This as a parody of a Micheal Grey post…
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The first computer I ever used was called the Vic-20.
This was before the internet existed in any real sense that would be recognizable today.
To telephone someone you used a rotary dial.
To drink a soda (like a Tab or a Shasta) you had to first peel off the pop tab.
To play music you had to put a needle on a spinning disc.
Things were different then.
I lived in a group home at the time, one day I met this girl at school and I started walking her home. I, clad in tube socks and cut-offs, would even carry her violin.
The girl I would walk home had a Vic-20 computer.
I liked her…
Vic-20.
I would go to her house everyday and we would talk for hours, if “talking for hours” means “I used her Vic-20 while she read Jack London novels”.
She had “Mole Attack” and “SeaWolf”.
Her father had what could only be described as an insane amount of reference books for computing. I read them all.
To set up a Vic-20 required a screwdriver.
You hooked it up to the UHF screws on the back of your TV. There was a switch and with that switch you could go from TV to Computer land.
Computer land was a nice place for me, the boys in my group home could be mean at times. Let’s just say they didn’t know what an infinite loop was.
The more time I could spend with her…
Vic-20, the better.
She would kiss me sometimes beneath her Benji poster, but I figured this was a small price to pay for computer time (ends up I was wrong about that – women are only attractive to me now if they wear frumpy sweaters and thick glasses).
When you flipped that switch from TV to Computer, you saw a display that would wow anyone…
Are you ready to enter a dream world of magic?
I was amazed by what I could make occur. For example, if I wanted to have the word “hello” show up on the computer screen, all I had to do was program this…
10 PRINT “{SHIFT+CLRSCRN}”
20 PRINT “HELLO”
30 END
Like magic, the word “hello” would appear on the screen, because I, Godlike, had decreed it to be.
Things were so simple, If I wanted to move the cursor all I had to do was use the cursor keys…
You could do anything!
I remember when her Dad told me he had bought something I would like. He had a smile on his face.
I was kinda nervous until he revealed what he had bought…
What am I, a king?
Who on earth could use so much memory?
Okay, back to modern life… I recently saw an ad for a Vic 20 from 1982 and I would like to highlight the selling features of the Vic 20. The ad listed 26 reasons to buy a Vic-20.
Including…
Reason No. 2…
25 K, baby. What you gonna say bout that?
Reason No.3…
This monster can go up to 27 and 1/2 k Ram.
Reason No.11…
This one is a crazy cool…
U to the L. This puppy has the ability to show both upper and lower case letters.
Want some Specs?
That aint all…
This thing roars like a lion
I just turned 40 years old.
I am very happy I met that girl.
She had a lovely Vic-20, and a name.
I don’t remember her name, but her Vic-20 rocked.
People are even still buying and selling these on Ebay!
Need a thirty year old computer to relive your childhood? Here are Vic-20 items on Ebay right now (hilarious, and how my walk down memory lane started in the first place)…
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This new tool checks images and alt text on a web page to see how well it can be “seen” by search engines.
One Google guidelines states…
Make sure that your title elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
My new free image SEO tool lets a user enter a url and check how well images are following the image ALT part of this guideline.
Image SEO Tool
Once you enter a webpage and click “go” this tool will…
- Show the images of that page.
- Display the ALT text associated with each image.
- Notes for each image about how well it is following Google guidelines.
Here is what the tool results looks like…
To check your web page images go to the Image SEO Tool.
How are scores assigned? / How does it know how well the guideline is being followed?
I have seen some tools that tell you if an image has ALT text or not, but I have never encountered a tool that examined the ALT text itself.
So I built this tool which does.
This tools not only sees if ALT text is present, it also examines the ALT text and counts the amount of words contained in that ALT text.
I thought about it, and the amount of words does tell us alot.
Scores are based on the amount of words contained in the ALT text. Here are some examples:
- If an image has no ALT text (o words) then the image is not following the guideline.
- If an image has 100 words in the ALT text it is likely spamming or keyword stuffing
- If an image has only one word it is likely not “descriptive”. The Google guideline states it should be descriptive.
I am creating free SEO tools which help a webmaster determine if they are following the Google webmaster guidelines. This and other new (and old) SEO tools having to do with Google will be on my webmaster tools page on feedthebot.com, so you might want to check that page every once in awhile.
