Another reason I was so excited was because she was asking for a shopping cart. I had seen Magento-a fantastic new open source shopping cart a few months ago, that’s one of the big advantages of wasting my life on the internet.

Magento is way further along then you would think a 1.0 oscommerce competitor would be, and its outstanding. It has great SEO features, plenty of stuff I have paid money to have added to other platforms. Great image handling. Slick and fast. The world’s best admin. It is not for the absolute beginner right noe, but believe me I aint far from there and its kind of running.

As I requested of one friend today, please start marrying off your children.

Anyway, Aaron Wall has released the first SEO tool in a while that I have thought was well-made and useful and it helps with this activity. You can Download the SEOBook.com Rank Checker here.

• Firefox Extension
• Add Multiple Keywords at Once\
• Checks Multiple Keywords at once
• Export to CSV

…ad so you might be behind on the news - news sites are good at telling you the current news cycle but  they are bad at informing you about recent days news. You have to do far too much reading the news backwards, especially on blogs and most news archives are kind of a mess, becaus the archives don’t get the advantage of selection, i.e editorial discretion about what is emphasized through placement and featuring.

Then I found Wikipedia/Portal:Current Events it presents the current important events from the last few days up front. Then it gives you a thorough survery of top world headlines for the previous 7 days events.

Excellent presentation and the wiki philosophy naturally lends itself to a diverse set of opinions.

Here’s a quick backgrounder on longevity research.

Aubrey DeGray is the most familiar face of the longevity research movement, Longevity research seems to be an extremely fruitful and possible line of research and one of the best ways to improve the human condition, but many people are reluctant to support it.

I think there is great resistance to goofing around with the natural order of things - people get sensitive about the edge cases of birth and death especially. I also think that older people do not look forward to the decrepitude part of getting old and can’t imagine extending that out forever. Eternal life is such a myth, and since, we are  self-absorbed as a species, so our own death would tend to fascinate us, it stays that way.

But, we are really just talking about cell death

It’s a process, and researchers are working it, but will it end up in the same kind of pigeonhole that cloning finds itself in, where it interferes with the natural order of things. Think about it, because if you are like me you hadn’t up until now and you realize that this research has a strong, inherent appeal of its own. It sounds like a fantasy because it was a fantasy as long as we have been thinking animals. But those elemental expressions of hopes and fears also predate cell theory and cell pathology and now we can look at conditions that cause the complex we refer to as “aging” and possibly suppress those conditions. How could you not want that? Honestly, it points to a paradox that people reach a certain level of sophistication where they can possibly enact these amazing feats but at the same time reach an obnoxious distance from their own instincts that they suppress their instinct for self-preservation.

Anyway, if you use Gmail A LOT, like I do, and you make filters every so now and then, maybe you’re a 4 hour work week type guy maybe you just need to manage your workflow. There are good ways to manage Gmail filters but what I want to talk about is maintaining Gmail filters.

I’ve had a gmail account for years and years and it acts as my primary contact point. The other day I was looking at my filters to see if I was inadvertantly filtering out a message I was expecting but didn’t receive, when I discovered that I had probably 50 filters currently running and a lot of them were no longer desirable, harmful even. Sending stuff to old business partners, sending Amazon emails to my wife (I guess that’s why she’s so hard to surprise), deleting a ton of things without reading them (I must have been in a  bad mood for a month or so). Anyway, it’s the old Law of Unintended Consequences — Unintended consequences will overwhelm the intended ones.  Basically, the stuff I had set up to automate and streamline my workflow, had long passed their point of usefulness and now was running out of control, hindering or possibly harming me.

It’s very easy to clean out your Gmail filters, just click on the Settings link in the upper right and then filters is one of the links across the top of the main pane.

You do not talk about your profitable niche.

The second rule of SEO Fight Club is -

you DO NOT talk about your profitable niche.

I’m serious, keep it to yourself! When you have a new one, turn off your stupid webmaster blog. Put it in maintenance mode. And Get to Work. What a lot of you don’t understand is that, those of us making a living with web sites, arent making money with our crappy little webmaster/seo/I Heart John Chow blogs. We are making money with niche websites.

