SEO Scam Alert -Traffic Power & 1P Lauch Fake SEO Forums

Another Traffic Power scam is underway. They have now set up fake SEO Forum sites according to SEO Book. Click on over and get a long list of disgusting, sordid, slimy, twisted, unethical, juicy and "this is all f*cked up" details.



As you know Traffic Power sucks and so does 1P as they are referring to themselves now-a-days.



Good catch Aaron. Give Traffic Power some hell.

Live Testing at Yahoo! Search

There have been numerous posts in the forums of how users are catching sight of new user interfaces being tested at Yahoo! Search. The posts usually are accompanied with the screenshot of what they saw -- usually just to show that they were not crazy and seeing things.



Fred Delse, Product Manager of Yahoo! Search explains what is going on:

"Making changes on Yahoo! Search is analogous to changing the tires on a car going 100 miles per hour. We need to be able to make positive changes to the UI without stopping the service and without users ever missing a beat. Live testing allows us to do so. In a live test, we give a slightly modified UI to a small number of our users for a few days. We collect metrics on how these users interact with the test UI and then make inferences on whether the changes are good or not-so-good for users. Good changes are released for everyone. The not-so-good ones are brought back to the drawing board for refinement or modification."

Red Hat acquires AOL's Netscape server software

In a move to add more open-source arrows to its quiver, Linux seller Red Hat has acquired the Netscape server software products of AOL Time Warner, the companies plan to announce Thursday.



Red Hat plans to release the Netscape Enterprise Suite as open-source software, meaning that anyone will be able to use, modify and redistribute the products. It's a new step in Red Hat's 'open-source architecture' plan to expand beyond its core product, the Linux operating system, Chief Executive Matthew Szulik plans to tell analysts at a company conference Thursday in New York.



In an interview Wednesday, Szulik declined to comment on terms of the deal, but said the company spent less than $25 million on the acquisition.



More of the article at CNET News.com

Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 4 Released

Mozilla 1.8 is at about the 80% completion stage with it's just announced Alpha 4 Release. Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 4 is now available to download.



New features include partial support for some new Web standards (such as CSS3), improvements to the popup blocker, keyboard shortcut improvements, virtual folders in Mail and Newsgroups (allowing one to save searches), a spellchecker included by default on Linux and many bug fixes.



The newly-released Chatzilla 0.9.65 is also included.

Updated Yahoo! Search Limiting Parameters

In an updated Yahoo! Search Review at Search Engine Showdown News, I discovered some interesting search prefixes that you can use. Some of these I was not aware of at all and they do not seem to be in the Yahoo list on their main site. They appear to be using old Inktomi prefixes.



New found prefixes include stem:, domain:, feature:homepage, feature:index, feature:meta, and the region: limiters.



The feature:x is very useful in some instances. For example, feature:index will return only index pages of a website. There are other feature: limiters for activex, applet and flash also.



If you are worried about ActiveX security issues, I suppose you can always search at Yahoo with the -feature:activex as a limiter and not worry about such things. But considering that Yahoo's Search Index is a little bit dated ... do not count on it.

Simply the Best Free Fonts

Simply the Best Fonts is just that. A tremendous amount of fonts that you can browse through by an alphabetical font listing or by font category.



Each font has a full preview page with proprietary details. Most fonts are freeware and as such free to use for professional webmasters and hobbyists. If you wish to use them commercially, you may have to register them first.



Via Blogoscoped

Pheedo Acquires BlogSnob

Pheedo announced to its members yesterday that it will be acquiring BlogSnob.

"We are now working on many new features to grow BlogSnob as well as our existing RSS Advertising tools. Look for further announcements there in the near future. The first change we are implementing is a name change. The new name for the blog exchange is the SimpleAd Exchange. This should be live in October."

BlogSnob is a free service that allows you to publicize your personal site. It's basically an ad exchange for Blogs. The simple text ad blends into your site design. Pheedo has said that BlogSnob members can he assured that they are committed to keeping the service free and only making it better.



On the face BlogSnob is all about showing off your blog. It is also a way for discovering other blogs. Many people use BlogSnob as a Web ring of sorts. You can hop from one BlogSnob site to another. This is similar to the Blogger NavBar that will jump you to a random blog.



Adam Kalsey will be joining Pheedo as their CTO. Adam has been the mastermind behind BlogSnob over the last year.



Pheedo will be adding a few advisors to their board to keep this on track. One of particular note will be Chris Pirillo from Lockergnome help them to understand the mind of a publisher.

"Chris brings the perspective of a long time blogger and publisher. He adds, 'Every link counts - which is why, especially as a free service, BlogSnob is invaluable.'"

Another advisor will be Dave Nielson from PayPal/eBay.

"Dave, an accomplished author and entrepreneur, recently wrote a book for the PayPal's Developer Network. ... Dave will guide us as we create a developer network as well as bring a technology/business slant."

Via: Weblog Tools Collection

Wordpress Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities

It has been reported that some vulnerabilities in Wordpress exist, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting attacks. More information can be found at Secunia Advisory.



Via Blogging Pro

Froogle Search: WebStractions

What does Froogle value your website at? According to Froogle, I am worth $179.69 at BlogShares and am currently #93 on in the Internet Standards Industry.



Had to laugh though. I am only worth $1.00 at Search Engine Watch Forums. Somebody needs to start smacking my Rep Button more.

