luni, 28 februarie 2011

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Street Food From Around The World

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 05:53 PM PST

Street food, although it can have a bad rep, is more true to local cuisine than the finest restaurants. This is what the people eat and we'll tell you where it's good. Every corner of the world and every culture has it's own version of street food. Different from fast-food although it is speedy, street food is what the locals eat when they're on the run and don't have time to sit down for a meal or they need to satisfy their hunger when everything else is closed. One thing is for sure, street food is cheap, delicious and gives travellers a first-hand glance into what the people really eat.

China

Strawberries and bananas covered in sugar.

Chicken feet


Roasted duck heads


Pig snout on a stick


Egg/meat pancakes


Bugs on a stick


Soup dumplings


Fried tofu








Watermelon


Starfish on a stick


Lizard on a stick


Misc. bugs on sticks


Cantaloupe


India

Cucumber whales

Aloo tikka


Orange juice


Fried balls of milk dough in spiced sugar syrup


Various types of roti (bread)


Spaghetti




Chile

Waffle dog

Argentina

Grilled bread

Dulce de leche filled baked goods


Nepal

Bread.

Fish


Ice cream


Malaysia

Yam cake.



Beirut

Bread.

Turkey

Fried clams on a stick.

Wet hamburger


Roasted corn and chestnuts


Cucumbers


Tea


Pretzels


Japan

Fried spaghetti.

Fish waffles with bean paste filling


Fermented rice sausage


Cambodia

Tarantulas.

Chicken


Eggs


Steamed dragonfruit buns


Misc. meat


Grilled banana


Bagette


Waffles


Morroco

Snails.

Thailand

Fried beetle pupa.

Grilled chicken gizzards


Meat on a stick




Squid on a stick


Bugs on a stick


Rat on a stick


Facebook Porsche GT3 R Hybrid

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 01:09 PM PST

Porsche is celebrating one million fans on Facebook . On this occasion, the German sports car maker has created a special model GT3 R Hybrid , which bear the names of all Porsche fans on Facebook. Also announced a special Web site dedicated to this initiative, which can increase the scale of the car to find his name on the cab. See this unique cars can be in the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart in February. In the continuation of the publication - a video about how this car was painted.




















How Netflix Destroyed Blockbuster (Infographic)

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 11:15 AM PST

As we dive deeperinto a digital age, Netflix has become a household name for online video and television streaming that has almost eliminated the way we used to rent dvd's and even watch TV. Driving to stores like Blockbuster to pick out a movie by hand has become altogether prehistoric. Here's the low down on just how enormous this internet giant called Netflix is becoming and who it's crushing in its path.

More Infographics.

Click to Enlarge.


Source: onlinembaprograms


Amateur Wedding Photography

Posted: 16 Feb 2011 10:36 PM PST

The one part of your wedding you should never skimp on is the photography. It's always better to shell out a boatload of cash for a good professional photographer than end up with amateur non professional photo shopped pictures of your big day as the couples in these pictures discovered.


























































































































Ship Wrecks Around the World

Posted: 16 Feb 2011 11:05 AM PST

British photographer Alex Mustard has travelled the world snapping pictures of wrecked ships lying on the sea bed. He has made many strange discoveries while exploring beneath the water's surface.

His pictures, taken while investigating the insides of eerie shipwrecks, include barnacle-covered motorbikes once meant for British troops in World War Two.



Rusty British trucks also lie forgotten in their watery graves along with rifles that have never been used, and one extraordinary photo even shows the shell of the iconic VW Beetle car.

Alex, from Southampton, Hampshire, said: 'Wrecks attract divers because of the incongruity of seeing something from above the waves beneath them.


















Source: telegraph


Audi Carbon Ski Concept

Posted: 16 Feb 2011 10:52 AM PST

Famous auto brand Audi in collaboration with the German ski association and leading ski specialists from Head has released a "perfect ski". Designed to optimize maneuverability and speed Audi ski concept focuses fully on one premium material: carbon. At 1,550 grams (with a ski length of 170cm) the ski will be about 200 grams lighter than comparable models, making it maneuverable and agile. The following prototype have just been tested at Kitzbühel's Downhill Hahnenkamm race.






















SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog


Tips and Must-Haves for your eCommerce Platform

Posted: 27 Feb 2011 01:28 PM PST

Posted by MikeCP

Choosing an eCommerce platform can be a terribly frustrating experience because of the options and packages available, the misinformation, the pushy sales reps, the time and money investment, and so on. I want to talk about this decision because of this experience, but I don't plan on making any platform recommendations. No, no. That's really up to you and the resources available to you. But I'm happy to give you a rundown of the SEO elements you'll want to consider in your decision making process.

