That IT Girl

Series: Selling My Domain Part 2

2011-04-01T23:08:00.001-04:00

This is my first post about what I did today to sell my domain, www.fashionmista.com. I have no idea if this will work at all, but it's an interesting challenge. So here's what I did today:

Made the graphic that you see above, to be the blog header over at FashionMista. This way, when a person is on the blog, they can't miss it, right? No matter what page they are on. I was going to put something like this in the right side column, but thought that this was good enough. I'm not going to blog over there anymore, so when you click on the top banner to take you to the home page, you'll always go to the page about the sale.
Changed the blog title tag to "FashionMista.com is FOR SALE". This edit is effective in all search engine results, so when someone is googling "fashionmista" to see what's out there for that term, they will see this sentance right away. My blog pretty much dominates this term for pages and pages. So I wanted to bring the potential buyer to my message right away: in the blue underlined sentance of the title in search results for SEO.
Emailed my fellow members at Collective-E, several of whome are in fashion and may know someone.
Updated my Facebook personal profile with the news and a link to the blog post.
At Collective-E, changed my company profile for this blog to have the new "for sale" blog header, and description about the decision. Press and fashion types frequent Collective-E, so they might see it.
Also at Collective-E, added the domain sale to The Marketplace. Collective-E will tweet it for me, and maybe share it on Facebook if it works with their editorial.

One of these days, I'm going to have to comb the Media Contact Lists at Collective-E, and pitch some editors. Not my forte or comfort zone. Luckily, my busines partner at Collective-E is Sabina Ptacin of Red Branch PR, so she can hold my hand. ;)

Read all of the articles in this series here.

Series: Selling a Domain Part 1

2011-04-01T22:15:00.001-04:00

Today I put a domain I own up for sale. The domain is www.fashionmista.com, and it was the domain for the first blog that I every created. The blog itself with all of its content is not for sale, just this domain name. And it's not really *just* this domain name. It means that I have to start all over with that blog and that brand, and reinvent its purpose.

I will be chronicallying the experience, which may lead to nothing. It may lead to me being wrong about this term, that has come to mean "male fashionista". To me, it's an opportunity for someone to own a very basic domain name for a website they are building or have built around this topic. Usually those are hard to come by.

I've been approached before, but didn't take it seriously because I wasn't emotionally ready to let go. Today, however, I am. The word is a very good fit for its new meaning, and I'm ready to let the male fashionistas have it!

Read all of the articles in this series here.

How to let Fans Engage/Write on your Facebook Business Page

2009-08-27T12:58:00.003-04:00

An easy way to increase interactivity on your Facebook page is to let your fans easily post to your Wall. The Wall is something that is enabled for both your personal Facebook page (like when friends write on your wall to say "hi" or share something), and the same now holds true for your Facebook Business Page.

Your first instict as a business may be to only allow posts from your business on your wall, to keep it professional. However, your fans (ie customers, supporters, potential customers) may want to publically chime in and let you know that they support you, or have a question that if answered, could apply to other potential customers. In fact, there may be some fans who have written on your Wall right now, but you never noticed!

To check, there is a little link that you very easily could have missed. It's at the top of your page, just below those tabs that say "Wall", "Info", "Photos", and the like. Under that is a text link that is called your business name. Next to it is called "Just Fans". It looks like this:

If you click on "Just Fans," you will see if any of your adoring fans wrote to you in a public way. Now. This public exposure is an incentive for them to write on your wall, which in turn shows up in their News Feeds as an activity that they did, which their friends can see, which then might prompt their friends to come on by and visit your page and see your business. So it may be in your best interest to allow these fan posts to be on the main portion of your Wall. If you did, your main Wall, if you selected that you want fan comments on it, would look like this:

Where you see the little yellow "katie james" squares is my business posting something to my page. Where you see other pictures of people is those people posting things to my page, and everyone else can easily see them. You can see from this picture that some fans of Katie James are asking Facebook questions. This is a great way for me to see them, and answer them back here on the blog.

To enable this to happen, follow these steps:

Click on the "Edit Page" link in the top left of your page, under your logo.

From there, you will use the little picture of the pencil to select which things you want to edit. Click the pencil near "Wall Settings". Click "Edit".

From the pulldown, select this from the setting, where it says "Default View for Wall", click "Posts by Page and Fans".

Now the fans will show up on your main Wall, with the posts from your business. To change this back, just follow these steps, and click "Only Posts by Page". In this case, "Page" means you.

It's Pouring Projects - The Latest from Katie James Pixelated

2009-05-23T15:33:00.005-04:00

We've been busy here! Three projects wrapped up this week for the Katie James Pixelated team:

Alisa Benay's Blog, Couture Corset Wedding Gown Designer

Alisa couture line of corset wedding gowns is quickly growing in popularity, and she needed her blog to keep the pace and reflect well of the brand.
DESIGN: We worked with the existing look of Alisa's website and using elements from her logo to drive this design.
TECH: We built this on the WordPress platform, as Alisa wanted to have important static pages and be able to stand on its own as a website, not just a blog.
WHO'S MANAGING: Alisa has the keys and is driving this baby. She is able to train her staff on making updates to the blog posts and the the static pages, as well as to both side columns.
www.alisabenay.com/blog

The Purcell Sisters

The Purcell Sisters, if you haven't met them, are some of the funniest, well manicured southern belles living in Manhattan. They wrote a book, Cocktail Parties Straight Up! to help everyone throw an amazing party, and have brought their delicious recipes to the Internet.
DESIGN: Their original website was designed in images - every last word of it. So maintenance -wise, making changes was A. not in their control, B. more expensive, and C. could take a while. We based this design off of elements that they liked from their old website, with a little more flair.
CHALLENGES: Recipes are quite popular, and there were a lot of them. We discussed ways to categorize them, and retain natural SEO opportunities in the menus and page titles, leaving the copywriting to the Sisters when they wanted to optimize certain pages. The menus are also built to keep you on the recipe you are looking at, so that you can browse the recipes in the menus without constantly changing pages.
TECH: This website was built on the Drupal platform.
WHO'S MANAGING: The Purcell Sisters, of course! We sent them directions on how to create a new recipe and to edit non-recipe pages. We built the recipe pages as a special template, so that all the Sisters had to worry about was having an image, typing in the title, blurb at the top, ingredients, recipe, and the make-ahead-factor.
Warning: If you go to this website, you will leave hungry. Very hungry.
www.purcellsisters.com

Gemma Redux :: Press, Lookbook and Announcement Box
Press page: (updates like adding products)

Announcement Box: (can be turned on or off in seconds)

Rachel Dooley, designer and founder of Gemma Redux, is on fire. She is getting press from major outlets, and her fans are loving it.
GOAL: To quickly feature new press, and make it easy to buy the featured jewelry right away.
DESIGN: We designed these new components to work with the existing design - clean and contemporary.
CHALLENGES: This website shopping cart design is quite unique, and we had to crack open a few elements of the content management system to make it all work smoothly.
TECH: It's on the ZenCart platform. Bet you wouldn't have guessed that, right?
WHO'S MANAGING: We both are. Depending on how busy it is at Gemma Redux, we may jump in to lend a hand. But, all components were built to be user friendly for their team.

For more information on other websites, see www.katie-james.com/classes

Why Meta Description Tags in a Blog Can Hurt your Socialness

2009-04-12T12:22:00.006-04:00

We just answered how to add a meta description tag to your Blogger blog template because someone asked this SEO question over at Collective-E.

However. Inserting a meta tag into your blog may not be the best idea.

Long ago, Meta Description tags stopped having any impact on how your site is ranked in Google search results (for a definition of the meta description tag with pictures, click here). This may not be the case for other search engines like Yahoo, but it is for Google (as of this post publication). However. Google may display the meta description tag in search results, and social outlets like Facebook will display them as well (as of this post publication...websites are always changing how they work). Here are Google's words stating that meta description tags won't affect your rankings. They do, however, still display them when it's a good fit.

So. Just when you thought "Great! One less thing to worry about!", you could argue: "Hey wait: Google can pick up and display a meta description tag, and so can Facebook, so I'll use it by creating some great marketing copy that reflects my overall website or blog."

This is the angle I usually take. However, this is not the case when it comes to blog posts. Recently, I "shared a link" on Facebook, which means that I posted a link to my Facebook profile, which then signaled to all of my friends there that I had posted a link. Not only does Facebook let me post a link, but it will display a photo if I so choose. The link that I wanted to share was just a silly one: I had just gotten my hair colored brown and blond, and had put it into a ponytail, and it had split itself into the two colors, and it looked interesting. I didn't color one side brown and the other side blond, as it's all blended when styled normally, but the ponytail was visually interesting, so I shared it with my friends.

Now. To be a good little SEO person, I had just recently installed the code to show a meta description tag on my blog template. Years have gone by, and I have never done this. So I did it a few weeks ago. I was in a rush, so the only thing I put in was "girly stuff", which of course has almost no use SEO-wise at all, but was a descriptive start at what you could find at my blog, FashionMista.

I have shared many links via Facebook, and always knew that Facebook automatically pulled the blog post title, the first line of my content on my blog, and a picture. The pulled content did the job, and I never had to make a "Comment" about my own post to explain what was going on.

Until now. Because I had altered my meta description tag, which said only: "girly stuff", when I went to post the link, Facebook showed everyone this:

The blue content, "FashionMista: Look at the Two Tone" is the blog post title. Since "girly stuff" is meta description tag, and hence the content that Facebook automatically displayed, it doesn't explain much about the hair. If this had been a normal article (aka not about a picture), the user would not be very inclined to click on my link, or at least let me explain the style. In fact, nobody did click on the link, which would have explained the style. They only commented based on their reactions to the picture. My mother in particular, was not pleased. She thought I colored one side brown, and the other blond, and looked like that every day. She almost went into shock and I did consider "unfriending" her to temper any social networking damage control.

Right away, I removed the meta description code from my blog template. I waited a day for this to absorb on the internets, and posted a new blog post with a new photo. This is how the new link has shown (with my boring hair style):

You see the blog post title: "FashionMista: Hair in 'Normal' Times of Styling". You see the photo, and you see the first few lines of content.

It is for this reason that I am advising not to fill in the meta description code on your blog. The overall meta description tag, for SEO uses on blogs, are not helpful and should not be used. They are too limiting. Blog posts are so specific to one topic or sliver of a topic, that you do not want that insight to be lost under a blanket statement of what your blog is.

For example: which statement is more effective for this blog post?
Content from the blog: "Who knew a ponytail gone wild could have launched a motherly protest in Facebook. There were honest to goodness revolts going on. Mom threatened to pull out of her highly anticipated trip to NYC, and dad ..."

Meta description tag for entire blog: "FashionMista is a chronicle of a designer who quit her day job to really design, and do a whole lot of other things."

Which do you resonate to? Especially if you were following my stream of link postings on Facebook? The statement that is more direct? Or the statement that is an umbrella term?

If you've noticed a trend in what makes people click on your shared links, do tell.

How to Add the Meta Description Tag in Blogger Blog Templates

2009-04-12T12:15:00.003-04:00

If you want to include the Meta description and keyword tags to your blogger based blog template, here is how you can do it.

Note: meta tags aren't that important anymore SEO-wise. However, they may show up when data is pulled from a social media outlet like Facebook, so if you do have something there, make sure it makes sense. BUT: It is not recommended. I did a writeup of why.

If you are still set on adding the meta description tag to your blog, here are the directions. The meta keyword tag will be pretty worthless because it is designed to include a string of words that are found on a specific page. Well, your blog has many pages on it, and if you are making this change at the root level, you only get to put in 1 meta description and 1 set of meta keywords in, which most likely will not include what one of your blog pages is talking about.

Log into your blog.

Click on Layout.

Click on Template and Edit HTML.

Make a copy of your code first. Do this by just Selecting All if it (Edit > Select All) and pasting it into a neutral program like Notepad or Text Edit. Try not to use Word, because that will add yuchy stuff to it without you realizing it.

Once you are looking at the code in your Template, find this line at the top of the code:
b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/

This line is already there. Leave it, don't edit it at all, and place the meta content code beneath it.

The code you will place will be:

meta content='TYPE YOUR DESCRIPTION HERE' name='description'/
meta content='TYPE YOUR KEYWORDS HERE' name='keywords'/

I didn't wrap these lines of code with the <> symbols because if I did, the code would actually kick in, and you wouldn't be able to see it here. So remember to close your code with the <>.

For your keywords, you can just put a string of words and you don't need commas. There is no need to repeat words in there. That won't help ya.

Once you have entered in the code, click to Preview your blog. This is very important. If your blog doesn't show up or looks funnhy, then you added the code incorrectly, and you need to go get the code you copied and pasted from before into Notepad or Text Edit, and start again. Or, just click Cancel and start again.

Good luck!

What is a Hashtag (#) or Pound Sign on Twitter?

2009-04-08T18:32:00.004-04:00

A "hashtag" , or a pound sign, is a Twitter term for the symbol that looks like this: #

When used in Twitter, the hashtag signals that the person Twittering is referring to a subject, or common theme or topic that other people are talking about in Twitter.

Here's a good article that defines the hashtag and gives a bit of history. Side note: funny that 'history' now defines something that is not even a year old, as of this post.

TECHNICAL USES OF THE HASHTAG #
A technical side effect of using this term, is that depending on how you are accessing Twitter, either from TweetDeck, Tweetie, or the regular old fashioned way at www.Twitter.com, Twitter will activate the phrase that directly follows the #. Here is an example of the # (hashtag) in use:

@ktjames I love to follow @collectivee, @sabinaredbranch, @bethschoenfeldt, @popjudaica @TheEllenShow, #followfriday

This is an example from a tweet from me, @ktjames, to my followers. I am telling them that I like to follow these Twitterers (remember, the Twitter name is offset by the @ symbol, and Twitter automatically makes it a link for you). I end it with #followfriday. This hashtag phrase is a commonly used phrase that people us on Fridays to tell their followers who else they like to follow. It helps spread the Twitter love by helping your Twitter friends gain followers.

BRANDING AND YOUR HASHTAGS #
Anyone can make up their own reason for a #, but it's up to the Twitter community to pick it up and use the hashtag. If you are going to make up your own hashtag, keep in mind that what makes sense to you, might not make sense to your followers, or potential new followers. #followfriday is a nice example because it states what it is: It is an activity that happens on a Friday when people shout out who they like to follow.

If I were to make up a hashtag for an event series at Collective-E for our Industry Insights, I could name it: "#CEII", which could stand for "Collective-E Industry Insights". But that probably would not make much sense to you. A more effective hash tag could be: "#industryinsights". Yes it takes more space, but it gets to the point.

If I were to make up a hashtag for the brand of this blog, I could call it "#kjpblog", which would stand for Katie James Pixelated Blog. You tell me if that would catch on or not. ;) I use KJP to refer to my brand, but I would need to become pretty solid in my brand for others to recognize the acronym. I would also need to tweet a lot about my blog. Maybe I'll try it and report back. ;)

Have you created any hashtags? And have they taken off?

How to Create an Auto DM (direct message) for Twitter Followers

2009-04-02T20:51:00.004-04:00

Note: This post was originally published on the Collective-E blog.

Here is how to create an auto DM (automated direct message) from your Twitter account to a new follower. For those who don't know, an Auto DM (or Automated Direct Message) is an instant message you get, that usually arrives in your email inbox, from the person who you just clicked to follow you in Twitter. You can access DMs in your side column of Twitter, or through a helpful application like TweetDeck. See below for the link of where you can access your personal DMs in Twitter. In theory, no one else can see them but you.

Once you have set this up, please share with us what you have chosen for your DM. What creative message did you think of? Auto DMs have been debated lately as a bad strategy, as they suggest laziness an wreek of infomertial-type people. So just be careful when you are creating them.

Go to TweetLater.com and register for an account.

Once you submit your registration, you may be taken to their newsletter page. Sign up or ignore this.

You'll need to log in again. Find the login button (as of this post, it's in the top right corner), and log on (even tho it seems like you would now be logged in, since you just created an account).

Now you must tell TweetLater about your Twitter account.

Click the blue +Twitter button in the top navigation.

Enter your Twitter username and password. I can't vouch for the level of security involved here. Making this decision is up to you.

Scroll down a bit and click the "Auto Welcome" button.

Also on this page, you can select if you'd like to auto follow those who follow you, or auto unfollow those who unfollow you. However, Twitter just decided to do away with the auto-follow feature because it seems disingenuous (which is my philosophy as well...and thanks @pegsamuel of @socialdiva for this Twitter Tip-off). TweetLater can provide this because they have worked with Twitter's API, which just means that Twitter allows them to use some of their technology to make fancy tools like this one.

The next question they ask you before you click "Save" is whether or not you want your @replies sent to you via email. @replies are the times that someone in Twitter is either talking to you or about you. This could be handy if you can't check your replies as often as you'd like. You can always see your replies in TweetDeck (for your computer), on Twitter itself (online), in Tweetie or Twitterific (on your phone) or other ways. You can also do a Twitter search for your name at search.twitter.com, or now from the new search box on the right side of your home page at Twitter.

