Posts by Dani

Consider the forum administrator chiming in to say that we stick by our policy of not deleting/editing any post that doesn't specifically violate one of our rules. And, in such a case, the minimum amount of the post is edited so as to conform with the rules.

I used to be able to code for 2 days straight, back when DaniWeb was first starting out and I was adding all the features. I also pulled an all nighter or two when we upgraded DaniWeb to this style back earlier this year, but that was the first time in years.

Long story short ... I used to do all nighters a *lot* when I was working from home. Days and nights just always mushed together. As soon as I got an office, I got into a really good schedule of working in the office only. It's really been AMAZING for my health ... and my social life! :)

oyster --> clam

I will consider re-adding the multiple reply button.

Yup, I heard about Delicious going bye bye. Not a huge loss IMHO, considering all the other social media bookmarking tools that have far surpassed it.

I will agree, that in today's economy, you can get solid workers as contractual employees as opposed to fulltime. Whether you want to go that route or pay the extra $$$ to hire a full company for the services you require depends on your capabilities and skills in-house to successfully manage the project or not.

Don't copy/paste the copyright sign from a word processor. That is what is causing the weird character. Instead, use the HTML code ©

So your HTML will look something like this:

<p>Copyright &copy; 2010</p>

I just went to the FusionCharts contact page to report this to them as a bug, and discovered this:

FusionCharts Technologies LLP.
Infinity Think Tank #1, 11th Floor
Plot A3, Block GP, Sector V,
Salt Lake City,
Kolkata - 700091, India

Apparently it is an Indian-based company. People from India tend to write broken English with the phrase 'the same' a lot. I will let Sanjay (our super moderator) explain why since he's from India and does it too :)

Here is what is going on ...

We use a Flash-based charting software to put pretty activity graphs in member profiles, charting posts and reputation. The charting software we use is detecting that you don't have Flash installed, and therefore is prompting you to install it.

"Please click on Ok to install the same." <= I have learned from my time here at DaniWeb that is how people from India speak English. I am assuming that the charting software we are using (www.fusioncharts.com) has outsourced some of their development to India.

I believe that Google trends lets you search for particular keywords, and it tells you the popularity of those keywords that you are looking for. Google insights is a bit more advanced in that you can search by locations and use more advanced filtering. From what I can tell? ... To be honest, I'm not quite sure myself.

I assume you are using Bruce Clay's PathMaps tool? You will need to install a line of javascript at the bottom of pages you wish to track:

<SCRIPT language="javascript" src="//www.bruceclay.com/pathmaps.js"></script> 
<SCRIPT language="javascript">PMAudit()</script>

Hi,

We are running a medium rectangle (square) ad for Microsoft targeted towards developers. However, it is UK targeted and I have no way of knowing whether it looks okay and is clickable.

Can someone in the UK please confirm for me? :) Thanks so much!!

I am familiar with the whirlpool forums and I know they can be popular for networking-related stuff, but I've never considered them a programming forum.

Haven't heard this before, although I did hear that Google is interested in possibly acquiring Twitter.

The best way to gain backlinks is to continually come up with unique content that people will naturally want to tell others about.

Keep the user engaged through some form of interactivity. If the user isn't commenting or posting, then they are interacting with your site in some fashion (flash, videos, AJAX interactivity, etc).

If your site is just the same static pages, then once they read them once, the user never has a reason to ever return. Give the user a different experience each time so they always have a reason to go back.

Just thought this was cool ...

I was doing a bunch of googling on crown molding designs. Then, I decided to come to DaniWeb for a bit. I was browsing seo-related threads and the Google AdSense ad units, instead of being related to seo, were directly related to crown molding.

@groedius

Sorry Man You Should know C++ Before You can start DirectX and Stuff
Now what you are trying to do is to ride a bike before you know how to ride a bicycle.

Offtopic:

Don't you mean ride a bike before you know how to ride a tricycle?

From what I can tell, that is often used in conjunction with HTML code that is encoded. The web browser decodes it on the fly using JavaScript.

Probably ;)

I'm pretty sure it's a gmail setting. Can other people confirm it happens for them? Nothing special about our html code that would snip that piece out.

> 2. Get the domain name for that particular country.
The problem is that, while this is true for most countries, the US does not really have a country-specific domain. The .com domain is considered country-neutral in Google's eyes.

It's hard to recommend the best way to advertise since you haven't disclosed any information about the service or who the target audience is. SEO can NEVER hurt. No matter what it is, there is always a way to get traffic for free through SEO. It's just a matter of perhaps being a bit creative with the keywords you are targeting.

Facebook and Google AdWords are also good options. Paying someone to promote your site for you is never a good idea when first starting out. YOU need to take the time to figure out what works and what doesn't. In my opinion, it's silly to give someone else extra money to set up a Facebook Ads or Google AdWords account and spend your money before even you know what the best strategy is. They'll probably end up just spending your money unwisely.

I'm not trying to say anything negative about SEOs, because many of them make a living at knowing the best techniques and strategies for AdWords, and can establish much more efficient and productive campaigns than people may be able to do themselves. However, I would hold off on doing this until later in the game.

Sitemaps provide a way for you to let Google know about all the pages on your site, and prioritize which pages are more important, and how often pages are updated. It is meant to offer Google some additional guidance in how to best crawl and index your site.

You need to reference the sitemap in an robots.txt file which gets uploaded to the server. You do not need to link to it from your actual webpage / homepage.

