Windows 7: What a disappointment.

So, I got a new computer. The old one, a 6 year old custom built Asus/AMD finally is starting to show its age, and when the power supply gave up I figured it was a good time to get a new system. I called my local computer store, explained what I wanted and signed the work order. It’s a graybox i7 with 12gb ram. Very fast, very slick.

The big question was the OS: Windows XP 64bit or Windows 7 64bit. I’ve used Windows 7 on a virtual machine on my old XP box and really like it (even without the Aero interface, which the old machine wasn’t powerful enough to support.) So I booted up the virtual machine and installed all my work-a-day apps on it: Cakewalk Sonar, Adobe Premiere and FXHome  VisionLab Studio being the really important ones. Each ran – though the FXHome product has to be run in XP Mode – and so I fired off an email: proceed with Windows 7.

I have since discovered what a mistake that was. Granted I should have done more thorough testing: I only started each package to see if it would run without error, which each did. Now, having done some additional research trying without success to work on a project, I’ve found the following things:

Recording “Stereo Mix” (a.k.a. “What U Hear”) off your sound card isn’t simple any more. On my new PC, it’s simply not an option. A Google search for a fix showed me that many others have had the same problem. The recurring theme was, “It worked fine in XP, but when I upgraded to 7 (or Vista), it didn’t work any more.” Many solutions were tossed out, like upgrading/reinstalling sound card drivers, right-clicking in device properties and checking “show disabled”, none of which worked for me, although I could be forgiven for asking

Why the hell should that even be necessary?

Sorry, I’m a little miffed. Seems to me that for content producers like me and others, this task should be a fundamental assumption so why should we have to work so hard to do it after “UP”grading? Microsoft in bed with RIAA..?

Ya think?

Yes, I can use the stereo mix to record stuff off YouTube…yes, that’s a violation of copyright…yes yes yes yes friggin’ yes. However, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to record the Stereo mix – not the least of which is a mix-down of audio tracks and MIDI-controlled audio output from my keyboard, something I do ALL THE TIME.

Or at least, I used to.

In XP.

Yeah, okay, now that we’re here, there’s MIDI. Same issues: worked fine in XP, doesn’t work now. Even the company that built my PC knew that 7 doesn’t support legacy MIDI interfaces, though they let me choose 7 anyway.

Which is why I’m miffed. No, not miffed. Pissed off.

I’m a user. I don’t build PCs for my living. According to what I’ve read this morning, audio/MIDI issues like the ones I’m facing now were introduced with Vista, so given that track record, my PC builder – who knows me and what I do – should have known about these issues and recommended – no, insisted on – Windows XP.

That I am discovering this now, mid-project, that I will have to take two hours out of my day to take the PC back and have it fixed (twice, if I have to drop it off and then go back), that I will have to reinstall all of my applications, another four hours gone: for all these reasons, I’m pissed off.

 

Installing software

My partner at work is one of those people who installs every upgrade and always accepts the default installation for any new software. Now, if you read that and thought, “Wow, what an idiot,” then I’m preaching to the choir: go to the Fellowship Hall, grab a cup of coffee and a serving of pie and wait for me, I’ll be there in a minute.

If you read that and thought, “What’s wrong with that?” read on. This article is for you. I’ve got pie waiting so I’ll be as brief as possible.

Remember those days way back when, when software came on CDs, and what it said on the package is what you were installing and that was it?

Now, all the software you could ever want to do just about any task that software can do is just a download and a few mouse clicks away. That’s a mixed blessing, as it happens, and this is the most important part:

Most software comes bundled with other stuff, and if you accept the default install, you’re getting it all whether you like it or not.

It used to be that the bundled software was innocuous, nothing to worry about. Most often, now, it’s yet another browser toolbar you don’t need or want. (Most open source software published under Gnu licensing rules is bundle-free.) Install enough stuff, and your browser will start to look like the picture.

Is that what you want?

Even software I would usually trust right out of the gate, like the anti-virus I just installed this morning, AVG, had the Ask.com toolbar bundled with it.

