The good news is that there is no major damage reported from the Vancouver Island Earthquake, but not only that, smaller quakes in the vicinity of the west coast are in fact a good thing. It means the tectonic pressure is being released and in fact can prevent a large earthquake happening in the future. Alas, it could also mean that there may be more earthquakes coming.

Vancouver Island Earthquake 1946

Vancouver Island has seen its share of big earthquakes. In fact, back in 1946, an earthquake measuring 7.3 was recorded on June 23rd. Two deaths were recorded from this quake, who’s epicenter was located on the aptly named Forbidden Plateau area of central Vancouver Island, west of Courtenay and Campbell River. This quake was felt as far away as Oregon in the States.

The two deaths were from a capsizing boat and a heart attack. Vancouver Island residents were scared and many ran out into the streets in terror. Luckily, today’s earthquake was not so fatal and buildings seemed to hold together, unlike in 1946 when there was extensive damage to buildings, such as the Bank of Montreal building (below).

1946 Earthquake damage on Vancouver Island

Many people were concerned that Vancouver Island may break off and sink, but today’s quake just proves how ridiculous that idea is. In a really big earthquake, it is quite possible that the seafloor that is just offshore from the island may be lifted up and it is possible that the coastal area could sink and at the worst, the sinking would be only a few meters. Residents living at the beach may experience some flooding but the likelihood of the island crumbling into the sea is not very likely at all.  Land slides in the ocean itself is possible which may cause smaller scale tsunami type affects which may contribute to localised flooding.

All in all, a relatively small quake similar to the ones we feel here in Central America and no reports of major damage or loss of life.

They are such a happy breed and are happy to potter around amusing themselves and thus were often traded amongst sailors and were eventually introduced to their rightful place in Italian nobility nonetheless!

Stating that Max Thurman is a dog is both obvious and insult to Max. The fact of the matter is, Max is rather human-like and has a lot od dog-like tendencies.

Bichon Frise and allergies

I myself am terribly allergic to dog and cat hair but with our dog Max, I find that these symptoms aren’t really present. The breed is known to be allergy-friendly and where most people claim they are hypoallergenic they aren’t quite this way, unless groomed regularly to remove the loose hair and dander.

I think I can spot a correlation between the times when I’m feeling prone to allergy when Max needs a haircut and grooming session.

You can read more about the Bichon Frise breed and allergies here.

Finding Max Thurman!

Now, recently, whilst Google searching for “Max Thurman” I found that pictures of my dog weren’t indexed. Shame, because I have so many. So I thought that I should take steps to rectify this. Alas, project “Finding Max Thurman!” has begun here, with this blog post.

Let’s start off with a photo that’s an oldie but a good one of Max Thurman and his very funny front teeth.

We were in bed with our dog-like human dog, which isn’t a strange occurrence and we discovered we can do something like a ventriloquy act with Max Thurman by moving his lips.

Endless minutes of fun ensued and several photographs later we finally snapped up a good one that wasn’t blurry or had terrible lightning!

Anyway, this is Max Thurman. An endless source of entertainment for Alyssa and myself.

Hopefully we get to see Rialto Casino back up there! I only wrote this post to help Google out with a little prodding.

If Article Marketing is something that you put a lot of effort into, then I’d suggest looking at other strategies as this isn’t going to be a sustainable SEO strategy. Last week, Matt released this video in response to the question:

“Do you recommend article marketing as an SEO strategy and how are the backlinks treated when other websites republish the same article?”

First of all, “WordPress SEO” (read more here) by Joost de Valk is FAR superior than than “All in One SEO“, it also does the XML sitemap and the SEO (better than all in one). In fact, the SEO is done in a better and more intuitive way with multi-step recommendations.

As for the “AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget“, delete this. It’s pretty terrible because of the JavaScript loading times and the dependency on that JavaScript to be loaded. In my opinion, install WordPress.com’s “JetPack” and put their share widget in there (it’s way better and coming from a better and faster download source).

Can’t beat “Flagrant Disregard’s Feedburner Plugin“, you should be using this.

Must have plugins

1. Google Analyticator
2. WordPress SEO
3. JetPack
4. Flagrant Disregard’s Feedburner Plugin

TL;DR (summary)

Less plugins are good, because:

1. less to update
2. less to debug
3. less to manage
4. easier to install again on other WP sites

Installing JetPack will save you a lot of time in the future as Automattic are going to eventually be adding all the good functionality, availability and extensibility of the plugins at WordPress.com.

More about JetPack

Check out JetPack, read more about it on WP Founder Matt Mullenweg’s blog and the ultimately important link.

And while you’re at it, boycott this company – Outdoor Adventures – http://www.adventureswhistler.com – assholes.

