Gadget Girl Accessories

Every time I change the blog’s theme or make some tiny behind the scenes adjustments Google yanks away my pagerank. It usually comes back in the next update or two, but it irks me that they are so fast to strip it away. I don’t pay much attention to the little green pixels, and I certainly don’t consider them a valuable measurement by any means….

I am much more interested in people than pixels. If you’re here reading my blog, than that’s awesome and all that counts in my mind. Unfortunately it is sometimes difficult to bring in sponsorship and review cool products without the little green pixels up there. *Curse you green pixels!*

This is the first video in a series for the new site I just launched last week Twitter Signature Styles.

In this video we just take a quick walk through of how to generate your very own twitter signature style to use on blogs, forums, message boards, and just about anywhere on the web.

Everyone seems to be on Twitter these days, using a twitter signature style helps you connect and update from other places, your forum signature, your blog posts etc… I have mine displayed on the single post pages of my blogs right now, and made it clickable through to my profile as shown in the video. I’m happy to report that I’ve seen a noticeable increase in Twitter followers this week since doing that.

Happy twittering

Have you ever visited a site and thought you might like to come back to it, so in order to find it again, you saved it to your browser’s “favorites” or “bookmarks” category? “Social bookmarking” is a term that describes a method in which Internet users can store, classify and share their Internet bookmarks.

There are many sites that allow users to share the sites they feel are useful and want others to know about. Other users can view these sites by category, topic or randomly, if they choose.

While this concept actually began in 1996, it started to get very popular in 2005 and 2006 when sites such as http://del.icio.us, http://simpy.com and http://furl.net started to take off.

As more and more of these websites pop up, new features such as allowing users to rate and comment upon the bookmarks, add notes, receive RSS feeds and even create social networks have popped up. The RSS feeds in particular allow users to receive up to the minute information on certain tags that they “subscribe” to. They are able to receive up to the minute information and resources on any given topic.

Since the information is being ranked by humans who are reading the information, the web pages with the most helpful content are receiving higher rankings. This is in comparison to a search engine’s spider that crawls the Internet and has its own way of measuring what pops up in the search engine results.

If you were searching for information on planting soil in a social bookmarking site, you may have very different results than which would come up in a general search engine search.

What does all of this have to do with your business? Basically, social bookmarking is the new “word of mouth” advertising. The more people that bookmark content on your site increases the chance of new users finding your site as they search through various users’ bookmarks.

If a site provides quality content that users find helpful and a little time is spent networking within these social bookmarking sites’, a site could have a much higher ranking within the social bookmarking site than it does in general search engine traffic.

Social bookmarking is another avenue of receiving web traffic. With many people taking hits from the search engines, this is another way to receive traffic. This doesn’t mean to ignore search engines or discontinue any search engine optimization efforts. This is simply another method that can increase traffic flow.

Deep linking is the process of linking to a specific page on a website, rather than just the homepage. For instance, a regular link would point to mysite.com, but a deep link would point to a specific page on that site, such as mysite.com/page1.

Some corporations try to discourage deep linking, as it allows users to visit a specific page, while bypassing advertising on the front page of the site. For most people deep linking is very helpful and actually sought after. The following are a few reasons why deep linking can help a business.

Deep linking greatly increases a user’s ability to find exactly what they are looking for on the web. If you were on a website researching chicken recipes and saw a link for chicken pot pie, when you clicked on it, you would expect to be on a page that had a recipe for chicken pot pie.

You would be disappointed if you ended up at a main page of another recipe website and had to search through all their recipes in order to find the recipe you thought you were linked to. When a website owner deep links to a specific page that contains the specific content their readers are looking for then the reader is much more satisfied.

Not only does deep linking help the website visitor but it also helps the website owner with keeping tabs on their tracking. They are able to see exactly which pages of their website are getting the most links. This can help them decide what the most popular content on their site is and what their visitors are looking for.

This can also help in the search engine rankings. If there was a site about tropical birds that had links coming in to various pages on different types of birds, when someone searched for “parrot” then the parrot page would come up. The person would be able to visit the page that allowed them to learn exactly what they wanted.

If you participate in any pay per click advertising, use deep linking to point to exactly what your ad is talking about, which will help your conversion rates. For example, if you have a site about gardening and place an ad for shovels, using deep linking in the ad to point directly to the shovel page rather than pointing to the home page.

If the ad pointed to the home page, there may be some visitors who would navigate towards the shovels they were originally looking for but some would leave the site altogether. If the ad points directly to the shovel page more people would buy the shovels and that would increase the conversion rates.

Start creating deep links in a blog and link to specific content on the site. Include deep links in articles submitted to reprint directories. Experiment with this idea and see if traffic increases.

A wiki is a tool that allows multiple users to collaborate with each other through a group website. Each user can add or modify text as well as upload files by simply using a web browser. While a wiki has many advantages, there are some disadvantages to this unique tool.

• A wiki is a web based document which means that what you put up into cyberspace can be found by other people. Wiki’s can be protected by using a password, but that doesn’t mean someone can’t hack into it. One of the people that has the password may be a little less than trustworthy and give the password out to others. If you are working on a project that you really don’t want others to see, you may not want to use a wiki.

