Kindle Fire HD Giveaway!

Welcome to our Kindle Fire HD giveaway! Sponsored by  Kid Lit Frenzy Read Now Sleep Later Nite Lite Book Reviews The Windy Pages The Book Pixie There's a Book The Late Bloomer's Book Blog Teach Mentor Texts The Reading Date Nancy Tandon Read Write Mom Show our blogger friends some love and at the same time earn entries into the giveaway! The Kindle Fire HD winner (US only) will also get their choice of 1 July or August Kindle eBook from Kid Lit Frenzy 1 YA Kindle eBook from Read Now Sleep Later 1 MG Kindle eBook from There's a Book If you are not from the United States, use the second Rafflecopter to enter to win up to $20 worth of books from BookDepository.com  and an ARC or signed copy of a book from Kid Lit Frenzy (A list of possible prizes will be posted after July 14, so check back!)

If you are a blogger, you can earn an extra entry by re-posting the giveaway. Copy the HTML from this page and paste it into a new post. We cannot count your entry unless you leave us the link, so remember to paste the link into the Rafflecopter widget. If you cannot embed the Rafflecopter widget, here is the Share Link for the Kindle Fire HD (US only) and the Share Link for the International $20 bookdepository.com widgets.

Rules:

1. You must be 13 years of age or older to enter, or have a parent/guardian enter for you. All entries are subject to verification.

2. We will notify the winner via email within 48 hours after the contest's end (11:59 pm on July 29).

3. The Kindle Fire HD winner must have a mailing address in the United States. The International ($20 bookdepository.com books) winner can be anywhere except the United States.

4. The winners will have 48 hours to reply with their mailing address or another winner will be chosen.

5. Contest sponsors are not responsible for items lost in the mail.

6. We love comments, but please do not leave personal information such as email or mailing addresses in the comments! We are using Rafflecopter because it will keep your information private.

Questions? Please email the organizer, Alethea, at frootjoos at gmail dot com.

Good luck!

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a Rafflecopter giveaway

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a Rafflecopter giveaway

Inspired by Kathy at I am a Reader

Major flaw revealed in Internet Explorer; users urged to switch : Christopher Null : Yahoo! Tech

Major flaw revealed in Internet Explorer; users urged to switch : Christopher Null : Yahoo! Tech

"The major press outlets are abuzz this morning with news of a major new security flaw that affects all versions of Internet Explorer from IE5 to the latest beta of IE8. ..."

Yet another reason to switch away from Internet Explorer, as if we needed another...

Share & Edit Code in Real Time

One of my developers, Mike, stumbled upon this site. It looks like a really great tool for sharing code and making modifications in real time. Plus, it's free! No more, "send me your file and I'll take a look" and "OK here's my modifications, try it out". Everyone on the app at the same time can view, edit, and save the contents. Cool, huh?

clipped from etherpad.com

Search Engine Spider Simulators

Check out these sites. They'll show you what your site looks like to a Search Engine spider, like Googlebot or Yahoo! Slurp. A spider is an automated program that "crawls" the web looking for sites to include in search engines (or other databases). They typically only look for text and links in a site, although different spiders can catalog different components of a site and have different algorithms for how they index the information they find. But this is a good way to get a general idea of what information a spider will see when it comes to your site.

Search Engine Spider Simulator - webconfs.com
Enter URL to Spider

Or this one:

Search Engine Spider Simulator - To The Web
Enter URL to Spider

Search Engine Optimization

I know I've mentioned this elsewhere, but it tends to pop up again and again with Web 2 Market's clients.  Search Engine Optimization...

The tips below were written specifically for AbleCommerce powered sites, but the tips are relevant for any kind of web site that wants to increase it's rankings.

The number one item that will benefit search engine rankings is content. If a site has good content the site will climb in rankings over time. Other items, like META tag keywords, outgoing links, incoming links, page layout, etc. will help the site climb the rankings quicker. Often times people focus too much on what a web site looks like to a human and not to a computer. Computers don't care about fancy graphics and they aren't intelligent enough to realize that “69-72 GM ½-3/4T kit with shocks” are actually Superlift brand Suspension Kits for a 1969-1972 GM Pickup Truck. That's not to say the customer should be ignored in favor of what the computers will see (some sites are very SE friendly, but not user friendly), but there does need to be a balance between the two.

AbleCommerce is written to be very Search Engine friendly, and with the Web 2 Market META Tag Manager plugin and the features that we've built into our W2M Enhanced version of AbleCommerce all the tools are built into our eCommerce sites to have great rankings. But it is up to the merchant to make sure that all of these tools are utilized, specifically by adding good, relevant content to product descriptions. This takes some time and effort, but really helps drive traffic and sales in the long run. We've seen sites jump from 10-15 pages deep to the first page in Google search results just by implementing AbleCommerce and adding good content to their sites.

To increase rankings it is important to utilize all the tools built into AbleCommerce.  I recommend working on product descriptions (both brief and standard descriptions) and getting some relevant content in there. A paragraph or two of plain English descriptions about the products, rather than just a word or two, or a specifications list, will do a world of good for a site's rankings. And don't ignore the Category pages either. Instead of just listing the sub-categories and products, utilize the Category Descriptions to add content and keywords to the site.  And show the Brief Description for products wherever possible.

For more information about Search Engine Optimization, check out my quick tutorial at SEO Tutorial. There are also tools that can help you out with your SEO endeavors.  I like Web CEO (the free version is pretty comprehensive), but there are others, too.

Good luck!

ColdFire ColdFusion Debugger

Check out this cool plugin for the Firebug extension for Firefox. Coldfire displays ColdFusion specific debugging information in tabs right in Firebug. It's pretty cool... Especially if you develop ColdFusion pages. If you do other web development make sure you have Firebug installed, it'll provide a whole mess of debugging infroamtion about your pages.

ColdFire ColdFusion Debugger

Firebug

IE 8 Warning...

Internet Explorer 8 Could Break Web Pages, Microsoft Warns -- Internet Explorer

From what I gather IE8 will be conforming to web standards. Finally! The downside to that means that any sites written specifically for earlier versions of IE may not display correctly in the new version. This is mixed news for developers. On one hand it's great that IE will now play nicely with other browser that do follow the standards. On the other hand it'll be frustrating for developers who spent hours and hours working out code that lets pages display correctly on all browsers because now all their hard work getting sites to display correctly on older IE versions may be for naught. It's also going to throw a monkey wrench in things because some users are still going to be using older versions of IE while others are switching to the new version.

I smell a mess...

Luckily Micro$oft has a simple META tag that can be added into pages to force them to display according to IE7 rules. This will be a hassle still, but at least there's a solution without re-coding major portions of old pages. There's also an option for setting a whole server to display like IE7 for developers who have access to their web server configuration.

I say everyone should just switch to Firefox.