sad-child10-edited

Back in January my long time friend, Eric Proffitt, called me and said he had a crazy idea he wanted to share with me. First, though, before I share his idea I have to give a little background on Eric.

Earlier this year I wrote about a quick way to fix wordpress themes that wouldn’t wrap text around your images correctly. It was just snidbit of code that you dropped into your style sheet, but it worked like a charm. I have since used the code on several free themes.

Recently, I was having issues with a couple wordpress themes not being able to use the caption section with the image function. Here are some screen shots I created for a friend showing the problem I was having:

Looks Fine in the Post Editor

For the last several months I have been working with Janet (aka newspapergirl.com) on creating a title for her new online pr book. That’s right, I said several months! We have gone through hundreds of possibilities. Personally, my favorite so far is, “Lois Lane’s Complete Guide To Online Press Releases” (her blog tagline is: The Lois Lane of the Web). Something about not infringing on trademarks keeps her from going with that title. Can you really trademark Superman!

It would not surprise me to learn that Janet has lost some sleep over her struggle of coming up with a nice catchy title. So, I decided I would help her further and research the titles on books people like. I’ve read hundreds of people’s top 3,5,10 books list. As I read these lists I would copy to a text file titles I liked. Soon I was creating a rather comprehensive list of my own.

I realized that my research might be of use to others so I compiled them into categories and created my own (rather large) top list. I do give full disclosure that I have not read most of these books. Though, I do start out with a list of the books I have read, which are books found in other lists. I also must disclose that each book links to Amazon for you to buy, and yes, my affiliate code is embedded (hey, this list represents countless hours of my life, the least I can ask for is 15% of your purchase ).

backlinks03jpg Have you ever wondered what the web would be if it was run by lawyers? Nah, me neither, but I received a tiny glimpse of what it might look like when a friend emailed me Advanstar’s Terms of Use for Linking. My friend wanted to be sure that her company was compliant to Advanstar’s Gestapo like terms.

At first, I thought my friend was kidding. Then I read Advanstar’s terms. My favorite is:

“Advanstar may at any time, in its sole discretion, without cause, revoke your right to link to any pages on this Site. In such event upon request, you agree to immediately remove all links to this Site”

Why do we put up with Twitter? Oh yeah, it’s free! Yet, only twitter would give me the below error (midday Friday) and still be  considered the web’s beautiful darling!

only-twitter

cloaking-ff

I remember back in 2003 learning about cloaking to help your search engine ranking. The basic concept is that you give the search engine bots a different page than what you give a real live person. I recall reading at that time that cloaking wasn’t yet determined to be black hat.

However, six years later, cloaking has been firmly established by the search engines as deep, solid, black hat seo. If you get caught you can guarantee you will be booted from the search index.