The sitemap should always be up-to-date and always contain all the latest pages on your site.

First of all, good work on constantly increasing earnings!!

Different things work better for different sites. Sometimes CTR is the best with contrasting colors, and sometimes it's the best for a particular site when the colors blend in, etc.

The best thing I can suggest is testing out different combinations of different things. Do a full week-long test with each one (Especially if performance tends to be different weekdays vs weekends).

Usually you can also contact AdSense Support by email and they will get back to you with some custom optimization improvements.

Tracking the number of hits that a logo or such gets is the only way I know of to track email opens. However, with images disabled by default with so many email clients these days, the numbers are FAR from accurate.

You can't do this through Google Analytics, as far as I know, because GA has no way of tracking hits to your own image. You would have to use your own server logs, or a tracker that tracks image hits.

Soo ... umm ... how is that?

It definitely was back in the day. However, I agree with vitminl that a listing is not nearly as important as it once was.

Also, when reading marketing/seo articles online, always be conscious of the date they were posted. Techniques tend to be trendy and then go by the wayside.

You don't need to submit your site because the big search engines will find you automatically. You just need to have another site somewhere link to you. And then they will find you.

Our Queen!

You have to wait another week and then visit matt cutts blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/) where he will publish a video outlining answer to some interesting questions.

Regards

Thanks!

Umm ... Matt Cutts is not a platform. He is a Google employee who (at least formerly) went by the username 'Google Guy' on SEO forums, back in the day. In any case, he is the liaison between Google and the SEO community.

If you change your forum signature, it affects all of the posts which you have already contributed. So, yes, it *is* retroactive.

If you are using Signature A for awhile, and then you switch to Signature B, all of your posts will now display Signature B. However, it is possible that some of your older posts will still be indexed in the search engines with your original signature, and Google may not update this, especially if they are older posts on pages that have long been forgotten about.

Actually, Google News picks our articles up within 5 minutes, typically. They are much more timely about Google News than the regular Google index.

Picking up an article here or there is very different from getting featured on the Google News homepage, or getting a significant amount of traffic from Google News.

For example, it's easy to get indexed by Google. Just create a site and have at least one link pointing to it. It's hard to get a lot of traffic from Google.

You can sign up for affiliate programs on sites such as cj.com

DMOZ is entirely volunteer edited. Depending upon the popularity of the category you submitted to, and the time dedication of the volunteer running that section, it could take anywhere from a few hours to an eternity :)

Try reaching out on resource-zone.com, a forum dedicated to DMOZ editors. That's what I did a couple of years ago, and it worked for me.

Cool. Skimmed through a bunch of the existing questions, but where do you go to read the answers? :confused?:

Basically what Living-seo-life said

Have a dedicated IP address. And try to host in the country you're targeting. If not just for SEO, but because your website visitors will be able to establish a connection with the server quicker.

Sign up for a Google Webmaster Central account at google.com/webmasters

There is an option in there to target to just a specific country. However, this almost always result in you receiving less overall traffic from the search engines. All of the international traffic you would receive will be filtered out, but you won't necessarily receive significantly more traffic within the US.

The advantage to doing this is if you sell a product just within the US, and are getting a lot of international traffic, you can't monetize the int'l traffic but it is still costing you a lot of money to have a powerful enough web server to handle it all. You'd rather your server only had to deal with traffic you can monetize.

No experience with Facebook advertising, sorry.

However, Google does not charge a start-up fee of $5. They just have a $5 minimum to get started. The initial $5 "start-up fee" actually gets applied to your ad campaign.

Well then you should start contributing again ;)

Visitor = One individual person
Visit = Each visit is the user accessing the website at a different time
Pageview = Single page viewed

i.e.

Visitor 'A' visited daniweb.com on Monday morning and surfed around to five different pages. Then, he visited Monday evening and surfed around to three different pages.

That is one unique visitor. Two visits. Eight pageviews.

I don't know of anywhere that you can get free hosting, but if you don't get a lot of traffic, you can probably find hosting for less than $5 a month.

Once the site is up and running, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to geographically target your audience. Additionally, Google is really good at figuring out who you're trying to target based on the content of the website.

Contribute really great content to your blog on a very frequent basis. Hard work gets rewarded.

I don't even know what tumblr is.

There are two aspects to SEO, as joy12 indicated. On-page optimization (proper HTML practices, keyword density, etc) and off-page optimization (Building backlinks).

It is important to have lots of links coming into your site. But, you're right, it works against you if Google discovers that you are paying for the links, and they didn't come in naturally.

To naturally start building links, start doing link exchanges with other websites about similar topics. Also, try to get yourself listed in directories such as DMOZ. (But not spammy type ones).

It's all about having content that people will want to link to. It also helps to use the 'Tweet This' and 'Facebook This' icons on your articles, to increase sharing through social media platforms.

Does it really need to rotate like that or can you just send 33% of visitors to site one, 33% to site two, and 33% to site three.

Because then you can just use php's RAND() function to randomly pick a number between 1 and 3, and depending upon which it chooses, it sends the user to the appropriate site. Super quick way of doing it without making it keep track of 'state'.

The random number generator, between 1 and 3, will average out to about 33% each. Of course, it's random, so not exact ;)

That idea was debated to death awhile ago, and determined that it just isn't feasable for the system to automate adding code tags.

> like the birth of my two eldest daughters for example. I was present at both yet remember neither
Aww, that's so sad :(