The quickest way to get around this problem seems counterintuitive but it is to install Gmail Notifier, set the option to use GMail for email links, restart your browser, and finally set the option not to use GMail for email links.

Incidentally, GMail Notifier is itself quite useful, it lets you check whether you have new GMail messages without opening your browser.

SQT: Mailto URL Fix

There are sites out there like ezinearticles.com that offer downloadable off-the-shelf articles for your site, but don’t be tempted. Some of them (not necessarily ezinearticles of course) can contain very poor quality, badly written articles so obviously stuffed with keywords for the sake of some misguided SEO (search engine optimization) effort, that any self-respecting blogger or webmaster will steer well clear. Moreover, if other sites are publishing the same content then your site simply becomes and echo chamber and can also be filtered out of the search engine results pages (SERPs) regardless of your so-called pagerank.

However, if you are ever stuck for ideas on what to write about, sites like ezinearticles.com coupled with a few thoughts from my recent Giving Good Headline post could provide you with renewed inspiration. Those free article repository sites categorize everything, and they have an awful lot of material to categorize.

Check out the categories for your niche. Health and fitness, say. They will have dozens of categories covering everything from acne, aerobics, and allergies to weight loss, womens issues, and yoga. Evergreen topics that will also attract readers to a health and fitness site. Moreover, these categories will have proven themselves popular again and again, if they hadn’t they wouldn’t be listing them, they’d create others.

Take a look in the categories you are hoping to promote, you’ll find dozens of articles. Now, without breaking any copyright laws, what is to stop you grabbing one of the titles, tweaking it slightly and writing your own original content? You could use Wikipedia and other subject-authorities to get your facts straight. You could check out Google News and the blogosphere in your niche and summarize the latest news (try Google Alerts and RSS to keep up to date on particular niches). Add your own spin and opinion and link back to useful sources.

You might even search for Creative Commons photos and images with which to illustrate your post or enable Zemanta, the Firefox addon I’ve mentioned briefly before, to automate the addition of free pictures and related links.

I almost posted the original much shorter version of this article as a comment on a Blogstorm post about ezinearticles, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense to publish it as a full-blown article in its own right. Hopefully, Blogstorm will spot the backlink and hopefully Sciencetext will get more out of it than if I’d simply posted a terse comment elsewhere. So, another quick tip for expanding your blog: Don’t comment on other people’s blogs, respond with your own post on your own blog and trackback/linkback to their post.

Creating Free Content

The company says it has evolved the technology used by the Google News service so that it can show categories down the left-hand side of the site and organize blog posts in those categories into clusters. Clusters, as you might guess are simply groupings of blog posts about the same story or event. By grouping posts in this way, Google claims that readers will be able to see the best posts on a story as well as get a variety of perspectives on any given subject.

If you dig deeper into each cluster, you get a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, but usefully there is also a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere and shows its blogospheric heritage so you can see which blogger blogged on their blog first.

Of course, Google Blog Search is not the only blog search tool, you could also try your search on Technorati, Bloglines, Icerocket, Blogpulse, Blogdigger, and Twingly.

So, now you’re asking, which browser should I use to browse the new Google Blog Search? Well, you might think I’d suggest Google Chrome, and maybe I will once they pull their finger out and get addons and plugins sorted for that superfast browser, but in the meantime, I guess it’s gotta be Firefox.

Google Blog Search

Unfortunately, to his ear it sounded like Latin pr0n and to me it was like something you’d grow illicitly in your attic conversion with UV lights and some herbal seeds. There was also the possibility that some readers mistake it for Aboriginal Aerobics and assume the item was about how indigenous peoples can improve their health through exercise.

The conversation got me thinking about how we silly bloggers come up with catchy headlines for articles. There are those who work like me with a journalistic head on and try to come up with titles that do the same job as a newspaper headline. I wrote about this task in a post on Sciencebase called Giving Good Headline, which gets an awful lot of the wrong sort of traffic, unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly.

There are those bloggers who search and scour Google Adwords looking for the best combination of keywords that will give them a boost in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and others who use use tactics aimed at getting people to link to their posts rather than simply read them.

A combination of all three strategies is probably the best way forward: come up with a journalistic newsy headline, check it for keywords, and then tweak it to make it irresistible for social bookmarkers to tag on Digg, Mixx, Buzz, and any of the myriad other web 2.0 sites with double consonants and lacking adequate numbers of vowels. You never know your post might even attract the right sort of readers even if they are looking for Latin porn or aerobics classes in the Outback .

Giving Good Headline

Apparently, in 2001, if you were looking for an iPod, you were probably after an Image Proof of Deposit Document Processing System rather than a music player. And, if you’re searching for iPhone, then you were after an internet telephony product rather than an Apple device. You’d have been on a pointless search if you were looking for Youtube as the term, let alone the site didn’t exist. You may have heard of Facebook at the time, but it was still limited to Harvard users rather than being the global phenomenon it is today. Club Penguin was a hockey club, but the kids social media site Club Penguin was “coming soon”.

Searching for “Michael Phelps,” would have taken you to the page of the D. Maynard Phelps Collegiate Professor in Business Administration at the University of Michigan, rather than the swimmer. At the time “Wikipedia” was brand new, so would’ve found that and if you’re into politics and rigged elections you will recall only too well the term “hanging chads”.

You can do a search on Google wayback when using this link, that search will give you the archive page for Sciencebase; Sciencetext did not exist as the tips & tricks site you know and love.