• Wikis do make it easy for several people to brainstorm and collaborate on projects by adding content to a group website, but if no one is keeping tabs on the content, it can get pretty confusing. All of your great ideas may turn into one big “idea mess”. Designating someone to organize the wiki and its content may be a solution to this problem.

• If someone in agroup is not tech-savvy, they may be very timid about using the wiki. If one or more of the users are avoiding the wiki because they are scared of it, the whole group will lose out on those people’s ideas.

• It is not uncommon for a group member to be lazy about doing their fair share of the work. When that person has access to everyone else’s work, it may be easy for them to steal ideas and take credit for work they didn’t really do.

• What happens when you lose your Internet connection or are traveling and cannot find a connection? Since the wiki is web based, if you can’t get to the web, you can’t access the wiki, and therefore, you can’t access the work.

• There are many types of wikis to choose from. Some of these can be confusing as to how to install it and back it up.

These are just a few examples of what can go wrong with a wiki. It’s important to realize that using a wiki can have many advantages as well. You should weigh both the positive and negative aspects of a wiki before you decide on using one. You may want to experiment with one, perhaps on a personal level first, before you implement the use of one for your business.

A wiki, also known as collaborative software, allows various users to add, edit and delete content from a group website. Using a wiki offers many advantages such as:

• Wikis are edited in a web browser. It doesn’t matter is a user is using a PC or a MAC or if they have a certain type of software. As long as a user can access the web they can access the wiki.

• Being able to access the wiki anywhere you have a web connection is another advantage all on its own. If a user is traveling then they don’t need to worry about bringing any files with them. They can simply log onto the wiki and have all the information they need.

• Emailing a large document to several people can take time and some people may not receive it due to spam filters. By using a wiki one user can share his or her work with all of the users at one time.

• Another advantage to using a wiki is that all the drafts of a document are saved. If a team of people have altered a document several times and feel that using the original introduction would now work better than the revised version, they can easily go back and retrieve the original.

• A wiki can be protected with a password so you don’t have to worry about the public viewing it.

• A wiki also gives the advantage of being able to put many ideas together and then going back to edit them when necessary or when time allows.

For example, you could use a wiki to keep track of all your outsourcing. A user account can be set up for all virtual assistants, ghostwriters, graphic designers, etc and a page can be created for each project. Then team members can provide input on what has been done on behalf of the project and what they still need to do.

When communicating through a wiki there is no worry about emails getting lost or thrown away. All communications will be kept inside the wiki. Users can also upload files to the wiki, which is another great tool for collaboration. If a ghostwriter depends on a virtual assistant to assign article topics, they can simply upload them to the wiki. Everyone can access them at any time.

By implementing the use of wikis in your business you will be able to stay on top of projects and have a better sense of organization. You and your team will be able to visualize group goals and the actions that need to be completed in order to achieve those goals.

A wiki is a website where multiple users can add, remove,and edit content on each page by only using a web browser. This makes it extremely easy to collaborate with people, even in situations where they cannot meet face to face.

Since the only tools needed to use a wiki is an Internet connection and a web browser, there is no longer a worry if all the collaborators have the same type of software. Wiki will serve as a virtual, collaborative memory for all the users.

One of the best examples of a wiki is wikipedia.com, an open encyclopedia. It is one of the most widely used reference tools on the web and it has millions of collaborators. Anyone can add their own entries.

Not all wikis are wikipedias, however. Some wikis are for private use and are simply communication tools between family, friends and co-workers. For example, a family of five brothers and their wives may build a private wiki where each brother can have his own page and update the other brothers about family happenings or make plans for a family reunion.

On the other end of the spectrum, a major corporation may want to use a wiki to keep several employees updated on a project. The corporation may have offices in New York, London and China. By using a wiki employees in each of these offices can collaborate, add data, modify data that was added by another member and even upload photos and files.

There are many free wikis to choose from. Some of them have their own hosting and some would need to be installed on the server. In addition to the free versions, there are also paid ones. Compare the features of various wikis before you make up your mind on one.

Some wikis allow for a lot of formatting. In the beginning, you may want to stick to a basic wiki that serves as a way to communicate and collaborate with others. A wiki doesn’t have to look super fancy. Once you get used to how a wiki operates then consider getting a fancier model with extra bells and whistles.

Using a wiki is supposed to make life easier, not more complicated. By keeping things simple and sticking to the basics, you will be able to use a wiki for many personal and professional uses.

For example, you may be able to use a wiki to help plan the bake sale you volunteered for, show your family the pictures from your last vacation, and work on a joint venture project with a partner that lives 3,000 miles away.

Wikis offer many benefits, they are easy to use and can certainly make life easier. Try experimenting with one and see how it can help you manage your business more effectively.

Cascading Style Sheets, also known as CSS, is a computer language that describes how the website should be presented. It shows what the background color is, what size of font is displayed and so forth.