Firefox/Mozilla Extensions - What's Cool and Hot!

Interesting topic running at the Band of Gonzos forum on Cool Stuff for your Mozilla web browser which also includes Firefox extensions as well.

Safe to say that the Web Developer bar is one of the major favorites here, as is the Googlebar. Many more excellent extensions are mentioned and worth a peak to see if there are any you might be missing in your arsenal.

My personal favorite is Sage, an RSS News Aggregator. It picks up where Live Bookmarks leaves off. Why Mozilla did not incorporate this functionality into the browser is a mystery. Live Bookmarks falls short and is not of much worth, to me anyway.

Thanks to David Crouse of USA Linux Users Group for getting the thread going.

Technorati Service Restored

According to Sifry's Alerts the Technorati service has been restored following the weekend from hell.



Technorati had a problem when an electrical fire broke out in the power main in the colocation facility in San Francisco last Friday evening. The fire led to a cascade of failures that has caused the Technorati service to be down for most of the weekend.



The repairs had their Engineering and Ops teams working all weekend to get things back up and running quickly, of what had to be a nightmare of a problem. It is good to have them back!

Weblogs Inc Looking for PhotoShop & CSS Bloggers

If you are a blogger or want to blog about Photoshop or CSS, here is your chance. Weblogs Inc has two blog openings at their main site. They are also looking for a Flash blogger to round out their design blogs.



If you’re interested in blogging about Photoshop, CSS and/or Flash—and making some spare change while getting even more famous-drop them a line.



The spare change that they refer to, from what I gather, is that you will be able to run your own GoogleAds on your blog there. Don't quote me on that. There could very well be other incentives, but it is not readily apparant what they are. I just noticed that the GoogleAds were inline with the actual blogs there.

My Yahoo! Gets a Facelift - RSS Feed Improvements

I logged into My Yahoo today and what a surprise. They have new features for My Yahoo of which I had to take a look at.



The most notable feature is the tabbed search bar addition at the top of the page. This is just like the bar in regular search. This should have been done long ago, in my opinion.



Rearranging your modules is easier to do now. Editing the arrangement can be done via a new drop down menu in the caption bars. The layout page is not really needed anymore, and the results are amazingly quick. You can even email your modules to friends if you want.



The RSS feeds module appears to be out of beta. They now are stating that they support Atom feeds, which was not even mentioned before. Kewl. We all knew they supported it long before they told us they could.



A new feed discovery page has been added for My Yahoo users (note: you may have to have an account to see this page). This page has pre-defined categories which appear to have hand-selected feeds listed in them.



The feed layout page is pretty kewl. They show a "thumbnail" representation of your page layout. When you hover over the individual items, a hintbox pops up with the feed title in it.



The pages look cleaner and crisper to me too. The improvements are quite nice indeed.

Bloglines Web Services Announced

Bloglines announced the Bloglines Web Services, a set of functions to access Bloglines data in other programs. The services are built on open standards, and make it easy to access Bloglines subscription and blog entry data.



Several leading desktop aggregators, including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and BlogBot, will be supporting the new functions, which will allow their users to synchronize their desktop accounts with Bloglines.

CSS Manageability thru Gzip Compression and PHP

Working with CSS can sometimes present problems other than cross-browser compatibility and hacks. They often lead to large and increasingly unmanageable labors of love. Reuse of your CSS in other designs can be tedious cut and paste jobs, in which you sometimes are just better off starting over from scratch.



Enter FiftyFourEleven's Mike Papageorge with a unique approach of organizing and optimizing your CSS. Mike utilizes modularized stylesheets by function (navigation, colors, hacks etc.) then "stitches" them together with php. The stylesheets themselves are parsed as php also, in which you can comment to your hearts content without worry of that content being sent when the sheets are called from the server.



There are advantages over the normal way of @importing complex function sheets from one basic stylesheet. His method delivers one transparent single stylesheet. He goes a step further with a simple method of Gzip compression and cache control via the php file to deliver this large stylesheet with amazing quickness. An Opera Browser side-effect of actually being able to see individual stylesheets being loaded one after the other is now being served just the one -- and the results (from what I read) are that the page loads very cleanly.



There is a reference in Mike's articles to Andy King's book, Speed Up Your Site, in regards to decompression inconsistencies of .css files between browsers. If you do not have his book, you can still peruse some of the Http compression information at his website.

Text Links Now Available on Weblogs, Inc. Network

For those of you looking for text links, per a Weblogs Inc post they are now being made available.



For $100-$400 you can buy a link on any of their webpages. The order in which they list them will be determined (for now) on a first come first served basis.



Posted costs:

• $100 a month for WIN blogs, Blogging Baby and Joystiq
  
  
• $400 a week on Engadget
  
  
• $400 for two weeks on Autoblog (or $200 a week)

Weblogs Inc. have just did a redesign of their sites and the text ad placements are above the fold and are very visible.

Peridot - Web tool may banish broken links

Broken and outdated links may be a thing of the past according to a BBC News article.



Peridot, developed by UK intern students at IBM, scans company weblinks and replaces outdated information with other relevant documents and links. It works by automatically mapping and storing key features of webpages, so it can detect significant content changes.



The students said Peridot could protect companies by spotting links to sites that have been removed, or which point to wholly unsuitable content.



