Posts

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Bogus Search Engine Optimization Services

As an owner of websites, I regularly get email like this:

Hi,

I am Maria, Business Development Manager.

I went to your website: “www.techdc.com” and saw that you are an online service provider.

Would you be interested in outsourcing Link Building Services to us? We will be happy to deliver one way thematic links for any theme and numbers. We have delivered over 40,000 links to various retail and agency clients spread over different verticals.

OUR USP:-

* Links from Unique IP’s

* Regular Caching sites

* Less Outbound Links

* Start pricing USD 1.5 only

We have our quality department checking each and every link as per the quality parameters.

We would pick the exact anchor text and will be happy to provide a choice of using as many anchors as you want. Besides all our links pass thorough the quality parameters set for link building ensuring only high quality link building for a website.

Do let me know if you are interested and we would be happy to discuss this further.

For more info you can visit our website URL: – [removed]

I look forward to your Positive response.

Kind Regards,

Name: – Maria

Post: – Business Development Manager

E-mail:- maria@[removed]

NONE of these services are legitimate. There are two possible things these companies do:

1) They could just take your money and do nothing.

2) Or they could do something worse than nothing. Some companies actually try to do what they say, creating “Link Building Services.” One of the elements of the Google PageRank algorithm is how many links there are to your site. By putting your link on a bunch of sites, they attempt to game the Google PageRank algorithm and improve your search ranking. The problem with this is that Google isn’t stupid. Google can easily and automatically identify bogus links from link farms. Google can then penalize you by lowering your search rank or removing you completely from their search results, the mark of death on the Internet.

Even if these little companies could outsmart Google, it’s a sleazy business. To improve your site’s search results, write good content and get legitimate links. For more information on Search Engine Optimization and PageRank, see our post Google SEO and Other Search Engine Results Performance Suggestions.

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Custom Computer Parts List For Windows 7 PC

I just built a PC that I wanted to be small-ish, quiet, powerful enough to play the latest games, and reasonably priced. While one can spend many hundreds more and eek out a bit more performance, the additional gains will be minimal. This setup plays current games, including my favorite Starcraft 2, like a champ and costs under $1370 as of this writing:

Parts List

Samsung XL-2370-1 23-Inch Widescreen LED LCD Monitor $310

Intel Core i3 CPU i3-530 2.93GHz $114

MSI N460GTX Cyclone768D5/OC 768 MB Overclocked Graphics Card $185

Corsair CMPSU-450VX 450-Watt Power Supply $70

Corsair 4GB DDR3 RAM $94

SilverStone MicroATX Midsize Tower Case TJ08B $95

OCZ 60 GB Vertex 2 Solid State Drive (SSD) $150

Gigabyte GA-H57M-USB3 Motherboard $120

Lite-On 24X SATA DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Drive $25

SIIG USB Mini Keyboard $22

Logitech Wireless Performance Mouse MX $80

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit System Builder $100

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Fake Shipping Alert

Be careful of fake emails pretending to be from your bank or shopping sites. Many are phishing scams trying to get your personal information. To avoid those scams, it’s best to go directly to the site instead of clicking to the site from an email.

Other fake emails are trying to infect your computer with a virus. This fake email with a shipping alert has been making the rounds lately:

Subject: Shipping Notification

Message Body:

Shipping Notification Thank you for shopping with us. We look forward to serving you again.

The following is your receipt. Please retain a copy for your records.
Qty  Item no  Description  Price  S&H  Tax  Return
Code
1 FC864-2038B Msg Drma7303 White 650.99 6.95 3.37 ____

Merchandise total 650.99
Shipping and handling 6.95
Tax on mdse 6.75% 3.37
Invoice total 706.31

Welcome to the convenience of shopping JCPenney Catalog

Doing a web search, we confirmed that this was malicious from Cisco Security:

Cisco Security Intelligence Operations has detected significant activity related to spam e-mail messages that claim to contain a shipping notification attachment for the recipient.  The text in the e-mail message instructs the recipient to open the attached file to view the notification.  However, the .zip attachment contains a malicious .exe file that, when executed, attempts to infect the targeted system with malicious code.

