I just downloaded and installed the coolest WordPress plugin. It’s called “Wordbooker” and it does something that is very helpful. Very helpful indeed.
Wordbooker WordPress Plugin
Okay, so every time I write a post in this jLeeg blog, the post will automatically get “pushed” to our Facebook Fan page. Cool? Do you know how much time and effort this is going to save? I am thinking right now that it’s going to really pick up the action on the Facebook page because I would most likely forget to do the Facebook page every time I do the WordPress post.
I will let you know how it is working out in the coming weeks.
Okay, so with any new endeavor on the internet, one of the very first things that needs to be done is to set up a Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter account. It’s not very difficult, it just takes a few seconds.
Please stop by and become a fan. It would make us smile.
jLeeg Blog Facebook Fan Page
Also, we linked our Facebook page with our Twitter page. This way all of our Facebook updates will immediately update our Twitter page. It makes things easier.
On my way back from Jiu Jitsu practice today, I witnessed a squirrel fall from a tree. A very tall tree. It fell right in front of my car and I had to swerve out of the way. Luckily, the squirrel was still alive and there were no other cars around. The road is very woodsy and not traveled very frequently.
My heart broke. The squirrel was just laying in the road, seemingly dead, but still breathing. I have seen this happen before. The fall usually just stuns the squirrel and after a few moments, it hobbles away only to regain its bearings. This squirrel didn’t hobble. It just lay there with a small spot of blood near its mouth.
I stopped my car and put it in park. I approached the squirrel to see what the deal was. Since he was alive, I decided to pick up a small stick to move him of the road. I put the stick under him and tried to move him. He wasn’t having it. He clung to the ground for dear life. I decided that I needed a larger stick, so I found one and tried again. I pushed the stick under him and lifted. As I did this, he grabbed hold of the stick. I walked him to the side of the road and placed him on a nearby stone wall. He just sat there very much in shock.
I got in the car and continued on my way.
After arriving at the house and waiting a few minutes, I thought I should take our dog for a walk down to see if the squirrel was still sitting on the rock wall. I was hoping that he wasn’t. I put the leash on the dog and took the walk. We made it to the stone wall and I was very relieved to find no squirrel. I am assuming he regained full consciousness and made his way into the woods. I hope he’s okay.
Up here at the homestead, we dislike squirrels. Not literally, but they do get really annoying around our bird feeders. While they are annoying, we would never wish any harm upon them and I feel just terrible when I see them hit on the road. I do what I can when I can.
Okay, enough of that. Let’s lighten this post up a bit. Want to see a funny video of squirrels getting flung off a bird feeder? Thought so. Just make sure you forward to about three quarters of the way through to get to the action.
We just went for what was supposed to be a brisk (quick) Winter walk. We usually walk for an almost exact mile, turn around and then walk back to the house. It’s a hilly walk and that’s kind of what’s so nice about it. In the Winter, the hills keep you warm by forcing your body to burn calories and in the Summer…well, in the Summer you get hot. I suppose the burning of the calories applies then too.
Today, we reached the one mile mark. My better half was walking in front of me. Usually, we reach the “marker” mailbox, stop and turn around. Today, she decided to just keep on walking. I think she mumbled something like, “Let’s keep going. It’s nice to finally be out of the house. It’s probably going to snow tomorrow.” I knew she was right. We kept on walking.
I have a little problem with enjoying what I am doing, or lack of enjoying what I am doing. I always think I am missing something from where I just came from. It’s a mental thing and I think I am a bit mental at times.
So, we kept on walking. We have walked this walk before. What we do is enter a pretty nice neighborhood, walk to the end, do a loop around the cul-de-sac and head on back. We’ve done it many times.
It’s so funny. We saw two other couples out today. I guess the sun woke people up. There was a couple in front of us for the last leg of our journey out. In the neighborhood that we walk in, there is one house in particular that I really like. It’s kind of a slate blue, very large double wing colonial that has a pool in the back yard. You should see this thing. It’s awesome. Two chimneys, four fireplaces and all the room in the world.
