Here is a graphic from my Google webmaster tools that proves page speed will increase the interval and number of pages spidered by the Googlebot.

 

As you can see the time spent downloading my content decreased and the pages crawled per day increased, verifying that an optimized site will help increase your SEO

How to get Google to index your pages faster and more often

 

My iPod Touch broke a couple weeks ago. It still plays music and games, but the home button broke and now I can’t get back to the home screen. I can’t believe Apple made this device with such a serious flaw. There is absolutely no way to get to the home screen without getting really creative.

 

I was complaining to my brother-in-law, who really likes Apple products. He asked if I had called a “Genius” yet. Nope, I haven’t. I don’t even know where an Apple store is, I’ve never been in one. I got this device at BestBuy. After going around and around with him he finally said, just throw it away and buy a new one.

After all you will get another iPod… No matter how much you complain, when you need a music player you will get an Apple product.

He was absolutely right! I don’t even know of another mp3 player on the market. Do they still make the Zune? iPod is so branded into my brain, I could complain all day long, but in the end I will get another iPod.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. To start, I hate it when he is right, and second, there has to be a way to get all the benefits of an iPod without an iPod. After all it’s just an mp3 player.

Read the full post: Android Vs. Iphone – No Killers But a lot of Competitors

 

 

Read the Full Post along with 5 blogging ideas to bring old content back to life

Below is an example of a recent blog post from my blog

As you can see, it’s not getting any traffic anymore… Most posts are like this

Here is an example of a post that gets hits regularly

That’s more like it… You want to these types of posts in your archive. Imagine a hundred pages like this providing traffic to your website. Unfortunately, only about 10% of your posts will continue to grab visitors, so do the math… That would be 1,000 blogs posts or so. that’s a lot of work!

 

There is an underlying, hidden component of  social media. While it’s often not thought about when making decisions, the game mechanics of popular social networks are very powerful.

Points, rewards, badges, status, customizations are all little pieces of social media crack that keep us coming back for more. You might not believe that you fall for these tricks, but I guarantee, if you take away the “counters” and “totals” from your networks and you’ll see a popular website dissolve into nothing.

This is the bad side of game mechanics in social media. Missing both sides or views  of a story

Read More @ Mattdunlap.org

 

Mailchimp Newsletter Popup WordPress Plugin

If you haven’t noticed, I like mailchimp for email newsletters but I’m not a big fan of there “evil popup” option. You don’t have a lot of control over the look and feel of it, so I decided to make my own. I also want to learn as much as I can about Jquery.

This plugin is built with Jquery and Fancybox. The plugin is very simple. It sets a timer to display a fancybox with a Mailchimp newsletter subscription form. I use an iframe to display the content in the popup... Read more at http://mattdunlap.org

Here is yet another way to install LAMP on a cloud server. This time I will be using a LAMP stack from Bitnami. I ran into a few errors, but once i figured it out, the install was very smooth.

This tutorial provides all the code and software to download in order to get the stack installed without any errors

 

I’m am totally loving the OldSpice responses to user submitted questions. The television commercials are hilarious and brilliant. If you don’t think so, your probably a woman, with a bad sense of humour. The commercials are geared for men, since well, it’s Oldspice. Now, out of the woodwork are findings that OldSpice causes cancer, and other stuff you don’t want.

Read More on my blog: OldSpice Social Media Buzz Kill

Probably the most confusing aspect of managing a cloud server is how to keep it secure. Well I have some good news, most hacks occur from bad passwords, not from someone breaking in through an open port.

How to secure a cloud server

The bad news is that WordPress is notorious for allowing bad guys in via plugins. Since anyone can write a plugin for wordpress, many times the coding standards are not very high. I’ve been bitten by a bad plugin before. It took me a while to figure out what was happening to my server. As soon as I rebuilt it, the hacker would break in… I finally narrowed it down to a plugin. Unfortunately it was days of downtime beck then because I was on a dedicated server. With cloud server, it sucks, but at least you can be back up in a couple hours. Read more

I was doing some optimizing today and realized there is not an easy way to track subscribers to my newsletters. For most websites this isn’t a problem, but since I have combined my personal blog with a business blog, I need to make sure the right visitor is getting the right information.

How to track subscribers with mailchimp

For example, my newsletter is trying to get people interested in making WordPress minisites, but some of my visitors could care less about being a webmaster, so it would be better for me, and them, if I just display some Google Adsense

I’m also a big tweaker… Not that crystal meth kind of tweaker, the website tweaker… If you’re one of the 4 people that read my blog regularly, better known as “my immediate family”, you will have seen different signup forms for my newsletter. Read More

Running a business on the Internet is becoming cheaper and cheaper every year. If you’re still on an expensive dedicated server, sooner or later you’ll want to make the jump to a cloud server. Not only will you save a ton of money, but with proper setup you’ll never fall victim to extended server downtimes.

From: http://ping.fm/SOPuM