Opera Mobile 9.5 is SLICK!

I’ve been playing with the new Beta version of Opera Mobile 9.5 for a few days now, and I must say, it is just plain COOL!

For all you iPhone geeks out there, this one’s not for you, thank goodness. At least us Windows Mobile (and other mobile OS owners other than the iPhone) have something you don’t.

So, what do I like about the new version of Opera Mobile?

Cool Opera Mobile 9.5 features

• It’s REALLY quick and extremely responsive
• It looks good. Remember, “pretty” is a feature for me
• It’s REALLY easy to use and move around in
• It seems to render web pages as well as a desktop browser in most instances. (The Google AdSense site is a problem that only Opera Mini seems capable of overcoming and logging into)
• Can use AJAX in most cases
• Browser URL auto complete
• The uploading and downloading of files works extremely well.

Here’s a video I created so that you get a (VERY rough) idea of what Opera Mobile 9.5 looks like.

Please excuse the quality. The video capture software I used for my HTC TYTN II (MyMobile) seems to speed things up quite drastically. And Windows Movie Maker widened the video, so it’s not in the correct proportions.

Anyway, enough excuses, watch this and let me know what you think

Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta Video

What don’t I like about Opera Mobile 9.5

The main thing I don’t like about how this new version of Opera Mobile works is the scrolling of pages. I think it’s something that Opera Mobile has always done, and something that Internet Explorer Mobile finally changed in WM 6.1.

When you scroll down a page, it only scrolls down half a page. This REALLY bugs me, especially when reading a page with a lot of text, because after scrolling down half a page, my eyes have to hunt for the line where I left off before scrolling down.

I’m not sure if it’s a “feature” I’m supposed to get used, but proper scrolling was one of the best (and for me, most noticeable) features in Opera Mini.

Final Thoughts about this browser

Overall though, I REALLY like this browser, and recommend it to everybody. I can’t wait for the final version as I’m sure it will be even better than the beta.

Something Interesting for Week 5 of 2008

Ask.com and your custom skin

I’ve mentioned before that I think Ask.com has the nicest UI out of all the Search Engines, and now you can make it look a whole lot better.

Well, you could if you had skills… You can now “skin” your personal version of Ask.com by uploading a photo and using it as a sort of “desktop background” to Ask’s search home page.

Here are a couple of examples using photos that I took:

I took this photo of an Elephant in the Kruger Park last year. One of my favourite photos of all time.

A photo of Basil Flowes growing in my herb garden… I’m quite proud of this one as well…

Thanks to InsideGoogle for this

XKCD Comic for geeks

XKCD. A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language

Well, that’s what they call it. I prefer to call it by what it really is.

XKCD. A comic for geeks.

I’ve been reading this comic strip religiously for about 3 months now. The humour is super dry, yet hilarious. Here’s a strip from this week:

Just a note: I use vi. That’s what REAL programmers use

Make a mobile friendly version of your webpage

Digital Inspiration have a cool post on making a mobile version of your blog with Google Reade.

I’m a GREAT fan of Google Reader, as I read about 30-100 blog posts a day, depending on how long it takes me to eat breakfast and lunch… I REALLY appreciate the mobile version of Google Reader as that’s how I get a lot of my blog reading done, because I’m not always in front of a computer (believe it or not)….

Found via GoogleTutor

Get 12 months advertising and only pay for 6

Lee Dodd stumbled on an interesting take on calculating advertising rates.

It seems that Red River Moms has a media kit for their website (available here: http://www.redrivermoms.com/media/RedRiverMoms_Sales_Brochure.pdf) that gives cheaper rates for a 12 month package than it does for the 6 months package.

I wonder if that was intentional, making people get 12 months advertising because they thought they were scoring!

WordPress SEO plugins

If you use WordPress for blogging, then Vinny Lingham has an interesting post for you to go read entitled “WordPress SEO Plugins“.

