling things, engaging visitors, entertaining with Chuck Norris references, etc.) can be fulfilled with no PageRank at all. Also, a page with high PageRank can fail utterly to accomplish anything constructive for anyone (at least short term).

Success online, as in life, is about success itself, as one defines it (e.g., sales, sign-ups, informed visitors, improving the world, happiness). If your page is hugely successful and has high PageRank, wonderful; if it's hugely successful with low or no PageRank, that's wonderful too. PageRank is only one metric among many, and it's tempting to put more value on PageRank than actually exists.

Many times PageRank has been discussed with clients, or other "stake holders," with regards to a site or page's value, and while this easily graspable shorthand may make us feel good, it also can keep us from addressing real value. At the same time, given the secrecy of Google and other search engines' algorithms, many feel utterly in the dark about search rankings that can vastly effect success, income and job security. PageRank is the promise of seeing inside the black box of how search rankings are decided, a promise often broken.

In the absence of clear objectives and metrics, PageRank can be an appealing substitute, but in reality PageRank is only one of many, many elements that need considering. When PageRank is used as the only gauge of a page's value, success or health it leads to bad conclusions, just as using a child's height as the only gauge of the child's heath, success or value would lead to bad conclusions.

Traffic Estimates for Other's Sites

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:05:00 +0000

Guessing how much traffic someone else's web site gets is inexact at best. Using more than one free tool can give rough numbers, though they'll vary widely and not always be accurate. Here are a few I've tried:

Compete: Makes pretty graphs, and uses relatively standard numbers (e.g., unique vistors, page views per visit, etc.). I haven't tried their premium services but imagine they're simlar to their free offerings, only more in depth and specific.
Quantcast: Their profiles break down some good demographic information as well as basic numbers like visits. They seem to give some insight in to who visits, not just how many.
Alexa: The grand daddy of such sites, Alexa's rankings have been what has pushed some sites into the popular consciousness. They also include useful information like how fast a site is compared to the net at large.
trafficestimate.com: Their numbers seem slightly inflated, but the month by month bar graphs are some of the simplest I've ever seen.
comScore - not free: Offers nothing free for an individual site, but seem widely well regarded. Is almost for the web what the Nielsen ratings are for TV (though Nielsen will hate me saying that since I think they offer web ratings too).

Where to Host Your Videos

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:59:00 +0000

Put your videos on YouTube. Their systems will take care of the delivery, your visitors may already be familiar with the player and know how to share the videos on YouTube with their friends. It costs you nothing, and may lead to you coming up in the world's second largest search engine.

Blogger Feeds as Sitemaps with FeedBurner (and Google Webmaster Tools)

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:21:00 +0000

...if you have a site whose original feed redirects traffic to FeedBurner (for example, if you use Blogger redirection, or you use our FeedSmith plugin for WordPress), you will need to give Webmaster Tools the address of a feed that does not get redirected as a sitemap source.

For Blogger users, the following general feed URL format should always work:

http://mybloggerblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?redirect=false

For WordPress FeedSmith plugin users, use this URL format:

http://www.mywpblog.com/?feed=rss2

For other platforms, other feed URL variations that are not redirected are what you need to provide.

(from FeedBurner Forums).

Twitter With Full URLs

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:46:00 +0000

When twittering, or otherwise posting a URL online, putting the http://www prefix on the web address will automatically be recognized as a URL and be made a link by various systems (e.g., Google's spiders, twitter's web interface, tweetie, etc.).

Facebook, for instance, automatically recognizes a full URL and makes it a link almost everywhere, and includes the page description and image in messages and wall posts. You can customize the default image, title and description that Facebook sharing uses too.

8 Reasons Your Web Site is Underperforming (That You Don't Already Know)

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:07:00 +0000

A web site's ranking and user experience are affected by many things you may not know because they're beyond the HTML on the web pages themselves. They can help or hurt your search engine ranking and your user's experience.

Domain name not registered for maximum length; Google and others take domains registered for many years more seriously

Server response time is slow and/or uptime is low

Server and/or name servers are in a "bad neighborhood"

Server hosts other sites too
- looks like you are not as serious and are not stable enough to weather a spike in traffic (e.g., the Slashdot effect)
- at risk of server going down, and taking your site with it, if another site on the server has an error or spike in traffic (slash-dotted/dugg)
no robots.txt file

no valid xml sitemaps

Dynamic looking URLs; they have a "?" in them

Character encoding mismatches
- encoding declared in the HTTP headers doesn't match the encoding declared in the page's meta tag
- Encoding on the actual page doesn't match either the encoding declared in the header and/or in the meta tag

There are also lots of things that affect your success that are on the web page; subscribe to learn more about those too.