Update: Some people reported bugs, they have been fixed. Specifically:
-some cases where images were being reported as having alt text when they did not was fixed (this was happening when people used alt=”" )
-dashes and characters are no longer counted as a word (in fact one letter words are not being counted either)
- I changed some of the conditions so that it is more acceptable to show more words (I went up to 15 words before giving a red “x” and saying “could be seen as spam”)
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Google does not have the staffing required to support customers. This has been an issue with them for years and won’t come as a surprise to anyone dealing with Google for awhile, but I must say that many people buying the Nexus One phone had no way of knowing this.
Google has a good name. People probably expect that they would have a good experience with them. You can almost hear them say “it’s Google, they will have all the details figured out”.
Well, no such luck for Nexus One purchasers. There is no phone support for the Nexus One.
This is America, and in America we like to talk to people on the phone when we are complaining. It is how we get our aggressions out.
Google may be grumpy about the disappointing sales of this phone (reportedly only around 20,000 the first week) but they should consider themselves lucky. If they can not handle 20,000 customers, how would they have dealt with 1,000,000?
There has been complaints of “spotty 3G”, which Google says is limited to a few users, but there are almost 1000 comments on the support thread complaining about it…
Google risks losing their good name with real customers, they should have things in place before they sell something to non search geeks.
Have a problem with your Nexus One? “No worries”, says Google, “just fill out this long form and then we will get back to you within 48 hours.”
This is not how phones work Google. If you going to sell phones you need to answer phones too.
Nexus One Support options are very limited but they do exist. Here are some options.
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How to reach normal business owners with real advice about local SEO?
Google representatives Ryan Hayward and Ari Bezman as well as industry leaders like Mike Blumenthal, Matt McGee, David Mihm, Mary Bowling, and Ed Reese are coming together to do just that.
We are pleased to announce to have Google as a sponsor for our first event! Getlisted Local University
When David Mihm and I created Getlisted.org our main concern was about everyday business owners who were sometimes getting ripped off or at least confused about what to do and how much to spend on their web presence.
We knew that that really didn’t need to spend much.
But how to get the message out?
Well funded, big players were selling them snake oil, and we were just lil’ ole us.
One of the things we envisioned was a city by city workshop.
We also wanted to see chambers of commerce, local papers, and non-profit business mentors like SCORE come together and get the word out.
Getlisted.org Local University is an event that will cater to cities that don’t always get the attention they deserve. It begins with Spokane, Washington on Feb 4th 2010.
We aren’t doing this to make a profit. In fact, 10% of all ticket sales for this event will be donated to a local business charity for that city.
To learn more about our first event in Spokane and how you can attend or be involved, please visit our event page.
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It is no secret that Adsense recommends larger ad units like the large rectangle. Using recommended Google Adsense sizes that are blended into your posts is likely to result in you receiving much more per click than you would with a smaller ad, on the same page, in the sidebar.
How to Float Adsense
To the right is an Adsense ad.
Notice it is not all smooshed up to the text.
The ad is a 300 x 250 large rectangle which is pretty big for my skinny little blog, but I figured I would show an example that even a large ad in a blogpost does not have to look hideous.
To make it further blend in (or at least be less ugly) I suggest you choose “image ads only” when creating your ad.
Here is the code to position those ads (it is just adding a “div”).
Add your Adsense code and then insert into your page or post.
<div style="margin: 5px; float: right;"> Put ad code here </div>
The above code will work on Wordpress blogs, websites, just about anywhere. It also works with just about any type of ad too, not just Adsense.
You can also use padding to control the space between the ad and your text. The above code uses a margin. If you want more space between your ad and your text try changing the “5″ to “10″.
To make the ad go to the left, just replace “right” with “left”.
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I was recently contacted by a fellow Google gadget developer and he mentioned his new venture called Snapabug.com and asked me to take a look.
I did, and I am pretty impressed.
It is a widget solution that streamlines a website/company support process.
Imagine someone is having a problem with your website and contacts your support team. Much of the required information necessary to resolve the problem is technical in nature.
What browser are you using? What version of Flash? What are you seeing?
Many normal web users simply won’t know this info and to resolve the issue is a whole bunch of back and forth communication.
Snapabug actually takes a screen shot of the users computer and reports the technical details of their computer automatically and integrates this info with your existing support system.
Visitors only need to enter their email address, a quick description of their problem and click “send”.
SnapABug collects all the information you need: email, description, operating system, browser, language, location, etc. Plus it takes a snapshot of the users screen.
