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Best Ad Network for Tech Blog? | billpg: I have no idea, but I'm interested in answers because when my blog used adsense, I'd always worry about mentioning viruses because of the ads that would show. |
Functional Programming Differences | loup-vaillant: "Treat functions as first class citizens"Actually, Object oriented programmers already do this. If they use "class polymorphism", "mixins", or any mechanism where an object's method could be determined at runtime, they use first class functions. They just don't know it yet. So, take an example where they would use mixins, then present them a closure or lambda equivalent. That should make functions less scary. (Side note: try to avoid the terms "first class" and "anonymous", "closure", and "lambda". "Ordinary" and "literal" are better, less scary. They point out the fact that functions are as mundane as integers, or strings, so of course they could be parameters or return values.)"stay immutable"This is indeed crucial. But effectively impossible until you don't change the way you think. Most imperative programmers think about what the objects should do. Of course, without side effect, they won't do anything, making programming impossible. So they have to think more about what the objects should be. Then, they will be able to avoid side effects until they are really needed."factor relentlessly"Talk about that only when you have talked about functions (don't say "first class"!), as an example of how you could really use them. `sort`, `map` and `filter` would be my favourite examples. Insist on the low syntactic burden of factoring. |
Should I be told a startup's present valuation when given stock options? | chrisbennet: If they expect you to work harder because you have equity, then yes, you definately have a right to know what you are getting in return for your extra work.In reality:
(A) The chances of your company ever having a "liquidity event" are slim.
(B) Even if it did, your share of the windfall would probably be less (per hour of overtime) than if you just worked at a "normal" job.If you accept the above, what your equity is worth becomes somewhat irrelevant. You better be doing it because you love the work. |
ad server recommendation? | kloncks: Back when I was in the need for an ad server, I remember using phpAdsNew, now called OpenX I believe.It's not for everyone, so I recommend you give it a spin before deciding anything, but it does offer a lot of configurability and analytical tools. |
Using Cassandra instead of MySQL from the start? | z8000: You should probably ask this on stackoverflow.com. |
ad server recommendation? | kev097: In addition to OpenX, check out Google Ad Manager/DFP. I tested both a couple years ago: found OpenX to be more robust and customizable, but Google had a much better UI. Both products have evolved since then. Either could fit your needs.http://openx.org/ad-server/hosted-packages
http://www.google.com/admanager/ |
Best Ad Network for Tech Blog? | ig1: If you've got a reasonably sized readership I'd try Federate Media.I'm actually working on something in this space at the moment as a side project (smarter ads for tech & programming related content), but I'm not going to be ready to test with users for a couple of months. Feel free to drop me an email though if you're interested and I'll let you know when I go live. |
Anyone interested to work on a project basis as a graphic artist? | thaddeus: I've always thought if I could spend money on a graphic artist/illustrator I would hire David Brasgalla. He's most definitely my favorite. Probably expensive too.http://www.pixelhuset.se/pixelhuset.html |
Best Ad Network for Tech Blog? | PStamatiou: Without knowing your traffic #'s, I can't say for sure but the big networks require a lot of pageviews/month. Among the lower is Tribal Fusion, which requires around 5,000 uniques per day. My blog is just about at this level, except for lower traffic on weekends, so I am considering applying soon.Otherwise you might consider private ad sales (not talking about those shady link exchanges emails everyone gets, those are bad news). Not easy to work with but it's the best bet for a small blog (let's say sub-100,000 uniques/month). There's also great potential to work with affiliate stuff if you find products you can honestly recommend and that your readers would trust your opinion on. I make about 1/3 of my blog income from affiliate stuff. Also make sure to invest in a URL tracker so you can hide affiliate links with yourdomain.com/Your_Slug to increase conversions and also let you find click stats, do A/B tests etc. I use one that is a WordPress plugin, you can find it on my blog in my profile, or feel free to email me.I'm just heading out the door but this is what was on the top of my head. I've tried pretty much everything out there for my blog over the last few years and have now gotten it to be ramen profitable (or in my case, healthier: salad w/ balsamic and chicken profitable) |
ad server recommendation? | jcdreads: AOL (I mean, Aol; actually the former AdTech) has a pretty good self-service solution. It has a pretty dashboard, good management interface, and getting campaigns up and down is fast. Not sure on price.http://www.adtechus.com/Home |
MixcloudAds, if we white-label it would you use it? | sstrudeau: This sounds like something that would go high up on our evaluation list for the company I work for -- for us, there's a big space between our bread-and-butter high end advertisers and the remnant networks filled with advertisers that would like to make sub $5k buys but take as much or more effort than advertisers on the other side of that line.That said, a pricing model as a % of revenue would probably be less attractive than a cost based on some function of resource utilization -- we don't necessarily need to give you incentives to figure out how to max our revenue; let us worry about optimizing our pricing and maximizing sales; you focus on providing us a kickass product.Also, ideally we'd be able to traffic ads sold via self-serve into our existing inventory (i.e., not a separate unit or zone) AND avoid overselling impressions we don't have (e.g., we frequently "sell out" of certain geotargeted metro areas) -- so it'd probably be best if it worked in tandem with our ad serving software (currently Google Ad Manager/DFP). |
ad server recommendation? | cheald: Google Ad Manager is pretty dead simple to use. OpenX if you want a native solution. |
Want to move to San Francisco/Silicon Valley - how would I do it? | keefe: dice.com and craigslist.org are two major job sources for SF bay area |
Competing with Google while running on Google App Engine | keefe: run run run away? seriously... think it through. app engine is relatively equivalent to ec2. why not just eliminate this variable and switch unless it is cost prohibitive? |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | sfgfdhgfdshdhhd: Ditch automated ads, ads that try to steal our focus away from the content, and ads that hog up our bandwidth, screen space, CPU time, etc. They're annoying, usually irrelevant, and serve no good.When you write, include in your writing very brief endorsements for products related to your subject. Don't just randomly interject with "oh by the way, go buy Product X!", but if Product X is a brand of hard drive and you're writing about hard drives, take a sentence or two to talk about the advantages of that particular brand. In plain text, just like the rest of your article.There are TWO important parts to this equation. Many people only seem to realize the first.