NOTE: When I tested this, by way of following myself from another Twitter account, the DM did not come right away, or even for a few days. The Support people at TweetLater, who were very nice, told me that there was a delay/problem with the Twitter API that day, so things were a bit out of whack. It did send a day or two later.

If you've had success with the auto DM, do let us know in the Comments below. If you've noticed that you've actually lost followers (people who unfollow you in protest of your robotic DM), also let us know.

PS: You can also use TweetLater.com to auto opt out of DMs that are sent to you (um...would that be bad karma if you have created one and set up your account to send them...? Think about it.).

Testing the UStream Video Embed Link

2009-03-08T19:45:00.002-04:00

Live TV : Ustream

Wow! This was a first test to see how the UStream from www.businessownersonline.tv could really work. Now thes question is, how to get a phonecall to be over the air as well, so that the listeners can hear other callers...

To Friend or Unfriend. Or Ignore. In Facebook.

2009-02-11T12:18:00.005-05:00

What if you have too many friends in Facebook? A tough problem, right? But what if you maxed out at 5,000, and/or what if you were sad that you weren't keeping up with what your true friends are doing in their home towns? You would need to scale back in some Facebook friendships, and essentially, unfriend some people.

If you're a person with a lot of street cred online, and you were reading this article on whether or not to create a Facebook Fan Page for yourself, then the next step you should be thinking about is how to handle your current collection of friends.

Why Do We Have Friends on Facebook?
If we are in college or high school, we are really just keeping up with our actual friends on Facebook - looking at their pictures, commenting on their funny videos, throwing snowballs at them, etc. If we are making our way in the world today, it takes everything we've got, and yes, we are using Facebook to network, sell product, sell services, and more. But with the 5,000 friend limit, which does really squash your chances of using Facebook for fun because you have so many networking types in your feed, you will want to reconsider why you are accepting friends.

Reasons to Accept Friends

You really want to know what they are doing, what events they are having, etc.
You want them to know what you are doing. You can assume they are going to be watching every move that you make, or you can decide to put a little bit of effort into them when they post a thought-provoking status update, release a video, post a link, etc.
They have sent you a little note with their friend request

Reasons to Ignore Friend Requests

You look at your mutual friends, and the mutual friends are all big time Facebook users who are more interested in having high friend numbers, than in the quality of what you are saying.
You have no idea who the person is, and you have no mutual friends. This person did not tell you why they have requested to be your friend.

How to Unfriend Current Friends to Make Room for New Friends
If you need to scale down your list, and you need to delete some friends in order to make room for new friends who you for either personal or professional reasons, you need to quietly unfriend people who are not helping your professional cause, nor are they contributing to daily doses of random happy things. There is no need to make an announcement that you are doing this, but before you do it, and if you have made a Fan Page for your business that you would like them to continue to follow, create a campaign for yourself.

How to Move Friends to be Fans
While you can't technically click a person to be a "fan" instead of a "friend", you can persuade your current friends to also become fans. Little do they know you may soon be cleaning house, and they will suddenly stop seeing your status updates, but that's ok.

Write about your new Fan Page on your blog, and link to it.
Put a "Find us on Facebook" graphic on every page of your website or blog. If you're not an "us", then make a "Find me on Facebook", but chances are, it takes some kind of community to do what you do, so consider sticking with "us".
Update your Facebook status to let your friends know you have a Fan page, and you will be posting lots of goodies to it.

Loving the Gmail Inbox Themes! Meet Candy

2008-11-20T21:13:00.003-05:00

I logged into Gmail, clicked on their message about "Click here for our new Themes!" and voila! My inbox is cute! Just click on Settings in the top right of your screen, then Themes on the far right of the next screen.

How to Configure Gmail to Get Your Work or Whatever Email

2008-10-06T20:13:00.005-04:00

So you wanna keep getting your professional email in gmail, because you love gmail's interface, and you know that you can access it from any computer that has an internet connection. I know. I feel the same. I have about 4 email addresses configured to come to my gmail account, and I couldn't be happier.

Here are the advantages to setting up your gmail account to receive your work or other emails:

Gmail serves as a backup of all of your emails, so if your computer crashes, all of those emails that were sent to you live on in gmail. NOTE: Gmail will not have records of the email you SENT to people. Not unless you CC yourself every single time, but that could be a pain.
You can access your email from whatever has an internet connection. Example: I'm working in Starbucks. I can receive emails on my Mac Mail program on my computer (comparable to Outlook or Enterouge), but when I go to reply to someone, I get a funny notice telling me that I can't send an email. Strange. But with some mobile connections, apparently T* Mobile is one of them, you can't send via your Outlook, etc. The alternative: Send from your gmail account, and have the From address be your work email. I can send from my blank@gmail.com, or I can send from my blank@katie-james.com account - in gmail.
Set up a filter in gmail to automatically read and archive all email sent to your work email. Because that is time suckage to read it twice.

One issue to be aware of, as "ksg" pointed out in the comments below, is that when you send from your work email, like blank@katie-james.com, gmail will insert: "Sent on behalf of...", which doesn't look 100% professional, if the receiver of the email even notices. I send on behalf of my work email for a few reasons, which include making sure the reply goes to my work email in the future, and if I'm stuck at Starbucks and don't have a choice but to reply from there. I'd rather it say that than just be from my gmail email. I don't mind this issue, but others do. You may be able to get around this by paying for a professional gmail account, but I have not used it to make a recommendation either way.

Let's get started, setting up your gmail account, which is also called "Configuring" your gmail account to receive email on behalf of another email. I hope I haven't lost you yet, with all of these email terms flying around. ;)

Log into your Gmail account.

In the top right of your screen, click on Settings.

From those tabs, click on Accounts.

Click "Add an email address"

On the popup, enter the name you want to show up for your account when you send an email. This name will be what the person sees in their "From" line when they open an email from you. Type in the email you are trying to set this up for (not your gmail email, but your work one), and click Next Step.

You will be presented with a message like this:
"Before you can send mail as blank@collective-e.com, we need to verify that you own this email address. To perform the verification click "Send Verification". We will then send an email to blank@collective-e.com with instructions on how to verify your address. "

Click Send Verification.

The nex screen will say something like this:
An email with a confirmation code was sent to blank@collective-e.com. [Resend email]
To add your email address, do one of the following: "

You can either click the link that comes in you email, or you can enter the code that is provided in that email.

To click the link from the email, go to your actual email where you normally recieve email for the email in question, like in Outlook, Enterouge or Mac's Mail, and click the link in the email. It will be from Gmail Team.

Click the link, or copy and paste the code that is in the first few lines, and paste it into the little box that first told you about it.

You final screen should say this:
"You may now send mail as blank@collective-e"

Yay! You did it.

Now you want to send an email as your work email - while in gmail. No problem. From any email you are writing, whether it be one you are starting or one you are replying to, look at the From line. There is a drop-down. Click it, and you will see your options of which email to send FROM: blank@gmail.com or blank@collective-e.com

Next Up: How to create a filter for these emails, so that you never have to see them if you primarily get your email via Outlook, Mail, etc. Stay tuned.

Do you syndicate your content? You could be weakening your SEO

2008-08-14T23:29:00.004-04:00

It's flattering when a website wants to repost your content via a syndicate arrangement. As an early website or blog, you may want to syndicate out your content in an attempt to increase exposure.

As a person with SEO awareness, I've never wanted to syndicate my content because I figured that if my blog had an article, I wanted to build links to it at my blog, thereby strengthening my link power for my blog as a whole, and that post in particular. If I posted my content on another blog or website, and people linked to it, then those links do not help my website. My name gets out there, but really, in the online world, you need to have a heavy hitter website or blog in order to have traffic and influence on the web.

That said. Someone in a forum shared a link with me on Google's approach to duplicate content and syndicated articles. It validated my gut instinct of not giving away content since you are essentially competing against yourself. From Google:

"Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to block the version on their sites with robots.txt."

If you are going to syndicate, you could and should seek out a link from the website who is reposting your article, and most likely, they will not want to block that content from being indexed because they are using your content to create more content on their own websites - without writing it themselves. Therefore, you could consider compromising by allowing them to publish an abstract of your article, with a link to your website or blog to get the rest of the article. Good luck!

What an Alt Tag/Attribute and Link Love Can Do for a Temporary Home Page

2008-08-05T17:36:00.009-04:00

So by the way, I'm starting a new company with two power houses in the women's entrepreneurial world (official announcement to come). And in doing so, we are building a mega website with lots of fun function for promoting your business. The purpose of today's post, however, is to demonstrate how a brand new URL with very little content and a lot of secrecy is already ranking Page 1 #2 of Google for the company name in as little as 6 days (could be less, this is just when I checked) without submitting to any directories or sending any requests to link to other websites.

Step 1: Buy the domain. Duh.

Step 2: While you build the core of your website, put up a temporary home page. But don't put up a giant image with your company logo and text saved in Photoshop or something. Go the extra mile and make the individual images that are not text, like your logo, and create content to go onto your page. Pay the programmer extra to do this for you. It's worth it. Google and other search engines will be able to start crawling what text, links and images you do have on there.

Step 3. If you have images, you have the opportunity to fill in the "alt attribute" sometimes known as the "alt tag". This tells blind people what image is appearing if they can't see it (it's spoken to them). Or if a person has images turned off on their Internet in order to load pages faster (aka not sucking down images), they can read what image would have been there. These alt attributes are considered by Google, so if you can, and if it makes sense to what the image actually is, include your keywords in these alt attributes.

Here is a screenshot of how my search term "collective e" is finding the keywords on the web page:

This picture shows how the search results are displaying the copy on the page. In bold, in the search results, Collective E is displayed. But as you see here in the picture, circled red, Collective-E is an image of a swirly font. Therefore, it is not actual text. To put "alternative" text there, for computers to read, we inserted "Collective E". It is that alt="Collective E" that is seamlessly being displayed in the search results.

Step 4: Find reasons to put links on your temporary home page. Gives search engines more to travel through on your site, and one more reason why you might look like a worthwhile and helpful website.

Step 5: If you have a blog, link to your new website from your blog on your side panel, like I did.

Step 6: Start Tweeting about your new website at Twitter.com to your friends, and include the URL in the tweet. Try to use the actual URL instead of a TinyURL, just for ultimate impact's sake. Google is returning tiny Tweets in its search results, so make sure you're lookin' good!

Step 7: Find a reason to blog about your new company, and include the company name, Collective-E, in the blog post. And link to it (as shown).

You are well on your way to building a solid foundation for a well optimized site. When you do launch, your content will be searched all the quicker by the mack daddy search engines. Just think - you haven't even built the Facebook Page for it yet (a Facebook Page is a public access page that search engines index), or added it as a Company or a Group in LinkedIn!

Great SEO Example of Well Optimized Blog Post for High Ranking in Google

2008-07-19T17:24:00.003-04:00

This blog post, a review on Ultimate Van Lines has been written so well, that one week after the author wrote it, she moved from #10 in Google to #2 (well, #2, but #1 is getting two search results as of this post) for the company's name,"ultimate van lines". And this is without any links pointing to it (remember, links are super important in SEO)! And what is #1? The moving company's website. Keep in mind, that the Skimbaco blog is an already established blog, so it has search engine strength behind it. But how did Skimbaco increase her rankings with just her wits and the time spent writing the post?

1. She included the keyword "Ultimate Van Lines" in her post title.

2. She included "Ultimate Van Lines" in her second paragraph, and linked it to their home page.
a. She could have kicked off the article with a linked "Ultimate Van Lines" in order to get these important keywords closer to the beginning of the article, but she didn't. Her intro was more important, which is fine.

b. This particular review is negative. The moving van never showed, and then got canceled in the system because the rep they were working with was accused by higher authority as having quoted them too low. So Ultimate Van Lines just canceled the order with no warning. Skimbaco later discovered that Ultimate Van Lines has a bad habit of stealing people's household belongings and holding them hostage for money, so it's for the best the order got canceled. That said, normally you would not want to link to the company's home page, since that is a form of Link Love. However, Google just wants to know that you are covering every angle of what you're posting about, so Google will consider this link helpful. Therefore, it is good to include it in this type of review.

3. She has repeated "Ultimate Van Lines" many times in the article, but not in an annoying, keyword stuffed way. She has written it in a useful way.

4. She has included links to other websites and reviews for Ultimate Van Lines. It might help her to move these links up higher in the post, but she's doing just fine for now. If her rankings drop for this term, this could be an option.

Can she get even more traffic from this post? Yes. She wrote a review, and people often tack on "review" to whatever they are searching for. This was how I doubled traffic for my series of laser hair removal from American Laser Center. I worked in "review" into the hotspots of the highest ranking post in that series.

To get more traffic, she can insert "review" into her blog title (remember the SEO value of the blog title). Skimbaco is currently ranking 4th in Google for "ultimate van lines review", getting beat by a usual heavy hitter, My3cents.com. but if she keeps this up, she could outrank it! Not to mention if more websites link to this post. Like mine has done. :)

Summize Replaces Need to Hit Twitter's Replies Tab

2008-06-26T22:45:00.003-04:00

Just in case you haven't tried it yet, Summize.com just saved you tons of time and frustration for when Twitter Replies stresses out. Summize somehow tracks all of the tweets from Twitter, and is a big search bank for words that you need to know have been mentioned.

If you aren't in the habit of clicking that Replies tab in your Twitter profile, you should start. It's a great way to know if someone tweeted back to you, or randomly to you. You can't be on Twitter all day long, so if you tweeted in the morning, and then are checking in at night, you can see if anyone responded to you, or randomly tweeted you, by going to Summize.com and entering in your Twitter name into the search tab.

Or, if you are checking on what's being said about your company, your competition, or a product you're wondering about, just put it in quotations (if it's longer than one word) to get an exact match from Summize.com. Just like you would do an exact match search in Google.

Fun, huh?

First SEO Class Success! Takeaway: Record your Movements

2008-06-24T15:36:00.003-04:00

The first SEO class of Katie James Pixelated was a success! Fifteen women with companies or working for companies attended, and it was held at the boardroom in the lovely In Good Company (with use of their super fun projector to project my laptop).

We covered everything from the 5 top areas of each web page that you must pay attention to if you want effective SEO, to why the 1 random search term that someone used can be your next big traffic hit, and should not be ignored. My trusty strategy partner Melissa took notes on our official dry erase board so that we can design more and better classes. Here's who was there: Sara from PopJudaica (hip Jewish t-shirts and gifts), Robyn from ChiqueLife (women's plus size clothing), Nicole from Lucky for Baby (cute baby cloths boutique), Kathleen from Kathlin Argiro (fab bridal designer), Betty from Betty Newman's Trendspotting (blog of amazing and unique product finds), Judith from ReelInvitations (dvd wedding invitations), Renee, an Intellectual Property Attorney, Kim Do, the New York based wedding and makeup artist, and Jill from Fretzels (chocolate covered pretzels) (who brought us some of her chocolate covered fretzles!! yumm!!)

What I wanted everyone to know about SEO, so that you can get control of it and feel like you are confidently steering a ship in sea of swelling competition, is to keep track of what you do. This can be done in the simplest of Excel documents. This way, when you are looking in your Google Analytics, or some other stat program, you can know what happened at the same time of a spike in traffic earlier in the month, or why your traffic for a certain keyword has started to decline (goodness forbid).

Here are the columns that I use to keep dated track of things:
Date , Detail of Change, Page Changed, Notes ,Results

When you put this in Excel, you can look down the list to easily find the date, then quickly see what you did. Here are some sample data entries I entered that have helped explain traffic spikes:

ThatITGirl
6/21/08 | Emailed Katja at @skimbaco that I posted about her shirt
6/22/08 | @skimbaco tweeted "don't bug me" post | Got X number of hits

www.katie-james.com
8/24/06 | Posted 1st desktop art design to Sumbleupon at night | Got 200 hits
4/9/08 | Put up newsletter signup in side column. | No signups. Still dry. :(
4/20/08 | Put up new design of newsletter signup. | Signups!! Dryspell over!
5/08/08 | Sent Mothers Day email to newsletter subscribers. Subject line had "shipping coupon" in it. | No sales. However, higher open rate than usual. ChicagoTribune.com featured dog treat bag with mysteriously same copy I wrote in the newsletter. Hmm...Must have a subscriber at Tribune!

Because I do this for my own sites (shopping cart site + 2 blogs), as well as those of clients, I keep these changes on Worksheets on the same Excel document. That way, I don't have tons of documents floating around. But this is my personal organization style that might not work for you.

Just remember: Be mindful of changes you make to your website, so that if you do something good, you can repeat it, and if you do something bad, you can try to revert back to how it was and stop the bleeding!

