Robin Good has written a companion article, Key Factors To Achieve High Google Ranking, to the statistical information in Google Ranking Factors - SEO List .
You may also be interested in Google Adsense Tips, Tricks, and Secrets.
I just received this update today. I have taken lots of web and graphic related classes at LVS Online and have loved them. If you decide to take classes, please tell them Robin sent ya!
Registration Is Open At LVS Online - Where Learning Is Fun!
You are receiving this message because you have subscribed to the LVS Online Update List. If you no longer wish to receive these update messages, please click on the link at the bottom of this message to unsubscribe.
New courses include: Corel Painter Brush Basics, Desktop Publishing, Digital Artists Studio, MS Excel 2003, Seed Starting for Home Gardeners, Illustrator 10: Getting Your Feet Wet Class, Illustrator CS/CS2: Learning to Swim Class, Illustrator CS/CS2: Getting Your Feet Wet, PSP Scripting 1, PHP Intro, QuarkXpress Level II.
The Intro to Windows class is now FREE! Opera is now FREE for LVS students! LVS is now a Corel Training Partner!
For more information, go to http://www.lvsonline.com/update.shtml
Classes begin September 3, 2005 so head on over to LVS Online now to enroll: http://www.lvsonline.com/register.shtml
Regards,
LVS Staff
LVS Online - Where Learning Is Fun!
http://www.lvsonline.com
Digital Photography Tutorials @ Cambridge in Colour - Beautiful imagery and a lot of fundamental digital photography tips and theory. While we’re on the subject of photography, check out AutoStitch if you like to take panoramas.
LifeHack has another great resource article (you really should check this site on a regular basis or setup a Sage feed. Essential Resources for Creativity (163 techniques + 30 tips + books!).
The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art - this is a great basic drawing tutorial. The fantastic thing about it is that it only requires MS Paint which is installed on all Windows based machines.
To follow-up on some of out discussions about search engine ranking today, I came across this list Google Ranking Factors - SEO List. This shows HOT techniques, as well as, BAD techniques.
Yahoo just acquired Konfabulator Widgets. Widgets bring your favorite web content to your desktop. There are widgets for weather, traffic, stocks, newsfeeds, games, etc. For example, you may want to keep track of the mosquito conditions in the bay area, this can be done with a widget. There are fun and useful widgets for you to explore.
So you may not like the FlyAKiteOSX theme look, don’t despair! There are many themes out there for you to try out. Here are a few sites to get you started with customizing your PC’s desktop:
WinCustomize - Themes, skins, icons, and wallpapers.
Thickskinned.org - Windows skinning.
Belchfire.net - themes, icons, wallpaper, etc.
Customize.org has a variety of “skins” for various applications.
Annoyances.org has information on customizing and controlling Windows.
TweakXP.com - lots of tips for customizing Windows XP.
If you want to create your own desktops, screen savers, icons, etc. take a look at the software offerings and download.com or NoNags.
My only word of caution on some of these sites that include free themes or free downloads in general, etc. is that some of these programs may include spyware/adware, so you must be careful when you are selecting programs for download. Please be sure to read the terms of service and hidden information on web sites before you install any themes or freeware. You may also want to use Google to search for the “site name or software program name” that you are considering downloading along with the word “spyware” to see if that site’s downloads have been associated with spyware. I did this with ThemeXP.org and found a lot of info on that site and spyware that the files may contain.
I would recommend that you always have some kind of spyware protection running on your system. I am currently using SpyWare Doctor for Windows and Ad-Aware Plus.
Seven Steps to turn your PC into a Mac - David H, this is for you. 
There is also FlyAKiteOSX. I’ve installed the FlyAKiteOSX on my HP and it’s pretty cool.
SQL in 60 Seconds - A short introductory article on SQL.
Web Site Test Tools and Site Management Tools - Listed are more than 290 tools. You may want to bookmark this site for future reference.
Niceforms - Ummmm, these do look nice! This technique for styling forms utilizes JavaScript and CSS.
Would you like to easily find out what colors are used on a web site. I Like Your Colors allows you to extract colors used on a web site. Simply enter the URL of the site and your colors are displayed.
Xmail Hard Drive - Turn your Gmail Email account into an onlin hard drive for free. A good way to transfer large image files between home and school. Let me know if you don’t already have a Gmail account.
Google Maps - Have you used Google Maps yet? If you haven’t, be sure to look at the satellite maps. There are all kinds of new services coming out that use the Google mapping technology. Try doing a search for “google maps” to see all of the cool new services.
CSS Selectors: a Visual Guide for Absolute Beginners - a short CSS Selector tutorial. Be sure to look at some of the CSS experiments in the sidebar of Literary Moose.
Bookmarklets - free tools for power surfing - David has mentioned Bookmarklets, small pieces of JavaScript that extend the capabilitis of Internet Explorer and Netscape. Bookmarklets is another repository and it includes a simple description of what Bookmarklets are. Yourhtmlsource.com and SubSimple also have a variety of bookmarklets for you to try out. WebReference.com has an article on how to create your own bookmarklets.
