Liz, Author at Successful Blog Page

Click once For Sumeet Jain

January 6, 2006 by Liz

Do you know Sumeet Jain? He’s a CSS whiz. Sumeet Jain came through when I had questions about my blog more than once. He’s an official SOB and a member of our community.

I know we can do this. After all it’s what communities are all about.

Hi everyone!

Some of you may have heard me rattling on before about a project I’m involved in called CalTV. If I haven’t yet given you that spiel, it’s basically a news site run like a video blog of student interview from UC Berkeley.

The next step for us at CalTV is to allow people to post their own interviews by filming themselves from their cell phones. We’re calling this Outspoken Architecture.

Naturally, this kind of functionality takes a lot of time and effort… and money. Motorola is holding a contest for seamless mobility, and our Outspoken Architecture is a finalist! We have a great opportunity here to get some funding, and you can help us out greatly by taking a quick moment to cast your vote for us.

No registration is needed. Just click the link and we’re voted for. There’s even a PDF of our mission if you’d like to make a more informed decision.

Here’s the link: Motorola finalist–Outspoken Architecture

Thanks a lot for your support. Oh, and if you know anyone else who might be interested in this kind of thing, feel free to let them know about the voting 😀

Adios,

—
Sumeet Jain

________________________________________________________________

Let’s show Sumeet Jain and CalTV what a great community we are.

Smiles,
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Hey there!

I’m almost home. The art is still in boxes and the walls still nead some decoration. So while you’re waiting our design touch ups, I hope that you’ll excuse the boxes and the dust.

In the meantime, I’ll leave some links and things that you might find useful while I’m cleaning up. Sorry to the SOBs I’ll get your logos back up there as soon as I can.

MY Fonts
A place to shop for fonts to spruce up your blog for the new year.

Photo-Based Color Palette Generator by Jeff Minard
Have your color palette computer generated to match your favorite photo.

HTML Tutorial
Use this tutorial when you need to spruce up your html coding skills.

And do stop by my new business blog:

Biz.erati with Miz Liz.

I miss you guys. Come leave a comment.

See you soon when this is the reregistered Successful Blog and it has its final design.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Google Site Maps–Looking for Lancelot or Guinevere

January 1, 2006 by Liz

Imagine you could know every thing that Google knows about you and your blog. Okay so you can’t. But you can know alot and over this past year Google’s packaged more and more of that information in usable chunks.

New Years Resolution 1 Check Out the Depth and Breadth of Google Site Maps
If you’ve not yet checked out Google Site Maps make an appointment with yourself to spend an hour doing so. This image of my site’s overview page will show what you can without downloading anything. I’ve linked it to the Google Site Maps login page so that you can dig right in.

Once you’re there Google asks you to make a verification file and to place it on your server at the root location of your site.

This leads me to Resolution 2, which applies only to the more experienced of our community.

Resolution 2: Be a Hero. Teach someone with a subdomain. If you know how to do this for a subdomain–such as Blogger–that has

no access to the server
no separate file for anything, but a flat open template instead,

would you take a subdomain blogger like me or another under your wing and show us how we might get our hands on the information that you can only get after verification?

You might think that since Google owns Blogger, they would offer some sign, some light, signal as to how to do this. But alas and alack, as in many major corporations, such communication is vapor on the wind. We must scratch and scrape. We are left bereft to find our way through the dark relying on the kindness of friends.

Translation: I’m dying to know what else I might find behind that curtain. Especially since the tabs the curtain covers are called stats and errors.

So there’s the quest. Is there a modern-day Lancelot or Guinevere would take up this gauntlet? Is there someone who tell me what Google should have told me? . . . Please.

–Me “Liz” Strauss

Thanks to Week 10 SOBs

December 30, 2005 by Liz

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

muddy teal strip A

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this badge’s validity, send him or her directly to me. This award comes with a full “Liz said so” guarantee. It is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame. Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Check Google Backlinks Through Yahoo

December 30, 2005 by Liz

I’m not actually sure how I got there. That happens to me in real life too–more than I’d like to admit.

Somehow I ended up on a forum called SEO Guy on a thread about backlinks. The discussion was about that age old question

Why don’t my backlinks show up in Google?

It’s accepted knowledge that Google only reports about 5% of the backlinks it knows about. This practice frustrates folks attempting to see where they stand.

Embedded in the discussion thread that I found was a way to uncover what backlinks Google has by asking Yahoo. The technique set forth below by forum member Brandon is complete with the compelling argument for why you would trust that Google has these same links.

This is an image of Brandon’s post at the SEO Guy Forum.

This is an image of the search text in action. It took a few tries to get it right using a blog with a subdomain. Note the space before the hyphen.

Not only did I find out what links Google has, I found out that Yahoo doesn’t show me all of its links when I do a simple link:mydomain.com search either. The link count for both my personal blog and for Successful Blog were both almost 40% higher through this command.

Believe me the entire thread at SEO Guy Forum is worth reading. I just found this particular bit worth highlighting for your attention.

I’m heading back that way. I’ve bookmarked both the SEO Guy Forum and the SEO Guy Blog. This SEO Guy makes SEO interesting. What a concept!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Blogger/ Firefox–Editing Trap

December 30, 2005 by Liz

If you’re working on a Blogger blog and using Firefox, recently when they hid the time options choice on the posting box, they also hid an editing trap.

Note: This seems to be true only in Firefox.

Here’s what happens: When you go back in to edit, unless you check the “keep current time” box, the time resets itself. That means that the time on the post becomes time of the edit, rather than remaining the time the post was originally published.

A post written in May, but fixed in July would move two months through your blog!

Read this explanation of how Blogger posts are an editing trap by Improbulus at a Consuming Experience. The post will lead you to the software fixes that you need.

Whew! What a mess that could be. Just when you thought your blog was doing fine. . . Thank you again. Improbulus.

–ME “Liz” Strauss