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Archive for February, 2013
Easy Instructions for a Right Side Interface
2013
02.26
02.26
Cau Karlito, Fernando gave me this project, but not much info… I sent you 20.1. as attachment the text for EN version, but the text in this document is not the same with what is on the website now. Did you by any chance get some different text from F. as well after this date? I am attaching it again so you kow which word document I am talking about. If you didn´t get any other text after this one, could you please put the text from the document on the web. Thanks a lot. Let me know if you have any comments, questions or anything regarding this pingish web.
Okay, checked it out and see that the text has changed. In the future I would really appreciate if you sent me the final draft. For my own customers I would simply charge more if they kept changing their mind. Now I have to set up these pages all over again.
Some points:
– in one section they now say Who We Are but before it was About Us. Change the title of the page?
– I see: “Folding instructions
Click here to see drawings for detailed folding instructions”, but the drawing is right there below the title “Folding Instructions”, so perhaps this is a mistake?
– and because I’m such an INCREDIBLY nice guy, I put the table of contents in the Product Descriptions page. The ugly pink is the default colour for links. If you want something else arranged no probs.
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sorry for that F. says he thought it wouldn´t be so difficult. In the future we will only send u the final text. Please let me know when the text is ready and uploaded, so I can contact the client to look at it. Do you think you can finish it today? Next step should be te CZ text.
yup, completed by the moment I sent the last email. I guess I should have been more clear about it. cc
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the client has agreed to do this page this way. Can you please do it? You mentioned that is difficult to implement, but it’s not. It’s actually very easy. You just have to choose a smaller size for the photos when you upload them and select the positioning (left & right), and somewhere on that same window (uploading photo window), you can click something that will make the photo appear larger when you click on it. WordPress makes it quick easy for you 🙂 Please let me know if you can’t figure it for whatever reason and I will take a look, but it should really take a few min to implement.
I didn’t say it was difficult I said that I should be told this BEFORE I make the pages. Now I basically have to do it all over again. For 2,000 Kc you are really milking things to death. With better organisation we can work together efficiently. But you give me text to put up on the net, then you give me much updated text and I have to do things all over again. If really necessary I’ll redo the photo page but I truly hope we can figure out some better cooperation. For 2,000 Kc I’m really uninterested in doing twice the work that I have agreed upon.
What concerns the pictures, I already wrote that I do not use their interface. It is painfully slow. The pictures should be resized and then placed next to one another etc. The amount of work I will have to do to change this is about as much as I already invested into that page. I really do not like this form of cooperation. k
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I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’re asking much here. For the client to revise the text once is not much. Some of our clients do it several times and that’s when we put a stop to it. In this case, this will be the final text (in english), and any changes will be charged separately. As for the photos page, I also don’t think we’re asking for much. The instructions on how to do this page were included in the doc that you received. Now we’re asking to do them in what we think is a more efficient way and not any more time consuming. What do you mean you’re not using the interface? You mean the WP cms? If these request seem to be too much for you, then now we know for our next project, but I don’t think we’re asking for anything that we originally did not agree to. I don’t want to go back to my previous emails, but I’m pretty sure this was already mentioned. Please note that we were very patient with you when it took you a very long time (about a week) to do the initial installation, which should take no more than an hour to do, because you were learning how to use the WP. It seems like the whole project is taking waaayyy longer than is supposed to. Anyways… This will be the last change before the client approves it and we can move forward with the Cz version. Will you be able to do it? If so, when? We’re now quite late with the site and would really like to finish it this week… Please let me know how we can proceed. Thanks.
cau dude, I really don’t remember receiving instructions before that the pictures were supposed to be side by side. The initial installation only took a few days, and was mostly plagued because of their server, so I do not take any blame for that. After that I made all changes practically the same day, and informed so. But sometimes almost a week later I got an email, “So, is it done yet?” Communication doesn’t seem efficient with you guys and I do not accept any blame for the project taking waaaay too long. Anyway, I’m at a turning point and probably need this 2,000Kc to survive before I get my first paycheck for this new work, so I’ll try what I can, athough I’m totally swamped with work putting this big project together.
No, I don’t use WP’s interface because its retardedly slow. Especially because of the server. Pictures side by side is simple html code. Don’t forget that I threw in a bonus freebee with the table of contents at the top of the products page.
Do you really need the popout pic? To me my way seems better. The pictures are nice and big. To fit side by side will make them possibly less than half the size, and then you click on them to see a bigger popout. Seems a lot of work for nothing, but I’ll do it if you really beally smeally want it. k
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Yeah, sorry bud… the client wants it. And I thought it was clear from the beginning. I would suggest that you try to use the interface, because it would be really easy. If you’re doing all of this in html, I’m assuming it will not affect the way the cms works, right? Meaning, the client will be able to edit all information thru the cms in a normal way, right? if you’re really having a hard time with it, let me know and perhaps we can do it from here tomorrow… I mean, it really should take 20 min.
So do you need the popout thing as well, or just the side by side?
For each page you can press “html view” and you see the html I put there. If you use the cms interface (which is very slow), it basically just adds the same html script, except I have greater control because the interface is limited in what it can do. The customer would just need to know what to do and I do not think its complicated. For example, they can stay in normal view and change text all they want. If they want to get fancy they go to html view and have to know basic html.
