Techie Talk

Install Firefox 2 Beta on Ubuntu Linux

Brian — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 02:17:24 +0000

Instructions on how to install the new Firefox 2 Beta on Ubuntu Linux.

How to Get an OS X-like Desktop Launcher Bar in Windows and/or GNOME

Brian — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 23:37:51 +0000

A step-by-step guide to show you how to get an OS X-like Desktop Launcher Bar in Windows and/or GNOME.

Free Law School Outlines and Technology How To Articles

Brian — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 14:17:56 +0000

A personal home page of a law student who is giving away free law school outlines and technology How To Articles.

Learning from the Most Popular Web Sites on the Internet

Brian — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 21:36:06 +0000

What can we, as web developers, learn from some of the most popular websites on the Internet? Currently, the top 10 sites according to Alexa are:

Yahoo!
Google
Myspace
Microsoft Network (MSN)
Ebay
Amazon.com
Craigslist.com
CNN
Go
Live.com

What makes them popular? (my idea is that the majority of these are search engines — the doorway/gateway to the massive Information Superhighway) But why is Yahoo still more popular than Google? I am not sure about the answer to these questions, but I’m open to others’ comments and ideas.

Using “Social Bookmarking” Sites to Boost SEO

Brian — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 21:05:10 +0000

I have not experienced whether or not it is possible to increase search engine rankings by being listed in popular “Social Bookmarking” sites such as “Del.icio.us“.

For those who are unfamiliar with social bookmarking (SB), SB is simply a way to store your favorite websites (bookmarks) on the Internet, rather than on your local machine’s web browser. This makes it easier to access your favorite sites from anywhere. It also makes it easy to search through hundreds, if not thousands, of your links and find what you’re looking for quickly. SB sites allow people to share their bookmarks with others, creating a large network of quality sites that can be “ranked” according to popularity with real, live humans.

I am conducting an experiment on one of my domains, Best Law Firm Sites, a directory of the best-designed law firm websites that I could find on the Internet. On the page, I am including the top 3 social bookmarking sites: Del.icio.us, Furl, and Digg.

I have read numerous articles that claim that “one-way backlinks” (coming from Social Bookmarking sites) are a good way to improve a Google PageRank. And, since Google search results are getting more and more cluttered as people learn how to spam the automatic web crawler, people are moving towards relying on sites that have been “confirmed” by live humans. Sites that are popular and bookmarked in other people’s accounts are beginning to yield better matches than the automatic-engines.