Net Sieve

According to JupiterResearch, online holiday retail sales will equal roughly $32 billion in 2006, with 114 million Web users expected to shop online during the holiday season.

With that much money passing through virtual hands, it’s hard to believe that a large number of people still refuse to use their credit cards online or have no idea how to protect themselves if they do.

To counter this, some Michigan State University professors compiled their smarty pants tips on how to shop – and shop safely – online. Even if you’re an old hand who brought your car on AutoTrader, your house on eBay and your spouse on eHarmony, you might learn something.

Visit Holiday Shopping Tips for the shopping scoop.

No matter how many Web sites I’ve created over the years, I’ve always had this mental block on the robots.txt file. For some reason I never remember to include it, Google bitches at me, and my sites don’t get indexed properly.

Finally, linking myself into a good generator resolved this. I mean really. How hard is this anyway? Take a trip over to Hypergurl’s site and save yourself time with this great generator.

Here’s the blurb:

The robots.txt file is the first file search engine “spiders” look for when indexing a website. The robots.txt file tells search engine spiders (robots) which files and directories they are NOT allowed to index. This helps to prevent incomplete site indexing as well as prevent exposing the files and directories that you don’t want listed. You may disallow, for example, “Google Images” from indexing certain directories and pages on your site, but not block “Google” itself from indexing those same files.

I’m going to give FireStats a go to track this site. It sounds good from the features page:

• FireStats protect the privacy of your users, unlike services like Google analytics.
• Basic hit statistics (hits ever, in last 24 days etc)
• Recent popular pages
• Recent referers
• Browser and OS trees, grouped by what matters
• IP to country – know where your visitors are surfing from (New)
• A list of recent hits
• Excluding unwanted hits from the display
  • By IP address
  • By Logged in user (to be used mostly to filter blog administrator(s))
  • By user-agent (to be used to filter bots)
• Import statistics from Counterize, to allow easy migration.
• Ajax UI, no need to reload the whole page – just press the ‘refresh statistics’ button to get the latest data.
• Designed to work on all browsers. (Tested on Firefox, Explorer, Opera and Konqueror)
• Internationalization ready (Translating to additional languages is easy)

If I encounter any grief, I’ll let you know. Or if this site suddenly disappears that may be all the warning you get. Now let’s crunch those numbers.

Need some great/outrageous/creative minds to tackle a problem for you? For free brainstorming ideas from around the globe, visit Brainreactions.net. Once you create a free account you can launch a question, gather as many ideas as you need and then close the question. Here’s an example of one brainstorming session (your results may vary):

How to make cheap or free publicity for a sport school to attract new members?

8. Invite coaches from all over the country to your sports school to share ideas on what works and what doesn’t work in sports teaching/coaching … sort of like a best-practices forum.

7. To build on the contest idea, maybe hold weekly contests/matches and create mini leagues representing different geographical areas that compete at your sports school

6. Organize a contest of some sort at your school and ask all local school children to participate. Let’s say, something like a mini local olympics which have easy to do contests like long jump, high jump, races, etc.

5. Do a before and after profile on your website every month where you show score improvements of students who have attended your sports school

4. Invite guest trainers who are celebrity sportstars or retired coaches

3. posters

2. business cards

1. flyers

While it wouldn’t be wise to post anything you need to keep secret. the ideas here are free for the taking. Not to mention, the exercise of answering a few questions will stimulate your thought processes. Win and win.

OK, it’s clear that I’m a Craigslist geek and I’m always looking for ways to enhance the experience. We all know it’s not the easiest site to keep up with.

craig2mail.com is a great site to have selected searches sent to your email whenever an item or post matches your search criteria. There’s only one downside – if it really is a downside, I haven’t decided yet – you can only set up one search per email. They say:

This site is NOT owned by or affiliated with craigslist.org. This site is simply a tool to do automatic craigslist searches made by a guy who spent too much time manually searching craigslist and still always got beat to the good stuff. I like Ebay but in many ways craigslist is better. One function that Ebay has that’s really great is the ability to get email notifications when something you want is advertised. For those of you who haven’t figured it out already…that is what this site is about. Submit a craigslist search and we send you an email notification every time a matching ad is posted to craigslist. You will get a copy of the ads text in your email and if it is something you want all you have to do is click the link at the bottom of the email to go straight to craigslist where you can contact the post’s author.

craig2mail.com has a strict spam policy. They don’t. Give it a try.

