Archive for February, 2007
Fat Thursday? I thought it was fat tuesday? You’re right, in the US we celebrate paczki day on the first Tuesday before ash Wednesday. Start stocking up on donuts, because Tat Tuesday is coming up on the 20th.
In Poland, they do things a little bit differently. Fat Thursday is the Polish feast that marks the last Thursday before Lent. It’s very similiar to Mardi Gras. Today is a day of gluttony that we fat kids have been looking forward to for a long time.
The best part is that being of polish heritage, I can celebrate today and Tuesday!
February 15th, 2007
Michigan is about to start adding a tax onto services as well as sales. The tax would include things like cable tv, veterinarian services, home improvement, lawn care, bowling, concerts, movies, video rentals, and lawyer fees.
Do they have this in your state? How does it work out?
Personally, I’m feeling ripped off that we the taxpayers have no say in this matter whatsoever.
Perhaps maybe it’s time to re-consider the fair tax?
February 14th, 2007
There hasn’t been much said over the past few months about the case of Belgium newspapers suing Google. If you haven’t been following the case, here’s what’s happening:
A group of Belgium newspapers has sued Google over its Google News service. The papers claim that both Google’s website cache, AND it’s snippet of articles are a violation of the country’s copyright laws.
It was announced today that Google lost the case.
It’s that these newspapers fail to see the value of being included in Google news. After all, Google doesn’t show the whole article, so it’s only acting as a method of driving traffic to the newspaper websites. That’s not even the main point of this case that astounds me.
The point I fail to understand, is why did this even come to trial? Are the newspapers unfamiliar with the robots.txt standard?
It seems to me that if they didn’t want their stuff being included in Google, they could have just told Google not to index it. Am I missing something, or does that just make too much sense?
February 13th, 2007
Bill Platt recently wrote an article for SiteProNews talking about the GoogleBomb algorithm update. Being a sitepronews subscriber, I got this little gem in my email.
It looks like sitepronews is letting just anybody with a theory go ahead and write articles now. This one seems to throw out some off the wall theories. Let’s take a look.
First, he quotes Matt Cutts on the googlebomb change.
according to Matt Cutts of Google, the changes in the GB update
were all completed within the Google algorithm. Cutts has always
said that Google does not like to manually rearrange the search
engine results, so an algorithmic solution to the GoogleBomb was
in order. A few of the Google engineers worked together to find
a solution to the GoogleBomb issue
Then he talks about his own research.
Here’s what he claims:
What I have been able to take from the results shown above is
that Google may have targeted only “negative links”. If you want
to review what is shown above, all of the Google Bombs that are
now gone had negative connotations to them. All of the Google
Bombs that survived can be construed as having positive, or at
least non-negative, connotations to them.
Is anybody else shaking their head when reading this? Negative vs positive links? You’ve got to be kidding me.
If he really did his research, he’d have found Matt Cutts comments here that say:
I think this algorithm does successfully minimize the impact of Googlebombs as we define them here at Google. Many of the sites that probably wouldn’t want to rank for these Googlebombs no longer do.
as well as the comment on Google Blogoscoped that really hammers the point home.
Matt says:
The litmus test for a Googlebomb is whether the site in question wants to show up at #1 or whether other people are pushing it up. If a site *wants* to show up, that’s SEO rather than a Googlebomb.
So from the examples you give, [Waffles] would be a Googlebomb, but [french military victories] would not.
So, from the Google Guy himself… the new change seems to focus on whether or not the page actually contains the text that it’s being linked to with. It has absolutely nothing to do with positive and negative links.
Nice try Bill, and congrats on getting your article out there in the newsletter – but next time, please do a little bit of fact checking first. There’s no telling how many SEOs out there digest these newsletters and believe them as gospel truth.
February 12th, 2007
How many of you write notes to yourself about things you constantly forget?
I’ve found one of the best methods of remembering stuff is to just blog about it. That way, I can just search my blog for the answer. It’s like having a 100% portable notebook. It’s also a good way to help other people who may have the same questions you do.
Like today for example, I needed to run a PHP script as a cron job, but I couldn’t remember the crontab syntax.
Here’s the command I enter to run my php script:
php -q /home/sitename/public_html/cronscript.php
Next time I forget that I need to use the -q option, I’ll know where to look!
February 9th, 2007
If you’ve ever run websites you’re familiar with the concept of a virtual server. Some of you may even be familiar with cpanel. Those of you who have, have no doubt encountered the following message in your inbox:
cpsrvd failed @ Fri Feb 09 13:36:38 2007. A restart was attempted automagicly.
If it’s your first time seeing this message, it can be pretty confusing. What the hell is cpsrvd? Failed – that can’t be good! Restart? Did it work? Did I lose any data? Is something broken? Is automagicly even a word?
