See One, Do One, Teach One

Matt Cutts is one of google’s most public faces. His insights into google’s philosophy and direction are high yield information.

Although usually followed for the etiquette and ethics of search engine optimization, Matt is also a highly skilled tutorial writer. Followers of tech-recipes will certainly appreciate these gems from his blog.

Moving to a New Web Host - Seemlessly moving to a new host or IP without losing google juice is a gastric reflux inducing concern. From MySQL dumps to DNS changes, these step-by-step directions will help keep the heartburn at bay.

Dynamic Adjustment of iFrame Height - The use of iFrame elements are necessary evils in some projects. Matt’s ideas and the comments that follow should help solve many common iFrame issues. Since adsense uses iFrames, it is not surprising that google would be interested in smooth iFrame integration.

Highlight Author Comments in WordPress - On Matt’s blog (and the upcoming transition of tech-recipes to WP) author comments are highlighted in an unique color for easy identification. Matt’s code and the suggestions that follow explore multiple solutions for this issue.

Downloading and Splitting Podcasts in Linux - Podcasts are wonderful sources of information; however, getting them into bite-sized morsels can be difficult. Matt’s tutorial downloads the podcasts and carves them into manageable sections for ease and comfort.

Technorati Tags: matt cutts, google, seo, linux, tutorials, howto

The tech-recipes authors are blogging like crazy. As I am not always the tutorial zealot, please allow me to brag on the crew a little this morning.

BFF and code monkey Q is becoming the photographer and photoshoppper extraordinaire. In his blog exposure post he highlights some of his favorite photography related blog posts.

New tech-recipes author Incursor reminds us all to take an ubuntu typing break. Our other ubuntu guru ShamansTears is on the cusp of getting Google Calendar working offline. He is destined to get us a big scoop before somebody leaks it to the a-listers.

Gadget boy and hardware hacker Seamonkey420 is beating the tobacco addiction but will never be able to give up the gear habit. Check out the videos for his Asus Eee PC 4G and his PS3 versus HTPC.

My wife and I are celebrating a little family time in the wine country. You guys be careful and not mess up the place, okay?

Technorati Tags: tech-recipes, gear, hardware, photoshop, links, PS3

TechCrunch and ValleyWag are two highly successful websites. Here are their recent stats for your reference.

It’s like a baseball pitcher in high school knowing that Nolan Ryan clocked a pitch 100.9 miles per hour.

TechCrunch’s January uniques: 2,647,027
ValleyWag’s January visits: 1,866,711 (stats)

Technorati Tags: techcrunch, valleyway, stats

Greg Reinacker is the founder and CTO of NewsGator.  He also happens to do some excellent professional photography. An interesting opportunity just walked up and smacked Greg across the head. He has pictures from a photography shoot from one of the contestants–Amy Davis.

Please allow me the snarkish oppertunity to interpret his blog post…

For the first time ever, I’ve started watching American Idol this year. And imagine my surprise when I see that Amy Davis is one of the final 24 contestants.

Amazing coincidence! American Idol is been on TV for seven seasons now. The year he finally to jump on the bandwagon just happened to be the season that he had unpublished photos of one of the finalists.

Just over a year ago, I spent a week on a small island near St. Thomas, doing a series of photo shoots. One of the models was Amy Davis. I remember thinking wow, beautiful and talented model…

We are all thinking right now… wow, being a CEO and photog rocks! Beautiful island, beautiful girls… wow. I am physically making the rock-n-roll devil hand sign over my laptop right now.

…and I’ve got literally hundreds of photos of her. So in the interest of helping her win, I’m going to post one previously unpublished photo here every week she stays in the competition.

Hundreds of photos, folks. Hundreds! Every week she’s in the contest, we get a new photo. Every week people are googling for her, Greg gets some juicy traffic. What could go wrong?

Huh, oh. Oh, well… at least we get to see her in some newsgator swag.

Releasing the NewsGator suite for free should get Greg some loving as well. Although Google’s Reader is superior to NewsGator’s online service, the NewsGator local clients far exceed Google Reader in speed and features.

The Gawker Network has recently changed it’s pay structure to encourage popularity over quantity.

In the new and old system, Gawker pays a base salary. In the old system, authors were paid a $12 per post bonus above the base salary. In the new system, an author’s bonus is based on having more pageviews than expected for that site.

Under the new system, posts that receive a high number of pageviews will likely yield a bigger bonus than the old system. However, lesser popular posts may never reach the pageview threshold; and in that case, the blogger will not get paid anything over the base salary.

ratdiary describes in further detail how many authors may lose money under the new terms. After claiming Gawker’s big man Denton has “no vision beyond page views”, one Gawker author has quit after only one day on the job.

Under this system, Denton is assuming that pageviews are the most important metric. This should not be surprising. Radio and television are already largely driven by popularity. More pageviews = more ad views = more clicks = more $$.

Sadly, this is why our main stream media is being diluted with pop-culture, britney spears / paris hilton junk. Popularity may equal money; however, it does not equal quality.