I’ve always been thinking of coding a plugin similar to what Vinny says “Landing Pages” does, so it’s a great find if it does what I need. Going to check it out when I get a chance…

Spying on your visitors

I’m sure by now you’ve heard of the new version of Performancing Metrics. It’s a completely revamped statistics tool with a few cool new features. When I say revamped, I mean, “not Performancing Metrics but rather GetClicky”.

For me, the best feature of this statistics tool is the “Spy” feature. This enables you to watch what is happening on your site practically as it happens in a cool AJAXy way. I wouldn’t recommend signing up for this if you monitor your statistics at work because I tend to find myself just sitting and watching where visitors are coming from and what they are clicking on after they arrive.

But, if you HAVEN’T signed up, go get your free trial and give it a go.

And set the voyeur in you free!

This post is an “almost” sponsored post by Performancing Metrics. If it works out, I might just be getting a 1 year free upgrade to the Pro package. Even though I’ve been raving about Performancing Metrics for over a year (on another blog)…

Register .co.za domains

Have you ever done a search for register .co.za domains in Google? I would think that you’ve only done this if you live in South Africa.

But I recently wanted to see how much it would cost to register a .co.za domain without taking out the hosting package that normally goes along with the domain registration. So I did the above search in Google and checked out about 10 of the paid results and organic results, and here’s the ASTOUNDING results:

www.africaregistry.com – $35 (about R250)
www.registrations.co.za – R200 (They claim Telkom charges R419)
www.godomains.com.au – AU $139.95 (about R700!!!)
www.afrihost.com – R300
www.names.co.za – R399

Now I don’t know about you, but when you can get a .com domain for about $10 (around R70), i think the above prices are a bit of a rip-off. Of course, there are cheaper places, like the service provider I’m using to host this site (www.anno.co.za). They only charge R70 to register a .co.za domain, and of course, it’s free if you take out a hosting package with them.

Yes, the above link is an affiliate link, which will get you a 10% discount on a hosting package, and no, this post isn’t just a plug for my hosting provider. But, if you ARE looking for a website host for your South African site (or even .com and other international domains), I FULLY recommend them. Their service is UNBELIEVABLE! And you can tell them I said so…

List building – 1 way money

Have any of you ever subscribed to a mailing list hoping to learn something new? With all the blogs I read, you’d think that I wouldn’t find the time to even WANT to try and read emails as well. But I enjoy absorbing as much info as possible, in the hope that sometime in the (not too distant) future I manage to spew it all out at once in some amazing money making idea that just works and makes me rich overnight.

Until then, I’m stuck with learning. And reading.

But COME ON!!! The only reason these people are rich is because they have these lists, and manage to sell a product through their affiliate link every now and again. Granted, it’s not easy getting a mailing list of 100,000 people, but if just 1000 of them buy 1 of their products EVERY week, (with sometimes up to 3 “Special, one time deals” a week), these guys are ROLLING in it.

Like I said, it’s not easy getting a list this size of people gullible enough to buy. But let me show you how embarrassing their e-mails sound. Here are 5 excerpts from 5 DIFFERENT mails I received from Eric Rockefeller in the last 4 days:

You probably already know that list building is one
of the most important things you can learn online..

It can make you a super affiliate overnight! You can
literally create cash on demand…
…
My good friend Tim Brocklehurst has just released
his secret list building weapon and it will practically
build your list for you on autopilot.
…
P.P.S. This is the coolest listbuilding software I’ve
seen in a while, check it out and you’ll see why.

Some gurus are steaming they can’t figure out why I am
outselling them…Easy, I’m not greedy like they are…
…
P.S. Don’t miss out on this one. Stop your search!
You want a job killing income? This is all you need.
…
P.P.S. With my bonus you can’t lose {!firstname_fix}
Join all the other smart people that have purchased
through me before it’s too late. Skip to it now…

And don’t get sucked in to buying because of some idiot
bonuses that make no sense at all I won’t name anyone
but 300,000 person spammer lists come on people.
…
P.P.S. If you are interested in cleaning up with PPC in affiliate
marketing this tool and the instrumental coaching involved
will get you there.