1) Make your ads not so obvious that machines can tell they're ads.
2) Make your ads not so annoying that people will update their ad blocking rules to remove them.In other words, working around the ad blocker to present annoying ads is just going to annoy even further. Your ads have to be seen AND they have to not be immediately blocked again and/or just ignored, and that means they have to be manually inserted so that they are intertwined with the content from both a technical and a writing standpoint.You might even get away with static banners, that don't stand out too much, at the top and bottom of a page (where we can scroll it off the screen), and text links next to the content area. Just not IN the articles, unless it's part OF the article.Why did I install an ad blocker in the first place? Because ages ago on gameshark.com, an ad popped up, demanding I join the US Army. I've never left Canada and I was maybe 13 at the time. This ad, for 30 seconds, played an animation with loud sound effects, hogging up all my CPU time and bandwidth (now I knew why the page had loaded so slow), and centred itself under the mouse cursor at all times so I couldn't click anything. It was a Flash layer of some sort, rather than a window, so no keyboard shortcut would be able to do anything either.
When this ad finally disappeared, I IMMEDIATELY looked up and installed an ad blocker, and never again went to gameshark.com. If I'd had any interest whatsoever in joining the US Army, that also would have killed it permanently.
This is the perfect example of how to do EVERYTHING WRONG with online advertising.PS: one of the worst comment systems I've ever seen. Requiring registration? Fail. Not stating this until AFTER the comment is submitted? Massive fail. Not stating the requirements on the form until they're violated? Cherry on top. |
Do you sneak workouts in at work? | keefe: I workout every morning, first thing. |
Want to move to San Francisco/Silicon Valley - how would I do it? | neilk: As an H1-B holder in a similar situation, I advise you not to do this. It's not as simple as Europe.The USA makes it very hard to get a visa. Also, even if you do get a job, working on your startup part-time is yet harder. Valley jobs typically take much more than full-time hours and have little time off. Welcome to the USA.Also, you haven't really defined what your goals are, other than just being in SF and working on a prototype. Without the motivation of being in a program like Y Combinator (not to mention all the introductions and networking they can arrange) this doesn't sound like a great plan to me. If you want to sprint for a prototype in some cheap apartment, you can do that anywhere.I'd advise you to do this instead.1) You seem to want to soak up SF & Valley culture, so do that first.- Get an internship at one of the better companies, ideally Google- Participate in one of Google's Summer of Code projects.- Visit SF on a tourist visa and just hang out. Meet a lot of people in the hacker and startup scene.Then:2) Invigorated with all these new ideas and contacts, go home, get some partners, and work on the prototype.You may not appreciate how much simpler this is right now, but you will if you try to live here for a short while. You can probably even live with your parents, since you're so young. Or go to one of the cheaper European countries, and hack by day, enjoy yourself by night. You're only young once so why not do it in style? It's called the World Wide Web for a reason.3) IF you think you're picking up momentum then try to find people who can bring you into the USA again. Hopefully you will have met enough people in stage 1 to do this.P.S. There are a few tricks out there to establish an American startup with non-American workers, but they are very high risk. Even if the INS buys it, you will end up signing most of your rights over to someone American. For obvious reasons I will not detail the legal tricks here, nor do I advise that you get into this without advice from a lawyer. But just be aware that there are possibilities if you find someone here that you can really, really trust. |
Have ideas, not the skill (Yet) | keefe: You should do neither. If you present good ideas to people that can execute them when you can't, why wouldn't they just take them? You should just be patient, take a passive note for some additional months. Write out your ideas on paper. Write down your skills. Depending on your age, consider going to university or getting work to bring up your skills. Once you are able to execute a significant portion of the work, then and only then is it time to move forward. |
ad server recommendation? | mattew: I have two clients using OpenX, and they are both quite pleased. One started out with the free, hosted version, and recently migrated to our own install of OpenX due to poor performance on the hosted version. Our local install performs quite well, though.OpenX is pretty easy to install and keep running, it does the job, and its straightforward to configure. Don't let the poor performance of the hosted version scare you away. |
Accounting software for startups? | ropergroup: QuickBooks has a basic program called Simple Start that is an easy to use program for new businesses. It will give you more functionality than Excel. For a discount, go to our website and click on any Intuit icon: http://www.ropergroup.com. With Simple Start you can create invoices, track payments, pay bills, print checks and create financial statements. |
Can we help each other? | graupel: Speaking from experience - if you are indeed a news personality at a TV station, you're going to have a tough time monetizing yourself without running into a conflict with your own stations web goals, etc.If you think that you have the right to monetize yourself while using the station as a promotional platform (even to put yourself in the public eye) and that your employer is not going to want a cut of the revenue you generate based on the "TV version" of you, you're fooling yourself. |
Variable Declaration Location | jaydub: Maybe its just an old C (C90 I think?) habit where declarations and code could not be mixed. |
Variable Declaration Location | sparky: It is a bit anal retentive, but there is sound reasoning behind declaring your variables in the narrowest scope possible. Google's C++ style guide ( http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x... ) captures some of them. Another is cache locality of your stack, if you are in a language or project where that matters; by creating space on the stack as late in the game as possible, your stack access pattern tends more to the end of the stack than if you declare everything up top in no particular order. This is a really small micro-optimization though; the main point is that you want to know what type something is and what might have been passed to its constructor, on the screen at the same time as the code that uses it.Another thought; if there is a mammoth difference between top-of-function and narrowest-scope-possible, that suggests that you may have very large functions, and might consider refactoring so that the difference between your method and his is small? |