This is certainly not a knock against Denton. Trying to prevent dilution is hard. Here at tech-recipes we will continue to utilize a straight profit sharing model. The advantage of the profit sharing model is that it rewards quality and popularity. The money made on an article is a factor of pageviews and what an advertiser is willing to pay to be near that content. High quality content (regardless of popularity) is more likely to receive better paying advertising.

Denton’s model, for better or worse, only rewards authors for half of the equation.

I just want everybody to know that we are paying our bloggers. BlogCharm may not pay their bloggers. AGLOCO died without paying its users. BlogNation is not paying either.

This is ridiculous. People are working and not getting paid. Unforgivable. The first thing you do is pay your people. You pay your people before you pay your rent, your servers, and especially yourself.

We have never missed a payment to our authors–not a single one. We are as open and transparent as possible. Our bloggers are our friends. I could not imagine under any circumstance not paying them.

We have never taken funding. We do not believe in black-hat SEO. We are building slowly and honestly. We have funds in the bank.

Depending on their skills and content, we have authors that are making several thousands of dollars a month. We even reward our volunteers who are not under contract. We are constantly in discussions and experimentation with our advertising partners to bring our authors the highest income possible.

BlogCharm, AGLOCO, BlogNation — shame on you. When blogging is your business, then your bloggers should be your top priority.

Technorati Tags: blogging, payment, hire

In reviewing our adsense for today, MightyQ noticed that our channel data was not updating correctly. However, the overall totals were within normal limits.

Scanning through the google adsense groups, he found this comment from adsense staff…

Hi everyone,

Our engineers are aware that some publishers are experiencing
reporting discrepancies between their aggregate and channels data
today, and they’re working to resolve them as quickly as possible.
I’ll let you know when I know more.

Sorry for the confusion,
-AdSensePro

As Q and I like to say, it is just a glitch in the matrix.

Techcrunch lets us know that newsvine acquired by MSNBC.com. Newsvine had raised $1.5 million in capital prior to this.

Considering the estimated metrics of newsvine, this really surprises me. Of course, all of these services are estimations. Let’s look at the numbers:

I’ll include tech-recipes in the comparisons for a baseline…

Compete - SnapShot of newsvine.com, tech-recipes.com
Alexa - Graph of newsvine.com, tech-recipes.com
Quantcase - Newsvine.com, Tech-Recipes.com

Today I discovered one of the weaknesses of badges, gadgets, and embeds. Users who are behind restrictive web filters may never correctly see a web page that contains an “include” from a blocked site.

On my XP machines at work, the Facebook Badge does not time out in a graceful manner. This has been the source of my thinking that my blog has not been working incorrectly. Today I installed firebug and yslow for firefox and noticed the following…

The site was stuck on waiting for the facebook badge — eternally. This is likely because of the websense restrictive filtering policy of the hospital. If I try to directly visit facebook, that never resolves either. I receive an eternal “Waiting for…” message in the tray in both IE6 and firefox.

Eventually, IE6 just quits waiting for the badge and never renders the rest of the page. After a minute or two, firefox gives up and does render the page; however, it is such a long delay most people would give up ship and move to another page.

Certainly, you can complain about the way the browsers handle timeouts on javascript. However, the more important point is the following:

How many users are we missing because we are using these embedded objects?

The huge spikes in internet traffic during the work portion of the week suggests that a large majority of internet traffic is from people at work. People at work often have some type of internet filter between them and the rest of the world. It makes sense to me, then, that these hot new embeddable objects may be making many web pages inaccessible to many users.

If a browser fails to load an image, it fails gracefully. If a browser fails to load a gadget, the rendering of your entire page may choke.

I guess I have now seen it all. ABC is blog spamming my site.

They posted the comment to this completely unrelated blog post — The PR Pain — Blog First, Test Later. That blog post is only a year old, btw.

The comment and my email response back to them are quoted below.

The blog comment –

Lauren | talkback@abcnews.go.com | abcnews.go.com/technology/talkback | IP: 192.195.66.48

ABC News in New York would like to extend an opportunity for your video comments to air on our program and be posted on our website.

ABC News Now’s “Healthy Life� wants you to ‘Talk Back’ about using generic brand drugs. Which do you use — generic or name-brand? Why? Generic drugs are cheaper than name brands — but do they provide the same relief & results? Have you had any problems with generic brands?

Tell us your story on-camera! Send in your video comments by Friday, August 17th at 9 a.m. EDT and it could be aired on ABC News Now!

It’s easy! Here’s HOW:

ABC News is specifically requesting 15-45 second video comments or photos.

HOW TO SUBMIT VIDEOS:
1) Via cell phone
Record a clip and email it to: icaught@abcnews.go.com

2) Via the web:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/TalkBack/story?id=3478601

We look forward to hearing from you & thanks again for your participation. Should you have any questions about this project, email us back at this address: talkback@abcnews.go.com.

Best,

- The ABC News “Talk Back� Team

My email response –

Lauren:

I realize that some mainstream media journalists may not familiar with proper etiquette on blogs. However, posting unrelated comments on a blog post for the sole purpose of driving traffic/attention to your site is considered poor form.

I would appreciate a response.

Best,

Davak

Author of See One, Do One, Teach One
http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/davak/