Remember this one thing, if nothing else: there is no browser toolbar that you need. All “helpers” just provide functions that are readily available in most browsers anyway, slow down your browsing experience, and, usually, report your browsing habits back to the owner, who then sells that information to marketers.

Really, is that what you want?

Here are my hard and fast rules on installing software:

Never, ever, EVER accept the default installation. Always select the “Custom” install.

Never, ever, EVER install any software except the stuff I specifically downloaded and want

It’s so simple, isn’t it? When faced with the choice of “Simple” (or “Quick”) and “Custom”, always choose “Custom.” Do this, and your PC will be cleaner, faster, and your browser window will always be user-friendly.

Creating a Google-Friendly Website

Creating a Google-Friendly Website:

This blog post is rather ancient in internet terms, but the practices I describe still work for me.

Disclaimer: the advice I offer here is based upon a great deal of research and personal and professional experience, but lest you misunderstand my intentions, I’m not inviting debate. There are a great many opinions about how Google works since no one outside the company actually knows, and thus you may feel inclined to disagree with my recommendations. Be my guest.  You have a blog of your own, I’m sure.

Late edit: there are some clarifications inline.

Let us begin.

For the record, merely having many visitors to your website isn’t going to help your rankings. Google can’t read your visitor count – nor would you want them to.

To increase your Google ranking, your site needs two things: relevance and importance. In this article I will detail how to achieve both in the eyes of Google.

Step One: decide how you want people to find your site. In other words: if you make flowerpots and want your business to come from Kansas City, then you want people searching on the words “flowerpot” and “kansas city” to find you. If you want flowers in there, too, add “flowers” to your list. People searching for “flowerpot kansas” will also find you.

Note: “flowers” is not the same as “flower”. Google search results will eventually connect those dots, but it will only be after the “flowers” entries are exhausted and so won’t help you. Same goes for “flowerpot” and “flower”. Google doesn’t search in words; not, at least, for results it returns on the first page.

Step Two: make sure your key words are in your TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and CONTENT. Of the three, the last is the most important.

TITLE: A “meta” tag that lives in the head section of your webpage HTML markup.  It appears as the text in the bar at the top of your browser, which is also used when someone bookmarks your page. In our example, the title of the homepage should read something like, “Marvin’s Garden, Flowerpots, Kansas City Missouri. Flowerpots, Flowers, Floral”.

DESCRIPTION: A “meta” tag that lives in the head section of your webpage HTML markup.  It is not visible to the end user: it describes your page in human readable terms. Google displays the description, if there is one, just below the title of the page in search results. It should also include your key words. Something like:

“Marvin’s Garden is a full service nursery in Kansas City, Missouri. We feature flowers, flowerpots, floral and garden supplies for the amateur and professional gardener. Spring flowers are in bloom, so brighten your home and garden today. We have sales going on right now on flower and vegetable seeds.”

In that description I’ve done several things: I’ve gotten my primary key words in there; I’ve added a few more to broaden my prospects; I’ve managed to put each key word in at least once, sometimes twice, and with variations; it’s grammatically correct and reads like normal text; and I’ve added a call to action to the potential customer.

CONTENT: Not a “meta” tag: this is the most important element of the three: the stuff on the pages that people read. Google rates pages based on relevance to the search terms, and it counts relevance by “key word density”, in other words, the number of times a search term appears in textual content on a given page.

Every image must have a descriptive ALT tag. This helps not only with SEO, but also with screen readers for the visually impaired.

The trick is to not over-do. If you write a paragraph where more than, say, 10% of the words are the same search terms over and over:

“We’ve got flowerpots, and pots of flowers, and more flowerpots, with clay flowerpots, and plastic flowerpots, and even metal flowerpots…”

Google will reject that content as being spammy and penalize your site with a lower ranking. The content can read like sales copy, that’s fine, but it must also be reasonable.

