Many of you received an email from blogger notifying  they will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. This means your blog will still be viewable but you will no longer be able to publish. 

With the use of a migration tool you will be able to switch to a blogger managed url using a  blogspot domain. The migration tool will be available February 22, 2010.

———————–The E-mail———————-

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog),  and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.  

The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year’s post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you’re interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.

• We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.Regards,
Rick Klau
Blogger Product Manager
Google1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

———————–END E-mail———————-

 

USPS has updated the codes for several of their international shipping methods.

You can update these yourself in your admin- below are the changes

old v3 code: First Class Mail International Package
new v3 code: First-Class Mail International Package

old v3 code: Express Mail International (EMS)
new v3 code: Express Mail International

old v3 code: Express Mail International (EMS) Flat-Rate Envelope
new v3 code: Express Mail International Flat Rate Envelope

As of November 2009, Internet Explorer and Firefox are still the browsers of choice as the most common according stats at w3schools.com

Internet Explorer users: 37.7%

Firefox users: 47%

Don’t forget to keep up to date with the latest versions of these browsers. This is free to do. You  can download by clicking the icons above.

Also, Checking your edits to your web site changes in both browsers will ensure your customers see things as you intend them to be.

 
Overview:
The Page title is the heading that appears in the blue bar border across the top of your browser (for example IE or Firefox). Page titles are found as a  META tag  in your source code between the <head> and </head>.  Page titles are listed first in google search results and what is used when someone adds you as a bookmark or in their “Favorites”.

Importance:

• the page title tag optimizes a web page for search engines.
• makes that web page stand out from other search engine results. The most important information your potential customers will use to decide if they want to visit your site after finding you in the search results
• They are generally heavily weighted by the search engine ranking algorithms.
• On the search results page the title is listed on the first line of the search result.

Hints and Tips-

• Page titles should be clear, descriptive, fine tuned, accurate, meaningful. They should not trigger a filter in Google’s search algorithm that marks it as looking suspicious. The reader should know by looking at the page title, exactly what is on that page.
• Target keyword phrase and put your, most important keywords as close as possible to the left of the title. Don’t waste the first spot with your site name!
• Think under 70 characters will be displayed
• Concentrate on optimizing for a single key phrase per page title, instead of trying to squish several key phrases into one page title.
• Do not repeat the same keywords over and over.  Do not keyword stuff in the page title.
• Do not use the same page title for all your pages as it could be considered duplicate content and not listed. Each page should be unique and relevant for the content.

written: Jan 11, 2005 at 08:33 AM by cgonsa.com. Updated for relevance: December 27, 2009

PandaPark.com domain and the existing designed website is for FOR SALE! The logo and trademark also go with it. This identity is completely branded with business cards, favicons, banners and more.  This is an incredible deal and a very special web design for the lucky buyer.  The design has a ton of adorable illustrations and darling animations including panda bears that float with balloons and roll in a park. There is also a seasonal change to the storefront for winter. So please do not hesistate to inquire about this unique opportunity that will be snatched up soon. Please contact cgonsa web design about this hip boutique.

Technology changes rapidly so be sure you always are on top of updates, security patches, and upgrades to your data base driven shopping catalog system.  Not keeping up with updates could cause compatibility issues, cause a security risk to others on your servers, your visitors who enter your site, your customers, and believe it or not, yourself.  In the worse case scenerio, your website could shut down and not be recoverable. Things do not last long in this business without maintenance.  I recommend never going longer than one year and more often if a security patch or urgent update for any reason is necessary. Please contact me if you are my client and want to receive an update.

Recent urgent update notifications-

9/30/09 Paypal changed the certificate chain they used in their API library- requiring a file replacement

How to read your google search results- above is a screen shot for the keyword search I did using the term, “boutique web designer”.

What you see is the following:

1. For the search term, “boutique web designer”, this indicates cgonsa.com ranks number one in Googles results.  The competition for this search phrase lists 13,700 others who target the same keyword phrase. Not bad results, huh? You can get the same results and to help with this a good bit of advice is to practice writing relevant, unique page titles for every page you create.

2. Google pulled the page title I created for my home page from the META tag for this page. If I did not have a META tag for the page description, Google may have pulled this from whatever the open source directory uses (dmoz.org) or other text content found on my web page. 

3. Google pulled the meta description (snippet)  from the  META tag for this page. If I did not have one, they again could have used dmoz.org or any relevent html text content from my web page.

Meta descriptions should be accurate for every page they are created. Do not duplicate the same one over and over. The meta description should accurately describe what one will find on that page. Meta descriptions should be unique and well thought out for every single page so search results are relevant and accurate in Google.  Keep them short, catchy (to entice the click through), and accurate.

Here is a resource for you including a YouTube video on the subject, “How Google displays Search Results”.

Google on YouTube. 

Keeping abreast of the latest with Google and SEO should be ongoing and crucial to success, so here is the link to their YouTubes  for those of you that prefer to watch and listen versus reading.  Google on YouTube. I recommend viewing all these videos, thinking of it as as your SEO 101 course. It will provide a strong understanding and foundation jumpstarting your success with your search engine results.

The presenter on the videos  mostly appears to be  Matt Cutts who if you don’t know already is one of our most important resources to follow.   Matt Cutts is head of webspam for Google.

Here Matt Cutts Blog

and….

Follow Matt Cutts on Twitter

While reading my favorite blogs over a cup a coffee this morning I came across the most adorable free twitter icon set. Wanted to share it with you and give a shout out to the artist, these are so cute and memorable!

Download the full set of twitter icons from Icon Eden

These are really good articles on what one may consider when putting a price on their work, art, illustration, photo, project etc…
After reading browsing these articles I realized I was on the right track.

freelance switch

escape efrom illustration island