RagePank SEO: SEO Articles

How to get your spam in front of webmasters

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 08:59:00 +1300

A client sends me the following email this morning...

I don't know what she is on about?????????

-----Original Message-----
From: XXXXXXX XXXXXXX [mailto:XXXXXXX@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, 1 April 2011 8:43 a.m.
To: info@XXXXXXX.co.nz
Subject: XXXXXXX Form Submission

This is an automated response, please do not reply.

A visitor to XXXXXXX submitted the following information on
your form. The address of the form is http://www.XXXXXXX.co.nz/XXXXXXX/.

name: XXXXXXX XXXXXXX
email: XXXXXXX@gmail.com
phone:
submit: Submit
reason: I really like what you post here,very fresh and smart. One issue
though, I'm running Firefox in Debian and parts of your current layout
pieces are a little off. I recognize it's not necessarily a widespread set
up, yet it is still something to keep in mind. I hope this will help and
keep up the top quality writing.
<a href="http://XXXXXXX.com">http://XXXXXXX.com</a>

It's worth noting that the link at the bottom goes to a Wordpress-related site.

Clever spam

This is quite impressive on a number of levels. Firstly, the spammer understands that the contact form is probably going to go to the owner of the site rather than the webmaster. Site owner's don't like layouts being broken (even on operating systems they have never heard of) so the only logical course of action is to forward the email to the webmaster.

The Wordpress-related link is much more likely to be relevant to the webmaster than the site owner, and that's what makes this spam so clever. They have successfully bypassed the layman site-owner and got the message in front of someone who could easily be interested in Wordpress plugins.

It's entirely possible there is a browser bug in Firefox on Debian, but unfortunately it's not economical for most people to keep a warehouse full of Linux distributions for browser testing. This means there's more chance this email will stick around in the inbox until it's dealt with, and that's clever too.

So how do I know it's spam?

Aside from the usual warning signs:

Sender uses a Gmail account
Sender's name is completely different to Gmail account
The message contains a link, not in any way related to the site content
The domain name in the link contains the word "best"
There are no specifics about what the layout error actually is. Note the difference between "parts of your current layout pieces are a little off" (non-specific) vs "The sidebar is sitting over the main content" (specific).

I also log another little bit of information with form submissions that proves invaluable for determing if enquiries are genuine.

Referer: direct visitor
Browser: Internet Explorer 6.0

OK - so I'm expected to believe that someone was using Firefox on Debian and couldn't view the site due to browser issues - so they switched to IE6 as their backup browser?

No fucking way.

Seriously, that's like suggesting that Steve Jobs keeps a spare Android in his car in case his iPhone breaks down.

Source: How to get your spam in front of webmasters

Nexus One vs Water

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:59:00 +1300

So my foray into the world of smartphones was brought to a short end over the weekend when my Android was destroyed by a minor spillage.

At this stage, I'm wondering if smartphones are all they are cracked up to be, and whether I actually want to buy a replacement. I'm just not sure - I guess I expected a lot more from the Android.

And so it ends

It all happened one Saturday morning. The phone was on the floor under the bed, plugged into the charger. This may sound like an odd place to keep it, but there's a reason for everything. Firstly, the bedroom is one of 2 places in the house that gets reception - see, the Nexus just doesn't get as good signal as the trusty old Nokia. Not even close. And secondly, the Nexus one has this giant blinky light that flashes every time you receive an email (ie permanently flashing). This is bright enough to warn passing ships of nearby danger, and certainly perfectly adequate for keeping one awake all night. So the lighthouse phone goes under the bed at night where it can blink to it's heart's content.

Then Emily accidentally knocked a glass of water off the side table. It landed on the floor but no spillage on the phone. This got cleaned up quick smart, and a towel was left there to soak up the water by the bed. At this point I'm making breakfast, and nobody else noticed the phone under the bed. I return a bit later and rescue the phone - no direct spillage but the screen is all misted up anyway. I unplug, remove the battery, dry out for 24+ hours in a warm place, then turn it on to see if it works. It doesn't. After a fair bit of playing around and a factory reset, I confirm that the device can boot but the touch controls are dead. And the phone won't charge. All indications point to a dead phone.

Reliability

As it turns out, I'm not alone in losing an expensive phone due to a tiny mistake. A friend dropped an Android from waist height onto a linoleum floor and the screen cracked. Another friend had his iPhone removed from the corporate network due to something about security (he now has a Blackberry and hates it). And I met someone else with a new Nexus One, also with hardware faults. The more I read online, it seems these things crack easily, can't sustain the tiniest amount of moisture, and need to be reset constantly due to software glitches. I'm talking smartphones in general here, not specifically Android. They just don't seem anything like as sturdy as normal cellphones.

The good

There are some things I will miss if I decide not to go Android again. The first is my bike-riding routine - which involves Runkeeper to record my loop times (and monthly total distance), the music hammering out something to get the blood pumping, and the phone headset in case a client calls. I quite like to go for a sneaky bike ride during work hours, divert the landline, and pretend I'm in the office if someone calls. I'll definitely miss that, and dread going back to the dusty old ipod + itunes.

It's an immensely handy tool for powder days too. Plenty of times last season I would drop tools and skip off up the mountain for some skiing because the weather was good. More than once, my day got interrupted with urgent stuff, which is fixable with a smartphone. You can bring up a webpage, see what's going on, login to the hosting control panel, email the client back, FTP in and do stuff if you have to, etc. It gives more power for doing technical stuff when you don't have a computer handy. Far better than the alternative of driving back to the office.

I'll miss the news reader a lot. I never seem to find time to read the news at home or during the day, the Android has been great for catching up on the news while the kids play in the park.

And the camera on the Nexus One was well decent for a phone camera. A reasonable picture + plenty of storage space + the convenience of not having to carry around a proper camera means you take more photos when the opportunity arises. And that's a good thing. Also the Android is great for flicking through old photos, with the big screen and all.

Special mention goes to the maps and navigation features - absolutely lovely tools to have when away from home.

The bad

These are all good things, but there's also the everyday annoyances which come about all the time when doing basic tasks. There's the crappy reception to consider - remember I'm comparing a $1000 brand new Nexus One to a 5 year old $250 Nokia here so really there's no excuse. There's countless small usability things like the above blinky light. There's this annoying glitch where the phone's touch screen won't respond after waking from sleep - even if the phone is ringing I often can't answer because the touchscreen takes 20 seconds to sort out it's shit. This issue is especially bad when Skype runs in the background which means I don't run Skype anymore. The email client has recently got mind-numbingly slow, taking about a minute on average to check email even on Wifi. Facebook photo uploads fail about half the time. The phone overheats when I use a protective case on it. The Google calendar doesn't seem to stay in sync properly and can't be trusted. The speaker gets drowned out easily if the phone is placed on certain soft surfaces, meaning you don't hear it ring.

A lot of this is minor, but seeing as we are talking about user experience, this is what spoils the fun.

The ugly

Then there's Google's new 15 minute refund policy. Yet again, Google completely missing the point and offering no sensible explanation to users or developers. The Android Market previously offered a 24-hour no questions asked refund on any paid app - giving you time to evaluate and be sure that the app worked on your hardware (which isn't a given). In my mind easily the best feature of the Android market, and a fantastic feature that iPhone users don't get. A clear point of difference that made Android's market better if you will.

It's now shortened to 15 minutes and as usual, Google has fuck all to say on the matter other than "most people who request a refund do so within the first 15 minutes of download and that’s why the change to 15 minutes". Which reminds me of when hard drive warranties in NZ went from 5 years to 1 year becasue "it's better for consumers that warranty periods are standard across all components". Right.

What Google have forgotten is that the 24 hour refund period puts the onus squarely on the developer to produce quality applications at a fair price. This is a massive driving force behind improving the quality of paid apps in the marketplace. Seriously, if a paid app can't sustain enough interest to make buyers want to keep it for just 24 hours, then it doesn't sound like a very good app to me.

