Things have changed, Charlie Brown!

The buzz is all about Caffeine these days. Google is making major changes to the algo, and I think I have some idea of what they're up to. It changes everything for the better.

Conventional wisdom says there are two kinds of SEO: internal and external. Internal SEO is what you do within your own site (keyword density, meta tags, W3C compliance) and external SEO is what you do on the rest of the web (link building).

If only it were that simple! To successfully SEO a site or page (this page and site are not optimized, by the way, because they are only designed to draw people who Google my name, Chuck Linart, and the site is well optimized for that) you have to learn to think like a search engine. Search engines "think" differently now than they did even six months ago.

Here are seven elements of successful SEO at the dawn of the Caffeine era, based on my testing:

Prank ideas come easy

Sometimes even we nerds need to get our prank on. Come to think of it, we probably need it more than other people since society's cool kids love to beat us down for some reason.

Here are some...

ideas:

Wouldn't it be nice to find easy protection for your Windows PC?

You've found it.

I did another post aimed at web surfers, helping people to protect themselves against xss already embedded in websites. Now I just want to quickly point out something to PHP coders, something that my travels around the web reveal is missing in a shocking number of sites: Basic security against this kind of attack being executed through form submissions in your website.

... and I'm OK with that

I'm not sure how to even define nerd, but I'm pretty sure I fit the bill. All my life, I've been socially awkward -- likable enough, but awkward -- and I've always had a passion for learning new things which seems, unfortunately, to be one of the hallmarks of nerdism in this day and age. Computers have fascinated me since 1975 when I, as a bit of a math prodigy, was privileged to make one spit out a picture of Snoopy on a dot-matrix printer. (Most people had never seen a computer in those days, let alone directed one to print something.) Star Trek and Star Wars are far more interesting to me than Star Magazine. Does that qualify me yet?

A client recently asked me for a php script to perform a pretty simple operation. I couldn't take their money -- not all of it anyway. I saved myself some time and my client some money.

Drupal makes it easy to keep it simple

What hassle! File this one in the "Don't make the same mistakes I made" folder.

PC and Mac, meet Linux.

(Watch all three clips.)

That is all.

As a general rule, I dislike Flash websites. They're clunky. They're expensive. They can place a monster load on your server. They can take forever to load. They're difficult to update. Often they seem kind of pretentious. Most importantly, they don't get spidered and therefore don't show up in search results. Flash elements within sites add some pizazz, but building an entire site from Flash makes no sense in most cases.

Even so, you may want a Flash site. You might just be that kind of person or you might be in that kind of business (design, multimedia, etc.). If that is the case, cleverness and diligence can still get you the all-important pull traffic provided by search engines. Read on to find out how.

Lots and lots of handy dandy quick info at this page about Linux tips. Most of it is stuff that the average newb wouldn't know, but there are some neat tricks for more advanced users, too. The stuff about speeding up the hard drive was new to me.