hmmmmm…okay. Overall, I LOVE it. Such a vast improvement over PalmOS (or POS as I like to call it). Email handling is awesome, Calendar is fantastic, the camera is great, contacts are great, web browsing is excellent.

You can load mp3s as ringtones…very cool. You can take screen shots (which I have since forgotten how). The flash on the camera has made me the envy of many iPhone users.

The app store is still lacking in a wide range of apps. Most of them are tools to use in place of visiting websites (craigslist, opentable, etc). I’m hoping that there will be camera apps and other functionality apps in the future.

Where is it lacking? Cursor placement can be very frustrating. You have to tap very precisely to move the cursor to the beginning of a line and I miss most of the time. There’s no joystick ring around the one button to aid in cursor movement, which is stupid imho.

Also, You can’t highlight text you’re not typing. So, if there’s something in an email you want to copy paste into a text message, you’re SOL. I hope that changes soon. You can copy text in a text edit area.

I’d also like to be able to map the virtual camera shutter button on the screen to the actual button on the phone face. It’s incredibly difficult to snap a self portrait….or a pic with a friend. I wound up looking like a tard several times last week at the conference I attended because of this.

Oh, and big whoopsie. I forgot to mention battery life. The Pre is always updating, syncing, checking email. Definitely buy the car charger to juice up on the road. And always plug it in at night. The battery goes from completely dead to full charge in about 3 hours. I made it about 6 hours of what I’d consider heavy use on a charge.

There are some extended life batteries out there, but none made by palm yet, so I’m going to wait…wouldn’t want to void my warranty or insurance.

I haven’t splurged for the touchstone yet, so I can’t tell you about that.

USB and media sync are pretty rad. iTunes recognizes it as an iPod and iPhoto sees it as a camera, so very easy to sync/import.

Thanks to (jeff)isageek for inadvertently prompting me to write a blog post.

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Dear Client,

I’ve heard from colleagues today that there is a phishing scam targeting Google AdWords account users. This scam is an email with the following (or similar) text:

" Dear Client, Your Google Adwords account has expired. You must renew it immediately or your account will be closed. If you intend to use this service in the future, you must take action at once!. To continue click here, login to your Google Adwords account . Thank you for using Google Adwords! Google Adwords Services DEP. COPYRIGHT Google Adwords Services 2009 (C) "

The email includes a link that will take you to a log in page that looks no different from the Google AdWords log in page you are familiar with. Please do not log into your account via this link. The URL is *not* on Google’s secure servers.

If you think that you’ve been a victim of the scam, please try to log into your account immediately via https://adwords.google.com and change your password. If you are unable to log in, please contact me as soon as possible and I will contact a Google representative on your behalf.

Thanks,
Sally Burke
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1-12 ounce jar marinated artichoke hearts
40 ounces frozen chopped spinach
1 large onion, chopped
5 tablespoons butter
4 eggs, beaten
1 cup sour cream
2 teaspoons garlic salt
1 1/2 cups Parmesan/Romano grated cheese
2 to 3 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup fresh bread crumbs

Preheat oven to 350f degrees. Lightly spray 9×13 glass casserole with non-stick spray.

1. Defrost spinach in microwave or on range top. Once defrosted, spoon spinach into a strainer and press as much liquid as possible out. Transfer spinach to a mixing bowl.

2. Drain artichoke hearts in strainer and press as much oil out as possible. Add to bowl with spinach.

3. Saute onion in 4 tablespoons of butter over medium heat until translucent and soft. Add onions to Spinach and artichokes.

4. In small mixing bowl, whisk together eggs, sour cream, cheese, garlic salt and lemon juice. Pour over spinach mixture and combine well. Transfer mixture to greased casserole dish.

5. In pan that onions were sauteed in, add last tablespoon of butter and melt over medium heat. Add breadcrumbs and toss to coat. Sprinkle buttered breadcrumbs over top of casserole.

6. Bake for 20 – 30 minutes.

Notes: This casserole can be made ahead and refrigerated. Just leave the breadcrumbs off until ready to bake. I usually leave the breadcrumbs off until the last 10 minutes of baking so they don’t over brown. I’ve had times where I didn’t drain the spinach enough and there was liquid on the top of the casserole…just keep baking until it evaporates.

