Complete List of SEO Tools

I was doing my daily crawl of blogs when I found this page listing the Complete List of SEO Tools. It truly is a complete list.

As time goes I will select my favorites from this list and add them to the links page.

Chris

We are in a recession...

So it is official, we are in a recession. But what is interesting is, that here in Buffalo it has not seemed that way.

Buffalo is a phenomenon, the subprime crisis, real estate bubble and credit crunch have not been a factor in the lives of the average Buffalonian. Since most major companies have left Buffalo long before the real estate bubble, we have not experienced large growth in demand for real estate or rising home prices. In fact, home prices and demand has been steady for years. One thing is for sure in Buffalo, there is a great chance that your home value will not change more than 1-4% in either direction, but more often than not it has gone up a mere 2 or 3 % over 10 years. So there was no bubble to burst here in Buffalo.

With a weak dollar, Buffalo has blossomed. This passed holiday season, Buffalo retailers have had some of the best sales numbers they have seen in years. Waves of Canadian's drove the short distance over the Peace Bridge to take advantage of a weak dollar and cheaper sales tax. It was probably one of the strongest influx of out of town funds this city has seen in a decade.

The weak dollar has also created an environment for businesses to be far more competitive with foreign companies, allowing US exports to climb quickly.

Federal Chairman Ben Bernanke has been pushing interest rates lower and lower. That means very inexpensive loans, in fact one of my colleagues in the financial industry has been telling all of his business owner clients to run to the banks and take out a loan. What is interesting is how it is affecting our local economy...

I recently updated my resume on monster.com. Within 2 business days I was contacted by 7 local recruiters and 2 non local. Normally it is the other way around. Every recruiter has had multiple jobs available for me to be presented to. From what I can tell, they are so many jobs available and not enough talent that the companies are accepting less qualified candidates with the understanding that they will be trained. For years, this has been unheard of in Buffalo.

As the Nation as a whole experiences rough times, Buffalo is blossoming... strange.

Chris

Review: SearchWebJobs.com

Through one of my daily news feeds I caught wind of a new jobs site that focuses primarily on web related jobs, SearchWebJobs.com. I like this idea. It allows you to look for jobs that are Full Time, Part Time and Freelance in categories Design, Development, Management, Tech and Other.

Very simple design. Easy to use and powered with minimal advertisements.

It is free for both the job seeker and the job poster. I recommend you give it a try.

Chris

Featured on BusinessWeek.com... ME!!!

So I really hope this is not my only 15 minutes of fame, because there is still quite a bit I have yet to do, but its still really exciting.

About a week ago in an effort to promote my property management application startup, I commented on an article on BusinessWeek.com about maintaining your day job and being the founder of a startup. Within about 6 hours of me posting the comment, I received an email from Ron Cassalotti, Director of User Participation with BusinessWeek.com. He was emailing to inform me that one of the editors saw my comment and wanted to use it in a piece about reader participation. I sent him the headshot that he asked for and waited.

He responded today to inform that they used it and gave me the link to where my comment was featured... right on the Business Week homepage. I am not sure how long it will be there, but it is sure neat to see.

Finding the Right Color Scheme

It is some times hard to find a color scheme that works well and it can be sometimes very time consuming. Here is a little tool that I found that may help in that quest. I have used it myself several times and it definitely helps in quickly picking images that help smoothen out a design.

http://www.colorspire.com/color-schemes/creator/web-layout-1/A13034/A13034-431416-4A2A2B-FFC1C4-431416/

I will add this link to the links page.


Chris

Save A Developer. Upgrade Your Browser.

I recently came across a website with a distinct cause, one that I support 100%. That site is savethedevelopers.org and their purpose is to improve the health of developers across the world by decreasing the stress involved in developing cross-browser compatible websites.

For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about when I say cross-browser compatibility. Web browsers, like Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari and Opera read code, the code that web developers create. Each web browser renders the code differently, basically converting the text into a website you can view and interact with. Cross-browser compatibility is basically developing a website or web application that operates properly on all of the major browsers. Here is the major problem, Internet Explorer 6 never played by the rules, the rules in place to make it easier for developers to make one website that looks and works the same on all browsers.

Here we are nearly 2 years since Internet Explorer 7's release and roughly 25% of all of the internet users in the world still us IE 6. Which leads us to the purpose of savethedevelopers.org is to decrease that percentage to a number that would allow developers to spend less time focusing on making their website cross-browser compatible and more time on features that enrich and improve the user's experience.

You can help the cause like I did, by visiting the site and copying code onto your site that will prompt users browsing with IE 6 to upgrade their browser. So that leaves me with my closing statement...

Save a Developer. Upgrade Your Browser.

Windows on Linux??

One of the main things preventing me from going Mac was the inability to run Windows on it. With that obstacle now out of the way with my use of VMWare Fusion I can live a bit more of a windows free life. But then I learned something new that made me even more excited... Windows on Linux!

Lifehacker has posted how you can run a virtual windows installation on your linux box just like how you run virtual windows on your Mac. It is not as easy to accomplish than using VMWare Fusion, but for a techie like me, I am not shy at all.

Over the next few weeks I will grab a spare box and begin my tinkering and will post my results here.

Chris

Review: ApartmentRatings.com Should Find a New Developer

I came across a news feed that apartmentratings.com had accidentally displayed their source code on their homepage, so I ventured over to take a look. I have never visited the site before and unfortunately by the time mozilla loaded the page they had fixed the error. Darn.

Seeing as apartmentratings.com serves a similar audience to my startup property management software website I decided to have a further look. I did a search for Buffalo, NY and the above picture was my search results...

I was quite disappointed to see that their sql developer does not know how to write a proper sql query. Somehow his query had populated search results with one record being populated 10 times, in no respectable order either. To make matters worse, is this site has no 'beta' stamp on it giving it some leniency for errors and it is covered in ads... slightly destructive to the websites appeal.

In my opinion, the vision behind apartmentratings.com had merit, until they decided to execute it poorly.

Chris