Variable Declaration Location | allenbrunson: pet peeve alert!I also prefer declaring all variables at the start of a function. My rationale is that, if all functions are written that way, it's less cognitive load when reading them. All variables used are known at the beginning, and once I've digested that, I can think about the code that will be working with them. These days, if I'm reading a function and a new variable is declared partway in, I feel like I've been ambushed with a new thing that makes it harder to understand.That said, I tend to write such short functions that it's never an issue. If a particular variable isn't needed until halfway into the function, that's a good sign to me that it needs to be broken into two or more smaller functions. |
Fastest way to make $300-400 a month online? | sebastianavina: sell drugs on ebay |
Functional Programming Differences | ananthrk: OT: I fit the profile of your target audience. So, if you don't mind, please post your slides after your talk. Thanks. |
Variable Declaration Location | gills: Narrowest scope seems to be pretty standard practice, as long as that jibes with the language (ex. javascript's function scope).But...there are probably more important battles to choose to fight during your project. |
recordable video chat API services? | DanBlake: We can do it at tinychat.com and give you raw access to the FLV's. Send me a ping and I will set you up with our private API. |
Best Material to Learn Search Engine Optimisation ?. | Roridge: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ is a good place to start. |
Please review my new website | wildsalmon: http://www.opinbot.com/reviews/show/agdvcGluYm90chwLEhVyZXZp... |
Cofounder vesting schedule for young startup | aditya: 4 year vesting with 1 year cliff for all employees (including co-founders) is pretty standard. As is acceleration upon exit. |
Cofounder vesting schedule for young startup | alain94040: No cliff for founders. Reverse vesting (you own your shares upfront). Presumably, you have been vesting already for a few months, so you are ahead. I would also recommend at most 51/59 split, not 50/50. You need a way to resolve deadlocks.By the way, consider using my online cofounders agreement before you incorporate (http://fairsoftware.net), so you can keep working on your project longer before seeing a lawyer (not that I'm advising you not to see a lawyer :-)The system we use is monthly vesting over 4 years, no cliff. I think that's the only fair thing to do with founders. |
Functional Programming Differences | Xichekolas: I would stress composability (which fits in with that whole DRY fad).Also, the ability to reason about your code is a big selling point of side-effect free code. When you don't have to keep track of a bunch of state in your head, it's much easier to reason about what code does, and find any bugs or unexpected behavior. |
Can we help each other? | alanrudolph: I think it helps to have a platform or idea that you stand for, because marketing yourself generically probably won't generate too much interest. For example, a local news personality where I live is well known in the gay community, and his name pops up on its own in that context. What are you into? Food, "financial responsibility," horses, etc.Or maybe you can start a phony rivalry with the weather guy and post catty things about each other. That might get some attention! |
Can I sell my early stage startup? | coryl: You can try listing it for sale on Flippa. Although if its not making money, I'm not sure you'll get much for it.If the business is promising I'm sure it'll get picked up. |
Can I sell my early stage startup? | noodle: options:1) shut it down.2) sell it. yes, you can sell it, although it will be difficult and/or won't sell for nearly as much as it would if it were fully established with paying customers.3) find a partner and offer them a majority stake to take it over completely. you retain some reasonable stake in the company and act in an advisory role as much as you're capable of. or not, but realize that if you're totally hands off, you shouldn't expect to keep a big chunk of it.4) keep working on it when you have the opportunity.i mean, completely dependent upon what it is, i'd be interested in #2 or #3. |
Can I sell my early stage startup? | dawie: Can you send me more info? davidsmit at google's email service. I might be interested. |
Can I sell my early stage startup? | dirtbox: Firstly, sorry to hear about your health.I'd approach similar, established companies that would be interested in acquiring your tech, or could use it in some form. As a last resort you could also consider splitting it up and selling it off in parts, assuming it's modular enough to do so.You should go some way to getting a good amount of your investment back.Good luck. |
Does any company want to hire me? | RiderOfGiraffes: Clickable: http://MichaelPlaterII.comOK, question: why didn't you put in this comment to make your site clickable? If I were looking to hire, I'd want someone with impressive credientials, and who showed some initiative. You've made it harder than it needed to be for me to look at your CV. What does that tell me?Secondly, can you negotiate options with the new company? If it's a hip, happ'nin' place then options could be worth a lot of money. Getting a stake in the company could placate your parents.Having said that, it's certainly true that you should look around, but don't waste your time. If you're going to take time to do it, do it properly. Bend yourself to the task as if the result really mattered.It might.ADDED IN EDIT: Why didn't you link to your earlier question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1105565 |
Does any company want to hire me? | RiderOfGiraffes: Context: I employ people. I have 22 employees, and the last three hires were because I saw someone that impressed me and put them on, even though neither of us knew what they would do. I knew they would be of value.I'm not hiring at the moment, but here are some thoughts about your resume:When I read a resume I want to know what value you will bring to my company. I want to know what you can do, and then I want to see the evidence to support your claims. I want to know why you are going to bring in more money than you cost. Your CV on your web site has to be generic, I know, but I can't easily see from it what you can do.There are some impressive things there (teaching in Ghana, running your company, etc.) and they will lend support to your claims, but first, what will you do for me?Secondly, I know it's unusual for a senior director of two companies (yes, I run another company as well) but I don't use Word. Yes, most people who will read your CV will, but it would be nice to have a plain text version, and a PDF version, and an HTML version. Make some effort to make it easy for people to see what you have to offer.Finally, one of my colleagues just read this and my other comment and said - "Harsh." Yes, agreed. But still, these are things I believe to be true, and I offer them in the hope that they are of value. They might not be, feel free to ignore them, but perhaps they will help. They are offered in that spirit.And I wish you good luck. |
"Basic SEO"? | andrewljohnson: 0. The zeroth rule of SEO is get your site listed for a search for your site. If your site is bobsfishingtips.com, make sure if someone searches for Bob's Fishing Tips, you get found. This means simply getting at least one real site to link the name of your site to you, or maybe a couple sites if you have some common word like Yelp.1. After that, make sure people link to you with proper anchor text for other keywords. If you want people to search for "fishing tips" and find you, then several people will need to link you something like this: This site has great <a href=http://www.mysite.com>fishing tips</a>.