Administration staff have to go through all the links on an intranet - internal website - or external website to check the information being linked to is still relevant.



The web-based Peridot tool registers webpages - either on an intranet or on websites - and follows link targets to compare them to webpages it has previously seen.

"The way we identify the content is through a process called fingerprinting which allows us to take representation of document like a fingerprint," explained Andrew Flegg, IBM software developer and technical mentor for the Peridot team.



"Externally, you have cases of companies that link to disreputable content which could seriously damage their reputation", says James Bell of Peridot

Technorati Electrical Fire, Service is Down

Technorati CEO David Sifry reports in his Sifry's Alerts blog that an electrical fire broke out in the power main in the colocation facility in San Francisco last Friday evening. The fire led to a cascade of failures that has caused the Technorati service to be down for most of the weekend.



Although he hopes to have the service up and running by Monday, today, last I checked it was still down. This has got to be a nightmare.

Hackers use Google to access photocopiers

In a BuilderAU article, using Google hacks -- requests typed into the search engine that bring up cached information on networks -- hackers are discovering and using login details for networked photocopiers so they can watch what is being copied.



The problem is not limited to just photocopiers, just about anything can be sought out on Google if the web server is not configured correctly to keep googlebot from crawling network information. Information that can be found are IP addresses, login details, and device information.

"Hackers have been using Google hacks for some time -- exploiting photocopiers is only a recent example of compromising online devices. Hackers also use the search engine to view logged conversations on the Google computer groups list. In these, techies often share network information, such as logins, and their company domain name when they post their e-mail address with a message."

A network is only as secure as your weakest link. Sometimes that link can be one of your own employees.

Google Web Hosting?

I don't know what this guy was smoking over at SitePoint, but Derek Vaughan is already claiming how Google is going to beat Yahoo in the Web Hosting war.



And no, there is no mention of a browser or operating system in this entire article. ;-)

Promoting Your Blog

Excellent article from Scoble on the promotion of your blog.

Google Toolbar - New Version Fixes Security Vulnerability

According to Dirson's Google-Blog, a new version of the Google Toolbar (Version 2.0.114.5) fixes the security vulnerabilty that was reported on last week.



I half-errantly reported that the vulnerability was only susceptible to a Local Computer Zone exploit. It appears that this is only true if your Windows XP machine was updated with IE6 Service Pack 1.



Google Toolbar users could suffer an 'HTML injection' exploit due to a vulnerability in MSIE and its "res:" and "file:" protocols. Gregory R. Panakkal, the person who found this flaw, says that these two protocols have been made inaccessible from the Internet Zone with IE6-SP1 onwards. It is still possible to inject code remotely on an unpatched IE.



The revision history for the Google Toolbar is not yet reflecting this new version information. It is not even reporting the recent version update which changed the PR checksum either.



Via InsideGoogle

Free PhotoShop Brushes

A very good set of PhotoShop brushes from the people at Toast Snatcher.



Machine Brush depicted at left.

Google Zeitgeist Missing Browser Stats

The previous update of Zeitgeist had the familular browser stats chart present as usual. The current Zeitgeist however shows that chart to be absent.



This is curious, considering that the rumors flying around a Mozilla-based browser are flying all over the place.



More on the Google Browser-Mozilla connection.

Firefox Gmail Give-Away & the Gbrowser Connection

I was looking at The Gmail Give Away over at Spread Firefox the other night and it got me to thinking about Google's recent courting of the Mozilla folk with the Campus Day. Here are 2,000 Gmail accounts being made available for anyone helping in spreading the word about Firefox.



I was not thinking about whether or not Google gave them the accounts to disperse, these could have been donated by many avid Bloggers quite easily. I had to ask myself, why Gmail Accounts? Mozilla would probably had to clear this give away with Google most probably, or at least discussed it with them in some fashion.



This is another piece to the Mozilla-based Google Browser puzzle. But a key one I think. It is classic Google promotion in fact -- think Gmail buzz here and I think you can see where I am coming from.



Bringing Down Internet Explorer



Google needs to crack the top dog in the browser market, Internet Explorer. For six months of solid security risks, a delay in SP2 and a constant barrage of warnings from the experts -- nobody really gave up their IE. Zeitgeist Browser Stats shows a little decline during this time period, but no marked rise in Mozilla.



It was not until PR was frozen in time 3 months ago when you started noticing the mass exodus by website owners to Firefox. Since the Googlebar and the PR meter was one of main reasons for sticking with IE, it would behoove Google to wean the owners off of it and migrate over to Firefox -- wouldn't it? Looking at the unmoving, seemingly broken, PR meter got boring. Why not try Firefox now?



Webmasters will carry the torch for the new browser, when and if Google decides to go thru with it. The SpreadFirefox site is geared for the promotion of Firefox. It is a concerted promotional effort and they have cranked out 2 million downloads in 10 days time. It will be a slow rolling snowball ala Gmail hype-style from here on out.



To put those 2 million downloads into context, there are now over 800 million Internet users world-wide according to Internet World Stats. That is to say that one out of 400 of these users have downloaded Firefox.



Interesting sidenote, the current Zeitgeist report at Google are not showing the Browser Stats. Curious that!



