Children of Iraq V1

April 14th, 2009 by Jesse

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I was deployed to Iraq with my National Guard Infantry unit and during my time there I saw many things, some good and some bad. One item that stood out then and still does today is the needs of the children there. They are not all that different from my kids or any other child here in America, they are just stuck in the middle of something they can’t control.

I took many pictures while I was there and made a few videos as well, this one is a slide show of some of the children in our area of operations. They don’t have a choice but still pay the consequences, which is sad. It is with these children[..]

Ditch database queries, speed up Wordpress

April 12th, 2009 by Jesse

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Wordpress is made so it is user friendly and easy to implement, so there are several ways that it can be optimized from it’s standard configuration. One of these ways is to reduce the number of database queries that are needed to retrieve the information to create the page, thus reducing database load and making your site load faster and saving server resources for when your post gets to the front page on Digg and just make the world a happier place overall.

The first place to go to reduce queries is your header.php file for your theme. If you open it in your favorite editor you will see many lines of code that looks something like this:[...]

Secure your Wordpress site Part 1

April 10th, 2009 by Jesse

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In the past few weeks I have read about dozens of Wordpress based sites that have come under some form of attack, while I feel sympathetic for the victims I hate to say that most of the ways Wordpress based sites are attacked can be prevented by simple measures that any site owner can accomplish. I will start off, what may be a mufti-part series on how to secure your Wordpress site now. While this is not the end all, be all of Wordpress security, following these tips will be an effective start to thoroughly protecting your Wordpress site and will make your site much more secure than most. If you really are serious about making money online, protect your business, it’s your responsibility[...]

Twitter spoofs run rampant online

April 6th, 2009 by Jesse

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I was just “researching” some information for future posts and came across a hilarious video about a company called Flutter.. It was originally posted by Slate Magazine and is considered nano-blogging, as it limits the messages that are sent to 26 characters, because that’s how many letters are in the English alphabet lol.. Love it, here is the video.

Stop framing sites from stealing your content

April 5th, 2009 by Jesse

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As with any business, it takes work to operate a succesful website and producing frequent, quality content can be a time consuming task, especially if you care what you write about. About 2 months ago on another site of mine, I started to find an excessive amount of requests coming from one particular IP so I dug in a bit deeper to get to the bottom of it. The requests led me to find a site that was taking website content and framing it (putting it inside an iframe) on their page, so basically it was my site within a page on their site, with their address in the url and a header at the top with their ads on it.[...]

“nofollow” or not to “nofollow” that is the question

April 5th, 2009 by Jesse

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Effectively promoting your “brand” is an increasingly difficult task in today’s online marketplace, with large corporate sites and Joe Bob’s mini-sites saturating the internet with 10,000 of everything it is getting more and more difficult to differentiate yourself from the rest of the code floating around on the web. Quality cross site marketing and promotion is becoming more and more important with every passing day. Using your website to promote or endorse another site, especially when reciprocated, is an excellent way for quality sites to help each other and to improve the overall user experience by providing access to relevant and preferably related information on other sites.

There has been some talk lately about whether or not to use the nofollow attribute on off site links, I personally[...]

Wordpress Robots.txt file for SEO

April 2nd, 2009 by Jesse

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Wordpress, straight out of the box is an excellent platform that is feature rich, easy to use and highly customizable. But guess what, it’s navigation structure is absolutely horrible in the eyes of search engines because many of the features that make user navigation so easy and intuitive end up having the exact opposite effect for search engine spiders/bots. The ability to easily navigate to posts/pages by multiple links of various names can produce a pile of the ever-dreaded duplicate content that search engines such as Google will penalize your site for. Unless you want your pages in the supplemental index, read on to learn one more SEO “must-do” to keep your site SERP’ing strong[...]

Don’t let your content end up in Google Hell!

March 31st, 2009 by Jesse

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As the popularity of blogging continues to grow, the desire to gather as much traffic from search engines like Google grows as well. Everyone wants their piece of the pie (and that of the blogger to the left and right of them as well)

There are several factors to consider when setting up a site, developing content and optimizing that content for the best ranking in the eyes of big brother Google and uncle Yahoo, many of these factors we all know, and yes, as far as SEO is concerned, content is king and always will be. If you simply keep feeding the monster fresh, original content on a regular basis and do nothing else, you will do well. However, for those of us that are looking for that extra leverage, or that little added edge to not only increase the perceived value of our content, our sites and in turn our site income, I will give you a few sure fire solutions right here, right now[...]