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Anybody else have a closet full of old, semi-crumpled rolls of Christmas wrapping paper? It’s a weird thing, buying Christmas paper. You think you’re running low, but really, you just don’t want to use the sad, tired old pieces clinging to their rolls when the shiny rolls in the store are so much prettier. |
That’s why I love the idea of buying one roll of wrapping paper, except it’s something I’ll never get sick of. Savvy crafters are buying bulk rolls of craft paper, except it isn’t plain, old brown like something a butcher would use. It’s matte black. You can order a massive 720-foot roll online for about $70 that will ... |
This black paper is easily customized with a handy chalk pen. (Have you tried chalk pens? They are life-changing.) So, if you’re sick of the same old Santa-and-reindeer wrapping paper, imagine the possibilities of making your own. |
Wrap the gift up and get doodle-happy with swirls, candy canes or polka-dots around the corners. How about lyrics to a Christmas carol or a silly inside joke you share with them? You don’t even need to buy those sticky gift tags because you can write the person’s name right on the wrapping. |
I’ve been making salt dough tree ornaments with my kids since they were babies, but it’s a pretty imperfect process. The dough is so salty that it makes my hands feel gross and it isn’t easy to get them baked properly. Luckily, Pinterest has come to the rescue with a new, no-bake version smells amazing! |
Mix together 1 cup flour, 1/2 cup of salt, 1/2 cup of cinnamon (and any other delicious Christmas-y spices, if you’re good in the kitchen and understand what those might be?) and 3/4 cup of very warm water. |
Mix it all up, roll out the dough on pieces of wax paper (so it doesn’t stick to your counters) and let the whole family go wild with cookie cutters. I think gingerbread people shapes would be great since the dough looks like gingerbread. |
Let the ornaments dry for one to two days until they’re nice and hard. Then you can decorate them with acrylic paints or puffy paints or just seal them with Mod Podge. Bonus: Mix a little extra cinnamon in with your paint so they smell extra delicious while they’re hanging on your tree. |
Once the jars are washed out and dried, paint them in seasonal colours using acrylic paints. Maybe you want them all white or cream or prefer the look of a row of red, white and green? If you want a rustic feel, you can use a piece of sandpaper and rub it lightly over any raised or depressed areas in the glass (where t... |
Line the jars up in the centre of your table and fill them with (real or fake) sprigs of holiday greenery, twigs, pinecones and holly. You could even go a step further and surround them with a string of battery-powered twinkle lights or candles. |
Instead of trying to draw on a Dollar Store coffee mug with a Sharpie and bake it in the oven to set the ink -- it just isn’t effective, no matter how many tutorials you try -- why not make a gift that actually can stand up to the dishwasher? |
Creatives of all ages love going to paint-your-own pottery shops like Clay Cafe, but you don’t need to have exceptional art talent to make a beautiful gift there. They have hundreds of different pieces of bisque (chalky-feeling, white ceramic) there for you to paint from basic mugs, bowls and plates to picture frames, ... |
Once you’ve paid for your piece, you have unlimited access to the paints, stencils and tools and you can go back as many times as you’d like until it’s done. Make sure to do three coats of each colour (to avoid a streaky finish) and sign your name on the bottom so the person knows you made it with love. They’ll be happ... |
Wreaths are usually one of those items that are actually cheaper to buy ready-made rather than make yourself. (As a serious crafter, I can attest that that’s almost never the case.) I think that’s because the base of a wreath, whether it’s Styrofoam or fake greenery, it is weirdly expensive to buy in a craft store and ... |
I’ve already tried and liked several alternatives, like making those poofy, mesh wreaths and more recently, making a wreath out of two wooden embroidery hoops. This year, I’m trying something new: making a holiday wreath from an old picture frame. |
Old frames are easy to find and often already sitting in our basements. Remove the glass and backing, wipe off the dust and paint the frame a nice, seasonal colour (hmmm, a deep forest green?). Then decorate just two corners -- like the top-left and the bottom-right -- using a big bow, sprigs of holly or wooden letters... |
Not only will this wreath look great in your foyer, but you won’t have to spend a big chunk of Christmas shopping money on a dumb wreath form. |
FARMINGTON — A Laconia man was indicted this month on a charge of aggravated driving while intoxicated in connection with an April 30 incident. |
A grand jury issued the indictment, alleging Sean Avery, 39, of 119 Hillcrest Drive, Laconia drove a motorcycle on Route 11 while under the influence of liquor and caused a motor vehicle accident involving another motorcycle resulting in serious bodily injury to himself, including a severe head injury. |
Avery was airlifted to Maine Medical Center after the motorcycle he was operating rear-ended a motorcycle operated by Leon Flanders, 53, of Meredith at about 7:45 p.m. on April 30, according to authorities. |
