Cats and Printers

Cats and Printers go together like cats and mice. Cats treat printers especially the ink jet kind as if they were mice or certainly living creatures and the consequences are often hilarious. The following video I particularly like:

Now, I shouldn't get too serious over this but Molly the cat in the video reacts to each pass of the ink jet cassettes. She reacts to the sound and it is a preparation for defense and/or attack to an animal. The sudden jerk of her body indicates that. Her whiskers go forward slightly and she attacks the nearest object which she confuses with the source of the sound. Great video.

The next one generates a similar reaction in the cat. The printer is a laser printer but the sound and action of the printer creates the impression to the cat that it is an animal and the cat pokes and prods it to test it; to see if it is dangerous etc. before attacking it properly, which the cat never gets around to doing because the printer never reacts to the prods and pokes:

The video maker appears to have thought he/she was holding a still camera as it is 90 degrees out of alignment! Cats and printers show us a bit about cat behavior. Here he is again doing the same thing but looking a bit like he is trying to repair it..........

...........when in fact he is once again prodding it as if it was a mouse. We have all seen cats play with mice when they have caught them. They prod them to get them moving and to check 'em out. This is the same thing only the mouse is bigger, noisier and made of plastic and metal. Cats and printers are a great team.



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Google Image Search builds Traffic

Google image search builds traffic. I run this Blogger site which is part of the main site: http://www.pictures-of-cats.org. Pictures of Cats.org (PoC) is about pictures of cats, for sure. But it is about much more than that. There is a ton of information on the site; lots of words. More words in fact than pictures. Yet most of my traffic to PoC comes from Google Image Search. This is such an important traffic builder but I sense that it is a somewhat forgotten, second string thing. Something that just works in the background to add an extra bit of traffic.

As the internet gets faster with improved broadband speeds (and in the long term it will get even faster) the old clichés about using small picture files to keep page load times quick are becoming redundant. We were advised to upload pictures not larger than 15,000 bytes. This is a small image. I use larger sizes, up to about 30,000 bytes. If there is only one image on the page I go up to 80,000 bytes. However, image file size needs to be considered every time to ensure decent load times.

Here is an image of the top 5 referrers to PoC (referrers means those sites and pages from which traffic to PoC arrives) for May 2009 (to day 5):

The important thing to note is that the No.1 referrer is Images.google with www.google a close second. In the top 20 referrers 8 are image searches. As said, Google image search builds traffic.

I don’t do anything special to get the images seen by Google. I simply ensure there is an “alt” tag. Even when there is no alt tag Google finds them. I find it is best to leave the pictures alone once on the page. Rotating pictures to freshen up the page is not a good idea as Google does take its time to find and list images. This is not because of something Google is doing but because of the enormous number of images on the internet. It is wiser to refresh with new text.

I tend also to make sure the image and alt tag chime with the subject matter of the post to ensure that the post or article is focused and coordinated. Please don’t forget that Google image search builds traffic. And when using Blogger it is best for SEO purposes to have a Picasa Web account and to upload the pictures using the compose mode image uploader. These images are saved on Google servers and listed in your Picasa Web album. Google image search lists Picasa Web album images so make them public if you can.

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Technorati Tags: software applications,SEO,internet marketing

Pictures with Captions in Blogger

Pictures with captions in Blogger blogs is fiddly unless you use Windows Live Writer. When inputing text and pictures into your blog using the compose input window of Blogger, pictures can be aligned or not. You have the choice. But you do not have the choice to add a caption to the image if it is left or right aligned unless the caption is already embedded in the image using image manipulation software before uploading. If the image is centred or left unaligned a caption can be added by using text in the usual way under the image.

Code can be used to add a caption to left and right aligned images. Below is the code for aligning and captioning an image. It is coded to align right. Just change the word in red, “right” to “left” if you’d like the image aligned left:

<table align="right" border="0"
cellpadding="10">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<center>IMAGE CODE HERE</center>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody><caption align="bottom"><font
color="#000000" face="Arial" size="1">
<center>CAPTION HERE</center>
</font></caption>
</table>

This code requires the image to be uploaded onto a server such as Picasaweb and the image location accessed and inserted in the code. The tag is <img src=”URL of image” alt=””>. A much easier way to embed pictures with captions in Blogger while at the same time aligning and resizing them is to use Windows Live Writer to write and then upload the Blogger post. This software is very efficient.

As can be seen the caption forms part of the image. It is called a “Watermark” in Windows Live Writer but I think it makes a nice caption that is extremely easy to create:

1. In Windows Live Writer, click on the picture
2. Align from the self explanatory menu in the right hand margin
3. Add a caption by selecting Advanced>Watermark in the right hand margin.