E-mail messages that are related to this threat (RuleID2979) may contain the following files:

Shipping Notification.zip
Shipping Notification.exe

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Dropbox Automator Service for Saving Selected Text

Always looking for new uses for Dropbox, I came across a couple of sites showing the same tip: 1) It’s All Tech’s How to automatically copy your Mac OS X clipboard to Dropbox and 2) Tip #1 in this MacOSXTutorials12 video.

What it Does

Essentially this is a way for Max OS X users to select text somewhere and then quickly append it to a text file in Dropbox. That might be a faster way, for example, to make note of things you find while web browsing. Or you might use it to add part of a PDF file to Dropbox without the extra clicks needed to create a new text document.

My Additions

I liked the tip but wanted to make a few improvements. I wanted to:

  1. Make the script work. The cat command needs two “>” in order to append instead of overwrite a file.
  2. Add date and time information to the text selection that I was appending.
  3. List the text selections in reverse chronological order, meaning that the most recent is at the top.

How to Make It

This is the Automator Service script that I used:

echo —“$(date)”— > ~/Text-Clips-temp.txt
cat >> ~/Text-Clips-temp.txt
cat ~/Dropbox/Text-Clips.txt >> ~/Text-Clips-temp.txt
mv ~/Text-Clips-temp.txt ~/Dropbox/Text-Clips.txt

Only Works in Some Applications

Unfortunately not all apps can use Automator Services. Only apps written in Cocoa, as Apple does with most of its apps, will work. This means that Safari, Mail, Preview, Calendar, and Address Book will work. Most other apps including Chrome and Firefox will not.

Side Notes

That this isn’t using the Mac OS X clipboard, as the tips I found stated. We’re selecting text and then using a service on it. The text is never copied or cut so it’s not in the clipboard.

Even though this tip is described as for Dropbox, there is nothing Dropbox specific except that the location of the text file happens to be in the Dropbox folder. Dropbox makes the service useful since you can have access to the text file from other locations. But this tip will work on any text file.

If you’re new to Dropbox, please use our Dropbox referral to set it up. It will give you an additional 250MB and give the same to us. Now Dropbox referrals will allow you to get up to 10GB for free, a great deal for your backup and sharing files needs.

What do you think?

If you have any suggestions to improve this Automator Service or to better use Dropbox, let me know.

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Canon S95 versus S90

King of Pocket Cameras, Improved

Canon just replaced their PowerShot S90 with the S95, so I did the same. The Canon S90 was my favorite camera ever so I wanted to see what Canon could do to improve it.

The S95 retains everything that made the S90 great.

  • a relatively large 1/1.7″ CCD sensor capturing 10 megapixels (same sensor as Canon G10 and G11)
  • excellent built quality
  • lots of manual controls that can be assigned to ring on front of camera

What’s improved?

  • body finish is more grippy
  • wheel on back has stop clicks (many people didn’t like the freely spinning wheel on the S90)
  • added 720p movie mode (only 24 fps though) with stereo recording
  • High Dynamic Range scene option
  • better image stabilization
  • can be used with a neck strap (holes at both sides of the camera)
  • just a little bit thinner (see photo). Some will complain about the camera being too small and losing the little thumb grip, but I prefer a camera to be as pocketable as possible.

Conclusion

There are loads of  pocket cameras to chose from that will take good shots in brightly lit situations. It’s in the poorly lit situations that the larger sensor of the S90/S95 really helps. It’s not about the number of megapixels, but about how good the image sensor is at collecting light. The image sensor on the S90/S95 combined with image stabilization makes the camera worth the money for me. By adding a plethora of manual controls, Canon has made a camera that many professional photographers will be comfortable using when they don’t want to carry their big DSLR.

Currently costing $399 at Amazon, the S95 is not a cheap camera. It isn’t a necessary purchase if you already own the S90. But the Canon S95 is the current best camera that can fit in a pocket and it’s a worthy successor to the S90.