Archive for June, 2008
Super Mario 3: Mario Forever Publisher’s Description
System Requirements
DirectX(R):DirectX(R) version 7.0 , 64 Mb ram minimum
What’s new
List of main upgrades in v 3.0 :1) Some changes in main engine.2) Game is more stabile in old machines3) Fixed problems with games save.
Download
http://www.soft32.com/Download/Free/Super_Mario_3_Mario_Forever/4-126649-1.html
Britney Spears was granted a change in her visitation schedule with sons Sean Preston and Jayden James Federline at a custody hearing Tuesday.
We just don’t know what that is at this time.
The troubled pop star was looking for overnight visits with the little rascals, but details were not released - nor will they be, apparently.
Both Britney Spears and Kevin Federline exited the courtroom hearing in good spirits. Britney, Kevin and his attorney, Mark Vincent Kaplan, all smiled and conversed with celebrity news reporters as they left the building.
No sign of K-Fed’s Vegas girlfriend, however.
Britney Spears and Kevin Federline separated in late 2006 and divorced in 2007.
The judge in the case, Commissioner Scott L. Gordon, told the attorneys that he was “very pleased with the progress on both sides.”
“There was a change in visitation status that was ordered by Commissioner Gordon,” L.A. Superior Court spokesperson Alan Parachini said. “I’m not at liberty to answer any questions about the nature of that change, however.”
We imagine Britney Spears was granted some sort of expanded visitation rights with two of America’s favorite celebrity babies, Sean Preston and Jayden James.
Our guess is that she will have the rights to overnight visits once a week - so long as they take place at her home and her father Jamie Spears is also present.
In related news, Laura Wasser is now back as Britney Spears’ attorney in the custody case. Wasser was Spears’ lawyer earlier in the case, but went and dumped Brit as a client after Spears repeatedly ignored her advice.
At my day job, we’re contacted every now and then by clients asking about search engine positioning and optimisation. Most of the time the client has been approached by an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) consultant trying to talk them into paying lots of money for search engine optimisation. The SEO firms promise “guaranteed top results” and “submission to 500 000 search engines and directories”.
Many site owners are regularly contacted by scam companies of this kind, and it’s understandable that many take the bait and start paying for “top results and submission to everything”. After all, who doesn’t want their site to be highly ranked by search engines?
In an attempt to help a few people avoid paying for unnecessary search engine optimisation, I’d like to share what I have done to achieve very good search engine rankings, for this site as well as for clients’ sites.
First, just let me say that not all SEO consultants out there are scam artists – there are many reputable firms in the business. However, anyone promising “guaranteed top results”, “submission to 500 000 search engines and directories”, “instant results”, or “permanent top positions” is most likely a scammer. There is no way anyone can guarantee that your site is the number one result unless they actually control the search engine results, or if the top ranking is for a word or phrase that only exists on your site, of course.
What strikes me as I think through the steps I have taken to get good search engine rankings is how much SEO has in common with accessibility, usability, and high quality markup – the principles of web standards. That actually makes it even better: by making your site more accessible and usable for humans, and by using valid, semantic markup, you also make it more attractive to search engine robots.
Consider the guidelines I describe here a basic level of SEO – try this first, and if you’re still not getting the results you want, you may want to look into getting help from a reputable search engine optimisation firm. If you contact someone regarding optimising your site, ask them what they will do for your site. If they suggest any kinds of shady methods, be very careful. They might get you penalised or even banned from search engine indexes. On the other hand, if their advice includes what I’m suggesting here, they will probably do a good job.
There are no shortcuts
I’ll start with the bad news if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to get great results. There isn’t one. Instead, expect to do some hard work, especially when it comes to the content of your site.
You will also need patience. Results do not come overnight. If you’re working on improving the search engine positioning of a client’s site, you should probably explain this to them early on.
Write good content
This is probably the single most important thing you need to do if you want to be found on the web. Even if your site is technically perfect for search engine robots, it won’t do you any good unless you also fill it with good content. Yes, really!
Good content to me is text that is factually and grammatically correct, though that is not necessarily a must for all kinds of sites. Whatever your site is about, the content needs to be unique and/or specific enough to appeal to people. More specifically, it needs to be useful to the people you want to find your site.
Good content brings return visitors. Return visitors who like your content will eventually link to your site, and having lots of inbound links is great for search engine rankings, especially if those links are from highly ranked sites.
Closely related to good content is fresh content. By adding new content regularly, you give visitors a reason to come back. Search engine robots will also visit your site more often once they notice that you update regularly, which means that any new content you add will be indexed quicker.