Police say Flanders was preparing to turn left into the Hawg's Pen Cafe, located at 1114 Route 11 when Avery, also traveling west on Route 11, collided with him from behind. Neither man was wearing a helmet and Avery suffered serious head trauma when he was thrown from his motorcycle, police said. |
Witnesses of the accident said Avery was unconscious and not breathing after the impact but was revived by a Hawg's Pen patron trained in CPR. |
Flanders also suffered a head injury in the accident and was transported to Frisbie Memorial Hospital with non-life threatening injuries. He was released the next day. |
Avery remained hospitalized at Maine Medical Center for more than a month after the accident. |
Now, he faces charges after toxicology reports confirmed alcohol was an alleged factor in the crash. |
The charge of aggravated driving while intoxicated is a Class B felony and is punishable by 31⁄2 to seven years in jail and a $1,000 minimum fine. |
Former President George H.W. Bush. |
Two actresses have accused former President George H.W. Bush of inappropriately touching them. |
Bush, a spokesman confirmed, routinely tells an off-color joke when taking a picture. |
The joke apparently goes, "Do you want to know who my favorite magician is? ... David Cop-a-Feel!" |
A spokesman for George H.W. Bush on Wednesday said the former president often told a lewd joke when taking pictures with new people. |
Two actresses this week have publicly accused Bush of inappropriately touching them and telling an off-color joke while being photographed with them. One of the women, an actress named Jordana Grolnick, detailed an August 2016 incident to Deadspin. |
Another actress, Heather Lind, said in a now-deleted Instagram post that Bush repeatedly touched her from behind and told a dirty joke when they met in 2014. |
"He touched me from behind from his wheelchair with his wife Barbara Bush by his side. He told me a dirty joke," Lind wrote. "And then, all the while being photographed, touched me again." |
A spokesman said in a statement Wednesday that Bush, who has vascular parkinsonism, a disorder resembling Parkinson's disease, had told the joke since he began using a wheelchair five years ago because "his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures." |
"To try to put people at ease, the president routinely tells the same joke — and on occasion, he has patted women's rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner," the statement said. |
It added: "Some have seen it as innocent; others clearly view it as inappropriate. To anyone he has offended, President Bush apologizes most sincerely." |
Every day a new SEO myth is born; unfortunately, not every day does an old SEO myth die off. The net result is a growing population of myths. These are nearly impossible to squash because the snake-oil salesmen of our industry keep perpetuating them — bringing them back from the brink, even. You can talk at conferences... |
Sometimes the myths get debunked, only to end up coming back with a vengeance. Take the meta keywords tag for instance. Google never did support this worthless tag. But apparently, Yahoo had been “supporting” the tag for some time. Remember when Yahoo went on the record (at the SMX East 2009 conference) to say they wer... |
I, for one, hate misinformation and disinformation, and our industry, unfortunately, is rife with it. I’m going to do my part in fighting this menace and spreading the truth — by exposing some of the more insidious myths in this very article. I think this is only fitting, considering Covario’s oft-stated goal is to be ... |
Hmm…. you won’t find them listed there anymore. |
Don’t use Google Analytics because Google will spy on you and use the information against you. This one comes straight from the conspiracy theorists. Google has made numerous assurances that they aren’t using your traffic or conversion data to profile you as a spammer. |
Your PageRank score, as reported by Google’s toolbar server, is highly correlated to your Google rankings. If only this were true, our jobs as SEOs would be so much easier! It doesn’t take many searches with SEO for Firefox running to see that low-PageRank URLs outrank high-PR ones all the time. It would be naive to as... |
Having an XML Sitemap will boost your Google rankings. I just heard this one from a fellow panelist in an SEO session at a conference I presented at within the last month (I won’t mention who, or which show.) This made me cringe, but I bit my lip rather than embarrass and contradict them in front of the audience. Shoul... |
Since the advent of personalization, there is no such thing as being ranked #1 anymore because everyone sees different results. Although it is true that Google personalizes search results based on the user’s search history (and now you don’t even have to be logged in to Google for this personalization to take place), t... |
Meta tags will boost your rankings. I’m so sick of hearing about meta tags. Optimizing your meta keywords is a complete waste of time. Period. They have been so abused by spammers that the engines haven’t put any stock in them for years and years. What about other meta tags — such as meta description, meta author, and ... |
It’s good practice to include a meta robots tag specifying index, follow. This is a corollary to the myth immediately preceding. It’s totally unnecessary. The engines all assume they are allowed to index and follow unless you specify otherwise. |
It’s helpful if your targeted keywords are tucked away in HTML comment tags and title attributes (of IMG and A HREF tags.) Since when have comment tags or title attributes been given any weight? |
