Any time you can get people engaged in a conversation you are going to drive more traffic, create a community, and benefit from the network effect.

His thinking is that posting on a regular schedule “trains” Google’s crawlers to expect your posts and look for them more frequently. If you go a week or more between posts for example, the Google crawlers won’t bother checking back with you daily.

Of course this is all conjecture, but the theory is sound. Google’s got a lot of crawling to do, and they can’t crawl everything every day, so it make sense that they are going to have some sort of heuristic based on update frequency.

My friend’s blog shows up within 24 hours, and he’s been posting at the same time of day for the last couple of years, so this would seem to support his theory.

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL’s). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

The article also provides a warning about the popular practice of recipricol linking:

There is much discussion in these last few months about reciprocal linking. In the last Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine’s latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site’s rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. So while the irrelevant inbound link was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.

Other goodies include pointers to some backlink tracking and analysis tools, discussion of the important of link text, and more. See also the article on building backlinks.

Turns out that’s ok, cause there is an easy work around. Just use the Mac’s built in support for Windows file sharing (via samba) to access your drive. Under Mac OSX just enable “Windows File Sharing” from your Sharing preferences pane. Then, under Windows I mount my home directory by accessing \iMac\duane, enable reconnect at login, and ta-dah.

Yes it seems a little odd to share files between two operating systems running simultaneously on the same computer, but hey – it works great.

How much drive space does Boot Camp need?

A basic installation of Windows XP Pro takes about 5 gigs, so that’s my baseline. Add in Visual Studio, Office, Firefox, and so on gets it up around 10-15 gigs. For my needs, this is fine but I still want some slack space available for smaller apps, documents, and media files. Ripping DVDs or any other disk intensive activity means you might need substantially more. Then, there’s the filesystem type issue, NTFS or FAT32?

Should I use NFS or FAT32?

Windows has two different filesystem choices. FAT32 (the “old way”) and NTFS (the “new way”). In case you aren’t aware of the tradeoffs from choosing one or the other, here they are briefly:

• NTFS supports larger partition sizes. Windows XP provides native support for NTFS volumes of pretty much any size, while a FAT32 volume is supported only for sizes up to 32 GB.
• NTFS supports larger file sizes. Under Windows XP NTFS supports a maximum file size of up to the disk size, while FAT32 supports a maximum file size of only 4 GB.
• NTFS is faster and safer.. New file system features, journaling, boot time improvements, and other performance improvements in Windows XP have been implemented only for NTFS.
• Some features require NTFS. Some features like Active Directory, symbolic links, and NT Domain membership require NTFS.
• MacOS can not write to NFS volumes. It can however, read them just fine. FAT32 volumes however have read/write access.

Converting from FAT32 to NTFS

convert C: /fs:ntfs

More details are available from Microsoft. Note, there is no easy going back from this step! (See below)

Converting from NTFS to FAT32

What if you want to go the other way, converting your nice fast, modern NTFS filesystem to FAT32? A little harder, but still possible (as long as your partition is smaller than 32 GB). The strategy here is to create a backup image of the FAT32 filesystem from the Mac side, then recreate the partition as NTFS and restore the image to it.

Use Disk Utility to make an image (dmg) of the Windows drive from MacOS X and safe it on your Mac drive. Then, boot from the Windows XP install disk and reinstall/reformat, selecting FAT32 this time. After the format is complete and it starts to install Windows turn the computer off to abort the process. Now boot back into Mac OS X. What you have done is create a basically blank FAT32 disk. Now you can use Disk Utility to restore the NTFS image you created earlier, restoring the files to the now FAT32 filesystem.

Hey, I didn’t say it would be fun, just possible.

Accessing your Mac drive from within Windows

By default your Mac drive is invisible to Windows. Which is too bad when all your documents and music are on your Mac drive. Plus, in my case it is highly desirable to allow both operating systems to share all of my slack space for music, video, and so forth.

Luckily, all you need is the reasonably priced MacDrive 6 for Windows. This software package provides transparent, integrated support for Mac drives (HFS/HFS+).

You can download a free trial edition from their website. It lasts a measly 5 days, but I guess it doesn’t take long to prove it works. After installing and rebooting your Mac partition appears as a new drive with full read/write access. You don’t use special tools, just the Windows explorer – beauty!

What I ended up with

Being that much of the ASP.NET code I’m working on relies on NTFS, I decided to stick with that. In the modern hardware era, FAT32 just isn’t done and there’s no telling what might explode on me. I create an image size of 30 GB, which means I could use the painful NTFS to FAT32 conversion steps above if I change my mind. This is probably more space than I need, but I can always image and restore later if I have to.

I’m also installing a copy of MacDrive. That will not only let me access my Mac files, but will let me easily communicate between the two worlds. For example, I can rip a DVD under Windows and burn it on the Mac if I need. This turns out to work pretty well.

In any case, I finally found an ideal solution with Apple’s Bonjour technology (formerly Rendevous). Bonjour lets you create an instant network of computers and devices just by getting them connected to each other. The computers and devices take over from there, automatically broadcasting and discovering what services each is offering for the use of others. This is the same magic that makes iTunes auto-discover other iTunes clients on the network. With Bonjour services installed on your Windows machine, you can magically discover your shared Apple printers on the network. It’s a brain dead setup/install process:

1. From your Mac’s Sharing preferences pane, make sure that Printer Sharing is enabled.
2. On your Windows machine, download and install Bonjour for Windows
3. After installing, click on the “Printer Setup Wizard” shortcut installed by Bonjour on the Windows desktop
4. Select your printer from the list of network devices found by Bonjour
5. Select “Generic PostScript Printer” (the default) as the printer type

I’m not too clear on why you need to use generic postscript driver rather than the native driver, but you do. I tried using the native driver for my Canon i960 but it failed to print. I’ve seen several other folks reporting this as well. It’s even selected by the Wizard by default. In any case, it works well with full color support and so forth.

Take ten minutes or less and pre-read the entire book. Go ahead and try this if you’ve never done it before. Treat a book like a jigsaw puzzle. Dump it out, then organize all the pieces first before putting it together. Read the dust cover and any cover reviews. Then look through the author blurb. Move to the Table of Contents and see if you can figure out the whole book from this page. Page through the entire book, page by page and glance through all summaries, tables, pull-out quotes, diagrams(especially), and scan through all the section titles and you go.

That old hub works fine on the iMac,but it is of course USB 1.1. That’d be fine except I have an external drive connected which is pretty much worthless at USB 1.1 speeds. Swapping in the new hub is the problem. D-Link claims that it fully supports the Mac, but I guess their flexible on this point. To me, its a show stopper.

I do NOTWANT to leave my Mac on all the time. I WANT it to behave! Anyone have any brand/model of USB hub that they have had success with? The D-LINK DUB-H7 hub I’m using is powered, and seems to be pretty high quality. It’s got 6 of the 7 ports used (scanner, printer, UPS, keyboard/mouse, card reader, drive), but nothing else magical.