In the past I have always done my own SEO stuff for my site. It has always been a pain in the rear and takes quite a bit of time submitting to directories and search engines. The other day I found SEO Consultant which seems to offer quite a balance of services that you would require for SEO optimization.

I would never use a service like this for my own blog however I do have a project planned for the future that I would use their services for. They are not the cheapest guys I have seen around but witht he services they include you are getting a lot for your money. They charge a retainer of $2000 for 10 hours per month of services. This equates to $200 per hour. Boy am I in the wrong business.

If you want your site to rank in the top of the search engines or to improve your page rank SEO Consultant is the way to go. Once I get my project off the ground or funding for it I plan to contract a company like this. You cannot just expect to start a site and have everyone just know about it without any marketing or search engine optimization.

Recently I have been getting more and more into Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. I have become attached to the syntax of Obj-C. If you are also just starting to learn how to develop applications for OS X and would like someone to work with hit me up. I could always use someone to answer questions for me and also someone who can use the knowledge I do have so that I may help you as well.

Programming for OS X takes an approach that I am not quite used to. You spend most of your time pointing and clicking rather than writing code which I am used to coming from a PHP background. I am not yet sure what I will write for my first application, I am actually still going through the new Hilligass book which is quite good in my opinion.

If you do quite a bit of web development there is a nice FireFox plug-in that can help show you which CSS selectors are not in use. This can be handy when you are working on cleaning up a site from an old layout and want to reduce just how much garbage code that is left over from the old design. Dust Me Selectors was just updated to support FireFox 3 which if you have not updated yet I urge you to.

There are a lot of blogs on the internet and most of them will have all of the social networking badges. As a webmaster wouldn’t it be nice to know what social networks your visitors frequent so that you could show only the appropriate badges?

Website developer Aza Raskin has come up with a simple JavaScript solution. It is a small javascript that will create a list of links in an iframe and then decide which site a visitor has been to based on the link color. When you visit sites on the web the links change colors to let you know that the link has been visited. This little javascript will return a list of sites that have been matched as visited. Now this is not a fool proof way but it is the best way currently. There are a few catches. The user has to have JavaScript enabled in their browser. It also only goes based on the browser history so if they clear their history often it won’t pick-up on this.

I am going to look into integrating this into my site maybe in a wordpress plug-in so that I can show only the relevant badges to my visitors. Obviously I would have a default list of badges to show just in case the script was not able to detect any of the sites. If you would like to get the script to use on your site be sure to visit this blog post.

Last week I wrote a review on Handbrake and MetaX which lightly touched on tagChimp. This week I am going to review a nice web based service that MetaX has been tightly integrated with. tagChimp.

If you like me have a lot of movies in your iTunes library, you will like this web based service that is community driven. MetaX used to only search Amazon, but now has the ability to search tagChimp. Before this integration you were subject to low quality cover art and you had to settle for less than perfect tag data (unless you added the missing information from Amazon). Now however when you perform a search you get high quality artwork (generally a max height of 600px) and accurate tag data. Now if you do not find the movie you are tagging in tagChimp’s database, not to worry. When you click on Write in MetaX it will add the data to tagChimp (Only if you have not disabled sharing with tagChimp in MetaX’s preferences). At this time tagChimp is relatively new so not all movies have the chapter data associated with them. Tim is still hard at work making improvments to the site every day. Recently he made it so that if the movie you are editing does not have chapters or the chapters are named like Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc. it will not add the movie to the tagChimp database. This was done to ensure that the tagChimp data was the highest quality possible.

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Since I bought my first Apple TV a while back I have been using a few applications to convert my DVD collection to a digital format. I do not know about you but I really got sick of searching through 300+ DVD movies to find what I wanted to watch.

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Most of us can remember the days of the Nintendo first coming out on the market. The best game in the world back then was Super Mario Brothers. I remember playing this game when I was a kid. I played it so much that I was even able to beat the game using only one life and not using warp zones. I also did not just skip by everything and just run to the end. I took my time killed all the bad guys and got almost all of the secret stuff such as mushrooms that would make you big, stars, etc.

This morning I stumbled across something that I found to be really cool. A web based version of the game that was written completely in JavaScript. The uncompressed size is 35kb and the compressed version is only 14kb. Now this is not the complete game and a lot of stuff is missing however they created this as a challenge to see if it could be done solely in JavaScript and just how small they could make the file. Everything on this is done in JavaScript. They even embedded the music as base 64 encoded data into the file. All images etc are generated with JavaScript which is actually really cool. Personally I think the guys who developed this did a really good job. Be sure to try out the game. You can find it by going to their blog post.

I had no idea you could do things like this with JavaScript and it makes me want to start looking into the language. What else could you do if you can generate something like this? Do you know of other cool things like this done with JavaScript? Please feel free to share them in the comments.

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the

Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Over the last few days I took some time and updated my theme so that I could use the latest Wordpress 2.5. I love the new features that come with it and love the administration interface overhaul. The Wordpress team has really been hard at work. For this I must say Thank You! It would take far more time than I have right now to write my own custom site and I love the fact that Wordpress is so easy to use.

When you are working with remote data feeds it will definatly impact the load time of your site.  For instance if you are using multiple curl calls to reach out to Google and Yahoo to get search results and Google takes 1 second but Yahoo takes 3 seconds it takes your application 4 seconds to load.  Now this can add up very quickly if you are making several connections.  The load time for your site becomes the total load time of all sites you are reaching out to.

What about simultaneous requests?  Well this would make sense because the load time of your application would be as long as the call that takes the longest.  In the example above the load time would be 3 seconds as opposed to 4 seconds.

Stoyan Stefanov wrote a nice article with example code showing just how to accomplish thi.  I cannot wait to give it a shot and boost the performance of my apps.  Thanks for pointing this out Stoyan.