Merry Christmas from everyone at VisualFuture

Grandma Leona's Shortbread

Using the paddle attachment on your mixer, cream butter and sugar thoroughly until light and fluffy. Add flour one cup at a time and mix well. Switch to dough hook if the mixer has a hard time.

Press into 9×15 jellyroll pan or 9×12 pan sprayed with cooking spray. Use a cookie stamp or a cut glass dish to press designs into the dough. If you don’t have anything like that, you can use a fork to prick holes in the top.

Bake at 325f for 35-40 minutes. Shortbread should be light golden brown. Cut in squares when hot from oven. Allow to cool in pan on wire rack. Store in a sealed container.

If you’re on an Apache server with mod rewrite & want to prevent Tynt from displaying your site here are some rules that may help:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR}    ^204\.244\.109\.(2(4[0-7]))$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR}    ^204\.244\.120\.(1(7[6-9]|8[0-3]))$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$    [F]

You can do plenty of other fun things instead of “RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [F]” if you like. For an example, check out the 404 page for SEOconsultants.com

Many thanks to @IncrediBILL, @pageoneresults, @scottpolk and @ericlander for bringing the situation to light & coming up with the correct IP blocks.

As far as I can tell, AdWords Report Center does not have a method for seeing data per country. Their demographics reporting is limited to age and gender. Here’s my method for revealing the data using Google Analytics. Your AdWords account must be properly linked to your Google Analytics account for this to work.

1. Log into your Analytics account and in the Dashboard, select Visitors > Map Overlay.

2. On the Map Overlay screen, select the country of interest, in my case that was Canada. You can drill as deep as you like here.

3. In the Dimension selection drop-down, choose Campaign.

4. Now, you can see the productivity of your Campaign(s) in the geographic region that you selected.

Now you want to know what to do with this new data? Well, I hope it convinces you to segment all of your countries into separate campaigns. For this client, Canada’s conversion rate is 68% lower than the site average. I’ll be splitting out Canada into a separate campaign as soon as I finish this post and redistributing my spend. I’ll also be talking with my client about updating his site to include Canadian shipping rates and landing pages for Canadian customers.

For a hot tip on how to make doubly sure that Google is only serving your US targeted campaign to US customers, see Uber Affilliate’s article, “QuickTip Time : Adwords International Traffic”

UPDATE 09/03/2008: Looks like Google AdWords finally decided that

I started reading up on how to develop a FireFox Extension and one of the first recommendations is to create a separate FireFox profile. The second profile is recommended so you don’t have to clutter up your “regular” FireFox profile with a bunch of debuggers and development tools. And, both profiles can be run at the same time. This got me thinking about other uses for 2 profiles:

• Having 2 profiles would allow you to be logged into 2 different Google accounts at the same time.
• You could run keyphrase searches and view “personalized” vs generic SERPs.
• Run one profile through a proxy service to see if your IP address is being served alternate content.
• Compare different extensions, security settings. Manage an alternate set of bookmarks, etc.
• Keep your “work” & “personal” browsing history separate.

Here’s the setup for Windows, using FireFox 2.x. I’ll try to add the Mac version shortly

1. Make sure you close all FireFox windows. In FireFox, “File => Exit” should to the trick.
2. Run the FireFox Profile Manager. Click on the Windows “Start” button, then choose “Run” Type firefox.exe -ProfileManager in the box next to “Open” and then click the “OK” button.

   

3. Create a new profile. Just click “Create,” give it the name seo & hit “Finish.”

   

Now that the new profile is created, you need a way to run that profile along with your “default” profile. At this point, any of your usual methods of starting FireFox should bring up your “default” profile. I’m going to roll a couple tips into one here, so you’ll end up with a way to run your “seo” profile AND give it the shiny icon of your choice.

1. Open Notepad: Start => Programs => Accessories => Notepad
2. enter the following in Notepad:

   set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
   start "" "%ProgramFiles%\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P seo

3. Make sure that the text after -P in the second line is the same as the profile name you created.
4. Save the file in your “My Documents” folder, and name it “firefoxSEO.bat”

Double-clicking the “firefoxSEO.bat” file will launch FireFox with your “seo” profile. So technically, we’re done and you can start running two FireFox profiles side-by-side right now. But as you can see, the default icon for .bat files is pretty ugly. And there’s no easy way to change it. The default icon can also be a problem later on, if you want to create even more profiles, and would like individual icons for each profile.

