Hitwise general manager of global research Bill Tancer showed up outside his usual blog haunts on his employer’s domain. He is on Time.com explaining how four weeks of searches showed a couple of things about Americans:

1) We’re way too comfortable asking a search engine about anything, and;
2) We don’t seem to have a comfortable grasp on some very basic concepts.

Here’s the top ten how-to requests Hitwise found for US searches for the four weeks ended July 21st:

1. How to tie a tie
2. How to have sex
3. How to kiss
4. How to lose weight
5. How to write a resume
6. How to levitate
7. How to draw
8. How to get pregnant
9. How to make out
10. How to make a video

Number six, of course, is quite easy in principle, less so in execution: first, get airborne; second, stay there. On a serious note, there are some things a search engine probably isn’t going to be able to help anyone do.

Quite a few WebProNews readers reside in the U.K. We cherish their visits, and understand they may indulge on occasion in taking a friendly swipe at Americans. Before they do so based on the above list, they need to take a look at what Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins found when she looked at UK Internet searches for how-to:

1. How to write a cv
2. How to have sex
3. How to
4. How to get a six pack
5. How to kiss
6. How to make money
7. How to draw
8. How to lose weight
9. How to save a life lyrics
10. How to get to

Mock not, lest ye be mocked. ‘How To Save A Life’ lyrics? Ugh.

Building relationships is important in any industry, but blog karma is the idea that what you do and how you behave will ultimately have an effect on you directly or indirectly.  Blog karma is not often written about, but very often spoken about by bloggers, especially successful ones.  So if you did believe that blog karma does exist, how should you go about increasing yours?  Here are 10 ways you can improve your blog karma:   

1. Be real.  This is the first and foremost principle of furthering your blog karma that I could think of.  Being real involves not lying, being transparent about who you are and what you believe, and sharing an honest voice.  People trust others that have an authentic voice, and are more likely to refer them to others or help when asked. 
2. Respond to emails. This is tough when you have a high volume of unsolicited emails, but the idea that someone took time to write directly to you should make it enough of a priority to respond.  Obviously, this applies to personally written messages, and not to email blasts of press releases.  Those are rarely worth a response.
3. Offer exclusives.  Maybe you aren’t breaking "news" on your blog, but the idea of exclusives is not limited to that.  If you are going to write about something interesting, offer a preview to other bloggers.  Share ideas as they happen and offer the chance for others to say it first.  Exclusives are gold in the blogosphere … everyone wants them.
4. Make connections. In social settings, the gold standard for making connections is introducing two people to one another who later get married.  Blogging is no different.  If you can be the person making these connections between individuals that may not have met otherwise, you will be remembered by both for your efforts.
5. Join networks.  This is not just about publishing networks, but about social networks of people who are interested in the same things you are.  Joining groups like this, and actively participating adds value to the group.  As a member, it probably won’t be long before you take something useful from the group.
6. Avoid snark. Snarkiness is the enemy of good karma.  Being rude, uselessly opinionated or arrogant are all rising behaviours from bloggers that add to the sea of needless commentary online.  The price for this may not be apparent, as unfortunately, snarkiness does sometimes result in readership (who can’t avoid watching a car crash?) — but eventually the snark will catch up to you.
7. Forgive mistakes. Most bloggers are not journalists and don’t have the time or necessity for checking every fact or argument before making it.  This does result in mistakes, and people do screw up.  Correcting them without holding a grudge is a big deal.  Mistakes are made, people are sorry.  If they fixed the error, then get over it.
8. Post to contact. Email is not the only way to get in touch with someone.  Posting about something they have written and linking to their blog offers an indirect route to contact, as most bloggers pay attention to who is linking to them.  Writing about one of my posts is still the best way to get onto my radar, and I suspect most bloggers are the same way.  Communicating in this way avoids the email filter and starts the dialogue.
9. Comment and participate.  This may be part of earlier suggestions, however the idea that you need to be a participant online rather than just an observer is key to this belief.  If you expect others to communicate and add comments to your blog, you need to be online doing the same for others.  Without participation, it is difficult to belong to a community online or build relationships with others.
10. Show gratitude. Often mentioned as an important factor in connecting with users, showing gratitude for someone participating on your blog, linking to you, or offering some other effort on your behalf is vital.  Appreciation makes someone more likely to believe that you think their efforts are significant and as a result, connect more strongly with you and your blog.

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Tags:

1. Increase Your [Blank] within [short time period]

This headline promises the reader that they will see an increase in something within a short period of time. People are impatient; they want to see results within a certain time period.

* Increase Your Blog Traffic within 30 Days

* Increase Your Wealth within 1 Week

2. How-to Improve Your [Blank] through [number] Easy Steps

People love how-to guides and lists so why not combine them? This headline shows people how-to do something in a list format.

* How-to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings through 7 Easy Steps

* How-to Improve Your Health through 5 Easy Steps

3. [Blank] Goes to an All Time Low by [some sort of incident]

By making a strong statement readers will be tempted to click through and find out more.