Geek Blogger Gear: Don't Bug Me or I'll Blog About It!

2008-06-21T08:02:00.006-04:00

Katja over at the Skimbaco.com blog released these t-shirts, and they are like a gift from the blogging goddesses! What a perfect statement: "Don't bug me, or I'll blog about it". That's right! That said, we all need to be careful, political, and stragical about what we blog about and the type of language we use, but there is reassurance that there is power in the people via online outlets, including blogs, Facebook status, Twitter feeds, and more and more and more. Still - I maintain - we who create content like this post, and we who comment or react to created content, must do so with dignity and from the high road.

But I still LOVE this t-shirt and bought one and a pack of postcards to send my friends who know of my blogging obsession, including my mother who fears the blog for stalkers. My own dad now knows, so when he tells me something important, he says: "Now DON'T put this on your blog. If I find out..." Or my boyfriend. He knows when to say "Don't put this on your blog."

Here are some examples of why not to ruffle the feathers of a blogger:

I have a health insurance company who I like a lot. They went through some changes, and changed who the health insurance provider was. This was a bumpy process. When came time to choose a new policy in December, their phones were flooded, website rejected some signups for new policy, and they were overwhelmed with emails. All of this understandable for me. I followed up a few times via email. They told me to hold tight. Two months later, when I still didn't have a new insurance card, I emailed again. They told me that I had in fact terminated my coverage January 2nd, and that I would have to reapply. Luckily for me, they said, we were were still in the 'late registration' period, and sent me a PDF to fill out. I hate PDFs. I called them. I asked to not have to pay 2 months of insurance for which I wasn't covered. When they denied me that request, and insisted I fill out the PDF, I got grumpy asked to speak to their manager. I left a message on the manager's voicemail: "I don't want to pay for 2 months of coverage I didn't have! This is so dangerous! It's not like my cable ran out for 2 months! Or a phone bill! This is health insurance! If you don't put back my health insurance right now I will blog about it and put it on my Facebook!" They had my insurance back on that afternoon. No PDF required. I still had to pay the 2 months though, which is good, since if anything happened to me during that time, there would be no excuse not to cover it.
My boyfriend works in film, and he got a "wrap" gift from one of the celebrities. This is a gift to thank you for your hard work. You just never know what to expect from these people with gobs of money. Tom Selleck, when Magnum PI ended, gave his people cars, or Rolexes or something. Last year, one film crew got iPhones when they came out. My boyfriend's wrap gift that he gave to his department crew was cool monogrammed zip-up black sweatshirts, from a little t-shirt shop he likes to give the business to. He tells me I'm not aloud to say what this certain big-time celebrity got for the crew, but lets just say he or his assistant (probably male) went to Staples, picked something up from one of those bins where they sell weird calculators and pencils, had it monogrammed with a message from the celeb, and called it a gift. Dang if I can't blog that, with picture! ;)

Here is my new flag for my office:

Are You Neglecting Your Blog for Twitter or Facebook?

2008-06-13T15:02:00.004-04:00

I mean really!?! FashionMista.com is sorely neglected, all because I seem to spend extra energy in Twitter or Facebook. The Tweets just don't stop coming - be it the desire to create a Tweet or to read them. What will we do? The blog is so much more powerful, right? Long term links, photos, design, Comments with more links, and more conversations that just stay preserved in the Comment box.

Over at the Home Office Collectives group in Facebook, Carla of the blog RockStarLifeLessons.com pointed out that she too has been neglecting her blog for Twitter, saying: "I am LOVING twitter...to the point that I've been neglecting my blog...I suppose I'll eventually add a widget to my blog so my readers know that I'm still online ;-)"

So this is what it's come to. Widgets. A friend passed me a link once, to a video. Once again, I've sadly misplaced this link, but the guy, who you social techies out there probably know of, was discussing the then new technology to search for feelings on the web. Somehow, I think, this website conjured up lots of words from websites, and put them into one, live space. At the end of the video, he announced that the web page is dead. Not his web page, but the "web page", as in the form.

However, I still have my shopping cart, I still have this blog, people still visit it, link to it, link from it, Retweet it, etc. I still manage pages of other websites and track their traffic patterns. But I need to spend a little more time here, I believe.

Thoughts? Please chime in! ThatITGirl as a blog (not me as a person), is lonely with the neglect of its author! And FashionMista.com - don't get her started. She sees more mobile Flickr photo uploads that she knows what to do with.

Thank You Notes and Social Networking

2008-06-06T11:04:00.005-04:00

Let me tell you, if you get involved with this social networking, don't think you're going to have friends and followers pouring in if you just sit there and watch the computer screen. Social networking requires a reach back into any kind of manners class your mom made you attend. Or maybe that was just my mom, pushing me to learn which fork to use at Manners Class one Saturday at the Stouffer's hotel in downtown Cleveland, back when there were Stouffer hotels :sniff:.

What my mom is a stickler about, however, are thank you notes. After each birthday party, the next day started with: "Did you write your thank you notes?" And who wants to hear that while they are still eating left over birthday cake? Same thing with Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, my Nana usually comes over to spend it with us, and brings bags of presents that she received from friends. Regardless if she liked them or not (usually it's a guaranteed "not" as she wonders why on earth someone would get her a chunky silver bracelet with onyx set in it, which I happily unburdened her from), she is more stressed about who gave her which present, and writes everything down immediately on a pad of paper that she brings from home.

The art of the thank you note. From a recommendation to a job, to a birthday wish on Facebook. Notes to people are usually always appreciated. I was quite bad at sending thank you notes. I may have failed to send my aunt a thank you note 3 years in a row. And then I noticed that I might not have gotten presents as frequently on my birthday, or at Christmas. I clued into this in college, and went on the offense by sending her Christmas cards (as a college student, just something non-family), or just made sure not to forget sending her a note when she did send something. What resulted was increased communication and presents to each other, and overall, a closer relationship.

This is not a ploy to get presents. This is an understanding of what acknowledgment of someone's effort can yield - both for you and the giver or well wisher. Each social network - Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, MySpace, Ladies Who Launch - has its own conversation style. For example, Facebook lets you know when it's a friend's birthday. You can sit idly by, making a mental note of the special day, or you can write on that person's Wall and wish them happy birthday. Or the reverse - your friends notice its your birthday, and send you well wishes, cards, virtual balloons and cakes. You can take it all in, feeling good, or you can go the extra mile and thank them on their Wall with a personal little note. As a birthday wisher, I am always happy to get some form of a "thank you!' from a friend, as I know we have thought of each other, and that's the whole point.

Are there times when you can thank too much? Perhaps. One Stumbler at StumbleUpon wrote a post encouraging website owners to thank random Stumblers who had bookmarked a page on their website (I can't find the link at the moment). I thought this a nice thought and good social strategy, but many Stumblers commented negatively on her blog and gave her a thumbs down in StumbleUpon, stating that they do get thanked, are overwhelmed with the notes, and hate it - with a passion! Yikes. Maybe those people should adjust their settings in StumbleUpon so that Stumble emails don't make it all the way to their gmail or yahoo accounts, and everything can be contained.

Before I digress any further, just know, that in order for social networking to work (ie make new friends, promote website pages, products, blog posts, other people's sales, etc.), you've got to participate and reciprocate. It's just the polite thing to do, and it will be remembered and appreciated.

Tweetworking (Twitter Networking) and Can Be Good for Business

2008-05-21T19:01:00.005-04:00

"Twitter twitter, twitter, twitter twitter."
2:31 PM May 07, 2008 from web

That was my first entry into my Twitter.com account, @ktjames. When I logged in for the first time, I was met with a wall of words, individual conversations between people who referred to themselves with @ in the beginning of their names. Was I, a social networking addict, overwhelmed? Yes! I had been resisting Twitter, despite friends asking to become Twitter friends, because I knew it was such a ... busy place. So I became a fly on the wall, studied everyone's 140 character mini-mini-conversations, and started to converse with them slowly, until I realized that no one was talking back, and I was all alone. It prompted my next entry of brutal honesty:

"Feeling like I have no Twitter friends...talking to no one...can anyone hear me??"
12:53 PM May 09, 2008 from web

Feeling like an avatar lost at sea, I bobbed in an ocean of silence in my home office, waiting, then moved onto other projects. Suddenly, a little email landed in my gmail. It was a private, "DM" (aka Direct Message) from a Twitter friend who I didn't realize was "following" me (aka keeps tabs on all of my tweets). She said that sometimes no one replies, and that it can be lonely. Quite a humble statement from a woman who has plenty of followers herself, and has a big Twitter Star with over 800 followers visiting her, in person, with kids and husband. We are watching/reading the whole road trip on Twitter as the Twitter Star drives with her family and sends Twitters mobile updates from her cell phone.

Then I got another response:
ManicTrout @ktjames I hear ya! 01:56 PM May 09, 2008 from web

and then:

DeAnnaCochran @ktjames I hear ya. Sendin the luv your way :)
01:04 PM May 09, 2008 from web in reply to ktjames

And that's when I realized we were all like truckers on the information super highway, talking on our CBs. Many of us work from home. Many of us have children and work from home. What was once a very solitary place physically, has become a mentally cluttered, clucking place of, in my case, women talking to each other about life, dinner, ever expanding to-do lists, SEO articles, and more.

Is this Twitter a waste of time? It really is IMing on hyperspeed and can rob a lot of your time. Can it help your business? Well, if you look at it from the networking perspective, you are networking with people in other ways than job fairs or trade shows or meetup events. You are networking through your computer in condensed forms, which makes you be direct, to the point, a little witty, and a little honest. Women are very active in social networks, as these demographics from RapLeaf show. In an interview for Ladies Who Launch, Patricia Handschiegel, founder of StyleDaily.com (which she sold to Styehive.com), may have said it best: "The best thing women can do is network. Women entrepreneurs are different. There’s a loyalty between us … an honest bond."

Since then, I have seen my Twitter friends promote each other in wonderful and unexpected ways. They:

Publicly welcome each other (goal: get more Twitter followers)
Tinyurl each other, which condenses a long link into a very short link (goal: get traffic to website)
Visit each other in person (goal: friendship)
Share quick dinner ideas (goal: eating good food and providing for family)
Identify with each other over kids or admin requirements (goal: feeling normal)

So should you do it for your business? Sure. How to do it for your business is a whole other article that would talk about finesse and genuine interest in others. It requires creativity in how and what you express to your online friends.

But for now, this business owner is hooked. When did I know I was hooked? When I twittered this:

"Goodnight Twitter! Have a good Midnight Maintenance!"
11:06 PM May 19, 2008 from web

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer Egged During Presentation in Hungary

2008-05-19T20:07:00.006-04:00

Yes, egged, during a presentation in Hungary. Saw this in my Facebook feed from @smbeebe . Amazingly, there were no "Don't taze me 'bro!" actions, or much of any actions for that matter. The egger did come prepared with a message written on the back of his shirt. But, there were no fast running police launching over rows of chairs, no screaming girls. The guy calmly left as calmly as he threw the eggs.

Groundswell: Good Social Networking Book from Forrester Research Analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

2008-05-15T20:54:00.010-04:00

Groundswell: Should you buy? Yes.

For my learning pleasure, Stephanie L. Cion of WELLalarm, treated me to a social networking seminar hosted by MIT Enterprise Forum to promote the social media guide book, Groundswell, a book by two Forrester Research analysts, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. I knew what I'd be exposed to in terms of socialness, but what I didn't know was what to wear, and ended up the only girl in the room in pink velour, surrounded by a sea of black suited banker types. After a while, a few more girls in colors trickled in. In the end, I was mistaken for a member of the media, so the outfit was perfect. I do, however, need a snazzier pant or pencil skirt suit, which means only one thing: shopping excuse.

About Groundswell the Book, and Socialness
Why did I go to hear what two research analysts had to say about social networking? I went because the authors are research analysts. For a minute of my life, I worked in the Research Department of the Food network, and it was fascinatingly wonderful. Through focus groups and other methods, you could very nearly get the answers to why a program was flailing (Al Roker's food show was the main program in question at the time...it was discovered that people responded negatively to the silliest hand gesture he did...and when he ate chocolate).

Josh Bernoff was giving the Groundswell presentation for the MIT Enterprise Forum event. He brought to light to a few considerations for social networking:

Social networking has opened a whole new arena of types of focus groups and involvement. Voluntary focus groups, unpaid focus groups, fun focus groups, anything focus groups. All because people want to participate and be heard from the comfort of their own homes. Or mobile devices. He showed a case study where one man who had voluntarily posted thousands of posts in a Dell support forum did it because he liked to hear people say "Thank you." Others do it because they like to be trend setters. Some do it because they like to feel powerful. Whatever the motivation, people are speaking online and they are being listened to - by each other (ie normal people) and by the companies making the products they are chatting about. If you get the book, look for the example of why CBS brought back Jericho (angry fans sent them thousands of pounds of nuts), and whether or not that was a successful decision.
Beyond focus groups, however, is relationship management. Those of you who participate in social networking know that your relationships with your people is crucial. You want to reply to them, give them new information to respond to about yourself (albeit carefully), show them cool links, and dazzle them with your energy.
Brand management. Whether you want to get involved with social networking or not, your customers may do it for you - in a good light or bad. So it's best to be familiar with the tools they are using, so that if you need to hire someone to fix damage, or continue to spin good vibes, you will be able to make a more informed decision about a social investment. Josh kicked off his presentation with the Comcast video posted at YouTube, created by a fluent social networking guy, when his Comcast service man came to fix his cable, needed to call Comcast for some reason, was put on hold for one hour, and fell asleep during that time. This video got millions of views. No such thing as bad publicity? As Josh pointed out, this video is the first video that comes up in YouTube for a search for "comcast." It was added to YouTube a year ago. As of this writing (5/16/08), the video ranks on page 1 in Google, #9.

For another example of social networking gone bad, read Groundswell to find out what the authors discovered about a cease and desist letter regarding a photo posted online of Barbara Streisand's house.

Should you buy the book, Groundswell? Yes. I am. I don't buy many business books. But Groundswell will have charts and case studies. And it's from research analysts. They only consider cold hard facts! Which are really very fun. It will open my mind to knew ways to use social networking to promote my business or pieces of my business. And by "pieces" of my business, I mean anything from a sexy silk sleep mask, to website design, to social networking services and strategy. My strategy is not to force brand and messages down people's news feeds (Facebook term), but to let anyone know who is interested. If interested, they will contact. Or purchase a product. The end. That is how social networking works.

Hurray! iPhones Can Multi-Text or Group Text

2008-05-07T13:08:00.008-04:00

You can imagine my shock when I went from multi-texting from my regular Nokia phone and later my Nokia PDA, to not be able to text to more than one person from the genius iPhone. Shocked and awed. So socked and awed that I could not recommend the iPhone with the enthusiasm that I wanted. Now, however, my iPhone can multi-text. It drank an update when I synched it, and I can group text! Sigh of relief.

Why would you want to multi-text or text to a group? To tell 2 people who you are meeting with in 15 minutes that the address has changed. Or to wish everyone happy new year at once. Or to ask your bridal party for their measurements all at once.

Here is an article at MacNewsWorld on speculation on the new iPhone. AT&T may sell it at $199? *whistle*. I bought it at $600, and now have the $99 unlimited talk plan (with $20 additional for data ie web and email), and am apparently locked in. As of 5/8/08, the plan is still being offered. Here are Apple's price plans for the iPhone. Apple features a $119 unlimited talk and data plan. This is really AT&T's plan that I have:

$99 unlimited talk + $20 unlimited data = $119 (plus taxes for your area)

You can buy the iPhone at Amazon, and activate via iTunes!

How to Get an Excel File from Google Documents to Your Computer

2008-04-29T12:45:00.004-04:00

Here is how you can suck down an excel file from Google Shared Documents. What are Google Shared Documents? It's Google's free tool to let you share a Word or Excel document online with a contributor(s) of your choosing. You must have a gmail account to take advantage of this, but a gmail account is harmless. Go get one. If you make edits to it on your computer, and want to upload your edited version to replace the shared file online, you can go into File (same File as mentioned below) and "Upload new version..."

Let's get started.

Log into gmail.

Click on Documents at the very top left of the screen.

Click on the file you want to view.

On the next screen, to the far left, next to the tabs, there is a pull down menu called "File". Click on it, and you will be presented with options.

Select "Export". It will ask you what kind of file you want it in.

Select .xls (this is an Excel file).

The file will zoom onto your desktop.

Voila!

Profile HTML: Amazing Facebook Page Application that Displays Working Code

2008-04-26T15:52:00.002-04:00

The Profile HTML Facebook Application is a gift from the coding heavens. If you need to get HTML code onto your Facebook Profile or Page (yes, Page as well!), the Profile HTML app can handle it in the way you'd expect!

Do a search for "Profile HTML" at Facebook, or click here for Profile HTML. The directions for how to make it work are really simple, in fact, I'm wracking my brain for what to tell you. Literally, Profile HTML is the equivalent of a point and shoot. Of course, you'd need code that already works...but I'm sure you have that.

