The Raging Tech

Dad’s Memorial Service

Thanks to the power of teh internets and modern technologies, I was able to put the video recording of my dad’s memorial service online. Mainly I did this for the relatives and friends who couldn’t make it for one reason or another. This video is 47 minutes long, so don’t jump into it thinking it’s a quick watch. Also, ignore me entirely. I was nervous and looking down most of the time. I hate the way I look on video. Anyway, pretty singing, nice words about Dad, praying, and brief biographical information from the pastor.

Enjoy! (It seems weird to say that about a memorial service video. I mean, you’d have to be pretty morbid to enjoy that sort of thing. Appreciate it, anyway.)

Dad’s Memorial Service from The Raging Tech on Vimeo.

Best Blog Ad Solution?

With the announcement I made earlier about having ditched Entrecard (incidentally, since clearing my Ad queue, I suddenly have over 30+ ad requests per day. Entrecard users, give up. I’m not putting my badge back up, and you should actually look at a site before you advertise with them.), it occurs to me I’d still like to earn some ad revenue.

Google Ads are neat, but they hardly do anything for me. Is anyone else making money from advertising on their blog that would like to share with me what system they’re using? Are you cold-calling or e-mailing sponsors to get ad sales? Do you have an advertising system you use on your blog that lets people sign up and automate your advertising process? I’d sure like to know. Leave me a comment!

See Where Your Web Host Stands

It’s important when choosing your Web Host, a place that will serve up your web site’s pages, that you choose one that is going to be able to grow with you. “If you build it, they will come,” is often the mantra of young start-ups trying to make it on the internet, but it’s true that if your idea does hit a home run you’ll want something that can stand up to the traffic hit.

You can read web hosting articles about which web host might be best for you over at Web Hosting Rating. Whether you’re a small start-up or a big ol’ tech news website, you might find out you’ve been missing out on a better deal.

A Little House Cleaning

I’m officially leaving Entrecard, the little badge that was on the right sidebar of my page before that would display various ads for people’s blogs. Why? Because the script’s and site’s slowdown was killing my page’s load time. It didn’t matter so much before, but for some reason on this theme it just wasn’t working.

Twitter is also on notice from me: their site is nice and the service is awesome, but the script’s load time to display on my blog was getting ridiculous.

I won’t blame the slow down solely on these two items, but they were what got hung up loading on my blog. I had both on my blog before with no problem. I think what might have been the major problem was the tabbed section on the upper right (where the RT logo is now). I’m going to replace those with ad space people can purchase. I’ve re-created the archives page with a plug-in and it’s now up at the upper-right corner, if you missed it.

I might try and put the Twitter code back, but Entrecard is gone for good. It’s been good for traffic when I first started, but then people stopped dropping but kept advertising with me. I apologize to those of you who faithfully dropped every day, and to the advertisers who I had to cancel your ads. You guys are awesome and part of what made Entrecard great.

Build SEO with .EDU Backlinks

If you looked at that headline and went “Huh?” - you’re probably brand new to the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There is an entire business industry setup around helping web site owners, blog authors, and online publications optimize every page - make that every word of every page of content - highly optimized to be indexed by search engines like Google or Yahoo!.

Search engines each have their own algorithms for indexing and ranking pages - there are books, seminars and get-rich-quick schemes all surrounding the cult of Google Page Rank. Businesses seem to live and die by their Google PR. The better optimized your site, the higher your page rank will be. A page rank is what determines how high in the results your listing is when customers are searching on certain keywords.

If you want people to find you, you want to be earlier in the search results, right? If your competitors are in front of you, your potential client might go with them first, and that means lost sales or ad revenue. Google and other search engines want their search results to be the most relevant, so they check things like your site’s meta-data and description and match it to keywords.

Back-links are when a site with more credibility or popularity than you links to your site. If it has a higher page rank than yours, it helps your page rank grow. Search engines rate links from sites with .EDU addresses as more relevant, because only educational institutions are allowed to have them. Since school teachers and administrators and professors are likely to be more researched (or so they think), an edu link is worth a lot to growing your site’s relevance within search results.

Also, just a link on a .EDU site isn’t going to help. Search engines look at the content around a link, so a link on the side of a page not surrounded by content is going to be less relevant than a link surrounded by content in an article, for example.