Seomoz has some great tools and this one is particularly cool – to me anyway, I know you guys are much more hip. Anyhoo, this is what it gives you:

• The Relative Importance/Visibility of a Webpage
• The Potential Strength/Ability of a Page to Rank in the Search Engines
• Data on Popularity, Links & Mentions of the Page Across the Web

The tool is designed to satisfy the curiosity of webmasters, surfers and web marketing professionals seeking a better metric to quickly assess a site/page’s relative importance and visibility.

Seomoz’ Page Strength

Seomoz.org is fast becoming one of my favorite resources. I get lost every time I go there, like some pimply-faced adolescent in The Mall, fer god’s sake. Fortunately, Seomoz is very cool and I can tell myself I’m all the cooler for going there.

What I’ve latched onto this time is their article rating the top 300 Web 2.0 sites. From Technorati to Furl to HipCal to Upto11.net. These site were rated on Usability, Usefulness, Social Aspects, Interface&Design, and Content quality.

Visit Web 2.0 Awards and BOOKMARK immediately. This is all you need to know until the next round.

Having a hard keeping up with computer terminology? Check out:

Webopedia: Online Computer Dictionary for Computer and Internet Terms and Definitions
This site rocks with constantly updated terms, term o’ the day, a newsletter to bring you the latest news in… letters and more. Here are the current Top Fifteen terms your peeps are checking into:

#1 RAID
#2 OEM
#3 SSL
#4 CPU
#5 proxy
#6 proxy server
#7 IP address
#8 ODBC
#9 phishing
#10 router
#11 URL
#12 SOA
#13 VoIP
#14 NAT
#15 TCP/IP

Further proof that you can never know enough.

Not all gaga over Google? Or do you simply want to reach out beyond Google’s limitations? (Yes, they do have them.)

To create free sitemaps that will attract the interest of other search engines, as well as Google, as well as real
live visitors, take a look at XML-sitemaps.

Some info lifted from their site:

• Create an XML sitemap format that can be submitted to Google to help them crawl your website better.
• Create a Text sitemap to submit to Yahoo.
• Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.
• Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your website.

Here are 4 simple steps to get it done

1. Enter your full website URL and some optional parameters in the form below.
2. Press ‘Start’ button and wait until the site is completely crawled (the progress will be indicated)
3. You will see the generated sitemap details page, including number of pages, broken links list, XML file content and link to a compressed sitemap. Download the sitemap file using this link and put it into the “public_html/” folder of your site.
4. Go to your Google Webmaster account and add your sitemap URL. Please check About Google sitemaps page for more info. (Necessary for Google only, natch.)

Looks real clean and simple. I like it. Now I just need to use it. Did I mention it’s free?

After my craigslist post, Nathan from Craig’s Little Helper wrote to let me know about another, better site. Well, I checked it out. It is better, but since he opened it up, he has to hear my opinions.

The helper would be even helpier (Of course that’s a word. You don’t think they’d let me have a blog if I just made words up all willy-nilly, do ya?) if it had an option for “All States” instead of requiring me to click each one. O’ the agony. And there could be a note near the keyword form saying that the CL post had to match all keywords. It doesn’t say that until the search results.

Otherwise, right on Nathan. The help section is muy well done. And here’s what the site says about itself:

“At Craig’s Little Helper , we strive to improve your search experience without compromising craigslist’s spirit of local community. Rather than parsing a pile of craigslist cities and showing you some formatted version, we send you to the authentic craigslist results pages for your search. That way you get to view your results in the format that Craig intended.”