Howdy, this is my personal online journal for whatever I feel like writing about.
The Importance of Backlinks
Having a good backlinks (a.k.a inbound links) is a very important part of getting your website noticed by not only the search engines, but the public at large. There’s an excellent article over at webconfs.com that covers this quite well:
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.
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Access your Mac drive under virtual Windows
If you have been using the Parallels Desktop virtualization software to run Windows XP on your Intel Mac you may have noticed that their hacky “PSF Network” solution to accessing your Mac drive under Windows blows. Don’t get me wrong – I’m very impresses with the rest of the package, and you can’t beat the price. But it just flat at doesn’t work.
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.
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Selecting an Apple Boot Camp disk format
I recently installed Boot Camp on my new Intel iMac, and it works fabulously. The big dilemma that I (and others it seem) have is how to best allocate the drive space between the Mac and Windows partitions. So many variables to deal with. I want to have enough disk space in Windows to get my work done, but I’m also stingy and don’t want to give away too much of my Mac drive’s space since it is my primary operating system. In this post I’ll try to explain what I learned and what I came up with.
Continue reading “Selecting an Apple Boot Camp disk format”
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Sharing a Printer between Mac and Windows with Bonjour
While in theory, if I have enabled printer sharing on my Mac, the printer should be available to Windows machines on my local network. In practice however, I’ve never been able to get this to work. I can get Windows to think its submitting jobs, but they never make it into the queue. I’m not sure if the problem is on the Mac side or the Windows side, but I’m putting my money on Windows being at the heart of the problem.
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:
- From your Mac’s Sharing preferences pane, make sure that Printer Sharing is enabled.
- On your Windows machine, download and install Bonjour for Windows
- After installing, click on the “Printer Setup Wizard” shortcut installed by Bonjour on the Windows desktop
- Select your printer from the list of network devices found by Bonjour
- 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.
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Speed Reading Techniques
Ran across an interesting post on speed reading techniques the other day that was particularly interesting. More than just techniques, it presents several strategies and even philosophy shifts that can make reading not only faster, but better. For example, consider this advise on “pre-reading” the book before beginning:
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.
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MacOS X Sleep Problems with USB Hubs
Why can’t I find a USB hub that will let my computer sleep properly? I recently bought a USB 2.0 hub when I upgraded to the Intel iMac. The hub works great, but it keeps the computer from sleeping while idle. I had the same problem on my G4. It took me about a half dozen hubs (USB 1.1) to find one that worked properly.
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.
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A Walk in the Woods
Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods” is a humorous essay about the author’s hike down (or up rather) the Appalachian trail. Bill Bryson is not a naturalist, an outdoorsman, or even remotely athletic. He’s an author who after living abroad for many years decides to rediscover American by hiking the “AT”.
Bryson shares not only his experiences but some trail history and lore as well. You meet interesting characters like Bryson’s friend Katz, who struggles to keep up, and a variety of trail mates that range from obnoxoius to memorable.
More importantly Bryson share’s his feelings about the land, America, and the deep chord traveling the trail strikes with him. While not a long book, I certainly enjoyed it.
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Universal Car Mount for Portable DVD Players
Found! An inexpensive way to play DVDs on the road. This Universal Car Mount for portable DVD players really works. You can use this universal mount with your portable DVD player to securely mount the player in your car, so you can enjoy your favorite movies on your next long road trip.
The ridged bars on either end of the platform extend (thanks to internal shock cord) and hook around the headrest posts. This leaves the DVD platform suspended between the driver and passenger seats, perfectly positioned for back seat viewing. We use these on road trips to keep our son happy.
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Using ACLs to Share iPhoto and iTunes Libraries
In this article over at Trent Davie’s ad Hominem blog he discusses an elegant solution to the whole notion of sharing an iPhoto library amongst several users on the same Mac.
My wife and I have this problem. We certainly don’t have our own sets of photos, but we do manage our own accounts. The old way was to wrap iPhoto in a bourne shell script that set the umask before each execution, maintaining group permissions. This works fine, but has the significant downside of having to be rebuilt every time a new iPhoto update comes down.
I’ll be trying out this solution to see if it works better for us. It also mentions in the comment trail that a similar approach could solve the problem for iTunes. What I really want though is for each account to share the same music library (the songs themselves), but maintain different ratings and playlists for each account. I’ve seen nothing that will do that for me yet however.
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The Pirate Hunter
“The Pirate Hunter” by Richard Zacks details the life and times of the infamous Captain Kidd. Hanged and vilified as a pirate for three hundred years, there’s much more to the good Captain than meets the eye.
As Zacks explains in his wonderful narrative, Captain Kidd was actually a legal privateer with a strong since of duty and honor. After a series of unsuccessful missions and a mutiny by his crew he became unfairly branded as a pirate.
Returning home to New York in an attempt to clear his name, Kidd was arrested and shipped off to England. To the end Kidd had faith that the English system of justice would save him. It was not to be.
More than just a history of this individual, this is a great adventure set in the golden age of pirates. The author uses a wide array of historical material and tells his story in an exciting and always entertaining manner. I recommend it highly.
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