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After many years of wanting to become an editor for The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) my application has been accepted! I’m so excited! My favorite part is that I am editing a category that I have a lot of expertise in; the Internet Marketing Consulting category! I’m pretty excited that I was selected for this category and it’s quite an honor. Now to try to explain this honor to my non-nerd friends and family haha.
Today is my little girl’s 4th birthday. Happy birthday sweetheart!
Today I was trying to figure out a way to embed RSS into HTML as static content. It was a total pain in the butt. I found a way to do it using a javascript but that didn’t solve my need since only a visitor would see the java-generated rss feeds. Search engines can’t parse something like that and the main reason I wanted to include an RSS feed in the HTML is to have relevant constantly changing content. I was able to find a bunch of RSS solutions for PHP but it was really hard to find something to take RSS and plug it into HTML using ASP. The method I found is great. A page on the server goes out and gets the RSS feed, reformats it into just the parts I want to display and then that page is called form another ASP page as a server side include. Works great. I got a whole page worth of fresh, nicely formatted content for just a little work. Hopefully it will be spidered correctly and indexed. Here’s the download: RSS to Static HTML using ASP. It’s a ZIP file and hopefully you can download it if you need it. Also, if you need to, you can use several copies of rss2html.asp by changing their names. I used two instances to populate a page with two different feeds. I used rss2html.asp and rss2html2.asp to fetch the RSS feeds and then called them both from the same page in the HTML.
Today is a sad day. Today is the day I dropped my iPhone on the ground. I’ve dropped it harder before, but it didn’t survive today’s fall. The screen glass is cracked and spidered. It’s pretty bad. Amazingly enough, the phone still works flawlessly. It detects every slight touch that I make over any area of the screen. Now here’s the bad part. The phone has never been eligible for the phone insurance from AT&T. I forgot all about that until today when I called to try to get the insurance on it. I was going to get the insurance today and “break” it next week. Can’t. Now I’m pretty well screwed. There are some glass and LCD replacement kits available online for about $200 but it looks like a complete and total pain in the butt to replace. Oh, and the replacement screen is non-returnable so if I can’t get it to go in, I’m out the $200 for the screen plus the $500 or so for a new phone. Man… this sucks. A word to the wise: HANG ON TO THAT SLIPPERY iPHONE!
Today was the day I made my 1,000th post on WebmasterWorld. I’ve been SEOMike for almost 5 years now. Others have copied my name, but none compare to my experience. Ok, enough ego talk 
I’ve learned a lot over the past 1,000 posts. The first five years (97-03) of my career as an SEO are kind of blurred. It was a long time ago and I have trouble remembering specific clients (especially by real name, not site name) but I remember all the things that made SEO work back then. Almost five years ago I came to WebmasterWorld and started learning how to apply a set of Best Practices to my work. It took me from a cowboy SEO to one that is methodical yet spontaneous. It’s a strange duality… a tech geek with a list of rules, while at the same time a free-roaming wanderer looking for loop-holes and things to exploit. I’d love to give a link to my 1,000th post but I put it in the supporter’s forum where it belongs. My posts are usually not the fluff that some people put out there just to increase their post counts on the web. I try to give well researched and thought out responses to people’s questions rather than “Yeah, me too.” or junk like that. That’s not worth a tick on someone’s belt! That’s what I call “net noise.”
A thread at webasterworld today was talking about manipulating the search results based on capitalization of letters in the search. ie. using all lowercase, title case, or all upper case. I did some testing on my own and noticed that the results for searches on google, Google, and GOOGLE were all a little different. The search for google had a nice neat list of Google’s products. A search for Google had one result clustered on to #1 and a search for GOOGLE had a wiki article placed at #6 with the clustered result showing too. I posted about this and then emailed a couple of friends about the issue. My friend C.P. replied about 30 minutes later saying that he isn’t seeing the different results. I searched it again and sure enough, the results are now standardized. I guess the G-men are watching! I wish I would have had the presence of mind to take a screenshot at the time to show the different results. Very interesting how Google says all the time that results aren’t manually manipulated. This was a great example and I wish I had a screenshot to show you the difference. Oh well, I’ll know better next time. It makes me smile a little knowing that I probably caused someone at Google to do a little scrambling to fix this issue.
SEOMike.com v.2 is finally in the design phase. My designer friend is working on some sweet images and a site layout for me. I hate the current look of this site and can’t wait until I get a professional looking site. Some features you can expect: a SEO news section with some of the things I think are important, an RSS feed for updates from me, a section discussing best practices for what I call “website master planning”, a more indepth “tools” section and more
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