* Comcast Goes to an All Time Low by Ripping Off a Senior Citizen

* Yahoo Goes to an All Time Low by Copying Digg

4. How-to [Blank] – The Ultimate Guide

By using the phrase "ultimate guide" and "how-to" in the same sentence people feel they are going to learn something and never have to learn it again. Why learn something when you can learn it once by reading the ultimate guide.

* How-to Install Linux – The Ultimate Guide

* How-to Create a Power Point Presentation – The Ultimate Guide

5. The [Name of an expert] Approach to [What the expert is good at]

People love to learn from experts, so why not teach them.

* The Guy Kawasaki Approach to Writing

* The Adaptive Path Approach to Design

There are tons of other title styles you can use when submitting a story to socially driven websites, but these are some of the ones I use on a regular basis. If you are looking for more headline templates I recommend checking out Copyblogger.

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About the Author

Neil Patel is an Internet marketing consultant for ACS where he has lead Internet marketing strategies for companies such as Hewlett Packard and Samsung. Currently Neil blogs about his marketing experiences at Pronet Advertising.

I titled this entry Howto Backup your Mac incrementally over SSH but this technique can also be used to backup any computer that can run rsync and ssh. They are already installed on Mac OS X, and most linux / unix servers.

Step 1 – Create a folder to store your backups on the remote server

mkdir backup

Make sure that your SSH user has permission to write to this directory.

Step 2 – Setup automatic authentication Optional

This step allows the backups to run without prompting you for a password when it runs. You can omit this step but you will have to type in your ssh password each you run backup.

I wrote an article called Setting up public key authentication over SSH that will guide you through this step.

If you own the server you might also want to create a user specifically for this process.

Step 3 – Use rsync to backup files incrementally

rsync -e "ssh" -rca --delete-after ~/test/ pete@myserver.example.com:backup

Now lets break it down a bit:

* rsync – this syncs the local directory to with the server directory.

* -e “ssh” – this tells rsync to use ssh if your want to pass in other ssh options such as port you can do that in the quotes: -e "ssh -p 12345"

* -rca recursive, checksum, and archive

* –delete-after - this will delete files on the server if you delete them locally.

* ~/test/ – I am backing up / syncing the test directory inside my home directory on my mac.

* pete@myserver.example.com:backup – my ssh username is pete, my remote ssh server hostname is myserver.example.com, and I am backing up into the directory ~pete/backup.

Excluding directories

Sometimes you might want to exclude a directory from being backed up, perhaps your Music directory since that is already backed up on your ipod.

rsync -e "ssh" -rca --delete-after --exclude=Music --delete-excluded ~/test/ pete@myserver.example.com:backup

Step 4 – Schedule it with cron Optional

Now lets create a cron job (scheduled task) to run this script every day. First make a new file called backup.sh in your home directory.

#!/bin/sh
rsync -e "ssh" -rca --delete-after ~/test/ pete@myserver.example.com:backup

Now sure make the file is executable: chmod ug+x backup.sh

Next type crontab -e this will open up your scheduled tasks list, in most cases it will open an empty file. Add the following to the file:

15 11 * * * yourusername ~yourusername/backup.sh

That’s will schedule the script to run at 11:15am. If you don’t want to do this step you can simply run the command whenever you want to run a backup.

DISCLAIMER You should test everything before performing the backups on your live data. If you would like to use the scripts above you must acknowledge that I’m not responsible for any loss of data.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this, please comment below. I’m use this technique to backup my two web servers on to each other.

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*Originally published at Pete Freitag’s Homepage

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Pete Freitag (http://www.petefreitag.com/) is a software engineer, and
web developer located in central new york. Pete specializes in the
HTTP protocol, web services, xml, java, and coldfusion. In 2003 Pete
published the ColdFusion MX Developers Cookbook with SAMs Publishing.

Pete owns a Firm called Foundeo (http://foundeo.com/) that specializes
in Web Consulting, and Products for Web Developers.

You can find this article here:

Howto Create an RSS 2.0 Feed

If you just need to get a RSS feed up quickly, this is the article for you.

By the way – time for a <cftease> – In a few days (or week or so, but close) something is going to launch. What is it? I can’t say. But I can say it is the main reason my open source applications have slowed down quite a bit the last few months.

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Raymond Camden, ray@camdenfamily.com
http://ray.camdenfamily.com

Raymond Camden is Vice President of Technology for roundpeg, Inc. A long
time ColdFusion user, Raymond has worked on numerous ColdFusion books
and is the creator of many of the most popular ColdFusion community web
sites. He is an Adobe Community Expert, user group manager, and the
proud father of three little bundles of joy.

Rather than showing you 10 file upload boxes at once, the user attaches a file, you can click a button to add another attachment. I had a client request this functionality in an app I am building for them today, and it was pretty easy to implement.