CSS is designed in a manner that makes it easier to define how text should look. If you are familiar with HTML, you will know that it was designed as a structural language. When the web was in it’s early development stages, websites were not “pretty”. In fact, HTML didn’t contain bold or italics tags until the mid 1990’s.

When someone uses CSS to build their website, they do not have to include a bunch of opening and closing tags, as would be needed with HTML. With CSS, not only can the website designer have the ability to set the colors, text and the background of any element, they can also create borders around images and define how much space these borders contain.

Another advantage of using CSS is that it centralizes all the commands for a specified visual effect. If a web designer wanted all of the headers on a website to be blue, they can simply create one rule in CSS that defines what each of the headers will look like.

If that same web designer were using HTML, they would have to add font tags around each header. If the website contained 40 pages, the designer would need to add 40 font tags around each header. As you can see in that example, creating one simple rule in CSS was a lot simpler and less time consuming. If the web designer wants to change the heading color from blue to red all they would need to do is change that one CSS rule, versus changing each font tag again.

The “cascading” part of CSS comes into pay when a web designer wants to add a specific style to a web page. To maintain a common theme throughout a site, the designer could save the style sheet to it’s own document and import it on any page they want to carry the theme to. If the web designer wants one page to stand out against the others, they can create another style sheet on that page. The two style sheets would cascade, and the web browser will display the style sheet that is specific for that page.

Some browsers allow the reader of the website to change the CSS of a page. This is called Reader Style Sheets. The reader could set all links to a special, pre-defined color. This is a great tool for color-blind web surfers.

Another bonus to CSS is that, when implemented, it creates smaller file sizes. Your pages won’t take as long to load as those written in HTML.

A good way to practice working with CSS is through a blog. It doesn’t matter if you use Blogger, WordPress or TypePad because they are all written with CSS. These sites also have CSS tutorials to help along the way.

Social bookmarking is a system of sharing Internet bookmarks with other Internet users. There are many websites that allow you to share your favorite web pages and network with other users. Here are a few of the most popular:

technorati.com – This site allows users to share their blogs, photos, videos and more and boasts almost a million and a half visitors each month.

del.icio.us – This site is a very popular and was one of the first social bookmarking sites to really take off.

digg.com – This site receives 8.7 million visitors each month. Visitors can look up any topic and receive instant information and statistics.

stumbleupon.com – This is a relatively new site and it combines myspace with social bookmarking. Users can make up 5 of their own pages on any topic they want.

reddit.com -This site allows users to view what’s new, what’s hot at the moment and what the weekly stats are.

fark.com – This site’s main page has categories displayed that allows the user to go directly to topics such as sports, business, politics, music and more.

mybloglog.com – This site combines social bookmarking, blogging and social networking.

blinklist.com – This website is still in beta testing and it’s mission statement is more about how people can use the service for keeping track of their own research.

ma.gnolia.com – This site isn’t quite as big as some of the others but it is very easy to use and has a lot of information to make the process of social bookmarking understandable. This is a great site to get started with.

tailrank.com – This site keeps track of the conversations between blogs to help find what is hot on the web. The user can search on any topic they like or view randomly through categories such as politics, video, technology and entertainment.

These sites are all varied and, while they share in social bookmarking, they are all geared towards different audiences. To get the most out of these sites you may want to combine the use of several of them. For instance, you can list your blogs on technorati.com and ping the site when you update your blogs.
Then join a site such as stumbleupon.com and set up five web pages about various topics found on your own website. For instance, if your website featured information on guinea pigs, one of your stumbleupon.com sites could feature information on feeding guinea pigs and another page could feature information on the type of environment they should be kept in and so forth.

Meanwhile, keep your bookmarks in del.icio.us to share with other users and visit a site such as tailrank.com to keep track of what other people are blogging about. This can inspire new blog posts for your own blog, which would then mean you’d have more pings for technorati.com and the cycle would just start over.

All of these elements would work together to create more buzz for your website and introduce you to people with similar interests. This could lead to more web traffic and even some future joint venture partners, which, in turn would lead to even more traffic (but that is a whole new topic for another article).

I turned on my computer motivated to work after a not so great week. Family emergencies and chaos had kept me away from my comfy desk chair this week and I was looking forward to getting back to normal. I clicked to open Smart FTP to start moving some files…. and a new box opens up announcing the change. Smart FTP is no longer free.

While this makes me sad, I’m not surprised. I’ve used many different FTP programs, including just using plain old windows and a ftp url the old school way and teh ever popular FireFTP Firefox plugin . Smart FTP was my favorite over them all for a variety of reasons. The single user license for home use is $35, and I find myself pondering the purchase this morning trying to decide if I want to buy a license so that I can continue my FTP bliss as usual …. or do I look for a new FTP program?

There are so many free options out there for FTP, but I it is something that I use frequently and I’m willing to pay a few dollars to have an interface that I’m happy with. I’ll think about it for a few more days before I decide on my final solution. In the meantime I guess it’s back to the old school windows drag and drop method.

What’s your favorite FTP solution?

[tags]FTP, Smart FTP[/tags]