The Trump Card - Longhorn



The timeline to the Longhorn rollout is a couple of years away and longer for it to become mainstream. Longhorn is reported to be a browserless system though. Internet Explorer, for all intents and purposes, is dead. The time is ripe for the picking to grab a large share of that dominant browser market with no expected updates or newer versions on the horizon.



The Firefox downloads are a notable start based on viral marketing. Browser market share is Microsoft's to lose now. They have got to be a little nervous about this I would think. It is reverse-Netscape deja vu coming back to bite them in some respects.



This is about as far as I got with my line of thinking however. From here we get into the whole Google OS speculation which may or may not be a long-range goal at Google. One thing is certain, whatever Google has up their sleeve will be fun to watch unfold over the ensuing months. At least more fun than watching boring IPO blog posts for several months was.

Adobe GoLive 8.0 - Improved CSS support

According to Think Secret, Adobe GoLive 8.0, currently under development and scheduled for release as part of Creative Suite 2.0 in early 2005, will offer support for new Adobe technologies, several new and improved authoring tools, better integration with other Adobe products, and smarter site management controls.



Among the features in GoLive is improvements in CSS support:

"Adobe is putting a lot of emphasis on increasing GoLive 8.0's handling of CSS content, adding a new CSS Objects item to the Objects toolbar, for quick layout adjustments using cross-browser CSS layout elements; a Split Source and Split Preview views for the CSS editor, allowing for real-time CSS designing with easy source code access; and an improved Grid element that has been redesigned for CSS DIV authoring with easy switching between DIV and Table layout views. Other new CSS-related tools include a Direct Select Tool, for selecting elements, tables, and DIVs; a DIV Select Tool, for selecting only DIVs; and Hand and Zoom tools for moving the content of the layout around and zooming in and out of the design."

Via Web Standards Project.

Flash SWF Charts using PHP

Here is a great tool called PHP/SWF Charts that is simple to script with PHP. The end product will create attractive web charts from your dynamic data, such as a database or flat file. Passing the data to the tool will generate high quality Flash (swf) charts.



This is a free tool to use, but the $20 registration will add a very desirable feature of clickable charts with editable links.



Via Digital Media Minute

Free Fonts

Free fonts from Tom Murphy here, which include a decent script font called May Queen.




Via Digital Media Minute.

Fagoogle Butterfly

Well Fagoogle did not last long. But didn't anyone notice the butterfly in that logo? I think MSN and Google would make for very strange bedfellows.



Sorry, couldn't resist!

Screen Scraping Resources

Old article, but a great resource on screen scraping.



Includes Philipp Lenssen's (of FindForward) screen-scraping With PHP5, an article on scraping almost any website and a few other goodies. A must read.



Cheers to Paul Hiles of Erimus Web Design for the dig.

Yahoo Dropping "Web" From Search

I was reviewing a post in one of the forums concerning Yahoo and stumbled upon something odd at Yahoo Search. While conducting a search for Singapore Web Hosting, the word Web was not bolded in the result titles. Furthermore, the cache versions of those pages did not reflect that word as being highlighted. The word, web, was being bolded in the abstracts. Just not the other two areas.



The same phenomenon happened for singapore web design. Other variations, same thing (such as texas web design, free web design, etc.) Quite strange.



Close examination of the results revealed that this was not always the case. Two results out of the top 100 did have the word web bolded in the title and highlighted in the cache version of the pages. Also -- the paid result titles had the word Web in bold lettering.



I immediately went to Daniel Brandt's Yahoo-Watch to see if they may be possible SiteMatch sites.



I ran the one query and saw that those two did not have the big green dollar sign next to them. Actually Daniel appears to have dropped all of the usual designations from the results, so I am not sure if they are SiteMatch sites or not. When did he stop showing the designations?



This is a screenshot (opens in new window) of what I saw. Ignore the red arrow on the one result with the directory category. The directory does not have any bearing on whether Web appears bolded in the title/cache or not. (I was too lazy to remove it.)

Backlinks Grabber : Free Online Tool

This is a cool tool from the people at TextLinkBrokers, the Advanced Backlinks Grabber a free labor-saving tool designed to be the fastest, easiest way to compile a very large list of sites relevant to a keyword or phrase.



What this tool does exactly:

• Performs a Google search for up to the top 20 sites ranking for that keyword.
  
  
• Crawls their backlinks and lists them by Pagerank, while eliminating duplicates and sites under the specified PR threshhold.

Then it sends you an email containing a list of all the backlinks that were found multiple times in the search - these are considered 'themed backlinks' - in an html and/or .csv list, with PageRank, for importing into Arelis or other software.



I gave this tool a try and it does exactly as advertised. I recieved an email with a whole slew of PR5+ pages (as I requested it to do) that appear in the Google results for a link: check.



UPDATE: Aaron Wall reported that Gmail "clipped" the report that was sent to him, and he did not get to see it all. Due to the amount of processing time needed to produce this report, it might be advisable to have it sent to a regular POP3 email account.

AuthorPower : Online Author & Editor Resources

Writing articles for the web is an art. Getting your articles published with your byline hinges on a number of factors including style, grammar, spelling, proper crediting of sources, and unbiasedness to name a few.



If you are considering writing an article for an online publication, take a look at the ZATZ authors' resource which is loaded with author guidelines, tips and toolkits. Even if you are considering publishing articles, the site has more of the same for your editors.

Google Browser Beta Invites?