I am playing a dirty trick on the Rich Jerk but hey I learned it from him,
so he can’t be that mad at me. IF you are ready to finally become
a super affiliate find out what my super bonus is here:
…
P.P.S. Be ready! Only 500 coveted spots and they will be snatched
up in the first few hours I bet…

That is usually why new PPC affiliate marketers fail, they throw in a huge
list of keywords and don’t know which ones make them money and which
ones cost them money.

Needless to say, I made over 5000.00$ last week with Google Adwords
in affiliate marketing using the XRAY and I am excited as hell…

Because I didn’t even work that hard doing it…
…
I will set up a special opt in page tommorrow for those of my subscribers
that are serious about making money in affiliate marketing.
…
(hint: I have a way to make it affordable for you! Pay attention, this bonus
will be better than anything anyone else will offer I can guarantee.
Sshhh that’s all I am saying.)

TOTAL KNOWLEDGE GAINED IN 4 DAYS: ZILCH! NADA! ZERO!

So, why subscribe? No disrespect to Eric Rockefeller as he’s obviously good at what he does, but I do live and hope that one day he will part with information, instead of ANOTHER affiliate link to a new and “highly recommended” product.

But I just HAD to get this off my chest. If you’ve read this far, thanks for “listening”.

Strange referrals and searches

Sometimes, the best thing about having a website is being able to see what people are actually looking for by seeing how they arrived at your site, and by seeing what they search for when they’re ON your site.

For example, today I had a referral from Google with the following search term:

“all fat woman should be killed”

I’m assuming Google ranked me for this phrase due to my previous post “2 Sides to every story“, but it’s still strange to see somebody searching for that…

Another strange statistic, is somebody who searched for “useful statistics” in Google, and landed on my site. This time it’s because of my post “HitTail – a useful statistics service“.

That’s all fine and dandy, but once they landed on my site, they then did a search for “shark attack statistics“.

Am I missing something?

How about you? Any strange referrals?

10 Free and useful webmaster tools

Lee Dodd has written a post titled “10 Ways to Become a More Efficient Webmaster” where he shares 10 free tools to help you “work smarter and not harder”.

My favourite tools in his list are:

- The “Keyword Typo Generator” which is great for your PPC campaigns
- The “SEO Firefox Plugin“, which I’ve been using for a while now, and I think is probably the 4th most used FireFox extension I have.
- The “Search Engine Rankings Tracker“.

To add my own list of favourite free webmaster tools:

FireBug

This let’s you edit CSS and HTML on the fly, which is a MAJOR help when trying to test and debug your blogging (or other) template. Here are some of the features:

• Inspect and edit HTML
• Tweak CSS to perfection on the fly, without having to save and reload a webpage
• Visualize CSS metrics and see how much screen real estate something is taking
• Monitor network activity and see what files are causing your page to load slowly
• Debug and profile JavaScript allowing you to break code and inspect values
• Explore the DOM
• Logging for JavaScript

A DEFINITE must.

DigitalPoint Keyword Tracker

Similar to the EarnersForum Keyword Tracker above, but it’s the one I’ve been using for about a year, so I know it, and use it OFTEN.

—

Found via ProBlogger’s “10 Tools for More Efficient Webmastering“

Who to target for online Advertising

If SEO is baking a cake, my head has been making cookies for a couple of months now.

A few months ago a colleague of mine said he was sitting with his mother while she was using Google and realised that when Google returned the search results, instead of clicking on one of the results, she would click on an Ad on the right. She did this time after time. It turns out that she didn’t know the difference between advertising and search results.

That was something good to know if you’re into the whole AdSense thing… The cookie had been put in the oven.

2 weeks ago, Google added cream to my cookie. They started ranking me really well on my one sites for 2 different terms. The first term tended to bring a lot of users who appeared to be non-internet users, whereas the other visitors were people who seemed to be searching for something more specific, and seemed to know what they were looking for. I would say that 30% of the non-internet users were leaving my site via an AdSense ad, whereas only 5% of the other visitors used an Ad as an exit point.