Having country-specific sites creates “duplicate content” issues in Google. Google is smart enough to present your .com.au site to Google Australia users and your .co.nz site to Google New Zealand users. Not using a ccTLD? Then set the geographic target setting in Google Webmaster Tools; that’s what it’s there for. Whe... |
Googlebot doesn’t read CSS. You’d better believe Google scans CSS for spam tactics like hidden divs. |
You should end your URLs in .html. Since when has that made a difference? |
You can boost the Google rankings of your home page for a targeted term by including that term in the anchor text of internal links. Testing done by SEOmoz found that the anchor text of your “Home” links is largely ignored. Use the anchor text “Home” or “San Diego real estate” — it’s of no consequence either way. |
It’s important for your rankings that you update your home page frequently (e.g. daily.) This is another fallacy spread by the same aforementioned fellow panelist. Plenty of stale home pages rank just fine, thank you very much. |
Trading links helps boost PageRank and rankings. Particularly if done on a massive scale with totally irrelevant sites, right? Umm, no. Reciprocal links are of dubious value: they are easy for an algorithm to catch and to discount. Having your own version of the Yahoo directory on your site isn’t helping your users, no... |
Linking out (such as to Google.com) helps rankings. Not true. Unless perhaps you’re hoarding all your PageRank by not linking out at all — in which case, that just looks unnatural. It’s the other way around, i.e. getting links to your site — that’s what makes the difference. |
It’s considered “cloaking” — and is thus taboo and risky — to clean up the URLs in your links selectively and only for spiders. If your intentions are honorable, then you have nothing to fear. All the major search engines have said as much. You are helping the engines by removing session IDs, tracking parameters and ot... |
If you define a meta description, Google uses it in the snippet. We already learned from my last column (“Anatomy of a Google Snippet“) that this is oftentimes not the case. |
The bolding of words in a Google listing signifies that they were considered in the rankings determination. Also discussed in my last column, this phenomenon — known as “KWiC” in Information Retrieval circles — is there purely for usability purposes. |
H1 tags are a crucial element for SEO. Research by SEOmoz shows little correlation between the presence of H1 tags and rankings. Still, you should write good H1 headings, but do it primarily for usability and accessibility, not so much for SEO. |
There are some unique ranking signals for Google Mobile Search, and they include the markup being “XHTML Mobile”. Google Mobile Search results mirror those of Google Web Search. By all means, create a mobile-friendly version of your site; but do it for your users, not for SEO. |
SEO is a black art. And it’s done, usually in a dark room, by some rogue SEO consultant, without requiring the involvement of the client / rest of the company. If SEO were like that, our lives would read like spy novels. |
The Disallow directive in robots.txt can get pages de-indexed from Google. As I explained in my article “A Deeper Look at Robots.txt“, disallows can lead to snippet-less, title-less Google listings. Not a good look. To keep pages out of the index, use the Noindex robots.txt directive or the meta robots noindex tag — NO... |
SEO is a one-time activity you complete and are then done with. How many times have you heard someone say “We actually just finished SEOing our site”? It makes me want to scream “No!” with every fiber of my being. SEO is ongoing. Just like one’s website is never “finished,” neither is one’s SEO. Catalog marketers get t... |
Automated SEO is black-hat or spammy. There is nothing wrong with or inappropriate in using automation. Indeed, it signals a level of maturity in the marketplace when industrial-strength tools and technologies for large-scale automation are available. Without automation, it would be difficult to impossible for the ente... |
A site map isn’t for people. A good (HTML, not XML) site map is designed as much for human consumption as it is for spiders. Any time you create pages/copy/links solely for a search engine, hoping they won’t be seen by humans, you’re asking for trouble. |
There’s no need to link to all your pages for the spiders to see them. Just list all URLs in the XML Sitemap. Orphan pages rarely rank for anything but the most esoteric of search terms. If your web page isn’t good enough for even you to want to link to it, what conclusion do you think the engines will come to about th... |
Google will not index pages that are only accessible by a site’s search form. This used to be the case, but Google has been able to fill out forms and crawl the results since at least 2008. Note this doesn’t give you permission to deliberately neglect your site’s accessibility to spiders, as you’d probably be disappoin... |
Using a service that promises to register your site with “hundreds of search engines” is good for your site’s rankings. If you believe that, then you may also be aware that there is a Nigerian prince who desperately needs your help to get a large sum of money smuggled out of his country, for which you will be richly re... |
Home page PageRank on a domain means something. As in: “I have a PageRank 6 site.” In actuality it means nothing. As I already stated, toolbar PageRank is misleading at best, completely bogus at worst. Furthermore, a high PageRank on one’s home page doesn’t necessarily equate to high PageRank on internal pages. That’s ... |