Once the HTML box is enabled for your Profile or Page, get the code you would like to add. Copy the code and paste into the large text box that the Profile HTML application provides once you sign up for it. Click "Submit" below the box. Voila. Now go view your Profile or Page.

The application was designed to work in the narrow side column or in the wider main body. If your code is of primary importance, drag it to the top of your page. You can click on the heading part (usually the blue bar across the top of the box for the Profile HTML application) and drag it to where you'd like on your Profile or Page.

You can have more than one HTML box on your Profile or Page. If you have more than one Page at Facebook, you can sign up for each page and add a box of code.

TIP: To get an element off of your website, like a form, right click on your page and select "View Source" or the like. Find the code and highlight it to copy/paste it later into your Profile HTML app.

TIP: If you grab code off of your website to be placed into Profile HTML, and if that code contains images, make sure your web address is included in the code you are using at Profile HTML. Most times, the code for an image or an interior link will omit the http://www.yourwebsite.com. It will start with something like /images/yourimage.jpg. Just make sure that http://www.yourwebsite.com/ is included before images and previously interior links. I say "previously" because now that this code is in Facebook, you are creating an exterior link to your website ("exterior" meaning from another website).

I have also dabbled with the Extended Info application. It did not work as I expected, so did not put much time into it. It may be useful for some purposes, but right now, the Profile HTML application did exactly what I needed.

Compare Vertical Response vs Constant Contact for Email Newsletters

2008-04-25T18:56:00.013-04:00

Vertical Response is the winner if the two are compared. Using Vertical Response after using Constant Contact is like a fresh summer day. Vertical Response vs Constant Contact lets you breathe easy while doing formerly complicated emailing procedures.

To Compare: Vertical Response vs Constant Contact:

Designing a custom newsletter design
Hands down, VerticalResponse. They offer a super easy editing canvas, where you can access the code, easily create tables, and more. Last I checked, Constant Contact did not offer an editing canvas, so you needed to already have your HTML built in another content editor, and paste it into their HTML area. That, or you have to be a Super Coder and be able to visualize what your code looks like as you type it up, which is a series of letters strung together. Good luck.

Or, you can pay Vertical Response or Constant Contact to build your design. But, if you are a do-it-yourself coder, Vertical Response provides the easiest platform to work on.

Reports and Stats - tracking click throughs
Both Vertical Response and Constant Contact give you access to which links were clicked on. Vertical Response breaks it down so that you can see how many clicks happened on which images as well as text. In order to know which image is which, you'll have to be familiar with what the URL is. The report gives you the actual number of clicks, plus the overall percentage compared to the rest of the links in the email. The list of links is presented in a chronological link list. Could Vertical Response develop something more visual? Maybe they will! But right now they are busy unveiling surveys.

Newsletter Design Templates
I tend to stay away from stock Templates. Customizing templates at Constant Contact could get messy, and be possibly easy to break, or corrupt, requiring you to build it all over again. If you are using a Constant Contact template as is, with no altering, you'll be fine. Both email companies offer programming services to create a custom newsletter template for your brand, where you can submit a design to them and they will build it for a fee. If you have used Vertical Response templates, and tweaked them, please chime in below.

Opt-in Sign Up Forms
A cinch with Vertical Response to make a straightforward, not too ugly email opt-in form. However, I've custom designed my own sign up boxes. See the newsletter signup form at Katie James and at Mugi Pottery. However, the generic opt in form design is not to shabby. (Sorry Vertical Response...I need to put the link back into you on those pages!)

Because the Vertical Response code for the email sign up form is so easy to work with, I was able to copy and paste it into a Facebook Page! Here are the details: how to put an html box on your Facebook Page.

Surveys
Constant Contact has offered the ability to send surveys for a long time. Vertical Response has just released their own survey service. I have not tried it yet. Have you? If you have experience with the survey tool at either Vertical Response or Constant Contact, please chime in below in the comments.

Cost
Yes, Constant Contact beats Vertical Response for cost (maybe, unless you're a non-profit). Constant Contact offers a monthly service, where you can pay $15 for a list size of up to 500, for example. Monthly cost goes up from there. Hopefully Vertical Response will go this route (because more of my clients would go with them). Either way, I personally do pay the per email price with Vertical Response because sending a successful newsletter is that much easier and enlightening with Vertical Response. If you are a 501 (c) 3 non-profit, they have special pricing. And 501 (c) 3 non-profits can even get up to 10,000 free emails a month!

So what are you going to do now? Sign up to send campaigns with VerticalResponse. So easy.

How to Make a Fan Page in Facebook

2008-04-17T15:15:00.009-04:00

Fan Pages in Facebook are fun and easy to make. What is a Facebook page? The Fan Page is a page in Facebook that represents your business. Unlike a Group, developers who build applications have some of them available for your Page. This means that you can elect to have an RSS feed box to show your latest blog posts on your Page, or to show a big photo of your book (aka "Big Photo" application).

A Few Things You Can Do With a Facebook Page

People can "fan" your page. A mini version of your logo will show up on their profiles. You can't "friend" people with your page, but people can "fan" your page.
Send "Updates" to your fans to tell them when you have a new product, special coupon codes, or anything else you think of.
Add applications to make your page interactive and interesting to look at. Not all applications are available for pages yet. A developer for a specific application needs to make a version for a Page.
And lots more.

Ready to make one? Ok. You'll need a little bit of time to be creative and you'll need a special logo.

Click here, or if you are logged into Facebook, scroll to the very bottom of your screen.
In the footer links, look for the link that says Advertising. Click it.
You may be presented with two options. On the right, where it says "Facebook Pages," look a little beneath it and click "+ Create Facebook Page".
It will now ask you demographic information. Fill this out, and type in the name of your Facebook Page. Choose wisely, because you can't change it.
Proceed as prompted!
Next steps will be adding different applications to the page to jazz it up a bit. For starters, I love Big Photo and Profile HTML.
To activate your page, you will need to "Publish" it. There will be a link to prompt you to do this.
In the future, to manage it, a link called "Ads and Pages" will always be on the left, as shown below. Follow these same directions to create one of those Facebook social ads. To manage, you will click this link to access both areas.

To get some fans, you might want to share it with your friends. On the side of your page, after you publish it, you will see a "Share with friends" link. Click it, and then you will need to type in your friends. If this link is not here, look for a + sign that is just below this list. At this moment, Facebook does not have an option where you are presented with a list of your friends that you can select. That would be much easier, of course. For now, you have to type them in. Facebook will complete the name as you type.

That should be it! You are ready to make a Page in Facebook. Good luck!

PS: If you need help making a special logo for your Facebook page, it is a new service of Katie James Pixelated! Contact us for details.

PPS: I have written several more articles on enhancing your Facebook page, such as, how to make a page more interactive with your fans. Click here to see all Facebook related posts.

PPPS: If you want to fan my page, here it is: ;) http://www.facebook.com/pages/Katie-James/15996316102

How to Make a Favicon - This Website Helps You Make the .ico File

2008-04-15T19:46:00.008-04:00

Here is a great website to make a favicon: http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

What is a favicon? It's the cute little graphic in the top of your browser bar that is usually pretty close to your logo design. Here's a picture to show you what a favicon looks like:

I've circled the favicons in red. The little blue and brown favicons that say "km" in script are little ones we created for www.kerrymonaghan.com, and they are my favorite ones at the moment. The orange favicon to the right is Blogger's. It's showing the page that that I am currently typing this post on. What is it good for? For brand awareness, of course! Favicons work in most browsers, including Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Other browsers are catching on.

Not only can the user quickly identify your website if they are using "tabbed browsing," which is when several websites are open in one browser window, but the favicon can also show up when the user bookmarks your page on their own computer, or in social bookmarking websites like Stumbleupon. Actually, those websites will most likely show a thumbnail of your web home page.

How to Make a Favicon
There are many ways to skin this cat, but here is how I do it:

1. In Illustrator, set your art board to be 16px x 16px. That's how big a favicon is. The size of your pinky nail.

2. Design your graphic, and always look at it from actual size, since other people won't be able to zoom in.

3. Save it as a .jpg. Sometimes, I send it to my programmer as an .svg file to make sure I've done everything right, and then he polishes it off.

4. Now you'll need to save it as a .ico file, and call it favicon.ico. Go to http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/ to help you with this, if your computer can't correctly create a .ico file.

You only need to call it favicon.ico, not pink-favicon.ico or something. The online tools that make the favicon work will only look for "favicon.ico".

5. Finally, you can upload it to your root directory, which means that you'll upload it to the file that is usually one past the www folder, if you have FTP access, which you can usually get by going through your host's website. I always prefer CuteFTP for my FTP access. If that just confused you, you could hire someone like my company, Katie James Pixelated, to quickly do this for you. If you have a blog, you might need to access your template code and insert it before the HEAD tag. Ideally, if your website is built for it, you should only need to upload this file into one place. If your website does not have include files, or is not dynamic, then you may need to include this file into each of your pages. But again, if that just confused you, it may be best to hire out.

If you have created a cute favicon, please share it with us by dropping a link to your website in the Comments below!

Blog Post and Page Titles are Super Important for Increasing Traffic

2008-04-11T10:10:00.002-04:00

This tip is an easy one, and we've covered it before: Page Titles are Super Important. I just changed a few little words in one of my blog posts titles, and it moved from page 1 #6 in google to page 1 #2 in google in one week.

This is a great way to try and increase your traffic by little numbers at a time. If you pay attention to your stats, to your comments, to what your readers are saying, you will see how you can change particular blog post titles and double your traffic to that page. If you are getting 10 hits to a post page per month, you could get 20. If you did this to 10 posts, that's 100 extra very relevant hits per month. I measure this for big and little websites - from one that has tens of thousands of users a month, to my own little blog (FashionMista), which is what I'm about to share. On a larger website, you can change your targeted keyword on one page to a better one that you found by doing your keyword research (try Keyword Discovery) and pick up 4,000 per month, up from 1,000. BUT, you could also have the reverse effect, and change what isn't broke, and start to slide down. So always do your research.

Here's what happened for my little blog: I am getting laser hair removal done on my legs, and am blogging about it. The intent (and thus my target keyword) was to blog about "laser hair removal". Therefore, I had that term in all blog post titles, in links where possible, and in any pictures (alt attribute). What I did not intend was to become a voice for/against American Laser Center (ALC), which is where I'm getting it done. But, that is what has happened. My blog posts naturally optimized for "american laser center review". Why? Because some other review type websites linked to my main page, people commented with those words, and I said "american laser center" a lot.

The other day, I got a comment on my main laser landing page from a girl who said something like: "I know this post was done in 2005, but it still comes up number 1 for a search on american laser center reviews, so I'll post a comment to warn..." Unhappy ALC people seem to find my blog, and comment about it. Which is fine. But anyway, I hadn't been following my ratings for this term, and sure enough, I was #1 for "american laser center reviews". I was #6 for the singular version (review). But I wanted to be higher. :) What's an SEO girl to do? Change the post title.

My blog post title was: "Laser Hair Removal: I Got Lasered". I liked it because it seemed compelling, and suggests journal entries. But, after learning that I was #1 for "reviews", and #6 for "review", and wanting to rule in both terms, I changed the title to: Laser Hair Removal: My Experiences and Reviews at American Laser Center."

That's it. I also edited the laser article to make it more current, explain that I was still getting the treatments, and made sure to include the word "review" in more places.

The result? Doubled traffic in one week.

Pay attention. You are your own gold mine. :)

ps: Here is my article on a blog post title with pictures

pps: Rankings mentioned here are subject to change at any time...

Vertical Response is My Favorite Email Marketing Newsletter Tool

2008-04-03T16:35:00.005-04:00

It's true. I can't get enough of Vertical Response. I read their blog and am even a member of their Facebook Group. Every time I go in to make a newsletter for a client, I think: "Sigh. Thank goodness for Vertical Response."

I've been through some pretty tough times with e-newsletter programs including custom built email tools and Constant Contact (ugh), and Vertical Response is just the cleanest, most helpful, easy to use environment I have used to date.

Here's why I like them:

Newsletter Stats: Their stats for tracking how your newsletter did are amazing. Not only are they comprehensive, but they tell me what words worked, and what didn't. Like, did people respond to a graphic of "Donate online" or did they click the words that said "Give online today" (it was the latter). Now I can make better newsletters for the next time for all of my clients.
Friendly Code Environment: I'm not a programmer...I'm a designer who can code into a website page to do nice-looking things. For clients who don't want to pay to have Vertical Response program a custom template that I've designed, I just set up the design, which I try to make as simple as possible with two columns, and make the edits. Tables, fonts, links, floating images, it's all fine.
Easy Sign Up Box: Another simple and cheap solution to getting an email sign up form on your website. If you want it integrated onto a special page, like a Contact Us page, you might need to involve a programmer, but getting a basic box with your website colors is do-able for a normal person. You can pay a programmer and a designer (both available through me at Katie James Pixelated), but the quick and dirty is not that dirty.
Blog: Do check out their blog for enewsletter tips. Here's a post about how to not write a subject line, for example.

Check them out for your email newsletter!

Google Images: an Easy Source of Traffic for SEO

2008-03-19T15:13:00.002-04:00

I was doing a stat report for a website, and have always known that Google Images can send a good amount of traffic, but it always helps to look at the numbers: for the year, Google Images had sent 27,5000 visits to this website, which was a small percentage of their overall traffic sources, but that's 27,500 visits just from including images in a blog post or website page.

A quick and easy way to bring in traffic from Google: use images in your web posts or pages, set their alt attributes, and link them to something if possible. This might get your image, and your website, found in Google Images. What does that mean? It means that if you are going to blog about something, include a picture, fill in its alt attribute, and write your post with your keyword phrases woven in. Let's break down this image recommendation:

1. You want to blog about the super cute rolling shoes that kids roll around on, but you want them for adults. You will create a "post" about this (aka web page, but if it's in blogging software, it's sometimes called a blog post), titling the post something like "Super Cute Heely Roller Shoes for Adults". I did not keyword research that, and guessed, but I do know from my own website stats that "heely roller shoe" is a searched for term.

2. You need a picture of a heely roller shoe. If you are not blogging on your own products, and you need to find the image, especially if it's a product, go to Amazon.com. Do a search for the shoe, right click on the image you want (Mac users: hold down your "ctrl" key next to the space bar and then click), and select Save to Desktop, or something similar. This sucks the image down onto your computer. Most likely, the file name is something like 2349875thiefuodjrw8.jpg, which makes no sense. Rename it to heely-roller-shoe-pink.jpg. This may or may not help in search engines rankings, but it can't hurt. Now you can upload it via your blogging software (Blogger lets you do this, or Flickr) or upload it to your host. Remember, if you are wanting to use an image from a small company, or a content based organization, you should ask permission and state your use of the image before you do this. It's a good idea to offer to link to that company or organization in your citation. Even with Amazon, it's just polite to link to them if you use their image.

2. You will increase the image's chances of getting listed in the first pages of Google Images for the specific keyword term if you fill in the alt attribute. This was created to help the blind know what the image is, so it's really a descriptive term of what the image is. It will not show up on your live website page. In the code, the alt attribute looks like this: alt="descriptive term here"

If you have to go into the code, vs your CMS or blogging software letting you access it a different way, the code for the image and alt attribute would look like this:
<img src="http://www.fashionmista.com/images/heely-roller-shoe-pink.jpg" alt="pink heely roller shoe">
I only bolded it to show you where it is. It won't be bolded in real life.

3. For your copy, get the actual keyword word as close to the image as possible. Google will read the copy on your page and show the image that is closest to it in Google Images.

That should be it! Pay close attention to your website stats to see what is working and not working, making adjustments all of the time. Good website stat programs are Google Analytics and Statcounter. Google Analytics will keep a history of your stats, but Statcounter will only keep it for 100 hits at a time. Each have their benefits, like how Statcounter gives you real time results in a consice way, whereas you have to wait a day before Google's presents the full results.

Wierd Formatting in Newsletters - Vertical Response Fixes!

2008-03-10T18:40:00.003-04:00

Vertical Response wows us again. Just saw this note in their newsletter, explaining how Word can cause formatting problems, like inserting a ? where an ' is supposed to go. If you didn't know that, now you do. If you paste copy from a Word document, or from copy you were sent in an email, there is code behind the lines that you can't see. When it's from Word, it sometimes inserts strange symbols and often messes up the apostrophe and the quotation mark.

When you are creating an email in Vertical Response, and if you only have Word to work with, you can insert your copy and press a button to clean it up. This little button cleans your copy, and you've got safe content to work with that won't turn into gobbledegook.

Get the details here:
http://blog.verticalresponse.com/verticalresponse_blog/2008/03/avoid-weird-for.html

If you're on a Mac, you can paste your copy into TextEdit, which also leaves clean content (but doesn't resolve all spacing issues if something is weirdly spaced). Windows people can use Notepad.

