One of the buzz topics last week was Security & Safety. The issue is URL shortening services.

WHAT IS A URL SHORTENER?

Some URLs run to dozens of characters, making them impractical to use. URL shortening services transform long URLs into short ones, thus:

http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-shortening-service-should-you-use-17204

becomes

http://bit.ly/jphUs

Shortened URLs are particularly important on character-limited status services like Twitter (140 characters max).

4 PROBLEMS AND RISKS OF SHORTENERS

Some shorteners are built in to services like Twhirl. Most can be surfed up on the web or added to your toolbar. Very convenient. But what are you getting? And what are the risks?

1. Transparency - I like to see where I’m going before I click.

2. Who’s monitoring my traffic? By introducing a third party between the user and destination, the issue of trust becomes important. Or, as Ronald Reagan used to say, trust but verify.

3. What if the service goes dead? What happens to my links? All of us use links in our content. It would be bad if those links failed because the service provider went belly up. Is there backup of all transformed links?

4. Bogus redirects - All of us get rickrolled once in a while, but shortened URLs potentially open the door to all kinds of click fraud.

THE SOLUTION: USE BIT.LY

Dozens of services have sprung up, in part to serve the booming Twitterati. Danny Sullivan does an in-depth review in SearchEngineLand.

The short answer: Bit.ly. It’s safe and secure. It also has a couple of very cool features:

LINK STATS - I love stats. Now you can have stats on how often and who clicks on your links. Guess what? This can help shape your content to more accurately match your audience.

PREVIEW PLUGIN - This beta plugin for Firefox gives you a cool Flash popup preview of the destination before you click. Voila! Click fraud defeated.

MORE INFO

Got more questions about URL shorteners or security or using social networks for business? Contact us.

Almost every business benefits by using photos to help tell their story. Increasingly, businesses are turning to Flickr as the perfect channel for serving their pictures.

In the last few months, a tide of new tools for sharing Flickr photos and sets have flooded the market. For the most part, these are free utilities that you use on the web. You enter some info, click “Create” and grab some code to put on a web page or in your blog.

We’ve found a lot of great tools for re-distributing Flickr photos. Flickr makes its own tools (which are very nice). FlickrSlidr is also cool (see it on our Photo page).

Most of the widgets we found were approximately square in shape: 1:1 or maybe 4:3. So, when we needed a wide horizontal slide show widget (16:9 or better), we searched around and found Slideoo.

Slideoo is simple to use. We created the widget in about 5 minutes. Their embed code worked perfectly (see above).

You can set the width and picture size with Slideoo. The widget above is 500px wide with thumbnail pictures. The widget includes “+/-” buttons and a slider at the bottom. See a different config on our Portfolio page.

The emerging world of widgets lets us concentrate on content, not code, adding cool features without any programming. Slideoo is a great new tool in the utility belt.

For website owners and creators, it’s important to check for broken links. Here’s our favorite broken link checker.

A broken link, of course, is a link that goes nowhere. It’s usually caused by a spelling error or a web address that has moved.

But how to check an entire website for broken links? The easy way is to use a broken link checker.

Lots of link checkers exists on the internet courtesy of private companies and public organizations like the W3C. Our favorite is from Website Goodies:

Website Goodies - Broken Link Check

Just enter the web address of your home page and click on “Check Links.” In moments, you’ll have a complete report on the links in your website.

Even if you have tested your links in the past, it’s good to test again from time to time to ensure the integrity of your web site.

Exporting your password information Sxipper is simple. Under the Tools menu, select Sxipper Preferences. Select the Login tab and click Export. Now you have a back up file of all your online passwords.

Sxipper is a free add-on for Firefox. Get it here.

Add-me.com, a site devoted to search and web tools, has a free online link checker. Just enter the url of your home page and Broken Link Checker delivers a report of active and broken links.