I love these Marketing Translation Mistakes.
Well, in case you didn’t hear the news in class, Rob and I put in an offer on a house yesterday morning and the offer has been accepted. 
You can see pictures of the new house here. We are hoping to close escrow by 8/16 and move in starting 8/20.
Make Your Site Mobile Friendly in Two Minutes. Really, just two minutes!
Here is an email icon generator, create an email icon for your own web page.
gOffice - a browser-based online word processor and desktop publishing program that generates PDF files. With the free account you can save up to 100 PDF documents online; you can sign up for a premium account for just $1.00/month. This is really pretty awesome; you can create word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and desktop publishing documents. This site is very new and still in “beta”, so there are a lot of planned features that haven’t been implemented yet and are not publicly available. If you don’t have MS Office at home or you need to be able to access “Office” features when you’re in a public setting this is the site for you. When you’re working in the word processing feature there are a variety of predesigned letterheads that you can use. Once this site is done, wow!
If you have every generated an HTML document with Microsoft Word and then looked at the source code you know that there is a lot of cruddy code. Textism offers an online Word HTML Cleaner.
Step-by-step instructions on how to make RSS Feeds. RSS Feeds are frequently used with blogs, news sites, and other frequently updated sites. You can learn more about RSS in this article on Sage, RSS, and other Goodies.
Marcia and I worked to remove a site from the Google index in a hurry. We used the instructions published on Google’s site and they worked and worked pretty quickly. I just came across this article on Removing Your Materials from Google and I thought you might want to bookmark it in case you ever have to remove a site from the Google index.
I found the Extensions Mirror, a forum with Mozilla (Firefox) extensions. You can access these extensions before we update Firefox.
Enjoy the weekend!
Digital Web Magazine has a good article on Architecting CSS. This article discusses the need for separate CSS files to control different structural areas of a site. There is also an article on Strategies for CSS Switching, which may be of interest to some of the more advanced students (Susan).
How about some more “essential” bookmarks for web developers.
This is very interesting and you may find it helpful when developing logos for web sites. LogoYes has Do-it-Yourself logos for $99.00. This is a Flash based site where you choose the mood of your logo (High-Tech, Bold, Flair), the industry that you’re creating a logo for, and the symbol or type of image. The site will suggest fonts to use with the image and allow you to input your company name. From there you determine your layout, rotation, and colors. After creating your desired logo, you can then click to buy the logo for $99. I think this is great for getting ideas for logos and for people who have a difficult time with graphic applications.
A summer get together in in the planning stages. This will be a BBQ/Pool party at Georgia’s house. We will post more information in the Stay in Touch section of the class forum. Please spread the word to former students that you are still in contact with so they can attend. If you give them the link to the forum they will be able to monitor the latest info.
The Online Journalism Review has a Blog software comparison chart that you may find useful if you want to create your own online blog or web journal. This chart accompanies the article “Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?”.
I mentioned Uzeful.org last week, in addition to their cool free goodies, they have a list of online generators which will generate fun and sometimes useful text and images.
Well, I moved all of my domains this weekend. I ended up getting a reseller plan; it was cheaper to host all of my domains and Rob’s with a reseller plan than via a regular account. I decided to use CRI Hosting because I had a really positive experience with their support when we moved the Hermit Crab Association.
I went with the Bronze reseller plan. While I don’t have any desire to resell domain space, it actually ends up being about $15 cheaper to host all of my domains per month. With this plan I have Web Host Manager (WHM - Gives me the ability to setup new hosting packages/domain accounts and do account management), CPanel which allows me to manage individual domains (mail, site statistics, subdomains, MySQL, manage files, and much, much more), and Fantastico which allows me to do one click installations of most of the popular open source web programs.
The support at CRI has been excellent. As I mentioned in previous posts and in class, moving the Hermit Crab Association was a huge project. CRI moved the database for us and ensured that the site worked. Their setup fees (if you want them to move your site for you) are just $25, well worth it in our case. I had CRI move all of the MySQL databases that I use to manage my various sites and I moved the individual files. All went well for the most part, the only hitch that I had was with my Movable Type recipe blog - this required a fresh install. CRI checked in with me throughout the weekend to ensure that the move was going well and to see if they could be of support. I was quite pleased.
CRI Hosting offers an educational plan that you all qualify for. You will need to put in a referral code, which I will give you in class, to activate the plan. While this plan only offers 10MB of space, the plan will give you an opportunity to check out CPanel and you can also use this plan with a domain name. Pretty cool! It costs $20.00 to setup the plan, but the site is yours for a year.
If you take a look at CRI’s regular hosting plans you will see that they are very affordable (the cheapest plan is $4.95/mo). Once you’re working and ready to upgrade your account to a paid hosting account it will be easy to do. These “educational” plans will work for one year from sign-up.