The main mistake people make is buying cheap outdoor furniture from their local Home Depot, Lowes, or furniture stores that do not specialize in quality outdoor living. These stores try to appeal to the mass market consumer by offering poor quality merchandise at a markup. The end result is that you, the customer, overpays for some chinese manufactured plastic, cheap wicker, or thin metal furniture. This furniture will probably last 4 years before it breaks and you will have to buy a new set. So lets think about this, you spent $1800+ for 4 years of use? That amounts to $450 a year for furniture that you may or may not have loved.

When buying outdoor furniture you need to look past the initial price tag to the “lifetime cost”. For instance, if you were to buy a quality high-end teak outdoor set you could expect to spend around $3000 to $5000. Lets assume $4000 for this example. Teak is from Indonesia and is the strongest wood available for furniture. Its oils and strength will allow it to last your entire lifetime and potentially generations thereafter (A family heirlume). So the lifetime of this furniture would be anywhere from 60 t 100 years. Lets go conservative and say 60 years. That means 4000 over 60 years of use would amount to 66 dollars a year. And on top of that, you are going to ENJOY your high-end furniture so much more than the cheaper patio furniture you spent 1800 to 2000 dollars on.

So when buying outdoor furniture remember these things:

1. Think about the long-term.

2. Buy from a Specialty Retailer of Outdoor Living Furniture.

3. Get what you like and will be proud of it.

Visit www.SpecialtyMarketplace.com for more information and Lifelong Outdoor Living Products.

It’s that time of the year again. I can’t believe the mosquitoes are out already because of all the rain/storms here. I can’t tell you how much I hate mosquitoes and how much mosquitoes just LOVE me. I’m like a mosquito magnet and unfortunately my son is too. My husband is lucky because they just don’t seem to like his blood type.

Since I don’t want to use any product with DEET because of the kids, I had to look for a more natural alternative. What I’ve found and read was most effective was Bite Blocker All Natural Insect Repellent Herbal Wipes. It’s $7.99 from drugstore.com and there is also the Bite Blocker Spray (found here also). I found the spray to be a little hard to use because at times it comes out in thick white chunks and not misty liquidy spray.

So anyway, this weekend we went outside and of course mosquitoes swarmed around. I didn’t use the wipes and got bit and ran inside the house. My son used it and didn’t get a bite the whole time he stayed out. I saw our grandma sitting out there with mosquitoes just hovering around her and they stayed about 7 inches away from her, but one finally did land on her. It didn’t get to bite her since I practically screamed out “MISQUITO IS ON YOU!!!!!!!!!!”.

So anyway, I don’t know how well they work, but I have read somewhere that they are better than some with DEET. I’ll try and find that site later.

Looks like Google is squashing all directory owners dream. Matt Cutts, who is the head of Google’s webspan team put out a blog post about how Google will be going after people who has paid links on their sites or is it that they are going after people who are buying paid links. They basically created the whole PageRank thing and now doesn’t want people to buy their way up in PR. Just because you have a link and it’s paid for and it doesn’t have a redirect, javascript or uses “nofollow”, then it will be consider bad in Mr. G’s spider eye.

So what would directory owners do. Basically it’s got to be free listing (or paid but using “no follow”). For people to want to pay for “nofollow”, you’ve got to have good traffic. To have good taffic, it would help if you have good PageRank. It’s like the chicken or the egg. So you need to build traffic first and to do that, Google will likely want you to use their adwords/adsense rather than building your own link campaign because it seems that they are deeming that as being bad. You just have to hope that people will add you to their site and voluntarily give you a PR “vote” for your site. Does that happen often? Unless you are already a big shot, it’s probably hard to do, though not impossible.

So, it’ll be interesting to see what will happen in the coming months…or year since Google spiders seem to be crawling slow (for the deep crawl). Maybe the spiders are too tired of crawling…

So we have the DMOZ directory which is the big one that everyone tries to submit to and which Google uses. Then we have other directories that are starting up all over the place. Now, there are also bidding directories where you bid to be on the top listing. What are the use of these directories? Most of them are there for people to submit to so they can get higher PR. No not Press Release…PageRank.

The so sought after PR, even more so than the other PR now, or at least on the web. But is PR just a hype. That depends on how you look at it. Surely a high PR site will work much better when it comes to search engines, but does a high PR automatically get high traffic which is what you want in the end and not just the PR. A succesful site will have high PR and ranked well in the search engines. This can be accomplished through the use of backlinks and keywords. Keywords are definitely useful, but you can’t go crazy stuffing them everywhere on your site. Why? because a search engine like Google will penalize you. Yahoo is more forgiving and actually seem to be easily tricked. MSN is in between, not sure what’s going on there, but I don’t actually use MSN or Yahoo.

Google is my choice for everything from email, to search engines, to calendars…you name it and Google will have it. If they don’t, they surely will in the future. Oh and did you know Google has the new Checkout, similar to a Paypal service?

My husband told me about Twitter awhile back, but I never signed up for it. Well I just did so I can see what it’s all about. It’s basically a tool where people can always update everyone on what they are doing. You can submit it on the web or from your phone and you can get updates of what your friends are doing by phone or an IM. People can have followers who are anonymously following their every move or rather whenever they have an update. I can’t get use to doing that since I’m always too busy to write up a short update note. I guess I already have a place to write thing here, plus it can be a lot longer than just a short blurb.

