Google lets you create your own “branded” search page, for example, http://logofor.com/AndrewM.
The main GoogleFor page is at http://googlefor.com/.
Archive for November, 2006
Make your own Google Search Engine?
Thursday, November 30th, 2006Search Engine Ranking Tweaking Techniques
Wednesday, November 29th, 2006General areas of Search Tweaking:
Favoring documents or web pages where the search term appears in the title, or in other prominent meta fields, such as “keywords” or headings.
Favoring documents where the matching “word density” is higher.
Favoring documents that are frequently clicked on as the result of a search, or that have many links pointing to them.
Favoring NEWER documents.
Favoring exact matches over “fuzzy” matches.
Favoring exact phrase matches over partial phrase matches.
Favoring documents found in certain sections of your web site, perhaps by looking at the URL.
Favoring small to midsize documents over large documents.
Favoring documents in a certain format; for example if instruction manuals are known to be in PDF.
Water Barrel
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006Just installed a pair of 80 gal rain barrels from:
http://www.rainsaverusa.com/
Used the following rainfall calculation for choosing a dual-barrel setup:
(Conversion from http://www.ilpi.com/msds/ref/volumeunits.html)
1 Gallon = 231 cubic inches
1 Gallon = 0.1337 cubic feet
Santa Monica gets 10″ per year
1″ over that roof section of 400 sq feet is 33.3 cubic feet
400 sq feet x 144 = 57,600 cubic inches
10 / 231 = 2,493 gallons / year
160 gal “should” cover re-use between large rainfalls 
Cell Phone Jammers
Monday, November 27th, 2006RX9000 HANDHELD – NEW MODEL
For worldwide use on all networks:
http://www.globalgadgetuk.com/rx9000.htm
GTP-1000: Worldwide Portable Cell Phone Jammer
http://www.grandtrades.net/
Adsense Alternatives
Sunday, November 26th, 2006Full Lists:
http://www.syndk8.net/forum/index.php/board,65.0.html
http://pro-seo.blogspot.com/2006/06/google-adsense-alternatives.html (good review info)
http://www.internet-search-engines-faq.com/google-adsense-alternatives.shtml
http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/adsense_alternatives/
http://www.ozzu.com/ftopic61508.html
http://www.kidslovepc.com/webtip/adsense_alternative.shtml
Picks Summary:
http://adscience.medspan.info/2006/01/10/google-adsense-alternatives-a-simple-list-of-best-choices/Full Lists:
http://www.syndk8.net/forum/index.php/board,65.0.html
http://pro-seo.blogspot.com/2006/06/google-adsense-alternatives.html (good review info)
http://www.internet-search-engines-faq.com/google-adsense-alternatives.shtml
http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/adsense_alternatives/
http://www.ozzu.com/ftopic61508.html
http://www.kidslovepc.com/webtip/adsense_alternative.shtml
Picks Summary:
http://adscience.medspan.info/2006/01/10/google-adsense-alternatives-a-simple-list-of-best-choices/
Permit Adult Content:
www.Clicksor.com
Reset, flush or clear your DNS cache.
Saturday, November 25th, 2006How to reset, flush or clear your DNS cache.
XP remembers negative (DNS unable to resolve) entries for a few minutes. Often this can be a pain when moving and debugging sites. As long as that negative entry sits in your DNS cache, your box will continue to give you a cannot find server error. By cleaning out your DNS cache, you can fix this problem.
Rebooting will flush your cache… but there is an easier way.
ipconfig /flushdns
Writing a Killer CV (Resume)
Friday, November 24th, 2006Summary Your cv (resumé) is one of the most important documents you will ever write, particularly in the new internet era of recruitment.¼br /> How to write a killer CV
Your CV is one of the most important documents you will ever write, particularly in the new internet era of recruitment. With job application becoming easier it follows that more applications are going to be received for each position advertised and this places even more emphasis on the recruiter to filter all of these applications. As a result many recruiters employ blanket rules in the first stage of whittling down the number of applicants for a post until they are in a position to invite people for interview. It is here where the most minor things can let you down, simple spelling mistakes, unclear lay out, a CV that’s too lengthy or too short, photocopies, fonts that are difficult to read. All of these stylistic issues can get in the way of your CV being considered by the recruiter. Beginning our CV guide, then, some simple stylistic tips.
1. Paper – Good quality paper will create a positive feel, it should always be A4 and preferably of 100gram for both the CV and the covering letter. 2. Layout – Make your headings clear and accurate, use plenty of white space, make sure the prospective employer can find all the key areas of your CV quickly and easily.¼br /> 3. Length – In the US resumes are usually kept to a single page, in the UK two pages is a good guide, any more can put people off regardless of how much apposite experience it contains, by cutting down on quantity the quality of experience should also improve. 4. Grammar – Poor spelling, typos or bad grammar must be eradicated. Run your document through your word processors spelling and grammar checks and then let a couple of people whose intelligence you trust look over it as they are less likely to be blind to errors than you are.
