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All JayAre blog posts

Twitter, Twit, Tweet

Twitter is a so called micro-blogging service that allows you to share your current activities with the rest of the world. It’s a very easy to use platform and many thousands of users suffer from a Twitter addiction.

Twitter microblogging

You can share your activities, thoughts, reflections, ideas, … using the Twitter platform itself, but also through instant messaging, SMS and other applications. The main idea behind Twitter is giving an answer to the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less.

If you don’t understand exactly what Twitter does or what it stands for, don’t worry: the nice people from Common Craft have created a great movie entitled “Twitter in plain English“:

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How to redirect your old site to a new domain and keep your rankings

Today I had to help someone redirect an old site to a new site with new domain name. It is possible to keep the search engine history and rankings of the old pages and transfer them to the new site.

How to redirect your old site to your new site

We’ll use www.oldsite.com as the one that needs to be closed and www.newsite.com as the new website (or the existing one that needs to be merged with the old one).

OK, here we go:

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Google experimenting with new personalized search result pages

In the endless battle to improve and personalize search results, Google often launches new features in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP’s). If the users like them, the new features might become visible to everyone, if not, they die a silent death.

Personalized search results on Google

With the latest feature Google aims at improving the results itself:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.

And this is what it looks like:

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GMail Art: Google goes viral in Russia

During the creation of the Google Russia viral video “GMail Art“, the following ingredients were used: 162 meters of grey tape, 45 Lego bits, 32 pieces of clay, 18 painting brushes, 18 m² plastic foil, 12 aerosols, 10 liters of white paint, 4 rolls of paper, 2 kg millet pulp, 1 printer, 1 hair drier, 1 floorcloth and 1 saw.

Great Russian GMail viral

The promotional video was produced by Saatchi Moscow to get more Russian GMail subscribers:

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Validating your website HTML code, CSS and RSS-feed

Most people claim you get higher rankings if your HTML code, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and RSS-feed are W3C compliant. I don’t always agree; it’s perfectly possible to rank a site without having every small detail just the way the World Wide Web Consortium specifies.

W3C HTML CSS RSS validation

Of course there are limitations. If you make too much mistakes in your HTML, CSS or feed, your rankings will be affected, but some small mistakes will be neglected (but you should always at least try to produce code as clean as possible). This is not the case for your RSS-feed. If it doesn’t comply, it might not be useable in every feedreader and you might lose a lot of visitors. So there are times you might want to check the validation for your (or someone else’s) website.

Checking the validation of your HTML, CSS and feed with the W3C validation services is not that hard, but with the shortcuts I am offering you, it’s really easy.

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Forgot to change the year in your footer?

A new year, a new footer? Even now in february I still see a lot of blogs that haven’t changed the year in their footer (yet). It still reads “© 200x – 2007“. Maybe the owner forgot to change the year or doesn’t know how and where to change it.

Wordpress copyright change year in footer

If you change the code in your footer as follows, you’ll never have to worry about it again.

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Top 10 Google parodies

According to Wikipedia, a parody is described as follows:

A parody is a work created to mock, comment on, or poke fun at an original work, its subject, or author, by means of humorous or satirical imitation.

Google Top 10 parodies

As biggest search engine in the world, Google had its part of parodies over the last years. Some went offline because Google didn’t like them and threatened to prosecute, but some managed to stay online. I present to you The Top 10 Google Parodies… that are still online…

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