So looks like Linden Lab invited the FBI to check out their online virtual world activities on Second Life (according to Reuters). Specifically the FBI are interested in their virtual casinos. Since Linden Dollars do convert to real dollars (although the conversion rate kinda suck), it’s no different than regular gambling.

The thing is, I’ve been on SL and where did I end up? At the casinos of course. I’m not a gambler in real life, but I became one in virtual life. I never went as far as to purchase more Linden Dollars just so I can gamble, but I did do what most people do when they end up at the casinos, they sit in the chair so they can make $5/10 minutes and sometimes $1/10 minutes. That’s Linden Dollar, so you’re not even making a penny in real life. It’s pretty sad. I did that for about a week and I had to just quit SL altogether. It was hard for me to find anything to do there. Most people are into building things and designing clothes, or buying and selling “real estate” or make “fake estate”. I didn’t get that far, I tried making one shirt and well, it looked pretty funky.

If I were to return to that world, I’d probably end up a gambler in the casinos all day. You’ll have to try it for yourself. You may find other interesting things there that I didn’t know about.

Looks like Google just cooked up something new and free again. Google 411 is experiemental right now, but you now it’s going to be a big hit. It’s better than paying verizon each time I have to use their 411.

1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) or visit their labs for more info.

Did I say Google is awesome? Yeah, they are…everything is free. Until you want to advertise!

Apple came out with another cool Dashboard Widget - it’s the Gas Widget. This allows you to find the gas station close to you with the lowest gas prices. It’ll be pretty usefull when gas prices goes up the next time.

Another reason to own an Apple!!
Apple Gas Widget

Sure a link from .edu and .gov will help PR, but it’s no different than having a link from other sites that carries the same PR as those .edu and .gov sites.

The only reason why it seem like they give out more “google juice” is because the main sites often have more linkbacks and therefore higher PR. They also do not have much outbound links, so they retain their PR and doesn’t have to share it to distribute it.

That’s not much different than a site that has high PR and doesn’t have much outbound links, it doesn’t matter if it’s .com .net .edu, or .gov.

If the page your on for the .edu or .gov site has a bunch of external links on it, then you’re likely not going to benefit from it that much anyway, just like a .com site.

Also, if you are on a student or faculty .edu page, it’s not going to do much, if you check, their PR isn’t going to be that high as the main .edu site. So, it’s not gong to give you much PR.

Bottom line is, a PR7 site that’s .com will be the same as PR7 site that’s .edu. You just want to link from a site that doesn’t have too many external links. I’m guessing under 50, and the less the better. Over 50 external links will likely not pass too much PR to you. 50 it’s just a random number, don’t take my word for it, but the more external links, the less PR you’ll get out of it.

Since seo experts would know that a blog will do good for a site, it’s almost neccessary to have a blog if you are running a directory. Since the reason for a directory is to be ranked high and to be found.

Anyway, I’m not going to go into that right now. I’ll just start on how I was able to integrate Wordpress with PHPLD (PHP Link Directory).

Step 1 - add the following to init.php:
$wp_post = $db->GetAll(”SELECT * FROM `wp_posts` WHERE ID != 2 ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 8″);<br /> $tpl->assign(’wp_post’, $wp_post);

Step 2 - if you want to post only on the homepage, add this to your main.tpl or where ever you want it show show:
{if is_array($wp_post) and !empty($wp_post) and $category.ID eq 0 and count($path) == 1}<br /> {foreach from=$wp_post item=wp_post name=wp_post}<br /> <a href="{$smarty.const.DOC_ROOT}/web/{$wp_post.post_date|date_format:"%Y/%m/%d"}/{$wp_post.post_name/">{$wp_post.post_title|escape}</a><br />{$wp_post.post_excerpt}</p> <p> {/foreach}<br /> {/if}

Step 3 - create a .htaccess in your root of your blog (not of your main site since your main site will have phpld):
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c><br /> RewriteEngine On<br /> RewriteBase /web/<br /> RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f<br /> RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d<br /> RewriteRule . /web/index.php [L]</p> <p></IfModule>

Step 4 - if you want to just list the title in the sub pages (basically, take out the excerpt part):

{if is_array($wp_post) and !empty($wp_post) and $category.ID eq 0 and count($path) != 1}<br /> {foreach from=$wp_post item=wp_post name=wp_post}<br /> <a href="{$smarty.const.DOC_ROOT}/web/{$wp_post.post_date|date_format:"%Y/%m/%d"}/{$wp_post.post_name/">{$wp_post.post_title|escape}</a><br /> {/foreach}<br /> {/if}

I don’t know if it’s the best way, but it’s one way. The other way is using the method describe here in DP forum. I had to do it this way because I wanted to be able to put the post in the directory anywhere I want and I already had the PHPLD done, so it’s just a matter of having the wordpress theme mirror the PHPLD theme. If you have PHPLD already done, you can copy over the html source into the wordpress theme. Though things like sponsor ad from PHPLD will not carry over to the blog. If someone knows how to do that, then please do share.

If you find this helpful and decide to use it, you can include a linkback to http://www.linkwebdirectory.com

Here is the code:
<a href="http://www.linkwebdirectory.com">Web Directory</a>

Happy Blogging!!