Top Pick: Flickr Colr Pickr

TOP PICK:
SITE RESOURCE SERIES

Author: Laura Klemme

Flickr Colr Pickr
http://krazydad.com/colrpickr/

Post athomic bomb
Originally uploaded by boskizzi

A creative utility to find photos on Flickr.

This utility is not published by Flickr.

Programmer: Jim Bumgardner
Brief Bio: Jim is a Flickr guru. He coauthored the book, Flickr Hacks: Tips & Tools for Sharing Photos Online (Hacks) for O'Reilly. He founded the Flickr Hacks group and has authored other Flickr utilities.


Flickr Colr Pickr is a utility that you have to see to really appreciate. With the color palette, you can filter photos by moving the slider and clicking on on color flower.


Photos can be selected by color fields, flowers, crayon box, squared circle, graffiti, Flickr Central, doors and windows, macro, textures, urban decay, catchy colors, stock repository and JPG magazine.

Featured Photo: Post Athomic Bomb
This photo, shared by boskizzi, was found using the Catchy Colors filter (shown in the top center of the screenshot). Clicking on the thumbnail image opens its Flickr window and it can be posted like other photos by selecting "Blog This."

Blogging Photos with Flickr

into the blue, blue world
Originally uploaded by manyfires

Author: Laura Klemme

Photos from Flickr can be added to your blog very easily.

After a few simple setup steps, you can send photos from your cellphone directly to your blog. The entire Flickr gallery can be viewed and the photos that are shared can be added to your blog with a simple click and a dropdown menu selection to your blog.

What you need:

1. A blog account.
2. An account with Flickr. If you don't have one, you can set one up for free.
3. Login and click on your login name in the upper right corner.
4. On the next page, click on "Extending Flickr." In "Your Blogs" click "Configure your Flickr-to-blog settings" and "Setup your blog."
5. If you are using Blogger, the screens will guide you through authorizing your Flickr account to access your blog.

Email to Blog
To email photos directly to your Flickr photostream or to your blog, Flickr can assign a special email address for this. Add this address to your cellphone and email address books and you are ready to go.

Featured Photo: Into the Blue, Blue World
Breathtaking. The photo here, is one that is featured on Flickr at this moment. The photographer is "manyfires" and is sharing this photo from her Flickr account. Here is what she has to say about capturing such a beautiful picture,

"I was on my way back to the Signal Mountain Campground (having been at Oxbow Bend) in the Tetons when I decided to pull over and try for one last pinhole shot. The skies were clear - nothing interesting there - but the vista was still breathtaking, and so very blue. I scurried down a rocky hill to the edge of Jackson Lake and sat for 20 minutes while pinhole did its thing. I later had to cook and eat my supper in the complete dark as a result, but I think it was worth the shot."

Photo Search with Flickr

Golden Gate, by Moonlight [2]
Originally uploaded by MumbleyJoe

Author: Laura Klemme

Need a photo for your blog?

Flickr can be a great place to find great photos. Users have uploaded and shared photos of countless topics and subject matter.

Search v Tag Cloud
You can find photos by browsing under a specific topic heading or by word tags. Word tags can be found with using the search feature or the tag cloud. With search, you need to type in a word to match, just like you do when you google something. The tag cloud visually displays the word with small or large font depending on the popularity of the tag. Either way, you have access to thousands of photos to choose from.

A search of "Golden Gate Bridge" results in a variety of great photos. If the photographer's settings allow, you can mark it as a "Favorite" or "Blog This."

Featured Photo: Golden Gate, by Moonlight
This outstanding photo of the Golden Gate Bridge is shared by MumbleyJoe.

Blogging - A Visual Introduction

Author: Laura Klemme

Are You Visual?
Sometimes new technology is easier to understand if you can see it explained visually rather than reading about it. Concepts that seem complicated become crystal clear.

The concept of blogging is easy to understand once you see it. The folks at CommonCraft have produced instructional videos on YouTube that can do just that. Through a short visual explanation, they give you the concept of blogging in a nutshell.

Blogging in Plain English

Top Pick: SearchEngineWatch.com

TOP PICK:
SITE RESOURCE SERIES

Author: Laura Klemme

SearchEngineWatch.com
Resource for Webmasters on Search Engine Marketing
http://searchenginewatch.com/

What do they do?
Well …. they watch search engines.

For website owners, this is a great resource to help improve your website marketing performance and operations.

Topics covered.
News. Search providers. Web Analysis Tools. Useful Tips and more.

This site provides you with a lot of free information, but does has a premium membership area for more extensive research and information. You choose.

FREE Newsletters and RSS Feeds.
Subscribe to free newsletters for the specific topics that interest you. No need to have to read through all topics. The customized selection of newsletters are sent to your email address.

Subscribe to free RSS feeds for updates to blog, news and posts for the searchenginewatch.com websites.

Wondering how to get started or improve your site?
searchenginewatch.com features a tutorial, Search Engine Marketing 101 that is great if you are new to web marketing or just want to make improvements to your website. Fundamentals such as page promotion, search advertising budget, comparison of the indexes and more.

Last updated: 10/16/2008

How Does Googlebot Crawl and Index Your Site?

Author: Google

From www.google.com 10/15/2008

Source

When you sit down at your computer and do a Google search, you're almost instantly presented with a list of results from all over the web. How does Google find web pages matching your query, and determine the order of search results?

In the simplest terms, you could think of searching the web as looking in a very large book with an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned ("served") to you.

The three key processes in delivering search results to you are:

Crawling: Does Google know about your site? Can we find it?
Indexing: Can Google index your site?
Serving: Does the site have good and useful content that is relevant to the user's search?

Crawling
Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.

We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits of each these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.

Indexing
Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

Serving Results
When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it's important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site's ranking.

Setting Up Blogger in 7 Easy Steps

Author: Laura Klemme

Creating and posting with Blogger

You can create and post a basic blog in about 7 easy steps.

1. Go to http://www.blogger.com, sign in with your Google account or create a new one.

2. At the Blogger Dashboard, select "Create Your Blog Now." Blogger's claim is that this is 3 easy steps. Sort of.

3. Add a title for your blog, give it an address. This will endup as [yourblog].blogspot.com

4. Use the default template or select a new one. Select "Start Blogging."

Well, there you go. Your basic blog is all setup. Technically in 3 steps. Now to create your first blog post.

5. While on the "Posting" tab, select "Create." Give the post a title (like a subject in email) and type your message and save. To see what it looks like, select "View Blog."

6. If all looks good, press, "Publish Post."

That's it. Your first blog post. Easy, wasn't it?

7. A few other important settings to check out. Options for privacy issues like who can post or comment on your blog and who can view it are available.

Next steps?
Be creative. Change the colors, fonts and layout on a template.

Checkout other options or design you own template.

Need ideas?
For tips, check out CopyBlogger or ProBlogger

Blogger - An Experience

Author: Laura Klemme

Blogger is easy to use. The user interface is very straightforward and what you would expect for a Google application.

For this blog, BeyondClicks, I used a standard layout but modified the color choices. Again, this was very easy to do by using one of the customization tools within the Blogger application.


Blogger makes the blogging experience a very easy one. The features of Blogger make creating a blog post as easy as typing an email message. I will continue to use Blogger and other blogging applications.

There are lots of website for ideas about blogging. One particularly useful one is www.problogger.com

Welcome to Beyond Clicks!

This site is a web resource. BeyondClicks provides you with websites that offer tips, info, download, and more. Go beyond the basic clicks.