I don't know the credibility of this, but a recent post at SEO Chat Forums by ericwfrost eludes to a Beta download for the new Google Browser. Downloads are apparently by invite only.



I think that the Gbrowser buzz is going to eclipse that of their recent IPO.

SEO and Web Development

Holy Moly! A good freind, SEbasic, was on hiatus for a while at his SEO and Web Development blog. Now he is back with a vengance.



If you are new to this game and need some quick information that will get you up to speed, pay his site a visit. Start with the Outsourcing Your SEO and work your way down the page links on the left. He covers DocType Declarations, Hidden Text, Basic SEO Tips, Search Engine Glossary of Terms, Cloaking, Doorway Pages, and has a useful list of Information Links.

Mozilla Based Google Browser Very Likely

A recent ZDnet article added more fuel to the Google Browser (aka Gbrowser) fire by speculating that the new browser will be based on Mozilla technology. Evidently, according to an article by Pinder of Blogzilla this is not too far of a stretch.



Pinder reports that Bug 226572 - Google branded Mozilla browser which has now been marked Private. He remembers this bug to be created in 2003 and is now looking for a cached copy of the file. He also adds:

The only item of note was the "This is a duplicate of a private bug about working with Google. So closing this one." comment. It was made by Bart Decrem , who coordinates marketing and business affairs for the Mozilla project.

The rest of his post goes into some interesting theories on what he expects the new browser to be. One of which is the innovative ways of utilizing XUL in the web applications such as Gmail and Google Groups.



Mozilla would also fit in with the scheme of how they are developing the apps such as Gmail and Blogger, which are javascript intensive applications. Extending the functionality of Mozilla to deal with these types of applications will be an easy task -- plus would invite future enhancements from the Open Source crowd at Mozilla. Heck, the darn thing could probably build itself.



Pinder also seems to think that Google will come out with an IM client before the browser. This is an interesting thought that makes sense. Google has all of these apps in the lab and will want to get them all pretty much in working shape before launching the browser to tie it all together. Having the IM client would add icing to some of the cake.



My feeling is this browser could be launched anytime they wish -- next week or even today. I also feel that given the woes of Internet Explorer lately and the above paced adoption of Firefox 1.0 right out of the gate, Gates and crew should have a little cause to worry. This is going to be a rough year for them.

Google Browser vs. Microsoft

I was looking at Barry's lame attempt to turn the Mac IE browser into a Mac Google browser when something dawned on me. If Google does go thru with the creation of this browser, how many platforms will they support?



They have secured the domain gbrowser.com and lured some Microsoft honchos off to Googleland which will lend credence to this browser becoming a reality. But what about the Mac and Linux platforms?



If they are going to make a go at this, I am hoping they will not choose to ignore that part of it. Of course, the Googlebar was strictly for Windows IE only and they never bothered to include them before.



It could just be they have had their eye on Microsoft hallowed ground the whole time, and this is their only focus. I mean, why waste resources and be sidetracked by it all.

Google Toolbar Security Flaw? Not Even Remote

I have been following a number of blog and forum entries on the security flaw that was reported in the Google Toolbar with an input validation vulnerablity, in which the 'About' section of the toolbar does not properly filter Html content. This will allow a local user to create HTML that, when loaded by the target user, will invoke the About page and execute arbitrary scripting code in the context of the page.



Note the keywords 'local user' in the above statement. There is no possiblity that this code could be injected by a remote user or website. The 'proof of concept' provided uses a res: file protocol which can only be invoked from the Local Computer Zone of Internet Explorer. In other words, if somebody has access to your computer locally and maliciously interjects this code into your Googlebar About page -- then you are in trouble. Chances are if they get that far, you are in a lot worse trouble than just the Googlebar, eh?



When security scares like this pop up, and being that this one involves Google, the headlines and brief paragraphs tend to make it sound a lot worse than it is. Let me be one of the first to dispel the rumors that may be already starting to fly around the net now. There is no problem with your Googlebar people.

Yahoo Result Fluctuations Due to Testing

In a WebProWorld thread, one member asked:

Every morning I check both Google and Yahoo! for the search term 'part time jobs' and others and consistently come up in the top 5 search results in Google. Yahoo! results are all over the place. One day we can be #5 the next #17 and then back to #3.



The kicker is that everyone else that we compete with seems to stay consistent. What could we be doing wrong? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Well feedback came from YahooMike on this question:

One thing that might be causing changes in the results are tests. We do a lot of testing and with that sometimes results fluctuate.



Another cause might be changes to made to a site (ie: webmasters testing to see what will work best). These types of changes might cause results to fluctuate.

I will buy into the testing, but not the page revisions by the website owners. This would only be true if the page was being crawled and updated in the index on a regular basis. Getting crawled/recrawled is slow, and to have it included/updated in the index is slim odds at best.



My suggestion is that you watch your results fluctuate and wait for their testing to settle down. Make note of your final resting place, if it is higher, no problem. If it is lower, then make some minor adjustments. Before you do make adjustments however -- check their cache version of your page to make sure it is your current copy of your page and not an old one.



After determining that you are dealing with the current version of your page and making the necessary revisions, do no expect your results to change overnight. With Google, this can take anywhere from one day to a month -- maybe longer. In Yahoo's case it could take upwards of 8 weeks or more -- and in some cases never.

Web Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer

The Web Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer is very similar to Mozilla's Web Developer Toolbar.



