TjRubley.com

I love Craigslist. Some of my best posts have been a result of this service, including my timely purchase of a Ducati SuperSport. Want to see the postings you’re interested in as soon as they’re listed? Read on!

1. Search Craigslist for the item you’re interested in on your local Craigslist site.
2. Copy the URL that is displaying your results.
3. Sign up for a Bloglines account (it’s free and web based).
   • Bloglines happens to be the service I use, but you can use any application that allows you to subscribe to .rss feeds like my.yahoo.com, feedburner, or a personalized google page.
   • And if you’re thinking ahead, yes, this technique works for any site that offers .rss feeds. Most browsers and web pages have an icon that is displayed if the .rss feed is available for a given page.
4. Now add this link, the one you copied when your results were displayed (even if 0), to your feed list on Bloglines.
5. Viola! Now every time an item matching your search hits Craigslist, you’ll be the first to know if you pay attention to your Bloglines account. Usually updates itself every few minutes! I leave the site open on a browser window while I’m at work so I can keep an eye on ad’s all the time!

Need an even more powerful search option? Check out CrazedList to search multiple local Craigslist sites at once! Props to Revgum for turning me on to this fantastic resource!

So what’s on my Craigslist .rss watch list?

• BMW e30 m3
• Motorcycles for sale with in Portland, Corvallis, and Eugene listings in Oregon
• Lotus, Austin, Alpina, BMW, etc… in Portland ad’s
• You get the idea, I’m addicted!

What’s on your Craigslist .rss search? Leave a comment with a link to your search!

dc

Remember the touch screen they used in Minority Report? Multi-touch Interaction Experiments. I want one! That photo gallery example shows a great desktop looking interface!

dc

I decided to do some sinning today by surfing flash based website over at PixelMakers when I stumbled on to this incredible website, Leroy the Hand. An outstanding flash presentation, I found myself fooling around here for more time than I care to admit. Nice work guys!

dc

A great little summary of top search terms in 2005 over at Search Engine Watch. Most of the results are what you’d expect, but the one from dogpile.com is hilarious. Apparently, dogpile is a search engine that searches all the major search engines at once and returns results. And what were their savvy users searching for?

3. Google
4. eBay
5. Yahoo
6. Mapquest

Other search services, LOL!

dc

Earlier I wrote about how my site was missing from Google due to the freshbot effect. Banned no longer, the site is being listed again where it belongs

I’m trying to talk myself into a full remodel of the site over the break, I wonder how badly that will hurt search performance LOL!

Google Search for Dan Crouch

dc

OSU Admissions Blog

Many, many thanks to Eric Stoller for his hard work on getting this blog setup and integrated with our current Admission’s template. N1!

dc

Nah, not really. Well I don’t think so anyway.

A week ago, I was in the top ten results for ‘Dan Crouch’, ‘Daniel Crouch’, and those terms plus ‘blog’. All of the sudden, my site is completely missing from Google! What could have caused it?

A little research reveals that it’s probably called the Freshbot Effect. Apparently it’s very common for a new site to get listed very high artificially and then disappear while the ‘true’ value is determined by algorithm. Doing a search on my URL returns absolutely nothing, which means the site is currently not even indexed on their servers — a sure sign of Freshbot apparently.

To get it back, I’ll need more traffic and more inbound links. In addition, keeping fresh content should also be of benefit. I just wonder how long it will take.

Additional Google Search Result tips.

dc

DevgroupNW hosted David McFarland to demonstrate the new noteworthy features of Dreamweaver 8. David is the author of many Dreamweaver books titled ‘The missing manual’. I can see why, he knows the in’s and out’s better than anyone I’ve seen.

Dreamweaver 8 highlights:

- In the code view window, you can collapse code segments. Especially useful with complicated template headers that won’t get modified, leaving just the relevant section to edit.

- Guides in design view. Similar in functionality to those found in Photoshop and Illustrator, these will prove very handy in lining up div segments. And yes, there is a snap to features as well.

- Dreamweaver can now link to external stylesheets. This allows the user to code a page for an existing site’s stylesheet during construction. I’ll bet it’d be especially handy for those Zen Garden authors/adopters.

