I had heard about Open Office before but I never gave it much thoughts. I already had Microsoft Office installed on my computer so why would I look elsewhere? But this time, I had a good incentive to look around for free Office alternatives, simply because I didn’t want to spend a few hundred bucks in a software I rarely use.

Reading the Open Office website, it seemed that it offered everything I was looking for. Again, I’m not a heavy user. I simply need to type text documents or create simple spreadsheets every once in a while, but no major documents requiring all the features of MS Office. My main concern was that I should be able to edit and create .doc, .xls, and .ppt documents. It seemed that I would be able to do that…

OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

I did a quick search for Open Office reviews and everybody seemed really stoked about it. The only complain people had was when trying to use Open Office for project in collaboration; not a big deal since I don’t do this. So I finally downloaded a copy of Open Office and installed it on my computer. The download and installation process was easy and quick, and in less than 5 minutes, I was running the full suite on my PC.

First thing I did was trying the word editor. It really looked and felt like MS Word. I created a .doc document, and opened an existing .doc document from my computer. Everything worked just fine. I did the same test with the spreadsheet editor. Same positive results. Then I noticed a little icon that enables me to print my documents to PDF. That’s an additional feature that I really like about this Open Source thing.

What do I like the most about Open Office? It’s FREE! Not “free” like in these sneaky softwares that you download thinking it’s free to be bugged later with countless reminders that you need to upgrade to a paid license. No. It’s free as in 100% free. You can do whatever you want with it. You can install Open Source on 1,000 computers if you feel like it; it will still be free.

OpenOffice.org 3 is free software. That means you are free to download it, free to install it on as many PCs as you like, free to pass copies to as many people as you like. You may use OpenOffice.org 3 for any purpose without restriction: private, educational, public administration, commercial… Free, really free.

Great! So I had my Office suite ready, now I had to find a good HTML editor. I looked online but I didn’t seem to find anything good. Maybe my search queries were the problem. So I asked the Twittersphere for advice and got a few replies back pointing to different options. After looking at them more in details, I chose to go with Kompozer. It’s not as friendly and complete as DreamWeaver but that will do the trick. After all, this is for my netbook and I don’t expect to edit many web pages while on the road.

I still needed two additional softwares to have a fully operational netbook: image editing, and email. I didn’t have to do any research on these 2 as I had previously used GIMP and I had heard many good things about Thunderbird. I downloaded these two and installed them as well.

I haven’t had the opportunity to use these open source softwares much but from what I see, they will do the trick and will perfectly suit my needs. Now I really need to add more RAM to this poor little Lenovo S10…

First, let’s see what’s good about Craigslist. To me Craigslist has 4 major benefits: it’s free; it’s a well known website; it is a trusted site; and most importantly, it is one of the most visited websites in the US.

Many internet marketers use Craigslist to make a quick buck. If you’ve been on Craigslist before, you’ve probably seen all these ads such as “Make $12,000 in 3 days”, or “Earn 2K residual for life”. These are ads made up to advertise affiliate programs. From an affiliate marketer standpoint, these ads have very little value because they will most likely be removed in a matter of minutes.

The real deal is to create ads that will stick (which means not be removed) to generate traffic to your site, not from Craigslist visitors, but from Google visitors.

Let me explain to you something you probably know… Google loves Craigslist and it crawls the site many many times a day. When you post an ad on Craigslist, Google will find it in a matter of minutes, index it, and give it much more importance than it actually deserves, putting it on the first page of Google for a given keyword. If one of your keywords shows up on the first page of the SERP, you’re gold! You will get good qualified traffic from this.

Let’s cut the crap. Here is what I recommend to do in order to get your Craigslist ad on the first page of Google:

1. Your ad title should be your main keyword/keyphrase
2. Choose your ad title wisely. If your website sells warts removal cures, don’t just name your ad “warts removal”. There is too much competition for this keyword, so be more specific: “Natural Warts Removal” would be good.
3. Write a very short post description. Just a few words are enough. You’re not trying to sell the people right here; you’re trying to get them to come to your site! A good description for our warts removal site would be: “Our natural warts removal cure will help you get rid of warts naturally without drugs or cream”.
4. Make sure to include your main keyphrase in the description.
5. Include your URL and make it clickable. Not good: www.SebastienPage.com – Good: www.SebastienPage.com
6. That’s it!

Now here is what you shouldn’t do:

1. Do not repeat the same process over and over again with the same keywords. I don’t even recommend doing this over and over again with various titles as the Craigslist community will get back at you by flagging your posts. Just do it a couple times a week, switching ad titles and ad descriptions. Note that ads show up quickly on Google, but they don’t stay for more than 2-3 days.
2. Do not use broad titles!!! As I mentioned above, do not use competitive keyphrases but go after the long tail.