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I don’t understand… This graphic shouldn’t need any resizing, as it should be the same graphic that came with the theme.. We just changed colors of top stripe and photos. Anyways, I just tried putting the smaller photos into the file that you sent with the right size, but the white color on the background is different… I have no idea why. Sasha is not here, so i don’t know if i can find the psd and try to figure out what’s going on… I’ll see what I can do
well, I sent you the header.jpg that was on the site. I’m pretty sure I resized what Sasa sent me the previous time so that it would match the original. But what she sent me now is longer and more narrow. If I just throw that up there I’m sure that it will not align properly and there will be all sorts of problems. If we are going to allow for a customer (understandable) who is going to want things inched left, and then up, and then down etc., its better to work with the exact same sized picture every time. Otherwise there’s loads of additional and unnecessary work. k
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I think I may have already mentioned this, but in case not…
All important changes I made, such as shifting a logo to the right etc., I marked with << . I use Total Commander, an excellent free file management program, and with this you can search for stuff WITHIN documents. The << with comments I put in standard /* php comment mode */ so it wouldn’t affect the rest of the document, and since I’m not sure how to put comments in html files (I think its !/ or something), if the comments were within html I buried them within <?php ?> . Instead of erasing stuff that you didn’t want I threw them into the above comments. I always made a comment what I did, so this way, if you ever need to do something in the future and I’m too busy or whatever, you can find what to do.
I like to work in html editor, which is free and colours the text up nicely so that you can orient yourself in php files. Instead of using the slow cms interface I find it much faster to change the files offline, save, upload via ftp, alt tab and then a quick f5 in the browser to see the changes. I think the cms is good for your customer but too slow for a real programmer.
Just some tips!
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downloaded some pics from the net and added an ico. Can you see icons in your browser tabs? Fairly satisfied with my results so far and thought I’d mention that it would be quite easy to change that pencil pic with your Madison’s logo. Then you could keep the pretty echanging pics if you wanted. Or those could be replaced by pictures of trees in the wild or something. All I did was crop a friend’s pics to the dimensions of the original – easy shit.
those cute little logs?? yeah I can see them. Delightful!!! I should mini-size the Madison’s logo so it can be used for an ico. I have instructions on how to do that taped to my monitor, its coming up on three years now. haahah! procrastinate. right on, this is so totally awesome. If you send me that fancy .pdf transformer thinga-ma-bob I can start chugging through the old Madison’s files on Monday.
easy as snot, if you have the right software, which I imagine you do. Simply Save As any pic (jpg etc.) as an .ico file. With my beloved software it asks me near the end if I want any of the colours to be transparent. I click on the white or black surrounding colour and it creates it just like a gif. Before getting to that point, crop the pic to make it square and then resize it to 24px by 24px. That’s it. Then in the header of your html text you add the .ico meta. Just View Source any page which has such a logo and you’ll see what the metatext should look like. Easy shit.
One thing I noticed on my new server is I just need to put a favicon.ico file into my root directory and ALL pages on my site that do not have specific .ico instructions fall to that as a default. Perhaps your server allows that, or you can ask the server company to implement it. Love discovering these little things occasionally. Definitely makes your entire site look more professional. k
After a Hard Year of Work in Bulgaria, Time to Head Back to Czech
2013
02.21
02.21
<< Hi Liba, yah, it was quite crazy during Jens’s wedding, but I was glad to spend some time with him and hang out at his house. I keep forgetting to ask but I’d like to get a hold of some pictures as well. They do not have to be high quality, or all of them, but many of me and you guys, and then some goo ones. Hope you and your grandma remain healthy.
>> That’s one of the reasons I keep inviting him to spend some time with me, to teach him how to be more independent thinking and to go after what he wants, once he discovers what that is, rather than waiting for his mommy to constantly blow his nose. I saw him when he was in Czech and couldn’t even recognise his deep voice on the phone, and was surprised how growed up he looked. But I guess it’s expected, since I didn’t seem him for so long. In any case he didn’t talk much as usual, and I might write pages of letters to him by email and he’d respond “dik” or something. I think his mother is poisoning his mind against me and she is winning a loser battle, and he is losing because of it as well. I haven’t mentioned this to him yet, and maybe never will, but I will certainly not turn into an emotional cripple if he never wants to see me again. As far as I am concerned he would be hurting himself much more than I. Anyway, I occasionally repeat my inviations to him, and if he always response so shortly he cannot expect too many letters from me. Perhaps you could email with him and it might make thing easier. Or maybe even give him partial lessons through email. He has internet and a computer at home (which I bought and set up for him), so he could study on his own time there. He needs to learn how to self-motivate himself, if he wants to accomplish anything. I’m really angry that Ilona sent the authorities after my mother. I didn’t even know they could do that. I told her she could send them after me. My mother has a different last name than me and it was entirely unnecessary. I was practically starving on the road, for one year I wasn’t even paying my own health insurance, just so I could cover alimony, and when I finally asked her and David to help me find work in the Czech Republic, they just dragged their asses, did nothing, and eventually I found out that they expected me to practically fall on my knees and beg for their help. This after so many years that I paid more than I had to, and gave them so much of my stuff before and when I left. So because they have this shit attitude they can rot. The Czech government will never get me. I even offered to hire David for a reasonable wage (more than 60 Kc per hour cash in hand), which they would have received secretly while I would still owe the Czech government for alimony. But he said he wouldn’t work until I first paid alimony. I assume they’re getting money from the government so this would only be bonus money for them. I can see how she’s feeding his mind with lazy ideas. So I have absolutely no remorse for their situation, and hopefully one day David will learn that such laziness and nothing will not get him very far in life. I think one summer of treeplanting with me will teach him some valuable lessons in life. Until then he’ll have to learn to raise a pinky finger to try and maintain some relationship with him. Otherwise I occasionally write to him and invite him again.