Openness is about letting things succeed on their own merits. It's not about pedding something average and using complicated license agreements and contracts to screw the user out of choices and freedoms. The move to 15 minute refunds is a move away from openness and towards 'buyer beware'. In what world can this be a positive step?

Sleep on it

So I'm going to have to think about this for a bit, and in the meantime see how my old Nokia treats me. It's certainly much more comfortable in the pocket and the battery life is fantastic, but it does have a few glitches of it's own to deal with.
A lot will come down to whether the insurance company ponys up the cash for the replacement - there's no way I liked the Android enough to want to fork out another $1000 of hard-earned cash, but for an insurance payout I might go there again. I'd love to be able to finish off the half-complete Android apps I'm working on if I ever find some free time.
I'll also revisit the idea of an iPhone4 again - maybe there's some merit in that idea after all with the benefit of hindsight?

One final thought - don't you just wish Nokia would make an Android phone? I'm certain their awesome hardware would go a long way to fixing many of Android's shortcomings

Source: Nexus One vs Water

Nexus One vs Iphone 4

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +1200

A couple of weeks ago I got a shiny new Nexus One Android phone. I thought long and hard about whether Android was a better choice for me than iPhone and eventually decided that it was - although both platforms have their fair share of nice touches and frustrations.

The purpose of this blog post is to convey my initial thoughts that went into the purchase process (specifically iPhone4 vs Android), and explain what I do and don't like about the Nexus / Android. I'm well aware that this topic has been covered before, but actually I was surprised at what things actually mattered to me once I started using it.

In favour of the iPhone

I thought long and hard about getting an iPhone 4. There's a lot to like.

I'm yet to meet an iPhone owner who is unhappy with their iPhone. That speaks volumes.
There are some cool apps available that aren't yet available for Android. I'm looking at you Civilization Revolution.
The iPhone 4 has addressed some of my main complaints with previous versions - most notably the data frequencies it uses in New Zealand allowing it to work better in more rural places.
It has Skype. Skype for Android isn't available due to some political agenda between Skype and some US carrier. Or whatever. If Skype can work on iPhone and my wife's Nokia, I don't get why they can't do an Android version. (Update: Android has Skype now, it's great)
It looks good. Seriously, Apple have nailed this - the device looks fantastic, whereas Android phones look comparitively ho-hum. My Nexus One was advertised as "Passion-Brown".

There is a lot more that is cool about the iPhone 4 to be sure, I'm only listing things that Android doesn't have and things that actually matter to me.

There were some off-putting things too.

Apple's insistence on proprietary phone chargers and sync cables is old-fashioned and serves no purpose. "Proprietary for the sake of it" doesn't work for me.
Itunes is horrible - I find it's impossibly hard to use for syncing our ipod, so I don't fancy having to use this with my phone.
The non-removable storage and the non-removable battery isn't great either.
If I want to write apps for it (which I do), I'll need to buy a Mac - which adds pretty significantly to the total cost of ownership. This is a biggie for me. (Update: Apparently you can now develop iPhone apps on a PC)
No flash. Why Apple is being stubborn about this is beyond me. I'm all for open standards, but not supporting flash simply delivers a lesser user experience.
This whole nonsense about having to jailbreak your phone to run anything Apple doesn't approve of - say for example, anything that competes with Itunes. I just don't like the idea of innovative, useful applications being declined by Apple due to political agenda.

So, weighing in the good and the bad - I decided I would deal with less apps, an uglier phone, a less-established platform and no Skype in exchange for being able to write my own apps, upgrade my storage capacity and use a standard low-priced charger cable of my choice. It's probably fair to say that I went with Android more to avoid Apple's proprietary nonsense rather than on the merits of Android itself.

Surprises

It's been an interesting experience so far. Let's say now that I didn't really need a new phone, and this is a toy - so any joys or frustrations are hardly going to be life-changing. I spend most of my day in front of a big-screen PC on a fibre connection, so for 'real work' I'll be using that. I don't go to meetings because all my clients are at least 2,000km away from where I live, and any local appointments are for serious things like the local Toy Library or going skiing for the day. I bought a smartphone because I wanted one. There - I said it. If I was a road-warrior like I was a couple of years back, different story.

Upon opening the box, I was disappointed that the removable SD-card isn't as removable as I thought. Unlike my previous Nokia which had a flip panel in the side, to remove the SD card you have to open up the case and pull out the battery. That's a lot less removable than I was expecting. Currently you can only buy 16Gb Micro SDHC cards (which I did, added $100 to the cost but I knew about this before I bought) - however it is only a matter of time before 32Gb cards are available and cheap.

Worse still - the Nexus One has only 190Mb available for installing Apps. This point somehow escaped me when I was doing my initial research, but you can only install apps to the miserable internal phone storage and not the ample-sized SD card. Meaning the downloading of any app is a calculated decision, and you have to think twice before downloading something "large" - like, 5Mb. A 10M meg app had better be pretty damn good to warrant using over 5% of your app space.
Android 2.2 Froyo allows you to move apps to the SD card, however this doesn't work like you might expect. A 2Mb app might allow you to move 1Mb of it to the SD card, but a lot of apps don't support this feature at all. While this helps make the space go a bit further, the app space limitation is still a huge limitation that Android needs to sort out. Given that I now know the SD card isn't all that easily removable, and you can't store apps on the SD card, I hate to say that Apple win this round. Easily.

Treats

On the plus side, the screen is beautiful, I'm enjoying the ample homescreens and widgets that are available, and I'm getting into the app-writing - albeit slowly. I already have my own app for turning on/off call forwarding on my landlines, and another for displaying French and German words I'm learning on my homescreen (I couldn't find an existing app that did this well). I'll also likely be making a snow-report widget for the homescreen too, although the spring snow is running out rather fast. I managed to get a car charger for a whopping $6 off TradeMe, and I chose a nice quick 16Gb class 6 Micro SD card for additional storage space. Moving music onto the Android is a breeze, and can be done as simply as copying it to any other external media. No evil music-sync software required.

Android has good apps for many of the things I want to do - IMAP email, geocaching, Facebook, maps, and a camera that takes well-decent photos. Firefox Mobile for Android is coming soon too. It can also be used as a wireless hotspot, which I will definitely be using when I next travel. I found a great app for monitoring the voice / data / SMS usage on my plan, so I can tell at a glance where I am up to in terms of free minutes etc - couldn't do that easily on my old phone. A less-practical but seriously cool find is Google Goggles - you photograph something, and it tries to match what you photographed from the web. It never ceases to amaze me what this thing can recognise. The Google star map app is fantastic as well, which demonstrates the accuracy of the internal compass inside the Nexus One. Aside from the fact that looking at a bright screen destroys your night vision, this is a cool app. Having flash in webpages is good too - but actually it's something you just expect to have and not something to get excited about.

The upgrade to Froyo (Android 2.2) was painless. I was worried I might have to run through some dodgy hack to get this installed, but the phone did it all by itself as soon as I turned it on. Obviously Vodafone NZ and HTC didn't feel the need to add any proprietary "enhancements" to the Android OS, which was nice of them. Froyo offers some nice improvements, notably the wifi tethering and partial moving of apps to SD card. If you are looking at buying a new Android, I wouldn't seriously consider any phone that didn't have Froyo on it or at least a firm promise of it coming soon. Froyo also has turn-by-turn navigation for us in your car, but when I tried to use this I got some random message about it not being available in my area. I'm not sure if they mean 'not available in Wanaka' or 'not available in New Zealand' (Update: Turn by Turn navigation now works in New Zealand). Nobody would actually need this in a town as small as Wanaka, but damn I wish I had this with me last year while travelling Europe.