Are You Bookmarking? Here's a Tool to Save You Time

2008-02-28T14:06:00.004-05:00

Are you social bookmarking yet? The act of bookmarking a website like you used to do for your own computer on Internet Explorer or something, but now you do it on websites that let you access your bookmarks from any computer, share them with the world, and meet new friends who like the websites that you find, and vice versa?

It's exhausting! And why do we do it? The answer to why people socially bookmark is a whole other post, as this post is dedicated to telling you about SocialMarker.com, the free (as of 2/2008) website that lets you throw up the same bookmark with the same title, review, tags, and maybe a picture, in a streamlined process. I didn't believe it was possible. I only imagined it. Then I gave it a spin, and shaved time off of throwing up a bookmark to three different websites.

Here's how SocialMarker works:
1. You must already have accounts at bookmarking sites, like stumbleupon.com, digg.com, del.icio.us, newsvine.com, Facebook, your Google reader, etc. You must be logged into them already. Usually they keep you logged in on your computer.

2. From its home page, follow the directions and drag the little link that they tell you to into your browser bar (the gray area up at the top of your browser bar, like where web addresses goes, which are also called URLs). This was so easy, I actually messed it up twice.

Here's a picture of where it should end up:

3. When you are on a web page that you like, could be your own or someone elses, you look up to the top of your browser bar and click on the little tool. It will be called SocialMarker.com. This will start the process of taking you through each bookmarking site. First you
will go to socialmarker.com by clicking on that little link up there that I've indicated with the red arrow.

4. Then you will select the bookmarking websites you want to submit your link to - while on socialmarker.com. Remember, you must already have accounts at these websites and be logged in, otherwise, nothing will happen. These websites needs ads to survive, so you may have to navigate around them.

5. In the top right corner, you can put in your Title, Link, Text and Tags. Usually, Title and Link will be filled in for you. You can change the Title if you want, but leave the link. The Text is your "review", and the Tags are keywords that describe the article, which helps it get found in the search tools on each of those websites.

6. Click Submit in the top right corner. There is a "Donate" button there too. Donate if you like!

Now, this tool takes you through each of your bookmarking websites, vs you going to each site, putting in the link, the text, title, tags, etc. all over again 3 or 6 or 9 times. So if you are going to say the same exact thing each time, then it can go pretty fast. If you want to tweak the Text (or "review") for the specific audience at the bookmarking websites, you could do that too. That's my preferred way, that way you're not just regurgitating information, but if you're in a
hurry...

Also, this method will not let you "photostumble", which is another way to bookmark images. To photostumble on stumbleupon.com, you must right click on the image, and submit it only to stumbleupon.com

Facebook pulls and uses your Meta Description Tag

2008-01-28T18:38:00.000-05:00

SEO gurus have been saying that meta description tags aren't worth very much anymore in Google's eyes. Blogger, Google's blogging platform, doesn't even let you put any in. So as a business owner with lots on her plate, one less thing to worry about on the website is almost a blessing. Or is it...

Before I continue, let's review what meta description tags are. You can click here for meta description tags broken down with pictures, but I'll recap. The meta description tag is unique to every page. It describes what is on the page, and definitely uses the keywords you have placed into your content, alt tags in images, linked content, etc. While it might not have very much pull anymore when a search engine is evaluating your page (aka if you don't have one, it won't kill ya), it is used other ways that is important to actual people's eyeballs when they are evaluating your page. You won't see it on the page itself, but it can be displayed in other places, such as in the search engine results (see these pictures for an example).

While the meta description tag might not be a heavy weight on the technical side, it is a heavy weight for a person's eyeballs, which now includes eyeballs in Facebook. When you "Post a Link" in Facebook, or leave a link on someone's "Wall," Facebook will automatically search for and pull available pictures from the webpage. You'll get to choose which image you want displayed. It also grabs the first line of copy from that page and displays it, as a teaser. However, if you have a meta description tag, it displays the content in the meta description tag.

Example: Galia Gichon is giving a financial seminar "Whip Your Finances Into Shape" with the Freelancers Union. I posted it as a link on the Ladies Who Launch Group page in Facebook. The first sentance was pulled: "Baffled by where your money is going? Does retirement seem unreachable? Anxious about uneven income? Tired of living paycheck to paycheck, or
just without a realistic financial plan?" After a quick look at web page's source code, as far as I can tell, there is no meta description tag. So Facebook pulled and displayed the first line of the page.

However, when I answered someone in Facebook about where to find my sexy sleep masks (just got in a new batch!), I gave her the direct link, and my meta description tag was pulled: "Perfect for travel, Saturday morning sleep-ins, and afternoon catnaps. This silk sleep mask is reversible with a lining to block out the light, thanks to the black silk dupioni." If you go to this page, you'll notice that you can't see this text on the page. It's under the hood, in the code. Only search engines and other computer robot things can see it, and then spit it back out when called for.

So, it's just a new light shed on your meta description tag, so that as you write it, you'll have a better idea of who and when it might be read.

And, if you have a website based entirely in Flash, this will not work for you! Flash basically acts like a projector, throwing a website on a screen with no way to pull the little elements from it, like pictures and text. If you want to learn more about Flash based websites, I wrote a whole post about it here.

What's in a Signature? Links, that's what.

2007-12-14T17:46:00.000-05:00

The best hiding places are the most obvious ones, right? Or the best weapons? Candlestick on the mantle. I don't have a fireplace, but if I did... We spend so much energy looking for the best places to advertise and socialize, and then we spend some more energy finding out what worked and didn't work for others - what website is the best investment, but what are their demographics, and do you care if you sold or instead got brand awareness.

Enter the email signature. The guaranteed little placement at the bottom of every single email you send out. It's free. It gets delivered. And it goes to people you know and most likely support you, which means they want to know what you're doing. Plus, you form new contacts all the time, so with your email signature, you are passively selling your entrepreneurial self.

Here's mine:
: website : www.katie-james.com
: blog : www.fashionmista.com
: other blog : www.thatitgirl.blogspot.com
: spam prevention blog : www.spammyscammers.blogspot.com
: etsy : www.katiejames.etsy.com
: stylehive : www.stylehive.com/person/fashionmista/grid
: facebook group Global Mistas Inc : http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5791719372
: cell : 555.555.5555

See how easy that was? And you can get creative with the layout, add your logo, etc. etc. But remember, this is not in print! So you can change this every day if you wanted. If you needed votes in a contest, include your pitch: "Vote for me in the Super Great Contest I Entered! It's really easy! Click on this link: www...." I've had website clients see an accessory design contest I'm hoping to score in, and they vote! Did I ask them to? No! It's out of the goodness of their hearts kind of thing. And they liked the idea.

The part where it becomes a chore is when you have a few emails. But really, it's a minor chore. I am email obsessed, so I have three ways of answering email from one email account: my Mac mail on my computer for the pretty "ding", gmail for global access and backup, and my iPhone (also Mac mail). If my signatures are the same, you never know if I'm walking down Broadway, sharing a cafe, or dutifully at my desk.

But don't stop at the email address. Include these links in forums you frequent, if you want your information in a totally public place (unless you're in a private forum). Forum members will click on your links, people coming in from search engines into that forum thread, etc. Warning: I wouldn't do this in blogs. Blogs are generally for Comments only - meaning, your opinion. Not your five zillion things you need to market. Just my opinion, though.

If you do this already, do you have any success stories from it? Has anyone bought one of your products, or become one of your blog junkies? Share with us in the Comments below!

How to create a Flickr widget (or badge)

2007-12-06T22:14:00.000-05:00

Log into your Flickr account.

Scroll down and look for the little chunk of links that let you do things. There are 4 rows of them.

In the last row, click Tools (or you could do a search on the page for "tools")

On the right of the page, there is a text link in a paragraph called "build a badge". This is listed under the "Display Flickr Photos on Your Website." Click "build a badge".

Select the little button for the "A Flash badge" if your website or blog can handle Flash. If not, like this blog cannot (thanks Blogger), use the one that says HTML for a static row of pictures.

Below that, click the blue box called Next: choose photos

Choose all of your photos, or photos tagged with something. Or from a set that you have organized.

Click Next: Colors

For the colors, I leave it as the default. It's just white and nice to look at.

Click Next: Preview and get code

Put your curser inside of that box with ugly code in. Copy it, and paste it in an email to me. Or paste it in a word document and send that.

Voila!

Here's my own Flickr badge (they call it badge, but it's also a widget) of the desktop wallpaper I've designed:

www.flickr.com

KT Flicker's Desktop Art from Katie James photoset

Address bar disappeared in internet explorer :: How to get it back

2007-12-05T12:38:00.000-05:00

This just happened to a friend of mine in Internet Explorer:
Help! I was changing a URL in my address bar, and before I knew it, my address bar dissappeared! I've tried everything, how do I get it back?

Microsoft posted a help page to make the address bar display again in your browser:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=842903

For my friend, she had gone to View and looked to see if Address Bar had a check mark next to it. It did. We unselected it, but nothing changed. Then we followed the Microsoft directions for the link above, and looked to the right of the browser window for a word called "Address." She found it, clicked on it, and dragged it to where she wanted the Address Bar to display. Voila.

Thanks to AskLeo.com for first posting about this.

Trying Out WhiteBoard from GroupBoard

2007-11-19T20:23:00.000-05:00

How a Fancy Pants Flash Website Could Hinder Your Sales

2007-11-16T16:58:00.000-05:00

First published for the Ladies Who Launch blog

Your high-concept, artful, playful website could be making you all but invisible in the search engines, nearly impossible for people to send a link to a specific product to their friend, and could negate any positive impact from social bookmarking sites like StyleHive.com. Most of the big designers use these types of sites, and I say more power to 'em. It just means that my little well-optimized website will get more exposure.

To define, a fancy pants website is usually built with a lot of Flash, or another program that animates things to make them extra cool. The website pages sometimes look like pages, but they may not generate their own URLs. Your whole website may run off of www.mywebsite.com. Let's look the super cute shoe company, Seychelles Footwear. Go to that website and play with it. It's very fun. Luckily, it can be fun because they sell all of their shoes through stores and other websites that are much better optimized (aka appealing or readable) for the search engines.

The Link Problem
Years ago, I bought some Seychelles. I was so excited that I blogged about what I bought, and the other cute styles. I wanted to link directly to the shoes I was talking about. On the web, it's best to get to the point as quickly as possible. With Seychelles, no can do. I can only link to their home page and figure out ways to finagle some images from other websites like Zappos.com to show what I'm talking about. In fact, I'd be better off linking to Zappos.com, since my readers could fall in love with the shoe, and buy it right then.

The Search Engine Problem
Search engines love links. Links are like vegetables to them. When a search engine visits your site, it 'crawls' or 'spiders' as much of your website as it can by traveling through all the links you have placed. If you have images linked to images, and no text, or no links that go to places that are forbidden to search engines, they stop and miss out on all of the stuff you can SEE on your site. They like to read things. If you have words that are images, for example, and not actual words, the search engine just sees a file called our_mission.jpg. It has no idea that there are words there.

The Usability Problem
If products are spinning by, it's visually exciting at first, but when you go to click on something, it can be a slippery experience. Making your site as easy to use as possible is a good goal to ensure that your users are happy and seamlessly turn into customers.

The Social Bookmarking Problem
I call this Socialness. Social bookmarking is when a web page gets bookmarked on a website by a person. Other people can see what that person bookmarked, and then visit the page. StyleHive.com has a lot of highly interested users looking for fun things, and they will buy. Your products can show up there (if bookmarked , or 'hived' by someone if that product has its own web page. If every product shows up on www.yourwebsite.com, and not on www.yourwebsite.com/products/398lfoifjlsfjow or something obscure to humans but very important to how the internet works, then you could be missing out on a potentially effective bookmark that could drive highly interested people to your products. Example: Coco Ribbon sells very pretty things on their site, and they just redesigned their website. I must confess, I do miss their old one because, I think, each product had its own URL. So, if I go to put something on StyleHive, StyleHive picks up the product image, price, and description and automatically publishes it on their site. However, with their current setup, pointing out pictures and assigning it to one page is tricky. All of their lingerie items, for example, are under this URL: http://www.cocoribbon.com/collections/lingerie, so I can't link to a direct one, which would get users there quickly, and help that product rank in the search engines. If you don't care about search engines, then this isn't a problem.

The Bottom Line
Using animation and other swirly things is fine. It's great. Just ask yourself, before you fall in love with a concept, where you are using it, and how it will affect your users, who ultimately, can be your biggest evangelists.

How to Get Photos into Flickr

2007-11-15T10:34:00.001-05:00

Flickr is woderful for many reasons:
1. You can show photo albums publicly, meaning that your friends don't have to log into one of five major photo sharing sites. Or, you can mark them private, and then your friends would need to log in again.

2. You can organize the photos by albums, or "sets" and let people see what albums you have right away.

3. If you have a website, you can go to town on different ways to share photos, and include links back to relevant pages of your website from the photo's description.

But how the heck to you get your photos off of your computer and into Flickr? Here's how:

How to Post (aka Upload) Photos to Flickr:
Login using your username and password. Yahoo bought Flickr, so it may be that your Yahoo address, if you have one, is the same.

Look for the words Upload Photos. If you arrive on the Home page, these will be large and blue. All of your tools for Flickr are at the bottom of the page as text links.

Follow the Steps.
1. Choose Photos
2. Upload Photos
3. Add Titles and Descriptions to a Set. You can "Add More" if you like, which is a link at the bottom of the box you'll see after you choose your photos. You can choose many photos at once by holding down your CTRL key as you select them with your mouse.

When you're ready to upload, make sure they are clicked as Public. This is the default, so it most likely will be selected. If you want to password protect them, aka not share them with the world, click Private.

When they upload, you'll see "Finished!" Click to add a title and description. These are super important, because they help people find your type of picture when they are search through Flickr.

These next steps are important, if you are interested in getting wide exposure for your photos:
Add Tags: Tags are words or phrases that have to do with the picture. For phrases, you'll need to include " " around it, to show that the word is really a 3-word phrase. For example: trip to paris would be "trip to paris". Then, include other phrases that have to do with the picture. If it's a product, include the product name, company name, color (that can be popular), type, animal name, etc. People's names, etc. Start paying attention to other tags, so that you can include things like "paris fashions" if that is a popular tag. But you want to be relevant, so as not to disappoint someone who is expecting something. You can always add or delete tags at any time when you are logged in.

Add Title: The default is the image file name, most likley IMG_341, which is no fun. Call it "Vintage 1994 Wedding Dresses from Channel". You can be long, it's up to you.

Add Description: Self explanatory. However, if you have a website, you can link to it here if it's appropriate. "See more website designs at www.mywebsite.com"

Add to a Set: Sets are organized photos, like "30th Birthday Trip" or "Thanksgiving"

You should be all done with uploading and naming your photos! Now create some sets if you want another way to display your photos in an organized way.

Creating a Set:
For extra fun, you could create a set so that people could view like photos at once. Here's how to do it:
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Organize in the "You" category.
At the top of the screen, click the Sets tab.
Look to the right, and in gray type (hard to see) click "Create new set"
Follow the directions, but basically, drag your photos into the little box on the left. This will fling them into the big gray box.
Name your set.
Click save.

That should be it!

Robert Bernocco Types His Novel Via Text and He's Self Published

2007-11-09T13:14:00.000-05:00

Author Robert Bernocco, an IT guy in Italy, couldn't find the time to type his novel. So he texted it to himself while on his commute to work. The book is 384 pages, published by Lulu.com. Here's Lulu.com's press release on his being the first writer to text his novel and how he did it. Says Bernocco: "It was really a time management issue." He wrote the book in 17 weeks. OMG.

The book is appropriately titled: Compagni di Viaggo (translates into Fellow Travelers). And he typed it on a Nokia! A Nokia 6630 phone, using the phone’s T9 typing system. I love Nokia.

How was he commuting? I've created a website template while on the subway. I risk taking out my PowerBook G4 and putting it on my lap while trying to look tough so that no one tries to rob me. Couldn't he have a laptop? Maybe he's a straphanger and has to stand the whole time. Regardless, amazing.

For the record, I first spotted a blurb on this in the daily AMNY paper while walking my dog (which you can also read online here). And for those curious about self-publishing, seems like Lulu.com for self publishing might be a tool to consider. I'd put a link on how to buy his book, but I sadly cannot find one! Not even on Lulu.com. Maybe I have to be in Italy.

Rank Highly with a Blog Post Title in Search Engines

2007-11-09T11:34:00.000-05:00

First published on the Ladies Who Launch Blog

EXTRA! EXTRA! BLOG POST TITLES MUST BE SEO JUICY!!

