E-mail and the Internet are the quintessential means of the improper usage and modern decay of the English language. It just so happens that your blog is spearheading that effort. Keep up the good work. - Priapic John
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Keywords of the Week
I don't get what all the fuss is about with the government trying to get Google to reveal search keywords. If they truly don't care about who is searching, rather they just want an idea what people are searching for, then they just need to sign up for WordTracker.com. It's a great tool to see how effective your keywords are on your web site. It's also a great tool to see how sick you people are.
This week, I'm too lazy to format the results with ranking. So I'm just going to list the rank and the keyword. If you see a missing rank, yup your guessed it, it's porn related.
What stuck me this week was an unfamiliar keyword "konfabulator". As a sacrifice for your keyword education, I have to sometimes type in the keyword that is unfamiliar to me. And I tell you, it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it. I've seen some images that I darn not wish on NM. So imagine my hesitation to search for Konfabulator. Well, found out it's harmless enough. Shame. Yeah, appears Yahoo bought them out and have a new product line called Yahoo Widets. I might have to check that out.
The rest of the keywords look likes a normal sicko search week.
(3) google (5) ebay (8) yahoo (9) lyrics (10) myspace (16) ice age 2 (18) digital cameras (20) konfabulator (22) myspace.com (24) yahoo.com (26) mapquest (31) games (32) song lyrics (36) dogs (37) chinese new year (39) anime (40) chris brown (42) dictionary
If your in the Loveland/Mason area, make an effort to visit the best Sushi joint in town. This is a great place to take those that are new and need their sushi a bit cooked, and it's perfect for the trained professional.
Appears the special for February is our favorite, the Lobster Special!!!
There appears to be some resentment in the video game community with the following trailer:
My take is that this is awesome!!! I mean, the Transporter dude, Burt Reynolds, Orcs, elves, Ninjas.....heck, the only thing to make this better would be Chuck Norris. But I will make that request to Make A Wish Foundation on my deathbed.
But the resentment is strong, with petitions such as: Stop Dr. Uwe Boll
I love the following quote from YouTube.com that sums it up the best:
Heh honestly could have been worse, clearly the Transporter was in such a high speed intense chase that he was transported back in time. He was then approached by the king of porn Jack Horner and Proffessor Arturo(who must have slid in some time before this) to help him deal with a problem. Clearly Skynet sent a terminator back in time to stop something from happening. Finally Shaggy has split from the rest of the gang and is trying to solve mysteries on his own. Can his skills unmask the true evil, who is likely some old man with a real estate scheme ? Find out when you see In the Name of the King!
Granted, all the traffic for Berlusconi comes from Italy where they obviously have a shortage of PM images. I guess the Italians get a kick out of the photo and my interpretation. Maybe not.
But there is no excuse for Wookie. Come on!! I mean, Number 6, I can understand. Knock yourself out. But Wookie?!!! You sickos.
I really didn't mind all the attention until I realized those images are starting to get hot linked. Which is basically bandwidth stealing. So to help illustrate the point on why hot linking is not a good idea, I've replace the orignal images with the following image.
I'm sure you're all tired of me going on about the best on-line radio station. But I'm telling you, there are just those times that when you hear a new song for the first time and you immediately know you love it. Just had that experience...not once...not twice...but freaking all afternoon long!! This is stuff you'll never hear on the Top 40 radio.
I've updated my playlist on the right for your listening enjoyment. But I really really recommend you spend some time at http://www.woxy.com.
The Delays have really jumped out at me. I'm a bit suspicious of their manhood, but I think we are all secure with ours so enjoy their video.
The Gossip was also a pleasant surprise. And yes, that's Kate Bush you are seeing.
Delays - Stay Where You Are Kate Bush - Somewhere In Between The Gossip - Jealous Girls Crooked Fingers - Wrecking Ball The Glass Family - Swimming In Fiction Them vs. Them - Messed Up Love Elefant - The Clown
This reminds me of a great joke I played gone bad. But that's a post for another day. In the meantime, whatcha get when you mix a gay PETA member with a warped Scare Tactics episode involving animal testing and DNA experiments?
Depending on how you are hosting your blog site, you may not have the tools, disk space or bandwidth to host different types of media. It's one thing to post a link to a video on Google Video, but what if you have a special video, audio/song, image that you would like to share and discuss. Well there are some additional tools (No, not by Google, but they are just as cool) you should be aware of to help complete your blogging experience.