<< I’m in Bulgaria at the moment and plan to be about a year, since I signed a year’s contract for fast and cheap internet on my mobile. Looking forward to perusing the Black Sea once it warms up, and other parts of Bulgaria, as there are supposed to be many beautiful areas, and the country is super cheap everywhere. Now I’m staying in a pension for 5 Euro a day after I left a previous job (http://kenax.net/links/construction-chicks.html). After new year’s I should be going to the south eastern part of the country to stay with another friend and help him reconstruct his house. Started polishing my French and want to offer that instead of from Czech, cause the Czechs don’t pay much, and there isn’t really a lot of work in that language combination. But I’ve picked up some new clients, and until I feel confident enough with my French, I’ve managed to find a fair amount of work. I’m also developing some accounting software for one company, and it wants me to develop its website, so I’m getting cash from different sources and overall I find it rather interesting at the moment.
Yah, I write with K all the time, especially since I’m developing her online database for her. Once that is finished I want to make demo pages and hope that through that I’ll be able to find more customers. I find that type of work much more intelligent and interesting, and for a long time I’ve been trying to get away from translations, even though the pay can be quite good at times.
Well, good to hear from you. Wrote dad about one project I’m working on now (http://africa-charity-project.org/) but not sure if he got it. Was looking for sponsors from the rich west. I’ve been trying to get involved in charity for so long, but the responses from NGOs are so lame that I finally decided I’m just going to start my own projects. I’m getting excited about this one and hope to head down to Africa once my year is up in Bulgaria. That would be truly exciting and juicy traveling! Adio
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Well, I sent out emails to everyone asking for a loan so I could go treeplanting for summer of last year. The only ones that could help me were Fernando and Jim. I paid F back right after the summer with 25% interest as promised and in time for his wedding, but Jim I couldnt cause the season was shorter than expected, health insurance was high and unexpected, my boss jipped me out of 2,000 bucks and other factors, and I needed some money to survive, so I instead invited him for a free vacation in Cyprus. So actually I still owe him and the world’s financial crisis goes around in circles, but business is slowly picking up for me and I’m slowly paying off my mountain of debt. So essentially he bribed his way back into my life and I felt I owed it to him. Horrible eh?
yesh, im sorry too because he owes me a lot of money. anyways, i thought you were done with your friendship with him. what hanged your mind?
I guess it’s just Jim being Jim. Usually when I am not sure if someone is getting my emails I send to them from several sources, but I’ve got many emails for my work. If he just ignores you or blocks your email I guess there’s not much you can do. Sorry that it turned out this way dude.
cant wait to hear about it!
funny, if jim thinks he was wronged, why is he ignoting my emails?
will dig up the explanation and send it to ya at some point. Rather funny and personally gratifying for me. Jimbo visited me in Cyprus for a month and was talking about your financial disagreement. Not sure I remember his point of view but he seemed to believe he was done wrong, or in the right or somethin. Otherwise we do email occasionally and I actually owe him some cash.
sorry to hear about the cold. but at least youre not in edmonton where it’s even colder! yeah, bulgaria is pretty cheap. i loved sofia. so are you going to fill me in on why you got fired? and are you still in touch with jim? he owes me a ton of money… its cold here dude. i was going to drive to Sicily after I got fired but calculated that I dont have enough gascash. Besides, I think I can live more cheaply here even with the pension. 2.5L bottle of beer in the grocery store for 1.3 Euro, yum yum. Truck is okay but needs some work and another reason why Im glad Im here – labour beautifully cheap here. Hope to polish it up before I split in a year. nice cows! sounds like you’ve been keeping busy. how’s the truck going? how come you’re not sleeping in that? In Bulgaria shortly after I got fired from this joint http://kenax.net/links/construction-chicks.html Long story but the world need justice and the foreman a good crack in the face. Now Im in a neighbouring pension for 5 Euro a day waiting for a friend to get back from China so I can stay at his house for free, until it warms up. Plan to stay in this country for a year and looking forward to the BS coast. that and my quick reflexes! where are you now anyway? maybe youre so fast on the court cause your skinny white ass slices through the air like a razor blade! hey, my white ass may be skinny but once i grab a squash racket slice like ninja and cut like a razor blade! that would be radical. Already have one friend who wants to join me – although not sure how much safer I will feel crossing African borders with a 60 year old man and your skinny white ass, heh heh hmm, interesting; i like it. if things dont work out in oz in feb when i get there i’ll come join you… will speak to someone i know who is doing some business with solar pannels and maybe he can help… hey dudes, did I say I’m crazy? I know I’m crazy. Anyway, crazy people have crazy ideas and I’ve started thinking about the following. After three years on the road, surviving through internet on my mobile phone, internet café, wifi from marinas and so on, and solar panels on my roof, I started to think that this could be a feasible concept for Africa. I like to call it “One Laptop Per Village”,
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responding to your last text message and email, as some things cannot be squeezed into a simple sms. After I wrote my explanation of how things happened and I received what seemed like a blatant insinuation that I’m a prima donna, I kept my mouth shut and hoped that things would somehow be resolved during a face to face meeting. You never responded to any of my emails etc., saw your vans parked occasionally around town but never invited for beers, so what was I supposed to think? I didn’t appreciate that you docked my agreed wages after working for you for a week. This issue of paying me less while I was in Bulgaria never came up for half a year while we discussed this and while I saved up the 1500 Euro cash to get to you, nor during the month that I worked in Bulgaria before I went to Czech. I drove your truck there, paid for the gas there and back, arranged the papers which your contacts were not capable of, and was shocked that you expected me to pay for them as well. And then you called me BS when I said I could have flown out for much cheaper and stayed with numerous friends. Sure, I enjoyed the drive there but, like I wrote, I slept in the van the whole time because I did not want anything to happen to it.