Note: One possible downside to this. When you upload images using the Blogger image icon in compose mode the image will be searched for and potentially listed under a Google image search. If you have Picasaweb it will also be saved automatically on your Picasaweb album. But will the same thing happen when the image is uploaded onto Microsoft servers as is the case when using Windows Live Writer? I think that Google image search is very important indeed. Don't ignore image search.

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Most Companies use Internet Explorer

Most companies use Internet Explorer as it is supplied with the computer, I guess. This is very bad policy and probably costs companies worldwide millions, perhaps billions in lost productivity over time. The speed with which one browses the internet and the ease with which one finds, collates and stores information from the internet is very important in terms of productivity for companies yet they are unwitting using the worst browser.

Not only is Internet Explorer slower to render pages, it is also less tolerant in rendering them. It is a comparatively clunky piece of software compared to Mozilla Firefox, which is currently the best of the lot, overall. The fastest and potentially the best (but not quite there yet) is Google Chrome.

• 78% of companies used IE
• 18.2% use Firefox
• 2% use Chrome
• 1.4% use Safari (Apple’s internet browser)

The figures are from http://news.cnet.com. This is appalling news. It is ridiculous. The IT guys at these companies are sleep walking. The employees and bosses don’t know better, however. Perhaps the IT guys stick with IE because they have learnt the software and are less familiar with the other browsers. The main reason for sticking with IE is that these companies use the MS Windows operating system and IE integrates with this. Plus they probably feel that security is good or best with IE. There is also the inertia issue. People just know IE and don’t want the hassle of changing. This mentality applies to all software. For example, MS Word is the most commonly used word processor but others are better. I use Google Docs.

The truth is that Microsoft (MS) dominates the market and consumers be they individuals or companies live with that because even today most people don’t know much about computers. MS are riding on the back of that apathy and inertia.

When I build web pages for my site www.pictures-of-cats.org I always check rendering of the page in IE as even though it will render well in Firefox and Chrome, IE will screw up on something and make the page look wrong or misalign something.

Companies really need to do some research on this to work out how much more efficient they can be with a better browser. And perhaps Firefox can do something too in terms of making their excellent product more interesting to companies. A free educational program directed at the bosses might be a start as the culture, methods and decisions to change comes from them. Most companies use Internet Explorer but they shouldn’t.

My thanks to Russ Adams on Twitter for leading me to this story.

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Technorati Tags: Building a website,software applications

Speed up Blogger Blog Load Times

There are several things we can think about to speed up Blogger blog load times. It is easy to get a bit carried away by the plethora of widgets that are available on Blogger blogs. Often these are third party scripts that take time to load. All HTML that pulls in information from another site will, bit by bit, slow load times. Typical examples are on this site are:

• Advertising. These are scripts and sometimes the adverts are the last to load. For example, I am considering doing away with the Amazon advert bottom left in red. I hardly get anything out of it so why bother with it?
• The statcounter top right is a third party script as is the bookmarker just above. These load OK but they all add up to a slower load time. I would consider limiting these (update March 2011: this has been removed).
• One particular slow loader is the Digg button under each post. I might get rid of this as well. At the moment, though, load times are just acceptable, I believe (update March 2011 - this has been removed)
• Pictures will always slow loading of the webpage. Internet access is becoming faster so this is less important but an image file, including the header image, should be no larger than about 30,000 bytes (or less) if you have several on the page. If you have one picture on the page then a larger file is OK provided the other factors such as third party scripts have been addressed. One slowing factor contributes and compounds the problem and every little thing helps.
• Image files should have dimension tags but these are automatically added by free image editing software such as Paint.net. Images should be resized carefully for maximum effect and quality while maintaining minimum file size. Images that are words are best saved as .png files and ordinary photos as .jpegs. Another piece of software that allows image resizing and blog writing is the new Windows Live Writer. I talk about this in another post: Write Blogs in Windows Live Writer.
• You can tell Blogger how many posts that you would like loaded at one time on the page. The higher the number the slower the load time. To control this go to Customize>Settings>Formatting and select the number in the box against “Show”. I selected 3. 
• Note: this page has a background image. This will slow load times. However, it is a Google background image which will load as fast as a background image can load. There is also an image above the posts - a banner - this is about 40K in size. This will slow things up.
• Long and large posts also slow up load times. Keep things succinct and original.

The above factors are all we need to know, in my opinion to control load times. Ultimately the simpler the site with the least amount of images the faster the load time. And load times are important. Speed up Blogger blog load times and please visitors.


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BuzzNet Tags: blogging,writing blog posts