So, back to the people walking ahead of us. As we got to the point of having my favorite house in view, we noticed that the couple was checking the mailbox and heading down the driveway. I said, “Holy cow, that’s their house.” She looked at me and said, “No.” She knew I wanted to talk to them.
Well, as it turns out, no one can really stop me when I want to talk to someone. I caught up to the other walkers and told them how much I admired their house. We ended up talking for about 20 minutes in the blowing cold. I really had fun. The guy told me all about how he designed it himself and about each room. I got a kick out of the whole thing. Then, he invited us to stop by any time we want. I thought that was cool. He turned around and said, “Now, I mean that. I’m not just saying it.” We were thankful to him.
The most interesting part is that this couple had no children. I would put their age at mid forties. They lived in this enormous home all by themselves. That’s why we related to them so well. We don’t have any children either and many of the things we talked about had a certain “childless” flair to them. It’s kind of an insiders thing. A little club if you will.
Listen, I have been around for a while. I have seen website directories come and go. I have seen directories that have disappeared overnight. Actually, that’s the norm. Most of them are spam directories anyway.
One of my own goals was to build a blog directory. I like blogs better than websites. They are “about” stuff and have a personal flair. The problem with directories though, is that spammers hit them hard virtually within a few days of them being launched. Sure, the idea is great in theory, but in actuality, they are rather hard to handle.
Over the years, I kind of stopped wanting to make a blog directory.
One such directory that I have always admired is BlogCatalog. As far as blog directories go, this one is probably the best I’ve seen. It looks good, it’s organized, there is no spam and the listings are clean. Also, it’s a really popular website.
BlogCatalog search bar from homepage screenshot. Courtesy of blogcatalog.com.
As with every new blog we launch, we submitted this one to BlogCatalog. Like usual, they took a look at it within a few hours and approved us for their directory. We did however have to place some code in the “head” portion of our website, just to verify that we are indeed real people writing on this think. Please believe me when I say we are real people.
So, let’s wrap this up. If you have a blog that’s worthy of a listing in one of the world’s premier blog directories, why not stop by BlogCatalog and submit it. Go on, you know you want to.
Have you ever read through the comments on Youtube? Well, if you haven’t, you’re not really missing anything. I’ll tell you what’s there. 90% of the comments you’ll find on Youtube for any number of videos will be written by what we like to call, “Keyboard Warriors.”
So, what’s a keyboard warrior? My definition would be that a keyboard warrior is someone who has a lack of skill or knowledge of the subject they are commenting on. They are generally aggressive in nature and have surely met up with some resistance in “real life.” In short, they are idiots.
Yes, folks, keyboard warriors are the people who comment on a martial arts video where a black belt demonstrates a move. The fool at home writes that the black belt just did the move wrong. I am guessing they get their info by watching other videos, but certainly not by being a black belt themselves.
Do you want a better definition? If so, you can find it over at the Urban Dictionary.
I think that’s a pretty good question. I think it’s a good question because I am the person who asked it. I did a Google search for it a few days ago and didn’t come up with much.
A few people here and there said it’s a good idea to have your doctype match the coding that you have on your website pages. That’s pretty much common knowledge. They claimed that the search engines like it. I’m not so sure about that.
You wanna see something? Here, check out this search engine spider simulator. Find a nice website and plug the URL into the simulator and hit submit. What do you see? That’s right, just text.
As far as I know, search engines strip away all the code on your web pages and just scan the text. Now, if you have some sloppy code that is causing errors, search engines are going to have a tough time sorting through all of that and might not be able to complete the scan. That is definitely bad for SEO.
I am no expert. I can’t claim one point of view or another. All I can do is say that I have not found anything that tells me for sure whether or not your doctype affects SEO. As a good rule of thumb, you should keep your doctype up to date and keep your code clean. If you are running a CMS, keep the upgrades going and stay current on template changes. That way, you will be running lean and mean and that’s always a good thing.