Get Boggle for your iphone/ipad for FREE today.  I’m downloading it now as we speak.

It’s a great game and only free today. That’s all, enjoy free Boggle!

Now Google, be so kind as to index this please, kthxbai.

Update a minute later – thanks Google, you indexed this in about 30 seconds.

And a few minutes later we get a full post index and an advert:

Even though Affiliate marketing is thought of as  the most simple and effective methods to earn money online, it is not as simple as it sounds. The wise Affiliate professional plans every action and executes it the very best way he can. He ought to also maximize the possible to earn by utilizing the right tools necessary for a successful Affiliate Advertising company. We have consulted some of probably the most profitable Affiliate entrepreneurs within the company and beneath are the top three necessary tools to get a profitable Affiliate advertising company.

1. Your own website

The most significant and indispensable instrument in Affiliate Marketing is your own website. The initial action in any profitable Affiliate advertising business is constructing a great, credible and professional looking web site. Your website is the jump off level of all of your advertising initiatives. Therefore, you must first construct a user-friendly web site, that will appeal to your prospects and inspire them to click on on the links to the goods and service you are promoting and make a purchase. Therefore, you need to initial concentrate your initiatives in building a web site which will cater to what your prospective customers require.

The most important thing you ought to think about is that almost all internet users go online to search for info, not necessarily to go and buy something. Over all else, make your web site full of original, relevant and useful content. People will love content articles that are interesting and useful. Maintain in thoughts that, within the internet, content material is still king and great quality content will not only build your credibility, it may also assist you to achieve a higher investigation engine ranking. By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish your self as a credible professional in the field, making you a much more reliable endorser of the product or service you promote. Establishing a good reputation is really a great action in building up a loyal consumer base.

2. Incentives

Competition is very tight within the web world. You must usually be one-step forward of one’s rivals to ensure that you simply capture a substantial share of your goal market. Consequently, you must use every possible indicates to encourage individuals not only to go to your site but also to click on and proceed to the websites from the goods and services you are promoting. Building an opt-in e-mail checklist is among the best ways to gather prospective customers. Provide a newsletter or an e-zine. Much better however, offer incentives for your prospective customers to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletters. You are able to current totally free softwares, access to exclusive services along with other freebies that will be helpful for your prospective customers.

3. Hyperlink Recognition (i.e. link popularity)

The importance of driving extremely targeted traffic to your web site cannot be emphasized enough. The all-important web visitors is at the prime of the list of the most important entities in the web world. Attracting people to your site ought to be the initial step you should carry out. Do everything to achieve a high search engine ranking. Hyperlink Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to determine search engine rankings. Consequently, to improve your link popularity, you need to launch an aggressive reciprocal hyperlink campaign.

One of the very best ways to do this – at no price in any respect – is by submitting articles, together with your website’s hyperlink at the useful resource box, to e-zines and totally free write-up sites. You will not just acquire exposure, you’ll also have the chance to promote for totally free, just include a hyperlink back for your site. The more websites you submit your articles to, the better your hyperlink recognition is. Make your content articles authentic, relevant and helpful to ensure that more websites will choose it up and post it.

These are but three of the many tools that an Affiliate professional can use to maximize earning possible. The possibilities are limitless and are restricted only by your creativeness, creativity, resourcefulness and determination. You can always explore other ideas and adapt other methods, which you believe may help you turn out to be a higher rolling Affiliate marketer.

If you knew about this and didn’t mention it, well, that’s not very nice.

This is a really nice feature!

I’m so happy that I discovered it and “command + shift and F” is my new friend.

First of all, the “spinning” technique you guys are using, it’s lame. Replacing {a word|a few words} like this is pathetic.

Second, the email addresses are obviously fake. Also, try harder with this. Make a database of emails with an associated pair name so you’re not sending a comment to my site from “Joe Adams” with the email address Frank.Jones@… Really?

Akismet does a great job of stopping the SPAM. Also the built in stop words. All I have to say is “keep spamming me”, because this is the only way I’ll get less SPAM. Ironic eh?

Trapped Cicada #1, originally uploaded by b tard.

Our latest bug friend who dropped by tonight. These little buggers are responsible for the most annoying noise you will hear during the Costa rica summer.

Alyssa calls the glass “the kill jar” but to date, we have yet to kill anything. They are always released to the outside from where they came.

You need to replace the KEXT file AppleUSBAudio.kext with an older version. You do all this via “su” or logged in as root.

