paulsilver

It's a bit of a weird question. As a parent, you do tons of stuff that is fun and good for your child and not for you. Ask a tired parent are you happy reading to your child when you've read them the same books over and over and they'll answer no. Ask them a few years later when the child is reading for themselves whether they miss reading to their child and they'll say yes.

My wife used to help with reading at my son's school when he was first there. Tip for future parents - read to your child! It becomes really obvious really early which children are read to/with and which are not.

The best place to start is to read Moz.com's Beginner's guide to SEO: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo then see what you can apply to your situation.

Also, remember that Google tailors it's search results to what it thinks you like to see, especially if you are logged in to your Google account when searching, so while you might be second when you search, when another person searches your page may not be second in the results.

I know two non-techies who bought Samsung Android phones when they upgraded rather than iPhones because of that trial. Not a huge effect and obviously anecdotal, but these things do have an effect.

However, I think developers are likely to stay with Apple as they have solidly adopted their products over the last 7-8 years, and weirdly many people seem willing to forgive a large company anything, just because they happen to have purchased some of their product range.

I have no idea why those links are being made, but you can take steps to try to stop them affecting your site:

First, register the website with Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) - http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/‎

Then use Google's disavow links tool to tell Google you don't want them to take any notice of the spammy links to your site.

The tool - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

A help page about disavowing links - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

Note that you can add comments in to the disavow file, mention in there that you have no idea who set the links up or why.

In the Eventbrite notice - http://blog.eventbrite.com/eventbrite-acquires-eventioz-and-... - it says the Lanyrd team will be moving over to San Francisco to join the main Eventbrite engineers.

It'll be a shame to lose them to the States again.

A reasonable explanation I thought of is they're having trouble keeping track of who is liking what across their databases. i.e. Alice has liked Company X, but the like turns up on Bob's account.

While this is a bit of a poor show, it would be an explanation that doesn't require any nefarious behaviour from Facebook, just some slightly dodgy code somewhere.

Sadly, rather than non-obvious, I think I've seen all of these on many productivity in the past.

I'd guessed this was to get something out the door quickly. It would be useful if you linked the FAQ image as a mailto to your e-mail address, or just through to your Twitter account. Having to type those out manually is a bit annoying.

Previously discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4644820

They're probably just using Google Alerts. If he tagged the image "nexus" when he put it on Picasa it'd be indexed by Google very quickly (they run Picass) and hit Alerts e-mails soon after.

I'm interested to see that developers aren't trusting Twitter when they said if you got close to your token limit you'd be able to apply to them to raise the limit.

On reflection, given their recent behaviour as a company I can understand that.

I'm not sure how many Twitter users actually use SMS any more. I tried to use it to send in an update a few weeks ago and it took ~4 hours for the tweet to appear in my timeline. I'm in the UK so maybe they have better response times in other countries.

I've got an Amazon credit card (in the UK) and it's a Mastercard run by MBNA.

I would guess Amazon have looked at replacing as much of the payment chain as they can and done the parts that are profitable to replace. But they have a long way to go before the enormous hassle of becoming a bank is going to be attractive and possible.

Nokia do still make some great versions of non-smartphones, I've seen a nice dual-SIM one being aimed at South America via a friend working on the project. However, I think smartphones are where the profit is. Once companies have seen the huge profits Apple have made, they want a piece of that pie. And frankly, who can blame them?

My wife just got a new phone. She wanted a basic phone as she likes texting on a standard phone keypad, and wanted an OK camera on it. She couldn't get a basic phone that did that, so ended up with a low end HTC Android (of the same spec as my mid-high end HTC from last year.) It could be the phone networks just don't want to stock basic phones as they don't make enough money off the contracts for them, they want to sell all the extras. On the flip side, last time I looked at basic phones they all seemed very poorly made and with awful interfaces, which is why I went to a smartphone a few years ago.

There are simple, large print phones targeted for older folk, they mainly seem to be advertised in the little pull-out magazines that come inside TV listing mags and similar in the UK, and during advert breaks on daytime TV.