Top 6 Online Writing Tips

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:32:00 +0000

Online writing is different than print writing. Make writing for the internet concise, clear and actionable. Readers prefer short articles that help them get something done; readers don't read the whole text online (only 20-28% of an online writing is actually read).

There are six key ways to write for the internet:

Online Writing - Scan-Ability Is Readability Online

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:25:00 +0000

Users scan more than read online, and they scan in an F-shaped pattern. This is a heat map of where readers' eyes look while reading online (red areas are most viewed areas, yellow next most, blue least most viewed; click image to enlarge):

(from Jakob Nielsen's excellent article on Banner Blindness).

Readers scan the first sentences of paragraphs to decide whether to read the rest of the paragraph or not. The first sentence should describe the paragraph, giving readers clues as to whether the rest of the paragraph will interest them. The first two words of each paragraph should be the most information-carrying words.

Even deeply interested and engaged visitors often do not read all of an article's text as the first 30 seconds of this video show:

This is part 1 of Top 6 Online Writing Tips
Read parts 1 2 3 4 5 6

Online Writing - Passive Voice May Help SEO And Readability

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:23:00 +0000

Readers often read only the first 2 words of a paragraph (Jakob Nielsen's October 22, 2007 Alertbox) so the first two words should carry the meaning of, or abbreviate, the entire paragraph without compromising the writing. The first two words of a paragraph or description must be specific, clear and meaningful to a reader or searcher.

Using the best voice in first sentences and descriptions impacts two things:

how often people click on a given search engine result
how much of a paragraph the reader reads

Descriptions may be placed in the description meta tag and sometimes accompany non-text items (like video or audio content). They are often used by Google and other search engines as the snippets beneath page titles on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Descriptions benefit from either active voice or passive voice depending on specifics. These are examples of less than ideal use of voice:

The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to stimulate economic growth.
Paparazzi attacked by Stary McFamous.

Those don't help users, or search engines, understand the entire sentence; the first two words are not particularly information-carrying words. The first sentence is aimed a people interested in interest rates, not those interested in the broader topic of the Federal Reserve. The second likely interests those who want to know about Stary McFamous more than paparazzi in general.

They are better rewritten like this:

Interest rates lowered by the Federal Reserve could stimulate economic growth.
Stary McFamous attacked paparazzi.

This is part 2 of Top 6 Online Writing Tips
Read parts 1 2 3 4 5 6

Online Writing - Titles, Subjects And Headings Need Inverted Pyramid Extreme

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:20:00 +0000

Titles, headlines and subheadings all need the most meaningful and significant information first, toward the beginning. Many forms of content are often viewed out of context and in contexts outside the publisher's control:

titles
subject lines
headlines

Microcontent must have an even more exaggerated inverted pyramid style than the larger content they designate; the first word or two should be the most important and meaning imbued words in titles, headlines and subjects.

There has also been some interesting discussion about the use of numbers in headlines.

This is part 3 of Top 6 Online Writing Tips
Read parts 1 2 3 4 5 6

Online Writing - Vocabulary and Keywords Should Be Old Words Placed Carefully

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:18:00 +0000

Users search for terms they already know more than new, made up words or jargon; If your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won't find your site (Jakob Nielsen August 28, 2006 Alertbox). The keywords you are targeting on a given page should be words often searched by the people you want to have find that page, as Google advises in their guidelines. They should also be pleased to find the page after searching for those words; they should find what they wanted to find.

Targeted Keywords should organically end up in the text since they will be relevant to the text. While some recommend exact percentages of words on a page should be targeted keywords, this can result in very awkward, or transparently keyword-stuffed copy (like this, this, this and this).

The best thing to do, is put the primary keyword somewhere in the first paragraph or first sentence, which should be easy since the keyword is related to the text. If putting the primary keyword in the very start of the text would be repeating a word in the title too soon, and would not be good writing, a secondary keyword can be used near the start of the text. It can also help to put a primary or secondary keyword in the last paragraph or sentence.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

-Winston Churchill

This is part 4 of Top 6 Online Writing Tips
Read parts 1 2 3 4 5 6

Online Writing - Acronyms And Abbreviations Need Mark-Up

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:12:00 +0000

SEO and accessibility benefit when the meaning of acronyms and abbreviations are clearly spelled out. Instead of leaving search engines to guess which meaning of an acronym you intend, tell them. Using HTML to identify acronyms and abbreviations makes pages more accessible to non-visual browsers as well.

Google indexes acronyms more effectively when they are marked-up properly; Some say they use the acronym tag ...frequently and I have a page that responds to a keyword that only appears in the title attribute.

Even more vital is identifying acronyms and abbreviations when they have many different meanings. For instance "NASA" is both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Auto Sport Association, or "LA" in the following:

I have a friend from New Orleans, LA who now lives in LA.