Once you’ve managed to make your CV look respectable you need to think about what goes into it. Your CV should include all of the following. 1. Summary – a brief, two-line summary which crystallizes your strong points for the interviewer. This summary will frame the readers impression of you as it will be the first thing they read and probably the last after they have read your whole CV. If it summarizes succinctly the information you have portrayed in your CV you stand an excellent chance of being remembered by the interviewer.¼br /> 2. Personal details – full name, address, daytime/evening and mobile telephone numbers, marital status, nationality and the status of your driving license. For marital status include only whether you are married or single avoid any terminology that may subject you to an adverse judgment on the part of the reader. Your nationality is vital to establish whether you are likely to need a work permit, if you don’t drive exclude any reference to a license. 3. Education – list your qualifications, grades, where and when they were achieved. For those with degrees and above, O Level/GCSE subjects are immaterial but the number should be listed.
4. Professional Qualifications – professional qualifications, memberships of professional bodies’ etc. should be listed. 5. Training – list any appropriate training courses you have taken and any qualifications resulting from them.¼br /> 6. Experience – As your career progresses the part time jobs, unpaid work experience etc. of your youth should drop off your CV. In reverse chronological order your CV should focus on your last two positions and your responsibilities and achievements in them. Internal promotions should be treated as separate positions with the job title and dates included. Within each position you should include an overview of your main responsibilities, transferable skills that you developed and all your major achievements in that position. Focus on concise and specific descriptions of skills but leave out IT literacy for a separate section, try to quantify your achievements for the reader, ie. the number of staff who worked under you, the amount of money your initiative saved the company, the actual increase in sales that you achieved. Concrete facts come over much better in CV’s than generalizations. 7. IT Literacy – Here you should enter all the packages that you are familiar with and the depth of expertise that you have in each. If there are packages that are specific
8. Other experience – a good place to list things like having lived abroad, language skills (include fluency level), leadership or team experience outside of work etc. 9. Hobbies, interests – try to include things that portray you in a good light and offer some value to how well you’ll perform in the position. Reading is great but doesn’t really show leadership, teamwork or drive. Team sports, charitable work, holding office for an organization all do.¼br /> If you’ve followed the above advice you should be left with a clearly presented, tightly organized CV, which shows your skills and experience in the best possible light. But in case you are tempted to fill out that last quarter of a page, bear in mind that some things are best left out of a CV. 1. References – There is no need to put referees names on your CV although most people do. By using the line ‘References available on request’, you can save yourself some space for other sections of your CV whilst also demonstrating that you have referees available.
2. Failure – Any form of failure on your CV can count against you in prospective employers’ mind, failed businesses, exams or marriages should all be omitted. 3. Decoration – Your CV should be free of borders, clip art, patterns, extravagant fonts and all other unnecessary embellishments¼br /> 4. Superfluous personal details – Age, height, weight, health conditions and photos are all abundantly irrelevant, unless the position is for the face of Christian Dior. 5. Expected salary – Never let prospective employers know what kind of salary you expect, this is an area in which your negotiating position will become stronger the further down the interview line you go. To sell yourself short at the CV stage would be foolish.
¼br /> Mark Stacey
http://www.pharmaceuticaljobs.co.uk/features/feature.asp?ROW_ID=145
Telephone Consumer Protection Act: Make Money from Telemarketer Violations?
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006Is it possible to Make Money from Telemarketer Violations by suing under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act?
“Our ARM mortgage recently adjusted. As the balance was so low, it was not worth the hassle of re-financing. Despite the fact that we are on the Do Not Call list, various title companies pulled the public data on us and our mortgage, merged with our telephone number and sold us as a lead to dozens (thus far) of mortgage brokers. We get the last laugh, as some of them keep violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, we file against them in Small Claims Court and eventually walk away with $1000 to $2000 per scumbag mortgage company.”
Tracking emails using the “+” extension feature
Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006Thomas writes: “I track who is selling my information and spamming me by using the +extension feature of the SMTP (email) protocol. Many email services (including Google Mail) support the ability to append +something to your email address to categorize your email.
“For example, I might put joe+amazon at mydomain dot com as the email address for doing business with Amazon. If I start getting e-mails from spammers to that address and I only use it for Amazon, then I know exactly who sold or gave away my information. The same goes for Verizon joe+verizon or Amex joe+amex or Bank of America joe+bofa. If the mailserver supports the SMTP standards fully, it should support using the +suffix option. Using this feature makes it unnecessary to create individual email accounts for each business that you deal with.
“By using the +something on the end of the first part of my email address, i’ve been able to cut my spam to a minimal level and have ammunition should I choose to take legal action or expose the dirty practices to the media. On e-mail accounts that don’t support this option, I still receive thousands of emails a day and I have no idea where they got my address from.”