Castpost - Great site to host your various media formats. Castpost not only helps you organize your media, but they provide a quick HTML generator that you can then take and cut and paste a nice little flash player in your blog pointing to your media file.
Flickr - Not only is Flciker not done by Google, but it's provided by Yahoo. But this is another great example of a Web 2.0 application. But more importantly, it gives you an account to store and organize all your images. You can link to your images, or use Flicker's slideshow, collage, and other presentation options.
StatsCounter - Now that you have a popular blog, you will need to track your popular pages, visitors, return visitors, and overall site usage. StatsCounter offers a clean interface and script that you just insert into your page to start tracking all this good information. Google does offer a similar tool, but at this time, Statscounter appears to be a bit more mature. But that could quickly change.
Technorati - This is a must have to understand what are people are searching for and how it relates to your site. How to draw more traffic to your site. To see who's linking to your site.
There are so many other tools that are available to use and integrate with your blog. I was just trying to show a small example that I have found to be very useful and easy to use.
In my previous post "What's the big deal with Google", I wanted to find a way to showcase all the wonderful utilities that Google has been pumping out. I figured walking through the process to create a blog would be fun. Plus I still get a log of questions lately from folks that are still not sure what this blog stuff is all about. They typically what to know what is a blog, do I need one, and how do I set one up?
You may have noticed I provided a link above to Wikipedia to help explain what a blog is. Click on it and you're taken to a free online encyclopedia that is updated everday by everyday folks on the internet. It's quickly becoming the standard way to refence terms and definitions to help your readers with new concepts. So keep Wiki in mind when you need your blog to explain things in geek. I will talk about additional Web 2.0 application that can complement your blog and surfing experience. But that's all together another post for another day.
Whew! That's a lot of goodness...and it doesn't even scratch the surface. There is so much more, but I wanted to concentrate on what would be relevant for blogging. Google has recently put a installation pack together to help make it easier. But I recommend you install the pack after you have reviewed what each application provides and if it decide you could benefit from it. So lets conentrate on the tools you need for blogging first.
Basic Steps
Blogger: Go to www.blogger.com and create a free account. If you don't have your own domain, no problem, Blogger will host your site. If you have your own domain, then work with your host provider to give you an FTP account that points to your web root. You will need to provide this info to Blogger so that it can publish your blog. Make sure you update you profile with as much information as you feel comfortable with. I always recommend that women should be careful and not volunteer your gender unless you really want to be harassed. If you like harassment, then don't listen to me.
Gmail: Once you setup Blogger, you are now entitled to setup a free Google Email account. You don't need Blogger to get Gmail, but why bother your friend to send you a Gmail invite when you can do it yourself. But remember, gmail users will always be happy to send you an invite. Make sure you go back to your Blogger account profile and update your email to use your Gmail account.
Picasa: Once you have your blog in place and able to publish, you would more then likely want to add some photos. Picasa not only offers wonderful blogger integration and support, but it's a wonderful way to organize all those lost photos and images scattered across your mutliple hard drives.
Firefox Web Blogger Extension: Hopefully you took my advice in the first post and installed Firefox. You will not be disappointed. Once you have it installed, you can start to learn about the Firefox Extentions. This really starts to show why Firefox is soooo cool. Google provides a web blogger extension that allows your to easily comment about other web sites and blogs back to your blog. Plus it allows you to find out what other bloggers are posting about other blogs, including your own.
Video: Google now provides a central place for folks to upload videos that otherwise are zinging across email, P2P file sharing, or hundreds of other video sites. If you need to find a video and blog about it, this will be your one stop shopping. [EDIT] Google Video has now made posting video links even easier. Once you find the video, they can provide you the code to add to your blog...like this. This by the way is a video of my typical workout session.
RSS Reader: As you start finding other blogs of interest, you will quickly learn what a pain it is to keep up to date with all of them. You can quickly miss a few days, and before you know it, your are serveral post behind on your favorite blog. RSS Readers allow you to store all your favorite blogs and web sites in one common reader. Allowing you to go to one place to find which blogs have posted new material. Most blogs today will support RSS Readers by providing a RSS Syndication link. All you need to do is copy and paste that link into RSS Reader, provide a description and you're set. Blogger by default will publish a RSS feed for you automatically with a feed file called Atom.xml.
Hopefully those new to blogging will find this useful. Those more experienced find that Blogger is a great start but does have its limitations. We can talk about more advance blogging applications down the road.
