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.

I was not under the impression it was so easy to buy or sell a business these days. Up until today I never knew there was a market for buying and selling small businesses. I mean I know that you can sell out once your company is large and profitable, however this site I found today shows that you can sell even the smallest business.

If you are searching for a business for sale you should give BiZag a try. It’s a new site that offers a search engine for finding a business to purchase. If you would like to list your business for sale you can do it there as well. While they do charge a fee for listing your business it is quite inexpensive if you do sell the business.

I am not currently in the market for buying or selling a business however I wish I knew things like this existed before I let go of Codebowl Solutions. It was rather profitable and I imagine I could have sold it. Maybe in the future I will be in the market, who knows.

Sites like BiZag may be useful for those who do nothing but start up a site, then try to sell it off as a business. Hosting businesses, Design / Programming businesses and even those get rich quick scheme sites you see out there. I wonder how many people would buy into that garbage.

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.

In the past I wrote a review on Linkinus. Since then I have been using it as my IRC client and have been loving it. It has a nice clean interface and allows you to write scripts (AppleScript) and Cocoa Plug-ins to add functionality to the client. The other day version 1.3 was released which added a few new features which I thought were worth reviewing. The first thing I will cover are the split chats. If you command-click on several IRC channels / Queries. You will be able to see all of them in the same window. It takes the window area and splits it if you will. This is a very nice feature however I believe it is lacking a bit of functionality just yet. It is a new feature so I am sure it will be enhanced as time goes on.

The very first thing I noticed is that when I had IRC running but Linkinus closed (detached mode) when I opened Linkinus I had split windows already set. It had been a few hours since I was in Linkinus and I was in some very high traffic channels. The channel windows were scrolling madly for about 5 minutes. It seemed like it was trying to “catch-up” to the IRC buffer. After about 5 minutes I had to close Linkinus, quit IRC and restart it all. The other area of the split chat’s that I feel needs improvement is how you switch windows. Yes you can use cmd+shift+down and cmd+shift+up and you can also click on the topic bar above the channel. However clicking in the channel window alone should change the active window. However it does not work like that.

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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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This is nothing new for me. My blog is constantly hit with spammers trying to leave comments. THey have not succeeded because I am using the Akismet plug-in for wordpress. However I am starting to wonder if there is a better way to block these guys. I notice every time that they are coming from different IP addresses, so I cannot simply create a blocklist otherwise it would become huge.

I continue to have to monitor my spam queue and find things like this

birkoff_[!2] | birkoff_md@goatrance.com | index5.onirte.com | IP: 201.70.17.163
birkoff_[!2] | birkoff_yc@goatrance.com | index5.onirte.com | IP: 192.41.218.100

Akismet does a really good job so far it has stopped 13,813 spam comments from reaching my site but what I am wondering is if there is a better way to filter these guys out and not allow them to access the site using up bandwidth. If any of you readers know of a good method please share it with me in the comments below.