Apps

I get the feeling the apps are more polished on iPhone. Unsurprisingly, many of the apps on Android appear a bit, well, "homemade" - which is of course part of having an open development environment as opposed to big brother approving everything in the store. Browsing the Android Market for apps is hard work, and generally I find it easier to read some reviews online then specifically search for the app by name. I would have thought the world leader in search technology could have made it a bit easier to find stuff in the app store. Once you find something you like, buying apps couldn't be easier or faster - and being able to get an automatic no-questions-asked refund on any app within 24 hours puts the onus on developers to deliver value, which I think is a fair system for all concerned.

Gaming

I'm disappointed with the games offerings on the Android. I'm still a little misty about the lack of Civilization Revolution, but that aside, I just haven't seen much which utilises the power of the platform or offers much entertainment value. I downloaded a few kids games for our 3 and 5 year old girls and these have been great - the touchscreen really comes into it's own, and the kids picked it up quick smart. However, some of the free games were ad-supported, and were showing ads that were basically pornographic. I'm not a prude and don't mind being served saucy ads while I'm browsing (OK, I quite like it) - however - whoever wrote the code that serves these ads in a Dora the Explorer game needs their head checked. It renders most of the free kids games useless. (Update: Looks like this might have been sorted, haven't seen a dirty ad in a kids game for a while now)

Nexus One Enhancements

The N1 offers a couple of nice things. Firstly is the voice recognition, built into any text input box. This works reasonably well if you speak slowly and clearly, and providing it gets it right, is definitely faster than typing on a touchscreen keyboard for SMS messages etc. On the downside, it seems to use a web-based API for doing the voice recognition, so this feature is too slow to be useful when you aren't on a wifi connection. It's probably ok on a proper 2100MHz 3G connection, but we don't have one of those in Wanaka.
People also commented a bit negatively regarding the usefulness of the trackball on the Nexus One. I disagree - this thing is very handy for selecting a specific point on the screen (like correcting a single character in a word). It gets in the places that your fat fingers can't, so this is a good feature to have available.

App development

And this is really the driving factor that got me onto Android rather than iPhone. I'm a developer and I like to develop. Android apps are written in Java, and installing all the required software and getting the development environment setup was painless. From 'click here to download' to 'hello world' in less than an hour. I can test apps on a virtual device on my PC, or on my Android phone - both very easy to setup. Working with Java is a rude shock for a PHP programmer - I'm all for Object Oriented code, but it does seem monumentally difficult to achieve things that would be straightforward in PHP. To be fair, I have 10 years experience with PHP and 3 weeks with Java. I wonder if that has anything to do with it?
I have written 2 workable apps already, and ideas for plenty more. And this is why I love the concept of a smart phone - being able to write apps designed just for me that can talk with the other various pieces of technology I own and do something useful. The internet is all about APIs now, and there are some really good sources of data out there now that you can mash up into your own app. Fun times.

I'm yet to create an app worth publishing, but one annoyance is that Google won't let developers in New Zealand (or most other countries actually) publish paid apps through their market. I'm not sure if there is an actual reason for this, or if it's politically motivated in that Google doesn't want to be seen to use Paypal for paying publishers (which is the logical alternative to Google Checkout which doesn't seem to work here). If Google has an aversion to Paypal, I don't see why they can't just tack on the app income to the Adsense cheque they are already sending me. I'm hoping they sort this one out soonish, although I suspect it might take a while before my app-writing skills are worth more than a dollar to someone other than myself :)

Related to this is the fact that apps can only be purchased in 14 countries (luckily, NZ is one of them). As a developer, this is a way smaller market to sell to than iPhone and Google really need to sort this out if they want to attract the serious developers. Apparently piracy is a major issue for Android and it's not hard to see why - people are pirating apps because they aren't allowed to buy them, which is the most ridiculous situation I have ever heard. Google says "We're working hard to add more countries, so please stay tuned!" - really, what's so difficult about it? Developers have been selling their software worldwide since the internet was invented and Apple must be laughing their heads off at Google's inability to sort this out. Another case of political agenda getting in the way of innovation, and it's harming the platform.

Overall

So, this is hardly a glowing review for the Android, but then I suspect my iPhone 4 review (had I purchased one) would have been full of different frustrations. The simple fact of the matter is that both Android and iPhone do some things very well, and royally screw up other things. You'll need to pick the platform that fits with what is important to you and in my case I still think Android was the right choice - but Google do need to pull their socks up if they want the widespread appeal that the iPhone has. Google needs to throw the developers a bone and let them sell apps in more than 14 countries, and open up that SD card instead of forcing all apps into the tiny internal storage area. These are big issues, but should be easily solvable. The Google suite of apps are fantastic, but it was always going to be the strength of the third party apps that make or break this platform, and Android is losing this battle in my opinion where it most definitely shouldn't be.

Source: Nexus One vs Iphone 4

How to get a non-profit Paypal account approved

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +1200

Getting a Paypal account is quick and easy, you can be all done in less than 10 mins. However, for non-profit accounts, there is a rather substantial account review process that needs to be completed.

This blog post documents what you should expect through this account review, based on my recent account setup for Wanaka Toy Library - which took almost 2 months to complete the review process.

I hope the following step-by-step guide is useful to another charity / non-profit organisation, and reduce this to a more reasonable timeframe. This is aimed at New Zealand non-profit organisations, but the principles should apply elsewhere.

Note: The above image of a tireless beaurocrat is entirely fictional and bears no relation to this blog post whatsoever.

Proper Planning & Preperation...

Paypal requires non-profit organisations to undergo additional security checks. Basically, this is to stop some friendly fellow in Romania setting up a Paypal account under the name of some recognised charity and then soliciting donations under their name. These additional checks are definitely a good thing, I want to have some confidence that any money I donate is going to the correct organisation.

Before you start your application, you should do the following:

Select ONE member of the organisation to be the primary Paypal contact person. I recommend setting up paypal@example.com as an email address for this person. This is probably difficult to change later on, so get it sorted now.
Configure this person's email account to send as paypal@example.com - If you need to email the Paypal team they want to see the email coming from the registered address, otherwise you get one of these "Just a kind reminder, for security reasons and privacy concerns, please send us email at apacdd@paypal.com from the email address registered to your PayPal account in question next time."
Create a letterhead template if you don't already have one. We didn't so just pasted a logo in the corner of a word doc.
Assemble all the various bits of paperwork ahead of time - have them printed out for a committee meeting, and get them stamped and signed. Paypal tend to request information in small chunks rather than give a definitive list.

Step 1: Setup the account

So, to get started, setup a Paypal account as per normal. You want to select the non-profit / charity option when they ask which account type. This is very straightforward.

Step 2: Explain why you need the account

A few days later, you should get one of these because you selected a 'non-profit' account...

Dear Harvey Kane,

As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the PayPal system. We recently noticed an issue with your account:PayPal requires accounts within the charity / non-profit category to provide us with some additional information regarding their organization. your account was identified as falling within this classification upon a recent review. If we do not receive a response, we may have to place limitations on the ability to access your account.

PayPal requires accounts within the charity / non-profit category to provide us with some additional information regarding their organization. Your account was identified as falling within this classification upon a recent review. If we do not receive a response, we may have to place limitations on the ability to access your account.

In order to secure your account, we would like further information from you. We appreciate your understanding as we work to ensure account safety.

Please log in to your PayPal account to respond to this request. Be sure to log in securely by opening a new browser window and typing the PayPal URL. Once you log in, you will be asked to provide information to secure your account.

If we do not receive a response within Jun. 2, 2010, we may have to limit access to your account. Limited access protects your account until additional security measures can be completed.

Sincerely,

PayPal Account Review Department

They will want to know what you plan to do with the account. You need to upload a description of why you need the account and what you plan to do with it. Be honest here as you don't want the account closed down later on once you are actively using it because you told porky pies on your application. The magic word they are looking for is "Donation". If you don't plan to take donations via Paypal don't use this word on your application - I suspect most of the extra paperwork is only needed for non-profits who want to accept donations.