The amount of time the tool takes to process your site depends upon the size of your site. For a site of reasonably modest proportions (50 pages or less), the tool might take 20-30 seconds.

You can also try the W3C link checker, but it’s a little more geeky.

Enter your url, hit submit and Web Page Analyzer shows you lots of interesting info about your page:

WPA calculates how long your page takes to load via differnt types of access (dialup, etc). It also suggests remedies for optimization.

Some pages may need bigger files than recommended by Web Page Analyzer, but it’s always welcome to see the arcane science of optimization portrayed in three simple colors.

Try it out on your own web address.

SyncTwoFolders is our favorite back-up program. It’s great for iTunes, iPhoto and most anything that’s stored in directories.

What we like about S2F is it’s flexability and simplicty. You choose your source, choose the target and choose a sync option:

Short explanations of each option pop up in the alt text to assist you. We use the one chosen here (Source up Target) to send files to an archive. Files are added from the Source to the Target (but not the other way around). Nothing is destroyed or over-written on the Target. Perfect for iTunes.

You can get SyncTwoFolders on Site de Tom Christ Flo Joa or MacUpdate where it is a five star rated utility.

It’s called Sxipper. Sxipper is a free plug-in for use with the Firefox browser (please tell me you’re not still using Internet Explorer).

Sxipper is easy to install (takes less than five minutes, no special skills or hacking required). It’s secure, it’s smart and it’s a massive time-saver. Here’s what they have to say about themselves:

• Always available - appears when needed, so you can log in or fill forms with a single click
• Trustworthy - encrypts your personal data and stores it on your computer
• Accurate form fill - learns from its own users how to complete forms with 100% accuracy with our unique training tool
• OpenID provider - provider of private and public identifiers. Sxipper.com is a secure, phishing-resistant OP, with support for PAPE. Identity 2.0 begins here.
• Easy to install - gathers data from your address book and web browser so that you have a running start

Basically, when you navigate to a site where you need a password (gmail, flickr, your blog), a little dialogue box pops up asking you to choose an identity. For most sites, there’s only one choice (the only time I see more than one is for blogging, but that’s because I write 6 or 7 blogs).

Select an ID and Sxipper logs you in. Simple!

Sxipper also features automatic form fills, a very handy feature. Never type your name and address again.

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A brief word about Firefox. Here at OCDC, we’ve tried (and continue to test our web work) on all the major browsers - IE, Safari, Camino, even Navigator (yuck). Most people continue to use IE because they’re stuck with bad old Web 1.0 habits.

Give Firefox a shot - it’s endlessly customizable to your needs, has a small footprint, is constantly (and automatically) updated and is from the not-for-profit Mozilla org. What’s not to like? Say goodbye to IE and it’s endless pop-ups, hangs and crashes.

Download Firefox and give it a try. You’ll thank me.

Keywords are nothing more than the most common terms people use to describe something. But choosing the right keyword can mean this difference between success or failure for your website.

For example, we almost called our website “interactive copywriter.” But a keyword search revealed that “interactive copywriter” was not anywhere near as popular a search string as “online copywriter.” Whew! Good thing we looked.

Keywords can be single terms or multi-word phrases (like “online copywriter”). Using a keyword tool gives you objective data about different words and phrases, an easy way to compare their popularity, helps you discover alternatives and gives you more surety about the words or phrase you choose.

We recommend the Google keyword tool for all online copywriting which involves the creation of keywords and phrases.

Favicons (pronounced fave-IKONZ) are the tiny pics you often see preceding a web address in your browser bar. Here’s ours:

In this post , we’ll tell you how to create your own favicons– it’s so easy, you’ll wonder why you waited.

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1. First, need to create your own favicon artwork. Any graphics program will do – Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, etc. The dimensions need to be 16px square. Yep, it’s small. So keep it simple.

2. Save your art according to these specs:

- Supported file formats: gif, jpg, png, and bmp.
- Use a gif or png with transparency if you require it.
- Maximum file size: 150.00 kB.