When doing work for clients, creating quality content is rarely the responsibility of the web designer. Often, the client wants to write their own copy, which is fine if they’re good at it and keep adding new content. In my experience, that is rarely the case. If at all possible, try to make the client realise that they should hire someone to help them write, or at least get someone to help them edit what they have written. In either case, make it clear to them that they can’t expect consistent high rankings without good content.
Think about spelling
If you write in English, you are probably aware of the differences in spelling between American and British English. Colour vs. color, optimisation vs. optimization, etc. There are also many words that are commonly misspelled (this goes for all languages).
I don’t like the idea of intentionally misspelling words, since it goes against my definition of “good content”. If words with multiple spellings or commonly misspelled words are an important part of your content, i.e. keywords, consider adding a glossary or similar to include the most common spelling variations on the page.
Write descriptive page titles
By making your page titles simple, yet descriptive and relevant, you make it easier for search engines to know what each page is about, and people scanning through search results can quickly determine whether your document contains what they are looking for. The page title is also what is used to link to your site from search result listings.
Because of this, the title element is one of the most important elements on a page. Some argue that it is the most important element.
When it comes to the order of the text in the title element, I’ve found that the following works well:
Document title | Section name | Site or company name
Based on a discussion here a while ago, that is probably one of the best formats for accessible title texts. Again, accessibility and SEO work together.
Whatever you do, don’t use the same title text for all documents. Doing so will make it much harder for search engines, people browsing through search results, and site visitors to quickly find out what the document is about.
Use real headings
Use the h1 - h6 elements for headings. Using graphics for headings may let you use any typeface you want, but search engines aren’t going to pay much attention. Even if you (as is required) use the alt attribute to specify alternate text for heading images, that text will not be anywhere near as important as real text in a heading element. In my experience, this is true even if the images are inside heading elements. If you know otherwise, please tell.
If you cannot use real text, look at the various image or Flash replacement techniques that are available. Be aware that there may be a tiny risk involved in doing so. Since image replacement techniques involve hiding text, it is theoretically possible for search engines to penalise you. Currently that risk seems very slim, but don’t say I didn’t warn you if it does happen.
Use search engine friendly URLs
Avoid dynamically generated URLs that use a query string to let the server know which data to fetch from a database. Search engine robots may have difficulties with this kind of URL – they may stop at the question mark and not even look at the query string.
Use search engine friendly, human readable URLs instead. This will help both your ranking and your users. I’ve seen incredible improvements in search engine results from just changing the URL scheme of a site.
Modifying and rewriting a site’s URLs can be a little tricky, and some CM systems make it more difficult than others to implement. It is worth the effort though. A couple of resources to help you make your URLs better:
Get linked to
There is no easy and sustainable way to solve this one except for – you guessed it – providing good content. Incoming links are very, very important for SEO. They are also possibly the hardest part of SEO to implement.
However, in my experience incoming links are less important the more specific and unique your content is. As an example, a couple of our clients are in what you may call niche businesses. They don’t have lots of sites linking to them, yet they started ranking very well in search engines after I had applied the knowledge I’m sharing here to their sites.
Use valid, semantic, lean, and accessible markup
Most web browsers have advanced functionality to decipher the tag soup mess that is used instead of HTML on most current sites. You can’t rely on search engine robots to do that to the same extent. Validate your HTML and avoid presentational markup – use as lean and clean markup as possible. By increasing your content-to-markup ratio, you make your site faster and more attractive to search engines.
High quality markup will help boost your rankings.
Accessibility is also very important. Making your site more accessible to vision impaired humans will also help search engine robots find their way around it. Remember, Google is blind, so even if you don’t care about blind people using your site (which you should), you’ll still want it to be accessible. This means that you should use real headings, paragraphs, and lists, and avoid using anything that may interfere with search engine spiders.
Flash and JavaScript are fine, as long as they aren’t required to navigate your site and to access vital information. Don’t hide your content inside Flash files or behind funky JavaScript navigation. Browse your site in Lynx, and with graphics, CSS, JavaScript, and Flash off. If that gives you problems, it is likely to cause problems for search engine spiders.
Submit carefully
Often slightly overrated, submitting a site to directories and search engines can be useful, especially if the site is new and hasn’t already been picked up by Google and others. Go ahead and submit it to Google. It won’t hurt, but most likely Google will find you anyway.
Two directories that may be worth submitting to are Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project. Be patient – it will probably take several weeks for your submissions to be processed, unless you pay for them to list you.
Don’t try to fool the search engines
Don’t use cloaking, link farms, keyword stuffing, alt text spamming or other dubious methods. They may work for a short while if you’re lucky, but you risk being penalised or even banned from search engines, which you do not want.
Search engines want their results to be accurate, and they don’t like it when people try to trick them. Just don’t do it.