Citizen journalists and industry experts who hope to monetize their blogs have a new challenge as writers/editors with regards to blog post titles. In the old days of print journalism, copywriters worried about how many characters (spaces included) would fit into a space for a great headline that would sell papers and keep readers. Headlines were clever ink prints on a page. On the Internet, however, they are links, cannot be touched with anything but a mouse, and they can make or break your popularity in the search engines. Why? Search engines love them, and people love them. Search engines can reward a blog post title with high rankings, and a person needs to click it to contribute to the traffic to your website or blog.

First of all: What is the blog post title and where do you find it? Read about the title tag with pictures here first.

In the Search Engine Age, however, writers have at least two new challenges:

1. Get the article to even rank highly in search engines, aka being #1 on Google or at least on the first page of search results. Search engines place a lot of ranking value on the page title. On a website, you can usually easily set your page title. On a blog, usually your blog post title doubles as the page title. While considering your blog post as a potential high ranking web page, the search engines pay close attention to what words you use in your blog post title. In the case of this blog post, it is titled: "Rank Highly with a Blog Post Title in Search Engines"

Example: Let's say you article is all about "essie nail polish" and how their new colors are based on candy. If your blog post title is: "Yummy Nails" but the content in that blog post is all about how essie nail polish was inspired by candy, and how your nails can look like pastel pieces of rock candy, then you have just shot yourself in the foot for ranking for the following words: essie, nail polish, candy, color. None of them are in your blog post title, as cute as it is. The search engines would most likely give you higher rankings with "Essie's New Rock Candy Color Nail Polish." You can get more clever with it, but the goal is to at least have essie and nail polish and color in your post title, because those terms may be what people are searching for.

How do you know what keywords people are searching for? You use Yahoo's free tool, Overture, or you pay for the keyword research tool Keyword Discovery. Everyone uses Overture, so it can be slow at times. But otherwise gives reliable results.

2. Grab the reader as they scan the list of blue titles in search engines to see which ones they want to click. Your titles need to be quick, short and to the point. This can be tough, if you're trying to get keywords in there. Sometimes you may need to take the SEO hit if you want your feed readers to click, rather than a search engine ranking. Read this to see how your ranking title looks in a search engine.

The point is: be cute in your blog post titles, but make sure your keywords are in there!! You may need to curb your creativity a little. :)

Widgets for your Website and Why you Want Them

2007-11-05T10:46:00.000-05:00

Widgets are free and happy little design elements to add to your blog. They come from trusted websites you use already, and are created to make your blog or website look good, and to market that website. You can usually create one in 10 minutes. Granted, you need an account at the website that offers the widget, and you'll need to fill it with stuff, but to actually get the code to put onto your website, you'll need 10 minutes.

What is a widget and why do you want one?
A widget is a chunk of code that you can embed into your website and usually displays a slide show of images, or other arrangements of images you have selected. You get the code from the website offering you the widget. Let's look at a Flickr widget, for example. You upload pictures into your Flickr account. You "tag" them with words that have to do with your pictures, like "Paris vacation" or "birthday party" or "friends." You go to the Tool area in Flickr, and create a badge (some websites call widgets a badge...I know, it's hard to keep up). You tell it you want a badge, or widget, of all the pictures you tagged "paris." Then it will create this small slide show of pictures that pop out at your users, who can then click on it to see all of your wonderful photos.

Here's a free widget from my Flickr account of websites designed by Katie James Pixelated:

www.flickr.com

KT Flicker's Websites Designed by Katie James Pixelated photoset

This widget is generating my photos using simple HTML. I could have used a fancier one that moved, but Blogger doesn't appear to like it very much, as Blogger messed up my code when I inserted it. Yes, a content management system can change your code. Very disconcerting. For the record, a fancy Javascript or Flash one would have worked in Typepad. To use the fancy one, however, you don't need to know anything about Javascript. Just know that not all blogging programs will accept it. Most will, but if you run into weird trouble with it not showing up, it could be that the coding language is not supported by your blog or website.

You can also use widgets for ecommerce, like if you had a store in Etsy.com, or just for fun with StyleHive. And, if you have affiliate accounts with websites, like Amazon where you make a commission of whatever anyones buys from Amazon once they click on a link from your special Amazon affiliates link (here's a write-up of the Affiliate program from an LWLer), those websites might also offer widgets to you. Amazon rolled out some cool ones, like this slide show that I made just now:

Are there drawbacks to using widgets?
Sometimes setting up the widget can be buggy. Amazon's navigation, at times, is not the easiest, so it's very easy for me to click on the wrong link to get my code, which causes me to lose all of my work. What work? Selecting which books I want to appear in the slide show, for example. That's it. So I just need to re-invest the brain power to remember which books I wanted to add.

Also, you are pulling data from another website, so that can cause your load time to run more slowly, especially if you have many widgets on your site. Like all things, though, companies providing the widgets will improve with time as they invest more in their ability to serve you faster.

And finally, a widget can sometimes not fit very well into your website design. So if you are going to build a website, keep in mind that you want room for these sorts of things. Certain designs, like my blogger template of the moment, look clunky with some widgets. I'm widget-happy, so I will continue to use them until I give blog a major make-over. Come visit if you want to see some more widget examples and ways I've used the widgets.

Happy Widgeting!

Turning a PDF Into a Word Document - Or Just Getting the Text

2007-10-30T23:31:00.000-04:00

You can convert your PDF into text without having to drag your cursor over all of the text to copy it, then paste it into Word. Even when you do that, you may bring over mystery characters, like ' or / that you didn't intend, and you'll find yourself either Find/Replace All, or removing them by hand.

Here is how you convert your PDF into Word - from a Mac using Adobe Acrobat Professional CS3. The process may be slightly different for you depending on which software version or type of computer you're using. But here's a general direction you can go:

Open your PDF in Adobe.
Go to File, and select Export > Word Document
Type in the file name, and click Save.
Open your new document while in Word, and voila.

BUT - this method will keep some of the layout of the PDF. This means, if any copy was in boxes, or if there were images, those may be brought over into the Word document. So if you want straight text, you'll want to export your PDF into a Text file. That's the cleanest way. You will get text. Unformatted text. Yes, you will lose bolding and italics and such, but you'll have your text to manipulate easily.

Getting Straight Text from a PDF
Open your PDF in Adobe.
Go to File, and select Export > Text > Text (Plain)
Type in the file name, and click Save.
Open your new document in Text (if on a Mac) or Notepad (if this works on a computer using Windows aka a PC)

Good luck! If you get other results, chime in the Comments and let us know.

Coffee Cup for iPod. Yes, that's right.

2007-10-30T21:31:00.000-04:00

Found this on StyleHive, and hived it in my StylHive. A coffee cup speaker base for your iPhod. No batteries required. Runs on the MP3 player power. My question is, how dusty would it get on the inside, and how tricky is it to clean? And, you couldn't get to the dial very easily when you want to change the tune. Hmm.

If this fits your fancy, buy from the MoMA Store.

If you're website's been stolen...

2007-10-23T17:21:00.000-04:00

Like if it is being hosted on another host under another domain name that you've never heard of, let alone given permission to, here's what Vertical Response did, who is a major and trusted enewsletter provider:

http://blog.verticalresponse.com/verticalresponse_blog/2007/10/someone-tried-t.html

You need to be a sleuth. Quiet and stealth-like as you backtrack.

First, check the WHOIS Directory. This tells you who owns a domain, the domain that is hosting your stolen site. Or even if they are hotlinking (aka robbing you of your images while sucking your bandwidth), you can check here for some clues. This can be made private, and numbers can be falsified, so it's a chance.

If an email was involved, like with Vertical Response, see if you can track the IP address who sent it, or call your host or enewsletter provider to see if they can help you track it down.

If there is a phone number or any type of contact information, use it. But be nice. They could suddenly dissapear.

Oh, and to get tipped off that this actually happened, set up a Google News Alert for your domain name and see what people are saying about you. Or try Andiamo Systems which is another system, but I've never tried it.

ps: If your website has been stolen, tells us about it via Comments!

pps: hi Vertical Response! I know you just Andiamoed this article. :)

How to Kill a Great Idea :: The Flame and Fizzle of Friendster

2007-10-03T12:18:00.000-04:00

Here's a great article at inc.com on why and how Friendster, one of the leaders of the social networking scene, flamed and fizzled out. Lessons on why you need to stop and fix a problem, why coders and programmers should maybe not be PR stars, why big partnerships don't always mean golden eggs, and what happens when too many big cooks get in the kitchen. Oh, and I don't think he (Johnathan Abrams, the founder) started with a business plan.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070601/features-how-to-kill-a-great-idea.html?nav=mostpopular

How to Find Good Blog Post Ideas from your OWN Website

2007-09-27T13:45:00.000-04:00

Stumped for a blog post idea? Chances are, you're like Dorothy with her ruby red shoes - you have the answers the whole time. Instead of clicking your heels three times, just log into your your site stat program and check your Keywords.

What are site stats? They are the statistics of who is coming to your blog, how they got there, which websites sent them, which keywords or keyword phrases they used in a Google or Yahoo or any kind of search. Most hosting companies provide these for free, but there are better ones out there, also for free. Look into Google Analytics and StatCounter. Both stat programs are free and invisible.

The Keywords people are using to find your blog are actual words typed into search engines by people interested in what you have to say. You may be scoring on the term "best ceramic flat iron" or "moms who make a million dollars" (I just made these up), but what are your smaller searches for? When you look into your keywords for which terms you're getting, look for the terms that are bringing in 1 search, or 7 searches, or 20 searches.

Small potatoes, right? Yeah, well, it also shows that your blog is coming up deep in the search engine rankings for this term, but you need to do a better job of optimizing for it to bring in an easy 50, 400 or 900 new searches. And chances are, you didn't meant to optimize for it at all. A combination of words from different posts, or you side panel, made your post rank for this particular term. Now all you have to do is write a well optimized post for it.

Gold SEO Nugget Example:
One rainy day, I was sifting through keywords, curious as to how people were finding FashionMista.com. A keyword phrase caught my eye: "do I have to be a good drawer to be a fashion designer."

Excuse me? No, of course you don't. But you had to ask a search engine that question? Fine, I thought. I'll give you the answer. I titled my post that exact question because the Title is the Page Title for that web page, and the Page Title is a very hot ticket for optimizing for SEO. Next, I made sure to weave those phrases throughout my copy in a way that made sense, and I included a picture, filled in the alt tag for that picture, and linked the picture. All very important steps for SEO. Search engines do look for images, and if the image has an alt tag, and is linked, the engine considers those terms especially important, which give you more exposure via higher rankings.

The result? FashionMista is at the top of searches for related queries (yes, people continue to ask the question), and the image I posted is on page 1 in Google Images for "fashion drawing".

So, it pays to sift through your keywords for a quick and easy blog post idea. Happy hunting!

ps: if you do want to learn how to draw for fashion, get the fashion drawing book, 9 Heads, which is fabulous. There are lots of poses, pleats, and ruffles to chose from as you practice.

If Someone is Stealing Your Code, Can They Crash Your Site?

2007-09-27T13:29:00.000-04:00

If someone is stealing your code and providing it to others to use directly from your website, aka hotlinking, then yes, they can crash your site. If the code they are using contains an image, for example, from your website, and that image is coming directly from your server, like img src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/yourimage.jpg, then it is your bandwidth that is allowing that code to work.

It's like using your electricity. If your neighbor somehow spliced into your electricity, and used his air conditioner and TV all the time, and one day you went to blow dry your hair, and you blew a fuse, this would be the equivalent to your site crashing. It would not come up anymore for your visitors. You, not knowing that your neighbor is stealing from you, you call the electric company to get more power. Ok, you don't do that for the electric company, but you would do that for your hosting company. And they would of course charge you for the additional use of bandwith, to prevent your site from crashing again.

How can you avoid this? Start by setting up a Google Alert for your website. Make it for www.yourwebsite.com. If code is being publicly posted somewhere for others to take and use, this will alert you to it. Next, put on some hotlink protection, which only allows specified domains to display images from your website. Learn what to consider if you do this.

Apple Won't Fix or Take Back Hacked Phones

2007-09-21T18:38:00.000-04:00

Just found this article from ZD Net via DIGG about a guy's friend who expected Apple to service his hacked iPhone. Apple wouldn't do it, and blacklisted his phone from future fixes, and refused to fix it. Um, duh? That's like: "Hi Mr. Store, I took apart your product and sprinkled some of my own stuff into it. Cool, huh? Got around your contract thing. So anyway, it's doing some weird thing that I need you to fix. Okay?"

He put a 3rd party application into it that opened the phone up to be used on TMobile, an accomplishment that happened rather quickly after its release. A lot of people want the iPhone opened up, like Free the iPhone.

My opinion? I wouldn't fix it if I were Apple. It's their product. They make the rules. Deal with it or invent something else. And don't invent something else to manipulate the existing product.

Related articles:
"Hackers" to share secret for iPhone free of AT&T
iPhone SIM Free

Brooklyn Artists Bring Free Wireless Via Cell Tower

2007-09-16T00:36:00.000-04:00

Capla Kesting Fine Art, a group of Williamsburg artists is trying to bring New York City into the 21st century by allowing free wireless to the masses. Being a New Yorker, this is a legitimate problem, being that it was easier for me to access free wireless while on Yale's campus in New Haven, CT, and in various strip malls in Columbus, OH.

A 10 ft hight tower named "CIA Cell Tower" is being constructed out of wood and antennas at 121 Roebling to amplify local wireless signals. It will be unveiled at the Confulx Festival, an event organized to promote awareness of the city. This may mean that the artists are amplifying local, unprotected wireless signals, meaning, the owner did not password protect his/her wireless signal when setting it up in his/her livingroom.

Part of their mission, as stated in Metro, is to also "raise awareness of government-funded wire-tapping, the erosion of civil liberties and the need to secure home connections from eavesdropping."

And from the Capla Kesting Fine Art press release:
Congress' recently approved changes to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the NSA to monitor domestic conversations and e-mails and provides the legal standing for the cell tower's construction.

"The tower allows groups like the NSA to collect data intercepted through e-mails and internet traffic on unsecured Wi-Fi connections without having to approach internet service providers such as AT&T Inc. This will eliminate the U.S. government's alleged complicity in current class-action lawsuits filed by consumers who feel their privacy has been violated," explained John Leo.

If you do have a protected wireless system near the tower, you can access it in areas not just your home or in the downstairs coffee shop. For me, it would be the downstairs grocery store, and my wireless doesn't actually reach that far.

Related Articles:
The Press Release
The Gowanus Lounch: "CIA Cell Tower" Art Project in Williamsburg
NY Metro

Hotlinking and Your Bandwidth

2007-09-15T22:16:00.000-04:00

I discovered a most disturbing thing: a scetchy free blogging software company was providing my free desktop wallpaper to its members. But not only that, it was offering it from my website, meaning, if someone were to plug in the code the way they suggested, then every time that blogger's website showed up, it would be pulling the image from my website using my bandwidth. You can see a picture of it on my Spammy Scammers blog, where I've exposed them. Now, as you all may know, I do offer pretty, feminine free desktop wallpaper. So, as with any file, purchased or not (like an e-book), it is subject to being thrown online somewhere without the owner knowing.

Posting an image directly from another person's website is called "hotlinking" or leeching. It's when you steal an image and the bandwidth from one website and to display it on your website. Bandwidth is basically the invisible stuff you pay for that shoots from your server at your hosting company through fiber optic cables and into people's computers to allow them to view your site. That's not the exact definition, but basically what it does. You know how when Daily Candy features a website, and sometimes you can't get to it? Well, it's because it crashed because it exceeded its bandwidth. There were too many people trying to access it at once, trying to pull images and text from it just by viewing them.

You can prevent a bandwidth crash by contacting your hosting company to ask them to increase your bandwidth (and your monthly charge). Or, if you know you're going to be on Daily Candy, increase your bandwidth for that month. But if you're doing well, then you'll have to keep that bandwidth increased for good...hopefully! A hosting company that has a technical system in place to provide more bandwidth on demand (like an overdraft safety account with your bank) is MediaTemple.

So. How can you prevent Bandwidth Theft, as I call it? You can get hotlink protection, and block every domain from displaying images from your site, except domains you specify. This does not prevent people from "grabbing" images off your site, uploading them onto their servers, and displaying them. Which isn't always a bad thing for PR reasons. Social bookmarking sites like StyleHive displays and shows off your images if someone socially bookmarks one of your product pages. BUT, if you have hotlink protection and did not allow for StyleHive to be an accepted domain, then your images won't show up there for people to drool over. Get it? So just make StyleHive an accepted domain in your code for your hotlink protection.

I went the route of hotlink protection because I was getting monthly alerts from my server that I was exceeding bandwidth, but my traffic was remaining the same. Mysterious, right? I attributed it to the fact that I used to store and serve all of my images for my blog, FashionMista, on my Katie-James.com server. As FashionMista started to pick up, particularly one image in Google Images that was doing particularly well, I was basically stealing from myself. So I got real hosting for FashionMista and started putting images over there. But, I was still getting the alerts. And now I think I know why. Hotlinking.