It is provided by the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team at the National Information and Library Service (NILS) , Australia. The Web Accessibility Toolbar has been developed to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility. It consists of a range of functions that:

• identify components of a web page
  
  
• facilitate the use of 3rd party online applications
  
  
• simulate user experiences
  
  
• provide links to references and additional resources

A list of functions that include toggling stylesheets, code validation, display headings, image lists, disabling images, color functions, page resize, page zoom, accessibility simulations for color blindness, cataracts, & other sight impairments, and a whole lot more can be found here.



This site also has an impressive listing of tools and references for accessibility that is worth looking at too.

Seraphim Proudleduck - The UK Nigritude Ultramarine

In the wake of the Nigritude Ultramarine contest, Salmonbones is sponsoring the Seraphim Proudleduck Challenge which is offering a Grand Prize of £1000 and two runners-up prizes of £300 and £200.



One caveat to this contest is that the rankings will be taken from Google UK. The Salmonbones site is enlisting the aid of independant UK Residents to be part of the verification team.



Found via SEbasic's Seraphim Proudleduck blog.

Firefox: One Millionth Download Mark Reached

Downloads for the Preview Release of Firefox 1.0 cranked out at the rate of 100K per hour in the first four days to put them at the 1 Million mark.

"This is the fastest adoption rate we have ever experienced, higher than every previous Firefox release."

Dang, that is cooking!



Via Spread Firefox

Gmail Invite Spooler

A new clearinghouse service for Gmail invites is being offered at isnoop.net. The program dubbed as the Gmail Invite Spooler (or Gmailomatic), has been in action since September 13th and already distributed close to 24,000 invites. This works out to well over 3,300 per day since its inception.



Via Aaron Swartz's Google Weblog.

Google's New PageRank Checksum is Cracked

This did not take long. The folks who cracked (and released) the last toolbar checksum are at it again. See the continuing thread at MobileRead Networks.



One of the MobileRead members, traB, has code you can insert on your webpages that will display both toolbar checksum values side by side. Any variations in the two will be easily spotted.



A new member to this forum is reporting differences between the old and new versions of the googlebar. He has these installed on separate computers. This has not been verified by anyone else yet, so I will leave that up in the air for now. If this is true, then that would mean there was a PR update that took place -- nobody would have noticed it unless they have the new version of the toolbar installed.

PageRank Missing from New Google Toolbar?

If you haven't seen the new Google Toolbar image at Google, take a look at what is missing from it. Yep, the PageRank meter is gone.



I am almost positive that it is not missing from the actual toolbar that you can install (I still have the old version). People who have it installed have mentioned it being there. It is just odd that it is missing from the graphic on this page.



Just file this in your wierd stuff about Google folder.

Yahoo Slurp Garbling Mac Encoded Pages

In a recent WebProWorld thread a member was wondering why his site was showing weird hieroglyphic (mostly Chinese) characters in his result abstracts. Searching for his site in Yahoo showed some of the strangest crap that I have ever seen. Another site of his was showing the same strange characters as well.



The one common denominator was the character encoding of the pages, they are text/html;charset=macintosh. This encoding makes the Yahoo Index choke. It chokes the system so bad that when you click on the cache link for any of these pages, it tosses an error for them. The error simply states, "We're sorry, but we could not process your request for the cache of http://www.xxxxx.com/. Please click here to check the current page."



My browser was showing the encoding of these pages as Western European (Mac), which is not a problem for the browser (I am running IE 6). It was not a problem for the Lynx text browser also. It is however a problem for Yahoo Search -- and it is not showing a Western European character set that I am familular with.

Microsoft Doorway Pages - Caught Spam Handed

Bhartzer over at WebProWorld posted an article that catches Microsoft red handed with the creation of doorway pages. The pages in question involve their Asian portal which redirects you to their Solution Marketplace using a little bit of JavaScript.



The article only cited 4 examples of this activity, but after I checked into it there are close to 600 pages of this section in the Google index. Most of the terms are hitting number one (I just did some random checks, not too extensive). It is not known if there are more divisions at Microsoft.com that are using this same technique.



Flood6, a moderator at WPW ponders

"Yeah, I'm sure that if google is aware of this, the decision on what to do is being made by someone fairly important at G.



If I were making the decision and there are fewer than 100 MS pages doing this, I would just axe those pages (and the pages they redirect to)."

I would imagine that they would filter out the doorway pages and let the other pages that were redirected to stand on their own. Just another method of filtering to add to the list.



Not wanting to get into the whole spam controversy, and whether they will be banned or not banned, I am content to see how those pages will play out in the next week or two after Google picks up on the thread.



I was more interested in how Yahoo was treating it. One interesting thing is that these pages must have a 'no cache' directive, because the results are not showing the link for it. The same holds true over at Yahoo Search as well.



So how is Microsoft fairing on Yahoo? Apparently not too well. Again I did some precursory checks, and they were not even showing up in the top 100 for those terms.



Of course, Yahoo is not carrying nearly as many of these pages as Google is. What else is new? But they are not banning them outright either, Yahoo is showing a mere 70+ pages in total. This is about par for the course IMO.



It is good to see that Yahoo is not playing favorites in the 'where are my pages' game. They seem to be treating Microsoft just like the rest of the website owners who are still waiting for 3 month old pages to be indexed. Perhaps they should sign up for SiteMatch and get their pages indexed to remain competitive in Yahoo Search.