Here's what we responded with - clear and to the point:

Wanaka Community Toy Library is a toy library based in Wanaka, New Zealand.

Members pay NZD$65 per year for access to the library, they can hire toys for 2 weeks at a time and then swap then for new toys. Members are expected to contribute to fundraising activities as part of their membership.

We are an incorporated society, and are a non-profit organisation. We are going through the process of developing a website, and we plan to integrate online-payment functionality into the site.

In particular, we would like to use Paypal for the following functionality:

- Allow members to pay their annual subscriptions using credit card / Paypal.
- Allow members to pay fees for overdue toys
- Allow members to pay to reserve a particular toy
- Allow the public to make a donation to the toy library

The site is likely to be very low volume, so Paypal is a logical choice as the fees are per-transaction rather than per-month.

Paypal have a special upload system built into the resolution centre which is generally pretty good, but frustratingly it only accepts image files and not PDFs. You will need to convert all your docs to lowish-res images before uploading. You only have a few megabytes of space available for uploads, so be mindful of this when uploading your images. Aim for 100 - 200kb per document/image and you should be fine.

Step 3: Basic information

Uh oh - you used the "D" word in your last correspondence didn't you. When you login to the resolution center, you will be asked to provide some more information.

Bank statement or voided cheque

A voided cheque or a copy of a recent (last 6 months) bank statement in the name of the organisation. We scanned a bank statement and sent this in. The address on our statement was for the treasurer rather than the organisation, but that wasn't a problem here.

Organisation summary on letterhead

This part is easy - summarise the organisation and additionally supply any supporting documents such as certificates of incorporation or a constitution. If you have an organisation mission statement, use that as the basis of this document. This must be on letterhead.

Wanaka Community Toy Library is a non-profit incorporated society based in Wanaka, New Zealand. The purpose of the organisation is to make available well designed, good quality toys that will extend basic physical, mental sensory and perceptual skills of children.

Membership is currently made up of 166 families from around the Upper Clutha area in New Zealand.

Full details of how the organisation is operated are available in the Constitution and rules of the Wanaka Community Toy Library, which has been provided previously to Paypal.

For New Zealand organisations, certificates of incorporation are available from the Companies Office and you can find other supporting docs publicly available at the Charities Commission. Very handy.

Proof of tax-exempt status

In New Zealand, all tax-exempt organisations are publicly listed. I phoned the IRD who said there was no official certificate proving tax exemption, however being on the 'donee organisations' list was proof of this status. Here's what we supplied to Paypal, and this was accepted without any fuss. As far as I could tell, there was no permalink to a particular organisation, hence the step-by-step instructions for finding our organisation.

Proof of Tax exemption

In New Zealand, Inland Revenue govern tax exempt organisations. There is no formal document or certificate proving tax exemption, however there is a publicly-viewable list of tax-exempt organisations available online on the IRD website.

Wanaka Community Toy Library Incorporated can be found on this list. Please follow these directions for proof of tax exemption:

- Visit http://www.ird.govt.nz/donee-organisations/
- In the 'Keywords' field, enter 'Wanaka'
- Scan for Wanaka Community Toy Library Incorporated in the list.

Inland Revenue can confirm that all organisations on this list are tax exempt. Their phone number is +64 4 978 0779 if there are any further questions regarding this page as proof of tax exemption.

If you aren't tax-exempt, good luck. From the tone of all their communications, the proof of tax exemption seems to be a pretty major requirement for Paypal. You may have trouble getting the non-profit Paypal account working without it, but do let me know how you get on.

Step 4: More information

You might get one of these...

Hello Wanaka Community Toy Library,

We are writing in regards to your PayPal account. PayPal appreciates that you have chosen us to accept payments for your organization.

We have received your documents. Thank you for your cooperation. In order to continue our investigation of your case, please provide the following information:

1. A brief organizational summary or Mission Statement.

2. We received the authorization letter from you but we noticed that the authorized person is not the account holder. I am afraid we can not accept the letter as a valid one. Please revise the authorization letter.

The detailed requirement for the authorization letter is as follows:

a. The letter needs to be printed on the organization's letterhead. The
organization stamp (if available) should be added in the signature section.
b. The named authorized person/s should be the main account holder/s and
responsible for all PayPal account-related activities.
c. The person signing the letter could be human resource, business
directors / owners (e.g. CEO, CFO, CMO) and should be a different person
than the nominated/authorized account holder/s.
d. If the account holder is the sole owner of business (no other
directors), he may act as the one signing the letter. The stamp of company
is requested on the signature section.

In addition, please state the authorized person is act for and on behalf of
the organization in handling all matters related to the management of its
PayPal business account (Please specify this PayPal business account by
including the registered email address of this account)

3. Proof of Identification - Photo ID of the authorized person/s (normally
the account holder) and the person authorizing the Letter of Authorization
(normally the person who signed the document). Examples of acceptable
Photo ID include: Driver's License, Passport, National Identity Cards.

4. We noticed that your website is under construction. Please inform us
when it is fully set up.
...

There are several things to discuss here.

Authorisation letter

Paypal need an official letter authorising one person to operate the account. It took us 3 goes to get this approved, so follow these instructions to the letter, and use our final letter as a guideline.

Letter of Authorisation 21st June 2010

To whom it may concern,

This letter authorises _______________________ (paypal@example.com) as the main account holder on our Paypal account, and they will be responsible for all Paypal account-related activities. The authorized person (paypal@example.com) is to act for and on behalf of the organization in handling all matters related to the management of its PayPal business account.

Signed:
...

This must be on letterhead.
The required wording is very specific. Our initial letter got rejected because we didn't properly follow the wording instructions properly.
The person you authorise must be the person who has their name on the Paypal account. We also got rejected because I tried to authorise the treasurer rather than myself.
If you have an official organisation stamp or "common seal", use this here. The use of your common seal may be subject to rules set out in your constitution - such as only being able to be used at official committee meetings.
To be on the safe side, try to get 2 other committee members to sign this rather than the noninated person signing their own authorisation letter.
You must supply ID for the 2 signatories + the nominated account holder. We scanned and sent drivers licenses.

Under construction

At the time of submitting this application, the website looked like a finished website, but I had a little "under construction" note in the sidebar while we finalised the Paypal application. This was a problem, so make sure your website doesn't use these words. A basic, crappy-looking website is fine, but an unfinished website is not so make sure you hide any unfinished bits of the website. I'd avoid the use of lorem ipsum text too - nothing screams 'under construction' like Lorem Ipsum :)

Once I did all this, I emailed Paypal directly via their provided address (rather than using the resolution centre), just to make sure things were proceeding...

Hi,

I have just uploaded the requested documentation via the resolution center. Hopefully this should be everything required to complete this process. I apologise for the delay, the committee only meets monthly.

To clarify:
- A brief organisation summary has been uploaded. Further details about the organisation if needed are available in the constitution (already supplied) or on the website, www.wanakatoylibrary.org.nz
- I have amended the authorisation letter. This authorises Harvey Kane (myself) as the Paypal account holder and is signed by the chairperson.
- Photo ID from myself and the chairperson has been supplied.
- The website is now ready for launch, and the 'coming soon' message has been removed.

Thanks very much,

Harvey Kane.

We had missed the Paypal-imposed deadline here by a week or so, which didn't seem to be an issue (maybe because I apologised so nicely).

Step 5: More information

After submitting the above, we got a request for some more new information.

Hello Wanaka Community Toy Library,

We are writing to you in regards to your PayPal Account. PayPal appreciates that you have chosen us to accept payments for your organisation. As part of PayPal's Compliance Program, we request that entities wishing to accept donations on behalf of a charity or other
non-profit organisation provide evidence of their legitimacy. Please provide the following information:

1. Please update your registration address by a physical one.

2. A valid Proof of address document to prove the new address.
- Proof of address document, such as a copy of a utility bill, bank or credit card statement, tax invoice, insurance bill in your name. Please note the address on the statement must match the PayPal account and the date of issued must be in recent 6 months.

