I realised that not many of the websites I use really actually use the title attribute in links. And considering most the sites I use are blogs that's really not so good, especially for interlinking. Title's really are just as important as the anchor when it comes to 'key phrases' (like 'key words', but... longer).

Go use them and see how much more search engine referrals you get!

Deadlines are good for you; they give you an aim and push you to keep working on whatever it is you're doing. However, from time to time, you miss those deadlines for reasons out of your control (or just because you're lazy). Most of the time that doesn't really matter, you just push to get it done as quickly as possible. On the other hand, if that deadline was public you'll quickly gain a reputation of being unable to keep to schedules.

If hundreds of people are waiting for you to release the next patch of your program, and the deadline you've told them passes, they're going to get a tad annoyed and each day that goes by they'll get bored of waiting and just head to a competitor.

To counter this, you just don't release a deadline. Keep one to yourself by all means, but don't publicise it at all. Google have this policy to and never give a specific date of when a new product will be released. It's because of this people quickly forget that half their products have been in 'beta' for many years. We'd never know if Google had set Google Talk to be released before it actually was and so no one can say that Google isn't very organised.

Microsoft said that they were going to release elite features for Vista Premium users in January. They're still waiting for them... This was a massive thing when someone blogged about it and the entire world was like "Oh, that's really crappy of Microsoft!"

So, why follow Microsoft when Google is much better?

Running a blog that requires lots of content is all good and well, but sometimes you get dry on ideas. So, once again, we rely on other random people to tell you what to write.

The blog posts that get linked to most are ones which have original research in them. Getting original research is easy for big blogs who have the money to spend on market research, but what about us little guys?

Well, why not rely on Facebook? Facebook Polls is just $6 and that gives you access to all of their users. Amazing, eh?

Once you've done your poll, write up your analysis and hey! Original, informative and (most importantly?) link bait!

I was saying just the other day that entering competitions, or group projects is a brilliant way to get link backs to your blog; and now Problogger is running one that will definitely send traffic your way.

Google bought FeedBurner fairly recently and it looks like there's a pretty clever reason. FeebBurner is used by almost every blog to manage their RSS feeds, since Google now has the ability to see when you've updated your blog they can crawl and index it quicker, and more accurately than just checking it every five minutes for updates.

The Google Operating System blog did a little experiment and found that Google now indexes blog post in almost real time. In one of their experiments it took just 11 minutes to have the new post indexed and on search results. That's a vast improvement from back when it took weeks for Google to even realise that you had updated your blog.

It might not be just FeedBurner, of course. Google could be listening to (read: crawling) Technorati more and indexing all the links from there (though, Technorati also uses RSS feeds, so most likely FeedBurner stuffage, once again).

So, switching to FeedBurner was a good thing for this blog!

Spring break came really quickly, which meant only one thing; I had no college. I spent the first week or two blissfully lacking any responsibilities allowing me to just laze around the house. Though, I quickly got annoyed with the void of productivity I was having so I sought a way to make me do stuff.

What I found was simple to-do lists. The night before I'd write down a number of things that I should have been doing the following day and I found being "told" what to do was highly effective, even if it was myself doing the telling. Having a list of things that I had to do made it more important. Waking up and thinking "I should clean my bedroom today" is all well and good, but you usually just shove it out of your mind. Having it written down is a way to making it official.

My to-do lists stretch from "be sure to have breakfast!" to "write that script that controls users backend access". As of yet, a month or so into having my lists "dictate" my life, I've never missed an item on it. My productivity has soared and I'm no longer wasting time around the house with nothing to do but make tea.

I'm still testing to see how many things I can put on my list before it gets too much, and I usually end up with hours left to spend how I like it.

Try it yourself.

(I can tick "write a blog post" off my list now.)

