Firefox 3

The long awaited release of Firefox 3 has finally left Beta and is ready for you to download. I’ve been using the new browser for a couple of days now and am very happy with the overall performance. Anyone who has used Firefox for any length of time knows that it could be a memory hog. There were several memory leaks and FF2 was generally un-optimized for efficient memory usage which has been resolved in this release.

The first thing I noticed was the modified look and feel. While I like it and it continues to grow on me my first reaction was that it reminded me a little more of Internet Explorer than I had expected but I believe that is due to the fact that I am running on Windows Vista right now and FF3 adapts to your native look and feel. I also lost several plug-ins which are not compatible with FF3 though nothing that would prevent me from making the upgrade.  One of my favorite plug-ins, GMarks, which synchronizes your Google Bookmarks with Firefox (as  you have your Google Book marks tagged, very useful!) still works flawlessly.

The inclusion of page title and favicons in the url drop-down or during url entry is nice as are the small but noticeable improvements to the download manager and one click bookmarking if you use the browser bookmarks as opposed to something like Google bookmarks. There are really too many changes in productivity, security, memory and customization and improvements to mention but overall the new and improved Firefox is definitely an upgrade from FF2 and continues to provide a far superior browsing experience to Internet Explorer.

If you haven’t made the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox, now would be a gret time to do it. You won’t be sorry and will be impressed at how much more you can do with it.

Learn to Simplify Your Life

As you know if you have followed this blog for any amount of time, I keep a lot of irons in the fire. And even though it has always been my desire to start my own business and work in that business full time I have continued to maintain a day job for any number of reasons. But sometimes we have to be pushed when we’re a little afraid to jump. So when I found out that headcount reductions were going to affect me I decided that now was the time to jump in with both feet and attack my dreams. So here we go…

About 9 months ago I decided it was time to really simplify my life, that I didn’t need all of the peripheral crap I had loaded it up with and I would be able to focus better and see more clearly if I dumped the extraneous things that were distractions. I love having a house, but it’s more work than I care for so it’s up for sale, bad market or not. I don’t really need two cars, after all I only have one butt so the BMW is up for sale (honestly the S2000 is just way more fun to drive). I’ve dumped clothing, old music gear (keep the guitars of course), electronics and other stuff that’s been sitting in a closet going unused. I’m even selling off some furniture and anything else I keep thinking I need but haven’t touched or used in a long time and I’m really looking forward to downsizing and focusing wholeheartedly on my businesses. To be sure, the lower financial burden will be helpful too since anyone who has started a company knows that cash is king and it can be tough in the beginning.

The lesson in all of this is that we really don’t “need” a lot of the things we think we do and lessening those things can be a huge step toward seeing with more clarity and focusing on what is really important. My inspiration for change has come from a lot of places but 4 Hour Work Week definitely played a part. If you haven’t ready it yet, check it out. I also recommend Pam Slim’s blog, escapefromcubiclenation.com for a lot of the same life simplifying insights. In the mean time, if you are thinking of starting a business, going back to school or any other en devour you just haven’t seemed to have gotten started, think very seriously about how important that goal is to you and even more so about what you can do without. Life, like a desk or room, can get cluttered and when it does it’s hard for us to be at our best. So clean it out and get down to what is most important to you. You’ll be surprised at what you don’t miss.

I’m not an advocate of being a “minimalist” either. I’m sure some day I’ll re-complicate my life (to an extent) with some things, but they’ll be things I really enjoy and it will be when I have time to enjoy them. So if you decided to scale back and find it more painful than I have (I find it quite liberating actually) then remember it’s temporary so you can move on to even bigger and better things. Best of luck in doing so.

Search Engine Optimization - Images

There are a lot of people out there that will tell you how to optimize your website for search engines. In fact, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become so popular that it’s spawned many of the usual product and service offerings to “ensure your success” or “guarantee a top page placement.” Do yourself a favor and don’t buy the hype, there is an abundance of free information out there to help. There are undoubtedly reputable publications which offer lots of helpful info at a price, and rightly so, people should be able to charge for the time and effort spent compiling all the good things you can do to optimize your site for search, it really is that important, but no one can guarantee your a particular page rank. There are just too many variables that you can’t control which get factored into the search algorithms.

However, you can do better and improve your standings which over time can have the same effect as compiled interest. It may not be much day-to-day but after a year or two it really adds up.

One of the big things a lot of people overlook is how they handle meta-data with respect to their images so here are a couple of helpful hints to improve your chances of being found through the pictures you use on your site:

1. Don’t use names like IMG00279, give your image a REAL and MEANINGFUL name like telluride-mountains.pg.
2. Use the ALT tag and include a meaningful name or description. It might just be the name of the image again or something else but USE it.
3. Use a “-” rather than in underscore “_” or blank space between words. To a search engine a “-” is a “white-space” character the others are special characters which means if you use a dash the search engine will read the name of the image as “telluride mountains”, but if you use an underscore it will be read as “telluride_mountains” (one word to a computer) and people aren’t likely to search for that. A good explanation (though somewhat technical) of why can be found here.
4. Host your own images. I know it adds a little load and uses more space but image searches are common and you can use them to drive drive traffic to your site.

Do this for ALL images on your site. Don’t use names like “header-logo.jpg.” Use something like “Scott-Ellis-header.jpg.” Hmmm….. now that I think about it, I might have some cleaning up to do myself.