Cute! Geek Girl T-Shirts and Pins!

2007-09-11T00:07:00.001-04:00

Just found these Geek Girl t-shirts and pins from Rotem Gear. How perfect!

Click here to see more t-shirts and pins...

Apple to Issue $100 Credit to Early iPhone Customers

2007-09-06T16:51:00.000-04:00

In the comments for my post on my iPhone flaws and pet peeves, fellow blogger MelissaHead informed us that her pet peeve was the lowered price of the iPhone of $200 so soon after the release - which is to the annoying dismay of us early customers. Then she found a letter from Steve Jobs stating that he received tons of emails from people like us (I didn't write in), and has agreed to issue a $100 Apple Store credit. Here's his letter:

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

Related Posts:
Stylepoll: Will you buy the $399 iPhone?

Annoying iPhone Flaws and Pet Peeves : One Girl's Review

2007-08-29T22:00:00.000-04:00

We've gone over what features I love about the iPhone in this mini iPhone review. The annoyances aren't outweighing my love, but they are causing me to flatly say: "If you are not obsessed with the iPhone, do not buy it now. If you are obsessed with your Blackberry, do not buy the iPhone."

My iPhone Pet Peeves

For $500, you can buy a phone that does not text the beautiful pictures it takes. That's right. One of the glorious features of the iPhone is its picture quality. You can email a picture to an address you hopefully have in your address book, if not memorized in your head, but you cannot text an image.
I also think you can't take video. You can watch video on the iPhone, and you can click straight to YouTube, but you cannot take your own video - I don' think.
The keyboard. I know it's cool and on the screen and all, but I can't thumb-type. I hold the iPhone in my right hand, and type with my pointer finger with my left hand. I've seen others do it this way, so I'm not alone. This means that texting or emailing while driving is very hard. Harder than when you were doing it before.
Deleting emails at a time. You get all of your email, and can delete your email, but to delete it, you can't mass delete. There are no little squares to check so that you can delete a bunch at a time. Kind of annoying.
Ok, so the Visual Voicemail is cool. You can see a list of who called and click on the name to listen. Love it. But, as with all lists in the phone, the spaces holding the person's name its too small. I have long, slender fingers, but even I have hit the wrong person before, and called someone who I least wanted to call.
Can't highlight a group of words. That would be helpful to copy and past a link, change something all at once, etc.
Adding to the Calendar. If I am looking at the Day view (vs the Month or List view), and I want to add something at 3:00pm, my instinct is to double click in the 3:00pm slot. No can do. I have to hit a little + sign at the top right of the screen (which, if you were a man with thick fingers, this would be hard to hit) to enter an event from scratch, where I have to assign the time.
Vibrate switch is easy to activate. There is a 'quick' switch if you want to quickly switch you phone onto vibrate. Apple put the vibrate button on the side, so that if you slide it into your purse, you could move the switch over and silence your phone.
Answering a call. I use the earpiece that came with the phone. And it's great. It's the iPod earbuds but with a speaking device in it. It comes in handy when I jog, in that if I'm listening to music, and the phone rings, which fades out the music, I can click the button on my earphones and answer the call. For some reason, I don't think to do this when I'm not jogging, so I use the slider to unlock the phone and answer. Well, if you don't slide the slider in just the right place, it won't unlock, causing you to miss or be being rushed on answering your phone. There may be a button at the top, actually, that does this. I'll have to check it.

I still have not read the user manual for the iPhone. But if you would like the PDF, here it is (PDF). There's a lot to be learned with this iPhone. For example: today I just learned that if I was talking, and then hung up by pressing the little button on my earbuds, if I press it a second time it turns on the iPod and whatever album I was listening to 5 hours ago starts playing right where it left off.

But, there are some basic functions that it needs to include, namely texting an image. That's just absurd.

Mysteries of Meta Title and Description Tag Revealed

2007-08-22T17:02:00.000-04:00

I get asked variations of questions about these tags as eager website owners try to figure out what to do with them to answer SEO needs, like: "Fill in your meta tags!" or "We'll give you Meta Tags for $$". But you want to know what the heck they are before you go and get these tags, or pay someone to get you keywords for your tags.

Title and Meta Description and Keyword Tags Overview

First of all, your keywords for the specific page go into these tags. These tags are specific to each page in your website, and are not used to generally describe what is on your whole site. They are located under the hood in your HTML code. Depending on how you update your website (straight HTML pages that you upload or through a content manager where you press Save or Publish), you will have different ways of accessing and customizing these. At their most basic level, they tell the search engine what the page is called, and what the search engine might find there.

We'll get to the pictures in a minute, but the most heavily weighted by the search engines is the Title Tag. The Meta Description Tag is less weighted, but very important for different reasons - actual people could read it in the search results and gauge if they want to click on your page or not. And how do they click on your page from the search results? By clicking on the Title Tag. The Meta Keyword Tag is not so important, but is a place where you can put a string of keywords that appear on the specific page.

Tag Definitions:
Title Tag: Shows up in your browser window and in search results (see both pictures). Search engines place good deal of weight on what you plug into here. Keywords should go at the front, as users scan the search results page and have their specific keyword that they just searched for on the brain.

The blue underlined text is the title tag that people click on to get to your page. Not just to your whole website, but to a specific page. The black text, in this case, is the meta description tag. The black text can also be viewable copy pulled from your actual page depending on the better keyword match. The green text is the URL, which is the direct way to get to that page on your website.

Meta Description Tag: It can show up in the search results when you run a search on a search engine like Google. It will only show up if there is a good keyword match between what is in meta description tag and what the user typed into the search box. Otherwise, it is
another indicator to the search engine about what is on the page. The main reason you want it filled in is to show the user a sentence about what the page is about. It's more of a marketing-type sentence and should be different than the content on your actual page. Different, as in, not identical.

The screen shot picture above shows how the meta description tag is displaying in the search results for the query: "jewelry bag travel". The below screen shot shows the first line of text on my jewelry bag page that this search result is pointing to. Usually, for a page with not a lot of content, and if there is no meta description tag, or if the copy in the tag is not a great match, the search engine will display snippets from the first few lines of actual copy from the page, and may include copy from your text based menus, etc.

This is the top of a browser window. The very tippy top has text in it. That's the title tag. See how it can show up everywhere? So you want to choose it carefully. Mine could be better, but this is what we've got for now. :) The white area is the Address Bar. It shows your URL, which was that green text from the search engine result in the picture above.

Meta Keyword Tag: This is just a long list of keywords found on the specific page like: "jewelry bag bags pouch pouches travel traveling jewlry silk pink brown drawstring pull snaps snap pocket pockets elastic" It doesn't have that much weight in the search engines, but it doesn't hurt to fill it in. And what do you fill it in with? Words that appear on the page and misspellings of those words. The meta keyword tag will not display anywhere and is only for the search engines to read.

Text on the Actual Page

See how the regular copy on this page is not the meta description tag we saw in the search results above. The title tag is in view in the top of the browser window (in picture above, not this one below). But note how the keyword that I'm targeting, "jewelry bag" is in some hot spots on the page. It is in linked copy below each image, and they all link to the specific color of jewelry bag. The text under these jewelry bag pictures is not an image. It is actual text, which is readable by search engines, which is what you want. If it's an image, the search engines can't read it. These tag images I have posted here are just images, and totally unreadable by search engines. But I have placed my desired target keywrods in other places of this post, so I can take the loss of actual text in this case.

Title and Meta Tag SumUp

Title tags are very important. The are read by users and search engines, and may be pulled by other websites who link to you, like the social networking sites like StumbleUpon. If someone uses a special website like StumbleUpon or ThisNext to vote for your page as a good page, that website will automatically pull your title tag and show it on their website. You may have Title and Meta tags filled in with keywords, but there are plenty of other places you need to put keywords, like in the body copy, alt tags, image file names (that's my theory anyway), headers and sub heads, menu copy, in text links pointing to your pages, etc etc. Now that you know this, the tricky and fun part is getting creative with how you place your keywords (that you have researched, of course). Hire out or think of creative ways yourself, but either way, be aware of it.

Good luck!

I Got the iPhone.

2007-08-09T11:21:00.000-04:00

I got the iPhone. Gerdy made me. My justifications:

It was released in the month of my 30th birthday
I got a new project today," and "Gerdy (my dog) dragged me into the store on our walk that usually never involves W.95th and Broadway. How can I deny her."

Every time I take it out of my purse, people ask questions. If it's a man, he says: "Is that the iPhone?" If it's a woman, she says: "Is that the iPhone? Oh, is that your cat on there? Oh! My cat...yadda yadda."
I have a picture of my gray cat Dinah on the phone as my wallpaper, which is not that unusual, but the screen is so big and clear, that it looks revolutionary.

I'm timing myself for this post, to show you how the iPhone has improved my life. At 10:42pm I took a picture of myself on the iPhone to show you how good it is.

See how good I look? ;) Kidding. I'm at Panera, working and listening to Sarah McLachlan. At 10:43am I emailed it to myself. At 10:44am I answered an email while waiting for my picture to show up in my inbox (Panera has free wireless). By 10:45am, I had received the email, saved it to my computer, loaded up my FTP software and uploaded the picture to the FashionMista server so that it could display here on this blog. This means that at 10:42am I took a picture, and by 10:45am it was ready to go live on the web, whenever I finish yapping away on this post.

I was super excited when I got the iPhone, but really, I just felt complete. I am a Mac girl, so I have been waiting for years and years for Apple to release something that gives us a calendar and address book in the palm of our hands, just like everyone else

iPhone Highlights (in no particular order)

If it's not in a case, it slides into my cloth lined wallet.

Address book and calendar synch with my computer via iTunes. It literally updates just like an iPod

When I synch the address book and calendar, the iPhone actually alerts me to how many contacts on each device - the iPhone and my computer, a PowerBookG4 - will be updated. This means I can type an event into my iPhone calendar, and it will fly into my computer calendar when I synch the iPod. Same with the Address book. And by "synch" I mean plug in the iPhone into my computer.

While jogging and subsequently stretching, I can: listen to my 1200 songs while I jog, answer an incoming call from Boyfriend about when he is finishing golf, then send an email to a friend to reschedule drinks, then call my sister-in-law to pass along a thought on how she can get married housing at Ohio State. The best thoughts come while jogging in the sunshine, so it's best to have all the tools in one place to deal with or nurture all thoughts.

iPhone earphones, which include a microphone to talk on, work as regular earphones. So I can plug them into my computer when working in a coffee shop. You could also have surround-sound phone if you like. Too consuming for me, but you might like it.

While driving cross country on the highway in Ohio, I could quickly tell Boyfriend where the nearest Jiffy Lube was at the next exit, thanks to the Map function in iPhone that uses Google Maps.

The Map function lets you zoom very far in to see small streets.

Love the calculator. So cute and easy to use. My old phone calculator on my Nokia PDA reminded me of my TI-81 graphing calculator, but without the graphing feature.

Ring tones. A personal favorite. Boyfriend's ring tone is an actual motorcycle that is revving up. My mom is a barking dog because her dog is always barking in the background when she calls me. My sister is chirping crickets because those are peaceful. My morning alarm are actual church bells, which actually don't do a great job of waking me up because they sound like real church bells outside, which is very peaceful.

The clock and alarm. Spin wheel and you set the time. Look at an iPhone and you'll know what I mean.

Camera is fabulous. It sucks battery life, but is so convenient.

I'll stop here. I'm going to write more on the pros and cons of the iPhone on my That IT Girl blog, but I am happy I got it. Typing is one thing that will be quite different from what you are used to. It is not very easy to type and drive at the same time, since the keys are displayed on the screen. That's right. It means that you can not feel buttons for keys.

More to come!

Free Vocal 411 From Google! 1-800-GOOG-411

2007-08-02T12:51:00.000-04:00

I love GOOG 411! A little news flash in my Gmail told me about Google's new free 411 service for businesses currently percolating in their Google Labs. I called from my internet based (Vonage) land line, and the nicest mechanical man asked me: "What business name or category?" and without thinking, I just said "restaurant" and then it asked me which intersection or zip code. I wanted the number for a Joey's Pizza in Chagrin Falls, OH to see if it came up, but all I could think to say was "44022".

Not two seconds later, the man at GOOG 411 was giving me the top 8 results, starting with the very yummy Gamekeepers Tavern as a restaurant in or near 44022. Joey's Pizza was in there, as was Dinks. I tried "pizza" for 10025 in New York, and it really didn't have any pizza listings. That, or it could not understand me above my fan.

Next, I tried a direct search for Joey's Pizza. I started with "Cleveland, OH." I did not get a direct match. But clearly it was there. I tried "Moreland Hills, OH," but instead it gave me related listings, which included "Boston Market." Errr. Wrong. So then when GOOG asked me for my city and state, I gave the zip code of 44022 and stated the restaurant name. Bingo.

Extra Fun Things About Free GOOG 411:

You can "Go Back" to go back to the place you were before. Then the GOOG Man says: "Going Back."
Instead of a machine tinkering away after you say something, to indicate that it is thinking, a little guy is making machine noises, like "bleep dee dee bleep." And if there is a problem with what he is looking up, it will go "bleep dee dee bleep bloop bloop CONK CONK" and the GOOG Man says: "Let's just skip that part."
You can just keep looking things up by saying "Go Back."
The GOOG Man reads to you the address right away. He can connect you or give you more details, like recite the phone number.
When you have found your number and you're on your mobile phone, you can just say "text message" and it will text message you (GOOG knows your mobile number) while it is connecting you to the place!

How GOOG 411 Helps Your Website SEO

To be included in GOOG 411, you need to submit your business to Google Local. Being included in Google Local gives you more chances of rising to the top in the search engines when someone does a search for your type of business and the Google Local results are displayed before all else. See this local Starbucks example. And don't forget: on Apple's new iPhone, that uses Google Maps to provide maps to phone user, the same thing is presented. So when a person is actually in their car looking to go somewhere, and they type in a search for your type of business in the local area, you will come up as a little red arrow pointing to exactly where you are, with phone number clearly displayed. My boyfriend and I just did it to find local golf stores in Portland, Maine because he was consumed with buying a (another) driver. So go submit yourself!

To use Google's free 411 service, dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone. There are still listings that are not in there. I checked for some local ones around our apartment. This may mean that the businesses need to enter themselves into Google Local, which used to just help with Internet searches. But now it also helps for free and fast 411. To add your business into Google Local, click here. Here are some good FAQs about GOOG 411. Residential 411 is not included as of this post.

Fast Iteration :: Redesigning a Living Web Site

2007-05-31T15:12:00.001-04:00

Just came across this article on User Interface Engineering (UIE) discussing Netflix's approach to redesigning their web site: it's constant. They are constantly designing and building new things for Netflix.com, but they remove it when it doesn't work.

"We make a lot of this stuff up as we go along," the lead designer at Netflix said in the UIE article. They found that about 90% of what they develop doesn't work. And by doesn't work they mean users don't like it or respond well to it.

Fast iteration is the freedom for a design team to continuously redesign and tweak features of the web site. It means that a company doesn't need to keep such a grand "when we redesign" list, because many of the changes can be made along the way, and removed if the research shows that users are not liking it. It also means, however, that the company will need an ongoing budget to fuel such enhancements.

The article mentioned how some web site designers don't like fast iteration because it diminishes the lengthly design and development phase, where hours are poured into perfecting a design, only to have it under-perform. With fast iteration, those hours can be trimmed, and added to if the feature shows signs of promise.

Most of the fun of the web for me, personally, is that it is changeable. It is not print where a book is printed and the colors work or they don't, or the glue from the binding holds or it doesn't. To embrace your website as a living and breathing thing, something that can get dusty and just needs touch-ups to maintain its healthy glow, you might just save some money and have a fabulous website.

Read "The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netfliz Designs a Winning Web Site" for the liberating details >

How to Share Word Documents in Google

2007-05-17T19:08:00.000-04:00

If you are editing a Word or Excel document with someone else, and if you have a bazillion versions of it saved into various folders on your computer, and if this is driving you nuts, you are a candidate for Google's shared docuement tool. All you need is an Internet hook up, a gmail account, and you're in!

Here's how you do it once you have a gmail account:

Go to gmail.com

Login with your username and password.

Once in your account, look to the top Left.

Click on Documents

You may need to activate this feature. Just say Yes to everything.

If you want to upload a new document, above the main blue bar, there is a text link for Upload. Click it.

Hit Browse and find the document you want to share.

Click Upload File when you’ve selected it.

Once you are at the main screen, you’ll see your document. Select it by clicking on the little box to the left, and look in the middle column. You should see a link for Share Now. Click it.

On the next screen, make sure “as collaborators” is is selected and enter the email (gmail) address of folks you want to share with. Gmail accounts are the only ones who can get access to these documents. And unless you share them like this with people you invite, they are private.