3. Now go to Dynamic Drive’s Free Favicon Generator.

Follow the instructions (browse and create icon). The generator will create a file called favicon.ico from your artwork. The generator will also create some html code for you to use on your webpage.

4. Upload your favicon.ico file to the same directory on your website as your index.

5. Add the code to your web page as instructed (just cut and paste it into the head section).

You’re done!

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Special thanks once again to Dynamic Drive for the free favicon generator.

Search was a 6 billion dollar business in 2006 and is projected to grow at 12% in 2007. Over 1/3 of all purchases of goods and services starts with an internet search. Optimizing your Home Page for natural search helps potential customers find your info on the web. In this post, we’ll tell you how to do it yourself in half an hour with basic web skills.

Briefly, search falls into two categories:

• Paid Search – this is where you bid on keywords and pay (usually) by the click
• Natural Search – also called organic search. This is where search engines (like Google, Yahoo and AOL) display your info based upon relevancy.

We’re going to focus on natural search in this post. These recommendations are based upon guidelines from Google and other search engines as well as our own experience with SEO. No fancy skills required – just basic HTML.

Here are 7 things you can do to optimize your Home Page for natural search.

1. KEYWORD SEARCH TOOL – The first thing to do is pick your keywords. There are both free and paid tools on the web that can help you research words or phrases that describe your business or service. We use the Google Keyword Tool (which is free). Decide which keywords best match your product or service. We usually pick two or three keywords and concentrate on those.

2. PAGE TITLE - Many people concentrate on the body copy or esoteric measures like keyword density, but search engines also look at the page title (<title> tag). It helps your “relevancy” score to use your main keyword in the page title.

3. HEADLINE - Search engines also pay attention to the headline or <h1> tag. The same is true for subheads <h2>. A common mistake is to use image text (i.e. a gif or jpg) for headlines, but search engines can’t index image text. Use plain text (html) or your headlines won’t be indexed.

4. BODY COPY – Now weave your keywords into the body copy. The hard part is making it sound natural.

5. META TAGS – Search engines also pay attention to Meta tags. You can find these are in the head section of the html. We recommend using both the “description” and the “keyword” meta tags.

6. AT LEAST 100 WORDS - Many search engines don’t index pages with fewer than 100 words. Some “experts” insist that longer pages perform better in search rankings. While this may be have the whiff of truth, we think over-long pages make deadly reading and ultimately turn off the audience and undermine the message.

7. USE LINKS - Linking your keywords between pages on your web site can also help your search ranking (once again by boosting relevancy).

Search is incredibly complicated and it is evolving everyday. But the recommendations listed above will bring your home page into compliance with the major search engines and lift your search ranking over time.

If you have more questions about search, please contact us.

The first link was for a gent named Alex King, a software developer who co-founded Feedlounge. Turns out there’s lots of great info on this site; we especially liked Alex’s favorite utilities and add-ons for Mac & Windows.

Lots of people make lists of stuff, but Alex’s utilities are really the cream of the crop. You probably have a few of these already, but check out the list for more really good stuff that’s free or shareware.

Here’s a couple more utilities (mostly for Mac) that we find useful in our work as online writers:

Transmit - Easy FTP and secure FTP. User friendly enough for noobie writers.
MacLorem (thanks to David Holt) - need Latin text (ipsum lorem stuff)? MacLorem generates latin text, Greek, Celtic… everything but Klingon.
Calendar Clock - Handy little pull down calendar that resides in your menu bar
Gmail Notifier - another menu bar app - this one notifies you when you have gmail.
SyncTwoFolders - one of the better utilities of this type. Even worked syncing two dreaded iTunes libraries.
Wiretap records any sound that is playing through your computer. We use it to record interviews conducted on Skype. Also good to record radio streams like our favorite KCRW.

Thanks again, Alex! If anybody else has a cool app, send it along and we’ll give it a try.