iTamer Posts

April 19, 2006 / Search Engine Optimisation

Guaranteed Google in 7 days

A common question in the forums is

I’ve had an email from a company saying they will guarantee my sites will be indexed by Google within 7 days. Is this a good deal?

that would be from a company saying things like

Based on our research, G-Submit ensures that the vast majority of web pages will be included in the main search engine results pages of Google within 7 days of service completion. And the good news is that G-Submit is totally within the guidelines of best practices set out by Google, so you won’t be penalized.

Bollocks! Ofcourse it’s within the guidelines, but should we pay for it? No Way!

Read the postGuaranteed Google in 7 days

April 13, 2006 / New Zealand

TradeMe phishing is not harmless

April 12, 2006 / Mambo / Joomla

Genuine 404s and Google Verification

Google is steadily building up it’s webmaster tools and winning over the hearts of webmasters. As covered in my Google Sitemaps and Verification post the feedback can be very, very useful.

I have run into problems though on Mambo and Joomla sites because they don’t throw true 404s so as far as GoogleBot knows every page is a good page. Google and Googlebot have given webmasters an incentive to change… access to the stats!

To get Mambo and Joomla to throw a 404 you need three things!

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April 11, 2006 / PHP & Web Development

Javascript Test Page

I’ve just been playing with javascript changing the style of an item directly as part of my prep for an AJAX integrated project. Making sure the code is cross browser is really important so I pulled together some bits and pieces from all over the place and have put together a test page with tabbed forms and a style changer.

Javascript Test Page

The key elements are the ability to get the element using any of the browser types.

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April 11, 2006 / New Zealand

It’s good to be a Rotten Apple

I tried out ecademy a few years ago and quickly tired of the networking tool. I guess I’m not their target market and I’ve never paid for one of their upgraded membership levels 🙂

Every so often I get a contact message, out of courtesy I take a look but they are rarely interesting. Well I’ve started getting messages from S?ren Gorm Rasmussen flogging the ACN pyramid (or not) scheme which has hit New Zealand.

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April 3, 2006 / WordPress

Another Widgets exponent

March 31, 2006 / PHP & Web Development

That tangled web…

I received an email notification to a forum post I’d participated in this morning, and bang, there went a chunk of time…

water on the beach

The trigger was a new site called PopURLs which is basically a single page aggregator of some of the major feed sites. Nothing radical there but down the bottom there’s the opportunity to post a link yourself. Given the OpenSourceCMS experience I had to check it out and submit a link.

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March 29, 2006 / New Zealand

Tobacco: Profits or Genocide?

Anyone who knows me knows how much I hate smoking. Such an insidious habit, so seemingly innocuous yet, as Shane Bradbrook points out, it’s the number one killer of Maori. Then you have to wonder how much of the so called Obesity Epidemic if affected by the sedentary lifestyle associated with smoking.

I’ve long been aware that the advertising and marketing efforts of the Tobacco companies is based on aspiration – to be sophisticated and western and, lets face it, white. So many foibles in the developing nations are based on those same factors – leg lengthening, skin bleaching and smoking. All dangerous, and frankly unbelievable. Yet they happen. We even hear that Chinese brides get raunchy wedding photos taken in an effort to appear modern. That message had to come via the distorted movie industry and it’s low-class relation the porn industry.

Read the postTobacco: Profits or Genocide?