Anyway, I still intend to pay back my debt to you, with interest as I offered, and I’ll work on your pages according to how you respond to my emails.
You write me a text that you’re “coming down from the mountain”, but do you expect me to run around to this pub or that looking for where you might be or where you might end up? When I received that text I stopped my cooking and was waiting. You couldn’t knock on the door or simply call me or something? In short I feel rather disappointed how things turned out. Gavin likes to blame me, saying that if I had simply agreed to work more hours I would have received my full wages and it would have been all okay. But that is not what we have agreed upon, was it? Before you left on your cruise you yourself said I could happily prune away at the trees until you got back and stay out of Gavin’s hair. But this was not the issue, as I wrote. When I repeated this to him, in front of Steve and Jane, Gavin stormed off and said, “either I go or he does”. This is not an issue of working more hours. He pot shot me in the mouth without warning and I slammed him in the face afterwards, as he quite deserved. This is BS treatment and I’m not impressed at all. Seems like you’re just making a joke out of me. For some time already I felt like a bit of a dog working there, I did not say anything, but once Steve told me he thought I was a good hard worker but that I was verbally shit on by you on a few occasions, I decided that it must have been a little too obvious for my liking. After he got paid he said he didn’t even want to spend any more time on the hill because he felt the arrogance was rife.
Since things could not have been resolved over a pleasant beer I just wanted to get this off my chest. I certainly deeply resent being called a prima donna.
Upload Text and Links to Pages for Google Content
2013
02.20
02.20
so your PIN is 26926 (yiepeeeee) what exactly is this for? I might need your help or an advice in marketing strategies… talking about getting higher and higher on search engine ranking. I think this is what you like to do, right? So when someone is looking for a chiropractor and types into eg. google search engine “chiropractor West LA” or “West Los Angeles” (area where my boyfriend’s chiro practice is located)what do we need to do for him to be the first option or choice for the patient? Do you know of yelp? I need to look into this. I mean how to be the first one when someone searches something particular such as chiropractor and West LA since there are tons of chiropractors (almost one on each corner!!! just like hospody v Praze, hahahaha). Any suggestions?
heydydo, thanks a bunch for the pin and I’ll activate it within a couple of days.
A few years ago you asked me about getting up in google and I wrote you a long explanation. Do you not have that letter anymore? Otherwise I can dig up some letters I wrote to others, or maybe even find the one I wrote to you before. Or I can nurse someone through the occasional step. Does your husband have a website and who is in charge of making changes to it?
For the google postcard thing you need to set yourself up an account with google (such as gmail), and then go to google places. Generally hooking up google places to your website helps with the rankings, and then you show on google’s local results. So, if someone close to where your husband’s office is does a search for “LA chiropracter”, his place will show up in the search results. It’s those little balloons with letters in them, hovering over a google map of the area. Try doing a search yourself to see the competition. His balloon would be one of those with the postcard thing. I believe each address can hook up to as many as 10 websites. k
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was trying to figure out how to be notified when someone submits an article to my wordpress free article submission pages and stumbled on the following:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services
Thought it might interest you, as you once stated you wanted others to be notified whenever you update your site with new content. not sure how you could apply this to static html pages, but perhaps its possible. I’ve started setting up WP to replace some of my html pages, to speed up the process. For example, I save a lot of my email correspondence with my translators and then upload that to webpages, as google likes new content to be regularly added. Since we often mention the word “translation” etc., and overall the text is organic, it can only be good. But I have SO much text to add I have simply been lacking the time to craft together the html webpages. But with wp I can now just quickly copy/paste the text, like I’m adding a blog entry, and everything else is automatic. It’s like a template. Check out what I’ve accomplished so far at:
http://001yourtranslationservice.com/WP/project-management/
Been adding various plugins, such as one which will link from certain keywords to the webpages of my choice. Now the process is really quick and you might consider the same for your site if you need to add a lot of text on a regular basis and lack the time to fiddle with your dreamweaver.
After the last big project, when several project managers were communicating with all the translators through my online systems, I simply downloaded all the correspondence and now have more than 200 pages I could add in this way. So I upload about five every couple of days and will slowly catch up to the backlog of text I’ve been accumulating over the years and hadn’t had time to convert to html.
Anyway, just thought I’d mention.
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> what you think about this email?
This is all about seo dude, and I can ramble on this forever, but I’ll try to cut it short to the absolute basics.
Hi – I`m Claire Scott from 121carhire.com. We`re one of the largest car hire comparators covering 15,000 depots worldwide. Our management team have asked me to contact partners that may complement our site and extremebulgaria.com seems ideal. We can either:- 1) Exchange links with you (we don`t have a links page – we link from relevant content pages on 121carhire.com which we will explain when you reply).
Link exchange is good because the more links to your site, the higher the traffic, and the higher you will be on google. Since you are already number one for “Extreme Sports Bulgaria”, then you can start linking to you from different text, such as “Paragliding inBulgaria” etc. You can create a partner page to link out to others. For this I created an entirely different domain kenax.net. Best is if the links to you are from pages or domains which have the same theme (sports, paragliding etc.).