Your support team and your customer can chat through this widget solution as well. A very impressive solution and great idea.
Explained in video below:
I can see many situations where this solution would be very useful. It looks very easy to implement as well.
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Many Google videos and much Google documentation refers webmasters to the page:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
This webpage used to contain a wealth of information that was useful to new and/or struggling webmasters. It explained and linked to several resources that helped the webmaster community.
Rather unbelievably, the page now is almost worthless to new webmasters, and I would argue downright confusing.
To show you what I am talking about here…
Google Webmaster Central History
Let’s look at the Google webmaster central page year by year shall we?
2004
See this page? It answers common webmaster questions prominently like “Why isn’t my page listed?” and “How do I get my site listed on Google?”
Nice page Google – Kudos. I wonder if you can make it better…
2005
Wow, you made it better! More concise, and answering more common questions. Where you can’t answer the question fully you link to resources that do. Boy oh wow you guys are swell to new webmasters! Thanks! Wonder if you could make it better…
2006
Holy helpful Batman!
This page is even better now and has a nice simple layout with oh so friendly icons, awwww. You really do like us webmasters. Shucks.
Could it get better?
2008
Wow oh Wow!!!!
Look at all that stuff you have that helps ‘lil ole me the webmaster! Such a great array of things, and it is all laid out in friendly terms, and I know what to do because you have it all broken down in chunks like “Improve traffic with Webmaster tools” and “find answers to webmaster questions” and “learn more about your site” and “submit your content to Google”.
So informative! So useful!
I can’t wait to see what you do next…
2009 (current)
What the f**k?
This page is useless. Crappy crap it is.
A wealth of vastly improved tools and resources are now provided by the Google webmaster team, and they have made such great progress in the last couple of years, but most of their improvements are now invisible to the new webmaster because of the limited nature of the new “Google webmaster central” page.
Google has mentioned and referenced the Google webmaster central page as a “one-stop shop for webmaster resources” and a place for new webmasters to go.
That advice is not sound anymore.
Why would a new webmaster need a rich snippet testing tool? (note: The rich snippet tool is ultra cool and a great resource, but is it really of any use whatsoever to webmasters in general?)
Google Base? Google base is promoted heavily as well. Again, a great product but not so great to the general webmaster having problems.
The most prominent chunk of real estate goes to signing in to “Webmaster Tools”. If I were a new webmaster and saw this, I would probably think…
Hmmm, “Webmaster Tools”, sounds like a page where there are a whole bunch of tools for webmasters. Sounds great, I guess I will create an account or log in”
The problem here is that when they do sign in they are redirected to the Webmaster Tools page – which is utterly and completely worthless to someone until they take a whole bunch of additional steps and time goes by.
The page does not even say what Webmaster Tools is.
This simply does not pass my bullshit detector. If I see a link that says “cat” I expect to go to a “cat” page.
For Google not to define what “Webmaster Tools” is, and to redirect users to a page that has no tools available to be used at that moment, and in addition require people to login or create a new account simply to not get what they are expecting is pretty much plain and simple wrong.
I think new webmasters deserve a page on Google where they can go to get general information about what to do next or how to solve and identify their problems.
Google webmaster central utterly fails to do this now.
My specific complaints…
This page does not answer any questions.
This page does not explain or even attempt to define any tools, resources, or processes for the new or struggling webmaster. (except for Google Base? WTF?)
This page does not offer any advice for a webmaster with questions.
This page does not follow the guidelines and recommendations of Google itself .
Food for thought Google… Your “guide to making a Google friendly site” states right at the beginning “Give visitors the information they’re looking for” – it also states “In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic.” (pssst – your topic is helping webmasters and you have literally NO TEXT on this subject whatsoever.)
Arrgh.
Hey, but just like anything else I see on the web, if something isn’t up to par, it just means an opportunity for anyone with the gumption to make a better resource.
I have the gumption… Here is my version of Google webmaster tools.
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The next 5 people to request a Google Wave invite will get one. Please email me or leave a comment.
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I will be on a couple of panels at Affiliate Convention in Los Angeles on December 3rd and 4th. Affiliate Convention is put on by those wonderful folk from Webmaster Radio and the speakers are many and interesting. Some of the people speaking there are: Danny Sullivan, Gillian Muessig, Greg Boser, Jordan Kasteler, Frank Watson, Jon Kelly, Cindi Krum, and more. Full list of speakers here. Should be a good time 
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