The good news is, don’t worry. It’s really no big deal. cpsrvd is part of your cPanel services (More specifically, it stands for “cPanel Service Daemon.” ), and it’s really common for it to crash. In fact, it crashes so often that cPanel included that little script to restart it when it goes down. (that’s the same script sending you the emails)
If it didn’t restart, you wouldn’t have access to your cPanel. If that should happen and you have shell access, you can restart it with the following command:
/etc/init.d/cpanel restart
It seems that you can fix this by upgrading to the latest version of cPanel. If you’re really courageous and have root access, you can try this: (Disclaimer: these commands have not been tested.)
rm -f /usr/local/cpanel/cpanel
/scripts/installgd
/scripts/cleanmd5
/scripts/upcp
So why am I writing a post like this? Because I couldn’t find any information about it on one website, I had to visit about 8 different sites to compile this post. It’s an example of a great SEO technique – posting a thorough answer to a commonly asked question. In this case, I couldn’t easily find what I was looking for on the web, so I made a page to fill that space.
Go ahead, try it out on your own sites – see if you get any increased traffic.
February 9th, 2007
Anybody that knows me can attest that I’m not a liberal, I’m just anti conservative. Many of my views on life revolve around a simple philosophy: “if it’s not infringing upon the rights of anybody else, I don’t have a problem with it.” This explains my stance on seatbelt laws, motorcycle helmet laws, etc.
Anyway.. is the world growing more conservative, or are people just going overboard trying to complain about things?
After the Snickers commercial was taken down, I’m glad to see that some companies are starting to stand up to the conservatives.
GM has refused to take down it’s robot suicide commercial after pressure from suicide help groups, and I agree with GM here. It’s a robot. Robot’s don’t commit suicide. It’s not a human, so it’s funny. Get over it.
In a like move, Amazon has ignored requests of the Human Society to take down a cockfighting magazine. While cockfighting is illegal, publications about it aren’t. (see high-times magazine for proof of this.)
What’s worse, I’m not even sure why they’re going after Amazon. The magazine is being sold by a 3rd party that is just using Amazon’s storefront. Clearly, they should be going after the publisher not Amazon right?
I just want to say kudos to GM and Amazon for standing up for themselves when other companies are quick to give in to conservative demands.
February 9th, 2007
So you’ve just had your next great marketing idea. You know, the one that will make your company millions. You can’t believe such a simple idea came to you so easily. You start thinking about the corner office, all the hott chics, the endless bar tabs etc, but you’re interrupted by your developer saying he’s done.
Great! Now all that’s left to do is send this baby out and rake in the cash.
Stop! Read it first!! Have your employees read it, send it to your mom. Do something before you just put it live, or you may end up with something like one of these:
What was that interest rate? When does it expire? What’s that big empty space?
or at least make sure spell check it:
In case you can’t see it… they used the wrong version of your/you’re
February 9th, 2007
I feel like I’ve said this over 1000 times, but you can’t legislate common sense. You also can’t make laws that prevent people from being stupid – but that’s exactly what Senator Carl Kruger is trying to do.
After a 23 year old man was killed last month crossing the street with his iPod, Senator Kruger is proposing a ban on crossing the street while using a cell phone or iPod.
Hopefully, the rest of New York will see how utterly stupid this bill is and tell Senator Kruger that he’s an idiot. (note to Senator Kruger: you’re an idiot)
Some people are going to be dumb and do things like cross a street when the sign says don’t walk. It’s not Apple’s fault, it’s not Cingular’s fault, and it probably had nothing to do with the fact they were listening to an iPod. You don’t need to be able to hear to see a blinking orange sign in front of you.
You just can’t stop people from being dumb, no matter what laws you make. What’s next? Banning deaf people from crossing streets as well?
February 7th, 2007
I’ve been watching the news about Wal-Mart offering movie downloads rather intently, mostly hoping that they’d learn from their previous mistakes but it looks like they haven’t.
It looks to me like there’s not only a few flaws with the movie download site’s business model, but there seems to be problems with the site itself.
For starters, the site doesn’t work in FireFox! That’s to be expected though because their audio download store doesn’t work in firefox either, and it’s almost a year old! (note to IE users: you’ll see a perfectly working store at that URL.)
Why would Wal-Mart alienate over 30% of the web’s users? That’s just not good business sense.
Secondly, let’s look at the business model. It’s bad enough that it won’t work on my iPod (but that’s Apple’s fault, not Wal-Mart’s) but they add DRM that further restricts it.
The pricing model hurts this even further. Why would I pay $13-$20 for a movie (compared to $10-$25 for a DVD) that only works on limited computers, can’t be burned to a DVD, and can’t be watched on a normal television (without an expensive adapter for my device). It’s just not worth it to me.
I’m certainly not going to upgrade from my iPod to something else just to download movies (Apple also offers movies.. it’s not clear if both will offer the same titles), and there’s no way I’m paying the same price for something that’s even more restrictive than a DVD.
I don’t think this service will be around long.
February 6th, 2007
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