– OR – 2) Our team have been working hard creating content on our own site and we wondered if you would be interested in some unique, free of charge content written for you to publish on extremebulgaria.com. Our editors cover a huge range of subjects and can quickly agree a subject with you and write specifically for you – you will have full editorial control and it will definitely NOT be a sales pitch for us! All we would ask is that you allow us to include one simple text link back to 121carhire.com towards the end of the content which will hopefully be found by the search engines in the longer term – which is how we would benefit.
This can be good too, since google likes “fresh and sexy” sites which are constantly updated with new content and pages. But again, best is if the content is the same as your theme.
For this purpose I created the site:
http://001yourtranslationservice.com/wordpress/
so that people could upload the articles themselves without bothering me. Each page they upload will always have important links back to my important pages as well.
Recently I also created
http://001yourtranslationservice.com/WP/project-management/
where I upload email correspondence with my translators. I must have about 500 pages like that now and will slowly be uploading them. Google cannot tell that it is not interesting material to read, but all our correspondence concerns translations, so I am only helping my overall site and important pages by always linking back to my important pages. It is like a blog, so all I have to do is copy/paste the text, and everything, with links, is created automatically.
So, should I bring some garlic or something tonight for superpopcorn, or will you dudes still be fasting?
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have to send from my computer email because Hotmail is being an asshole. Apart from that, this is so exciting!! the password to extract data from the .pdfs is mad7SONS if you can’t get into the really old ones then I don’t know the password because that would have been someone who worked there that I never met. No matter, you have oodles of files from let’s say 2002 to 2007! the market comment should flow as one long text block taking all of Page 8. if you think you will need 2008 to 2010 then that might be more complicated because the market comments are scattered all over six pages, in individual text blocks. lalalal, excited.
okay, just converted the first file and attached. There are two formats and I would suggest Text Flow Without Pictures (not the file name ending with 1), after which I manually erased the table figures and saved it as the _cleaned file. That works out to about 2,300 words, which is a nice size for SEO purposes. But it was a bit much and slow for my little laptop and I’d like to suggest instead to set everything up for you. I assume it will go much faster for you on your powerful computer. You could have it working on your PC while you continue to work on your Mac. Did I already send you the PDF Transformer software? Of what you sent me that should add up to 350,000 words total, which should be a sufficiently juicy number to grab all the keywords and be at the top of google in everything. Then you could consider expanding your site to include an input form so that US and other country mills etc. could add their own information. If you do start doing that, the search forms should probably be changed to operate on a country basis, otherwise the dropdown list would be excessively long.
Then we’d need to strategise a bit:
1) as I have mine set up, on the left hand side would be the important links (can be the left or right side). They would appear like that on each of the individual pages and would link to the most important pages you want to promote.
2) from within the text, you would choose keywords to link out from, like you see on my pages, and they should link to important articles. Perhaps you have a juicy article about shingles, so you would link to it from the word shingles. There is a WP plugin for this so this process is automated.
Once we set up this structure I would only have to copy/paste from the Word files into WP and everything else would be automatic. Since there would be about 150 pages I could upload maybe 3 every time the site gets indexed, which is about once every two or three days, so it would take roughly half a year to upload it all. Or I could upload more pages each time and speed up the process. I’m not certain which is better, but my guess is that its more organic to spread it out, as google will see it as a site which continually gets updated with new articles. Just a guess.
Okay, I’ll start setting it up on my end. If I eventually change the form page to get rid of the ugly text boxes and change the formatting, you can take that and apply it to yours. Need to make it look prettier if I want to win myself some new customers. k
Think to Link to the Top of a Google Search Website Page
2013
02.19
02.19
now that my big project is over and I’m back to looking for work, I decided to try a different approach and get my new “French to English translations translator” page high up on google. I succeeded with Czech to English, but it seems there isn’t that much google search work out there for that language combination. Perhaps most people just go across the street to their neighbourhood translation agency and asks them, because they trust a secretary they can “smell and feel” rather than some contact somewhere on the internet.
But perhaps it will be different in French to English. A lot more work and I am going to go for it. I think the actual translators start at around the fourth page, agencies at best around the second, mostly third. The rest are dictionaries and free, online machine translations. If people want the real thing they need to go further down the search results. I’ve been focusing on this page and am shooting to get it into the top 20. I’ve managed with everything else I’ve tried for so far (usually in top 1 to 10 or something), so I feel confident with this. I can make the website as an agency or a translator, and have a good proofreader helping me with that. Perhaps you might be interested in some output as well?
http://001yourtranslationservice.com/me/CV/French-to-english-translator.php
It’s a first quick draft, saved from my Czech to English page. I know I’ll be working on it but, for a start, I’ve started the backlinking etc. thing, as I know it takes a while until it has an effect on the search engines (SEs). I’m hoping that I can get to the top 20 in the next few months. I am going all out aggressive on this one page. On pages I’ve gone aggressive on in the past I’ve always succeeded, but I realise this is QUITE a competitive keyword area.
Anyway, sorry for the long wind, but while being aggressive about promoting this page I’ve discovered the importance of backlinking. For a while I’ve been following the below guy’s newsletter, as he was handing out lots of useful, free information. He has been quite for a while and just sent out this:
http://www.linkbuildingdossier.com/
147 bucks and I’m gonna go for it. Since you’re the only person I share all my seo secrets with, I was wondering if you would wanna go halfer. Even if you don’t want, I’ll probably be willing to share this with you for free anyway. Lots to read but this guy has been doing it for 10 years and, after hearing such “bs” from his students, he decided to put out a book. Sounds like a good deal and I’ll go for it. I’m near the top of google for “translation service”, with competition of about 25 million, but I think that most people don’t search for that but rather something like “french to english translation document” etc. Czech to English is in low demand it seems.