All requested information must be submitted within 7 days to continue the review process.

This was because we used a PO Box as the contact address, however PO Boxes aren't acceptable. This was a bit of a problem for me as I simply don't have any mail coming to my physical address - I have gone to great lengths to become location independent, continually updating one's physical address gets too hard. To counter this, I raised a small invoice to the organisation using my own company for "Web hosting". This initially got rejected because it was made out to "Wanaka Toy Library" so I re-issued the invoice to "Wanaka Community Toy Library Incorporated, Attn: Harvey Kane" and it was accepted. The important thing is to have the organisation's name, your name, and the exact physical address you have listed with Paypal.

Again, this took me longer than 7 days to organise, but it was still accepted.

All done

A couple of days later, we got one of these...

Hello Wanaka Community Toy Library,

Our review is complete and we have restored your account.

We appreciate your patience and thank you for your help in making PayPal the safest and most trusted online payment solution.

Thanks,

PayPal Compliance Department

Sweet, glad to have this all sorted. And our account has been functioning nicely since.

Shortly after the 'account approved' message, I got another email...

Dear Harvey Kane,

We understand that your PayPal account may have been temporarily limited due to questions or concerns by our Account Review team. Thank you very much for your cooperation during this process. We are pleased that your account has now been reinstated.

As part of PayPal's Commitment to excellence, we would like to ask you to take just a few minutes to answer questions about PayPal's account limitation process.

To respond to our survey, please click on the web address below. If that does not work, please cut and paste the entire web address into the address field of your browser.

NOTE: Please respond within five days. After 5 days, this invitation will expire.

(link here)

Thank you for your feedback and continued business with PayPal!

Sincerely,

PayPal Customer Support

I sent some honest feedback of how I found the process.

Summary

So - the intent of this post is to help other organisations prepare the required paperwork to help the account review process along. I couldn't find good resources available explaining how it all works, especially anything relevant to NZ organisations. Paypal is a very good low-cost option for non-profits wanting to start accepting orders and donations online - however the setup process is, if I'm being generous, a bit difficult.

I would recommend assembling all the documents mentioned above, and send a big lump of paperwork for Paypal to pick through. The frustration for me was having to wait for committee meetings or chase around other committee members for signatures or paperwork, so hopefully this gives a good overview of what paperwork is required so you can get it all together in one go, at one committee meeting.

Good luck.

PS. - If you fink this information useful, please consider making a small donation to the Wanaka Community Toy Library using our shiny new Paypal account :)

Source: How to get a non-profit Paypal account approved

Trolls and email addresses

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +1200

Privacy seems to be a fairly hot topic these days and I watched with interest when a local company made a bit of a blunder and the privacy police promptly jumped all over them.

The offender was Paymex, a local New Zealand payment gateway provider that is sadly closing their doors - and bulk emailed an announcement all their customers without remembering to BCC all the addresses. Oops.

I haven't used their service for some time, so this announcement doesn't affect me, I read the announcement, deleted it, and carried on with my life.

However, not everyone was so contented and some people just had to start up a discussion.

Obviously, I am not happy with your lack notice regarding the closure of Paymex services. However, this pales into insignificance compared to your openly displaying my email address to various members of your customer base. This is extraordinarily unprofessional and we will be moving our clients to other services with all due dispatch.

Growl growl, coming from a privacy-concerned guy that publishes his email address in spam-harvester-friendly plain text on his website. By the way, I don't think Paymex will be all that upset about clients moving elsewhere, what with them closing down and all.

And then a couple more emails with a similar tone.

bla bla bla... (snip) ... bla bla bla

And then some words of wisdom...

However as a user I do not want to be subject to hundreds of emails today with comments.

So please do not REPLY to All as this is going to get out of control.

Exactly - at this point the BCC cockup has turned into a grand old discussion being sent back and forwards between a few hundred unwilling participants. Let's not make a bad situation worse right?

Our organisation has never been associated with PayMex and is also shocked at the lack of privacy of email addresses.

These emails are either Spam, Hoax, or the product of a very unprofessional organisation.

"Shocked". This guy kindly included a link to his website in this complaint about spam. It's not ok to mass email people out of the blue, but apparently it's fine to jump on the bandwagon once somebody else starts it.

And then someone having a crack at moving the discussion out of people's inboxes...

Although we are all agreed it was wrong to share people’s details for many people there may be benefit is discussing options and identifying others with the same integration needs. In order to kill any further e-mail discussion but allow real discussion to take place we have set up a blog that people can add discussion to:
http://www.fuzion.co.nz/blog/2010/07/06/226/

Please note that we will not contact anyone directly as a result of posting on this blog.

Hopefully this will be the last e-mail to this group and anyone who wishes to discuss further can use the blog

Some people got the message but not everyone. This seemed like a perfectly logical option, but with a mailing list this size there are bound to be trolls lurking.

This is really unprofessional to lack all customer email contact to every one.

Like this one - who just regurgitated the sentiment that has already been shared, adding nothing to the discussion that nobody wants anyway.

Hi Paymex

Email address is personal information, sould not be discloursed to anyone else without the permission.
I will keep the right to take legal action.

Legal action is the answer to all the world's problems. Paymex's offence should not go unpunished, and I would see them condemned to slavery for sharing my email address.

Who is this and what's going on? the website of the email domain is in NZ, i'm in Melbourne Australia!

Yep, spam the list, someone out there will be perfectly happy to explain what's going on!!!!!111111

who cares! - n0b0dy 1s prfect - so just go over it!

Yes, a sentiment shared by many, though sadly the discussion continues.

Paymex sending my email out like they did pisses me off, but so does each reply that repeats it!

At least be smart enough to make it a blind copy if you’re going to copy me in.

Better still just send your complaints direct to Paymex and leave me out.

Aaargh. Again, a valid point but meh, if I wanted a discussion I'd go troll a forum or something.

I too am NOT happy that our addresses got shown to "the world" - but please
guys, stop REPLYING TO ALL !!!!

And the saga continues. I don't think this will be the last message. Again, meh.

Illustrations

Oh, in case the purpose of the illustration is lost on anyone, it's supposed to be a troll. You just can't trust trolls with email lists. If the illustration police want to point me at some good tutorials, I'd be most appreciative :)

Source: Trolls and email addresses

Stopping Manual Spam on your Blog

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +1200

I woke up this morning to a number of new comments on my blog. All of them utter crap from offshore SEO link builders.

I know they were posted by offshore link builders, because I happen to track referral URLs on all comments. These particular referral URLs all had search queries like web design "post comment" which is a pretty standard starting point for link builders looking for blogs to comment on.

Great post!

This got me thinking. When was the last time one of these link builders actually posted a useful comment? Their comments make it straight past the CAPTCHA because it's a human entering them, and because they don't usually contain spammy phrases such as 'WOW gold' or 'viagra' it's hard to algorithmically filter them too.

Does anyone else have problems with these 'low quality but not completely spam' posts? The ones where you have to stop and think for a bit before deleting?

Would it be so bad if I simply said no to all comments from visitors that arrived at the site from a search query such as web design "post comment"? Or any search query containing "add link", "submit url", "post comment" etc.

So, I thought I would put a bit of code together to put this theory into action.

Announcing...

So here is ManualSpamBlocker. It's a Wordpress plugin that closes comments for all posts if the visitor arrived via a dodgy looking search query. The link builder can still enjoy your quality blog posts, but they just won't be able to comment on them because they will think comments are closed.

Simple huh?

This is the first Wordpress plugin that I have released, so I would really welcome any feedback you might have on it. It's still to be considered Alpha quality code, so don't be rushing to install it on your high-traffic blog just yet. Once I'm happy with how it's looking, I'll submit it to the Wordpress plugin database and see what happens. Happy to give out SVN access to anyone who thinks they are able to contribute.

