September 15, 2004

• hmmm, i guess i'm a monkey. and i'm a senior in h.s. and i like clean, profanity-free music. yep. And did you read the bit where is says you don't self-link? nope.
• I thought we were past the spat of self-linkings
• whoa whoa, i did read that part, very carefully actually, and it seemed like it basically just didn't want people to post links up on the front page. and then i did a search for promotion and found nothing anywhere near relevant to site promotions, so i decided that to post a curious george about site promotions was legitamate. perhaps i did stretch it a bit by posting my link inside the read more, though, and if it's possible to have the link removed whoever runs can certainly do so.
• actually, just to reiterate, if anyone really has a problem with this post, they can certainly delete it. i don't want to cause a rumble. but i truly am curious about promotion tools out there.
• Is the content on that page really one big image? I mean, what tool would you even use to do that? Did you take a screen capture of MS Word? I don't mean to sound like a jerk here; my mind is boggled in the most sincere way possible.
• huh, that is mind boggling. it's not supposed to be one big image. there's supposed to be links... it wasn't like that before... hmm. now it only works in internet explorer... weird. i'm using microsoft publisher and it's always worked until now.
• aha, it's fixed now. not one big image :) apparently you can't group many different things together.
• Hmm? His page looks better than mine did when I was in high school. Well, sort of. But at least I made awesome-r use of the {blink} tag. And speedo, I think you just answered your own question: spam every blog, every IRC chatroom (I'm looking at you, too, Grod), and every newsgroup you can find. Failing any of that, read up on pagerank, if that is important to you... And make sure your site is w3 compliant/compatible/whatnot. The w3 should have plenty of stuff for you to read... and stuff.
• Self-link removed. Don't do it again, please. And the FAQ is plenty clear on self-linking.
• I'm no expert, but I think "spam every blog" (didn't Julie Andrews sing that... no, that was just a nightmare) requires some qualification. You need to find people who might actually be interested: (a) because if they're not, you probably won't get more than about two hits out of it anyway, and (b) what's the point of having a thousand people visit the site if they all just curse you for wasting their time? Oh and (c) there's not much value in getting a mention from a site which itself only gets three visitors a month. Oh and surely page rank is important? There is some useful advice here. The tools offered are not that exciting, but just having lists of major search engines and indices is quite handy.
• YOU FOOL! THIS IS TEH INTARWEB, YOU CAN'T GO AROUND LINKING TO STUFF!!!!!1!1
• U CANT JUST GO PSOTING YR STUFF 2D FRUNT PAGE, KTHX! (Hi, speedomansam!)
• Oh my god, it's like Satan joined AOL.
• plegmund: i was kidding about the spam bit. don't ever take me seriously again, please. ;)
• Sorry, Wedge. My brain was on a coffee break.
• Hi, Speedomansam--just to answer your question... See a detailed discussion on a Certain Other Site here and here. The general summary of those two threads seems to be, "Create a really good and distinctive websight, and an audience will take care of itself."
• best advice i ever took: 1. validate HTML. 2. validate CSS. 3. validate links. 4. validate accessibility. remember also that search engines can only rank you based on content. no content, no rankings. pictures of text will not be read or ranked. linkfarms will not be ranked highly if at all. flash is quite often unsearchable and therefore won't help. pdfs can be searched, but the average user will hate you for forcing them to use it if you don't have a damn good reason. java apps generally suck, as they force the user to load an operating system inside their operating system just to view what quite often is a meaningless and useless shiny thing of little value. there's very, very little use for java that i've ever seen that couldn't easily be duplicated using flash or CSS. flash or java navigation menus are the idiot's way of making the web shiny, don't fall into the trap. you will improve your rank if you can get quality links to your website. quality means "other high ranked pages link to me", not "everyone and their brother link to me". low-quality incoming links don't help much, and the link-in to link-out ratio is something to consider as well - don't be totally insulated from the outside, but too many outgoing links makes you look like a linkfarm, and will hurt your ranking. weblogs using popular free tools like blogger can help your link-in ratio if you have good stuff to post and do it regularly - the community will find you if you're worth looking at. finally, test, test, test. when building a website i generally test using firefox, mozilla (current builds), IE6, opera 7, webTV browser, netscape 4, and netscape 1 on windows. when i have access i test again with mozilla, safari, and IE5 on mac OS. occasionally i test with mozilla or Kmelion on linux (whenever i get around to booting my server to GUI). if it's something other than my personal site, i also fire up lynx to check text browsing. then again i'm shooting for more "everyone can read my content" than "this is a kewl site with cutting edge stuff". as long as the content is there, ready to be seen, you can pretty it up with as much CSS as you want - but make sure it fails gracefully in older browsers or text browsers. i was up there in search rank on google; going full-on standards compliant bumped me to the top of the list. if you start out compliant and have good content, you'll rise to the top faster. good luck.
• oh, and ALA is a great place to start looking for those above-mentioned "pretty it up with CSS" items. go nuts dude, they've got some great stuff there free for the taking. bluerobot and glish also have some good standards-compliant CSS layouts you can futz with too. burn through the links on the ALA sidebar for more sweet webby goodness.
• ah christ i screwed up the link. see above section in part 1 on "testing prior to posting". damn.
• oh damn. i've turned into some sort of sad, little online lawn nazi
• Is that anything like a lawn skinhead?
• aside from self-link issues. Which I would NEVER condone, learn how to do your own code. Notepad is your friend! Technical issues aside, the best way to get traffic, is to have content that people want to read. My blog isn't just a blog. I don't use it for talking about how my day went. There are people that do that, and I think that is cool and all, that just ain't my thing. My Blog is about my research (wow, who knew self linking could be so tiring?). I try to update it at least once a week. I give people a reason to come there and a reason to come back if they are interested in the topic. In the beginning I was lucky to get 10 hits a day, but I've been at it for more than two years and now I get over 500 hits a day, whether I update on that day or not. So it takes time. The bigger gaming blogs still don't link to me, but screw 'em. If you write enough, you will show up on key words. I'm amazed at the search terms people use to find my page. So, in summary, Give people a reason to come and they will.
• happy belated birthday jccalhoun.
• You could always get a really snazzy hit counter - that seems to work. Of course, having content that people really like is the best promotion. If you host MP3's, people will find you through the alta-vista music search. Have a very clear title and describe what the site is about using the most important words you think people would use to search for a site like yours. And definately stick to pure html. If you don't know how to write HTML, something like Netscape Composer is not great, but free - if you have the access or money to buy something like Dreamweaver, that is even better. But you will still need to understand HTML concepts to use a webdesign program well, even if you don't know the HTML yourself. Does anyone know how google trawls work? Is there stuff they don't trawl? How often is google updated?
• Fark classified ad (and for 400 more bucks your site can be on the front page)
• This thread, for the most part, I think, exemplfies the true simian spirit. In many other forums (one in particular comes to mind), the poster would simply have been savagely gutted amid howls of sanctimonious derision. Granted, a certain amount of poo was in order but what's a little flinging among friends? I'm impressed with the generosity of spirit that was shown here, offering genuine advice that may be useful to all. Bananas to Mr. Frogs et al.