2. The more authority these links have, the better you will do. If you get a very high PageRank site to link "fishing tips" to you, you might be immediately first for that query in Google. Or, 2-3 medium links might do it.3. The words you want people to search for need to be used several times on your site. You should have the words "fishing tips" on several pages and you should link to your best page on "fishing tips" by putting that phrase in your own links to your own pages.4. Also make sure you put the keywords you want searches for in the title of your page, and enclose them in H1 tags or other bold/header tags. This won't help very much, but it's probably worth doing.5. Links don't really help you unless they are from a real domain - a link from someblog.blogspot.com will not help your PageRank much at all. Also, the domain needs to exist for a while to help you - something like a year.6. Good places to get links are from your college and high school newspapers, local newspapers, and anyone else who has a website that would appropriately cover you.7. Some sites have way more PageRank than you might expect. www.cmu.edu is an anchor site for the link graph, and a link from this site will do wonders for your PageRank.8. Here are some excellent pages on SEO: http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-one/
http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-two/
You should also check out Mahalo.com. That site is SEOed within an inch of its existence on Google, so take some tips from them but tread carefully.9. In the end, it really boils down to having authoritative links with the right anchor text linking to you. The rest matters very little. |
"Basic SEO"? | rokhayakebe: Ask yourself this question:
"If I was looking for X and landed on this page, what would I want to see (information, layout)?" X being what you want to rank for.
Edit: Then get people online to talk about X and link to your page. |
"Basic SEO"? | imp: 1. Pick your target keywords (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)2. Make sure those keywords are on your page and maybe urls also.3. Get links. More the better. Not from spammers. |
"Basic SEO"? | mseebach: Basic "white hat" SEO is two things:1: Making sure your site is visible to search engines. Make sure there are meta-tags, that navigation, headers and text is text, not images or flash. Have a sitemap. Make sure links to pages contain a good description of what's on the page.2: Making sure someone's linking to your site. Pitch to blogs to get them to talk about and link to your site. Comment on blogs, putting your website in the "website" field. Have good content that people will want to come to and share - the best way to be visible is for get other people to do your promotion for you.The reason it should be a niche, is that when there isn't too many people writing a website, it's easier to rank high for a search term. If you picked generic technology news, you'd be hard pressed to break page 10 on Google. If make a good site about how to grow your own organic hamster food, you could make page one with little effort. Picking the niche is as much basic SEO as the technical stuff for this "trick".Finally, TANSTAAFL. |
How Can Ads Not Suck? | sojourner: My concern with asking "How can ads not suck?" is the limitation of the answer. If I take one step back from the question, my view of the problem shifts and the potential solutions grow. Your concern isn't about ads and ad-blockers, it's about generating revenue from a site. You think that ad-blockers are affecting your revenue. They aren't. How you're advertising is affecting your revenue.I'd start with the question "How can I generate revenue without using ads?" Others may have better questions. |
"Basic SEO"? | Timmy_C: I also like to tell people what basic SEO is not:1. SEO is not keyword frequency. Although the page you are optimizing needs to contain the search term you are trying to rank for it shouldn't be saturated with that term. The first four words of the <title> tag, the <h1> tag and maybe an <img> alt attribute are a few good places to put a good keyword.2. More links isn't necessarily better. A couple good links from one or two good pages can really boost your rankings more than a lot of links from unimportant websites.3. Meta tags won't help a page rank higher. The <meta name="keywords"/> and <meta name="description"/> tags aren't used as ranking factors but it's good to include them because they do signal "about-ness" to an engine.Some things that might hurt your SEO are frequent server downtime and site inaccessibility, cloaking by user agent, links from spammy domains and acquiring links from known "link sellers".Source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors |
"Basic SEO"? | lmkg: SEO has two basic components: making your site seem good and worthwhile, and associating it with particular search terms. Making it good and worthwhile and not-spammy mostly has to do with incoming links, and having fresh content. Reach out to blogs and other sites in your domain to try and collect back-links.In order to find what terms you should associate with your site, do some basic research on search volume (google has some tools for this). Once you have the terms you want to rank for, it's a matter of making them more prominent in your site. Header tags, the title tag, the first 100 words of your body copy (p tags), and your URL structure (readable & hierarchical) have the strongest impact on this, as does the anchor text of both internal and external links. Meta description doesn't impact your ranking, but it does impact click-through in the search engine listings because it's the default text the search engine will display under the title.The last part is making sure that content is available in text form on your page. Banners that are in flash or image files should either be replaced with images, or you can do graceful degradation by having the text be replaced with images via javascript (this is consider OK by google so long as the replacing image contains the same text). If you have videos, include transcripts or at least summaries. If you have lots of images, use the alt attribute. Don't make things Ajax unless you really need to.The last recommendation is don't spam. You'll get penalized. Spamming is putting more SEO-bait than content on your page, and/or placing content that search engines will see but most users won't (putting the same content in different forms is ok). Most tricks you can think of, someone else has thought of first, and you will get burned for it. Done properly, white-hat SEO and accessibility overlap very well, since search engine spiders are basically low-capability browsers. |
How much is a link to my app worth? | Travis: I'd recommend against it, although I don't have experience.1) if they're reputable, they will just review you (not charge a fee). Also recall that the FCC requires bloggers to include financial disclosures now, so that will lessen the impact.