KEYWORDS. There’s a reason I haven’t addressed this, the most popular of methods to drive search traffic. The “keywords” META tag is in the same class as the TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags, with one notable exception: GOOGLE DOESN’T USE THE KEYWORD TAG AND NEVER HAS. Neither does MSN. Yahoo! does, but exactly how is hard to determine. Go ahead and fill the KEYWORD tag, it won’t hurt, but don’t count on it.

If you have a retail site where adding content is tough in context, here’s what you do: add links to your homepage to other pages on your site that have that content. When I had Seamlyne.com, I moved my ranking from the middle of page 2 to the first or second link on the first page with one simple change: I added two links to the homepage, an FAQ and a “Fun with Tights” page. On each page, I made sure my key words (tights, codpiece, renaissance) were used at least twice. I also added “news” to the homepage that changed every other week or so.

Another option: have a blog. SOOOOO many opportunities for content, cross-linking, etc. Even better for SEO if the blog (or blogs) lives on a different domain.  Don’t just copy/paste content, though. Google tends to ignore duplicate content.

So, now we have a handle on relevance in Google: if your site is relevant for a key word, that key word will be in the content about 10% of the words. The content will change every so often, so Google assumes the site is active.

Now, to increase your site’s importance, you need back links, which is to say, links to your site from other sites. Set up reciprocal links with like-minded webmasters.

Back-links. That’s what my Seamlyne teaching site was for: that sucker was back-linked on at least a dozen sites, and it, in turn, linked to the retail site. I would write articles in Google groups, and make sure to reference the website.

Issue a press release every time you have something to say. Free press releases look handy, but you won’t get the kind of coverage that’s useful. You can cover much more ground by using a service. If there are trade journals for your field, you may be able to submit stories there, as well.

Contact your local news outlets: newspapers, radio, television. They might be interested in a human interest story for their business section. If the story makes it onto their website, that’s great!

On the subject of Flash:

This used to be an issue. As of January 1, 2021, Flash is dead. Chrome hasn’t supported it for several years, and Adobe finally – finally – dropped it as a product offering.

So, how do I know what my site looks like to Google and other search engines?

Through the use of a search engine simulator, like this one.

Some random bullets:

Write articles in flowerpot related groups on Google groups, reddit, and other forums. Start a blog on WordPress or Blogspot about flowerpots, and link back to your website. Better yet, link back to a page on your website where you write in some detail about your topic and link back to your retail site.

Finally, stop using “click here” as an enticement to click. Instead of:

To learn more about flowerpots, click here

try

Kansas City gardeners love our flowerpots

Extra credit if you can now tell why that’s better 🙂

 

Finally

You can find more information (basically everything I just said, but shorter), here.

Search Engine Optimisation

I am an expert at optimizing websites for the maximum impact on search engines. An expert, seriously. I know as much as the dudes getting $500 a month who optimize websites for a living.

It’s simple. Ready? Write this down:

It’s all about text content.

Not images. Not Flash. Not Ajax. Certainly not keywords.

Content. Text. Text Content.

Google™ doesn’t use KEYWORDS, and never has. Yahoo!™ doesn’t.

If you want Google™ to rank you for “pottery” in “Lawrence, Kansas”, then make sure that those three words appear as often as is logically possible in your content. It doesn’t get simpler than that.

Have an image? Make sure the ALT tag has text. Have a link? Make sure it has a TITLE tag. Make sure the link doesn’t say “Click here”, but is meaningful, like “”Get more information about Kansas Pottery.”

Visit blogs, online forums, and newsgroups related to your subject. Post, reply, flame, and make sure your web address appears at least once in every one.

Visit related websites, and see if they’ll link back to you.

That’s IT.

If you Google™ “how do I optimize my website”, you’ll find all kinds of resources, and they’ll all say basically the same thing. It’s about getting the word out, then having the word on your site.

After that, things get a little vague.

If you call me on the phone and ask, “Why did Google™ drop 20 of my pages from it’s index?” my first inclination is to respond, “I don’t know, why don’t you call and ask them?” Since I can’t do that, what I say instead is, “I don’t know, let me check on it and get back to you.”