I'm signed up to an awful lot of RSS feeds; for copyrighting blogs, professional bloggers, humorous feeds, news feeds, feeds that give me game updates. All in all, I get around 30 new posts every hour or so (gotta love TechCrunch and their compulsive posting) so whenever I'm away from an Internet connection for a short while, I come back to find hundreds of new feeds that I have to read. Do I read them all? Of course I don't. But do you know which ones I always seem to stop and read?

Usually, it's the ones with pictures.

Childish as it may seem we're all attracted to pictures. I only really noticed the power of them a few days ago, when I spotted that whilst I was 'j-keying' through Google Reader with two hundred feeds to look through I was stopping at random articles that I thought interested me. And yes, most of them had images in.

I've been reading blogs for quite a while now, they are after all the newspaper of the Internet; if you don't read them you fall behind and running a website becomes pointless (and what do you have to geek out on!?). Though there's one thing that really bugs me.

Interlinking.

It annoys me when blogs constantly link to themselves. When it's helpful, obviously it doesn't bother me. Like when they link to a post they wrote about Feedburner's merger with Google when the author wants to mention that. The type of interlinking that bugs me is when the author links the word "Playstation 3" to a review of an obscure game that they reviewed on their blog a few weeks back. It's the first kind that is actually useful.

It's useful not only to the user, but to the blogger as well. There a few reasons behind interlinking. First, it ups that page's PR, not as much as an organic link from another site does, but it still does. One of my projects got PR 4 from just interlinking.

Another reason is that people reading from an RSS reader are more likely to head over to the site if you link to another page on it. RSS feeds are great for the readers since they can get all the content they want all in one space, but for publishers it means that users never have to go to their website and so they don't get so many page views which causes their advertising revenue to drop. So, by interlinking you'll get more people to see your actual pages (and adverts!).

A reason that I don't like; it gets people to stay on their site, rather than go to another. Chances are that if you link out of your site then the person won't come back unless they're really interested and have a good attention span (which tests say most people online don't).

So, you should interlink sensibly, in order not to annoy your readers. If you're linking to information then it's fine to link to that information on your site if you have it, but don't link to your site if that information really won't help the user.

Microsoft's Live Search market share jumped from 8.4% to 13.2% in the period of May to June (this year) according to Compete, Inc, a company that tracks and monitors website traffic. That's awesome news for M$, but a lot of people are saying that most of that increase has been because of Live Search Club, a site made by M$ where you play games that mostly involve using Live Search to find answers to trivia or other things. You win tickets which you can exchange for pretty snazzy prizes; Xboxes, copies of Vista, USB headsets - all Microsoft stuff of course.

Other estimations say that without Live Search Club, their market share should only have crept towards the 9% mark. So, because of competitions with shiny prizes Microsoft's battle against Google in the search engine market got them an extra 4% market share - even if most of that 4% is just from bots.

This just goes to show that competitions really do help promote your sites.

When you start up a new site there are two things you really need; content and traffic. There is actually a good way to get both of these, all in one go. Run a competition.

The best way you can get content is to get other people to write it for you, since you could find yourself spending hours writing when it really isn't your talent. Though buying copy is quite expensive; a really good copywriter can cost you around £40 an hour, if you're lucky you can find a few people who are willing to write a 500 word article for £10 or so. The bottom line is that copy isn't cheap.

However, there is a sneaky way you can get your visitors to write articles for you, and send them in at no cost to you at all. You could start a competition; get users to write unique content for you and send it in. Tell them you'll put all of the submissions on your site and that the best few will receive a prize.

It's really the prize that draws people's attentions and brings in the traffic. If you're starting up a new website then it's unlikely that you'll be getting many sponsors who will be able and willing to donate prizes for your cause (unlike CopyBlogger gets, or Problogger), so instead you could either find money from your savings to get an expensive prize, but a few small prizes work just as well.

You could even knock up a few $15 T-shirts with your logo on. You'll be getting even more exposure then if the winners walk around with your URL proudly on their custom apparel.

A couple of my favourite podcasts are getting to around episode on hundred; yay for them! However, I thought this might be a good time to give them, and anyone else who does a podcast, a piece of advice. Do not ever do a 'past clips' show.

