martinsc.net

a video presentation on what RSS is all about and how to use it.
if you have no clue what RSS is, this video is a MUST see

admin :: Jul.30.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

no comment….

admin :: Jul.30.2007 :: funny :: No Comments »

The Official GoogleBlog published a post regarding the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). REP allows you even more flexibility now. take a look at these highlights:

• CONTENT=”unavailable_after:” - a great way of letting the Search engines know when your content expires / is not relevant anymore
• X-Robots-Tag: noarchive, nosnippet - do you have pages that you don’t want to be archived? not shown in the sippets?
• CONTENT=”NOFOLLOW” - don’t let the Search engines follow the links

Read these three posts if you want to know more:

1. Controlling how search engines access and index your website
2. The Robots Exclusion Protocol
3. Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility

admin :: Jul.30.2007 :: SEO, google, robots.txt :: No Comments »

now that is funny… should teach those kids a lesson…

a chat conversation over MSN messenger from a kid trying to trick someone and steal his account details…

admin :: Jul.27.2007 :: funny :: No Comments »

Let’s talk a bit about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO means to optimize your websites / webpages in a way that will help the Search engines (google, yahoo, live, etc’) to find your site and to send you a decent amount of visitors. Common believe is that traffic (visitors) that come from the Search Engines are the best kind of traffic for a website, since they found you after they searched for whatever you are offering. Let me give you some ideas on how to optimize your site the “good way” (not the “bad way” - black hat). Some webmasters over-do the SEO so much that their site is almost unusable - very very bad…. Others optimize their sites for the wrong search terms… Some get blacklisted by the Search Engines for spamming or using Black hat methods…

I have gathered some tips that you should read and think about:

• Build your webpage for the visitor and NOT for the search engine.
• META tags are the business card of your website - write your META tags well
• Remember that search engines cannot read your images - use the alt tag
• Your site should have unique and useful content - if you have that - other sites will link to you (links from other sites to you are a very good thing for search engines)
• Don’t copy text from other websites - Google might punish you for “duplicate content“
• I can’t stress this enough - build your site for the visitor!
• Don’t try to be smarter than google - you aren’t … don’t try to pull any dirty tricks (hidden text, very small text, keyword stuffing, etc’) Google improves it’s algorithm from day to day.
• Check your server logs and make sure you have no dead links on your site (you might have a great written article on your site, but no one can reach it…)
• Use a robots.txt file to tell the Search Engine spiders where to look and where not to (sensitive data, member only areas)
• Make sure that your navigation is readable for the Search engines (HTML and not images…)
• Validate your coding
• Read the google webmaster section

These are only some tips to get you started. Read the guides, FAQ, guidelines, help sections almost all Search Engines offer to webmasters, read, read and read some more…

admin :: Jul.27.2007 :: SEO, Webmasters, google, web dev :: No Comments »

Now here is a fun thing :) the official gmail blog posted a video (read the post here) that shows how the gmail envelope travels around the world. you can add your own video clip too in a few easy steps

1. print out the M-velope

2. Film your part of the story

3. upload it to youtube

4. submit it to youtube

check out the site for all the info

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/gmail_video.html

admin :: Jul.26.2007 :: fun, gmail, google :: No Comments »

We all know that windows xp has lots of stuff most of us don’t really use. If you have a pc running with a low amount of memory (less then 512 MB) you might wanna disable everything you don’t need. Disabling and removing unneeded features can turn a very slow running Windows XP machine into a well performing workstation. Techtree.com has a great guide on which services you can disable safely. Read it here.

admin :: Jul.26.2007 :: Microsoft, OS, Windows :: No Comments »

I really like Ubuntu. I have installed several different Linux systems on my test machine during the last few years. I tried Fedora, DSL, Lindows (known as Linspire now) and and much more… They all had one thing in common - i installed them, but couldn’t find anything that would keep me using them. I would always return to my Windows Box.

But since Ubuntu 7 my world has changed… From the first boot from the Live CD i noticed something new… Linux was usable and even a dummy like me could work on it. I found a great guide (The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn) on how to transform the default Ubuntu 7 installation into a desktop that could do everything Windows XP could do (except sending error messages to Microsoft :P). The guide creates a list of apps most windows users use and explains step by step with lots of screenshots on how to accomplish all that with Ubuntu. If you go through the guide from the beginning to the end you will find a desktop that does (almost) everything - from picture editing, Skype, Google earth, Bittorrent and emule. It takes some time and might look like “Chinese for advanced students” sometimes, but be patient and walk through the entire guide.

After installing everything (and even starting to understand some stuff) i used my Ubuntu setup more and more. Except one thing i still couldn’t figure out how to do - using Ubuntu as a webserver where i can work locally on my websites. I needed a way to install apache, php and mysql. As always i turned to my good friend and helper - google. After some searching and clicking around i found another great guide (also from howtoforge.com) - “Installing LAMP on Ubuntu for Newbies“. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP… that was exactly what i was looking for… After installing LAMP on Ubuntu, my Ubuntu station became my main developing workstation and i just can’t get enough of it…

admin :: Jul.24.2007 :: Linux, OS, Ubuntu, web dev :: No Comments »

Very interesting… only a few months after shipping Windows VISTA, Microsoft confirms Windows Seven with a planned release during 2010.

So far, the company has determined Windows Seven will come in both 32- and 64-bit flavors

 Before Microsoft delivers Windows Seven, it plans to roll out an update to its current MDOP offering, Vista Service Pack 1 and then another MDOP update, according to the deck. Microsoft made no dates — tentative or otherwise — available for these planned releases via the deck.

Yes, it is going to take us at least three years to release Windows Seven. Longer if it’s buggy and doesn’t hit the “quality bar.”

read the full article at ZDNet 

admin :: Jul.23.2007 :: Microsoft, OS :: No Comments »

Ajaxwidgets.com has put online 5 great video tutorials on Ajax . Sometimes learning from a video is easier than trying to understand a full blown 100 pages article…

admin :: Jul.23.2007 :: Ajax, web dev :: No Comments »