A year or so ago, Google dropped a bomb on all website designers, publishers and online content authors: Your websites had better not only be SSL-secure, but also “mobile-friendly” — and while the first edict is easy to solve with money, the second command costs you a lot of time and money and energy — especially if you’ve been publishing live content on the web for a long time.
I am not one to live in the past or have any regrets. History cannot be changed and regret only rots the promise of tomorrow. In putting together this new Boles Blog to reflect what came before in 14 other instances of thoughts and writing, I came upon the old Awards page for the now retired Go Inside Magazine; and I found great joy in looking back at those wildly created and brightly colored animated .GIFs, and I decided to share them with you here now. I moved the images off the now dead GoInside.com domain and placed them on the live Boles Books domain for serving, but I left the historical, clickable, URLs intact as a compendium of the greatest hits of what was, really, The Original Internet.
Do you recognize any of these websites? Animated .GIFs were big back in the mid-1990’s, and one good way to promote your new website was to “give an award” to another website — there were no blogs back then — and require a link back to your award website. The most elite award we won was from, at the time, the fledgling “Microsoft Network.” MSN was starting with a big bang and a booming promise and it was a Big Deal to get that congratulatory email from Microsoft telling us we were “The One” for a day. That single award from MSFT doubled our readership for the rest of our being.
Continue reading → Blast from the Go Inside Magazine Award Past!
Last week, I signed up for Microsoft Office 365 and, even though I’m on a Mac, I thought the online email and team and website services would be a good and solid backup for the life I have heretofore entirely and exclusively run on Google Apps.
I was right and I was wrong to try Office 365. This is the story of how it all played out.
The tide of uncontrolled anger on the internet — think Juicy Campus and FML and Lori Drew as previously excoriated examples — rises anew in a wave of awkward hatred as Dirty Phonebook crashes against our moral shore.
We are pleased to announce today that BolesBlues.com now also owns the domain name DevilNote.com. That means if you type http://DevilNote.com in your web browser, you will be brought right back here!
There is no substitution for being clearly understood in an emergency situation. It is honoring that truth that led Janna and me to invent sosASL.com as a free online portal for urgent, living and dying, communication between first responders and the Deaf.
Today, I want to warn you about Sweetheart Website hosting deals that you may not know about, or fully understand. Those backroom deals may unwittingly influence your buying decisions.
Continue reading → Sniffing Out Sweetheart Site Hosting Deals
If you aren’t using Google Analytics to track your
website visitors and performance, you should get on board because the service is free and robust and the discovery process may tell you things you don’t want to know but need to know about the sites you operate.
Once you sign up for Google Analytics — you may not be able to do it right this moment because their service is overwhelmed — and you add a little bit of script code to the raw HTML of every page you want to track, you will begin to see the magic of what is really happening on your sites behind the browser.
On Tuesday I wrote a review called Yahoo! Search Marketing Foolishness where I recounted my unfortunate experience with that internet advertising program. Yesterday, to my surprise, I was contacted via email by Michael E. from Yahoo! Search Marketing at 3:43pm Eastern.
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