Successful Blog

65th Crayon Finds that Google Doesn’t Use Search

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Thought I’d share this Sunday fun while you’re waiting for the boxes to get opened. . . . a piece I’m running today on my personal blog.

This Just In from The 65th Crayon:

When he got the call to attend a meeting at Google headquarters, The 65th Crayon was a little perplexed. Our reporter friend hadn’t been there since he had taken them to task last fall for the problem of dlites and dlogs–fake websites and blogs set up by dogs–in the case of the invisible dog spamming the Internet.

“I thought they might be calling for a follow up report,” said our supersleuth reporter, “or I considered that they might have had some new ideas about related Adsense Words. To my surprise, it was nothing of the sort.”

At this point, our remarkable friend pulled a red plastic egg from his pocket, saying “You might not remember these. “This is the original Silly Putty, made from the work of engineer James Wright, who was trying to invent a new kind of rubber. It became a famous toy when it was introduced on the Howdy Doody Show. Since then kids have been pulling, turning, and twisting it and of course, pressing it against the newspaper to pick up pictures.”

“It appears that Crayola the company that sells Silly Putty now offers it in another size–Silly Putty Bulk–and several colors. Apparently the engineers at Google decided that they needed a lot of it.”

The Google engineers tell the story quite well at the Google Blog. This image shows how they put the bulk shipment they were going to share together in a pile for a picture. Later, they couldn’t pry the Google glob apart so that each owner could claim his or her blob of the bigger glob. That’s why they had called in the 65th Crayon.

“Silly people. They thought I might be able topull apart 250 pounds of stuck together Silly Putty. Had they used their famous search engine, they would have known,” the 65th said seriously. “You always call in the crayon expert before handling explosives or Silly Putty.”

Then in usual fashion, our reporter friend tied his trench coat belt and walked off, like Humphrey Bogart.

–me strauss Letting me be

Scribbles: A-Go A Coloring Party

For links to additional Scribbles Reports by the 65th Crayon see the sidebar.
Scribbles Reports by The 65th Crayon appear every other Sundays in Letting me be …
The 65th Crayon is a copyright of ME Strauss. All Rights Reserved.

Community Writing Opportunity

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For all who write, here’s a change to promote yourself and your business:

Do you know the Writer’s Blog Alliance? If you’ve never been, you should check it out. All blog writers are welcome but particularly suited are those who publish writing blogs. One of the founders, Deborah Woehr, also publishes:

The Writers Buzz
A blog on promoting what you’ve written

Prosperity
Deborah’s Novel–a great read with strong plot and characters

DeborahWoehr.com
Deborah’s Personal Writing Journal–some great writer’s tips from this pro

Now Deborah is putting together an anthology to which I’ve already submitted. I think that you should know about it.
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From Deborah : Seeking Submissions for the 2006 Writer’s Blog Anthology

Whether you’re a professional writer, a part-time freelancer, or a beginner, here is your chance to submit your best blog post for inclusion in what we hope to be the start of an annual tradition. We need submissions for the following categories:

Journalists
Columnists
Freelancing
Fiction
Non-fiction
Litblogs
Graphic Novels
Poetry

At this time, we are not offering any payment for submissions. This is a volunteer effort.

Deadline for Submission: January 31, 2006

Guidelines for Submission

1. All submissions must be in well-written English. No excessive slang, profanity, violence, etc.
2. Your blog must be at least three months old.
3. Include your real name, the name of your blog, the link to your blog, and a thumbnail image of your blog.
4. Include the post that gained the most response from your readers, adding a short paragraph that summarizes their reaction.
5. Don’t forget your byline, where you can include links to your other blogs, books, business websites, etc.
6. Please do not submit any more than two entries. There is no guarantee that both entries will be accepted. If you do submit a second entry, it must be from another blog with a completely different subject from the first (ex. a fiction blog and a column blog about politics). All double submissions with similar subjects will be rejected.
7. Submit your entries to deborah@writersblogalliance.com
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Check out the Writer’s Blog Alliance and what they have to offer, and do throw caution to the wind and give Deborah’s Anthology a chance at your best work for her anthology.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Click once For Sumeet Jain

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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

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

Smiles,
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Please Excuse The Boxes

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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

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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.

Googlesitemaps Overview

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

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muddy teal strip A

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

anthony dever logo

blogebrity logo

modernfabulousity logo

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.

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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