2) if it's not a reputable blog/site, then you're not going to get much PR benefit
3) a lot of these sites exist just for PR, and will eventually get revealed/shut down (there are few/no guarantees that the site will exist shortly, or that it will continue with any positive page rank. Chances are they built their PR on greyhat techniques)
4) Doubtful that you'll get any meaningful signups through this, which means that you're just thinking about your PageRank. Which leads to,
5) don't manipulate your PR; it will quickly become a full time job. The proper way is to follow all the google guidelines and build longer lasting relationships with legit bloggers and review sites. |
"Basic SEO"? | qeorge: Here's the basics:- Research your keywords, make a list, especially paying attention to which ones are the most popular. The results may surprise you.https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal- Optimize your title tags (different on each page, mention your keywords, first 4 words of the title count the most)- Put your keywords into high-value elements (h1-h4, img alt text, ul's, dl's)- Get links from other websites (best case scenario: link's anchor text is your keyword). Higher the PageRank of the linking site the better. NoFollow's don't count.To get links: 1) Ask directly
2) Mention them in your blog posts, hope they reciprocate
3) Pay them (but don't tell anyone you did)
4) Make interesting content on your blog that naturally gains links
- Don't use subdomains (i.e., put your blog at mydomain.com/blog/ instead of blog.mydomain.com)That will give you a good start. From there, start a blog with interesting content, and submit it around. The idea with the blog is that the posts are more interesting than your site's copy, so people will actually link to it. |
"Basic SEO"? | brown9-2: Google publishes a pretty clear and simple "Webmaster guidelines" checklist to follow: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en... |
"Basic SEO"? | akrymski: I also see ads that say "mom working from home earns $500 a day online!". If it was so easy to make "instant $50/month" then I'd just sit there and set up a new site every day for a year, and then retire. Truth is - there's no get-rick-quick scheme that runs on auto-pilot. A site isn't just a domain, you have to publish content on it, you have to continuously improve SEO and gain links, you have to invest in the domain, hosting, bandwidth, time, content, links, etc, etc.First decide how much an hour of your time is worth. Then decide if an investment in this website is worthwhile. |
"Basic SEO"? | csomar: Black Hat Seo0. Find a new, non discovered niche. This niche should be gold, this mean the Adsense Pay Per Click is high. Register a related domain.1. Purchase unrelated domain names, any domains really, get ".info" domains since they are cheap.2. Buy a SPAM tool like Xrumer and SPAM related/unrelated blogs with unrelated keywords. (Did you wonder the thousands SPAM comments you get with xfdfrg in anchor text and wonder why the spammer didn't found better than those keywords?).3. SPAM a couple thousands blogs, get a couple hundred back links. You need many links, your anchor is not targeted, so quantity need to beat quality.4. After you get the back links listed in all your domains, make a 301 Redirect, this will bring all the Google juice (back links) to your domain.5. Your domain rank high, it brings traffic, optimize it for Adsense.Why all this mess?A. It helps stay under Google SPAM radar since you are using unrelated keywords, in fact keywords that related to nothing.B. Other black hat or white hat web masters won't discover your Gold niche while you are building back links.As I said, this is black hat and involves spamming. I never tried it, but it seems to bring some good cash it you choose well the niche. |
"Basic SEO"? | rubyrescue: Build Links. Here are my 5 steps to get started from nothing, with 5 free bonus steps. Do one of these per week, in a little over a month you'll have a foundation. Remember SEO is like farming, you reap what sow and it takes a long time to reap the harvest of all the hard work.1. Leverage your competition, by finding your top five closest competitors and spend your first round of SEO getting links from the top 100 sites that link to them. Once you filter out the ones that you won't be able to contact or you know can't edit their content to add another link, you'll be down to 20% of those 500 links. Now, you can do this in a day. Create an email, send it to each one of those guys asking for a backlink, telling them you're in the space and explaining why they should link to you. Don't pay for links, because it's not worth the risk of the google "police" finding out.2. Long Tail. Don't focus on ranking for the super-competitive keyword such as "flowers", rank for medium-tail keywords that you can make some ground on with less effort. "flowers going away party", "flowers evil mother-in-law", etc. Related to #1, when you ask for a link, feel free to suggest anchor text in the link that helps you get what you want from that link.3. Kickstart your on-site content strategy. Make a list of 100 articles that would help you drive traffic. Take the top 10 ideas and hire someone to write them. For each article, when you publish it, find 100 more people to ask for links to the article. Send them specific text and a specific page you want them to link to.4. Authorities. Make a list of 10 authorities on your subject who blog or create content. Write an article that you think would be interesting to them, something specific that is in their space. Make the content really good. Contact them personally (phone call, even) and ask for links to the article. In the flowers example, academics focused on environmental issues related to flower farming, for example.5. Directories. Build resource articles that cover your space in a way that focuses on your strengths. Find directories and ask them to link to your article. In the flowers example, an article on determining the proper type of flower for all special occasions or religious events.6. Build links.7. Build links.8-10. Build links. |
"Basic SEO"? | epi0Bauqu: Really basic: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimiza...My tips (once you understand the really basic): http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/04/search-engine-op...HN comments on my tips: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553613 |
"Basic SEO"? | steveklabnik: It's probably something like this:http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/adsense/42980-how-...Which was discussed on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511935 |
How much is a link to my app worth? | stevenloi: I'd second not buying links this way. There's a ton of free ways you can personally market your app already. Since you mentioned the sites that solicited have relatively low page rank, it's not worth the time/risk/money. |
"Basic SEO"? | sscheper: My advice:1. Content is king, obviously, but get inbound links through guest posts2. The rest is detailsThe details:
