Hey there! My name is Scott Webster and I am one of the guys who run AndroidGuys. We’re a site dedicated to Google Android and the Open Handset Alliance. We offer daily updates of news, opinion, and podcasts about anything and everything related to the 34 members of the OHA. I’m here to do a little guest-blogging today, thanks to JoeTech.
In February of next year, television will be switching to an all-digital signal. This move will free up the current swath of 700MHz spectrum being used to broadcast episodes of Jeopardy to your aunt Dorothy. So rather than just let the airwaves go to waste, the FCC held an auction so that some lucky company will end up with the rights to use the spectrum any way they see fit with one not-so-tiny little caveat in the deal. That winner must open the network up and allow any device capable of running on it to do so. This means no restricting devices and locking it up like much of the current cellular system in the United States. It’s very highly sought after spectrum mostly because of the speed and capability to penetrate walls so it attracted around 200 potential bidders by the time the auction kicked off.
So who won? Who cares? I’m here to tell you about what might come about, regardless of who ends up with ownership. Just a little daydreaming about the stuff you and I use on a daily basis and how they could be impacted by the auction.
Cell Phones – Of course! This is the main reason so many companies were involved to begin with. Think peer-to-peer file sharing from your phone. Imagine sending and receiving emails with large attachments and the ability to download music straight to your phone from wherever you are. Yeah, you feel me.
Gaming Devices – Handhelds like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP could be slightly redesigned to allow for head-to-head gaming outside of your local area network (LAN). Forget being stuck inside your house or coffee shop hotspot. You could be playing against an opponent from another state while riding the bus. Why stop there? Play DS against someone on the Wii. As long as you’re able to connect to the network, you should be able to play. It doesn’t matter that your Dell laptop is used to play Counter-Strike against a friend using an HP desktop, does it?
Digital Cameras – How about being able to take a picture from your camera and being able to upload it directly to your Flickr account or Facebook profile? Yep, throwing a little bit of hardware into your Olympus could allow for that! No need to wait for you to get back home and tether to a PC. No special memory cards like the Eye-Fi either. Point, click, upload!
Mobile Television – Much like the ability to record shows on your satellite radio receiver, you could potentially record television shows on a personal video recorder. Devices like the iPod Touch might have already opened the door. Download last night’s episode of Lost from iTunes. While you’re at it, why not watch ESPN since you’re waiting for your breakfast at Waffle House. The spectrum has already been used for years to broadcast television to your home. This is the next logical step.
Household Appliances – Ladies and gentlemen, we are on the cusp of some Jetsons type stuff. Picture a house where all of your appliances have little computers in them so they can talk to each other or receive instructions. Imagine getting online and turning the thermostat up before leaving work. While you’re logged into the control panel, go ahead and pre-heat the oven. All these devices could communicate with each other once they jumped on the same network. Going on vacation? Keep an eye on your security camera with real time video. There is all kinds of untapped potential here.
If you like this article and want to read more from the author head over to AndroidGuys and check out all the latest news surround Google Android and the Open Handset Alliance. Be sure to subscribe to our feed as well! This way, you’re guaranteed not to miss a post.
Many thanks to JoeTech for allowing me the opportunity to bring my writing and opinions to another audience!
I just got an email inviting me to be a part of then next big Sedo/GreatDomains live domain name auction. Since this is the second domain related email for me today and I’ve been dealing with server moves (I have more sites to move, still), I decided to mention it and I’m going to let you bid on a few of my domains, too.
Premium Domains for Deep Pockets
GreatDomains is happy to announce another Premium Auction Event in the series of live auctions powered by Sedo. The auction will begin this Thursday, February 21st, at 2:00 EST, and will feature a great selection of premium domains, including Eggs.com, Autograph.com and FixedMortgages.com. This Premium Auction will close on Thursday, February 28th, at approximately 2:00 EST.
Is appartment.com really a premium domain? My picks are pda.net, telephone.net and vhs.net, even though they’re all .net. I’m wondering what happened to the premium domains I used to see on GreatDomains. Are they all gone? I’m sure you’ll still need money to get in the game, though. Maybe you should just scroll down and look at a couple of my names.
Buy one of my domains and save several thousand dollars
I have a bunch of domains, and I’d rather have some cash to put into other areas of online marketing, so I’m ready to sell a few domains. Not in the market? If you link to this post and someone from your link buys one of my domains, I’ll give you 20% (or you Entrecard members can opt for a flat 100 Entrecard credits instead of cash). Please note that some have half-finished sites on them and actual page rank. If you win one of those, you get the domain only, unless otherwise noted. Let’s get started, then.
- Bidding ends at midnight, March 1st, 2008.
- To bid, just comment below or email joe@joetech.com with the subject “Private bid” and I’ll enter your bid here. Note the amount you’re bidding and the domain.
- One bid per domain and one domain per bid, please, unless otherwise noted.
- If you bid and fail to follow through, I’ll make fun of you all over the interweb.
- Starting price or current bid in bold, but check the comments for newer bids before bidding.
- If you don’t understand a domain, google the keywords.
- If there’s a current bid, the next bid will be noted in parenthesis.
