Sunday, February 27, 2005

Search words for Spy Journal Web Sites

Top 20 of 774 Total Search Strings

astrumi
bill hekman
calvary life fellowship in indonesia
insaniquarium hints
insaniquarium tips
operation auxin
austrumi
calvary life fellowship indonesia
muslims of meulaboh
microsoft action pack
auxin
excel tips
meulabohon
spy tips
sumif criteria
astrumi password
automatic trendlines
bill hekman pastor
dlgaskdestts_msg1
go daddy superbowl


Posted by: Jethro | 11:20 PM |

Submit your RSS feed to MSN Search Via XML-RPC

Thanks to Robin Good for this one.

The opportunity, which as I had reported before through my RSSTop55 was already available to all independent publishers via the My MSN Portal facility "search for content to add" feature, is now consolidated and made more effective thanks to the partnership MSN Search has just finalized with news syndication service Moreover.


Posted by: Jethro | 1:12 AM |

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Good blogging is Quality not Quantity

I use my blog as an outlet. Sort of a daily journal that I can refer back to and answer that question of "what was I doing last Thursday?" but some bloggers are true publishers. These artists put thought into their writings and create works that stir emotion and hold our attention. Sanity Adrift is one such blog. His posts come every 3-7 days and are always well written, intelligent and captivating. His most recent post, where babies come from starts off as an adorable story about a mother answering that dreaded baby question for her daughter and ends up leaving you holding the fruit rollup while imagining Ziggy's brother's fate with a grin.
A well thought out blog entry can be worth day's of haphazardly written notes.

djuggler's personal blog is Reality Me.


Posted by: djuggler | 11:46 PM |

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Jon Stewart's Daily Show discusses bloggers

Jon Stewart's Daily Show piece on bloggers is an absolute must watch! Exceptional! Thanks to Halley for the link!


Posted by: djuggler | 12:17 PM |

Monday, February 21, 2005

Preventing Comment Spam

Comment spam is when your blog receives a comment that simply says "Visit my site at Reality Me! Love your blog btw." Or perhaps you receive an advertisement in the comment. The hopes of the spammer in the recent past have not necessarily been to gain a couple of clicks from your comment but instead to falsely increase their page ranking in Google and other search engines (yes, there are others).

Google has come up with a method to not prevent comment spamming but make it so ineffective that the incentive is gone. Google's blog discusses this in more detail but the long and short of it is adding rel="nofollow" to a link will prevent a search engine from using that link as part of the page ranking criteria. For example, <a href="http://cursed-juggler.blogspot.com">Reality Me</a> is what comment spammers do now. Google's suggestion to end the effectiveness of comment spam is to show the link as <a href="http://cursed-juggler.blogspot.com" rel="nofollow">Reality Me</a>

Of course they are not suggesting that you edit each and every comment to add rel="nofollow" yourself. The makers of commenting software like Haloscan will do this automatically. Google's blog entry lists several companies that have already jumped on the bandwagon.

Special thanks to Christian Cantrell for bringing this to our attention.


Posted by: djuggler | 2:11 AM |

Friday, February 18, 2005

Drupal releases - modules and themes

Drupal has a page of modules and themes that are available for download and installation. Most come with pretty good instructions on how to install and set up. I did find that removing a module (by deleting the module file on the server) caused the apache web server to crash. Maybe there is a better way to remove them.
Some specific modules I have installed on the www.lite-house.org site are:
event
remindme
image
sitemenu
syndication

I am thinking of installing Taxonomy Access Control as a method of controlling access to certain topics to certain user levels.


Posted by: Jethro | 2:50 PM |

HTML and CSS Resource

I have found a beaut new HTML and CSS resource. I shall be using them lots!
They even have made it easy to link to them by creating the html for the links for you.
I will add these to the side bar in due course.

Tizag.com - Webmaster Tutorials and Resources - Complete and concise webmaster tutorials to increase your knowledge of HTML and CSS.
Tizag CSS Tutorials - An interactive CSS Tutorial that let's you practice on what you have learned without leaving the web site.
Tizag HTML Tutorials - Complete and concise HTML lessons aimed towards novice to intermediate web designers.
Web Host Guide - An informative guide that discusses what should be considered and understood before choosing a web host.


Posted by: Jethro | 12:46 AM |

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Blogs of note

I am going to start linking interesting blogs here. Not the mundane or ordinairy, but only those that stand out from the rest for some particular reason.
I doubt you can compete with today's pick for its uniquenss comes not from its subject matter (raising Yousef), or its blog design (disturbingly similar to my createablogblog blog) but its location. Its the blog of a lady living in war torn Gaza raising her son.


Posted by: Jethro | 10:23 PM |

Careful what you post - don't lose your job!

Another article discussing the dangers of blogging about work or proprietary information.

Mark Jen landed a dream job with Google Inc. in January. He was fired less than a month later. His infraction? He ran a Web log, where he freely gabbed about his impressions of life at the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet search giant.
And lawsuits:
In recent months Apple Computer has launched legal attacks against operators of at least three Internet sites -- not run by Apple employees -- that allegedly posted or linked to information that the Cupertino, Calif., maker of the iPod portable music player claims is proprietary.
Think before you hit "Publish Post"
djuggler's personal blog is Reality Me


Posted by: djuggler | 1:31 AM |

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Making money from your blog or news site

Robin Good has all the good oil on this one. (pun intended)
He has written a fantastic article about it.
Follow the links to find out how he makes money with no banner adverts.


Posted by: Jethro | 6:44 PM |

Thursday, February 03, 2005

Drupal site being configured

I have started configuring two drupal sites. One for my brother at www.jonomiller.com and the other for my sister at www.lite-house.org.
Drupal is a pretty flexible and powerful content mmanagement system and includes blogging as part of the package.


Posted by: Jethro | 1:56 AM |

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Adding an RSS or XML feed to your blog

Read What is RSS and then choose an RSS aggregator (or news reader) to view your RSS and XML feeds in.

How to add an RSS feed to your blogger blog.
I am going to add an RSS feed to the createablogblog blog (is that too many blogs?).
Here is how to do it.
From your blogger dashboard click the little blue cog (settings link).
Next click the Site Feed tab.
Select Yes to Publish Site Feed and Full to Descriptions.
Now take note of the URL (link) for the feed.
Click Save Settings.
Later we will look at adding this to your blog page so readers can subscribe.

My RSS feed is in the ATOM format which is what blogger uses.
http://createablogblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
You can look at this if you want but it is designed to be read by a news reader. I use Sauce Reader but there are many others. Some integrate with outlook, some are stand alone and some integrate into a browser. For example Mozilla Firefox has Sage as an integrated extension.


Posted by: Jethro | 10:11 AM |