If you're not in the market for a new eCommerce platform, maybe some of these common platform missteps will convince you that it may be time to consider.

Proper Product Image Handling

Your product imagery can provide awesome conversion benefits and make a strong differentiator in your niche. Unfortunately, a lot of eCommerce platforms don't provide the necessary control and commit a lot of SEO missteps (like generating a new URL when the product images are cycled).

proper image handling
Images that create new URLs is a big no-no. Vat19.com's Giant Gummy bear page passes this test as the URL doesn't change when the delicious image is changed.

Page-Level Control of Head and Meta content

Sure, it makes sense for your title tag, H1, and image alt attribute to default to the product name, but if you don't have the option to create custom meta information you could be in for some frustration. One should be able to edit titles, H1s, image alt attributes, meta descriptions, etc. from every product page in the admin.

Additionally, it's important that the content in the HEAD section of each page is editable. If I want to drop a Google Website Optimizer script onto one product page, it shouldn't be impossible. The same goes for adding a rel=canonical, meta robots, or a page-specific JavaScript snippet.

Product Reviews

Product reviews are awesome for conversion, and it seems like many eCommerce platforms today offer some sort of built-in review system. Reviews can also have a positive impact on your product pages' rankings with the naturally keyword-rich UGC it generates. Unfortunately, tons of product reviews systems utilize JavaScript to call the reviews after the page loads, providing no SEO benefit.

Search engine readable product reviews
Fortunately for Amazon, this review is seen by the Googlebot because it's rendered in HTML

To make sure your product reviews are search engine readable, view source on a page with reviews and be sure the text appears in the code.

Robust Sitemap and Product Feed Control

Most modern eCommerce platforms submit Sitemaps to the search engines, but there's so much more that can be done. For instance, segmented Sitemaps is an awesome way to monitor indexation of different sections of your website. If your platform doesn't allow you to adjust your Sitemaps, you'd be missing out.

Additionally, product feeds allow you to submit your products to comparison shopping engines like Google Merchant Center, NexTag, Shopping.com, and many more. Google Merchant Center is the big one; an eComm platform that auto submits to GMC opens up more possibilities to appear for queries that trigger products in blended search, as well as product extensions for PPC advertisements.

blended search and ppc product extensions
You want this. Your eComm platform should allow it.

301 Redirects, True 404 pages, and Other Rewrite Control

Some of the hosted eComm platforms allow no control over 301 redirects and URL rewriting, and this is a big problem. Similarly, many platforms don't send a proper 404 status for a dead page, opting instead to 302 redirect to a (status 200) 404.html, or worse, the homepage. As products are removed from your catalog, you should be able to 301 redirect that old URL to a related product, or send a proper 404 status message. Anything else will cause confusion for the search engines AND users. Lastly, and most obviously, URLs should be rewritable to allow for keywords-richness.

improper 404
Contrary to the friendly message, everything is not ok. This "404" page is seen just like any other resolving URL by the search engines. Header checker courtesy of Andy Stratton's checkmyheaders.com.

Filtered Navigation that Doesn't Suck

An example of faceted navigationFaceted or filtered navigation is a contentious point amongst eCommerce platforms as very few platforms do it exactly the same.

First and foremost, a filtered navigation that relies on parameters and session IDs can be very difficult, if not impossible to build in an search engine friendly manner. In many cases, the Googlebot could waste a ton of your crawl bandwidth crawling in and out of navigational filters. Additionally, it can become a information architecture nightmare, with the Googlebot crawling deeper and further from the homepage to reach product pages.

A more modern approach to faceted navigation is through using AJAX to filter products. Just make sure that there's an HTML crawl path to your products, and you're not hiding any really good organic landing pages within your AJAX navigation.

There's a lot of ways to approach this issue, and its worthy of its own discussion. See Rand's Whiteboard Friday on the matter. The general rules for a search friendly faceted navigation:

  • Keep the crawlers from crawling endlessly through filters. Remember, rel=nofollow and canonical don't preserve crawl bandwidth.
  • Don't hide great organic landing pages from the crawlers by using AJAX. AJAX is ok, as long as there's an alternate path to pages you'd like to rank.
  • Robots.txt can be used as a solution but must be done carefully (for example, creating a rule to disallow access to URLs with 2 or more parameters/filters).

Site Speed

At this point I'm really more concerned with site speed from a conversion standpoint, rather than as a ranking factor, but there's reason to believe site speed will see increased importance in the algorithms' future. An advanced cacheing ability is a must for the modern eCommerce platform.

