Moveme.com - Winners of the People's Choice Award 2007

Move Me, this year's People's Choice winner, beat competition from far and wide to take the number one prize, proving that moving doesn't have to be as stressful as we may think.

In addition to taking the People's Choice crown, it also proved a popular site with the expert panel of judges, winning the Innovative category award announced earlier in January.

Move Me aims to take away the stress of moving house with its free Move Planner. The planner takes everything into account from finding reputable removal firms to who you need to notify of your change of address.

Enjoy!

• Yahoo People's Choice Award

• www.moveme.com

Looking forward to the award arriving this week ;-)

Still improving my lil’ demo apps code I’ve moved on to create more permalink google-friendly site structures and reading data off RSS feeds.

So in the benefit of others, here’s what I found,

SEO on Rails …nice blog on integrating basic SEO tactics into your rails app, friendly permalinks, url mapping and dynamic metatags.

Screen Scraping …good in-depth article on screen scraping with Rails, pulling off html data from a target website (e.g. Twitter) to import into your database

Google / Yahoo Sitemaps …excellent article showing how to get your Rails App to create Yahoo / Google compatible sitemaps using the in-built XML features of Ruby.

Enjoy,

John.

Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses.

Everyday each one of us is subjected to a constant bombardment of information, opinions, sounds and mental programming; most of the time without us even noticing what’s going on. However, if you turn around and look at everything in a different light, studying what’s going on and asking why as loud as you can, you can pick up so much information things might become a little clearer in that hazy and very weird thing called life.

Think of adverts on tv, there’s that particular one with the band you love, maybe Muse and you just have to hang around till it finishes; the advertisers know this so while you’re mind is on other things they’ve got you to plug their product. It’s crafty, but it does work, and in many cases that Nationwide mortgage or JML mop really was a good purchase. There are a billion other techniques and in the most sense it’s all about a good ad campaign, if you put the right amount of effort into something the returns can be endless.

Same thing with ideas, if you go out today and have a look around I’m sure your bound to see or experience some kind of problem or fault that hinders others and you know just needs that extra bit to be perfect. It’s the essence of being an entrepreneur, going out and fixing something for the greater good, not necessarily for the money.

Someone famous once told me, “first create something to solve a problem, the money will come later” trust me, if the ideas sound enough you won’t have a problem with the money; it’s just getting that first spark of inspiration to do it that’s the clincher. Look at your job, did you say yes because of the money or what you’d be doing, 90% of the time it’ll be the task; passion to do something is what drives us and feeds us in those long hours of darkness.

Take care out there.

John,

Like many things, running a website can be a time consuming activity; virtually every second of the day you think up new ideas and cool features to bolster up your community and make the best use of what you’ve got.

Now when it comes to putting your site out there and spreading the word there is no real sure-fire way of checking how things are going. Of course there’s tools like Google Analytics or the RankTools Firefox plugin, but nothing you can click on which will show you everything in one hit.

Luckily a new startup has filled that gap with a site called Popuri.us

Popuri.us

This site allows you to simply type in your website’s domain name, and instantly get full ranking stats for your site at the click of the button; think of it like confused.com for web developers.

Google Pagerank, Alexa, Yahoo, Technorati, Bloglines, Live, Del.icio.us, Whois and DNS reports, all your ranking results available in one tidy screen.

Site Changes…

With red91.com, you may have noticed a more expanded ‘resume’ section, here i’ve started to add all the answers postings i’ve put into site’s like LinkedIn.com and Jobster.com, some of it’s not that good but any advice is better than none.

Also I’m considering releasing some of my old .NET tools I did in a new ‘downloads’ area, but haven’t finalised that yet, looking into some things.

…yes before you ask, i’m trying out podcasting and may have something running in the next couple of months, will keep you posted.

All the best,

John.

SEO = Search Engine Optimisation

Have you ever wondered whether there was a quick and easy way to get your site noticed by all the search engines around the world, and hence get your site to become more popular?

Well there are several methods, first is simple, just post good content.

Second, post comments on other peoples blogs which will in turn get rooted back to you and hence connect and crawl you up the list (but try to be nice at the same time).

And third is to post your site to all the major search engines, by letting them know you exist you create instant word-of-mouth and jump faster up the ladder.

Below is a list to help get in touch with the big search providers, better than a postcard.

• Microsoft Live Search URL Submission


• Microsoft MSN Search Free Submission


• Yahoo Submit Your Site


• Google Webmaster Tools


• AOL Sitemap Submission : http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www. (your site) /sitemap.xml

All services are free at time of writing.

More Tips

another tip is to use the Box Model and put everything in div tags, having your main content at the start of the page and everything else below, like sidebars, header, footer, etc.

so when the bots crawl your page the get right to the content first and don’t get confused of side-tracked by anything else.

also include meta-tags, keywords, use the DocType (strict / transitional), always helps, anything to make a bot’s life easier. also a robots.txt file to tell them where they should start and a sitemap.xml to give them a roadmap of your site.