Read/Write Web lists new and specialized search engines. Interestingly, they claim that each of the 100 betters Google in one particular feature. I wish them luck and eventually a significant part of the search pie. Competition is what the market needs.
Have you tried any of them?
Most people are aware these days that a blog can do some good things SEO-wise for a site.
Written properly, with interesting and valuable content, a blog can be magnet for relevant incoming links. Make no mistake, these are very valuable.
So, how do you best support your corporate or e-commerce site with a blog?:
Place the blog on your main domain – a subdirectory is fine (http://www.yourdomain.com/blog), though.
Try to avoid using a subdomain – like http://blog.yourdomain.com. Your main site won’t get all the possible value or leverage out of the links to your blog.
Don’t start your blog on another domain entirely – That means you shouldn’t use hosted services like Blogger or Typepad if you’re blogging for business reasons. I know, I know. My blog isn’t hosted on the Web Positioning Centre domain, but there is a good reason for that. Dangerous Thinking is a venerable old blog, going back more than five years and has a large number of mature links. Moving it elsewhere would mean losing them and starting again. Instead, I link back to Web Positioning Centre.
I feel I owe you an explanation for the long silence.
Dangerous Thinking wasn’t happy at its old home and I couldn’t fix the problems, so I’m biting the bullet and moving it on to WordPress. Here I can fix problems, or I certainly know a man who can 
Paul Silver, Web Positioning Centre’s Head of Technical SEO, is currently doing some stuff that I don’t begin to understand (maybe he’ll be able to explain at our meeting this afternoon), and I want to make some changes – both cosmetic (ie not the default template) and technical (finding the right plug-ins for what I want to do) – so I guess it’ll be around a week before normal service is resumed.
As I continue to sort out my presence online, I’ve peeled off the Food and Drink content from Dangerous Thinking, and launched Meals on Blogs at www.mealsonblogs.com.
Meals on Blogs has been going for a few weeks now, and the content works a lot better away from Dangerous Thinking’s business focus.
Please have a look and tell me what you think.
Dualit, makers of shiny metallic kitchen stuff, came up trumps today.
Part of our espresso machine broke over the weekend, so I called the company helpline. As I fully expected, they had better things to do on a Saturday than waiting around for my call, but I did leave a message on their voice mail.
At 10:55 this morning I got a call, apologizing that they hadn’t got back to me before!
There were no questions about how long we’d had the machine, or what I was doing with it when the piece broke. Just another apology that they were waiting for the part, and a promise that they’d put one in the post just as soon as they were available. No charge.
That’s what I call customer service.
I’d certainly buy again from them – our Dualit toaster has been brilliant.
A few months ago I thought I’d found my Holy Grail of Getting Things Done. A realisation that a wiki solved many of my information handling problems, followed by a later connection with Pimki – Assaph Mehr’s potentially great cross between a wiki and PIM. A series of e-mails led to us developing an idea of how Pimki could become a brilliant framework for GTD.
I’ve been using a mixture of Palm Desktop and Pimki for the past few months, while Assaph develops Pimki 2.
Trouble is, Instiki, Pimki’s underlying wiki, has lost its focus recently. It’s getting a MySQL backend to sort out its Madeleine (sp?) storage problems, or maybe it isn’t. To be honest I’ve lost track of what is going on. Alas, it does seem there’s precious little development-wise happening, and the Instiki mailing list has become a depressing place for me as Instiki seems at best to be moving sideways.
Assaph has said he’s moving Pimki on to another platform, which is great news. But my Palm sync started getting even sicker, I was getting further and further from having even a working GTD system – let alone the one we’d discussed.
I spent a large part of a weekend looking for another wiki that would allow me to do what I wanted – have my projects, reference material and NAs all in one place. No luck. Besides, most wikis are for geeks who love doing arcane things on servers.
For some reason, I looked back at Backpack from 37 Signals and found it had moved on considerably since I had my early-adopter’s play with it some time ago. Over the past month or so, I’ve developed the best implementation of a GTD system I’ve yet had.
I started writing it up as I had a couple of requests for further details after a posted to I mailing list. Watch this space…
I’d like to wish my readers, family and friends a Happy, Healthy, Peaceful and Prosperous New Year!
Last night, I was cooking dinner.
I took a large celeriac in a plastic bag out of the fridge and asked my wife whether she wanted it with our meal. With a look of surprise on her face, she said “What’s that, a human head?”.
As if I normally keep my severed heads in plastic bags in the fridge!
Normality in the Rosam household.
Looking at one or two of my recent posts, I think I’m sounding like a candidate for that TV programme, Grumpy Old Men.
Is it desirable to rant publicly, I wonder?
I hate the Royal Mail and just about everything to do with it.
It’s unreliable and slow – and hence expensive. And today they won’t answer the bloody phone. What’s more, the system just cuts off after what feels like hours – and, of course, I’m paying for the call because the Royal Mail ‘press 5 to blow up the whole edifice’ system has answered the call. I guess they’re making a cut from the 0845 number I called.
Now I have to schlep right over to the sorting office to retrieve a Special Delivery item someone sent while I was in Cornwall. If I could get through, then I could arrange for them to deliver it to me.
What a complete waste of time!
I particularly hate the Royal Mail because it’s a service that worked better – faster and with more frequent deliveries – years ago than it does now.
That has to be wrong, doesn’t it?
Recent Comments