Recently, JoeTech.com had a lot of down time. This was because I’ve been working hard to promote it and apparently, it’s been working. The solution was to move from my older server with very little RAM to a faster one with more RAM and updated software. You can’t just jump into something like this, though. If you don’t want a nightmare move, you need a migration plan. Here’s my migration plan for moving any data-driven web site.
1. Give notice
Whenever possible, give notice to your readers/visitors/users that your site will be down during a specified period of time for planned migration. Ideally, this time should be in the middle of the night (to most of your visitors), to minimize the inconvenience. Unfortunately, when you’re site is in need of moving quickly in order to stay up, this step sometimes must be skipped (as was the case for JoeTech.com).
2. Prepare DNS for the move
Whether you handle your own DNS, or someone else does it for you, you should make sure that the TTL (Time To Live) for all your DNS records are set to something like an hour. This should be done 48 hours before your move at the very least. Doing this will ensure that when you move the site and switch the IP address in the DNS records, people will get to the new location quickly. If you want to double-check the site before it comes back up, add in a new “A” record that already points to the new server’s IP address. I like to call this “A” record “new.mydomain.com”. If you do this, step 5.5 below will be to visit new.yourdomain.com in a web browser and click around to test things.
3. Take inventory
Make a list of everything that needs to move. You already know that your web directory and database need to move, but are you forgetting anything else? Does your web server have a special setup for your site? Do you have any cron jobs running that you’ll need set up on the new server? If someone else developed your site and you are not sure about this step, ask them.
4. Put your site on “hold”
Create a small page that just has your site logo and something to the effect of “Sorry. We’re moving to a faster server. We’ll be back in an hour or so.” Put this page in place of your web directory and make sure NO pages on your site can be accessed. Keeping people out of any page will result in no loss of data.
5. Move all your files and data over
Now that the database is sitting idle, it’s safe to move everything without losing anyone’s changes, posts, comments, etc. This often takes the most time, but I like to sit and watch it because I just feel better knowing there were absolutely no errors. Getting your new server to point to the right web files and data will depend on how your server is set up. Many servers come with Plesk or CPanel already installed and you’ll just need to follow their instructions on how to get your site and database set up before moving everything.
6. Set up Email, cron, etc.
If your email goes through an account on your server or you have any cron jobs or additional setup to do on the new server, do it now.
7. Bring it back to life
Once everything is set up, you should cross your fingers, say a little prayer, and then bring your site back to life. To do this, simply swap the IP address in the DNS to the new server’s IP and you should see your site come up pretty quickly.
8. Restore longer TTL
After a day or so, change the TTL in your DNS records back to what it was before (could be a day or a week). If you forget to do this and leave the TTL at 1 hour, it can create an unnecessary burden on your DNS server.
If everything goes well, you should be able to move a data-driven site or blog with very minimal downtime and no big problems. Planning ahead can save you from a lot of headache and embarrassment, so plan ahead and have an easy migration.
When you set an external link in your blog with the href tag , you can do it with DoFollow or NoFollow with the rel attribute, and both influence in search engines in different ways.
What is DoFollow and NoFollow?
NoFollow: nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. This attribute is added automatically to URLs input into comments, so that those URLs don’t get any link from you.
DoFollow: technically is nothing, this attribute doesn’t exist but the people call “dofollow” to disable the rel=”nofollow” attribute added to external links.
Which is better?
Neither dofollow nor nofollow are better, you should analyze what do you want for your blog.
NoFollow attribute is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing the index of spam from occurring in the first place and to deter spammers from posting comments to boost their URLs search rankings. But according to the statistics shown at the Akismet’s antispam service, this tag has not stopped the comment spam and has not discouraged spammers.
While all engines that support the attribute exclude links that use nofollow attribute from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of the attribute vary from search engine to search engine. The following is a table courtesy of wikipedia about the interpretation by the individual search engines:
By removing nofollow attribute, you won’t get more spam than you get daily, akismet is made to block it anyway. Instead, you will be helping to other bloggers who comment on your posts to grown their community by linking them into search engines. You may also start to see more comments in your blog, which it’s better for you.
How to remove NoFollow attribute?
There is a plugin for wordpress to remove this attribute from your comments. Also I found some tutorials to remove this evil attribute from your Blogspot, TypePad or Moveable Type. In addition, there is a button over the web which you can put in your sidebar to let people know that you’ve setup DoFollow, thank Randa Clay for the pretty button.
What do you use, NoFollow Or DoFollow?
This guest post was from Mr Javo, a 19 year old Venezuelan marketer. Visit his site for more tips and advice on Internet marketing.
When Hack n Mod sent me this link with the message, “Your readers will enjoy this: Absolutely incredible!”, I was apprehensive. After all, I get a lot of links in my email and most of them claim to want to show me something amazing. This one, however, was from a site I recognized and have read and promised that you guys and gals, my readers, would enjoy it. I checked it out, and I think you will enjoy it, indeed.
From Hack n Mod:
Dutch artist Theo Jansen demonstrates his amazingly lifelike kinetic sculptures, built from plastic tubes and lemonade bottles. His “Strandbeasts” (Beach Creatures) are built to move and even survive on their own.
ORLY? Just watch the video below and see for yourself (skip ahead a little).
Now what amazes me almost as much as these kinetic energy devices is that they’ve been around for at least a few years and I’m just now seeing them for the first time.
Get Higher Ranking in Google