The fact of the matter is, when I call you back, I’ll have nothing to report, and I’m not going to make something up.

Because I don’t know. Nobody knows. Google™ doesn’t publish how their search works, and I could beg them all day and never find out. In the parlance of my industry, Google™ is a “black box”: you feed it your input, you get output, and you’re not allowed to see the inner workings.

When I say, “I’ll check”, I’m just allowing you time to get distracted and busy. In your mind, I’m likewise busy; in reality, I’m getting a cup of coffee and working on somebody else’s issue.

When I call you back, and I do, I will report to you what you already know. You had a hundred pages indexed yesterday, eighty today. You’ll deny messing with the site, I’ll deny messing with the site. Then I’ll tell you, “We’ll do an audit on our side, and let you know if you need to change anything on your side. It can take up to two weeks for Google™’s index to change, so we’ll revisit this then, okay?”

So, I’ll admit, that last bit was a lie: we’re never going to revisit this. By tomorrow morning, the next day at the latest, you will have forgotten about this whole issue. That’s the nature of your business, and mine.

So there’s the situation: you want the Ultimate Search Engine Optimization Answer.

Okay, here it is: there isn’t one. Are you listening? There. Is. No. Ultimate. Answer.

SEO has been on the internet radar since the first search engine appeared more than ten years ago. SEO has been big business for the last five or so. Don’t you think, in five years, if there were an Ultimate Answer, someone would have found it by now?

The best we can do is make educated guesses, do all the things we know to do, and hope that Google™ doesn’t screw us both. And if it does, we live with it.

Beware the guy who tells you, “For $100 a month I can guarantee you a high ranking on Google™.” That’s true, for a couple of weeks, until something else comes along that’s optimized a little bit better, or has content that’s a little bit newer.

Anybody who can write a website can “do” SEO: keep your content relevant, fresh, and easy for Google™ to read.

It’s not a task to be done. It’s a process to be followed.

VPN, OR Non-technical people making technical decisions

Let’s begin honestly: this is an introduction for AceVPN.com.

I recently had a friend from Germany ask me about VPN services. She misses American TV shows, and wants to watch them over the internet, but for her many of those sites are blocked.  Since the supposedly reputable ones cost money, could I make any recommendations?

My understanding of VPN was something like Terminal Services for Windows, and didn’t include getting around regional or corporate restrictions: it simply never occurred to me.

A couple of weeks ago, my partners at work started talking about putting in a hardware firewall to restrict access to things like Facebook – ridiculous since at our largest we’ll never have more than ten people, and there are only three of us now! Yes, Facebook can be a time waster, but it’s also a resource for me: I often post technical questions for my many techie friends who are also on Facebook.

I may very well need one of these services in the future, myself.

I found several VPN services through a Google search, but as I have no experience with any, it’s tough to recommend. The prices are all comparable, within $10US or so of each other. Once I’ve reached the point where one orange looks like another orange, I change my criteria.

Is the company honest about what is on offer – basically an end-run around network restrictions, or do they hem and haw around the issue? Does the service look like it caters to someone like me, an individual who wants safer, anonymous, more secure browsing?

Does the website look like it was written by a meth addict, with content all over the screen? If so, imagine what the customer service must be like.

Does the website use correct, idiomatic English, which suggests one of  two things: either the company is honestly an American company, or the company cared enough to hire a good translator. (I found one website that claimed to be American, but the website copy was full of past/present-tense errors, indicative that it was written by a non-native speaker, or someone who’s just bloody stupid.)

I also look for articles like “The Five Best VPN Services for 2009”, or some such, and then I read the comments: that’s where the real information is. At the bottom of this article, a couple of readers suggested AceVPN.com.

I visited the AceVPN.com website. The copy is written well, using good English. The design is no-nonsense and easy to navigate. Their services are comparable and prices are very reasonable.

This is a site I’m bookmarking for future use…which will most likely be  just a few minutes after the new firewall is installed at work.