My brother Luke sent me a link to a cool online favicon maker he used to make a favicon for my new company, Izeni. It’s pretty easy to use, so I made one for my blog as well. (Yes, it’s that same ugly pic, just smaller). Anyway, it’s kind of fun. If I’d known it would be that easy to do, I would have made a favicon forever ago. :)
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OS reinstallation would be much easier with a plugin that could dump your entire list of Firefox plugins and reload them later.
Does anybody know of a plugin like that? I’ve used screenshots to remember which plugins I’d installed, then reinstalled them one at a time, but that’s a remarkably sucky way to go.
What do you use to avoid having to find and reinstall your favorite plugins one at a time? Anything?
I don’t know about you, but my PR was showing as a 1 forever. Not that it really matters since I’m not really selling anything here, but it was kind of annoying. Why wouldn’t Google satisfy my ego like it does for everyone else? (Actually, it was more like, “I don’t suck that bad.”) The crazy thing is that my blog feed page had been showing up at a PR 3 all along, but that made no sense to me, unless Google was using my Google Analytics traffic to determine which of my pages were important –which is very possible. I get a lot more hits on my feed than my regular pages: probably a combination of having savvy readers and a really ugly pic. :)
Still, I suspected (since my content is so darn good) that if I was not unconsciously breaking some cardinal rules, then Google must be was just toying with me using cached data from different data centers. Since I’ve now instantly jumped from a 1 to a 5 doing hardly anything, I think it was the latter; but there’s no way to be sure –it’s just too much of a black box. Being a little opaque plays to Google advantage since it keeps blackhatters from gaming the system. I like that because it makes search result more relevant. But I’ve determined that Google’s antics are enough to drive anybody crazy if they’re trying to use PageRank as any sort of validation measure. Here at home, I’m still showing up at a 1.
So I wish I’d seen this Future PageRank Tool a little sooner. I don’t know how long my PageRank was limboing in Google purgatory, but my big jump tells me it was a while. The Future PageRank Tool basically queries a whole bunch of Google data centers for you, so it’s like the Google Toolbar, only reliable. Had I used it a few months ago, I may had saved myself some counseling. :)
By the way, for those of you who don’t use the SearchStatus plugin for SEO, it’s basically the Google and Alexa toolbars combined and on steroids. If you’re still wallowing in IE sadness, the SearchStatus plugin is yet another reason to use Firefox (YAR2UFF) . Perhaps I’ll highlight the many merits of SearchStatus in some future post, but for now you’ll just have to take my word for it.
So wanna know if Google loves you after all? Check out Future PageRank. If it turns out that Google really does hate you, then take comfort in the fact that “Future PageRank Tool” is somewhat of a misnomer; it really only sees the present. There’s still hope for you and Google in the future, and even there weren’t, MSN isn’t that bad… Lots of people like butterflies… We call them “lepidopterologists”, or more comonly, “weirdos”.
Tags: Alexa, Black Hat, Caching, Firefox, Free Tools, Future PageRank Tool, Google, Google Analytics, PageRank, Search Engines, SearchStatus, SEO, Syndication, Tips and Tricks, Vanity
Uncategorized | Jordy | 
October 9, 2006 9:18 pm | 
Comments (4)
Devin Thorpe (aka Mid Market Maven) from the Thorpe Capital Group just finished a great series of posts called 10 Ways to Get Money To Chase You. Devin is a smart guy who gives great, succinct advice. His blog is a definite must-read for business types.
I found two free services that come in handy when you want to transfer files that are bigger than your email server’s limit. YouSendIt and DropLoad make it really easy to upload a large file (up to 1 Gig) to their servers via a simple webpage, so there’s no need to use an FTP client. After the file is uploaded, an email is sent to the “recipients” with instructions to download, which must be done within 7 days.
This is a great service for people who have trouble emailing large attachments. Sure, you could always setup an FTP server and grant the person access, but for one-time deals or non-technical folks, these sites provide a simple and elegant solution.
TinyURL.com is a neat little site where you can submit a really long URL to make tiny. When someone clicks the TinyURL link (or pastes it in their address bar), they are briefly taken to the TinyURL.com page, then instantly redirected to the appropriate site. It’s a real simple concept, but it’s also really handy, especially when you’re posting a long URL into an email where the text wrap might break it.
For example, this gargantuan 322 character URL:
http://maps.google.com/maps?daddr=157+E+Rosemary+St,+Chapel+
Hill,+NC+27514+(Hell)+%4035.914810,-79.054805&saddr=Micr
osoft+Corp,+1+Microsoft+Way+%23+8,+Redmond,+WA+98052+(Micros
oft+Corp)+%4047.644154,-122.118906&f=li&hl=en&dq
=hell&cid=37062500,-95677068,15779228992678768709&ll
=54.876607,-93.691406&spn=43.504226,119.882812
… becomes this a sleek and paste-friendly one.
http://tinyurl.com/f7enh
Only 24 carbs chars!
I use that particular TinyURL link to give directions all the time. :) Very handy.
