March 5th, 2010
Google has been providing personalized search results for years, and changed its tactics often. Their latest application will replace SearchWiki in favor of adding a "star" to a search result you want to see up top of your search results in the future.
According to Google, it’s a new search feature that is rolling out now, but should be available to everyone in the next few days, . When it becomes available, any result you click to star is added to your Google Bookmarks, Google Toolbar, and any searches you do in and around that topic in the future. So if you star your local favorite coffee spot, expect to see it in a mini-box up top when you search for "coffee" in the future. SearchWiki results will stick around for those with Google accounts.
How will this affect SEO? It’s too early to tell but I bet google will track how many people are starring a website and use that weight to rank that site better. It will give the site more importance over others if more people want to see it at the top of their results. I also wonder how SEO companies will take advantage of this tool.
Tags: google, Search Wiki, SEO
Posted in SEO, google | No Comments »
December 7th, 2009
So today I stumbled across a new way to search the web.
Google has developed a way for me to take a picture of an object which they will analyze. Once they are done it will provide me search results based on the image! This is an amazing feature and I think will drive the search market even more to mobile phones. Now I can drive by a store, take its photo and get all of the information I need about it, as long as google can get it of course.
I want to know how do I get information indexed into their service. How great would it be to be a restaurant and have your great reviews provided to a customer from a photo he took on the ride home. I really think this is going to change the way we look at SEO.
If you didn’t have a reason to get an Android Phone, now you do.
I’m so tied into Google now, it scares me…..
http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#landmark
Tags: android, goggles, google
Posted in SEO, Software, google | No Comments »
November 19th, 2009
I had my Blackberry 8730 for almost 3 years it was dropped multiple times, survived my children and a car accident. Due to this beating the scroll wheel stopped working, the phone would just shut off randomly and the screen had two vicious cracks in it. That in it self wasn’t enough for me to get rid of it.
The main problem for me was the limitation of our in house Blackberry Enterprise Server. The software was severely outdated and we were not going to upgrade anytime soon. First of all, wav files were not being pushed to my device. The BES server we have would not support them. Our in house Phone System sends all voicemails to my email as a .wav file. The DROID can easily play these files.
The droid fits me well, I am highly integrated with google. I use their calendar, gmail, docs, analytics etc. It also updates my contacts and merges them all into one contact list for my work and gmail accounts. It makes it very easy to navigate.
Posted in Hardware | No Comments »
November 11th, 2009
Since I have been in IT (since 1997) I have had a Novell server in my network. Why you ask? Well they just work.
I started my career as a Systems Administrator for Computer Learning Centers, INC. We have 3 Novell servers ranging from 3.12 to 4.11. I bet over the 3 years I was there they might have crashed 5 times. Trust me they were not the built on the best hardware, but they worked.
When I started my career at my current position, I inherited another Novell 4.11 server. For my early years here, we needed it to run our accounting software. We didn’t have the Windows Version. Besides a raid controller going bad and me having to rebuild the server on new hardware, the thing never went down. This beast has to be at least 13 or 14 years old and it still runs fine.
With that said, we went to a new web based accounting software and I wanted to upgrade our backup software. This signaled the end for the Novell 4.11 server. We have 3 Windows Servers in house and I can use them for file sharing etc. So today I shut it down. I guess I don’t need my CNA Certification up any longer!
Posted in Software | No Comments »
November 9th, 2009
I’ve run into this a few times over the years. Here is the Scenario
Windows 2000/2003 Domain
Windows XP Clients
The user has just changed their password.
The user can log into the computer fine with their new password but access to shared resources (their home directory and even logon scripts) return an error of Access Denied. This also denies them access to their email.
You need to go into the Control Panel then to User accounts.
Then Click on the Advanced Tab and navigate to the Manage Passwords. The password that is stored on the PC for the server in question is wrong. I would just delete the stored password and try to access the share again. It will now use the user credentials from the PC and not from the passwords stored on the computer.
Posted in Software | No Comments »
November 6th, 2009
As they say on the products home page “Blog your heart out” with Windows Live Writer.
I’ve been using wordpress for a number of years and the backend does provide a nice interface for creating posts, pages and maintaining your site but you still had to login to your website and upload graphics to your posts.
Windows Live Writer provides a great way to post to your blog from an application on your desktop. The best part about it, it’s free!
Lets say I want to insert a graphic into this post its as simple as copying and pasting the graphic into your post. Or you can use the navigation buttons below to do it. I simply used a screen capture program (Lightscreen) and used the shortcut ctrl+v and it posted it directly into my post! Going forward I will encourage all my web clients to use Windows Live Writer to edit and maintain their blog.
Publishing Animation
Posted in Software | No Comments »
November 5th, 2009
For those of you who are looking for an alternative to higher prices NAS drives supplied by Dell and HP. I would take a hard look at the Disk Station 509+.
Synology Disk Station DS509+ offers PC server equivalent performance for efficient data sharing and backup. Its high performance coupled with sophisticated Synology Disk Station Manager 2.2 provides an ideal solution for cross platform sharing, secure server backup, Windows ADS integration, business mail server, and corporate surveillance. The plug-n-use Synology DX5 easily expands the DS509+’s storage capacity up to 10 hard drives on the fly.
- High Speed
39+ MB/Sec RAID 5 Write
55+ MB/Sec RAID 5 Read
- Hot-swappable HDD Design
- 2 Gigabit LAN Ports
- Windows + Mac + Linux
- Power Saving (30W~69W)
I purchased two of these NAS Systems recently. One as an onsite backup and the second as an offsite backup. I stuffed 4 1 Terabyte Samsung Drives(HE103UJ) in them and set them up in Raid 5 mode. This gives me about 2.8 terabytes in space to backup my servers and local workstations.
The Synology Systems are able to be brought into a Windows Domain which is perfect for what I needed. They also provide a network backup solution that allows you to backup one Synology Server to another. This was really easy to setup. I would highly recommend purchasing these devices as a NAS Backup device. Once I test them out more I will let you know how the media and ftp servers work out.
My Setup
Synology 509 +
FIOS 25/15 (I get 25/25 to my other location)
The Onsite Synology is connected to the second Synology through a VPN.
The second Synology Device is on a FIOS 20/5 Connection.
I average about 2.2 Mbs transfer rate between my two buildings.
Tags: Hardware, IT, NAS
Posted in Hardware | No Comments »
October 27th, 2009
Internet Explorer 6 was released on August 27 2001. The browser dominated the market because it was released with Windows XP and of course at the time there wasn’t much competition. Now the browser is old and out dated yet millions of people are still using it. It doesn’t render .png graphics correctly. Developers need to format style sheets specifically for it’s outdated code and Microsoft no longer supports it. IE 7 was released in 06, and IE 8 was released this year.
Go for them just for the tabs or get another modern browser like firefox or my favorite google chrome.
Tags: chrome, firefox, ie6, ie7
Posted in ie6 | No Comments »