Chow.com

Then I realized there was no “John” in front of it.

Happy New Year! Here’s a photo of my worst blind date ever..

I have a wishlist for Weebly as long as my arm, but a lot of them are in the pipeline I’m sure. At this point we’re still waiting for the ability to make (and thus customize) themes.  I’ll post some info here about my Weebly efforts soon.

The  Weebly founder, David Rusenko, has an interesting blog. A useful post for my audience is his 6 Easy Tips to Prevent Downtime, which is useful if you are responsible for site administration for a small or smallish company.

I was sitting around feeling epigramatic so I wrote something like this:

You can publicize posts.

Basically you can design posts to be marketed and then do so. You build links to the posts, by finding other places to link it. This is often done in entertainment niches by concocting “news” or the upcoming release of a new product and giving plenty of images. Then when you draw people to these existing posts, you try to give them something colorful to click on off to the side as well as a nice message inviting them to register and explore your boards. BigBad does a good job with the latest posts of his forum available from the front page and he has lots of appealing content. So if the visitors get there, I’m pretty sure it would convert.

You can build links to the forums.

I offered to do this for him. I have a pretty good feel, better than the average SEO fo where to get links from in this area and how to make them stick. There are good ways to find quality boards to post on. And there are known methods for searching google to find quality backlinks

For the most part link building forums are a pile of sheep poop. Nobody wants to give away their tricks in this area. She will spam you until your ears bleed (its not spam but its an agressive off-topic newsletter) but Michelle MacPhearson offers a really useful social media checklist, that has a lot of good places to get links that will give you ideas of your own. It’s a good idea to keep a hosted public presence where you can throw links at, including links of other things you like. You can do this with del.icio.us, you can do this with a Google Reader Shared Page - it’s like a linkblog.

You can make a video the next time you go to a con.

BigBadWolf is awesome about going to the all the major horror events on the east coast and promoting his site. To me, thats where the real value is, where he gets out and has potential audience members right there. You’ll get a pretty good conversion rate from telling people about your web site in person. A way to extend that is with video. It doesn’t have to be expensive, I got a flip video camera for christmas. Which is the coolest thing in the world. All you need is 1 interview to make a useful video for site promotion. There are tons of indie horror comic artists and writers who frequent Comic Monsters.

You can take the pictures you’ve taken at events and you can create a flickr stream. There are automatic uploaders for this that are free, but its easy enough to do.

Specifically, Flickr uploader - Flickr can have huge giant effects on your traffic, but even if what you have is pretty vanilla, Flickr can be a part of your SEO strategy

You can give me the URLs for any rss feeds that you can currently make for the forums, and I will see if we can do something for them.

Basically an appealing feed can be marketed anywhere

Do you have a comic monsters myspace page? Facebook? You could pimp out one or both.

This is about traffic not seo. I could give a fig about my search engine rankings, if I have people showing up.

You could try to banner exchange with other sites, and do that instead of putting adsense under the second post.

You might need OpenAds to do this, but even I can install and run OpenAds I think this makes good sense for forums because forums always have a lot of cool graphics in the sigs, and I think a kickass banner to a relevant audience is always a good idea. You can even pick up some good links by holding a banner contest, a good link and a great graphic for a low price.

Could you work with any of these insiders comic book publishers to sell products on the web? Do any of these companies have cafe press stores?

CafePress is kind of a boilerplate boring suggestion for most people. Nobody wants your URL on a hoodie but BigBad’s site is full of really vibrant art for horror fans. Some of that stuff is possibly marketable. Also, he could engage his forums to help him design a t-shirt or something to commemorate the next big event. CafePress stores are also excellent places to drop links.

You need a current installation of Wordpress

Instructions:

1. Download the Advanced RSS Feed Wordpress Plugin
   
2. Activate the Plugin (inside Wordpress admin area, plugins tab, click Activate link next to “KB Advanced RSS Widget”
3. Go to Presentation tab => Sidebar Widgets and drag “KB Advanced RSS 1″ from the bottom to your sidebar and “Save Changes”
4. You can style this feed very easily. Using the included options. I will have more posts on styling this feed.