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SEO, for so many reasons

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Reason number {insert bizarrely obscure number here for comic effect}. Branding is highly important, but most of your site’s traffic likely comes from organic search (visitors stumble across you after searching Google, or Bing) and while you might have a fantastic scheme for converting them into customers, unless they can find you in the first place, your scheme means nothing.

Yes, branded search converts at a higher rate since the visitor was looking for you, but what power does non-branded organic search have beyond basic non-branded keyword filtered conversion reporting?

Once again, we step further into analytics and take a look at what wasn’t so apparent on the surface of keyword referral tracking. Look at the Multi-Channel Funnel section of Google Analytics. By assessing the top channel groupings assisting each other to conversions you may quickly see a picture such as this:

via How to Prove the Value of SEO in 10 Minutes – Search Engine Watch (#SEW).

Get people to your site. Make sure they can find you. Otherwise you may as well stick with an advert in the Yellow Pages. (For anyone under 25, the Yellow Pages was a brick like tome made up of thousands of pieces of yellow paper, containing adverts for businesses. And using it SUCKED).

Piracy, drones and dreaming.

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As controversial as they may be, I have to hand it to The Pirate Bay, they certainly keep themselves at the forefront of technology.

Our data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary. Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into a deadlock if not used for 8 hours.

All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing. The site that you’re at will still be here, for as long as we want it to. Only in a higher form of being. A reality to us. A ghost to those who wish to harm us.

via The Pirate Bay – The galaxy’s most resilient bittorrent site.

It used to be said that the pornography industry drove innovation, but I would say for the past few years it’s been the file sharers.

The Pirate bay have looked into hosting their sites on a series of flying drones, that operate over international waters. It sounds incredible (in the, “that must be made up, it’s too incredible” sense of the word), but it’s quite achievable. In fact, they wouldn’t even be the first to do it.

I’ve longed imagined a distributed form of web server, which is a step beyond even what they’re doing here–where the web server software doesn’t even live on one computer, but is shared around the world.

On the one hand that seems inconceivable to most people right now. And while what they’re doing may be questionable at best, I choose to keep thinking the undo-able can be done, I think with the flying drones, and the metaphors for deity.

If we stop dreaming, we stop creating.

Let’s make stuff instead.

Easily search and replace throughout a (smallish) MySQL database

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Every now and then I need to search through an entire MySQL database, to change a word, term, URL, or some other string.

Rather than searching through the entire database to make the change, I just use phpMyAdmin to export the whole thing as an .sql file, which is of course just plain text.

Open it in a text editor, find and replace in there, then re-upload to phpMyAdmin.

In short, I get it done easily in a bout 45 seconds without having to worry about a typo in an SQL query destroying my data.

Facebook’s Spotify privacy settings, for dummies

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I listen to a LOT of music. It’s not often you’ll see me without a pair of headphones on (which might have something to do with why I’ve got a hearing test this afternoon!).

Some of it is undeniably wonderful, and some of my tastes…well…let’s just say it’s not often that I give out my last.fm profile.

I’m also big on sharing, and like to share playlists or tracks with friends on Facebook, but found whenever I did they were coming up with the “only me” privacy setting, which is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

With Facebook’s seemingly fortnightly changes to it’s privacy management, it’s not always obvious where you fix something like that.

Here is exactly how you fix precisely that:

How to Edit Facebook’s Spotify Privacy Settings – For Dummies.

Donate monthly via Paypal, and HTML

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BINGO! This is just what I needed tonight. I was starting to create a PHP solution that would enable me to set up monthly donations (rather than a subscription) to Paypal.

But then I thought, “Paypal must have a more elegant solution for this, and if not more elegant, than certainly simpler”.

And while they didn’t, a quick Google search revealed someone else had. In HTML.

Monthly Donations Button | PayPal.

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