Essential Keystrokes » Terminology

Common Craft’s Social Media in Plain English

Char — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:27:40 +0000

By now you all should know how much I love Common Craft’s new media in plain English videos! They really are the best. Here is their latest which is Social Media in Plain English (and it will make you want ice cream afterwards).

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

Podcasting in Plain English

Char — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:36:42 +0000

The team at Common Craft are well known for their videos that explain high tech topics in plain English. I just watched one of their newest additions, Podcasting in Plain English, and am posting it here for you to learn from too.

Have a great weekend.

Happy RSS Day

Char — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:05:58 +0000

May 1st is RSS Awareness Day! In celebration, let’s start off with the best explanation of RSS ever from the folks at Common Craft.

Once you understand what RSS is, you need to find your favorite aggregator. Personally, I prefer Google Reader, but I know many who swear by Netvibes, Pageflakes and Bloglines. (Here is a full list of feed aggregators). This allows you to stay up to date on your favorite sites from one convenient site.

More fun RSS tools:

A huge compilation of free RSS icons of all shapes and sizes for you to use on your site
Feedburner – the ultimate tool for managing, publishing and monetizing your feed.
Mashable has the ultimate list of 120 RSS Tools with everything from readers, plugins, hacks, and such to help you get the most of your feed.

Happy RSS Day! Don’t forget to hug your chicklet today!

Posts Too Good Not To Share

Char — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 15:04:50 +0000

The more blogs I read, the more great information I find! And this week, there have been some posts that are just too good not to share with you!

How To Get More Text Link Sales by John Chow

16 Must Read Articles to Get the Most out of Your Blog by the Wrong Advices

8 Ways to Turn Negative Feedback into an Opportunity by Wendy at eMoms At Home

Best Ever Explanation of RSS – thanks to Dawud and David for sharing this excellent video

Need a Website or Redesign? Here is our process. by Prime Marketing Blog – while this is their process, it is similar to mine, and anyone who is considering a new site or redesign should really have a sense of what goes into the whole thing!

And another tool for helping you maximize your web site’s performance – Small Buisness Hub’s Website Grader – thanks to Deziner Folio for the tip!

SEO Techniques – White Hat or Black Hat?

Char — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 13:26:06 +0000

Whether you are doing your own search engine optimization or having a company do it for you, you should know if the techniques being used are considered “white hat” (ethical and acceptable) or “black hat” (unethical and no longer acceptable).

Examples of White Hat Techniques:

Unique, relevant and quality content
Correct meta tag practices
Descriptive ALT tags for images
Page titles and file names that accurately describe the page
Quality inbound and outbound links

Examples of Black Hat Techniques:

Keyword spamming or stuffing
Cloaking or doorway pages that serve the page one way to the search engine spiders and another way to the visitors
Spamdexing or abusing search engine algorithms
Hidden or invisible text

Of course, the search engine optimization technology and best practices are always changing. To stay up-to-date with the latest techniques do your research. Some good sites include:

What is a Widget?

Char — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 09:21:00 +0000

Last year when I got my iMac G5, I was getting to know my way around it and all of a sudden a layer of little windows appeared with the latest weather, a solitare game, maps, calendar and a variety of other little gizmos. On the Mac it is called my Dashboard, but after a bit of research, I figured out that these are called widgets – small files that run single applications in individual window that can be customized for your desktop. I’ll call them “Geek Toys“.

Originally created in 2000 using XML, they were launched for the Mac platform and now using Java, they are available for Windows.

Where do you get these widgets? The name in the game used to be Konfabulator, but it appears that Yahoo! has bought them out. Yahoo! Widgets gallery lets you find widgets and download them, or if you are a widget creator, you can submit them too.

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