For me this was a type of confirmation on the whole “who to target” idea, and helps me know what type of topics to talk about if I want more AdSense exiters.

Rand’s article “Online Advertising Needs to Evolve” put the cherry on the top of my cookie. He says it best in his article:

- The more you use the web, the more immune you are to advertising
- AdSense (and YPN) prey on the naivete of users – savvy visitors don’t click these

My final thoughts: I’m starting to realise that South African traffic is ideal for AdSense as most visitors have not grown Ad-Blind yet, and I don’t have as much competition JUST yet, especially in my niche which is targeting moms and dads who still need help programming VCRs. Well, Tivo’s and PVRs at least.

HitTail – a useful statistics service

HitTail is a cool statistics service with a slight difference. They don’t track visitors once they arrive on your site, they only track the source of visitors that have arrived via a search engine, and then monitor what keywords the visitor searched for… Why is this beneficial? Well, this all relates to the Long Tail theory, where (in THIS instance) the least popular keywords actually make up most of your referrers.

Here’s an explanation I gave my wife on the Long Tail. Amazon.com, as we all know, sells a LOT of books. Obviously, there are the books like Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” which sell in the 1000’s. Lets say that in any given day they sell 100 copies. And, let’s say there are a few other books by popular authors like John Grisham and Frederick Forsyth (can you tell what books I read?).

Amazon also “stocks” books that are not so popular and only sell 1 copy a day.

The Long Tail theory roughly says that, even though these big seller books sell 1000’s a day, the sum of all those “1 copy a day” books totals a lot more than the popular books. And, I’ve seen a lot of mentions of there being an 80/20 rule, where the Long Tail consists of 80% of the total.

Ok, so now you’ve read my attempt at explaining the Long Tail theory, here’s how HitTail fits into all this. If you have a site that is “optimised” for a few major keywords, you might be getting a decent amount of traffic from them, but you probably also get visitors for terms or phrases you may mention somewhere on your site. You might be lucky to get this visitor because they’ve gone past the first 20 or 30 results on Google and thought your site seemed the most likely result they needed. HitTail has the ability to point out what those search terms are, so that you can then focus on writing an article or 2 about each of those terms. This might cause you to rank higher in Google for those terms, and therefore bring you more traffic.

I’ve just started using HitTail on one of my blogs, and here are some of the really interesting terms I’ve found that I’m receiving visitors for and HitTail is suggesting I write articles for:

“girl party ideas”
“stylish kitchen”
“velvet paint”
“home deco”
“bright pink bedroom ideas”

Believe it or not, it’s not a sex site. So, using these terms, I can try and gain more traffic. It might not be much, but if I double the number of visitors for these terms, I’m adding to the overall number of visitors to my site.

Very useful. So, I recommend that you go check them out at www.hittail.com. I also recommend that you read this blog post by the HitTail creator entitled “HitTail Vs. Digg – Which Works Better to Drive Traffic?“. It might be useful if you have a site that is just starting out and are keen to try HitTail.

By the way, I’d love it if you could post a few comments below on some of the strangest search terms that people have used to land on your site. I’m always up for a laugh.

Cool Desktop Wallpaper from NetBeans

If you’re looking for some abstract wallpaper for your desktop, go take a look at the NetBeans Evangelism Collateral page.

Personally, these are perfect wallpapers as they don’t depict anything in particular, so I don’t really notice that it’s the same thing, day after day after day. It’s the same thing with all the funky new ringtones with songs. They might be really cool songs, but if you hear them on the radio more than 3 times a day for a month, you’d DEFINITELY get sick of them. So why would you want to listen to the same 15 seconds of the same song, 10 times a day!

Of course, if you’d like to make your own ringtones from your MP3s, here’s a little tutorial I wrote:

Creating your free ringtones

The only software you’ll need is “Windows Movie Maker“, which you probably have installed on your pc already if you’re running Windows XP.

Anyway, enough plugging for today. Go download some cool wallpapers…