23.02.2010
Blog
Last year I tried to limit my travel but still ended up making about ten (!) trips in 2009. This year I’ve resolved to travel less for work. Right now, here’s my current speaking/travel plans for 2010:
March 2-4, 2010: SMX West, Santa Clara, CA. I’m doing a “Ask the Search Engines” panel.
May 19-20, 2010: Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I’m doing a site review session.
June 8-9, 2010: SMX Advanced in Seattle
November 8-11, 2010: PubCon in Vegas
I was gone last week (February 9-13) for the TED conference, but that was attending, not speaking.
23.02.2010
Blog
I recently went looking for some software to make a blog into a book. Here’s what I found:
- Lulu will take PDF files for a book. Blogbooker.com will try to create a PDF from a blog. Unfortunately, my blog made BlogBooker choke (I have 991 posts from my blog) — even when I excluded comments.
- Blurb.com will try to create a book from a blog, but it only supports blogs hosted on WordPress.com, not other WordPress blogs. That will help some people who want to print their blog into a book, but not everyone.
- I had the best luck with FastPencil. In order to reduce the size of your exported blog, you’ll first want to go to your comments section, click on the “spam” link and clear out any spam comments by selecting all the spam comments and clicking “Empty Spam”. Then you can export your WordPress blog (from the Dashboard, click Tools, then Export) as an XML file that you can download to your computer. From there, FastPencil lets you upload the .xml file and then select which blog posts to include in the book. You can also filter by time, which I had to do. Even my blog posts (no comments) from the last year and a half still made a 350+ page book, and FastPencil choked on turning my entire blog into a book.
FastPencil did a few things well. Included images were imported, and some formatting such as bold made it into the PDF. But other formatting, such as code formatting and newlines/spacing between paragraphs didn’t make it. Embedded content such as videos or polls were likewise empty. Trying to import my entire blog also didn’t work. But all in all, I was impressed with FastPencil. They also have nice collaboration tools (e.g. you can designate editors, reviewers, co-authors, and project managers to help in writing/polishing the content). The site also works through your web browser instead of as a downloadable program, which appealed to me. If you’re used to WordPress, FastPencil won’t be too much of a change.
It’s still not a point-and-click affair to make a nice looking coffee table book out of a blog, but it’s getting closer. Right now, the “make a book” niche feels like the early days of recordable CDs. Back then, CD-R discs were expensive enough that I would spend time to make sure that I used all the free space on the CD. Eventually prices dropped so much that you didn’t feel bad about burning a half-empty or not-perfectly-polished CD.
If you’ve tried other blog-to-book services or websites, let me know your experiences in the comments.
23.02.2010
Blog
Back in December, I happened to click on a Greasemonkey script in Chrome and was shocked that it just worked. At the time, I wrote a note within Google that said
Whoa. I just clicked on a Greasemonkey script in the latest dev version of Chrome (4.0.266.0 on Linux). Chrome offered to install the GM script, so I said okay. The script ran perfectly in Chrome with no changes at all! I don’t know how many Greasemonkey scripts will run in Chrome unchanged, but at least some will.
Last week brought that news as an official announcement. My guess is that scripts that don’t use specific Greasemonkey APIs should be fine.
(Side-note: I found a good post from November that claims that ~60% of Greasemonkey scripts don’t use any sort of special API calls at all. The top API calls appear to be GM_getValue and GM_setValue (16.5% of Greasemonkey scripts), plus GM_xmlhttpRequest (15.5% of Greasemonkey scripts). It’s unclear which of these functions might be worth supporting. Some could have security implications (GM_xmlhttpRequest). Others like the get/setValue functions could be done by using other ways to store data.)
So this is cool. There’s a good chance that your favorite Greasemonkey script might just work in Chrome. Personally, I recommend the dev channel version of Chrome. It gets all the cool features early, and it’s been very stable/fast for me.
22.09.2008
Blog
Are you about to embark upon the new and exciting journey of getting your website done, redone or undone. Are you hoping to avoid the latter? You want style, you want usability, functionality, reliability and aesthetic quality….right? Let me guess..on a budget ? You may be considering flash, and why not, flash makes websites look ‘flashy’; amazing animations, cool effects and funky navigation. No match for regular dynamic ASP, PHP or HTML website right? But what about the search engine side?…
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22.05.2008
Blog
The Google Ballyhoo – Yahoo and MSN relevance.
The Google ballyhoo, as I would like to call it, has created a somewhat deceptive illusion that Google is the most relevant search engine. It is true, that at one point in time, Google was the best search engine, providing quality, fast and honest results. However, several changes in algorithm, the realization of the power of search, and the ‘Google Currency’ (see my previous blog) have, in my honest opinion, changed Google for the worst. This however, is not to discount the efforts of Yahoo and Live (MSN), I believe that these search engines, particularly Live, have been quietly, yet quickly learning from their competitor, and, as such have caught up, and arguably overtaken Google in search result relevancy.
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22.02.2008
Blog
By now, almost everyone is familiar with the terminology of Web 2.0, a term loosely used to describe the internet in the 21st century. But how is Web 2.0 different from the previous web and how will it specifically effect your business?
22.02.2008
Blog
How does a search engine know that the search results are relevant to the search term entered?
The answer to this question lies at the heart of search engine competition, and is the main reason for Google remaining the leading search engine. A search engine uses a number of different factors to provide search results to your browser within split seconds after the query has been entered. One of the factors taken into account is the number of links.
Links work in a similar way to word of mouth promotion. For instance, if you like your local website design company, you may recommend them to you friends and acquaintances. Linking to a website, is ‘virtually’ the same thing.
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22.09.2007
Blog
In starting up an effective internet marketing campaign you definitely need to know what to do. But more importantly, you must know what NOT TO DO.
Many start up website administrators fall in to some cleverly laid out traps by search engine gurus.
So in this blog I will point two initial foolproof strategies and identify some foolish traps to avoid.
Premature launching may have a nasal spray solution in real life, but a premature website launch may cost you more than the odd grand it would cost to get your site properly checked before hand.
22.06.2007
Blog
So you have started up a website and you have dedicated so much time and money towards designing, creating, implementing and testing it, but no traffic. What to do…
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22.02.2007
Blog
How Competitors Are Buying Their Way Ahead
There is a dirty secret among many individuals and companies dealing with SEO online, one that they want to keep from any new competitors trying to jump into the market. It’s easy to find out what the most effective search engine optimisation techniques are for online articles, but on page optimisation isn’t nearly as important as the off page optimisation.
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