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.
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.
After writing my review of Orgoo yesterday I was emailed by a woman named Emily. She said that she was from Fuser.com and wanted me to write a review of their service because they offered many of the features that Orgoo was lacking. Things such as the in-box columns that were re-sizable, etc..
While they do not yet offer the instant messaging which is a huge drawback for me. They do offer integration into MySpace and Facebook. The integration seems pretty good. Although it is not something that I would use on a daily basis. It allows you to quickly see who has messaged you, your top friends based on comment / message activity etc. Again this is not something that I would use on a daily basis so I will not go into too much detail about it here.
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A few months back I signed up for the Orgoo beta and had to wait until they opened it up for more accounts. Last week I received a notice that my account was ready to be used. I quickly went over to the site and signed up for my account. I have been testing this over the last few days and while it is a good service I do not think it is ready for most people to use as their primary e-mail / IM.
It is extremely easy to setup your IM or e-mail accounts for use on Orgoo, the interface is nice and easy to navigate. The entire design of the site is easy on your eyes so you will have no problems staying on the site for a while. There are no obtrusive flashing banner ad’s or anything like that.
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Over the last few days I have been reading up on CarPuters and the things you can do with them. As you might have read in my post about the CarPuter there are a lot of things you can use them for. I was reading the forums over at mp3car.com and I found this post about a Dashcam video with GPS Speed overlay. I was intrigued to find a solution that I would be able to use with the Mac Mini I plan to integrate. During my search I found a great piece of software called SecuritySpy.
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Since late 2000 I have been thinking of building a CarPuter (as they are called) however the costs were expensive. I needed to take the time to plan out how I would install the system, modify the vehicle as needed, etc. It was just more than I wanted to take on financially and time wise. Now however I am thinking about integrating one into a car I plan to buy within the next few months.
You might be wondering why in the world anyone would want to put a computer in their car.. There are many reasons, below are just a few.
- Music
- Movies
- Gaming
- GPS Integration
- Satellite Radio Integration
Just so there is no confusion I am not the first person to do this. Many people have done this so I am not engineering anything. I am simply going to follow guides that I find online and seek any assistance I may need from the community at mp3car.com, there is actually a nice post of someone installing a system into a 2005 Mazda3 which is worth taking a look at.
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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.
A while back I heard about a site called liarcard.com, this site stated that they had voice analysis software that was initially developed for security purposes. It is now available to the public and they state that they are over 95% accurate. I decided to try out this service tonight with my girlfriend. We were asking all sorts of questions and answering them differently each time. I have to say that this has to be a total waste of money. When I was asking questions I asked what her favorite color was. She answered with pink and it said she was honest. Later in the conversation I asked the question again and she said orange… Guess what? She was truthful again. At once point during the conversation I asked what time it was, she stated the correct time and it buzzed saying that she was lying.
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For a while now I have been looking for a good solution for online billing for clients that I have. I have tried using Quickbooks and while that is a very nice application I just cannot access it from anywhere I am unless I have it installed on both my home machine and my laptop. I did look into the online version of Quickbooks that Intuit offers however this was only for IE users. Sorry mac users. Tonight I have started looking at Freshbooks and I must say that it is very nice.
I signed up for a free account but with as easy as it is to use I think I will be upgrading soon. You can customize how your invoices will look, add clients, projects, tasks. This is just the tip of the iceberg though. They have a nice dashboard widget that Mac users can use to track time. When you are developing you don’t want to have to flip back and forth from a web page. You just want to start the timer and then go back and stop it. A web based timer means it is yet another window that has to remain open.
I am going to furthur explore the system but since it is free to try why don’t you go sign-up for an account and check it out. If you do a lot of online work I am sure you will find it very useful.