Source: Stopping Manual Spam on your Blog

POST is the new nofollow

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +1200

Google has recently posted some trivia on the use of nofollowed links. I had to check the clock to make sure this wasn't one of their April fool's stunts. It's not, which is a bit scary.

Matt Cutts sums it up right here in an interview with Danny Sullivan.

Danny: So there’s 10 links on home page, 5 pages Nofollowed, where is that link juice going?
Matt: You can think of it as evaporating.

Wow, ok. Oh, by the way, Google has been crawling Javascript links too.

Danny: You guys have click-change, that now you are actually reading javascript, but you said "if you have paid links, you can use javascript and your good", now you're not good?

Matt: As Googlebot got smarter we started changing our advice on this. What we haven't mentioned is that elsewhere, even on the onclick, you can put a rel=nofollow on a link within javascript, you can do that if you want to be completely safe, I expect to see those stay safe.

Optimising your links

Right. So for those who have been busy sculpting their pagerank via the nofollow attribute (which is what Google designed it for) it now appears that we have been shooting ourselves in the foot. All our nofollowed links are actually working against us by reducing our PR, and our javascript links are being clicked on.

So - how do you link to something that is a bit average quality or you don't really vouch for it? Nofollow has now lost it's shine, and the javascript option is gone too.

Options

Which leaves precious few options. The obvious one is no links. I speculate there will be a plethora of Wordpress plugins released soon that give no link at all. In lieu of a link, you will need to copy-paste a plain-text URL into a browser window if you wish to visit the site. Not especially great for usability, but now one of the few ways to preserve your PR so you might understand webmasters going down this path.

The other option that springs to mind is a flash based link. This could be complex because Google's crawling of Flash sites is constantly improving, so you might need to embed your links into an external XML file or obfuscate them somehow. This approach would be an accessibility disaster, but I can definitely see webmasters going down this path too.

POST

The third option, and perhaps the best option I can think of is HTTP POST. Google doesn't follow through POST forms, because POSTing data can potentially change the contents of a website. POST forms often contain things like delete buttons, and you don't want spiders running around clicking those all over the place.

Google confirms this on their blog, illustrated by the following comments.

Gael Fraiteur said...

For good internet citizens (and according to the REST bible), the rule is that a robot should not invoke POST methods, because they may have side effects. GET methods are supposed to be programmed so that they have no side effect.

I hope Google respects these rules too.

Susan Moskwa said...
@Gael: As mentioned in the post, we'll only be retrieving GET forms, not POST.

OK, so how about we add a POST form with a single submit button. The form POSTs to redirect.php?r=www.domain.com which then does a 301 redirect to the actual link.

This isn't a link, so it doesn't need to be nofollowed.
It's POST, so Google will respectfully ignore it.
The user will end up where they want to be.
You can use CSS to disguise the submit button and make it look more link-like, perhaps even using javascript to edit the statusbar rollover information. Unfortunately, I don't think you can get the context menu for 'open in new tab' to show up.

I'm giving serious thought to making this change to the blogs I administer.

Nice one Google

Google has their head in the clouds if they think webmasters are going to ignore this change and simply go about their business of 'creating great content' and not worrying the fact that half their PR is heading down a black hole. I think the way websites link together is going to change, and expect usability/accessibility of websites to go backwards as a result.

Source: POST is the new nofollow

robots.txt vs sitemap.xml - Who will Win?

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +1200

On-page SEO is largely about getting search engines to visit your site so that they can index it nicely. But it's also about stopping them from indexing things you don't want indexed.

So today when I came across some indexed content that shouldn't have been indexed, I was a bit surprised / shocked. You see, the content had been specifically blocked from spiders using 2 different methods - robots.txt and a noindex/nofollow meta tag.

However, upon further inspection, for one reason or another this content had lost it's noindex/nofollow meta tag and had somehow found it's way into the XML sitemap. Doh!

Game on

So the situation here is that robots.txt is saying "Block" and sitemap.xml is saying "allow". I verified that the content in question was in fact blocked using the tool on Google Webmaster Tools.

Sitemap.xml is the winner - the content gets indexed regardless.

Makes sense, I guess

I had thought that robots.txt was acting as a failsafe to make doubly-sure that the content doesn't get indexed, but this isn't really the purpose of robots.txt. Robots.txt is more designed to instruct crawlers that are blindly trolling through your content. It will stop a crawler from visiting a page if it happens to find a link to that page on it's travels.
However, when you write a sitemap.xml file, you are specifically inviting the bots to visit and index the page. It makes sense that they ignore the instructions given in robots.txt because they are serving a higher authority.

So, this does mean that extra care needs to be taken with the creation of your sitemap.xml file. If search engines are treating this as gospel, then make sure it's correct.

Source: robots.txt vs sitemap.xml - Who will Win?

Are you using Google screenshots illegally?

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +1200

SEOs and web design agencies often use a screenshot of Google results to show off their wonderful rankings. I hadn't really considered the copyright implications of doing this, until I stumbled across the official page on how to use Google's brand.

Because most of us are too busy enjoying Gmail, Chrome and other cool freebies, it's easy to forget that Google are actually a multinational behemoth and have an army of legal-weasels dedicated to copyright infringement, EULAs, and all that yucky stuff.

I'm hardly surprised that such a page exists - of course it does - but the following piece I found interesting.

This use must be unaltered: You can't superimpose graphics, photos, or ad copy on the screenshot or change the look of the screen-captured image in any other way.

And this also...

Please note that using a screenshot of a Google search results page in connection with advertising your products or services (for instance, showing a top ranking on Google) is not considered instructive or illustrative, and therefore is not permitted.

Pretty clear. SEO and web design companies who use screenshots as 'advertising' is a clear-cut violation of these terms.

I know I have done this in the past, and I'd wager that there are some pretty big SEO companies out there using Google screenshots as advertising, or altered screenshots to illustrate a point clearer.

Source: Are you using Google screenshots illegally?

OSS Bar Camp, Dublin, 2009 - Review

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +1300

I have just spent the day at the thoroughly enjoyable OSS Bar Camp in Dublin. It was a much needed dose of geeky goodness that I haven't done for a while, so well worth the effort.

I haven't been to a bar camp before, so wasn't totally sure what to expect, but the presenters were entertaining and I came out this evening knowing a few things that I didn't know this morning.

Luis de Bethencourt - Ubuntu

Luis is a core developer for Ubuntu, based in Dublin. I use Linux for my servers but haven't really used it for a desktop OS, though I did have a play with an Ubuntu boot CD and was suitably impressed. Luis stressed that Ubuntu is not so much a technology as it is a community, and that it's the quality of the people that make Ubuntu special. His keynote speech was a nice reminder of why open source is cool.

Jaime Hemmett - Git

I have had the pleasure of meeting Jaime at the 2 PHP meetups I have attended since being here, and since she is Australian, we have something in common (that is, everyone in Ireland thinks I'm Australian). Git, a version control system written by Linus Torvalds is something I had heard of but hadn't really had the time to investigate further. The room was basically filled with SVN users (myself included) and Jaime's objective was to get people to give Git a try, nothing more. SVN has been a godsend for the work I do, but it does tend to be a bit slow and unreliable. As I write this, I haven't been able to do a proper checkout of Jojo CMS because the JS Min SVN repository (which we link to) seems to be down. I'm not totally sure that Git is a better option for my purposes, but I'll be giving it a try.

David Coallier - Get Ready for web 3.0

Shit, I thought web 2.0 was all about buzzwords for the sake of buzzwords and AJAX for the sake of AJAX. I didn't know there was a web 3.0 until this morning, but I guess it makes sense.
Adccording to David, web 3.0 is all about standardising web APIs. David has contributed to the PHP core and is a developer for Echo Libre who where sponsoring the event (thanks for a great day team).

