Web PieRat

Star Wars + antiquated technology + an obsessive drive to create = the “Imperial March” played on floppy drives. Don’t believe me? I find your lack of faith disturbing.

I’ve never been so happy in my entire life. Two floppy disk drives grinding out a melody of chirps and buzzes in perfect mimicry of Lord Vader’s chilling theme. Thanks to YouTube’s sh4dowww90 for the video and accompanying explanation.

Will Jeff Bezos, Chairman and CEO of Amazon.com, blanket the internet with Silk?

Amazon is registering Silk-based domains by the hundreds, possibly indicating the future availability of the day-old Amazon Fire’s browser on more platforms. Of course, the domain registrations could be defensive, but 500 domains is an awful lot for a browser meant to live on a single tablet island. I prefer to think that Amazon’s registration of SilkSmartphone.com means that soon I can browse faster on my android phone.

Silk browsers for PCs, Macs and mobile devices would be a good move, Amazon. If you own the browser, you can suggest your services. “What do you want to do? Watch, Listen, Read, Play, Shop?” I’m envisioning a browser toolbar with tabletesque icons for each action that look delicious and seduce you to click. An Amazon browser that makes it easiest to consume Amazon products and media, plus collects all your browsing data to feed the Amazon machine, is a no-brainer.

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My latest article at Ecommerce Developer, read it in full here.

Search engine optimization doesn’t end with the battle for ranking position. With thumbnail images, social mentions, reviews, news, shopping, maps, paid ads and more clamoring for attention on search results pages, ecommerce sites need to show off their snippets to win the searchers’ clicks. It’s like mating season for birds: The more visually stimulating snippet may win the click over a better-ranking snippet with a plain chirp and dull feathers. Increasingly, developers need to know which metadata and coding choices can turn a common sparrow into a SEO songbird.

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Kindle library ebooks are here! Amazon and OverDrive, the biggest supplier of digital books for libraries in the US, have joined forces to make Kindle ebooks available for digital checkout over the air from where ever you are. In this first wave, 11,000 libraries have jumped on board. No one seems to have published a list of WHICH libraries, however.

UPDATE: Thanks to Shelley Wiese, here’s the link to search OverDrive libraries link to discover whether your library is included. Or you can try searching, as below.

I’ve been using the OverDrive Media Console Android app to read ePub and PDF formatted liberary ebooks for a while now, but the inclusion of Kindle library books is an amazing leap forward in the usability of library ebook reading. You can annotate, sync your bookmarks and current page across devices, and lots of other cool tricks that the OverDrive app doesn’t allow.

So here are the 6 steps to reading Kindle library ebooks on your android:

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I hate paying for apps up front. I know that smart people spend lots of time and creativity making them, but at least half of the apps I install get uninstalled within 5 minutes because they don’t include the feature I wanted or the design is clunky. When I find one I love and use daily, like ADW Launcher, I go back and buy their paid version or donate to their cause. But I want to try the app free first.

Amazon has made this particularly easy by offering free apps regularly. I’ll give Amazon credit, they’re really trying hard with the Amazon Appstore. Competing with Google’s native Market is pretty tough, but Amazon isn’t above bribing us.

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Today is, of course, Talk Like a Pirate Day. On September 19, geeks the world over begin to talk, write and code like pirates. Those misguided folks who identify instead with ninjas have no day, since ninjas are known more for their stealth that their colorful language.

Being a PieRat myself, I have no official day (yet). And my language, while frequently colorful, includes more instances of “canonicalization” than “argh” or “shiver me timbers.” All the same, I do adore Talk Like a Pirate Day.

These are just a few of the ways I celebrate this and every piratical day.

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Richard Baxter’s Google Adwords API Extension for Excel plug-in has completely turned my keyword research world upside down, requiring a new set of tools to cope with massive data overload. I’m not complaining, it’s an awesome plug-in and free to boot. But new tools require changes in the processes and other tools used to wrangle into a form that’s usable. With a combination of Baxter’s AdWords API extension, DigDB plug-in for Excel, and good old fashioned waiting for processing to complete in Excel I’ve cut my high-volume keyword research time by 75%.

By high-volume keyword research I mean identifying related keywords for thousands of known phrases, which while fantstically tedious is also quite useful for finding new keyword markets to optimize for.  For example, within five minutes of reading Baxter’s post on SEOgadget and downloading the plug-in, I was happily fetching keyword ideas for 46,000 phrases. Why 46,000? Well, I had a list of 200 cities, 150 topics and 4 different phrasings for each combination of city and topic. Adds up quickly does’t it? Thank god for MergeWords. But back to the AdWords API plug-in.

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