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Technology
SEO Snap! New Search Algorithm Released by Google...
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Submitted by Alexis Wilke on Tue, 05/08/2012 - 17:45
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Guys! Look at that ugly penguin hiding...
Google is constantly changing (improving...) and this time many got a hit because of their new Penguin update. In my case, the latest changes have been rather positive, but many people got hit the wrong way around and their ranking went down, possibly very much so (some talk about receiving a negative ranking and suing Google over it!)
The latest change can affect anyone, although if you've done nothing wrong, you should be just fine. This being said, the way this new release works can lead to your website losing its rank because someone else played a trick on you. Whether Google can detect and/or accept that you weren't responsible is a different question. At this point, it is still a bit early to say that it is all bad.
So? What did they do this time?
Twitter Profile Picture or Avatar not loading...
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Submitted by Alexis Wilke on Wed, 04/18/2012 - 13:00
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Yesterday I created a new Twitter account and I could not get my Profile Picture to load (they also call it the Twitter Avatar).
I tried I do not know how many times, changing the format of the image (JPG instead of PNG) and it still wouldn't work.
Today, I found this message explaining that somehow it's a major technical problem on their end.
I Can't Upload My Profile Picture or Avatar
Bug alert:
- The avatar upload feature has been temporarily disabled. Users will not be able to upload new profile pictures at this time.
Engineers are aware of the above issue and working ...
Snap! Marketing: Order of Importance of your Web Pages
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Submitted by Alexis Wilke on Fri, 10/28/2011 - 20:35
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Today I watched this video about Übercart which is the e-Commerce system we offer with Snap! Websites.
The last slide presented in this video1 shows a list of pages by importance. This entry really caught my eye because the order of the pages is different from what I've seen before.
If you also have a cart and offer goods to your customers, this is very important to you because if you are like me you want to increase your sales and not just spend your time on beautifying pages that are not significant to your actual customers.
For example, my company's main website has an okay front page. We actually don't change it (it could definitively be better!) because not even 10% of our traffic ever visits our front page (i.e. out of 3,000 hits or so a month, we'd get a whooping 260 hits on the home page, often not the same people who landed on another page.)
- 1. The slide of interest appears a little after 9 minutes. Note that the video is pretty awful otherwise...
Snap! News: Google Search using SSL!
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Submitted by Alexis Wilke on Thu, 10/20/2011 - 12:42
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On October 18, Google announced that all the searches for logged in users (say you have a G+ account...) will make use of their secure pages (i.e. using encrypted data.) Our new upcoming Snap! Websites version will also let you log in your account using SSL.
This is important for users of Google+ since a bar appears at the top and the functionality of that bar includes a cookie. This is a security issue since your account could get hacked since your cookie is traveling on the Internet in clear while doing searches (unless you log out of G+ each time you use it?)
Who is that author? Increase your credibility with Snap!
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Submitted by Alexis Wilke on Thu, 08/18/2011 - 14:10
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As I keep up to date with Google Search Engine enhancements, I listen to a video (here on the left) yesterday explaining how you could increase your credibility (and thus increase the number of hits you get on your websites) by clearly specifying who the author of a post is. I immediately made the necessary changes to Snap! so it supports this capability.
For anyone who offers a blog or similar feature on their website, it is very likely that you will include the name of the author and a link to his or her account. The account should include a small biography describing the author
Is your website flickering?
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Submitted by Alexis Wilke on Sun, 07/10/2011 - 14:27
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Today I was visiting the American Cancer Society when I stumble upon a strange sentence... Now I'll have to think about means to inform Snap! users whenever they are creating a page that could be affected.
The sentence goes like this:
Pages shall be designed to avoid causing the screen to flicker with a frequency greater than 2 Hz and lower than 55 Hz.
The figure to the right shows the accessibility of an handicapped person in a wheelchair.
Click on the picture to see the full figure from Section 508 paragraph 1194.41.
A URL for your Google+ account
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Submitted by Alexis Wilke on Sat, 07/09/2011 - 01:51
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Today I started testing Google+ and I find it great for it is really fast (some of the features are a lot faster than the equivalent in Facebook.) This being said, and even though I got about 90 connections in a day, this doesn't mean it will overcome Facebook and LinkedIn.
Now, if you look at the URLs as you browse your account, it looks terribly ugly, right? To get a better name you want to go to the Google+ shortener: http://gplus.to/
We work hard for Snap! to be secure
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Submitted by Alexis Wilke on Wed, 05/11/2011 - 15:26
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I am glad to inform you that once again I had a reported security fix patched by the Drupal Security Team.
You can read the security problem in details on the Drupal.org website:
SA-CONTRIB-2011-020 - Taxonomy Access Control Lite (tac_lite) - Cross Site Scripting
This is how we work here. Security is our prime goal and we work hard to make our system secure at all time.
Although this XSS problem was mitigated in several ways, it was still a problem.
Make you Snap! RSS feed available on iPhone
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Submitted by Alexis Wilke on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 11:07
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Today I found a neat little Internet application which I think you can benefit from, especially if you have a blog or write news on a regular basis and your website supports an RSS feed.
The application retrieves your RSS feed titles and presents them as if you were in one of your iPhone menus. When the user clicks on one of the menu titles, it sends the user to a page with the RSS feed title and teaser. You can also provide an icon (57x57) to give your users the best visual way to find your feed on their front screen.
Crazy Long Domain Names without meaning!?
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Submitted by Alexis Wilke on Fri, 04/01/2011 - 16:47
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Gothic Letters HJKLPQR by Giovannino
Today I received a spam comment on Snap! Websites. Nothing too surprising up to here. Quickly browsing (the text was just gibberish so fast reading takes on its full meaning!) I noticed that the link in the email was using the domain name abcde. The first 5 letters of the alphabet.
This gave me the idea to check whether someone had registered the Latin alphabet domain name. After all, it could be viewed as a valuable domain name, right?
Sure enough! abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz dot com is registered! The registration was made privately (the whois does