Outsourcing link building to a far-away, hourly contractor with no knowledge of your business is a good link acquisition solution. And a sound business decision… NOT! As it is, the blogosphere is already clogged enough with useless, spammy comments in broken English from third-world link builders. No need to make it wo... |
The clickthrough rate on the SERPs matters. If this were true then those same third-world link builders would also be clicking away on search results all day long. |
Keyword density is da bomb. Ok, no one says “da bomb” anymore, but you get the drift. Monitoring keyword density values is pure folly. |
Hyphenated domain names are best for SEO. As in: san-diego-real-estate-for-fun-and-profit.com. Separate keywords with hyphens in the rest of the URL after the .com, but not in the domain itself. |
Great Content = Great Rankings. Just like great policies equals successful politicians, right? |
Now it’s up to you, dear reader, to do your part in spreading the truth. Whenever possible, stand with your SEO brothers and sisters united against this damaging SEO mythology. Let’s all be SEO mythbusters. |
Which SEO myths are you most sick of? What did I miss in my list? Talk back in the comments. |
Postscript: Be sure to read the follow-up column to this, 36 More SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To. |
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia--CIMB Group Holdings Bhd. (1023.KU), the country's second-largest lender by assets, on Monday reported a 26% on-year jump in its net profit for the second quarter ended June, mainly on higher net interest income, and income from Islamic banking operations. |
The better performance also came on the back of write-backs for impairment losses and for commitments and contingencies, according to its financial statement. Net profit for the April-June period rose to 1.10 billion ringgit ($258.44 million) from MYR872.83 million a year ago, according to a local stock exchange filing... |
Revenue increased 10.9% to MYR4.33 billion during the quarter from MYR3.90 billion, the filing showed. |
CIMB, Southeast Asia's fifth-largest bank by assets, spent the past decade expanding in a region that has lately been struggling with softer economic growth. |
But things have turned positive in the region this year, especially at home in Malaysia, which announced earlier this month faster-than-expected second quarter economic growth of 5.8%, a pace last seen in first quarter 2015. |
"We feel cautiously optimistic for the second half of 2017, given the strong GDP (gross domestic product) growth for Malaysia and Indonesia, and the expected gradual improvement in Singapore and Thailand, all of which signal increased regional activity and improved capital markets," Chief Executive Zafrul Aziz said in ... |
CIMB shares were down 0.3% at MYR6.70 ahead of the earnings release, underperforming the local benchmark index's 0.11% rise. |
Authorities have identified the man killed in a shooting that left another person wounded Tuesday evening at an apartment building in south suburban Alsip. |
Officers responded at 6:22 p.m. to a report of shots in the 4600 block of 131st Street and found two people suffering from gunshot wounds in the vestibule of the building, according to Alsip police. |
Andrew L. Scott Jr., 33, was pronounced dead at the scene at 6:40 p.m., according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. He lived in Hazel Crest. |
An autopsy Wednesday found he died of multiple gunshot wounds and his death was ruled a homicide, the medical examiner’s office said. |
The other person was taken to a hospital for treatment, police said. Police did not provide details about the person’s age, gender or condition. |
The shooting is not believed to be random, and the victims may have known the shooter, police said. Investigators do not believe there is an immediate threat to public safety. |
Anyone with information about the ongoing investigation should call Alsip police at (708) 385-6902, ext. 264. |
I am looking for a good affordable orthodontist in the Krugersdorp, Roodepoort, Randburg erea.My daughter needs braces and unfortunately I'm on a budget. Does anyone have experience with this? Thank you. |
Unfortunately - This wont be cheap. I recently broke a tooth. Had to get a root canal and a filling. I came to just under R5000. |
I wish i could be of more help. |
Braces are not cheap, but they do let you pay them off over time. So you will have the initial consultation fee (R3500, they need to take xrays and moulds etc), a deposit (I paid R15k) and then monthly payments (I paid R1800 a month for 17 months). This is an orthodontist in Sandton, others may be slightly cheaper. |
Depending on what type of braces are used, and the treatment plan, will determine the costs associated with it. |
This guy has his prices online, so you can look at the worst case scenario, he seems to be cheaper than the ortho I went to. He is also based in the area you are looking for. |
Also bear in mind, there may additional costs for tooth extractions/surgery beforehand. I had to have my widsom teeth and two pre molars removed. That was a fun exercise. |
Thanks for the advice.My cousin went to Hugo and they did a great job.I made an appointment and hopefully it wont cost me more than R30000. |
Dalakas did super work for both of us. |
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