Optimize Your Web

Wanting to send a text message while sitting at your phone?  Google makes this easy by allow SMS messages from GMail.  If you are logged into Google, simply click here and you can see which of the awesome Google lab projects you want to try.

I suggest you try the SMS messaging, the custom colors for labels (especially if you’re a label-holic such as myself), pictures in chat, and Google Calendar.  There are plenty more that may be useful, but those seem to be really handy for myself.

Share with us if you have any good ones to add, or just want to post your opinion about it.

Right now, I am in the tough decision of what combination of training methods I should choose in order to be a MCTS and then MCPD certified ASP.NET 3.5 developer.  Listed below are the possible methods and their pros and cons:

Books: They are cheap and can be taken anywhere for learning.  Bad thing is that you do not have much direction besides reading straight through and cannot ask for help on the book (some come with forum discussion areas, but feedback is not guaranteed to be fast, easily understood, or correct).

Online Training: Cost is higher, but these series of courses (to prepare for a certain exam) are scheduled to take a really long time.  While you do get some feedback and can ask questions, if time is a factor in your decision, probably one of the worst ways to train.

Classes: If you complete the prerequisties, classes are the fastest way to learn.  Instructors that are certified know exactly what you are needing to work on for the exams, give great pointers, and will answer any questions you may have.  Downside is that they are the most expensive way to learn and if you are starting, the prerequisties probably have their own classes (which leads to even more money having to be spent).

Vocational, Community College: While these classes may give you a better understanding and allow for quick feedback, they are basically in the same basket as online courses, except you can’t choose what time of the day to work on the class like you can with online classes.

Online Videos/Tutorials: These can come from places such as Microsoft.com, or be hosted on third party non-affiliated websites to show you how to start application development from scratch.  These should be mixed in with any variety of training methods you choose due to their short time, and (most of the time) free of charge while providing useful information for our knowledge enhancing.

So needless to say, I am going to approach these exams in a structured manner.  I am going to first get the books and read/practice code/syntax and get a solid grasp of the language and structure before I move on to the next method.  Throughout the training process, I am going to mix in tutorials and online videos to see how a professional instructor or programmer organizes and writes their application.  I believe after this, I will take a class and learn within the time (2 days to a week normally) before I take the exam.  Another helpful thing: practice exams.  Take these to make sure you are ready to take the actual exam, because nothing is a bigger waste of money than going into an exam and not knowing where your skill level resides.  If anyone has any suggestions or other combinations, please let me know.

Many users, such as myself, enjoy the great addons to customize and enhance their internet experience for Mozilla Firefox. Well there’s more than a few add-ons out there and most are housed here. Here is a good list of add-ons that may interest you, especially for web development and design, along with blogging and search engine optimization (SEO).

• Aging Tabs – Makes unused tabs fade with age and highlights the selected tab.
  • Great for people who bog down their system with their endless tabbing and want a quick reference to see where they can free up some memory by closing an old tab.
• Better Gmail - Enhances Gmail with a compilation of user scripts and styles.
  • If you use Gmail and Firefox then you must try this addon and get the most out of your Google mail.
• ColorZilla – Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.
  • If you do any type of web design, photoshopping, or anything related, this addon will help you quickly grab any color from any picture or site.
• Delicious Bookmarks - Access your bookmarks whenever you go and keep them organized.
  • This is a great addon for anyone who uses delicious bookmarks, which if you bookmark on multiple computers or want to share bookmarks with peers or friends, this is a must.
• Download Statusbar - View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar.
  • If you are tired of having the default status window, this one is easily customizable to allow small notifications of downloads.
• FireFTP – FTP client.
  • Enough said. Since Firefox does not render FTP connections correctly, this will do it for you.
• IE Tab – Enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Firefox.
  • Great for those sites that were not optimized for Firefox or that require IE. I don’t enjoy those sites, but have this as a little work around. (An example is the stattracker program for Yahoo! Fantasy Sports).
• SEO For Firefox – SEO Information inline with Google and Yahoo! search results.
  • Enabling this addon in the bottom right of your browser and do a search on google. This gives you all sorts of great information about the sites along with a Keyword analyzer.
• User Agent Switcher – Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
  • Can be used to hide your User Agent information that can be see in website analyzers such as Google Analytics. Also, you can pretend to be an indexing bot like GoogleBot and see if you can view some things only GoogleBot is supposed to see!
• Web Developer – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
  • You can see more things than you probably want to with this addon, such as css, image properties and lots more.

