Beyond Caffeine » Uncategorized

Google Desktop For Linux

Nicole — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 03:47:03 +0000

Google Desktop came out for Windows first. Not a huge surprise. Then it came out for Mac. Now Linux. That is something to be happy about.

You can read about the release of Google Desktop for Linux, or you can just go ahead and read about how to install it.

There are a couple of decent walk-throughs on how to install it for Ubuntu. If you prefer using the graphical interface for Ubuntu, you might check out this page tutorial. If you are comfortable with using a terminal in Ubuntu, this would be more to your liking.

There are plenty of other step-by-step tutorials for other Linux flavors, as well as terminal tutorials for install using APT, YUM, urpmi, YaST2, and RPM. Overall, if you are an Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, or Red Hat user, you should have no problem at all finding instructions on using it. For other flavors, you will have to know what you typically use to install things via terminal, or try a google search on it to see if someone has written up a tutorial!

~Nicole

The Top 10 Blog Survival Tips

Nicole — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:54:31 +0000

We’ll take a break from our normal programming to examine some common threads between blog failures. I think this is a good time to point out that not every blog is destined for stardom. Some blogs simply will not excel, no matter how much effort and time is put into them. Many times the blogger is to blame. It is his/her poor decisions on content or user experience that are ultimately at fault. However, most of these are completely avoidable. Want to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes? Here’s how.

1. Writing too little content. This is anything from writing very short posts to posting very infrequently. Your blogs should be 300-500 words each. Give your readers something to indulge in. You’ve got to establish a routine that your readers can count on. When I go about my daily blog reading, I expect fresh content. When I don’t find it…I go elsewhere.

2. Bad navigation. Readers come from all walks of life. Not everyone is as uber-leet computer savvy as you. Yeah, so you’ve got a sweet flash animation drop down toolbar. That does you no good if the user doesn’t have flash installed or has no idea how to use it. Keep it simple and efficient. The draw here is your content, not your flashy web skills.

3. Poor marketing. Take advantage of directories, read up on SEO, use indexing tools, pinging tools, social network tools, etc. Create a signature with a link in every forum you belong to. Join new forums each day just for that purpose. Just make sure you have something real to contribute to the conversation or find yourself blacklisted as a spammer.

4. Too broad. Niche blogging is where its at. With the blogosphere saturation levels reaching an all time high, you’ve got to focus on smaller groups of people to increase your conversion rate. You can say 3 things to a thousand people, or a thousand things to 3 people. It doesn’t take a statistician to figure that one out.

5. Sterile content. To maintain any kind of readership you’ve got to have good, refreshing, original content. Don’t be just another wordpress blog. You’ve got to write engaging, thoughtful content to stimulate your readers and make them want to come back for more. Read a few books on writing. I recommend “The Elements of Style”.

6. Poor ad performance. A great many bloggers become disgruntled at their small earnings and decide the blog is a total failure. Don’t let this get in your way. This is such a feeble problem that can be solved by doing a bit of reading on placement and strategy.

7. Competition. There isn’t much you can do about this one. What I recommend is that you make friends, not enemies. Network. Treat other “competitors” as you would like to be treated. Generally speaking, bloggers are nice people. They like to help each other out. There’s always potential for a link swap or article review. Take advantage of things like ReviewMe.

8. Pulling the plug too early. If you’re blog doesn’t blow up within the first few months, don’t abandon it. Chances are, you’ve got a lot of lurkers that haven’t converted to subscribers yet. They’re waiting to see if this is going to be another one of those few week flings that fill up much of blogger.com or any of the other big name establishments. Have some faith.

9. No dedication. Many bloggers try to take on too much. They have 2-3 blogs going, hoping that one of them will make it big. They fail to realize that by doing so, they are condemning themselves to lower levels of success and in turn, placing more stress/work on themselves than required. Make one blog and stick to it. Don’t expect things to happen overnight.

10. No audience. As elementary as this sounds, you’ve got to have readers. You need to be taking advantage of social networking sites. You need to encourage your readers to comment. A non-active readership loosely translates to no readership at all. Any potential advertisers will see this and shrug off your blog as stagnant. This may complicate the conversion between casual browser and subscriber. Make sure you build a “community” environment for your readers.

Written By: Octoprofit.com

About the Author:
How to make money online with blogs, adsense, seo, affiliate programs and everything else. Visit http://www.octoprofit.com for more articles like this one.

Gmail Paper

Nicole — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 02:44:41 +0000

If you logged into your Gmail today you might have seen something like this:

I’d love to find out how many people are searching their mailboxes for this new feature or contacting tech support to find out how to do it

Gotta love Google.

Speaking of things like this… did WordPress miss the day or did I miss what they did? Last year they came out with the highly entertaining WordPattern.

~Nicole

BegForPost – The New Spoof

Nicole — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:29:50 +0000

And people say that techies don’t have a sense of humor. Well, likely PayForPost won’t have much of one about the obvious ‘spin-off’ of their service, but it’s hilarious nonetheless.

BegForPost doesn’t pull any punches when it states baldly on the homepage:

“BegForPost will allow you to keep your burnrate low while maintaining high ethical standards”

It seems to be clear reference to the controversy raised by PayForPost (and similar services) about whether or not such services are ethical.

I don’t know how long this new ‘begging’ site will be around, but they definitely made their opinion about those other sites quite clear.

~Nicole

Server Issue Update

Nicole — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:13:11 +0000

I heard from Kalle, my sys admin, this morning and it looks like the server may have succeeded with it’s previous suicide attempt, at least mostly. In his words, “it seems quite dead”… I think that says it all.

He’s going to attempt to get the files from my blog off the hard drive and get them to me so that I can put them on my other server and get it back up again.

Will keep you posted!

On a side note — it feels odd posting by writing the articles manually and uploading files to my server! Which is, of course, how we did things for many years. How quickly we get spoiled by content management systems

~Nicole