- .css support is better, but not great. At least all the .css specific functions are located in their own pane now.

- David demonstrated the advanced search and replace features that Dreamweaver supports. Although not necessarily a new feature, I hadn’t seen the tool used with such prowess before. The example he used was for stripping font tags from a 10,000 page website and referencing the .css sheet instead. The conditional search and replace with 3 levels of conditional logic was impressive!

- Dreamweaver 8 supports PHP 5, which OSU will be getting in the spring.

- XSLT support for XML documents/feeds. This was very cool and he demonstrated just how easy it is in design view by adding feeds to his demonstration website in about 5 minutes. I’ll be trying this functionality out soon on my index page.

- fyi to me, David mentioned that Flash installations are much higher Windows Media Player or Apple QuickTime. Makes sense after I thought about it.

dc

Announced yesterday, Google Web Analytics is now free! Considering we were looking at Urchin previously, this should be interesting.

And according to this blog entry, it’s free for up to 5 million page views!

dc

{A brief citation of articles related to business blogging. Enjoy! -dc }

Business Blogging for Beginners – Fast Company

“Creating a business blog is a lot like hosting a cocktail party: You’re networking with customers in a low-pressure setting and, at best, nurturing great relationships.”

Blogs will change your business – Business Week.

“It’s time for a frank talk. And no, it can’t wait. We know, we know: Most of you are sick to death of blogs. Don’t even want to hear about these millions of online journals that link together into a vast network. And yes, there’s plenty out there not to like. Self-obsession, politics of hate, and the same hunger for fame that has people lining up to trade punches on The Jerry Springer Show. Name just about anything that’s sick in our society today, and it’s on parade in the blogs. On lots of them, even the writing stinks.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)”

The Bottom Line on Business Blogs – Entrepreneur

“So how do blogs fit into a business? They can be used in several different ways. Many companies use them for communication and collaboration among distributed colleagues, partners, suppliers, customers and others. That’s the most popular use. My personal favorite is that they also can be used as a unique, informal way to establish a company or individual’s reputation or brand. Other businesses use them to improve operations (like for project management or tech support knowledge-sharing), to demonstrate expertise (useful for professional services businesses) and to establish competitive differentiation. Blogs let companies reach out to value chain members with organizational news, marketing promotions, new product announcements and more. “

“Blogs can really give a company substantial business benefits:

· They’re cheap, easy to launch and don’t require HTML expertise.

· They make working in groups easier, are community-builders and can be more inclusive (and interesting!) than e-mail.

· They strengthen internal and external business relationships and improve productivity through interactive information exchange.

· They’re not intrusive, since users have to seek out a URL to read the content.

· They improve branding by presenting a more authentic and distinctive voice for a business than canned PR or MarCom messaging.

· They’re more searchable than e-mail and instant messaging, so they’re effective as an information or knowledge-base archive.”

How Blogs Pertain to You – iMedia

“Many businesses and publishers are still trying to figure out “blogs,” wondering if they should have a blog and what they should blog about. That’s probably a mistake. What they ought to be trying to understand is bloggers and blog readers.

It’s probably not wise to generalize about something as amorphous as the Blogosphere, but here goes: the Blogosphere is a place for people who want a more personal relationship with various entities they deal with on a regular basis — corporate, government, media, you name it. They want to have a sense of a person behind or within the enterprise. They are looking for something or somebody real.”

When a business shouldn’t blog – Business Blog Consulting

“Imagine two opticians. One says “I take care of eyes. There’s lots of medical info on eyes out there, so my Web site will be a digital brochure, and that’s good enough for me” while the other says “I get the same questions from every patient, and there’s so much confusing information online, I’m going to try and shed some light on eye care and eye health by writing about it. But not with a newsletter, how 90s!, but with a blog.”

Now, a slight aside: I believe that the future of business is findability, and if your business doesn’t appear when your potential customer looks for you online, you’ll eventually wither and die. Given that, you can guess which optician I think is going to be more successful in 24 months.”