1. Use alt img text to describe images2. Use hyperlinks with solid naming conventions: http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-one/and nothttp://www.localseoguide.com/p=1882703. Use rel=nofollow for links that you don't want the search engine to pick up.For instance, if you're an amazon affiliate, your links should look like:<a href="http://amazon.com/product/affiliateid=blahblah rel="nofollow">name of amazon product</a>4. Pick a title tag that you think people will search (e.g. "How to Lose Weight," not your post title, "Amazing thing that I did last month")6. Add certain pages to your robot.txt file that you don't want to get picked up (i.e. your privacy policy or terms).7. Ensure that there are no broken links within your site (internal broken links)8. Have keywords and a metadescription on each page |
"Basic SEO"? | bradrydzewski: SEO can be expensive and time consuming, and a single update to Google's algorithm can send you back to the drawing board.My advice: take all of the time and money and, instead of SEO, focus on making your product great or creating great site content.If you have a site worth visiting, the quality linking and SEO will eventually take care of itself. People will blog about your site and link to it without you having to do anything other than being the best at what you do. |
Can I sell my early stage startup? | sganesh: I am interested. And would like more information. My email is in my profile. |
"Basic SEO"? | noodle: here's the basic set of rules i adhere to:1) only pick a few keywords.2) make sure you have those keywords in the title tags, in an h1 that either copies or restates the title, and in an h2 that is basically a site summary sentence/paragraph. you can use css to hide or image replace the h1/h2.3) get some other sites to link back to you. old, established, trusted sites are best. avoid link farms. avoid becoming a link farm yourself to obtain links. links with "nofollow" attributes don't count.4) the url you have helps. whether it is yourkeyword.com, your-key-word.com or whatever.com/your-key-word, it isn't a huge thing to worry about (especially if you can't help it). but it does help to have the keywords in the url in some form.5) in the end, content trumps most things. search engines are smart enough to recognize most spammy things. if you want to get good results, produce a good webpage with good content. |
"Basic SEO"? | sidsavara: http://www.sensational-seo.com/ Free firefox plugin for basic SEO ;) |
"Basic SEO"? | hfz: I believe this article by Derek Powazek is worth reading: http://powazek.com/posts/2101 |
choosing Web framework, again | benedwards: Saying Django is not appropriate for complex sites is just plain wrong. For whatever reason Django was just not a good fit for that author, but I think there's thousands of Djangonauts developing complex sites that would completely disagree with him.Definitely don't pass on Django because of one guy's opinion. |
choosing Web framework, again | tobyhede: I think the best advice is just to pick something and stop worrying. Analysis can be a form of procrastination.That said, I use and recommend Rails. Rails 3 is nearly ready for prime-time and introduces a suite of changes that make it faster, more flexible, and infinitely configurable. The part I have always liked about Ruby and Rails is that even when you are stretching beyond it's intended use-cases, it bends rather than breaks. |
How to recruit great hackers in a remote location? | jarsj: Being flexible might help. Hire part-time. Have them stay over for few months and also allow working remotely. Make them visit once in a while. That's the mode I engage with companies who have good problems to solve and it works. |
How complex is image resizing? | Qz: There are a few standard algorithms, like Bicubic, trilinear, and others. Photoshop generally lets you choose. Different algorithms work better for different types of images, and also depend on whether you're shrinking or enlarging. Photoshop has the most common ones and probably works for 95% of common cases. |
What are typical eCPM for Google Mobile Ads? | johng: This is from a cell phone forum and the "mobile skin". This value is all of last months traffic:Impressions: 426,784
eCPM: $1.39
Revenue: $592.15Won't say which site, hope it helps. |
How complex is image resizing? | mbrubeck: It's not that complex, but it's complex enough that even Adobe Photoshop gets it partly wrong:http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.htmlhttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141971 |
How complex is image resizing? | wmf: Consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanczos_resampling -- inventing this stuff required Serious Math Skills, but implementing it is probably not that difficult (provided you know the right keywords to Google).Related discussion about how all software does it wrong: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141971 |
What are typical eCPM for Google Mobile Ads? | stevenloi: Thanks john! any information on CTR as well? |
How to recruit great hackers in a remote location? | Mz: If I were in your shoes, I would try to find out what gets people to go live in Antarctica. Here is a super short article about life as a "Polie":
http://www.worldhum.com/travel-blog/item/life_as_a_polie_at_...And I would do some web surfing about The Mojave Desert and Barstow California. I lived on NTC for a while. The High Desert and Barstow had some phenomenal info on the web at that time about all of it's "assets": Natural beauty, solitude, etc (ie it's remote and there's virtually no sign of civilization). It used to crack me up. Funny personal anecdote: My spouse tried to get out of going there because he was sure I would divorce him over it. Then we (the whole family) loved the place and tried to extend our stay. :-DYou need to figure out what would motivate someone to go where you are and you need to figure out where to look for people with that type of motive. I would work on developing that understanding by looking at similar examples elsewhere as best I could. |
"Basic SEO"? | joshklein: Search engine optimization is about (1) some basic technical steps that most standards-complaint developers understand, and (2) making your website worth caring about so people WANT to link to it. At least, that's the non-sleazy kind of search engine optimization.The magic spell you're referring to is just that; a magic spell. The reality is that these people make hundreds, if not thousands of these "niche sites", and 1 in 100 is marginally successfully. They do it at such volume and with such an efficient system of rolling out template websites with useless filth the internet doesn't need that they can turn a profit.But their real profit comes from selling their system, using select stories like the ones you've heard, or generating a month or two of profits and then flipping the website to another owner. Unfortunately, these websites rarely maintain said profit.The real question you have to ask is whether you would rather make an average of $5 per month off of 200 websites, or $1000 per month off of 1 website.For a technical person, there's no doubt that the 1 website is the "easier" road, and it ain't easy. But 200 websites making $5/month ain't easy either. The people doing so have an extensive and intricate understanding of internet marketing sleazeball tricks, the same way many technically-oriented hackers here know their craft inside and out (the good and the bad).Still, there ARE some quick things you can do to optimize your pages and create your own “link neighborhood” when you launch a fresh site. Real success comes from really making something HUMAN BEINGS want to visit... but these things will jump-start you once you have that material.1. Pick a domain name that matches your primary keyword.2. Get other important keywords into the