They might be taking the view that when Twitter sees that their third party apps are showing the adverts Twitter is sending out, a lot of the pressure on the relationship will come off. It's not like this policy has to be static, in a year the policy could change completely.

And on the flip side, they have to stay positive and at keep motivation up if they're going to work on some other revenue streams which aren't dependent on Twitter.

As far as I can tell, nothing to do with the ColdFusion on Wheels project - cfwheels.org - apart from them both having been inspired by Ruby on Rails.

This fits in with something I came across last year. A client had been sold on promoting their site using social media by someone at a web agency they trusted. I took a look through their followers after having some suspicions about the advice of the expert about something else. As far as I could tell, three-quarters of the followers of this company were fake. They only had about 400-500 followers, so nothing like the numbers mentioned in the article, but a pretty useful amount at the time.

I wasn't sure if the client company were aware most of their followers didn't really exist. I was trying to work out how we'd broach it with them when we were dumped off our bit of the project. I couldn't work out what all the fake followers were for, I presumed at the time it was just to make it look like the social media guy was doing his job well and it was all going well, when in reality he was just buying followers in. The idea he was trying to bring in more natural followers by having a big follower count at least means he could have been acting more ethically than I thought.

Given updates in Google over the last couple of years to make social signals more and more important, it could be a lot of people buying likes, fake followers and retweets are just trying to influence the rankings of the company/page mentioned in Google's search results by showing a lot of social activity about that company.

If this is the case, the abuse will continue and probably get much worse until either Twitter cracks down on it or Google dial back on how strongly it takes signals from Twitter. Unfortunately, given how much blog spamming there still is, even after everyone started using 'nofollow' on comment links, it may not make much difference to the level of abuse. Lots of people spend time trying to manipulate Google in ways much of the SEO industry believe don't work any more.

Given this, it'll be up to Twitter to stop the abuse, and as it makes their service look busy and popular, they potentially aren't going to be interested in being too aggressive on blocking fake accounts, unless they're being very obviously abusive. Personally, I still get plenty of accounts following me which have just started, then spewed spam links to people for days, and Twitter hasn't worked on a way to automatically shut them down (although it seems to happen pretty quickly after I use the Block facility to report them.) So I can't see that they're going to get around to shutting down harder to notice fake accounts very quickly either. Not until it becomes a large enough problem that the mainstream press starts complaining about it.

I can't see those in the HTML, whether I'm logged in or not, but I have used googleoff & googleon in HTML comments before - they're used to control which parts of a page can be ignored when using a Google Search Appliance.

So, if Quora use a GSA (or rack of them) to power their site search, they can ensure parts of the page aren't added to the index of the search. This can be helpful if you want to exclude areas that are repeated a lot in the site but are not helpful if you are searching, like navigation or help panels.

(Quick edit) googleoff/googleon are completely ignored by normal Google, AFAIK it's only used for their Appliance products.

It disappoints me that a Dropbox employee might be using the same password for a work account and anything not work related. It's bad enough that they might re-use passwords internally, but I find that understandable.

However, using a work e-mail and the password you use at work on someone else's system was stupid. You can have faith in your own security measures, but not anyone else's. If you're going to re-use passwords, at least have a work one and an everything else one.

I used to pay for Fastmail.fm as a mail service. It wasn't that cheap, but the top account which gave plenty of space and the ability to have my own domain wasn't expensive.

They kept the old versions of their web interface alive for many years after the active development of the 'default' moved on to different designs. Which was very helpful for me, as I much preferred their non-Javascript laden interface and kept the one I started with for many years of use.

I only moved on when I tripped their anti-spam/account hacked filter and didn't have my business e-mail for three days because the messages the interface gave me were misleading. Apart from that, I was very happy with them and they were very sensible about what they'd do with the interface.

As an aside, I think $12 a year is unrealistic for paid webmail as you'd need a good level of scale to make it pay for such a small amount. You're already talking about a service a small number of people want (interface staying the same and willing to pay for it) I'd expect you'd find the same people would be willing to pay enough to make the service worth running.

An interesting take on where Apple's behaviour has taken a previous user of a lot of their products.