Here’s one word of warning. Please be careful of following advice offered by teenagers posing as people who know what they are talking about. SEO and web design skills are developed by experience and research. As of yet, I have not found any one of these individuals who have ample experience or who have done any amount of research. By research, I don’t mean reading a Wikipedia page. I mean months of setting up systems and testing results. The internet is full of people who like to write down their “hunches.”
If you read my last post, I showed you how to change over a MySQL database from Latin1 to UTF-8. In this post, I’ll show you how to complete the process of having your web pages actually use that UTF-8 encoding.
I’m going to be brief here – Okay, if you right click on virtually any web page and choose “View Source,” you will see a meta tag that looks something like this:
That meta tag is the declaration for which character encoding your web page will use. It’s pretty simple. All you need to do is to choose the character encoding that best fits the language your web page is written in. Many people these days are choosing UTF-8 because it’s what we call Unicode (any language).
If you are following my last post and are trying to change your site over to UTF-8 from Latin1, you most likely saw something like “latin1_swedish_ci” in your database. That was your table collation. Your current meta tag most likely looks something like:
So, what do you do? That’s easy. Just swap out the “iso-8859-1″ in your web page meta tag with a “UTF-8.”
Now, if you have some weird characters on your web pages, they may change to something that looks like a diamond with a question mark in the middle of it. From my experience, that’s from people copying and pasting from some writing program like Microsoft Word. They are also caused by HTML special characters. You will need to edit those strange characters out of your text by using a website editing program of something even as simple as Notepad.
Questions/comments, leave them in the comment section and I will get back to you.
This is a pretty popular topic online these days. Ever since Google wrote in its blog, “Unicode nearing 50% of the web,” people have been making changes. Hey, if Google likes it, we like it. I mean, we are lowly web guys and gals out there trying to get by. Any time Google says that UTF-8 is the best option, we listen.
I am not going to delve into a dissertation on what character sets or character encoding are. For that, you can look here and here. Chances are, you will still have no idea what is what after looking at those two pages. But, if you do learn a little something and want to go ahead and change over your MySQL database from your current character set to a new one, these handy (and very hard to find) instructions might just help you out.
Okay, here goes. In this example, I will show you how to change your current database’s character set from Latin1 to UTF-8. Here is a disclaimer – perform the following at your own risk. The following worked for me. It may not for you. It may completely destroy everything you have ever worked on. I am not responsible for what happens. Nuff’ said.
On the command line…
1. Dump the existing Database # mysqldump current_database > current_database.sql
2. Use Sed to replace all occurrences of CHARSET=latin1 to CHARSET=utf8 # sed -i 's/CHARSET=latin1/CHARSET=utf8/g' current_database.sql
3. Verify there where no Create / Drop Database lines or USE statements
4. Create new Database # mysql create database new_database.sql
5. Use this altered MySQL Dump and restore it to the new_database database. # mysql new_database < current_database.sql
If you have already been messing around with some stuff, such as dumping your current database, creating a new database with the UTF-8 character set and then importing the dumped database and haven't had any luck, it's because you didn't change the table collation. What's table collation? Well, you can click here to find that out. It's almost as boring as character sets.
What I did above changed every table that had a collation of "latin1_swedish_ci" to a collation of "utf8_general_ci." Ask me how and I'll tell you that I have no idea.
So there you have it folks. There are a bunch of other methods online for getting this done, but none of them worked for me and they were crazy complicated. This was the most simple and straightforward.
If you do give this a shot or have a better way of getting this done, please share by writing a comment. Over and out.
I had been out for about a year. The reason I left was because I didn’t think I was making any money and the accounting fees at the end of the year were kind of high. I get ticked off easily and tend to over react. When I saw the accounting bill, I pulled my money from the market. It was a lousy year anyway.