Firefox Preview Release

Firefox has come out of Beta with the Firefox Preview Release. I take that to mean that it is a release candidate and not the official release.

Rumor has it that this preview release breaks the Googlebar that current Firefox users are just now beginning to enjoy. It seems that there are many more that will not work as well. They will have to wait for the extensions to be updated -- which I would imagine will not take too long for some of them.

The notice at Mozilla mentions numerous features that are improved (that is usually a given on updates, isn't it?). Improvements in pop-up blocking and security are listed.

One new addition is Live Bookmarks which help users discover a new dimension to the web by allowing them to create bookmarks that display dynamically updated content such as news headlines. Live Bookmarks let users view RSS feeds.

Via the Band of Gonzos Browser Forum.

Google PageRank Scales (Directory vs. Toolbar)

Have you ever noticed that the Google directory shows PageRank on a different scale than the Google Toolbar. The directory scale has eight units of measurement which represent PR of values 3 through 10. Anything less than a 3 is displayed as a "whitebar".



To help you visualize this a little better and to interpret the scale, read the article by Fabien Faceries in the PR Weaver Blog.

PR Weaver - Backlinks and PageRank analyzer software

PR Weaver is a browser based software which displays Google search results (Google API Key req) with PageRank under each individual search result. These results can be saved as an HTML sheet or in a CSV list.



There are four types of searches that PR Weaver will conduct for you, Search and Backlinks Analyzer as well as advanced versions of these two. The desktop software utilizes your Google API Key and an "embedded" IE browser to take advantage of the Google Toolbar for PageRank analysis -- therefore there is no violation of the Google TOS. Kewl!



The options on the searches are configurable to dig as deep as you want into the search results. Surprisingly, the software retrieves those results very quickly and can be sorted in any fashion that you want.



A very nice touch is that the results will also show the Class III IP addresses of the urls. This is a nice investigative tool that can stand on its own, because it will easily detect if there are inter-server linking going on between sites.



If that is not enough, in the Advanced Backlink Analysis, it includes the anchor text of the backlinks (or Alt Img text) and can ignore internal backlinks if you wish.





I have been using this tool for little over a day now, and I am totally impressed. It is available for free download (I think I left that part out above) at the PR Weaver website.

The Regex Coach - interactive regular expressions

Having problems with regex expressions? Then try this amazing tool The Regex Coach. It is a graphical application for Linux and Windows which can be used to experiment with (Perl-compatible) regular expressions interactively.



The Regex Coach has the following features:

• It shows whether a regular expression matches a particular target string.
  
  
• It can also show which parts of the target string correspond to captured register groups or to arbitrary parts of the regular expression.
  
  
• It can 'walk' through the target string one match at a time.
  
  
• It can simulate Perl's split and s/// (substitution) operators.
  
  
• It tries to describe the regular expression in plain English.
  
  
• It can show a graphical representation of the regular expression's parse tree.
  
  
• It can single-step through the matching process as performed by the regex engine.
  
  
• Everything happens in 'real time', i.e. as soon as you make a change somewhere in the application all other parts are instantly updated.

If you want to experiment with some regex expressions using this tool, try the Regular Expression Library. The library has categorized expressions for Email, Uri, numbers, strings, markup code, dates/times, address/phone and more.



Thanks to Mark Cunningham (Mark's Virtual Playground) for his post in the Html-Kit newsgroups on this. Nice find Mark!

Commercial Open Source CRM - SugarSales

Open Source has a new Customer Relationship Management software called SugarSales and it is "sweet". This is a commercial grade Sales and Marketing tool that you more than likely will not see anywhere -- except at SourceForge that is.



SugarSales is designed for Sales and Marketing professionals to keep on top of the key deals in their pipeline. It helps to manage accounts, contacts, opportunities, leads and more. Easily track tasks, phone calls, emails and meetings with your customers. I wouldn't be surprised if it brought them their morning coffee.



The User Interface is very clean and intuitive. The tabbed interface uses minimal clicks as possible to do the job, and there are hot keys everywhere if you prefer using a keyboard. Multiple user-selectable templates (skins) can give you the look and feel like other web apps you may have used.



It will run on Linux or Windows using IIS or Apache Server. MySQL and PHP are required though. Runs on high-end servers or small notebooks/computers. Source code is provided.



Check out the demo at the SugarCRM website.

Gallina: The Gmail Blogging Tool

Here is a fun little php script from Jonathan Hernandez called Gallina which uses your Gmail account to act as a blogging tool. The script connects to your Gmail account using libgmailer from gmail-lite (an Html interface) to connect to your Gmail account.



Anything that you "star" will be published, unstarred items act as rough drafts. Gmail's labels will categorize your posts and replies to conversations act as "entry comments". The script also uses XML/XSLT for formatting.



Jonathan did have a demo running on his site, but unfortunately it suffered the SlashDot effect and had to be suspended until they calm down a bit over there.



Slashdot does raise the question of third-party scraping tools (such as libgmailer). One Slash-dotter writes, "But this bloggy thing is a very cool feature and Google might well publish a public web-services interface to GMail as well to allow things like this to happen before the end."

Thumbnail Creation Plugin for HTML Kit

For those who use the Html-Kit web authoring software, you will be pleased to know that a new plugin has just arrived.

