“Tech” Category

Driven, goal-oriented entrepreneurs fight the odds to establish and grow their small-business. Budding, medium-sized firms emerge and confront growing pains that inevitably accompany success. Worldwide, well-established corporations strive to maintain position and stay vigilant to keep their edge. Each is committed to their best as they play a part in a real-life example of Herbert Spencer’s, “Survival of the Fittest”.

Those able to survive and prosper in this environment have several traits in common. This article will focus on one; the ability to make efficient use of all available tools to achieve success, at the right time.

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After reviewing my latest Google Sitemap statistics, I noticed that there was an error being reported. The message stated that the link to my DD-sitemap was broken.

I quickly navigated there and found that everything was fine. The sitemap displayed as usual.

Confused, I checked the headers with Live HTTP Headers and found that my sitemap was sending a 404 error, which doesn’t make sense because the page loaded normally.

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CSS is a wonderful, and life shortening thing. When I initially set out to learn it over 3 years ago, I only used it to format fonts and remove the underline from links. This was because no 2 browsers interpreted CSS the same, which made a 100% CSS design all but unattainable.

Now, thanks to everyone but Microsoft’s effort to move towards a standard, CSS has moved to the forefront and become, in my opinion, the only way to design a website. The web has outgrown HTML and is ready to graduate to adding more design, with less markup.

Here are a few CSS tidbits that I wish I had known before I spent hours scouring the Internet to find the answer myself. I hope they’ll help you save the precious years of your life… that I’ve lost.

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Yesterday, I answered a couple frequently asked questions about high-definition televisions. Now that you know what HDTV is (you know you want one) you’ll need to determine what type of high-def television to buy. There are 3 technologies to choose from:

• Plasma Display
• Liquid Crystal Display (LCD)
• Digital Light Projection (DLP)

I’ll describe how each technology works and detail the benefits and drawbacks of each.

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After having my eyes opened to the wonders of high-definition, I have been one its biggest advocates. I can remember having my first HD experience in 2001 at Circuit City. I wish I was kidding, but I actually started feeling faint I was so amazed.

During my pro-HDTV campaign I’ve encountered a couple questions from non-believers who doubt the power of the mighty HD! So, I thought I’d address a couple online to help others get up to speed on this exciting new (albeit a consciousness stealing) technology.

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This Christmas, I got the coolest gift ever; a Sony HDR-SR1 camcorder. It’s one of the first consumer level HD camcorders of its kind with 1080i recording capability courtesy of Sony’s ClearVid CMOS sensor.

It’s amazing.

Only one problem…it’s from Sony.

Why is this a problem? Because Sony is notorious for using propriety hardware and software in their equipment and their latest entry into the HD camcorder market is no different.

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Continuing with my Wordpress love-fest this week, I thought I’d share some of my favorite SEO related plugins. However, Wordpress as a content management system (CMS), has a number of pro-SEO features right out of the box:

• Wordpress SEO Advantages

• 100% CSS Design

  One of the biggest advantages to Wordpress is its 100% CSS theme design. As standards are adopted by next generation browsers (except Internet Explorer), the benefits of CSS are being seen, not only in website design and performance, but SEO as well.

  By using CSS, you can minimize the amount of markup need to achieve the same design objective. Ultimately, this improves your markup-to-content ratio, leaving more content then markup for spiders to index. Since “content is king” (or is it “kontent”?), this feature gives sets the stage for search engine marketing success.

• Link Structure

  Wordpress’s permalink structure combined with Apache’s mod_rewrite gives you the control you need to make informative, search engine friendly URLs. In addition, each link is consistent. In other words, you don’t have to worry about remembering to put a trailing “/” on each directory or make sure your file extension is .htm and not .html. Wordpress handles that for you.

• RSS Feeds

  One thing I noticed almost immediately as I reviewed my server access log, is how much spiders love my RSS feed. After thinking about it for a moment, I realized why. Why go through the trouble of spidering an entire site when you can simply see what’s new?

  With Wordpress, RSS compatible feeds come standard.

• Extensibility

  Wordpress, having been around since 2001, has an extensive and ever growing library of plugins that add a host of new features. It’s this library that, in my opinion, lends the most value to this CMS.

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As you know, given the nature of the Internet, a website can disappear at any moment. Unless you really liked a particular site, it’s not usually a problem. But what if your site, links to this phantom site? Now you have a broken link!

If you’re a freak like me… that bothers you!

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