Musical Notes
How to display musical notes without images. (ASCII)
The quarter note: ♩ which is ♩
The eighth note: ♪ which is ♪
The single bar note: ♫ which is & #9835;
The double bar note: ♬ which is & #9836;
Black Friday Stats
Here is the stats for our e-commerce store that we run. The store just went live in April of this year, so this was the first experience of a “black Friday”, and all that goes with it.
I was very impressed by the traffic spike, and sales increase as well. The sales kept on coming strong starting on Thanksgiving and really all the way through “cyber Monday”. Very fun and exciting. We ended up selling out of many items and getting very low on others.
This shows the traffic traffic increase. Traffic was triple a normal day.
Thus our November sales were the best month yet this year. Sales did really dip in the summer time, but this is somewhat normal for the industry we are in.
Overall, I think it should be called maybe “Black Friday Weekend”, because while traffic was highest on that day, the sales came in consistent throughout the entire weekend. Good stuff.
Avoid Ghost Town Posts
How many times have you seen a post like this, you read the exciting description and get to the video, and hit play and then…
“We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.”
Argg.. frustrating right.
Here is how to avoid this problem on your own blog. Each time you embed a youtube video, open up “Any DVD Converter” (or any similar program), and save the You Tube video as a flash file, and then save it, or upload it into a special folder on your blog. This way if your embedded You Tube video is removed, you can place your own copy on the blog (assuming there are no copyright issues). (Any DVD Converter is a free program, make sure you download the freeware version)
Removing the Generator Tag from Wordpress
Before making changes to your theme, always make sure you backup your files.
Within your themes directory is a file called functions.php. Simply add this line to that file between the php tags (ex: under the <?php tag )
remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');
This will remove the “generator” tag from appearing in the meta head section of your wordpress website.
You will likely also find a generator tag within the theme header file, and it will look something like this:
<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(‘version’); ?>” /><!– leave this for stats please –>
You can also safely remove these lines also if you’d like.
Why would I want to do this? Well, there is a small security gain to be made, as some malicious scanners will scan accross the web looking for vulnerable or certain versions of Wordpress, and it is in your best interest not to broadcast it out.
Get Addicted to Smush It
Smush_it update: Smush_it is now a Yahoo tool and can be found here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/smushit/
Smush_It will smush a few extra bytes out of your images to make them smaller. In my experience it shaves a little bit off each image, but if you add up a few “k” off each image, it could add up to 20k in size. This could increase your page download speed by just enough seconds to improve your site. The way I see it is that every little thing you can do to speed up your website will benefit the site.
The best way to use smush_it, is with the firefox plugin. This makes it a snap to use, simple go to your page, click the smush_it icon and it will bring up the smush_it page and start fixing up your images.
You can see the results from this site, shaved 13k off the download size without changing any image quality or removing anything from the site. It’s like getting something for free! Note that sometimes it will change your GIF files to PNG, so you might have to change a few file references in your html.
And yes, it’s very addicting!!
Smush_it is by
http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2008/09/30/new-tool-easy-image-optimization-with-smush-it/
and
http://www.phpied.com/smushit-is-a-smash-hit/
How to get your blog indexed in a flash.
So you have a brand new blog. How do you get your blog indexed quickly? One of the easiest steps to take is to submit it to some solid blog directories. One of the best lists is located at:
http://www.toprankblog.com/rss-blog-directories/
I’ve found that getting listed on blogville (blogville.us) will get you indexed very quickly, as you will show up on their “new” page for at least a few days or weeks. Blogville is a free blog directory, you can write a blog title, add a description , and add comma seperated keyword list to your blog listing. Not much is free these days, so be sure and take advantage of all the free listings you can get. 
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