The whole discussion of APIs is really interesting. I use APIs on a daily basis, and understand the frustrations of having to learn something new every time I want to connect to a different web service.

Web 3.0 is apparantly all about standardising how we connect to web APIs, but I'm still having trouble visualising how this might work. The issue in my mind is this - how do you standardise data formats when the data is completely different across each industry? I have spent the last week or so connecting to different Bible APIs in order to display the bible on a website, and it's not trivial. Aside from any technical considerations, the solution we eventually chose has a number of legal restrictions on it, so I'm not sure how this might be standardised.

Stuart Langridge - Advanced Javascript

This talk was pure comedy. We looked at some new whizz-bang javascript features, things that make our lives easier and make our javascript faster. We were told that this was available NOW. Some of the developers in the audience were concerned about browser compatibility, but this isn't something that bothered Stuart - most of the features he showed us worked fine in Safari, Firefox, Opera, and all good modern browsers.

This is all well-and-good, but there is that small percentage of the market (80%) using Internet Explorer which doesn't support any of the new features he showed us. Hmmm. However, the good news is that a lot of the functionality can be replicated using a javascript library like jQuery.

The take-home information from this presentation: Keep using jQuery, it's bad-ass.

Paul Biggar - Optimizing PHP with phc

PHC, or phpcompiler is a compiler for PHP (yep). Paul is a developer for this project, and has a passion for compilers. He discussed some of the challenges in optimising PHP code, and left the audience feeling that PHP was actually a bit of a lost cause. "real" programmers often give PHP grief for being an untyped language, and say that it encourages sloppy coding, which I do agree with. But it's also simple enough to get something running quickly, and powerful enough to do whatever you need it to do, so PHP does deserve a bit of credit.

I enjoyed this talk, which was coming from a unique angle.

Alan Burke - Drupal

Drupal is similar in soooo many ways to Jojo CMS. Obviously Drupal has a much much larger community / budget, but the concepts behind the products are similar.
Personally, I have struggled with Drupal being a bit limited out of the box - if you want Drupal to be 'just how you like it', you need to install the right modules or do lots of customisation, which can be a bit daunting. However, there is no question that it's a powerful platform, and I guess it would have been nice to see some example Drupal sites in detail. There is a 2 day Drupal geek-fest in Galway next weekend, so I'll be attending this, and are looking forward to it.

The pub

And then we all headed off to the pub for a thoroughly enjoyable discussion of all things geek. I stayed a bit longer than I intended, and ended up missing my bus and having to faff around in Dublin for an hour before heading home. Wouldn't be the first time I have gotten lost in Dublin.

I'd like to extend a big thanks to Laura Czajkowski and Jaime Hemmett for organising the event, which was by all accounts a success. Open source is alive and well in Ireland.

Source: OSS Bar Camp, Dublin, 2009 - Review

SEO Counter - jQuery character counter

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +1300

For the last several years, I have used a little javascript character counter to keep my page titles and meta descriptions to a certain length. When titles are less than 70 characters and meta descriptions are less than 155 characters, Google won't truncate them in search results, and this looks nice.

Today, I decided to bundle up a version of this script so others can use it in their CMS or website. This variation of the script is based on jQuery, and is pretty straightforward to install.

Why?

If your page title is longer than 70 characters, Google will shorten it when it is displayed in search results. This means visitors don't get to see your full message. I like my titles to include the keywords I'm targeting, but also have human appeal so they are clickable. If they get shortened by Google, they have slightly less human appeal in my opinion, and you have less control over how your listing is presented.

Above: Titles longer than 70 characters and meta descriptions longer than 155 characters will usually get shortened.

SEO Counter

SEO counter is a simple script that adds a counter to your text input / textarea fields, so you know how many characters you have left to work with. For titles, the counter starts at 70 characters and counts down to zero. This makes it easy to know when your title is likely to be truncated in the search results.

Example

You can see the script in action at the SEO Counter example page.

Download

Download seocounter.zip

Installation (quick version)

Installation is fairly straightforward.

Include jQuery in the <head> of your document.
Include seocounter.js in the <head> of your document, after jQuery.
Add class="seocounter_title" to any title text inputs on your page.
Add class="seocounter_meta" to any meta description textareas on your page.
Make sure your form fields have a name attribute set (this also needs to be unique).
Call SEO Counter using the following code in your <head>...

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){seocounter();});
</script>

Installation (detailed version)

Include jQuery

Add the following code between the <head> and </head> tags of your page...

You can also use Google's copy of jQuery...

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

Note that if you are already running jQuery, you won't need to include it twice.

Include seocounter.js

Add the following code between the <head> and </head> tags of your page. This must be added after jQuery.

Add classes to your input boxes

You won't want the counter on all of your input fields, so you need to specify which fields where you want the counter. This is done by adding a new class to the input or textarea.

If you want a text input to behave like a title, add a class of "seocounter_title".

Make sure the field also has the name attribute specified, this is required by SEO Counter.

If you want a textarea input to behave like a meta description, add a class of "seocounter_meta".

<textarea name="meta_description" class="seocounter_meta" rows="4" cols="50"></textarea>

You can add counters that countdown from any number as well. Add a class of "seocounter_XX" where "XX" is the number of characters to countdown from.

<input type="text" name="foo" class="seocounter_50" />

<textarea name="bar" class="seocounter_200" rows="4" cols="50"></textarea>

Call SEO Counter

Add the following code between the <head> and </head> tags of your page. This must be added after jQuery, and after seocounter.js

<script type="text/javascript">

$(document).ready(function(){seocounter();});

</script>

This will cause the SEO Counter script to appear after the document has loaded. If you happen to add extra input elements to the page dynamically, you can call this function again to add the counters.

Title suffixes

I pretty much always use a suffix on my sites. For example, on RagePank.com every page title ends with " | RagePank SEO" which I like from a branding perspective. However, this means that this is 15 extra characters that needs to be included in the equation. In effect, my titles can't be longer than 55 characters (70 - 15 = 55), so the counter needs to account for this.

To workaround this, when you call SEO Counter, include the title suffix as an argument to the function. eg.

<script type="text/javascript">

$(document).ready(function(){seocounter(' | RagePank SEO');});

</script>

Easy.

License

You are free to use and modify this script free of charge, subject to the terms of the Lesser GPL license. If you like this script, please consider linking to http://www.ragepank.com

Testing

I have not done extensive testing on this script, however it is quite simple and I wouldn't expect to run into many problems. Feel free to get in touch if you find any bugs, or have any comments.

Source: SEO Counter - jQuery character counter

How to stir up your insurance company

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +1300

When we bought our first house, about 5 years ago, we didn't have much cash and went for a 95% loan. Because of this, the bank made us get life insurance - which we didn't really want, but didn't have much choice. Now that we have kids, it's a worthwhile thing to have, but at the time is was yet another new expense that we had to deal with.

I'm overweight, and the insurance company wanted to do a full medical checkup before they would insure me. A doctor came over to my house and interrogated me, held me by the balls while I coughed, then took 15-20 goes at trying to find my blood vessels to take a blood sample. Literally - he just kept jabbing the needle into my arm, muttering about how hard it was to do. I was ready to kill him, then someone suggested I go to the local nurse for a blood sample - she got it right first time, bless her.

After all that, turns out I have really high cholesterol plus a whole lot of other things wrong that I didn't understand; such as uric acid and liver function - and the insurance company turbo-charged my premiums as a result. I have been unhappily paying them each month since.

So, now it's 2009, and over the past 15 months I have been busting ass doing lots of exercise and eating properly, and I'm 20kg (44lb) smaller as a result. It's not miracle weight loss stuff, but I'm pretty pleased with the result and definitely looking and feeling better. A few weeks back, we were selling stuff on TradeMe and noticed a SureSlim voucher for sale - these normally go for $1000, but we picked it up for $100 which is a bit of a bargain. I didn't really need SureSlim as I'm doing ok by myself, but I figured a bit of professional nutritional help wouldn't be wasted.