A few more SEO elements

  • Automatically generated but manually editable HTML sitemap.
  • Simple breadcrumbs. Preferably generated in a way that triggers Google's enhanced snippet:
    enhanced breadcrumb snippet from Google
  • Navigation that non-JavaScript users (and crawlers) can navigate. Image-based navigation should use alt attributes or css image replacement. See Amazon's approach with css, images, and JavaScript disabled visible on the right:
    amazon.com's search friendly navigation
  • DNS control to allow CNAMEs, content delivery network integration, subdomain usage, etc.
  • Customizable (or no) file extensions in URLs. domain.com/product/ rather than domain.com/product.php.
  • Blog integration on a subfolder. If this isn't possible and your blog has to go on a subdomain (or worse, another domain entirely), that could be a sign of even more frustrating control issues.

Some Non-SEO elements

There's obviously TONS of non-SEO related features that should be included in a good eCommerce platform. Here are just a few.

  • Strength in Numbers and Extendability - At some point your eCommerce platform will frustrate you for one reason or another, and you'll feel a lot better if there's a vibrant community and developers building extensions behind it to help.
  • Data Portability - Can you export and import all of your data from the admin? If one of your manufacturers makes a change to all of their products that requires a small edit to all of their descriptions, can this be done simply? And what about a few years later when you're ready to move to a new platform?
  • Internal Site Search - Your platform should definitely have a strong internal site search functionality, or at least allow for full integration of a third party's search solution.
  • Updated, but Not Too Often! - When was the last time your platform updated? 3 years ago? Well, a lot has changed since then, I'm not sure I'd trust that. At the same time, updates every other week can be extremely frustrating.
  • Great Checkout Process - We'll leave what "great" actually means to the conversion rate experts. Needless to say, this is a HUGE differentiator for eComm platforms. I'll also lump advanced control of shipping rules, gift cards, and coupon codes in here as well.

That's Everything! </sarcasm>

I don't envy the engineers behind today's eCommerce platforms. They're tasked with building a system that's both simple yet robust, 'just gets out of the way' yet 'all-in-one', user friendly yet secure, and so on. No fun. I don't expect that I've covered every bit of must-have functionality either, but I hope I've got most of it. If you've got any particularly frustrating stories from dealing with your eCommerce platform, follow me on Twitter and let me know, or sound off in the comments.

Obligatory "You Forgot Feature X" Updates:

  • From @yoast: support for rich snippets. Google recently added eCommerce sites to the list of sites that can utilize rich snippets. Fortunately, if your GMC feed is properly set up, you may not have to do anything to take advantage.
  • From @dergal: Analytics. I left built-in web analytics out originally because I'm a die-hard Google Analytics junkie, but if done well it can be a nice feature to have.

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Behind-the-Scenes Video: "Thurgood" Screening at the White House

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday, Feb. 28,  2011
 

Behind-the-Scenes Video: "Thurgood" Screening at the White House

In honor of African-American history month, the White House hosts a screening of the new film "Thurgood" - a one-act play starring Laurence Fishburne and written by George Stevens, JR. Go inside the screening to watch interviews and learn more about the impact of Justice Marshall's work towards equal rights in America.

Watch the video.

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

President Obama on Libya: "These Sanctions Therefore Target the Qaddafi Government, While Protecting the Assets that Belong to the People of Libya"
The President signs an Executive Order regarding blocking property and prohibiting transactions related to Libya and issues a statement on those sanctions.

Seventeen Small Business Tax Cuts and Counting
You asked us about what tax cuts the President has instituted for small businesses. Learn more about the17 tax cuts and credits President Obama has passed since taking office.

Eric Holder's Story: Standing Up for American Justice
Attorney General Eric Holder contributes his story to the Celebrating Black History Month series.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Standard Time (EST).

9:45 AM: The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing

11:00 AM: The President and the Vice President meet with a bipartisan group of governors WhiteHouse.gov/live

2:10 PM: The President meets with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon

3:00 PM: Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

WhiteHouse.gov/live  Indicates events that will be live streamed on White House.com/Live.

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Seth's Blog : The simple two-step process

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

The simple two-step process

Step one: Open all doors. Learn a little about a lot. Consider as many options as possible, then add more.

Step two: Relentlessly dismiss, prune and eliminate. Choose. Ship.

The problem most people run into is that they mix the steps and confuse them. During step one, they aren't open enough, aren't willing enough to consider the impossible. And then, in step two, fear of shipping kicks in and they stay open too long, hold on to too many options and hesitate.

Simple doesn't always mean easy.

 
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