Anyway, just a thought, but if you quickly skim through that website from this guy, you will see a lot of areas he is covering, and I think I could glean out a lot of tricks to get lots of traffic to your sites. k
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yes, two way, direct exchanges became quickly popular, and subsequently abused and used by everyone, which is why google tweaked their algorithm to discount or negate them. When you think about it its pretty obvious and easy for google to remedy. But three way links are much more difficult for google to discern. I therefore always try to point to you from a DIFFERENT domain than you are pointing to me. I already proposed using my directory kenax.net, as I have a category which seems to fit the theme of your site I would be pointing to. Having similar themes is also very important when linking. If you don’t like that proposal I can think up something else for you. There is lots to learn with seo (search engine optimisation) and it is constantly changing, because the spammers are trying every trick possible to get to the top, while google is adjusting its algorithms in a sort of war against the spammers/cheaters, to keep the search results honest and useful for the regular user.
I can link directly back to you, but I’ve been studying search engine optimisation for years and everyone says that direct, 2-way linkbacks are much less powerful because google can easily see that we are exchanging links and hence it is fabricated and not “organic”, so they are highly (or completely) discounted in their algorithms. I have PR2 links I can link to you from, if that is the problem. Let me know your thoughts.
thank you for the linkback. Trying to figure out where is a good place to put your link. Would something like this be okay? http://kenax.net/recip/Society_and_Culture/Employment/index.html
I only link to sites that link back to me from the same site that I’m linking to. If you cannot link back from the same site that I linked to please let me know … and I’ll remove the link to your site. Thanks so much, Luke http://www.colorwize.com
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Thank you for this wonderful step. I’ll send the PIN code as soon as it gets to up me here. Maybe I should consider having second thoughts about having a website? I must have heard you say you were a web designer too? From the pages I visited during the JD project I admit that you must be a very good one indeed. So, I would like you to tell me how much it may take for you to design an attracting and rich website for us. You can design it in English, and make available some tabs for 2, 3, or 4 other languages. I’ll then translate it into French, and have a translator for German (my third working language), Spanish…A dynamic and attractive website in short… I was actually looking for the contact of your fellow countryman whose name is Rotislav Kavan. He’s a very good web designer who happens to have taught me basics of web design using HTML and CSS…and some Computer Assembly and Maintenance…I saw him designing a website for a friend, and I really liked his patience and dedication, and sense of beauty. I could not find his contact at all, and you make me think of him, if you could do me that favor… The second request is the following: I’m still on SDL Trados 7x. Is there anything I can do to rely on you for a more recent version if you don’t mind? Such action could really improve our competitiveness as we proceed to create the website. If it’s a bad request, just forget about it…I feel so close to you that I always speak out my mind whenever you’re around. Again thank you so much for all you’ve done for me this far. See you later.
I think the best option is if I teach you how to do it yourself because it can be pretty time consuming work. You can then spend time on the details. I can help you in some ways. We’ll see. You can take any page you like on the internet, right mouse click, “View Source”, and then save that, with all the pics, and use it as a template – replacing their text with your own text. My pages are simple to copy. Other pages can be too complex.
Then there are sites you can use to create html pages, based on templates. Very nice stuff, sometimes you can find free services.
For other languages of your website, it is potentially problematic because google works on a per language basis. If you bought a domain and hooked it to my site, you can have translator.com, and then put a spanish page on sp.translator.com (subdomain). You separate things like this for google, and the languages do not interfere with the search results. To get to the top you need a lot of text in each language, but it does look nice for visitors if you have different translations.
Don’t know the Czech guy you mentioned. Try a google search, or perhaps seznam.cz, or facebook.
I have an older version of Trados than you.
Page Style Text in Pictures and Pages
2013
02.18
02.18
I’m not sure what to do with the styles… Let’s leave it like that for now.
What is going on with the homepage? I guess you changed the website to http://sweetmilk.cz/ and forgot to tell me? 🙂
I was looking at /test/ and didn’t have any en/cz… It seems to work well under /W?/
A couple of things though:
– Can you make the cz / en bigger?
– There are only 4 pages in the Cz version. Why?
We will send you the new header today.
Yes, I moved it to W because we were having that discussion about test and you did not respond, so I went ahead and made an executive decision. As per the weblinks I sent you moving WP can be problematic and I did not want to deal with glitches later. I chose only one letter (symbolising WordPress) to limit any SEO effect.
Yah, forgot to mention it, sorry.
I don’t know why there are only four pages in Czech but noticed it this morning. Perhaps it happened when I pressed Reset on the xlanguages last night, when the server was going berzerk and I didn’t know what was happening. I’m hoping that once we add content they will return, otherwise I will have to resolve it somehow. I’m blaming this one on the server.
Okay, will make a bit bigger. k
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heydydogal,
just got an idea for your doggie site. I’m putting together a site for a friend of mine and think it could become regular work for me. At first I thought it was sorta a dorky idea but now I see the sound logic behind it, and that it can actually be pretty useful. I gather you’ve heard of WordPress? Well its free blog software and many people develop Themes for it for free. So essentially different looks and feel. The difficult thing is to set it up (that’s me), but once done then its really easy for the owner to add pages and upload pictures etc. It’s not done yet but you’ll see the idea: http://sweetmilk.cz/
Check out the Product Description page. The customer sent me a Word file with text, I simply copy/pasted it into the page (while in Administration mode), and it popped out nicely formatted automatically. I just need to make a few more tweaks to change the headings etc., and all other pages will look the same. It’s even got a multiple language plugin. So, yes, a bit more work for me to set up, but once done then you guys can add your own pages and pictures etc., and zero maintenance for me. The only thing is that your server needs to be able to support php, but pretty well every server should allow that nowadays. If not you guys can transfer your site to mine for free, but you’d have to pay for your own domain (about 10 bucks a year).