Here’s how to do it (re-written from here):

1. Download the AppleUSBAudio.kext from 10.5.6 here.
2. Unzip it.
3. Open up terminal
4. Make a backup of the existing driver by running the following in terminal
   
   cp -Rp /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBAudio.kext ~/Documents/AppleUSBAudio.kext-BACKUP

5. Exit any applications that are using a USB audio device and unplug all USB audio devices. In my opinion, print this page and restart your computer and ONLY open terminal. Unplug your headset please.
6. Unload the existing AppleUSBAudio driver from the kernel by running the below command in terminal.
   
   sudo kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBAudio.kext
   
   If you get an error saying ” not found for unload request” your fine. If you get an error claiming it can’t be unloaded because its in use (don’t have the text in front of me) then stop and go back to step 5.
7. Remove the existing driver by running the following in terminal.
   
   sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBAudio.kext

8. Put the new driver in place by running the following in terminal.
   
   sudo mv ~/Downloads/AppleUSBAudio.kext /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBAudio.kext

9. Remove quarantine (OSX Snow Leopard and Leopard):
   
   xattr -d com.apple.quarantine AppleUSBAudio.kext
   
   You can see if it was quarantined by running this:
   
   xattr -l AppleUSBAudio.kext

10. Load the new driver by running the following in terminal.
    
    sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBAudio.kext
    
    Note: At this point if you get an error like this:
    
    check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8)
    
    Do the following:
    
    chown root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBAudio.kext
    chown root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBAudio.kext/*
    chown root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBAudio.kext/*/*
    chown root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBAudio.kext/*/*/*
    chown root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBAudio.kext/*/*/*/*

11. Confirm the new driver is loaded by running the following in terminal.
    
    kextstat | grep AppleUSBAudio
    
    The output should look like the folliowing (the 2.5.8b13 is the important bit, some of the other numbers might be slightly different):

    sh-3.2# kextstat | grep AppleUSBAudio
    129    0 0x92cdc000 0×28000    0×27000    com.apple.driver.AppleUSBAudio (2.5.8b13) <99 98 36 14 8 7 5 4 3 1>

Now to google bot, go update these pages from cache please:

Page rank and MSN avatars. This is a shameless plug to get these pages updated in Google.

Here in Costa Rica the internet is terrible. At home it is OK but in the office it is always falling over. We are on a huge waiting list for Wi Max and until then we just have to suck it up. In Canada and the United States, we never really have issues with our internet connection unless we live in remote areas of the country.

At least in the more remote parts of North America we have options. We should all be glad about his because since I moved here, I am somewhat limited. There aren’t a lot of companies who specialize in dial-up internet and DSL service. We’re kinda tied here to the one service provider but things are about to change. Rumours of Comcast coming here and investing is huge right now. The same with the telecommunications monopoly also with five potential new companies coming here.

I wish we had the same flexible options here in Costa Rica that we have in north America.

Check Youtube, Search and all their other products today. I’ll leave you with two more, one is a video April Fool prank on Youtube and the other is in their Search. First the video, after the break…

And now the Search – check the upper right corner of search statistics:

Subject: Searching for religion

Message Body:

I made a big mistake by getting my mates to claim I was G-d’s son. Some people took me too seriously and now I have a shedload of believers that need convincing I was just pulling a stunt.

Can you set me up with a website so I can inform the masses that I am just a dead guy with holes in my hands and being Jewish is the way to go.

I will pay you with very old shekels my Mum gave me when she did the DNA test proving Joseph was my Dad, he nearly killed her over that prank.

I thought this was funny. Then again, my sense of humor is weird because I like to use a paint roller frame to paint walls.

Now, more that ever I feel inclined to track earthquakes since Haiti and Chile had some pretty devastating mass movements, but also because I now live in Costa Rica, which itself is an earthquake zone (see map below). In fact, we felt the fall out from an earthquake off the coast of Chile just last week.

Apart from the US Geological Survey’s latest earthquake site, the best and most concise resource I have found is on Twitter and by following WheresItShaking. These two sites alone can keep me up to date with what’s going on in the world.

At school, I always wanted to get involved with Geology and enjoyed the study of Plate Tectonics. As well as my studies as a Chemist, I won’t ever forget the enjoyment of studying rocks and the earth, most likely because of the fact that the school trips (or at least one of them) was most legendary.

Nowadays people are churning out content and trying to remain in top position for their selected category or niche and it’s getting harder and harder to write unique content, so coming up with an idea on what the hell to blog about is actually really hard.

Now back to the matter at hand. Many of my pages in Google’s cache are displaying the error when some bastards tried to hack my site:

As you can see this is appearing in the ‘btard’ category. It is a dumb category, and meaningless I know but it was a test term that this whole site was based around way back. I have some work to do.

So you, like me have a (WordPress) blog and you have a cached listing that you want to update so why not make a post (like this one) and check that box relevant to the category (and search result page) and hope that your pinger tells google that you want a refresh on that cache.