I'm not sure what the correct name for one of those is, so I'll explain what I mean. You know in Friends or Kenan and Kel (which is what made me think of this) when they have a whole episode devoted to the funniest moments they've had in their show and collaborated them all together in some funny way? Those.

Those are brilliant for TV shows since it's not likely that you actually own the box set and can watch all the episodes at your leisure, so when it comes on TV and can sit around and reminisce and force a laugh at "we were on a break!".

All good and well. However, podcasts are delivered over the Internet, an eternal storage medium where you can't really "lose" anything, but more relevantly, you can always find everything. There's no need to go and compile your old shows into one when the listener can just as easily click "previous podcasts" on your site and there they are!

If anyone does do this, it'll be an awful waste of bandwidth.

When you're creating a program from scratch, never build the layout into the code. Find another way around it so that the coding and design don't intertwine. This is something I should have known, but I guess it's one of those times where you have to learn from your mistakes. This layout, lovely as it is, is too damn compressed. Fixed width layouts should be avoided at all costs, especially if the widths are small. I'll be changing the theme of this blog soon to have a more CopyBlogger type theme. So, look forwards to that!

We thought we should give you an update on exactly what we're working on at the moment, so here it is!

With the mini-Blog

• The procedure for showing posts is rather mess, so that'll have to be fixed.
• Adding polls to promote user activity and generally get ideas about what you readers think.
• A top commenter's section in the side bar, giving a link back to them as a thanks for adding to the site's content!
• On the back end, I want to make an algorithm that can quickly detect SPAM and remove it from the moderation queue.

Kingdom of Alrond

• We're continuously working on KoA; we're almost up to where we left off with Sheep Farmer. It's taken us this long because we've had to rewrite everything, obviously and make sure it's up to par with our new systems of the mapping and just generally exciting stuff!

In case you don't know, factory defaults are the default options and other things that a piece of software comes with pre-packaged. For instance, in Microsoft Office Word 2007, there's new easier to use Styles (I know you could use them in older versions, but never so easily). I really like these new styles, heck, I even like the new default font.

However, my only dig is that everyone on Earth is going to be using them. At the moment not many people have Office 2007, so these styles looks fresh and professional, but as it becomes the norm more and more people will be using these new and swanky styling systems because it's so easy. But in the same way that Comic Sans looked brilliant when The Sims start using it, once everyone starts using it it'll make my skin crawl.

This isn't just a stab at one of Microsoft's products, there are others as well; Mambo and Joomla, phpLD and even phpBB styles all come with the same style that hasn't changed majorly in years. Soon the designs that they come with all look the same, even if the user changes the colour scheme and adds a pre-made template. Eventually the site has no personality to it.

A simple work around for this would just be for the distributor to add a different set of default styles (in the case of Word, etc) or layouts every week or so (depending on how popular the software is). This would mean a bit more work for developers, but there are thousands of free templates around the Internet for things, I'm sure they could just build one of those in for default.

Today we've just added the functionality so that comments have to be moderated before they're shown to the general public. This'll help keep out SPAM and just general nasty people. Of course, nothing wrong with a heated discussion.

All these additions though have started to make the scripting cramped and messy, so that will be the main focus of the next lot of updates. That does mean that there won't be any fancy front end/visible updates for you guys, but it'll make it a lot easier to implement anything else that should be added.

We also added our RSS feed! All fixed up, nice and RSS 2 valid! Subscribe to it from Feedburner, I'll probably do a proper blog post later on Feedburner later because I never realised how great it is! It comes packed with features to make your feed better. Not to mention, they cut out the problem of me having to learn how to pingback! The only reason that we bothered starting to use it was because of its acquisition by Google, who we're all a big fan of here at Shamess Productions.

We've also added ourselves to Technorati and already have an authority of four. Okay, that's not amazing but I'm sure we're getting there!