Wondering why everyone is talking about fishing on the internet lately? Well, they are referring to Phishing, the technique hackers and spammers use to steal your identity. The Anti-Pfishing Working Group does a much better job of explaining it.
If you haven't seen this technique yet, let me share one with you in the hopes you can learn how this works and avoid getting the hook set. I just received this email from an Ebay member. (don't worry, I disabled the Respond Now button)
Notes of interest:
Well done page layout. Looks like an authentic email from an Ebay user in the UK.
Page uses the real images and security warning pages from the UK ebay site. Tricksy hackers use ebays own warning message to not reply to the email to get you to use the authentic safe Respond Now button. We are dealing with clever social engineering here.
Man, what a guilt trip. How can I deny not helping this poor old woman in the wheelchair?! Dang, these clever chaps will make you swallow the hook.
Notice the URL. A dead give away. But as a good little camper, I enter my Ebay information. At this point, I'm taken to Ebay's real site telling me my login failed...as that's not my real Ebay login info.
So why all this fuss to get my Ebay login info? Well, the biggest trend now is to setup a fake auctions and get folks to send cash for items they have no intentions on sending. And they are hoping you don't check your ebay account activity until you start getting the nasty grams from the buyers or find your ebay account has been suspended.
As for me, I will be sending Tivo a nasty gram asking them how in the wide world of sports did a spammer get an email address I only use for Tivo.
[Edit] Appears I'm the idiot that released my Tivo email account to the world. Bots are now crawling through blogs and web sites looking for valid email accounts and selling them to spammers. And sure enough, I listed my Tivo account in a previous post many many moons ago as a referral. So the lesson here folks is:
Don't list your valid email address as text format (html, asp, aspx, JS, etc...) on your web page or blogger.
Avoid using the Mailto: tag as a contact us mechanism
If you insist to leave your email in text format or using the email tag, then use a prefix tag in front of your email address that will force a human to remove it before they send you the email. Such as Remove_SpamTag_Myemail@goferboy.com. In this case, the user see they need to remove the prefix to the point they get the valid email which is Myemail@goferboy.com.
Take the "You must be this tall to ride this" approach and use Norwood Matt's approach to contact him. Scroll to the bottom of the page and make sure you break out the slide rule and Cap't Crunch decyption ring to successfully send him an email.
Been hearing a lot of talk about Google lately? Trying to figure out all the fuss? Well let me see if I can help you out.
Google keeps providing more tools and applications that I come to depend on, that I don't know how I use to get out of bed. And you can tell Microsoft is getting irratated with all the attention Google is getting as Bill Gates remarked, 'I hear they're coming out with a robot that will cook hamburgers, too. Let's spread that rumour - there's nothing they can't do.'
I will attempt...and I use that word with caution, to layout all the Google goodness that might actually be useful for you. I figure that best way to do this is to walk you through a task that hits on many of Google's technologies. And that task should be fun, so lets go through the process to start and build a blog. It all starts with Google. So lets get started.
First things first. To really enjoy your browsing experience, I recommend we practice safe blogging. So please go to Mozilla and download Firefox. I'll will show you later how to add some cool google related Firefox extensions. But you're saying this has nothing to do with Google? Well, if Google were to make a browser, it would have been Firefox... Developed by Chuck Norris. I mean, we are just not ready for that type of coolness yet. So lets take this in baby steps, ok?
OK, now you need a home page. Go to Google's Portal here: www.google.com/ig Bookmark that and make it your home page. You have just completed your first step to Google Nirvana. There is no turning back now. Next Post we will get you setup with the Ultimate Email. Yes... that's right, Chuck Norris's email application of choice.
Woot! You are not going to believe what has happened to me!!! I have come into the possession of 14 Million dollars!!! Well, I will be the executor of that amount, and my take will only be 20%. But that's still like...um...a lot of money!!!
So I need your help, I have to figure out which organizations to donate the money too. Here, read this email I just received and help me out. Those with good ideas shall share the the wealth!!!
I'm telling your, this internet stuff is just getting better!!! I just got another email offer that I can't pass up!!!
And they say you can't trust unsolicited email. hahah...who's the loser now, huh?!!!
I was just complaining to NorwoodMatt that Google really needs to pick up the ball to complete their portal domination. And to do that, they need a good...no...a great calander to-do application. Well, varspool wrote a great list of technology to change your life and she nailed it with a great to-do list application. Make sure to check out the rest of varspool's list.