Lately I have been reading Digg a lot. But I have noticed some abuse by some of the posters and really annoying “coincidences” with news. I am a little annoyed with the clicks that seem to be apparent with submitting news on Digg. Why am I annoyed? Because I feel that this does not allow others to share posts and have corrupted what the site’s original purpose. Here are some irregularities and suggestions on how to fix:

• People digg anything their friends shout to them or tell them to digg.
  • This ruins the purpose to digg something you actually think is worthy. I don’t have a problem with people digging their friends posts or shouts, but not strong.
  • Solution: Have algorithms that restrict the number of diggs you can digg a day. Maybe limit diggs when they are shouted, as in only allow 50 diggs even if someone shouts to 2000 friends.
• People digg everything so that people friend/fan them and allow them to shout at them. An example is seen in this post: showing 80 soome-odd digs in 3 minutes which may be from using the script described in this post: About a Digg Script.
  • Solution: Same as in the above post, and also limiting the number of stories someone can digg per day. Maybe restrict this to those that are their friends or however Digg sees fit.
• Stories seem to duplicate with slightly different titles. I have seen several posts recently about the “Rapping of the Atom Machine” or whatever everyone is calling it. This post continually hits the front page. It makes it so front page stories are continually recycled.
  • Have people monitor Digg. Easy as that. Have a moderator, or a few to look at stories, look at abuse from people, and take corrective action.
• The top “X” number of posters control the front page…. Why and how? Is it abuse or legitimate?
  • If you have algorithms in place and moderators in action to limit these, then people won’t have the ability to do abuse the system and get paid for it.  Another option is to make all articles Anonymous until it either hits the front page or is “x” hours/days old.

I assume with the Ads on the site that Digg and it’s creators are getting a good money stream. Why not pay someone to sit at home and monitor Digg? Is it because any story regardless it making Digg money? Well you will soon see a decline in users once they notice these problems.

I for one will continue to read Digg as long as people are noticing the same mistakes and abuse that I notice. A public outcry has already been seen as we can see here calling for the ban of what seems to be an abusive user.

I certainly hope Digg follow the suggestions of the many of users out there, and maybe take my ideas and others and turn Digg back into the Democracy that it was intended to be, otherwise your user base may just shrink while you ignore the public calling for justice.

One main reason that you should require authorization for every comment and trackback/pingback for your blog is this:  If you don’t, spam will get through and that will negatively rank your blog/website.  It even has the possibility to show up your search results on search engines.  I have seen this first hand, and it makes your site look very unprofessional and very spammish.  I would take the extra 2 minutes and look through your comments and approve or mark as spam.  This is minimal effort with great benefits and should be undertaken by any serious blogger or website administrator.  Setup your options so it notifies you of any comment awaiting authorization and keep your blog looking great and appearing professional.

Trying to get the most out of your blog?  Want to inform a lot of XML-RPC site update services of your latest posts?  Well you need to enable a few things in your WordPress wp-admin and then use a long list of sites that have been compiled for your convenience.  But first, you need to have the following updated in your Settings.  Go into Settings -> Writing and look for the following:

To post to WordPress from a desktop blogging client or remote website that uses the Atom Publishing Protocol or one of the XML-RPC publishing interfaces you must enable them below.

Remote Publishing

To post to WordPress from a desktop blogging client or remote website that uses the Atom Publishing Protocol or one of the XML-RPC publishing interfaces you must enable them below.

Then you need to add the list of update sites for XML-RPC to this part further below in the same section.

Update Services

When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services. For more about this, see Update Services on the Codex. Separate multiple service URLs with line breaks.

Here is the list:

(continue reading…)

Everyone nowadays has video on their websites, which is not always the method people want to receive their news. CNN, MSNBC, and any other large news source needs to understand that while video clips are great for some people, it’s not great for all.

I myself have a hard time watching news clips at work because it may bother those in offices close to mine. Why not have an article that goes along with the video so those that do not or cannot watch the video can still get information that they want. It’s very frustrating to want to see some breaking news but cannot due to the inability to watch the video.

Let me know what you all think and if you think it’s a good idea for news companies to take a little extra time and write a print form of the video news.