Here’s the code:

<input type="file" name="attachment" id="attachment" onchange="document.getElementById('moreUploadsLink').style.display = 'block';" />
<div id="moreUploads"></div>
<div id="moreUploadsLink" style="display:none;"><a href="javascript:addFileInput();">Attach another File</a></div>

And now here’s the javascript function to add another input box:

var upload_number = 2;
function addFileInput() {
                 var d = document.createElement("div");
                 var file = document.createElement("input");
                 file.setAttribute("type", "file");
                 file.setAttribute("name", "attachment"+upload_number);
                 d.appendChild(file);
                 document.getElementById("moreUploads").appendChild(d);
                 upload_number++;
}

Google also does something else that is pretty slick in Gmail with their attachment uploads – they appear to upload the file using AJAX. So you can type your email while your files are uploading. Perhaps I’ll look into doing that in a future blog entry.

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Related Entries

* View Original Post

Pete Freitag (http://www.petefreitag.com/) is a software engineer, and
web developer located in central new york. Pete specializes in the
HTTP protocol, web services, xml, java, and coldfusion. In 2003 Pete
published the ColdFusion MX Developers Cookbook with SAMs Publishing.

Pete owns a Firm called Foundeo (http://foundeo.com/) that specializes
in Web Consulting, and Products for Web Developers.

It’s full of useful code samples, advice, and HOWTO documents for plugging into our growing army of Web Services using the world’s most popular server-side web scripting language: PHP.

• HOWTO: Make Yahoo! Web Service REST Calls with PHP: Should you use curl, fsockopen, or something else? Here are some thoughts on the subject.
• HOWTO: Parse Yahoo! Web Service REST Calls with PHP: Yahoo! Web Services return XML. Some can also return JSON and Serialized PHP. We recommend techniques for parsing and accessing all of these data types.
• HOWTO: Cache Yahoo! Web Service REST Calls with PHP: Caching is essential for performance and reliability. There are many ways to cache data and we offer up a couple of them.

It’s hard to believe that it was only a year ago that we launched our developer network. (Back then we called it YSDN for Yahoo! Search Developer Network, but it wasn’t long before we outgrew that name.)

Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.

Nowadays I don’t see too many of those (a sign that Linux has grown up enough or just that it’s cheap enough to run separate machines?), so the answer is usually simple: set the hardware clock to UTC, run ntpd and set your timezone correctly. But for those who want to understand how everything works, http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Clock-2.html has all the details. http://www.linuxsa.org.au/tips/time.html is also a useful summary.

So when a local reseller called recently saying he couldn’t get a Fedora Core 4 box to hold time upon reboot, I assumed he just didn’t have things set right and referred him to the docs.

I was wrong. The next thing I heard from the reseller was that he had found a fix.

Apparently there is a current bug with some Intel motherboards: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=144894. To fix, you don’t use UTC on the hardware clock, and you add CLOCKFLAGS=–directisa to the /etc/sysconfig/clock file.

I’m not sure where he found that, and am actually surprised that he did. Googling for anything time related turns up thousands of “hwclock” man pages and duplicates of the LDP docs; it’s hard to sort through all that and find a problem like this. The final comment he had was:

All is working fine now. I think the only problem is that when daylight savings hits, the customer will have to update the bios and the Linux date separately.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

Yahoo Podcasts includes detailed information that explains what podcasts are and an excellent how-to guide on creating your own podcast, how to create the RSS feed, get listed in podcast directories (there’s a list of other major directories) and much more.

In addition, you can get the Yahoo Music Engine, a desktop application/plug-in for Windows with similarities in concept and functionality to Apple’s iTunes – you can listen to music, CDs, LAUNCHcast Radio and podcasts, as well as burn CDs and buy music downloads (at $0.79 a track compared to iTunes’ $0.99 in the US).

You buy music from Yahoo Music Unlimited, the new subscription service that’s clearly a head-to-head challenge to the iTunes Music Store.

What will likely be appealing to many people is that Yahoo’s offering supports both the WMA file format as well as the MP3 file format (used by a wide range of portable digital players), and Apple’s AAC file format (used only by the iPod range). More info here. Some people might not like Yahoo’s all-embracing approach to Windows Media DRM (digital rights management), but you’d better get used to it – this is arguably the future of digital media and how it’s made available online.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report is listed in Yahoo Podcasts – you can subscribe here.

There can now be no doubt – podcasting has entered the mainstream.

Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

Hat tip to Search Engine Journal for the info.

“Julio Alonso of Weblogs SL has advised Blog Herald via email that he believes this is the first time one of the large internet companies has sent a cease and desist letter to a Spanish blog,” reads SEJ’s post.

The original how-to information was posted on August 23rd at UNEASYsilence, but relaying the information via a larger network set off Yahoo! Spain.

“I’m not even going to pretend I know what laws are possibly being violated. This is an educational post,” admits Derek of UNEASYsilence.

Alonso has removed the post “to avoid the possible legal liabilities that were clearly stated on the email.”