Your collaborator should get an email to their gmail account that you’ve shared a document with them. When your invitees click on Documents from their gmail account, it should be there.

1,2,3 go!

Give it a try and let Comment below if you have any questions!

!! TaDa !!

2007-05-14T16:27:00.000-04:00

I edited a Blogger template to handle my own design elements! Thank you Blogger! I learned a little today about more difference between Blogger and WordPress and will post on it later. What I learned actually made me propelled me to give Blogger one last try in the custom-design arena. So you could say that I learned a lot. More on that to come.

Changing from a Classic Template to Beyond Beta

2007-01-26T23:58:00.000-05:00

Whatever the new blogger templates are called, I've just changed this blog from Classic to the new stuff (new as of 1-25-07). All directions have said that changes will be lost, but I wasn't sure just which changes those would be. So far, here's what's happened:

Lost the statcounter.com code.
Can't place Adsense code near the tag, as was warned to me. This lets me put Google Adsense ads at the bottom of each post, like on this laser hair removal post (scroll down).

Getting sleepy, so if I remember anything more, I'll add it here.

Home | Link to this

Changing My Blogger Template

2007-01-26T23:19:00.000-05:00

Hi, how are ya. I'm experimenting with changing my blogger template by messing around with this template first. At the moment, the template is a schollarly kind. I'm going to see if I can't change the graphics on it.

Privacy and Terms of Use

2006-01-20T14:35:00.000-05:00

The blog ThatITGIrl, located at www.thatitgirl.blogspot.com, does not share or sell any data collected, in any form, to any entity.

Data Collection
ThatITGirl does collect visitor data for website statistics using two tools: www.statcounter.com and www.google.com/analytics. Both services may place a cookie on the visitor's computer, unless that visitor has all cookies blocked in the browser they are using.

Affiliate Ads
FashionMista is a participant of the Amazon Affiliate program, which means that if a product is displayed or discussed here, if it is linked, it may be linked with a special Amazon tracking link in order to credit FashionMista with a commission of a sale at Amazon.

Comments
Comments are left at the digression and respectfulness of users. At this time, the Author needs to approve comments before they are published, and reserves the right to delete any inappropriate comment without notification or reason.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Katie at fashionmista @. gmail dot. com

Site Stats and Google's Urchin

2005-11-15T22:02:00.000-05:00

I was going to give you a breakdown of the free site stats out there, but then Google announced that they are giving away their statistic analytics software for free! Google bought Urchin On Demand, a terrific site statistic program that captures which pages were viewed, which pdfs were downloaded, which files were hit, referrals, etc. Normally it's about $200 a month to get, which is crazy. But now it's free, and even more free when you use their AdSense program (so it's really a giant push to get more advertisers on AdSense, which is fine).

Here's what Google says about it:
http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google's strategy is amazing! They are crushing competitors by offering major things for free. This may have a trickle down effect, as I'm already free now to move hosting companies for my website. I am paying $24.99 to a hosting company to host my site only because they offer Urchin. But now that I can get it for free, I'm free as a bird to pay $10 or less to a company that does not provide Urchin as part of their hosting package!

The other free site stat program you could consider is StatCounter.com. At one glance, they give you the referal, location (city, state, country) and entered and exited page. I use both programs in order to get up to the minite at-a-glances (thanks StatCounter) and comprehensive stats (thanks Urchin).

Permalink

Internet Advertising

2005-09-30T11:15:00.000-04:00

You know what I think is very interesting? I've never read about how .coms do their advertising, but I was on Fandango today, and saw that the banner add was targeted to NYC with Mayor Bloomberg advertising for himself. When I searched for movies in 44022, still the same add. Now I went to Netscape to check my stocks (oh, sweet google. Bought it at $97 and now it's $313. But I only have 2 shares) and saw a ny ad for that as well.

These banner ads must be targeted to IP addresses, which is totally cool and smart. Maybe you all know this already. Also, with web advertising, it's brilliant in so many ways, but one ways is that thanks to cookies, companies can get much more accurate numbers for their audiences (city, state, country, unique vs returning visitor, etc.), versus television, where the Nielson audience is 10,000 and the programmers get to speculate based on what those 10,000 viewers are watching. And to watch, they have to click a button to say that they are still there. Television advertising is in the stone age. Poor programers and TV ad execs.

I'm in love with the internet.

Google Personal Pages

2005-08-15T17:31:00.000-04:00

I've come accross great instructions on how to create a Google Personal Page. She said it much better than I would have, so here it is:

I don't know how many of you guys use a google personal page or a Yahoo personal page, for that matter... but you can "site feed" the blog to your personal page.

To get a google personal page: ( if you use a google email service ( gmail)or, if you want to start using that service)
http://www.google.com/ig
sign in ( or start a new account)
click on " Add Content"
( you can add all different kinds of newspaper links, stocks, sports, weather, and have them personalized to your preferences, etc.)
go to " create a section"
paste the following into the space: http://whateverURLyouwant/atom.xml
(you'll need that URL to have the /atom.xml at the end of it in order to see new posts to blogs automatically.)

this will make it so when you go to your google personal page, the newest blog entries will be there in their own little section, you can click on them and go straight to the blog.

Easy as pie. Blueberry.

Super Easy RSS Feeds for your Favorite Blogs

2005-08-12T11:12:00.000-04:00

What are RSS feeds? Really Simple Syndication. They let you view headlines as they are posted on newspaper websites, and you can do it for your blog as well. There are online programs out there to keep track of this for you, like Bloglines. But there also another way that has great benefit...

Do you have a personalized Yahoo or Google page yet? These let you view the latest headlines from your favorite blogs in an at-a-glance style. The added benefit to adding an RSS feed to your Google or Yahoo personal page is that you can add your own blog as a source of fresh content you'd like to track. Once you do that, it forces Yahoo and Google to link to that new post. When that happens, Yahoo and Google have spidered you sooner than they would have.

This is the theory, at least, of this Brad guy at SEO Elite. I'm trying it out, but nevertheless, if you are RSS wary, and don't 'get' how to tell a program to track headlines from a certain source for you, this is a very simple way to do it. For Yahoo and Google, you just go to the "Add Content" button on both (in Google, go one step further to "Add a Section"), and add the site feed of your blog, or anyone elses. That ends in .xml and can usually be found by clicking on an orange button with the letters "XML" or "RSS" in it. Hunt around, you'll find it. Or, if you're using a browser like the latest Safari browser, you can click on the blue RSS button in the right hand corner of the address bar and get the site feed address up in the address bar. Copy and past it into the site feed text box on Google or Yahoo.

When you're done, you can return to your Google or Yahoo personal page and see the latest headings and blog posts!

Tags Make Your Blog Go Round

2005-08-11T12:25:00.000-04:00

A fellow blogess needs to make links in her blog. She's having trouble understanding the concept of wrapping words with 'html tags' to make them do something, like format themselves. So, right now we're going to focus on the basics and learn about html tags. Once you get this concept, linking will come easy.

HTML Tags are your friends when making something online. You 'wrap' tags around words you want to be bold, or format in any way. Try it with me. Bold a word. To bold, you use the b tag. To italicize, you use the i tag. The arrows have to be around the tags. You have a opening tag, and a closing tag, with your the word in the middle you'd like to be formatted. A word that is bolded has those tags in back and front of it. Like this: bolded. They have on the left, and on the right (the closes the 'wrap' - anything with a / closes the tag). If you follow so far, make somthing bold in a comment or one of your posts, and we can move on. :)

To really see lots of html tags you can use, see this cheat sheet from Webmonkey. This may help.

You can do this!!

Changing Your Blog Template

2005-08-06T12:52:00.000-04:00

If you change your blog template, you will lose specific additions to your template code that you added. That means, if you have statistic code in your template that you put there, that stat code will not be in the new template. Before you change your blog template, go into the template settings and copy and paste all of the code into a Word or text only document. That way, you will be able to add your specialized code back into your new template in a quick and easy fashion.

How Will Google Find My Blog?

2005-08-06T08:24:00.000-04:00

Google will definitely find your blog when another website links to you. Yahoo, Google, MSN and other search engines work in simular ways. A search engine like Google will find your blog and rate it according to how many links point to it, as well as relevant content within its pages. Therefore, in theory, you don't need to submit your blog to a search engine directory (and you should never pay one to have your blog included - search engines do not work that way, Google doesn't at least). But it doesn't hurt and is painless.

When you're blog is in a place you're satisfied with, I recomend you submit it to two places: straight to Google and to the human edited directory, dmoz. If you submit your blog to dmoz, make sure you select the right category (there's lots of them). Google may include your blog in future spiders (it's not 100%, but is likely), and a person at dmoz will one day come over and check your blog and add it if he/she likes to that directory. Dmoz does give blog and website information to Google, Yahoo and others, so you may as well submit. I'm no expert on dmoz, I just know it is recomended by bloggers to submit to it.

Because you've selected in your settings to have each post be a page, each post is qualified to come up in a search engine result for whatever you wrote about, be it "seychelles wedges" or "kadorables t-shirts." So when you're writing each post, think about what search terms a user might type into Google's search box (or another search engine) when looking for something specific. Yahoo has a great tool you can use called Overture. This was built for websites who want pay-per-click advertising on their sites. It measures what search terms are being plugged into Yahoo every month. So Overture is a free and easy to use tool to check if a phrase is being searched in search engines. Your blog has a good chance of showing up in these search results if you write your posts tightly around a phrase.

But, the bottom line is, you will rank higher in search results if you 1. have links poinint to your blog or specific posts on your blog and 2. 'optimized content' is written tightly into your posts - for those posts you want to rank for (or be found for), that is.

May the search engines be with you!

You Published A Blog. Now What?

2005-08-05T21:14:00.000-04:00

Here’s where we rub our hands together. There are several basic ‘Settings’ in your blog that you want to make sure are fine tuned. We’re going to go under the hood to make sure you can get the most exposure at the most basic (aka easy, least amount of effort) level. I’m assuming you’re using Blogger (blogspot.com), so just follow along. If you’re not, your blogging program most likely has similar options for you.

The Tabs
When you log into your account, and you click on the blog you want to work on, you’re go into the behind the scenes area. You see 4 tabs: Publish, Settings, Template, View Blog (that’s an easy one). This is where you’re create and edit posts, tweak RSS feeds, publish to FTP if you so desire, change your template, and other little quarks.

Posting Tab
This is where you’re create and edit your posts. It’s pretty basic and self-explanatory. If you want to allow people, random people or your friends, to make comments on your post, you can make the decision here. It will be specific to this post. So if you clicked “No” to people commenting on your post on a past post, and you don’t want people commenting on this post, then you’ll have to click it again. Keep in mind, you are the administrator (god or goddess) of this blog. You can delete any comment, or any post for that matter, at any time.

You can change the time and date of your post here. If you don’t want people to know you were up at 4am blogging, then change the time to 2pm.

Settings Tab
Ok, here’s where we really go under the hood. I’ll just define what everything is, and why you want it. If you care about showing up in search engines for certain phrase searches like “seychelles wedges” or “new york fashion designer,” pay attention:

Under Basic:
Title: the title of your blog. It appears in search engines as the main linked copy and at the top of the browser window. Look up at mine. It says “That Girl with the IT Answers”

Description: appears somewhere below your title depending on your template. Fill this with good keywords but in a way that makes sense, as in a complete sentence.

Add your Blog to listings?: when you publish a new post to your blog, Blogger will automatically tell blog listings that you have a new post. This can generate traffic to your site. It will be random traffic, but traffic none the less. Usually, people are hitting that ‘next blog’ button at the top of a blog, and you could be the next blog because you have fresh content. You’ll want to say Yes to this. It doesn’t hurt.

Show Quick Editing on your blog?: this will let you get into your settings from your blog. So if you’re reading it over and catch a mistake, you can click on this little graphic to go to your settings. It looks like this:

Show Email Post links?: this does what it says. It’s another way of people to share your blog with other people. Doesn’t’ really hurt, so click Yes.

Show Compose Mode or all of your blogs?: this lets you use a ‘wysiwig editor’ with your blog, which means that, formatting your text will be much easier. It will be like formatting text in Word. You just click in a word you want bolded instead of wrapping code around it.

Under Publishing:
Woa there, Nelly. Don’t mess with this until you’ve done your homework. The only thing you want to change here is to click Yes to Notify Weblogs.com. Again, this notifies a blog-tracking program that you have fresh content on your site. People from far and wide looking at that list of currently updated blogs may see your blog Title and click on it.

As for the FTP and SFTP settings you see there, those are for if you want your blog to live in a website that you already maintain. Think long and hard before you do this, because reversing it could be painful. There are many little changes associated with changing where your blog is published, and you’ll want to think them all through. For a quick dip into it if you’re curious , you can see me flail for help (and get it) when I changed the settings (ouch for the brain).

Under Formatting:
The usual suspects are in here: time zone, how dates are displayed, how your archives are displayed. Keep all other settings at Yes except for the Show Link Field. No one really knows what it does or what it’s for.

Under Comments:
Comments: to show or hide. Showing comments is up to you.

Who Can Comment?: Again, up to you. Anyone gives ability for more people to comment. If it’s only members of your blog, those are more settings.

Default for Posts: do you want comments available every time you create a new post? If so, click “new posts have comments”

Show comments in a popup window?: this let’s your comments pop up separately, leaving your blog still open in the browser window. It allows for quicker loading of comments if you click Yes.

Show profile images on comments?: some people have pictures attached to their profiles, like me (see strange looking mouse above). This picture will be included with the commenter’s comments.

Under Archiving:
Choose your archive frequency (personally, I think monthly is good enough and easier for the user to go through).

Enable Post Pages?: if you click yes, all of your posts will be their own web page. This increases your chance of getting into a web search result for those keyword phrases. This of course not only increases chances for traffic, but gets you traffic who want to be on your blog.

Under Site Feed:
Another good way to get traffic. People can subscribe to services that alert them when new content is posted to their favorite blogs or websites. bloglines.com is one such service. If you click Yes here, then your site feed URL will be enabled.

Site Feed URL: it’s your blog URL plus the atom.xml exension. Unless the user has a special ‘reader’ that can turn this code into a pretty page, it will be a bunch of code. But it’s great to have.

Under Email:
I’ve never used this, so feel free to experiment.

Under Members:
This is where you’ll add members who can publish or do certain things on your blog. If you decided that members only can comment on your blog, than this is where they will live.

I think that’s all for now, don’t you? Check back for adding statistics (and which are the best free statistics) to your blog so that you can see who the heck is coming to your blog.

So You Wanna Publish A Blog

2005-08-05T19:57:00.000-04:00

Excellent! It’s not that scary, really. Time-consuming? Sometimes. Possibly addictive leading to obsession? Yes. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s learn how to publish that blog.

1. Find a blog program to ‘host’ your blog
Hosting means that someone is keeping the power on. To go with a blogging program means that someone is giving you tools to create and manage your blog. This should be free. I use blogspot.com. It started out as Blogger, and Google bought it. I have a friend who works there, and he’s a great and efficient guy. He loves the environment, and so do I. So, go to blogspot.com and sign up for an account (although, you're kind of already here, since I'm at blogspot.com...just look up in my URL in the address bar).

2. Create your account
Your Username appears when you comment, no matter how many blogs you have under that account. For example: my username is BloggerMouse. My blogs are “FashionMista” and the one you’re on now. When I comment anywhere in the blogging world (well, blogs that are under blogspot), my name will appear as BloggerMouse. This is changeable anytime.

3. Pick your template
Blogger will present you with a list of templates to choose from. This is the design, or visual layout, of your blog. You can design your own template, but that’s advanced. For more information on it, though, go to the bloggerforum to see what other people say about designing their own templates. Otherwise, the ones Blogger provides are just fine. You can change this at any time as well once you get started, and will actually be presented with more choices. Note: if you’ve done anything customizable to your template, those changes will be lost when you change templates.

4. Go ahead, post something
Christen your blog with your first post. Go to Create Post and write anything you want. If you’re using Windows or on a Mac using Firefox or maybe Mozilla (just not Safari), you have access to a ‘wysiwig’ editor. This stands for ‘what you see is what you get’ and it makes formatting the copy in your blog much easier. You’ll see buttons for Bold, Italic and to make a link. Use them. They work just like if you were formatting text in Word. Just highlight your text and press the formatting button of choice.

Enjoy!

Publishing Site to FTP vs Blogspot

2005-08-03T12:43:00.000-04:00

I've just been through a nightmare with publishing my blog to my website via FTP. When I wanted to switch back, Blogspot denied me, telling me that my blog was already in use (ahem - by ME!). BlogForum has been a great help, and finally Blogspot help got back to me telling me that the switch-back was possible. Well, it wasn't until today...

I'll write more about it later, but for now, if you're having problems publishing your site to your FTP, or coming back, click here: FTP SOS

Just know, that as of today, the function works to switch pubishing back to blogspot from your FTP. Very strange.