Sureslim required another blood test before we could started.

Blood test results

So I get the results back, and it looks good. Cholesterol is waaaay down (still higher than normal, but a massive improvement) and all the other things they check for are within normal limits.

So the first thing I do is phone the insurance company to sort those premiums out. I email them the blood test results, and tell them what I did to reduce the cholesterol. And this is where it gets interesting.

You see, I BCCed a copy to a competing insurance company, to make sure I wasn't getting done. Turns out, I am. Current insurance company are charging $97 per month, and the quote from competing company is about $30. Hmmm.

I'm currently in negotiations with the existing company - but in order to get them to look at my premiums, I need to complete a mountain of paperwork. I said I would print, scan and email the form (I don't own a fax) but it's 25 frikin pages - my scanner doesn't have a sheet feeder.
In order to sign up for competing company, I also need to complete a mountain of paperwork, so this isn't something I can avoid.

Here's the bit that surprises me though - My current provider actually wants my business. Normally with these faceless behemoths you tell the call-centre person that you are looking at going with another provider, and they couldn't be less interested. However in this case, I have had phone calls + emails from 4 different people trying to keep me happy. I managed to get their attention.

It seems that my case is moving further and further up the food chain, but nobody has any authority to actually do anything without the mountain of paperwork being returned. But it's nice to know they are trying their best.

What I think

Here's my take on all this - it's not about price, it's about respect. They have been enjoying my triple-charged premium for years, and now it's my turn. I have worked really hard to lose the weight that I have, and if the insurance company wants me to jump through further hoops, fuck them.

Part of the weight-loss process is getting a new outlook on life - you feel better, you look better, and you are confident again. The healthy food fuels you with more energy and zest than ever before, and dealing with this shit is now easy. When it comes to negotiating life insurance, you are no longer on the back foot and can start demanding what you want.

I am in control - and when Sureslim do another blood test in 6 weeks time, I'm likely to have even more leverage to work with. I'm contemplating my next move - this is one monthly bill I'm really excited about lightening up.

Source: How to stir up your insurance company

Ireland beckons...

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +1300

We have recently decided to move the family to Ireland for a while, which I'm hoping is going to be a fairly exciting change.

We have tickets, and it's all happening quite soon.

The basic idea behind the move is pretty simple:

The kids haven't started school yet.
We don't currently own a home (having sold earlier in 2008), and the NZ housing market doesn't seem to be improving anytime soon.
My wife isn't tied to a flash corporate job, she is currently doing the housewife thing.
I'm a freelance website developer and internet marketer - if there was ever a job that could be done remotely, this is it.

So given all these things, why not?

Ireland is an obvious choice of locations for us - my wife Kirstin was born there and holds an Irish passport, which makes everything a whole lot easier. No visas, work permits, paperwork etc to deal with. Aside from that, a good Irish accent always puts a smile on my face, and our experiences of Irish hospitality so far have been excellent.

We leave New Zealand on the 21st February 2009 and will probably live in Dublin, but that isn't set in stone. We aren't sure exactly how long we will be gone for, but it's likely to be 6-9 months in Ireland, plus a bit of time in France and possibly Germany on the way back if finances allow.

How will the business run?

RagePank and Capsaicin will carry on running with surprisingly few changes. Because of the wonders of modern technology (VoIP), you will still be able to reach me on the same Auckland phone numbers, but most of the business is run by email anyway. I'll still be carrying on with all current projects, except I might actually have a half-decent internet connection in Dublin.

Obviously I won't be available for any meetings - but those who know me will know that I have been avoiding meetings like the plague for some time now - most things can be resolved over the phone or via email, which is almost always quicker. The other significant change is that office hours will be reduced to 7am - 12pm (NZ time), so if you need to call me, call me in the morning. I'm toying with the idea of redirecting calls outside these hours to someone local, but I'm not sure it is really needed or would help.

I'm currently trying to cut down as much paper mail as possible as this will be going to a 3rd party and will be checked fairly irregularly. I'd really appreciate it if customers could try to pay their bills electronically rather than by cheque, if possible.

If anyone wants to catch up before we go, just send me an email. I'll be available for face-face meetings during January, if one is needed, but February is going to be pretty busy.

I'll likely start a travel blog of some sort, and I'll post details if this goes ahead. I'm also giving serious thought to writing a book about potatoes - I hear the Irish like their potatoes.

Source: Ireland beckons...

Hey Google, check out my 301s

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Every so often, you need to change the domain name for a website. This isn't something to be taken lightly as there are several implications.

One of these implications is having stale pages lingering around in Google's index from the old domain. The issue here is that due to dupe content issues, Google may not be willing to index your new content until the old content is gone. Sure, you have setup a 301 from the old pages to the new pages, but maybe your site just doesn't have much authority and Google doesn't care much about your redirects.

Without any links to those old redirected pages, Google won't be revisiting those pages anytime soon. Meaning Google won't get to see your 301, the old page stays indexed, and the new page is ignored because it's dupe content.

My solution to this problem is simple - write an open letter to Google. I like to keep it light hearted, it's not like a person is going to read it. Something like this...

Hey Googlebot, long time no see mate.
Hey, I was wondering if I could bother you for a bit - I have this site I'm in the middle of optimising for a client, and he has the .com domain and the .co.nz domain.

Thing is, the site has had dupe content issues in the past and we are only now doing something about it. You assumed that the 'master' copy was the .com but actually we want the .co.nz to be the main copy because the client mostly deals in New Zealand so to help out we have put a 301 in place.

So Googlebot, could you be so kind as to check out our 301s on the following pages, and do the decent thing and update your index?

Cheers mate. If you want to come round for dinner one night we would love to have you - get your wife to bring some of that lovely link juice that she makes :)

Cheers,

Harvey.

You don't post the letter - you just place it on a page somewhere that Googlebot will find.

So basically I'm just recommending that if you want to speed up the reindexing of your site, you need to get some links. Wow - aren't I just the leading authority on new SEO information!</sarchasm>

Thing is, the pages I mentioned above will never generate any direct links under normal circumstances - anyone linking to a little site like this one will be linking to the homepage. Just adding one link to each of the pages that Google has indexed means that there is a much better chance of Google seeing the 301 and updating the index quicker. If the links are placed on an external site that has been around for a while, then things should happen even quicker.

XML sitemaps

Anoher thing I will sometimes do is include the old URLs in the XML sitemap - if the search engine attempts to follow the link they will see the redirect and (in theory) update the index.

Obviously this method doesn't scale particularly well - but for a 5 page site with almost no links, it's a good way to get things happening just a bit quicker than normal.

Source: Hey Google, check out my 301s

Announcing NewFirst Thunderbird add-on

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Again, I stray from the path of SEO blogging and post more non-SEO content. However, seeing as my blog gets more Firefox traffic than IE traffic, there's a good chance that many of you are using Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client, so this post might be of some use.

NewFirst Thunderbird Add-on

This morning I decided to do something about a particular Thunderbird behaviour that has been bugging me for some time - the fact that when you click the date column header to sort mesages by date, they get sorted 'oldest at the top' by default. I want them to be 'newest at the top'.

Above: Clicking the date column header sorts in ascending order (oldest messages first). You need to click it a second time to get descending order.

I couldn't find any way to rectify this default behaviour, so I created a Thunderbird add-on called NewFirst to get things how I like them.

This is my first attempt at a Thunderbird Add-on, so I'd appreciate any feedback on this (either by email, or using the blog comments below). It's a very simple add-on, but solves a problem I'm sure others have noticed.

More info

You can either read the full spiel, or just download newfirst.xpi and get on your merry way.

Source: Announcing NewFirst Thunderbird add-on