Well, that will work. That image above was snapped on “2010-03-13 at 9.18.53 AM” (the image name is “Screen shot 2010-03-13 at 9.18.53 AM.png”). We’ll see how long it takes to fix the cache.

I’ll follow up with other ways to update cached listings.

First of all go to your Twitter page and a web browser and look at the source code. From there you should see something that looks a little like ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/6156482.rss’ (this is my Twitter timeline feed RSS). Save this or get ready to insert this into the code later. Let’s move on to making this page.

Making the template page

To make my Twitter RSS feed page, I made a copy of page.php from my theme folder and renamed it to template-twitter.php.

For it to be used as a real template in the WordPress system I added this to the top of the code:

The final page as a regular template now looked like this:

Adding the Twitter code

The code to produce the feed is really simple and there are many more ways of expanding upon it but for the sake of simplicity we let’s go with a plain unordered list of items. First of all we’d like to enclose our items in an unordered list and each Tweet will be a list item. Wrapped around this is he hyper link to the actual tweet on Twitter.

Explanation of the code

This is a call to include the WordPress feed api so we can make use of the feed functionality (software reuse, amazing!)

I added the comment here that we’d be making a feed object from the Twitter RSS. Pretty self explanatory. This is where you insert your Twitter RSS feed.

This is the place to enter the number of items you’d like to display in your feed. Again, pretty self explanatory!

This is where we build out the array and tell it to start from zero items and count all the way up to the number of items specified previously.

If there aren’t any entries in the feed, this will help it be (somewhat) graceful and spit out a string to that effect.

Assuming we have some feed entries, the code begins to step through each value with ‘foreach‘ and creates the array ‘$item’.

The code above is the real meat of it all. This is the code that spits out items from the ‘$item’ array from the Twitter RSS feed. This block of code is all contained within a list item (‘<li>’). Within the ‘<a>’ tag you can see the ‘href’ attribute is output as ‘$item->getpermalink();’ as well as the ‘title’ attribute.

The anchor text is displayed by outputting ‘$item->get_title()’ and is cleaned up somewhat by the ‘htmlentities’ function.

At the end, the date is added in a similar way to how it is added in the ‘title’ attribute of the link and the ‘<li>’ list item is terminated.

Finally, the foreach control structure is terminated and the unordered list is closed.

The complete code is here. You can save this and upload to your /wp-content/themes/THEME-NAME-HERE/.

Now to make the page in WordPress.

From here onwards it’s really easy. All we have to do is make a regular WordPress page and write any introduction paragraph explaining what that page is and then select the template.

Now, because WordPress is super hi tech these days, people can move around certain components of their working installation so you should be looking for something that allows you to select a template which is included in the ‘Attributes’ section (min is on the right hand side).

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like:

WordPress - choose a template

Of course, if you’ve made it to there, you need to choose the correct template, like this:

WordPress - choose a template from the dropdown

The end…

Write your paragraph blurb and make sure you’ve selected the twitter template and loot at your new page (mine looks like this).

I believe Google should introduce some responsibility to it’s results pages so that there are some relative weights given to valid and compliant code (W3C).

Enhancing a site for W3C compliance could potentially bring more users who require accessible websites. I’ve tried to do some research on the law of accessibility but didn’t draw too many good/useful results for this article’s purpose. I did see the US Usability blog which isn’t a terrible read at all but no real info on where governments stand on creating usable and accessible content. There is no doubt that people with disabilities can benefit more from better coding. If we can all try to stick to standards then engineers can develop better methods of delivering the information. That to me, is a good enough reason to deliver standard code.

The accessibility idea is a spin off from standards. Think of coding standards from a logical point of view. You want your website to go the distance, right? Bad code isn’t going to do that for you. To put it frankly, deprecation is a mother f*cker… The chances of compliant features and code becoming deprecated in the near future are not very likely.

So if not for the future of your web content, how about for people who have disabilities? Either way, ignoring compliancy will eventually decrease traffic either from missing a segment of human users (Accessibility) or from losing traffic from service adoption due to deprecation.

Personally, I like gnar gnar bytes the most.

@mattcutts, is it true you said invalid markup has no influence on SEO with Google?

Edward Lewis on Twitter to that guy :P

Update: http://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/9994544671

@pageoneresults I believe I made an SEO video about that; if a page has high quality we would like to return it despite errors.

There are quite a few more comments to read on Edward Lewis’s twitter about the W3C valid code and how Matt Cutts hints of it’s lack of influence within the sphere of Google search and SEO.

I spent the night in a Costa Rican night club, google Gaira. Check the title, so cute: “Club Latino High End”.

Time to go eat a burrito.

Anyway, you can look out for those here. They’ll most likely be on my flickr so you can check them out there.