RentaCoder (and related) Tips
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006List of sites:
www.TopCoder.com
www.elance.com
www.scriptlance.com
www.GetaFreelancer.com
www.SmarterWork.com
www.PHPCareer.com
www.Guru.com
www.Workaholics4Hire.com
www.FreeLanceWorkExchange.com
To avoid the same mistakes developers make over and over again, there are a few things you need to know before you hire that eLance, Scriptlance, or RentACoder software developer.
Rule 1: Your software needs to be created in small steps.
It’s more expensive that way, but at least you can get your version 1.0 out with the basic features. Once you have that base just pay the programmer on a case-by-case basis depending on which SMALL feature you want to add.
Get your version 1.0 working, fully error-free, tested, and SELLING with the site live before adding features for version 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, etc. When you move on to these newer versions make sure it is all error free and selling on your site before continuing.
After the initial version has been written you will know exactly what you’re paying for. Keeping it simple allows you to be very specific about what you want your script to do without overloading the programmer with details.
Small steps also mean any changes to your software project will happen fairly quickly. If they don’t, you can ditch an unreliable programmer without losing months of time.
Rule 2: Programming will cost you money.
Some writes about a programmer in India, or Russia or some other place who spent a day writing a script and it all cost him a grand total of 100 bucks.
One look at the script and you realize it’s a piece of junk.
There is no reason to go ultra-cheap on the money you put into creating your software product. Your only expense is the cost of having it developed, everything after that is pure profit.
A (print) book publisher will pay an ex-President millions of dollars for a ghostwriter to produce an autobiography, because once the actual text is written, the publishing company can start manufacturing books for a dollar or two and sell it at $29.95. It’s the same idea here, most of the expenses will come now instead of later.
Rule 3: Most programmers know nothing about marketing.
Sorry. It’s just a fact. Most of these guys have been creating the exact same script over and over; usually bad ones like a traffic exchange or dating scripts. Be patient and explain split-testing, double opt-in or whatever needs to be explained and if the programmer can’t understand those concepts just go with someone else.
Rule 4: The code needs to be well documented (comments in the code), that way you can come back to it.
If you find a problem with your program a year from now, even the original programmer will be clueless UNLESS there are comments within the source code explaining very clearly what every function and block of code is supposed to do.
Rule 5: Your programmers need to speak decent English.
Not that Indian dialect of English either, real English. This is definitely not the time to lose anything in translation. Plus if everything is in another language how can you possibly switch to another programmer if you need to later?
Rule 6: You will almost always catch stuff the programmer didn’t.
There is a real thing called Programmer’s Immunity. Basically it says that the average user will have more computer problems than a programmer, because a programmer is used to making things work (work-arounds). This means every once in a while, your programmer will subconsciously miss bugs that are glaringly obvious to you.
Don’t get annoyed; just let the programmer know about the problem, and what exact steps need to be performed to reproduce the error.
You will need to test the program yourself. You will also need to send the program out to beta testers to make sure others can use the software without problems. And YOU will need to find out if the program can be used without instructions by someone who has never seen the software before.
The installation instructions need to be worded as simply as possible, without a lot of legalese or technical terms.
Rule 7: (For web-based apps) use HTML templates.
Most programmers are lousy designers. This way you can change the way the script appears and even hire out a professional designer.
You need the programmer to use a very simple template system.
In PHP this would be something like FastTemplate, where there is a simple tag in the HTML like {firstName} or %firstName%. There are other bad template scripts for PHP such as Smarty, which sucks because it embeds PHP code in the templates. You=92d have the same problem using regular PHP. The whole point of having templates are to separate the code from the appearance.
Rule 8: If you can afford it, get a code inspector.
This is a programmer you know to be good but maybe too expensive to write the entire script, who can take a quick look at the code after every release to make sure the program is “good enough” … not perfect but sellable.
Your inspector is only looking for HUGE problems in the program or script like the usage of gotos or globals, or maybe your freelancer is using a database but hasn’t normalized it properly or forgot to add indices where they are needed to keep the database fast.
Rule 9: Stay away from GPL, open source, and re-used code AT ALL COSTS!
This is a biggie. Make it clear you do not want code reused from other scripts. Obviously if the coder uses parts of someone else’s script you are in violation of copyright laws.
On the other hand there is free software out there called GPL (GNU Public License) which is free to use but only if you make the source code of your entire software product available as well. That is definitely NOT what you want.
Rule 10: Your software will break over time.
This is just a fact. If you=92re having some desktop software created in C++ the code might not compile correctly on a different compiler in a few years. Some software written in version 1.0 of Microsoft’s .NET runtime already breaks when you run it on computers with version 1.1.
Don’t even get me started about PHP. When PHP releases new versions the new ways of doing things are not always backwards compatible. Depending on which modules or security patches a given web host has installed, certain things may not work as well. That’s life.