That’s it!
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okey doke Sasa. Right now I’m working on another project and tomorrow I drive to another town, so I can start on this tomorrow eveningish. Just lettinyakno. k
heh heh, just saw a preview of the pics. Like I told Fernando, funny that Czechs can spend money on billboards and fancy websites, but the English text is shite and the girls didn’t even seem to bother to wash their hair! Will get to this asap.
This pix r nightmare… I feel sick when I have to retouch this ugly blond teethed mum.. BUT, my predisposed friend, you shouldn´t forget this client is Dominican
In the page Product Description there is a section Wearing Instructions with four steps – here you will put 4 photos named instruction1 – 4. There are four numbered instructions pictures plus one unnumbered one. – this unnumbered is folding instructions There is also a Folding Instructions title beneath that section but which does not have any text at the moment. – just put the picture. For the remaining pics do I just throw them into the Pick Your Style page? – yes The text is also strangely spaced a bit. Want me to make the spacing a bit smaller? – make it look nice 🙂 I gather I should resize the pics and make them smaller byte size for the web? – I did make all the pix 800 x 600, u can make them even smaller. zdarec, saša
maybe the sizes were 800×600 or whatever, but many of them were more than 300kb, which is really big and slow for many people. I can reduce it to about 50kb while keeping the picture quality pretty well the same. That way the page with pictures loads much faster. People are too impatient these days and simply may not want to wait if it takes too long.
Another question: your customer wanted the Product Descriptions page broken up into different sub-pages, but F said that it did not pay enough for this extra work. Perhaps I could at least offer to put links at the top of the page, like a table of contents, where each link zips to that part of the page? k
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okay, I chmoded the folder to 777 and it worked, but when I finished bumbling around with their slow Flash uploader I noticed that it added something to the html view, which I altered and ended up with
<img style=”padding-top:15px; padding-bottom:10px;” src=”http://sweetmilk.cz/W/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/instruction4.jpg” alt=”instruction4″ title=”instruction4″ /
In that case, rather than bumble around with the Flash uploader, I would suggest you simply just upload your pics by ftp into the relevant folder (or name your own) and then just copy paste the above script where you want, changing the file names too. Much much faster, plus you can gain better control through the style thing I added. Just a suggestion!
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okay, think I’m done with the latest chores:
– lowered the spacing between characters and bullets to make it look nicer
– defined the h3 heading I used in the Products Description page.
– in the future they just need to surround titles with the standard <h3 </h3 while in the html window and the same style should apply.
– in the css file I marked all my changes with << and put comments so you or your customer can easily refer to them in the future (for example if they want to change the h3 style, or add another heading style)
One potential point: for the Pick Your Style page I used the alt/title tags as Fabric 1 etc. I presume useful if a customer wants to order some fabric. No problem to place some text above it and which defines it, perhaps using h4 and styling it correctly.
If they want different Alt tags for the Czech version just tell me what to use (Textil 1?). I found that when I switched to Czech the pictures didn’t reload but just stayed (quick change). Changing the Alt tags might force it to reload, but I guess it doesn’t matter cause the surfer will probably get to that page from within some other Czech text page, in which case the pics would have to completely load anyway.
Awaiting the next task! p
WordPress is Everything with Pretty Changes
2013
02.16
02.16
I’m totally boohoo right now because I was going to use this same style for my personal site, ketadesign.ca, and now you are making me think its not exciting enough to promote myself as a graphic designer. I guess stealing someone else’s code is not a good idea, but its just SO not the kind of thing I like doing! even with Dreamweaver there is so much coding bs I have to do.
well, I dunno if it’s because you told me that, but when I look at it looks like its stolen or a cheap copy or something. Or like you are trying to look professional but getting about half way there. I think the most important is to be pleasing to the ideas. Actually I find most websites out there pretty boring and poor choice of colours, and often I’m not even that happy with what I make. Personally I think when people read your articles, its nice to have all those warm colours everywhere. Now it kinda feels cold and empty. You used to paint and stuff right? I think you should focus on some sort of graphic portrayal, focusing on the comfort of your readers and not try to impress anyone. You can accomplish a lot with simple tables and nice graphics as backgrounds. If you want to get fancier you can use divs and create layers, with graphics overtop other graphics. But from what I’ve perused on the subject you often have to write exceptions for different browsers, and it starts to be a real pain. So I prefer to stick to simple tables. Often preferably fixed width cause then it looks the same all the time. And fixed font sized. I would focus on using your graphical talent to make nice pictures and stuff in the background. Colour up the page. Once that is done, then you can concentrate on fancy stuff like popout menus, flash and the sort. You could do that after you go live and pretty up your pages later.
I tried Dreamweaver a few times and its too hard for my liking. I use it for only a few things which my other program doesn’t offer. The fancy stuff I find on the internet and practically just copy it in through notepad. k
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OK let’s try this, because when I showed it to you before you said it looks clean and good. I just stripped out some of the jangly stuff . . . did I make mine too plain? http://techincentives.ca/ exceptions to different browsers is already written into the style sheet, which makes me super duper happy. Don’t forget, the content in the centre block is still not there, I am just talking about the actual layout right now.
first of all, if you resize your browser to smaller you can see that it’s a fixed width table. That way everything stays in place where it should.
