‘Spell Checker Blues’

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rarely ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect in it’s weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

Anon

1. Make sure you are linking to the first page of a tutorial, list or other paginated article. Some older sites lack navigational menus on every page, and its no fun when we can’t get to the beginning from where we’ve Stumbled onto a site. That and we lose the anticipation when you dump us onto the #1 item in a list.

2. Don’t link to sites with a million and one non-thumbnailed images or embedded objects that immediately load upon Stumbling. I’ve had my browser seize because of some Stumbles, and I’m running a nice computer on a fast connection.

3. Don’t Stumble one of those ridiculous Stumble Cards. Seriously. No.

4. Think if you’ve ever seen this content before on another site. That oh-so-hilarious compilation of bad accidents? Yeah, it’s been copied on dozens of sites. We don’t need you to Stumble yet another.

5. Don’t Stumble sites that don’t credit their sources. You’re often just spreading plagiarized content. If the owner doesn’t say they took those pictures, then find out where they got them from.

6. Generally speaking, avoid Stumbling sites that have yet to join this millennium. Leave blinking text, spinning .gifs, neon colored backgrounds and background midi files you can’t turn off back in 1997.

7. Pay attention when Stumbling sites with frames. If you want to Stumble a particular frame, you have to open it in a new window and then Stumble.

Bonus! 8. Just because you haven’t seen it yet, does not mean it’s not old meme.

Pretty easy tips to follow, no? Now go forth and Stumble some NON-crap so I can get back to my regularly scheduled procrastinating.

It used to be that the SEO experts all ranted against flash only sites because they couldn’t be indexed by Google. Not so anymore. Google can pull text and links from your rich media files. It’s much harder to pull off any optimization in a flash file, but at least now flash sites aren’t left in the dust. So why all the fuss about flash?

There are multiple problems with flash only sites:

1. Not everyone has flash. Requiring people to download something just to view your site will most likely cause them to go elsewhere.
2. Visually impaired people will find your site useless.
3. No one likes waiting around for 60 seconds for your page to load. The internet is vast, if your page doesn’t hold the a users attention immediately, they will find another site.
4. Navigating in flash is unfamiliar to many users. The “back” button on the browser no longer works and unless you have a perfect menu built into your site, many users will give up and find a text based site.

In addition, flash is not longer “cutting edge” technology. It’s not “cool” or “edgy” to have a flash only site anymore.

This DOES NOT mean that you can’t have any flash elements on your page. Flash can be used to seamlessly integrate video, music, image galleries and lots of other interesting multi-media files. Flash can display many of the things that text can’t, but it can’t replace text based sites.

If you have been considering monetizing your blog, it’s definitely an interesting read.
Thoughts on PayPerPost - Technosailor.com

This is a handy tool to increase traffic to your site, especially if you are a fan site.
To help optimize your image ranking, you can follow these easy tips.

1. Use relevant keywords in the file name. If you image is of a cat in a Santa Clause costume (how did you get the cat in that outfit, anyway?) then name your file something like cat_as_santa_clause.jpg or cat_christmas.jpg.
2. Use relevant keywords in the alt tag for the image. If the image is of, say, President Bush, then use “President George. W. Bush” in the alt tag.
3. Use relevant keywords in the caption of the image. The text closest to the image provide context for Google to determine the image content.
4. Don’t block the Googlebot from your image directory with robots.txt.

Of course, there are downsides to the Image Search.

• Google gives users the options to just view the image and ignore your site completely. This means that even if your image gets a lot of hits, it may not translate into more traffic for the rest of your site.
• An increase in image views may increase your bandwidth a lot. If you have very little bandwidth on your hosting account, then this may not work for you.
• Users may hotlink your images by pulling them from Google. This is annoying and can waste your bandwidth.

Depending on the site you have, you may or may not find it useful to try to optimize your images for Google Image Search.

To a blog, an affiliate implies a commercial relationship. Generally speaking, a blogger will put up affiliate links for pay. These can be either paid links from another blog looking for traffic, advertising from commercial companies, or similar types of commercialization.

To a fan site, an affiliate (sometimes called a sister or sibling site) is a website within the same fandom that engages in a reciprocal relationship. This can be as simple as just exchanging links or as complex as exchanging content, sharing forums, or working together on a project.

Be careful what you are asking for when you contact another site asking for a link, despite my advice not to do this. When you want a reciprocal link, ask for it by name, otherwise you may find yourself either receiving a bill from a blog or facing an angry fan site webmaster.

First off, if you’re leaving comments on a blog, chances are that they are using the “nofollow” attribute. This means that spiders will not follow that link back to your website/blog. So if you’re commenting on a blog just to fill in the little textbox that says URL, you’re doing it wrong.

Let me repeat that for you. Don’t comment on a blog/guestbook/shoutbox/forum just to self promote (unless you’re dealing with a plugboard, in which case, go for it.) Not only will it piss off the blogger (and possibly cause them to delete your comments) but it is a waste of your time. Comment only if you have something meaninful to say, even if it’s just a “thanks for the article.” You want to start a dialogue with the website maintainer.

Do not use a spam tool to post the same comment on multiple blogs. Bloggers are not stupid. They know these tools exist and can tell copy and paste comments from real content. If the victim is feeling vindictive, they can report your IP to your ISP or report you to your webhost, possibly getting you booted from both. Don’t be stupid.

Why do you want to start a dialogue? Because you want the webmaster to think of you as an individual person, not just another anonymous passer-by on the internet. If you pique their interest they might come wandering over to your website, and if they like it enough, they will link it on their own.

Obviously, this kind of tactic works best if you’re dealing with websites with similar topics to your own, but don’t be afraid to make friends across the board. Like any kind of networking, you never know who will recommend you to someone else.

In short, leave thoughtful comments on other sites, not just promos for your own work.

So what kind of thing am I talking about? Well, it doesn’t have to be an actual tangible thing. You can give away information like:

• Tutorials
• eBooks (of your own making, of course)
• Resource Lists
• Patterns
• Hints and Tips

Other intangible (and thus easy to give) things include:

• WordPress Layouts
• CSS Templates
• JavaScripts
• Graphics
• PSD, Vector or Action files

Of course, I mean that you should give away these things legally, so if you can create this things yourself, all the better. If you can’t, try hitting up college students in design or comp sci courses as they’ll often do cheap labor in exchange for something else to put on their resume.

Don’t forget to include a little promotion for yourself within your giveaways (a text link in a layout, a readme.txt, a note in the meta info).

Chances are after the first few folks find your new giveaway (which you’ve done some promotion for yourself already) they’ll start spreading the word to their friends, submitting your site to Stumble, and linking to your site from their own.

In many fandoms it’s perfectly acceptable to e-mail another webmaster whom you have never met and request to exchange links or become affiliates.

This does not fly with many members of the blogging sphere. Do not e-mail a webmaster whom you have never spoken to before and ask them to link you. This is considered extremely rude and will result in many bloggers simply blocking you.

Popular bloggers and webmasters have dozens of newbies harassing them weekly for links and favors. If you join the pile, you will be ignored. If you want to become known to a webmaster, participate in their site. Leave well-written, thoughtful comments on their posts. Participate in their contests. When they have a post relevant to something you’re writing, link back to them. Once you establish yourself as a person and an asset to link to, they are likely to link to you on their own.

It’s important to know what “part” of the internet you’re on when you’re participating. Different internet cultures have different rules of etiquette and you will do well to research and follow them when you are active within that internet culture.