Looking for a way to create thumbnails of large images? This plugin can generate a custom size thumbnail of the specified GIF, JPEG or PNG image along with the HTML code for opening the original image.




Features:

• Creates a thumbnail of the specified GIF, JPEG or PNG image.
  
  
• Generates HTML code for displaying the thumbnail and linking it to the larger original image.
  
  
• Real-time, side-by-side preview of the original image and the thumbnail.
  
  
• The size of the thumbnail can be customized to be as small as 16x16 or as large as 120x120 pixels.
  
  
• Thumbnails can be saved as JPEG files or as PNG files (for better image quality).
  
  
• Code tab for viewing the generated HTML code.
  
  
• Supports tag formatting preferences under 'Edit | Preferences | Format'.
  
  
• Displays image dimensions and image file size.
  
  
• Remembers the location and the size of the resizable wizard window between sessions.

Using the plugin to insert a thumbnail is very simple. Images in the HTML document path (where the HTML file was saved) will be listed on the wizard by default. Pick an image and click 'OK' to save the new thumbnail image in the HTML document path. The 'OK' button will also insert HTML code for displaying the thumbnail and linking it to the original image.



Another great plugin from the Html-kit Support team!

Yahoo Black Hole: From Slurp to the Yahoo Index

I just did a review of the August logs at the Band of Gonzo Forums in regards to the Yahoo Slurp spider and comparing those results with actual pages that made it into the search index. What I found was absolutely disgusting and I could not believe my eyes.

Last month the Slurp spider crawled a total of 1196 pages in total. Out of all those pages, only 17 pages made it into the Index at Yahoo Search. Of those 17 pages, only one was an actual forum topic page.

Logs of other sites that I monitor are showing similar results. A whole lot of crawling, but the pages disappear into a black hole at Yahoo. Some pages get crawled more than one time, yet they still do not make it into the search index.

According to Yahoo's information on inclusion into the index:

When Yahoo! Slurp crawls pages from your site, the pages are not instantly put into the Yahoo! search index. Once crawled, the documents will be considered for inclusion at the next database update. Pages that are indexed will be able to be seen at the conclusion of the update process.

What in the hell does "considered" mean? I know an update just occured, because I can see some pages that they were awfully kind enough to "consider". Of course I answered "no" to the question "Is this enough information?"

Some pages can bear the delay (if at all) in getting into Yahoo's search index. But some pages cannot. Time sensitive pages such as information on current issues (SP2 troubleshooting, virus removal, etc.) need to be fresh in the search index -- the delay makes entry into the index a moot point after 3 or 4 weeks.

I also deal with several commercial sites. New products and their entry into the index involve intense competition in the first few weeks of sales. If you are in there on Day 0 and nobody else is --- well you know where that can hurt you. After the media blitz on the product dies down, then you may be lucky to have one page in the index -- again, what is the point? The traffic is no longer there and you lost out on a lion's share of the blitz.

This raises the question about relevancy at Yahoo Search. It also questions the freshness and the credibility of search as well. What do they deem to be "considerable"? I have read the guidelines at Yahoo and as far as I know, I have not broken any of the rules and those pages go above an beyond their quality requirements. Yet it seems that doorway pages seem to get a free pass thru the black hole and go directly into the index.

I know this is not just a problem here, but all the forums are abuzz with the same stories. Yahoo is broken and they are not moving to fix the situation all too quickly.

I am keeping an eye on the sites in my sector to see if there is a pattern, you can bet your money on that. So far, I have not seen one except that it appears that spam makes it into the index quicker than legit pages do.

Am I suggesting spamming the Yahoo Index? Not yet. I will tell you one thing though, if that is what you have to do to get ahead at Yahoo Search -- you can fill in the rest here. It seems that if you cannot beat them -- join them.

My view on this does not reflect the same views at the BoG Forums. But if you want to chime in on this, you can do so here.

BoardViewer - New Forum Crawling Spider

If you own or operate a forum on the web, you might want to take notice of a new spider that is crawling discussion boards exclusively. The purpose is to create the largest index of discussion boards on the web.



Here are the details of the spider:



Website: http://www.boardviewer.com (aka BoardViewer)

UserAgent: BoardViewer (ISSpider-3.0; http://www.boardviewer.com; compatible; MSIE 6.0)

IP/Host: 64-158-138-48.intelliseek.com (there may be more)



They have the normal Spider Policy jargon here. This spider is not listed in the robot registry -- and is probably not in your robots file for your log analyzers either. My logs suggest that the spider is non-obtrusive and crawls politely.



BoardViewer is a member of the Planetfeedback family of services. More aptly, BoardViewer is part of Intelliseek which specializes in unstructured data—information found in multiple formats and disparate sources. They are also the same group behind BlogPulse.



BoardViewer will continuously be growing their list of discussion boards. You can send them your favorite discussion boards via suggest@boardviewer.com so they can be sure they're included.



Website information suggests they will soon be offering a the BoardViewer Search Engine which will allow you to search a comprehensive collection of discussion boards.



Also, a message board registration page for Boardmasters (their term, not mine) will soon be available. Boardmasters will be able to register with them to receive periodic updates as they grow the BoardViewer service, as well as update their listing.



Join the discussion at The Forum Zone, a discussion board dedicated to forum owners.