Second they got a flash to animate the page.
Yes, I’d say it clean and generally gives a good impression, but still feels cold, which can suit something technical, but for your purposes I think it gives too cold of a feeling. Personally I would try to put beautiful pictures of trees and forests and ocean blue in the background, perhaps rotating pictures with different articles. Something close to home and people can feel comfortable with when they read your articles.
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Okay, so I got WP up and running and now trying to get a grip of what I am supposed to do.
At one point you wrote:
– And yes, we will provide you with all of the photos, graphics, etc… But it’s up to you to tell us how you need it. For example, I don’t know if those 2 baby photos are 2 separate photos or one big background graphic with the logo and color strip. You need to tell us that once you’ve looked at the code.
– We will be changing the logo, photos and the top color strip. We will also change the navigation links and the layout of the homepage. Everything else will stay the same.
but I don’t remember you sending me any of this.
I checked out
http://evocreative.com/sweetmilk-wp/
and looked into your ftp folder and found
theme905
Should I download this from your server and install it on Sweetmilk, and hunt around for the relevant pics etc? I suppose I should get this done before playing around with the results.
Right now I’ll download the xlanguages, study it, and familiarise myself with the rest. k
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okay dude, did some research and found the following:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/webhosting/wordpress/wordpress-26.html
which blatantly says that this practice is strongly unadvisable. The procedures on WordPress’s own site are also a bit daunting and indicate that it is not advisable. Especially if you will want me to hack in to the themes and make custom changes, which I am capable of.
But I understand how you cannot “go live” during development, so I suggest the following for this and future cases.
Install the files into some folder and KEEP THEM THERE. Don’t choose a name like Test but rather some short SEO associated keyword, as I suggested.
Then, once completed, all you need to do is set the root index file as the main entry point, and everything else stays the same. Maybe your programmers have done it many times in the past, but maybe your programmers don’t understand php so well, or didn’t make more complicated custom changes, and are operating within WordPress’s interface alone. For this project I already stopped operating within WordPress’s online interface because I quickly realised that it was only making changes to the underlying php files, which I can do much faster offline. It’s simply a slow and gumby way how to go about it.
What I propose is that I simply get this first project working and we can both judge how to continue. From my perspective I have to admit I get quite irritated when having to work in some gumby fashion, or when people who know less than I insinuate that I don’t know what I’m doing. Look at the ending of all WordPress files – they all end in .php! I know what I’m talking about. And there is no reason to transfer all the files into the root directory when wanting to ride over the root index file. Here is WordPress’s own instructions:
Giving WordPress its Own Directory While Leaving the WordPress Index File in the Root Directory
more at: http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory
This makes a lot more sense, but again, the proper way to do it is to choose a carefully thought out folder name for SEO purposes and not just choose Test.
Will get working on it now. p
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yokay. I myself didn’t like it but it’s the widget that comes with the plug in and I guess incorporated with the theme. I too figured the client would want it under the header in a strip or something. The rest is just css and prettying things up. Spent a fair amount today reading up comments on the plugin. Overall pretty good, but a lot of conflicts with other plugins, so try to avoid using other ones. That’s one problem with this WP approach, is that plugins etc. can often conflict. Then you need a real hacker to figure out a solution, and the time spent on it ends up being more than just designing the whole thing from scratch (not to mention that such hacker skills are more rare than html/css etc.).
I suggest we do things in upgrades, preferably rather than sending little tidbits of requests but all at once, like in a wave? I like to focus on one thing at a time and I’m more productive that way. p
Hey, good job… It seems like you’re on a roll now, good.
The only thing is that these flags should go somewhere on top. I would prefer to put ‘en | cz’ instead of flags, but the client prefers flags. I will convince him to not use flags… So can you please use text instead. Just like this please: en | cz
Please use the same font and color as the side menu but perhaps one size smaller. You can place it right under the header stripe, either on the left or right.
I’ll send the design… easier that way 🙂
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So for my new WordPress work learned that it works on php, so everything I’ve learned up to now has definitely helped me. I figure WP was made for bozos who don’t know programming and just wanna use templates, plugins and widgets to get their ass wiped for them. But then my boss friend wants this and that done, so I hack into the php and change the theme and everything in a custom way. But I guess the advantage is that, once genious me actually sets it up, the bozo customer can add pages or make changes itself without much skills.
Now my eyes have turned to place something on a page and I was finally forced to learn divs with css positioning, and its EASIER THAN SNOT!!!
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okay, copied in the text and must say I was pleasantly surprised to see how WP automatically converted everything nicely straight from Word.
It wouldn’t let me separate headings with two hard enters, but that’s okay cause using headings is better anyway.
So I suggest looking at the Product Description page. I changed the first Challenges title to an h2 heading, which can then be controlled easily in the style sheet. The customer can then use this h2 heading for his Czech or other pages and everything will be uniform. Other number headings are of course possible for different styles.
So far pretty easy stuff!
Everything else can then easily be fine tuned according to CSS. Such as the point/bullet form:
– making the lines closer together
– using any image to repace the little arrow on the left side
– indenting etc.
So I’d welcome feedback before piddling around with this. I can use my own judgement but not sure what “executive authority” I have regarding design and formatting choices. So rather than launch into anything would prefer your feedback first.
over&out