Try your own searches for 2001 and let me know what you find.

Google 2001 - A Search Odyssey

So, how many people are actually using it? I took a look at the GetClicky stats for the Sciencebase.com site, for September just to get some idea of who is using Google Chrome. Sciencebase gets more traffic than Sciencetext, but more to the point, I wrote follow-up posts about Chrome on Sciencetext, which may have attracted Chrome users and so biased the stats.

So, for Sciencebase.com, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still tops the browser charts at 65.9% of Sciencebase visitors. Firefox pops up at 25.9%, Safari (usually Mac users) at 4.5%, and non-Firefox Mozilla 1.6%. Mobile users account for a mere 0.4% of visitors. There is a trickle of users visiting the site with their Sony PSP or Playstation 3 or Nintendo Wii. The first pocket browser, Opera, has just 0.7% share. Cue fanfare:

Google Chrome has 0.9%

So during September Chrome beat Opera for visitors to a science niche website, but only just. I’ll report back at the end of October and let you know if those percentages have shifted.

If you want to download Google Chrome, here’s the link. Let me know if you’re using Chrome and whether you prefer it over your old browser. Have you binned your old browser in preference for Chrome?

Who Uses Google Chrome?

I even spend some time maintaining my rank in Google for the keyword “sciencebase” (currently #1 as you might expect) and for my name “David Bradley” (was #1, but being outstripped by the actor’s entry on IMDb and some Victorian tractor museum, pah!). Although if you add a qualifier e.g. “David Bradley science”, “David Bradley blogger”, “David Bradley writer” and a few other phrases, I’d rather not mention, you’ll see I am #1 for those.

However, a e-conversation with a fellow science blogger got me thinking. He was quite proud of the fact that he’s ranking well for his name and variations thereof, but not for any other keywords or phrases. He told me he was trying to build up an online identity. That’s definitely a good idea but I think that should be the focus of your web 2.0, social media branding. After all, if someone doesn’t already know your name, why would they be searching on Google for it? Conversely, if you have a web 2.0 identity, then that sector of your audience already knows you and where to find you via your Plurks, Tweets, and Flicks etc etc.

If I were my colleagues search engine optimization manager, I’d be looking to get him ranked for more general phrases, such as “blue science widgets”, “red science widgets”, “widgets for science ethics”, that kind of thing…because that’s what people on Google hoping to find those things will actually be searching for, not him by his blogging nom de plume. If you’re Microsoft, Digg, Coke, or NASA, people just aren’t going to be searching for you by name, so you’re not going to grow organic traffic focusing on your name as a keyword.

Of course, it’s worth making sure your name and brand rank reasonably well, for the odd occasion when someone might Google you prior to a dinner party or after a Twitter conversation when they’ve lost the URL you mentioned, but really how often does that go on?

Find Your SEO Namesake

According to MyDigitalLife, “ChromePass v1.0.0 is a password recovery tool which aim to recover user name and password stored by Google Chrome web browser.”

All you have to do is run the ChromePass.exe file and it will reveal the origin web address, the action URL, Username, Password and even the time the password was stored. Apparently, it has a nice, well-designed interface. Here’s the download link for the Google Chrome password cracker, but I’m not vouching for its safety, so do your own virus scanning etc and stay safe.

The fact that Chrome has been out for a few weeks now and this password cracker has only just appeared is rather surprising. It’s emergence, once again, shows the inherent insecurity of storing passwords in your browser. A much safer way to store your tattoos, although maybe not quite as aesthetic is to have them tattooed on to your inner thigh (honestly, that’s not a recommended approach, you could lose a leg to identity thieves.

Hack Google Chrome Passwords

I wrote this SQT item at the beginning of September and spotted a neat little tool mentioned on ghacks called GPass, that is worth mentioning here. Apparently, it free software that provides an encrypted connection to bypass Internet censorship and restrictions. It “makes use of encrypted socks tunnels to launch applications and can use Skype and Tor as backup tunnels.”

SQT: Access Flickr in UAE, Iran, China

If you want to start a website that looks professional and is easy to administrate but simply do not have the time to learn how build it yourself, using a blog publishing system is the perfect solution. Here are the top three reasons why:

1. The difference between regular web hosting and Wordpress hosting is that normally what you get is a shared web site hosting deal, with some space on the host server to store your website files, a certain amount of bandwidth and possibly a free domain name registration. With Wordpress hosting however, the host is aware of your limited time and programming interest thus offering pre-installable blog Wordpress scripts. This will allow you to set up a Wordpress blog onto your web hosting account without manual installation or configuration in a matter of minutes.
2. Another advantage with Wordpress hosting is that it’s open source. With the wp-files in your server space you can easily access them, download them and edit such files as the CSS. This freedom you do not have if you are not self-hosted. You can get a blog hosted by Wordpress.com but that will deprive you of all the design theme alternatives, plug-ins and other applicable features only available for self-hosted wp-bloggers.
3. You do not have to be a blogger to get Wordpress hosting. WP is simply a user-friendly publishing system, used by many professional website owners. With a theme editor directly in the admin and addable plug-ins for just about any desire, Wordpress is more than just a blogging tool. It’s a content management system that allows anybody with little time and know-how to administrate their website.

So, what are you waiting for? Time is of the essence, after all.

This item is a guest post by Sciencetext supporter webhostingsearch.com

3 Advantages of Wordpress Hosting