Bookmarklets for Search

Here are some handy bookmarklets I use that let me select text on a web page, then click the bookmarklet to look it up directly on Wikipedia, Google and other places. You may find them useful.

In most browsers, you can just drag these links to your Bookmarks toolbar or favorites. In Internet Explorer, you'll need to right click links and select "Add to Favorites", then add them to your "Links" or other folder of your choice. The 2nd link is the same as the first, but with a shorter name to save space on your bookmarks bar.

• Find on Google | Google
• Find on Wikipedia | Wiki
• Find on Google News | GNews
• Find on Amazon.com| Amazon
• Find on Google Images | GImages
• Find on Google Books | GBooks
• Find on Yahoo | Yahoo
• Find on Yahoo News | YNews
• Find on YouTube | YouTube
• Find on Bing | Bing
• Find on Bing News | BNews
• Find on Twitter | Twitter
• Find on LyricsTime | Lyrics- Select an artist and/or song name, or lyrics on a web page, then use this bookbarklet. It opens in a new window so you can continue to listen to music while you read the lyrics.

Making the Most of a Small Garden

New gardeners are generally eager to get growing and by summer generally find they over-planted in the spring. Who could imagine those miniscule seeds or tiny starts would get so big so fast? Seemingly frail tomato seedlings play this trick on me every time. Here are some strategies and vegetable selections for the small garden.

Compact growers produce well without taking over:

• Bush beans and peas: Just a few plants produce about as many string beans as your family will be willing to eat. Look for pea varieties that grow 32" or shorter.


• Determinate cherry tomatoes: Though these will still take a lot of space, they're not as aggressive as regular or indeterminate tomatoes.


• Dwarf varieties: Many vegetables also have dwarf cultivars that may be more appropriate for small plots.


• Herbs: Low growing herbs like chives, parsley, cilantro (coriander), thyme, tarragon, sage, and oregano or marjoram pack a lot of flavor in a small space.


• Root crops: Just a few radishes, onions, shallots, beets, garlic or carrots are all you need to spice up the rest of your dishes.


• Salad greens: Leaf lettuce, arugula, spinach, and mustard greens like mizuna are easily managed. Try small plantings every few weeks to extend the harvest. My greens even seem to bolt less readily when crowded together.

Maximize vertical space, but be cautious about shade:

• Cucumbers: Cukes can be trained up a strong mesh or trellis.


• Pole beans: These are adept at holding on to any vertical stick or trellis.


• Some squash: I've successfully coaxed butternut squash up a trellised arch, but had less success with delicata squash. Experiment with one or two seedlings of your favorite squash.


• Taller peas: Pea vines 36" and taller can be trained to vertical supports. You'll need to tie them off regularly since their tendrils aren't strong enough to hold on during our windier days.

Inter-plant seasonal crops to maximize your harvest by spreading it further throughout the season. Just as spring crops like spinach, lettuce and peas are half grown, interplant a few summer crops like bush beans, basil and more lettuce. Just as your summer crops are half grown, harvest the remainder of your spring crop and interplant some winter crops like kale, collards, chard, and winter leeks. As you harvest some winter crops in November, plant a few garlic cloves or sew in a little mache (corn salad) for next spring.

Some aggressive vegetables folks with small gardens should avoid include:

• Artichoke, cardoon, rhubarb, zucchini: These large leafy plants quickly dwarf their surroundings.


• Asparagus: Though small when harvested, the remaining stalks you let grow to power next spring's shoots are too tall for small gardens.


• Brambles: Raspberries, blackberries and other perennial brambles grow too tall and shade most small plots. They also spread by runners.


• Corn: The stalks simply grow too tall and will shade the rest of your plot. Successful pollination usually requires more stalks than will fit in a small space.


• Indeterminate tomatoes: "Indeterminate" means the thing never, ever stops sprawling!


• Mint, lemon balm: These aggressively invasive plants can be confined in a container, but should not be planted in the bare ground if you have any hope of growing anything else.


• Potatoes: Though you could try just one potato plant, harvesting generally requires you to dig up a significant chunk of real estate where other plants may be growing.


• Squash, melons, pumpkins: Most of these grow meandering vines that smother anything up to 10 feet around.

Perhaps the best advice to new gardeners with small plots is to simply plant less. Otherwise you may end up with a surplus of one crop, but nothing else to harvest. Start with just a few plants to find out what grows best for you, and how much space each eventually consumes come summertime.

Copyright © 2006 Brian Ballard. All rights reserved.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips and Tricks

Here are some SEO (search engine optimization) tips on how to get your band or music site to show up higher in organic searches (i.e. non-paid search results):

1. Think Like a Searcher

What words will your visitors be searching on when you want your site to appear in the results?

