Bonafide Webhead

So the other day I came across a post from non other than the amazing Rhea Drysdale. Rhea is a real web tools guru she knows all sorts of tools and services that can put your productivity through the roof. One of the tricks that Rhea mentioned is Rae Hoffman’s approach to hacking bookmarks.

In short, Rae uses Firefox’s Bookmarks in conjunction with custom URLs to turn your address bar into a souped up search machine! Here’s a quick example of how Rae works her magic.

Rae finds a service that uses dynamic URLs such as WhosTalkin.com She then runs a query through the service. As a result we get a URL that looks something like this:

http://www.whostalkin.com/search?q=sugarrae

Next Rae will replace the query in the URL with %s to act as a place holder. So the URL now looks like:

http://www.whostalkin.com/search?q=%s

In Firefox Rae will go to Bookmarks>Organize Bookmarks, then right click on Bookmarks Menu>New Bookmark

So now when Rae goes to her address bar and types “who sugarrae”, she will get a fresh set of results from WhosTalkin.com

Rae takes things a step further by using this hack to run analysis on pages and sites by using the URL in place of a query. For example if she wants to run a Whois check her setup might look like this:

Now when Rae types whois whostalkin.com into her search bar a Whois report from DomainTools.com appears.

Are you starting to see the magic here? If not here are a few of my favorite examples to get you started. Just copy and paste them into the method above.

Bookmarks with URLs:

Shorten URL’s
kl.am
http://kl.am/api/shorten/?url=%s&format=text
TinyURL
http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=%s

Social Bookmarking

StumbleUpon
http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=%s

del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/post?url=%s

FriendFeed
http://friendfeed.com/?url=%s

Digg
http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=%s

Sphinn
http://sphinn.com/submit.php?url=%s

View a Site as Text at SEO-Browser.com

http://www.seo-browser.com/index.php?user_agent=1&address=%s&action=Parse+URL

On Page Keyword Analysis

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis-tool.shtml?url=%s

Translate any web page into English:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=%s&sl=auto&tl=en&history_state0=

Bookmarks with Search Queries:

Google News Search

http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=%s&cf=all&scoring=n (sorted by date)

Google Blog Search

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%s&scoring=d (sorted by date)

Google Maps

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s&hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl

Get Yahoo results as a RSS feed:

http://search.yahooapis.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=%s


Update Twitter

http://twitter.com/home?status=%s

Have fun playing with these bookmarks and feel free to leave some of your favorites in the comments! Stay tuned for my next post where I kick things up a notch with this bookmark hack and JavaScript!

So, if you haven’t heard already, the fine folks over at IMBroadcast.com are hosting what some are calling the blow out internet marketing conference of the year.  IM Spring Break will be a hyper-networking/hyper-educational event. They are capping attendees to 200, which means that there will be very focused & intimate discussions revolving all aspects of internet marketing.

I have already bought my ticket, but many of you haven’t! So, hurry up and register because like I said before only 200 lucky souls will be there.

The conference organizers are hosting a contest to send one lucky attendee to the conference free of charge. The rules for the contest basically state that all those who enter must write an article detailing 7 things that they predict will happen during the conference. Then tag as many people you like with links. If you have been tagged then you must write and article as well and tag back to the original tagger. Who ever gets the most tags will win.

Allyson Ferguson (aka SEOAly) tagged me in her contest entry.  Allyson really wants to go, but I have already paid for my ticket so, I am going to play along anyways so Allyson can get my linkback.

This will be my first internet marketing conference so I am not really sure what to expect, but I have a feeling that around 85% of the attendees will pee their pants at least once. You see, in every adult’s life there will come a time when something so amazing, so mind blowingly awesome occurs that they lose all bladder control. I think this is called called “urge incontinence“. Most adults don’t start experiencing these awestruck events until in their 80s, but some are lucky enough to piss their pants at a much young age.

Don’t get me wrong, peeing your pants can be embarrassing, especially when around all your “professional” internet marketing colleagues. Therefore to give you a bit of a heads up, I am going to lay out events that might induce pants pissing.

7 Reasons that You will Piss your Pants at IM Spring Break.

• 25% will piss their pants when they hear Rae Hoffman’s dirty secrets during her NDA Keynote.
• 10% will piss their pants when they learn from Reg Saddler, Todd Mailcoat, and Neal Rodriguez, about the fruits of successful social bookmarking.
• 10% will piss their pants in between sessions when I tell folks about WhosTalkin’s future plans.
• 10% will piss their pants when they hear from Brent Csutoras, Rae Hoffman, and Wil Reynolds about how to build links like a rock star.
• 10% will piss their pants when they learn from gurus Li Evans, Jeff Quipp, and Brian Chappell about brand building through social media.
• 15% will piss their pants when they discover, that as reports suggest, Dave Snyder is a bear!
• 5% will piss their pants when Jordan Kasteler decides to take his skills offline and attempts to “sphinn” attendees  at the bar.

Wow, I think that Loren, Dave, and Jordan should look into buying some plastic tarps & and cleaning solution. Its either that, or make their conference extremely borining, and we know thats not gonna happen! See ya there!

It’s the holiday season which means that its that time of year that I feel a bit generous (yes, just once a year, live with it). Here’s a great way that you can show your generosity by helping a charity in need and getting massive amounts of links for your good deed.

Here’s the secret: Give the charity of your choice a page on your web site. The vast majority of work that we do at jozsoft is web development for non-profits. From my experience there are LOTS of small non-profits and local charities that could greatly benefit from a web presence, however lack the funds required to make that presence a reality. If I could I would give away all my services for free to non-profits, but then I would be out of work and never finish with the TONS of them that need web help. Trust me they are out there, just start looking.

Did you say something about links??

Yes, I did. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t get something out of being such a great guy or girl, right? Here’s how the links work: when you add the charity’s page to your site you are effectively extending your web presence into their organization. This is extremely powerful because, every member, volunteer, staff person, constituent, and supporter will automatically become your domain advocate and hopefully link builder.

I have done this several times and have seen huge success with each. But there are a few things to keep in mind that work best.

One Page – Why just one? It’s allot easier to do just one page and it will be easier to focus link juice to other parts of your site if you have fewer pages. All their information on one page means all links pointing to one place, you get the idea. Many don’t care putting all there info on one page when its free.

http://www.yoursite.com/non-profit-name.html

Linkable Content – Encourage the organization to provide content for the page that people want to tell others about or link to. Examples are: monthly calendars, fund raising messages, information about upcoming events, resources for their members, or even embeddable content like videos or slideshows from different events.

Active Orgs. – Organizations that stay active are the ones that will build the most links, because they are the ones that have the most to talk about. Examples of active groups would be church youth groups, boy and girl scouts, School PTAs, and others.

The Right Org. – Its important to pick an organization that you don’t have any fundamental disagreements with, otherwise you might have a problem if you have to remove their page in the future.

PageRank Sculpting – Ok I don’t want to advise that everyone does this because it is more on the grayer/black side of SEO. However, if you really want to send the most link juice possible to the rest of your site then at the very least you should include one or two links to your home page on the non-profit’s page. This can be done by including a link at the bottom that says something like, “this page is sponsored by jozsoft”. Then, “nofollow” the rest of the links except the one to your home page. Only do this in moderation because all of the authenticity that you have just received by helping a charity will be gone if caught.

I hope this is helpful and encourages you to help out a local non-profit or charity this holiday season. Remember, the links are the added bonus, and the better your free service to the charity is, the more links you will receive, people like talking about good things!

WhosTalkin.com Video Demo 2