So now I’m back. I figured that I need to do something with my monthly disposable income and investing in the stock market seems to be the way to go. I really wasn’t getting anywhere with these depressing savings account interest rates and CD rates aren’t much better.
Now listen, I’m not a dumb guy. I really pride myself on my intelligence (or perceived intelligence). It’s just that when I get into something, I get excited. I do go overboard at times. I know I’m not alone in this because I can imagine every other male in America out there sitting at their computer doing the same thing I do. How many times have you run down to your wife with the great news that you may have just stumbled onto something magnificent? It’s too easy to spout this stuff out to friendly audiences. The fact is that they aren’t doing us any favors when they turn and say, “Oh really? That’s great.”
Someone needs to stop us. Someone needs to tell us not to buy high and sell low. It’s way too easy to fall into that trap. We aren’t the day traders we think we are. Paying ten bucks a trade at TD Ameritrade isn’t going to get us where we need to be. As much as we want to believe, we aren’t them.
So, what’s a guy like you and me to do? First, we need to relax. We need to get our money as far away from those fee hungry mutual funds as fast as we can. I have been selling as soon as they meet or exceed the purchase price. At a 1.5% management fee, it’s not doing me any good to let the money sit. We also need to get our money out of individual stocks. I was never actually interested in them because of the risk. One of my favorite lines is, “What if the CEO of that company gets hit by a bus tomorrow?” I really don’t want to check their stock price after that. I don’t have the stomach for it.
Knowing these two things, I went on a hunt for something that would sort of put my investments on auto-pilot. Something that would tell me what to do and that wouldn’t siphon my hard earned dollars right out of my account. Something that would force me to take my finger off the trigger and get me the heck out of online “trading.”
Enter Mitch Tuchman and MarketRiders. First off, I would like to say thank you to Mitch. I have been using MarketRiders for just over a month now and it works. It really works. The beauty of the whole thing is its simplicity. It relaxes guys like me who, over a month ago, owned stake in way too many mutual funds and payed way too much in fees.
I had this little love affair with high yield bond mutual funds. I would scour the internet for mutual funds that pay high dividends. I’m not sure why. I think I liked the idea of a income that I didn’t really have to work for. The only problem is that I never sold any shares and never withdrew any money from my account. I was paying taxes on all those dividends and then just reinvesting them into the mutual fund again. Not smart. I mean, if I didn’t have an income, that would work, but not that this point in my life.
So, what does MarketRiders do beside offering over active traders such as myself a sedative? Okay, I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here and try to write up some catchy description. I’ll let you read their “Why MarketRiders” page yourself. It’s very comforting.
Let me tell you what I like about these guys:
- They aren’t pushy. They put the info out there and are like, “Hey, here it is. Here’s out pitch and you can take it or leave it.” You can read what they have to say and then go do your homework somewhere else. Chances are, you’ll be back.
- They are fairly inexpensive. For a tad over $9 a month, you can save yourself a heck of a lot in commissions. Brokers love to charge all sorts of ching ching for the same advice. Sometimes it’s not good advice at all. I can imagine it sort of feels like running on a hamster wheel.
- I like ETFs. Funds that are managed by a computer make more sense to me than funds managed by a person. I have never liked the human element. It’s emotional and greedy. It’s imperfect and has an ego. I don’t like it.
- You still feel like you are in charge of your money. You basically do what the system tells you to do, but you are always in charge. Since you are using an online discount broker, you have power and never have to pick up the phone with a feeling that you are bothering someone.
I am sure there are a zillion other reasons why I like this system, but we can get to that through comments on this post. I’ll respond, I swear. The one thing I want to mention is the satisfying feeling of watching the ebb and the flow of the market. I find great interest in the dynamic between the value of bonds, stocks, commodities, international, domestic and so forth. When one goes up, the other goes down (most of the time). It sure beats following the erratic nature of individual stocks and just keeping your fingers crossed.
Feeling? Questions? I am ready and willing to help out.