Pick keywords (and their synonyms) appropriate for your target audience to use in the content of your site. Focus on medium-specific to very specific terms so there won't be so many other results competing with your site.

Don't use your keywords too many times on a page or a search engine may consider it keyword spam.

2. HTML Elements

Use your keywords in your page TITLE, meta descriptions, in H1 tags, in bold (or strong or em) font, and as hyperlinked text. Use different appropriate TITLE tags on different pages.

Use your keywords in your image file names, directory paths, ALT attributes and TITLE attributes. Use keywords in anchor TITLE attributes.

Most modern search engines ignore the meta keywords tag which is notorious for spam, but that doesn't mean you should not use the meta keywords tag.

If your site has versions of essentially the same page, but with different URLs (like sort order, or different skins), use link rel="canonical" tags in your page headers pointing to a single primary URL. Search engines will apply page rank "votes" from all links to the various versions of your page to the single canonical URL. That increases its page rank density, meaning your canonical page link will appear higher in search results.

Also add other useful link and meta tags various services, like Facebook and iPhone, may recognize.

3. Keywords in URLs

Use your keywords in your page and image URLs if possible (see example below, both go to the same place). Keywords may be in the actual file names on your server, or you could use URL rewriting to convert URLs with keywords into server file names.

http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Deathly-Hallows-Book/dp/0545010225
http://www.amazon.com/These-Words-Get-Indexed-Too/dp/0545010225

Google prefers keywords in URLs to be in lower case and separated by dashes (-), rather than spaces (which get rendered as "+" or "%20") or underscores (_).

4. Links to Your Site

Google gives your site extra credit for other sites that link to yours. Get other sites, blogs, and discussion forums to link to your site, preferably from hyperlinked keywords. So provide easy-to-copy deep-links or permalinks on each of your pages.

Syndicate your content (e.g. with RSS feeds) so links back to your site appear on other sites.

Provide common social bookmarking sharing links (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Delicious.com, Digg, Buzz, etc.)

Find content-appropriate Wikipedia articles to link to your site as a reference.

Many search engines honor rel="nofollow" in link tags. If that attribute is present on a site's links, don't bother putting your links there - search engines may follow them to find your site, but they won't consider the link a "vote" for your page in their page rank.

5. On-Site Links

Hyperlink keywords on your own site to other pages on your site, or to your site search. This is why many sites now display "tag clouds."

6. Long Tail Text

Have lots and lots of pages with lots and lots of words. Not every page will get more than 1 or 2 hits ever, but in aggregate the search traffic adds up.

Use HTML rather than PDF or word processor files. Though some search engines will index document formats, some don't. Besides, proprietary document files are harder for visitors to access than HTML anyway.

7. Text Instead of Flash, Images, or AJAX

Render keywords on your site in text, not images or Flash. Search engines have no way of knowing what's in those files.

Search engines don't generally execute JavaScript, so any text available only from AJAX calls is not visible to spiders.

8. Traffic Reports

Monitor your traffic logs or reports. Your Home page may not actually be your site's front door. Make sure search entry pages are relevant to the search terms, and help users who first enter your site from a deeper page find other pages on your site.

Use your traffic reports to see what top search terms people use to find your page or site and update your pages to optimize for the keywords people are actually using to find your site - even if they're slightly different from what you first thought. If Google decides your site is the best place for keywords you didn't expect, optimize for those words. Ride the wave, don't fight it.

9. Spelling Variations

Include some common typos of your brand names and keywords so people who make the same typo in their search see your site in the results. (But see also tip #14.)

10. Make Dynamic URLs Look Static

Make site search look like regular pages with URL rewriting. Search engine spiders won't follow always dynamic or script directory links, or links with query string parameters, because they could result in an infinite number of pages, but if you make the spider think your dynamic page is really static, they'll index them.

For example, make a search URL that is really http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?term=lyrics look like this: http://www.mysite.com/search/lyrics. On Apache, you can do that with your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule search/(.*) /cgi-bin/search.cgi?term=$1 [L]

The (.*) part means "take anything that appears here and put it in variable $1". The $1 part means "take whatever was in the first parentheses and put it here." The [L] means this is the last rewrite rule and the server can stop looking for other rewrite rules. Move the [L] to your last rewrite rule if you have more than one.

11. Avoid Frames

Don't use frames! Most search engines can't (or just won't) navigate to sub-frames. And if a searcher clicks through directly to one of your sub-frames, your site probably won't display properly.

12. Sitemaps

Implement a Google Sitemap.

13. Avoid Link Farms

Don't get your link on link-only pages or parked domains. Some search engines penalize sites that appear on these spam pages.

14. Don't be Devious

Use your keywords in real content. Don't put keywords in tiny fonts or in the same color as the background text. Some search engines penalize sites that use non-visible text.