An excellent TED Talk by Eli Pariser: Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles’. One of the really surprising things he claims, is that even if you’re not logged into Google, the search results are still being filtered for you. He ran a quick experiment, to show how different people got wildly different results for the same word, at the same time on the same day.
I often have my small business website clients request images to be used in online advertising. Generally they place these ads on a website and are charged a monthly fee. When visitors click on the image, they are taken to my clients’ websites via a link. But how do my clients really know what kind of return on their advertising investment they are getting? My favorite website traffic tool is Web-Stat. This tutorial assumes you are using Web-Stat, but it should give you enough general information to help you regardless of the tool you’re using.
I just noticed that my Feedburner counter shows zero readers. I went searching to see if anyone else has this issue and found this post: Feedburner Counter displays 0 readers on all blogs – so apparently it’s not just me. I agree with Vincent and am hoping Google hasn’t just decided to kill Feedburner services. Here’s a link to the official Feedburner Status Blog.
UPDATE: The number came back, magically, by itself. No idea why.
I use Web-Stat to track my website traffic and to warn me if my site is down. Whenever my websitesite goes down, I wonder to myself…how often do websites go down? My hosting company is DreamHost and whenever there’s an issue people rant and rave about downtime. But I wanted to share my actual downtime statistics with folks, who may be wondering: how much downtime is “normal” for a small business website?
I’m on holiday as I write this. I picked the month of December to be on a holiday for several reasons. One of my reasons is that I can use Google Trends to see when searches for what I’m selling (small business website design) drops.
I don’t actually know why, but when I write. I put one space after each period. I can’t remember why I learned to do this, and sometimes when I write, I feel a little pang of guilt with this feeling like maybe I should be putting two spaces. I learned to type on a manual typewriter in high school. But I’m lazy, so I put one. Recently, I read this article in Slate, entitled ” Two spaces after a period: Why you should never, ever do it.” and I am now guilt free. If you type, it’s great reading. Excellent for cocktail “did you know that…” conversations.
Here’s a link to my favorite Favicon Generator, it creates the icon for you and gives you the instructions and code you need to implement it. It works!
I read this wonderful article recently called “The Quickest Way to Kill Your Online Success“. It is an excellent read for folks, especially small business owners, who think that they can just use social media sites, like Facebook, to replace an actual “real” website for their businesses. Here’s my favorite quote:
“You should always, always, always have a website. I know some authors who use Facebook as their websites. Big mistake. I know other authors who get a website that doesn’t belong to them, meaning they are part of a community of free sites they don’t own. If the community decides to stop doing websites and goes away, guess what happens? So does your content.”
It’s a really superb article for small business owners, so please do give it a read, it’s long, but contains what I think is great advice on how to use social media to promote your website, and not just promote social media sites themselves.
I came across this article reviewing Google + entitled “I’d Rather Be a Minus Than Be on Google +“. I am admittedly social media phobic – I closed my Facebook account after three weeks and only look at Twitter during emergencies. So I was curious about someone’s opinion of this new Google+ which is supposedly going to be the new Facebook killer. It’s a good article, enjoy.
Normally I strongly encourage clients who are getting a new website to use their domain based email as their business email address. So rather than having janedoe@aol.com, I try to get them to use jane@theirdomainname.com – or any email based on their website domain. Recently, two of my clients who wanted to use AOL had a strange thing happen.
“The comparison clearly suggests that more people on the higher side of IQ scale have moved away from Internet Explorer in the last 5 years,” AptiQuant concludes.
I have many clients who seem to get stuck at this point in the DreamHost set-up process, and it’s because, well, while I love DreamHost, they don’t make this easy or intuitive. So here’s my attempt at making it clear. This assumes you already have an account with DreamHost, and have registered a domain, but need to set up hosting.
Say you’ve purchased your domain from a company, like GoDaddy. And now you want to transfer it to a different company, like DreamHost. Here are steps you need to take. I’m going to keep them general enough so that you should be able to transfer them from and to any domain registrar.
Today one of my WordPress clients couldn’t modify any of her posts. She was using a computer with IE 9. I was on my computer using Firefox, and could modify her posts with no problem. A quick search on Google yielded others with the identical issue. For this client, all I could recommend was to switch Firefox, which she did and verified problem solved. You can view the identical issue reported here on the WordPress.com forum.
First the confession, I’m not on Facebook. I was for about three weeks but after spending all day at my computer, I just didn’t want to spend more time on another application. Some of my clients find it very worthwhile for their small businesses, I just didn’t quite have the community thing going for me.
So it was with great interest that I read this article in Techland: Facebook is not your friend. The article makes some good points, in that Facebook is a business, and exists to make money, and therefore, there may be times when your privacy will be sacrificed. The article is really a call to be smarter about what you post online, which in general, I think is good advice both for people who are on Facebook and blogging in general. Enjoy.
Aldebaran Web Design now offers phone consultation services for folks who don’t have a website, or have a website designed by another developer.
These consultations can be used for general web design questions, WordPress blogging lessons, ECT (ECommerce Templates Online Store) help, or questions about Search Engine Optimization. And you don’t have to have your website designed by Aldebaran Web Design to use this new service – it’s available to everyone.
I had a client today upgrade her WordPress blog to 3.1.1 and when she clicked on any categories or posts, she got a 404 page not found error. Took a while of searching on the web but solution was found. Solution required regeneration of brand new .htaccess file and deletion of one plugin. Details are below.