However, I can't help feeling he'll be writing a similar article about Google in a year or two. Personally I feel depending on one manufacturer/service provider for everything is a little short sighted.

Once upon a time I'd have been too naive to believe this sort of thing goes one. Sadly, I have worked for deeply unethical people twice who would pay for all sorts of parts of their own lifestyle out of company money seemingly on a whim. I can see many or all of the allegations set out in the article as being true, although I hope the abuses were not so heinous.

I can't explain such behaviour because I think it comes from such a different mindset to my own that it is truly alien. If the allegations are true it would seem Domecq has a level of disregard for others that is psychopathic in nature - not caring at all for either investors or the people working for the company and perhaps not even understanding that she should care about them.

In the UK the female body decoration the 'vajazzle' has become a talking point because of the TV show 'The Only Way is Essex'. I would guess someone trying to sell vajazzles would be in the market for your Vaginawear.com domain, so there might be some money in it while the fad is ongoing.

If you built it, I think you'd find the real problem is having enough resolution in your fingertips to work out what the hell the picture is about.

Lots of people who become visually impaired later in life can't read Braille as their fingertips aren't sensitive enough, especially if they did manual work earlier in their life. Working out a picture is even harder.

As a side note about this, William Moon invented 'Moon script' which was a kind of simplified alphabet in embossed writing to help visually impaired people read. It was invented a little before Braille invented the raised dot patterns, and even after Braille became popular, Moon still had it's niche for those who didn't have the resolution for Braille. As Moon was based on the Roman alphabet, it was also easier to learn for people who'd been able to read then lost their sight.

I last used my Palm Vx... this morning, as it acts as my alarm clock, 10-11 years after I first got it. BigClock is one of the only apps I needed to get to improve this excellent little device.

These days, the pick up for where you're tapping the stylus often gets out of sync with reality, so I've aliased one of the physical buttons to the menu that lets you re-set it as I had to do a hard reset once when it got really out of sync.

It's feeling it's age, but is still a wonderful little machine and has it's own simple charm. Brilliantly focussed on getting things done - and I believe it was used by David Allen in Getting Things Done as it came with all the apps you would need to use his system effectively.

You'll probably be interested in Threedom Phone, which is about to launch their beta. It's an App / extra layer for Android. Unfortunately Ribot, the team behind it, seem to have removed the information about it from their website, but from what I've seen of very early versions, it'll be a good match for what you want. There's a few details about some of the places they've demoed it for older people on their Twitter stream:

http://threedomphone.com/

https://twitter.com/#!/ThreedomPhone

I know there aren't many details on there, but Ribot are a very interesting company who have made a lot of very good apps for a variety of mobile platforms, and it's well worth keeping an eye on this project.

At my first programming job, I had an agreement with the head of IT (and SQL server DBA) that we'd act as the same sort of problem-solving sounding board as the duck in this story. It worked well, even though he understood little of what I was doing, and I only understood the basics of what he talked about. Just verbalising a problem is a very good way of thinking around it in a different way than you had before.

These days I'm freelance and am usually working on my own, so I tend to start e-mails explaining the problem to mailing lists, then realise what I'm doing wrong and ditch the e-mail before it's sent.

Thanks, and yes, I can now see New is absolutely full of the same story.

I thought it was odd that I couldn't find it, so I submitted to find the conversation and it went in as a new sub. I can't see anyone else's submission of it in the first few pages of New.

If you have the site registered in Google Webmaster Tools, you get a message within the GWT system about the penalty, and an area where you can appeal it. You also get warned about malware infections, and I think now old installs of Wordpress.

I had a client get caught in one a while ago, the notification isn't perfect and at the time (I don't know about now) they didn't e-mail the account holder as well, which I thought was a bit daft as they have your e-mail as it's your login.

For the client, when I cleaned up their site and wrote an appeal saying what had been done, the Webspam team were very quick at processing our appeal and restoring the site. It wasn't a buying links penalty though, it was about stuff they had on the site from some dodgy advice they'd had a few years before that I'd been trying to get them to remove, so it was easy to show they'd learnt their lesson in the appeal.