Which is marked-up with this syntax:

I have a friend from New Orleans, <abbr title="Louisiana">LA</abbr> who now lives in <acronym title="Los Angeles">LA</acronym>.

In all cases making the meaning of acronyms and abbreviations clear makes for clear online writing.

This is part 5 of Top 6 Online Writing Tips
Read parts 1 2 3 4 5 6

Online Writing - Numerals Are Better In Online Writing

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:11:00 +0000

For numbers, use digits, not words, online. Users can more easily read and understand these:

24 Reasons Why Marshmallows Are Awesome
There are 50 states in the United States.
On August 1, 2008 at 6:18:22 PM GMT the US national debt was about $9,535,720,238,424.97.

Than these:

Twenty-Four Reasons Why Marshmallows Are Awesome
There are fifty states in the United States.
On August first two-thousand eight at six eighteen and twenty-two seconds in the evening, GMT the US national debt was about nine trillion, five hundred thirty five billion, seven hundred twenty million, two hundred thirty eight thousand, four hundred twenty-four dollars and ninety seven cents.

Numerals are more scannable than words.

This is part 6 of Top 6 Online Writing Tips
Read parts 1 2 3 4 5 6

Use a Proxy to Change Internet Location

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:27:00 +0000

Web sites can use your ip address to determine your internet location and your location in the real world. They use geolocation to treat visitors from different places differently. For example, Google typically redirects users to the local version of their site, and modifies search results to try to provide more geographically relevant search results (see this in action).

Use a proxy to see what different visitors in different places see. For instance, if you visit spyber.com you will see where spyber.com's machines believe you are located. Also, hostip.info does this (as other sites do too). You can change your internet location, without physically moving or connecting to the internet differently. This is useful to test what a website will look like to visitors outside of your own country. To change your internet location, do this:

go to a proxy web site, like proxify.co.uk
put the URL you want to view through a proxy, like "http://www.spyber.com/", into the text box
hit the button to access the URL though the proxy, in proxify's case, the "Proxify" button

You'll see that spyber.com, or any other site you visit through proxify.co.uk, sees you as coming from the UK, even if you are not in fact in the UK.

Sites are sometimes blocked by proxies, and proxies are sometimes blocked by sites, so you may need to use another proxy site.

Atom verses RSS Feeds

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:33:00 +0000

The Case for Atom

Embracing Atom now gives you broad compatibility with any standards based system, and in the future should keep your feeds adaptable and compatible with future technologies and tools.

Feeds in the Atom Syndication Format (atom 1.0) will have the widest possible uses, compatibility and longevity of any current syndication feed format. Atom is already a widely supported syndication format, and in the future a full-fledged protocol, that is already in development, ...for using XML (Extensible Markup Language) and HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) to edit content... an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources belonging to periodically updated websites (from
The Atom Publishing Protocol Memo).

Video Intro to the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub):

RFC5023 details the Atom Publishing Protocol.

Atom, not RSS

[Atom has] been through a standardization process organized by an international standards body and there is an RFC that describes exactly what an Atom feed is and how you should parse it.

RSS is only "standard" in the sense that there are lots of people using various flavors of XML that claim to be RSS. There isn't even agreement as to who "owns" RSS 2.0 - Dave says he does, and the RSS Working Group says they do. Now there are 2 versions of the same "standard" floating around

(from Jason Lefkowitz's comment on technologyevangelist.com).

Online Picture Editing

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:25:00 +0000

If you're away from your computer, using an online picture editor to resize, crop or otherwise do light image editing can save you having to find, install and use a graphics program on an unfamiliar computer. This can be especially useful if you are using another online tool that makes image files. For example, if you make a flowchart online, you can save it, and then use an online picture editor to make additional changes (like make a title, notes, etc.).

If you're using a public computer, like in a library, computer lab or internet cafe, email your files to yourself when you're done. Then delete the local copies of your images off of the public machine. It makes no difference what kind of computer you are use to connect to the internet, since many of these tools work the same in most browsers and on most computers (though it might need to be a relatively modern computer and browser to use some online tools).

Here is a list of image editors that show promise:

Support iPhone with YouTube Videos

noreply@blogger.com (David August) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:29:00 +0000

You should be supporting iPhones with the YouTube videos on your web site. Link to the YouTube video page as a standard link, don't only embed it. iPhones have a YouTube application that will be launched by a link on a web page to the YouTube video page, but iPhones don't yet support flash, so they can't display the embedded videos right on the page in Safari, yet.

Including the link with also help search engine crawlers find the videos and better understand what is on your web site. Here's an example of how to support the iPhone when embedding YouTube Videos.