secondary page URLs using mod rewrite (or a platform that supports it, like Wordpress).3. Make sure every page has a unique title and H1 tag that matches your primary keyword objectives for that page.4. Make sure the homepage links to most, if not all, other pages (at least to start).5. Make sure every page links back to the homepage and many other secondary pages using appropriate anchor text.6. Register on every social media site that makes sense for you (using this list). Include a link to the site in your profile. It helps if the username you choose is a primary keyword.7. Link the social media profiles to each other where applicable. Fill them out as fully as possible.8. Actually use the social networks. More activity will create more pages of content with more links to the profiles, in turn passing more “juice” to your website.9. Claim your site using Google Webmaster Tools. Submit your sitemap (preferably one that is automatically updated).10. Do a Google Search for every one of your top keywords. Figure out how to get a link from any site showing in the top 20 results.11. Do not under any circumstance pay someone for a link. Do not offer or accept offers to trade links.12. Avoid linking out to shady websites of any kind.13. Study the keywords your competitors target (if they use meta-keywords like bozos, you can just lift those from the source).14. Write a blog, or find some other way to continually add new content. This adds to the content you have indexed, but is also another opportunity for links. Long term strategy right here.15. Build a Twitter client, wordpress theme, or something else that people will link to and use with persistent links to whatever you decide is in the by line.Follow these tips and you’ll end up with a few hundred links to your site. That should get you indexed and off to a start, but its no replacement for the real work of being worth caring about. |
How much is a link to my app worth? | tbgvi: Agree with the others, buying links isn't worth it. Google will eventually catch on and devalue it, so it's a waste in the end.Focus on sites/bloggers where your potential users are. The most useful links are the one's that actually drive traffic directly to your site that end up converting.I listen to/trust Rand from SEOmoz on SEO issues, here's his thoughts about paid links:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/our-stance-on-paid-links-link-ads |
"Basic SEO"? | eurokc98: I am surprised no one has mentioned this yet: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-s...Google recently published an internal SEO audit. The report is more or less a blueprint of what you should follow on an on-site level with your own site and I would have to imagine that was the intent. |
How to recruit great hackers in a remote location? | setori88: I would love to move out there as long as there is a powerful internet connection and easy access to vegetarian food. Though I'm out in Hong Kong ;) How about simply telecommuting - if it is software development. |
HELP suggest how to empower poor village kids with CS/IT | pook: Have you read about the Hole In the Wall project? http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htmI'd suggest a similar model for education. If this is to be within a school you don't need such an emphasis on durability, so you have much more options for UI(the original lacked a keyboard). Definitely include a Hacketyhack(Ruby) environment, several typing games, etc.You will probably find that the children will explore and suggest far more interesting avenues than you will initially consider. As long as they've got a flexible starting point (Edubuntu + a good selection of webapps and tutorials pre-bookmarked) you are bound to get results.edit: please please do not include BASIC. Ruby or Python are far more useful as educational languages. Not only are they far more useful and educational, but I guarantee the children will surprise you with innovation you simply cannot get from BASIC. |
"Basic SEO"? | javahava: There a few automated tools that can help you analyze your site for potential SEO mistakes - this is one I've made which can hopefully help:http://www.seositecheckup.com |
How to recruit great hackers in a remote location? | algorias: Getting to know more of the world and working in a remote location close to nature are actually huge pluses for a lot of people (myself included). You just need to find those people and keep the hassle level as low as possible. Relocation assistance is important.Damn, you're making me seriously consider submitting a resume... |
How do HN comments get negative point values? | dood: From the FAQ: Why don't I see down arrows?
There are no down arrows on submissions.
They only appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold. |
Who are the best icon designers? | Chirag: Please have a look at http://www.iconarchive.com icon designer put there work on this site you'll be able to contact the authors via the site. |
How complex is image resizing? | nzmsv: For a project in first year uni, I implemented nearest neighbour, bilinear, bicubic, and sinc. I remember sinc looking marginally better than bicubic, but not significantly so for most images (which is probably why Photoshop didn't implement it at the time - I don't know if it does now).How hard it is depends on what you mean by hard. Coding these algorithms took an evening or two, but I didn't know about the gamma problem until I read the link in these comments, so it is not trivial. |
How much is a link to my app worth? | coryl: Paying for backlinks is garbage, just keep pumping out your product. When you're at a stage where you can write something interesting, whip together a press release and mail a bunch of tech blogs. If you get coverage from even 1 of the big guys, theres a trickle down effect where tons of blogs will write and link to you thereafter. |
Who are the best icon designers? | taitems: Just a short list of icon designers I follow on twitter, I plan to collate this into a blog post eventually:- Sofa: http://www.madebysofa.com/- Pinvoke: http://twitter.com/pinvoke_com + http://www.pinvoke.com- ByLine Break, Midtone Design: http://www.midtonedesign.com/ + http://twitter.com/DDrDark + http://twitter.com/bylinebreak + http://bylinebreak.com/- Cocoia: http://twitter.com/Cocoia + http://www.icondesigner.net/- Louis Harboe: http://twitter.com/spiralstairs + http://www.graphicpeel.com/- Jonas Rask (retired): http://twitter.com/JonasRask + http://jonasraskdesign.com/- Mathieu White: http://twitter.com/MathieuWhite + http://mathieuwhite.com/#funtime |
HELP suggest how to empower poor village kids with CS/IT | jamram82: As someone familiar with Indian IT ecosystem, please bear in mind Indian IT system is different bit and lags behind SV. Indian IT system is pro-Microsoft rather than Linux based. Indian CS/IT education concentrates on MS Windows from lower grades itself.There are two sections of people you might face - those who need IT literacy so that they can move on with jobs like DTP, Admin Assisstant and those whose career would like to be built on computer science.For IT literacy section, familiarity with MS Windows, MS Office (or OpenOffice alternative), Internet Browsing, Accounting packages like Tally, Computer and printer hardware assembling and troubleshootingFor Computer Science section, you will still needProgramming: GWBASIC (or latest MS Simple Basic) to get them familiar with programming and their syntatic structures.
