I’ve been kind of bummed lately because I felt like Firefox was pretty sluggish on my Macbook Pro. I was certain I had installed the univeral binary build but tonight I really began to suspect I had not selected the native code. Firefox seemed really slow and it was using a large chunk of memory (250MB). So I killed Firefox, dragged it to the Trash Can (gotta love that 
), and downloaded the latest build of the native Firefox universal binary codenamed Deerpark. Immediately I realized that indeed I did not previously select the UB because the icon was different.
I fired it up and tried a few sites. Amazing! This thing is screaming fast even with my extensions installed. I swear its faster than Safari and certainly faster than Firefox on my phatest PC. Also memory usage dropped to 50MB. Deerpark only takes about 1 second to start versus about 7 seconds on the non-native build. The best part is that all my extensions and bookmarks remained entact. I love you Steve Jobs.
I can’t remember how I stumbled upon this but I was messing around with some WHOIS searches and discovered that Hillary Clinton has prepared herself for a possible presidential campaign in 2008. Although Hillary has publically stated that she is focusing on her senate re-election bid and not thinking of a presidential bid, she has secured the domain hillaryin2008.com.
The whois contact information on hillaryin2008.com is exactly the same as the whois contact for her current official domain hillaryclinton.com:
SIMMS, NOEL nsimms@cmdinet.com
4711 36TH ST N
ARLINGTON, VA 22207-4302
US
703 536 1719 fax: 123 123 1234
They’ve even covered the negative “Hillary Sucks” angle by securing hillarysucks.com
I did some digging around in Archive.org to see if I could find some of my first websites while a computer engineering student at NCSU. I was able to find the URL to my first website (http://www4.ncsu.edu/eos/users/a/adspence/www/tony.html) but sadly its no longer in Archive.org.
I did find an archive of my robotics project named LOLA! LOLA was able to navigate a room or hallway and avoid objects and stairwells by processing information received from sonar and tactile sensors. The software was custom written in C by myself and a couple other software engineers and was driven by a small PC running Linux.
And I was thrilled to find a copy of my senior design project codenamed Project Greenlink which was my first database driven website. The task was for the NCSU arboretum and the task was to merge a plants database (Filemaker Pro) with a maps database of the coordinates of the plants. Then I had to tie it all together with a cgi search function for the web.
What was your first site?
Martinibuster has a great post today on how to maximize your Adsense revenue on forums. I was going to post my additional tip on his blog entry but it looks like he has comments turned off so here goes.
In Martini’s entry he advises that you should edit your user’s forum post title’s to maximize the content theme of the page so that Adsense will retrieve targetted ads.
Rewrite member post titles so that they are COHERENT and MEAN SOMETHING. “Help,” and “I’ve got a Question” type titles are not going to help your forum rank well so why do forum operators not edit them to something meaningful?
This is absolutely true and furthermore it has a great impact on the future organic traffic you could receive from each post created. However, if you are running a successful forum with many posts created each day it would be extremely time consuming to manually edit all bad post titles. Also, loyal members get a bit pissy when you start altering other user’s posts.
Instead this method has worked extremely well for me. Create a sticky post which will be displayed at top of each forum with the title:
DON’T POST TITLES like “I have a question”
In the body of this sticky post:
Please don’t create posts with title’s “Can someone help me?” and “Help please”. Use the subject line appropriately.
Help us understand what your post is about in the subject line. You’ll have a better shot at actually getting the acvice you are looking for and it will help everyone else who is looking for the same information.
Thank you.
Also ask your moderators to refer any users to this sticky post if the user continues to write “Need help” and “Question” titles. I hardly ever see these anymore in my forum. Don’t work yourself to death. Get your userbase to do the work for you!
Aaron just IM’d me about some weirdness he was seeing in the SERP’s. He had a site that was 301ing the domain.com to www.domain.com. The problem was that Google was indexing the 301 page! I had never seen this before but a quick query found many more. Is BidDaddy broke?
Google query to find some of the indexed 301’s
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22301+Moved+Permanently%22
And check out #1 position for this query:
http://www.google.com/search?q=birds+cornell+edu+all+about+birds&btnG=Search
