newmediaMike

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-14

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

• @AlanoClub - thx for the follow. #
• @Mouthygirl - one month is ideal and two prizes, be sure to cal one a Grand Prize. Who isn’t a sucker for a grand prize? #
• What’s your current “earworm”? Thanks to my tween daughter, mine is the Jonas Brothers “Year 3,000″. Thanks Blondie! #
• Very Interesting - Did you know that you can text your zip/CDN Postal code to MYSBUX (697289) to find the 3 nearest locations? #
• @starcella, thx for the follow, I may need you and Joe’s services soon for my home PC. #

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Read it Later Add-on for Firefox

I am cursed in that I’m a pack rat. Offline my office is a total clutter mess. Online, I’ve got a gigazillion bookmarks on my computer in folder after folder, some sub categories have multiple sub categories.  One of my folders of bookmarks is for articles or items I want to read but just don’t have the time to do so right now.

Well, I came across this on another blog. A website called TheIdeaShower came up with a better “idea” - a new Firefox Extension that allows you to list the items you want to read easily without having to bookmark it. After all, your bookmarks really should be left for sites that you REALLY want to go back to.

So, here’s a great little tool that sits on your Firefox browser and it’s brought to you by TheIdeaShower.com! It’s called “Read It Later“.

By the way, this was my 200th post as newmediaMike!

Tags: firefox browser, firefox extension, readitlater

Daily SEO Tips - Clean up your code

I did an optimization evaluation on a site the othre day and I couldn’t believe the amount of crap code that was in the head. It was no wonder the client’s site ranked so poorly, the poor bots had to wade through tons of code to get to the meat.

So my advice to them was - clean up your code. Get rid of “code bloat.” Spiders are simple programs, try to make it easier for them to do their job simple: finding your content. Put one spider in another spider’s web and it gets stuck. By using CSS and moving the Java-Script and CSS to external files, you can minimize the likelihood that a spider will get stuck on your site and not being able to spider your full page nor all your links on it. Want another reason to use external CSS files? Anything that pushes keyword containing text further down on the page could be negatively affecting your rankings.

I’m taking the weekend off again, so the next SEO tip will be Monday.

Tags: code bloat, Daily SEO Tips, search engine optimizing tip

Mobile Applications I’ve discovered

I “discovered” the joys of the mobile web a few months ago after I bought my SonyEricsson 810i. Since then I’ve been finding all sorts of mobile applications and uses for my mobile.

One I’ve been using off and on for a while now is TwitterMobile. In addition to SMS (aka, “text messaging”), you can access Twitter from most phone’s web browsers.

Just point your browser to http://m.twitter.com for a tiny Twitter interface. (Try saying that five times quickly!). Now you can keep in touch with all of your Twitter friends no matter where you are.

I’ll be putting it to good use this weekend as I’m heading out for my fourth camping trip of the summer. This time the girls and I are going to Awenda Provincial Park up near Georgian Bay.  Maybe I’ll go crazy and Twitter about every detail of the trip !

Another mobile app I’ve discovered I cannot live without is my GMail application.

My main email address is now newmediamike@gmail.com - with this app I can access my GMail account as if I was logged into my PC. It is a great addition to my mobile phone.

The challenge I find of course is the volume of email I receive it sometimes gets overwhelmed with Bacn. Yeah I know, I was canceled a lot of my Bacn emails, but the totals have slowly crept back up again. I guess like Homer Simpson, I just love my Bacn!

The GMail app is small and fast. I put it to good use last weekend when we were in Montreal as I had my creative Post email forwarded to my GMail account, that way I was able to keep in touch with a couple of clients and the office as we were working on a time sensitive project. I’ve proven I don’t need a Blackberry.

Another app, and I’ve been meaning to try out for a few weeks now is Kyte. It is a mobile client allowing live video streaming to a webpage/channel/widget etc..without the hassle of uploading.

Kyte describes itself as : “Easily create your own interactive TV channel featuring pictures, videos, music, polls, livechat and much more with kyte.tv.”

It seems almost like a “MyTube” crossed with a real-time-chat room with other interactive elements thrown in. After setting up an account you can download the mobile client. I’ll try and post some Kyte videos over this weekend too.

Tags: Gmail, Kyte, mobile, mobile applications, Twitter