Avoid using frames
While it is possible to provide workarounds that allow search engine robots to crawl frame based sites, frames will still cause problems for the people who find your site through search engines.
When somebody follows the link from a search result listing to a frame based site, they will land on an orphaned document, outside of its parent frameset. This is very likely to cause confusion, since in many cases vital parts of the site, like navigational links, will be absent.
Some sites use JavaScript or server side scripting to redirect anyone trying to load a document outside of its parent frameset to the site’s home page. This is a very user hostile thing to do, and it definitely does not help the people visiting your site. Just lose the frames. They are bad for usability anyway.
Be careful with browser detection
If you need to use some kind of browser detection, make sure that it doesn’t break when a search engine spider (or any unknown user agent) comes along. If the spiders can’t get in, you won’t be found. I’ve seen this happen on the sites of fairly large companies.
Don’t waste your time on meta tags
Most search engines don’t place any great deal of value on the contents of meta tags anymore. They have been used way too much by spammers. I’d suggest using the meta description element, but that’s all. Keywords won’t hurt, but they will rarely help either, so they are generally not worth the effort.
Some search engines use the contents of the meta description element to describe your site in their search result listings, so if possible, make its contents unique and descriptive for every document.
Uuh. That was too much for me to read.
Ok, then. The ultra-short guide to SEO: add quality content regularly and make sure your site is well-built.
If you have a cell phone that has become locked because it was given to you by a friend and you never got the code, or you forgot your own code, don’t be afraid. Unlocking a cell phone is usually a simple process and unless you try guessing at the unlock code too many times, you won’t have to use any special equipment.
Unlocking a phone to use with another service, however, usually requires special software that you will need to either purchase, or will require a visit to a mobile phone retailer who has the equipment and will charge a nominal fee. For a few phones, there are simple unlock codes that you can just enter into the phone.
Unlocking a sim card, on the other hand can be difficult. If you simply want the card unlocked to be used with a different service provider or in a different country, law requires that your service provider make it possible to do so, which will prevent you from having to change over all of your numbers. This makes it easy to change phones as you can just simply unlock the sim card than use a data cable to move over all of your ringtones, wallpapers, and photos.
If you do not know the passcode for your SIM that was created by yourself, you should call your mobile provider who will provide information on your specific SIM card.
Certain phones become un-usable if you try to unlock them unsuccessfully too many time. Be warned that this is common on many nokia phones!
Nokia Phone unlock codes:
NokiaFree.org
Motorolla Phone codes:
MotoUnlockNow
Virgin Mobile, Boost, T-Mobile, Cingular and all other phones:
MobileUnlock
A ridiculous hair style is now the least of Amy Winehouse’s problems.
According to the singer’s father, Mitch, the Grammy-winner has been diagnosed emphysema; he fears she could be “dead in three months.”
“The doctors have told her if she goes back to smoking drugs it won’t just ruin her voice, it will kill her,” Mitch told Great Britain’s The Daily Mail.
Amy Winehouse has a choice: Breathe properly or continue to do drugs.
Winehouse was taken to the hospital last week for tests after she fainted at home in London.
“With smoking the crack cocaine and the cigarettes her lungs are all gunked up,” Mitch said. “There are nodules around the chest and dark marks. She’s got 70 percent lung capacity.”
We hope you’re listening, kids. Don’t do drugs.
This program is designed to help you read any of your passwords that are covered by the asterisks.
One of the most frequently asked questions about Accessible Search is: What can I do to make my site rank well on Accessible Search? At the same time, webmasters often ask a similar but broader question: What can I do to rank high on Google Search?
Well I’m pleased to tell you that you can kill two birds with one stone: critical site features such as site navigation can be created to work for all users, including our own Googlebot. Below are a few tips for you to consider.
Ensure that all critical content is reachable
To access content, it needs to be reachable. Users and web crawlers reach content by navigating through hyperlinks, so as a critical first step, ensure that all content on your site is reachable via plain HTML hyperlinks, and avoid hiding critical portions of your site behind technologies such as JavaScript or Flash.
Plain hyperlinks are hyperlinks created via an HTML anchor element <a>. Next, ensure that the target of all hyperlinks i.e. <a> elements are real URLs, rather than using an empty hyperlink while deferring hyperlink behavior to an onclick handler.
In short, avoid hyperlinks of the form:
<a href=”#” onclick=”javascript:void(…)”>Product Catalog</a>
In preference of simpler links, such as:
<a href=”http://www.example.com/product-catalog.html”>Product Catalog</a>
Ensure that content is readable
To be useful, content needs to be readable by everyone. Ensure that all important content on your site is present within the text of HTML documents. Content needs to be available without needing to evaluate scripts on a page. Content hidden behind Flash animations or text generated within the browser by executable JavaScript remains opaque to the Googlebot, as well as to most blind users.