The solution is to create a shortcut to “firefoxSEO.bat,” and give it any icon you like!

1. Right-click on “firefoxSEO.bat” and choose the “Create Shortcut” option.
2. Move and/or copy the shortcut anywhere you like: your desktop, shortcut bar, QuickLaunch bar, etc.
3. Now, right-click on the shortcut, and choose “Properties.”
4. On the second tab “Shortcut” click the button labeled “Change Icon”

   

5. You may get a message like the following. Just click “OK”

   

6. Now, pick an icon! Usually Windows will direct you to the file %SystemRoot%\system32\SHELL32.dll which has many icons to choose from. There are some additional (& quite retro) icons in %SystemRoot%\system32\moricons.dll
7. You can also design your own icons with a graphics program, or there are several websites with icons & even some online icon creator sites.

You’re all set!

UPDATE: Here’s a link to Asa Dotzler’s blog where he covers how to create a shortcut to launch a specific firefox profile on mac. Pretty simple to do using Apple Script. -Sally (the Mac user of this team)

Derek Vaugn, Techpad Agency

http://webceo.com/

Keyword rank checking; like WebPosition. Downloadable Windows software that runs in the background. Long lists (~200+ Keywords) can take several hours to run.

IndexTools: Last 100 Visits report

View the last 100 visitors in realtime. Helps identify trends in realtime & provides details of where the visitors are coming from.

http://spyfu.com/

Keyword Competitive Intelligence

http://google.com/trends

Useful for popular terms, may not have accurate data on lower volume terms. Can be used over time to add new terms.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Free keyword tool, works without an Adwords account. Has a "Site-Related Keywords" tab that shows related terms based on the content of an URL.

Todd Malicoat, Meta4creations, LLC

Server information:

http://ip-report.com/

Find “safe” IP blocks

http://www.seologs.com/ip-domains.html

Information on the number of sites for a given IP address

Competitive Information:

• SEO for Firefox
• http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/
• http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/switchproxy

Backlinks:

• http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/
• Greg Boser’s Tattler
• http://www.linkhounds.com/hub-finder/
• http://www.webuildpages.com/search/

Keyword Info:

• Aaron Wall’s Keyword tool
• http://labs.google.com/sets

Header & Page Level

• Number of links on a page bookmarklet

Spidering

• Xenu Linksleuth

Project Management/Small Shop SEO

• Solo SEO
• Compete

Many more tools

• StuntDubl.com

Jessie Stricchiola, Alchemist Media, Inc.

Links & Link Value

Cumbrowski’s Query & Link Stats Converter

Processes the raw data from Google Webmaster Central .CSV files

Joost de Valk’s Google Webmaster Tools External links tools

Provides additional information on sites linking to you: PageRank, rel=nofollow, “link not found,” image link, frame

dnScoop domain & site value tool

SEO Tools – Link Price Calculator

Project Management

• Basecamp

Blackjack

• Hot Hand Advantage

Joe Laratro, Tandem Interactive

• GSite Crawler: Google Sitemap Creator

From the Q&A

• allproxies.org
• Microsoft AdLab

Finally, I’ll have to admit I didn’t note some of the tools that "everyone knows about" already. While not a complete list, here are some tools in that category:

• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• WordTracker
• WordTracker Free Version
• Yahoo Keyword Tool
• WebDeveloper FireFox Plugin
• Live HTTP Headers FireFox Plugin
• Web Position
• DNSstuff.com
• DomainTools (formerly whois.sc)

There appeared to be two major contenders when I Googled “link checking tool for mac”…

Braxton’s Link Tester (BLT) looked pretty good. The website displays a 3.5 mouse rating from Macworld. After reading Macworld’s review, I ruled it out because there is no option to exclude specified URLs or domains.

Then, I found Integrity by Shiela Dixon at Peacock Media. Integrity is inspired by Xenu, and it’s freeware. Hooray! Have I found the last piece to my Mac migration puzzle? Am I finally free of the PC?

I’ll be using Integrity over the next few days and will post a full review in a couple weeks. Check back for updates!