When working in SEO it’s important to realize that Google uses past searches to influence new ones. Because of this, testing a search term can have obfuscated results. If you are searching your own websites’ name or the same terms over and over, it will affect the order in which your results appear.

Of course everyone has their own history, so searching Google with a clean slate doesn’t exactly guarantee that it will give you a better picture of where your potential readers or customers will see it, but it will give you another perspective.

Outside of changing preferences within Google, the only way I know how to achieve the search results with no influence is to add

&pws=0

to the lengthy URL that Google generates after you perform a search, and then hit Go/Enter.

If you know of a better way to achieve this type of search, please let me know in the comments!

I wanted to talk about the genius that is Lockerz. I hate to call this a scam really, because if I would have been able to produce something like this I definitely would have. Check out the video below.

For the longest time the only way to try out Google’s new product Google Voice was to be invited, but I never took the time to seek out an elusive invite. Yesterday Google Voice was finally made available to the public, and being a willing participant of the Google takeover, I set up my account.

Setup

Setup was super easy, if you have a Google Account (which you should), there is nothing more to signing up than typing in your password and choosing a phone number. You can choose your phone number by typing in your area code, or typing in a phrase that you want, and it lists all available numbers. For example, I first tried searching for “austin”, but there were no corresponding numbers available. This isn’t too surprising considering Austin is a six letter word, and you’re searching for a seven digit number. I then tried “hutch” and found several pages of options to choose from.

Features

Initially I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to use Google Voice, and what benefits it would provide. Seeing that it is free, I decided to grab my number and start playing around. I’m sure Google Voice does a lot of little things, but I’ll highlight the stuff that makes it valuable to me personally.

• Voice mail
  Any call that is placed to your Google number can either be accepted or sent to voice mail (duh), but trust me it gets a lot more interesting. Voice mails are tied to your account, and you can access them from anywhere you can connect to the internet. They are saved and transcribed automatically. No more going through an annoying menu in a hopeless attempt to find a voice mail that actually was deleted three days ago.
• Texting

  All texts that are sent to your Google number are archived on your account, making it the easiest way to back up your texts available. You literally don’t have to do anything, other than make sure that people are texting your Google number and not your original number.

• Connecting Phones

  When someone calls your Google number, you can easily set it up to ring multiple phones. For example, the service can ring both your cell phone and home phone (what’s a home phone?) if someone calls your Google number.

Layout

The layout similar to a Gmail account, with a voice mail inbox, a text inbox, and a contact list. Your contacts can be imported from multiple types of contact organizing software such as Outlook.

Overall

I can say I’m excited to see how I use Google Voice in the near future. Google has really hit the mark with this service, and I can see this being a useful tool for both personal and professional use.

Find the .EXE files here, but feel free to read on.

On more than one occasion I’ve had my unfair share of issues with updating my flash plug-in on my browser of choice. Adobe gives detailed instructions on their website, but for some reason something goes awry and I am never able to simply follow the steps they provide.

Instead I thought I’d provide my fail-safe way to update your flash player in Firefox, or any browser for that matter.

At the bottom of this page links for the executable files for IE and Firefox are given.

In my opinion, these links provide a much easier solution than going through the update process. I don’t think it’s kosher for me to post direct links to the files, if you know the rules behind this feel free to enlighten me!

Don’t be silly and use my shape, go ahead and use the official vectors from Twitter themselves. You can find those right here. Thanks to @gilbert for the advice.

I made wasted my time making a custom shape in Photoshop replicating the “t” icon from Twitter. A custom shape is a vector, which allows you to resize the shape without losing any quality. I thought some people might find it useful so I decided to share it here. It’s not perfect, but it is free!

Figuring out how to actually share the shape was a bit of a hassle, so I thought I’d share how to do that as well. If you make a shape (or shapes) that you want to share, follow these steps:

Continue Reading »