Ensure that content is available in reading order
Having discovered and arrived at your readable content, a user needs to be able to follow the content you’ve put together in its logical reading order. If you are using a complex, multi-column layout for most of the content on your site, you might wish to step back and analyze how you are achieving the desired effect. For example, using deeply-nested HTML tables makes it difficult to link together related pieces of text in a logical manner.
The same effect can often be achieved using CSS and logically organized <div> elements in HTML. As an added bonus, you will find that your site renders much faster as a result.
Supplement all visual content–don’t be afraid of redundancy!
Making information accessible to all does not mean that you need to ‘dumb down’ your site to simple text. Making your content maximally redundant is critical in ensuring that your content is maximally useful to everyone. Here are a few simple tips:
- Ensure that content communicated via images is available when those images are missing. This goes further than adding appropriate alt attributes to relevant images. Ensure that the text surrounding the image does an adequate job of setting the context for why the image is being used, as well as detailing the conclusions you expect a person seeing the image to draw. In short, if you want to make sure everyone knows it’s a picture of a bridge, wrap that text around the image.
- Add relevant summaries and captions to tables so that the reader can gain a high-level appreciation for the information being conveyed before delving into the details contained within.
- Accompany visual animations such as data displays with a detailed textual summary.
Following these simple tips greatly increases the quality of your landing pages for everyone. As a positive side-effect, you’ll most likely discover that your site gets better indexed!
Mozilla security chief Window Snyder (left) has confirmed the existence of a serious code execution vulnerability in the brand-new Firefox 3.0 browser.
Snyder’s confirmation follows a public warning by TippingPoint’s ZDI (Zero Day Initiative) that the flaw could lead to PC takeover hijacks if a user simply surfs to a rigged Web site with Firefox.
On the Mozilla security blog, Snyder said the bug impacts Firefox versions 2.x and 3.0:
This issue is currently under investigation. To protect our users, the details of the issue will remain closed until a patch is made available. There is no public exploit, the details are private, and so the current risk to users is minimal.
At Mozilla we appreciate any report of security issues because that is how we make the browser stronger and more secure. The best way to keep Firefox users safe is to report the issues directly to Mozilla as TippingPoint has chosen to, and to wait to release details until a fix is available.
As previously reported, the vulnerability was sold to TippingPoint ZDI a few hours after Mozilla’s shipped the final release of Firefox 3.0.
Atlantis is an innovative, no-nonsense word processor carefully designed with the end-user in mind. Compact, fast-loading, but still powerful and efficient, Atlantis will be the perfect companion for a wide range of your word processing tasks, – from simple to most complex.
It does not matter if you are a novice or a power user, Atlantis has the tools you will ever need to compose highly professional documents. Using a most original and practical Control Board, you will create and manage all components of complex documents with unparalleled ease: sections, fields, headers & footers, newspaper columns, bulleted & numbered lists, styles, bookmarks, footnotes & endnotes, etc, all are a breeze with Atlantis.
Both the Safeguard and Backup Files features make sure that you work under extremely safe conditions. Private documents can also be encoded and secured: you can save them to a proprietary COD file format using powerful 256-bit encryption technology.
The Atlantis AutoCorrect and Spellcheck-As-You-Type features combine with a unique typing assist, the Atlantis Power Type, to dramatically simplify your word processing life.
The Atlantis interface is entirely customizable: menus, toolbars, hot keys, colors and sounds can all be adjusted to suit your own requirements. What’s more, Atlantis is a fully portable word processor. You can install Atlantis to a memory flash drive, and Atlantis will travel with you wherever you go.
And much-much more for you to discover…
Download
http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/downloads.htm
Interacting amiably with family and friends is a super stress reducer. Instead of the mind working overtime on worries and problems, it is occupied with thoughts of other things and other people. There is less mental capacity left for anxieties and self-doubt.
“Friendship improves happiness and abates misery by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.” - Marcus Cicero (BC)
Good friendship is healthy but it isn’t easy for everyone. Getting people to like you is the starting point, and that should be fairly easy to do. People have a basic need to be liked themselves. Show interest, appreciation, and kindness. Smile. Praise given out sincerely is a great act of friendship. Be a good listener and try to see the good, not the bad qualities in people. These actions will usually be returned to you, sooner or later.
“The only way to have a friend is to be one. . . A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
As a friend, try to let an unfavorable incident or remark fly right over the top of your head. We all blurt out something stupid or do something regrettable at times, and it’s so nice when the other acts as if it never happened. This is a dear friend.
“The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.” - Buddha (BC)