Database: SQL language based on DBASE III (or latest MySQL alternatives).Teaching programming in C,C++ and Java always helps, as most schools and companies insists them as your passphrase in your resume to be even considered for written tests (talk about idiocrazy)One another thing I faced during my career start, I could not afford any computer literature like books, magazines as it is way too expensive even for great Indian middle-class. So wherever possible, I try to sponsor computer magazines and books to local libraries and private lending libraries so my fellow citizens have better learning opportunities than me. |
"Basic SEO"? | joel_hughes: "Basic SEO" to me would be doing a good job of understanding the client's products & services during the design process and making sure these come across well in the build - especially with good URLs (eg http://www.mycompany/weoffer/service-name/ etc) plus making sure that key page website copy is written in light of the obvious keywords/phrases for their industry.If the above sounds obvious then you'd be amazed how many sites I come across which blatently ignore this - if you don't put the raw ingredients into the mix - Google aint ever gonna bake you a cake!Basic SEO (to me) is NOT:
- advanced keywords research
- advanced off site SEO tactics
- probably not keyword/time trackingJoelPs I never really class Adwords as SEOPps apologies for any typos - on my BB |
Who are the best icon designers? | az: www.iconfinder.net has collections of icons and should lead you to some designers |
For the prototype.js users -- is it worth it? | patio11: We use it at both the day job and in my business. It is clearly better than nothing. If I were starting from zero today, I'd take a very close look at JQuery, as I think the web development community is rapidly standardizing on JQuery, which means pre-made things that I want to incorporate are disproportionately written in JQuery. However, I have never been totally unable to find a Prototype moral equivalent for the types of controls I have wanted. (e.g. a color picker)Your mileage may vary, by the way, but I think it cuts about 90% of the pain out of AJAX development... leaving 90% to go. |
For the prototype.js users -- is it worth it? | bkrausz: We use both jQuery and Prototype together in our app. I love jQuery and would love to use it exclusively, but our architecture was build around Prototype's class extension capabilities, which I have to say are pretty damn convenient. Beyond the ability to make JS much more easily handle inheritance, I haven't found much benefit from it over jQuery.I'm also specifically annoyed at how it tries to modify the HTMLElement prototype, since that's not allowed in IE < 8, and caused some weird bugs for me (sure, it should be mutable everywhere, but let's be realistic: IE < 8 has a huge market share, and should have code consistency. After all, that's what JS frameworks are for, amongst other things). |
For the prototype.js users -- is it worth it? | scotty79: I think over last years jQuery won popularity contest with prototype.js and other libs. It's very handy and consistent. Lots of plugins exist that provide additional functions. |
Who are the best icon designers? | cromulent: Jon Hicks work always impresses.http://hicksdesign.co.uk/ |
Who are the best icon designers? | iconfinder: I run Iconfinder (www.iconfinder.net) and have hired many good icon designers. Please send me a mail if you would like to have a talk: martin.leblanc [at] iconfinder [dot] net |
For the prototype.js users -- is it worth it? | jmathai: If you haven't committed to a Javascript library then I'd take a look at jQuery. Every library has it's pros and cons but you'll likely find more support for jQuery than any of the others.I used to use prototype.js and once I used jQuery I never looked back.Props to prototype.js though as it was one of the first standard libs that did a really good job abstracting away the crappy parts of JS (browser deps). |
Can I sell my early stage startup? | ig1: What's the business domain ? |
For the prototype.js users -- is it worth it? | Plugawy: Depends on what are you going to do - I created quite big apps in both jQuery and Prototype.Whatever you want to do - you can do in both - it all depends on the size. I find Prototype better for big projects where you can use it's class system. It feels like Ruby as well.jQuery on the other hand is small and gets the job done, but without a plan on how to structure your code things can get really messy. |
For the prototype.js users -- is it worth it? | grayrest: Do not write your own library from scratch. It sounds a whole lot easier than it is since most of the work in writing the library isn't the actual code writing but rather getting it tested and debugged in all the variants of all the browsers. Use a library.As for which library, they provide mostly the same functionalty at the bottom but differ in the high level feature set and how they're organized. My take:* jQuery - Most popular, best for 'ajax sprinkes' apps but less great for full-on applications* prototype - Prototype hacking outside of ES5 feature backfilling is evil* mootools - The community cares a lot about their visuals but I got burned with a number of bugs caused by them taking shortcuts for size. This was 4 years ago so the kinks are probably worked out, but there are other options so meh.* yui3 - My favorite. Built around a selector api, fine grained module system, custom event based, and the UI layer is very much about progressive enhancement. The downside is that there's not a lot of community support.* sproutcore - the absolute best data layer, UI layer wants to own the page* dojo/yui2/closure - I don't like these because I think they're too heavy or too much like javaMy specific problem with jQuery is that every app over 1k lines or so tends to go spaghetti. The module/event systems in dojo and yui and the data binding in sproutcore guides you to a more modular system which makes for a more pleasant application building experience. There isn't really a technical reason you couldn't do it with jQuery but I've never run across an elegant, modular jQuery codebase. If anybody has one, I'd love to see how it's structured. |
"Basic SEO"? | stef25: "Put up a site about a profitable niche, do some basic SEO, and bam! presto! Instant $50/month!" I've done this but the 10 page site brings it a little less, about 30 - 40USD / month. No adwords, wrote the content myself, only one or two incoming links. If your niche / keywords are specific enough you'll rank in the top 5 without many problems.Keep in mind that since the content is very specific and does take some time to write (research, ...) knocking out 100 or even 10 sites like this would be quite hard work. |
Who are the best icon designers? | gte910h: http://www.virtuallnk.com/ did nice icons for a client of mine |
Review my website soundkey.com | Roridge: I often just use Google dictionary which spells the word phonetically or just plays the word to me.However, I like your idea that you can embed the sound key into something else, and have sounds which are more like audio semiotics. (audiootics?)They layout could be more compact, specifically on the browse-sounds page. Why not just put the player to the right of the word on the same row. OR hide the player all together and just have a speaker button.A future idea might be to create a clever algorithm to highlight the syllables as they heard, or the sound being played like a progress bar over the word.Good luck. |
"Basic SEO"? | rogermugs: why is it even called SEO anymore? Shouldn't it just be GO? Google Optimization? |
Review my website soundkey.com | jrnkntl: clickable: http://soundkey.comI like the idea, you should provide an API so that websites that teach languages can hook up with that.Bug: your last sample ends too early |
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