I use this trick on the 3 of my money making sites and I get great traffic for free. Since you’re targeting the long tail, you’re most likely not gonna get thousands of visits. But as we say in French, “10 grams of fine patisseries are better than 10 pounds of potatoes”.

Here is a screenie of my fake ad posted on Craigslist for “Natural Warts Removal” ranking #1 for this search! Note that I posted this ad on Craigslist on 1/16/09. This screenshot was taken on 1/17/09. So by the time you see this, the results will most likely have changed.

Click on the image for a larger view.

I was actually ok with it as I didn’t have the choice. I was kinda pissed though because @franchise was not even used. The person who registered it clearly did it to secure this username but it never gave any status update, didn’t follow anyone and had only 1 follower. I assumed it was like with domain names. First come, first served…

But last week I came across this blog post that actually explains you how to get the Twitter username you’ve always wanted. Here is what I learned from it.

Twitter has a six month rule for all accounts and if the account hasn’t been active within this time period, you can make a request to actually get this username:

An account is considered inactive if it hasn’t been logged into or updated in over 6 months.  Inactive accounts are automatically removed from Twitter.  To keep your account active, log in or post an update.

Pretty handy!

I decided to follow the process to claim the @franchise Twitter username. The first step is to send an email to username@twitter.com amd explain the situation. I received a confirmation email from Twitter within seconds and a few minutes later, I received this email:

Hi Sebastien Page,

We’re working on your user name request. To help expedite the process, please reply to this email and include the following information if you haven’t already:

* your existing Twitter user name and/or the inactive user name you’d like to acquire
* if you’d like the new user name to belong to a new account (if yes, please provide an email address unattached to another Twitter account)
* if you’d like to change the user name on your existing account

Please be aware that if you’d like to change the user name on your existing account, Support will do this for you automatically when the user name is released so it doesn’t get taken. This will not affect your existing direct messages or replies, however, all replies and direct messages going forward must be addressed to the new user name once it is changed.

If your user name request concerns impersonation, trademark infringement, copyright, or another Terms of Service violation, please send your request to terms@twitter.com for help from our Terms of Service group.

More information about inactive user names is here.

Thanks!

Twitter Support

This morning I received an email from the Twitter support team informing me that they had successfully switched my account to @franchise.

That was pretty simple and painless.

This post was inspired by a tweet from Lorelle, my favorite WordPress expert. Lorelle’s tweet was saying “Make WordPress’ search function suck Less” with a link to this post. I had WordPress search issues in the past and found a few solutions and I thought I would learn a little bit more from this post, but I didn’t.

Basically this post was about manually tweaking your search.php file, which improves the WordPress search feature but it still doesn’t make it a good search feature. The main problem with the WordPress search feature, besides the irrelevancy, is that if you have a large blog of a few hundreds posts, then there is not much you can do to speed up the search.

I don’t pretend to be an expert about WordPress (I’m actually far from that!) but I do think both solutions I will talk about in this post are much better at delivering very good search results for your WordPress blog. By “good search results”, I mean results that are delivered quickly, that are relevant to your search query, and sorted by relevance.

wpSearch Plugin

The wpSearch plugin is like having your own custom search engine on your blog. wpSearch is based on “Lucene“, a full-featured open source text search engine. wpSearch is fast, and relevant, which is pretty much everything I need from a search engine on my blog.

To set up wpSearch on your blog, simply download the plugin from here, then upload it, set permission to 777 (very important), and activate the plugin from your admin panel. After activating it, you will have to build the search index database, which may take a while (about 5 posts/second) if you have many posts on your blog. That’s all there is to it. Now check your search feature and you will see a huge difference in the results you will get. The relevancy will be so much better that like me, you’ll want to blog about it ;-)

Adsense For Search

Adsense for Search (AFS) is now my favorite search feature for my blogs for 2 reasons: for one it is the best search engine you can get; and two, you can actually make money from it. Even though I hate Google as a company, I can’t deny that their search algorithm delivers the best you can get from a seach engine thus far.

Now the main concern about Adsense For Search is that you have to rely on Google to crawl your website to index your new posts. Some people won’t use Adsense For Search for this one reason. Yes, you have to wait for Google to crawl your site and index your pages but how much does that really matter in your case? I mean, is it that important to you that your post must be foundable immediately after being published?

Besides, one benefit of Adsense For Search that I have been able to verify on all my blogs is that when AFS is implemented on your site, Google will come visit you quickly and more often. I haven’t done scientific tests on this, but I was able to notice it on many occasions. Most of the time, when I publish something on my blogs, the post is picked up by Google within hours, sometimes within minutes.

To set up, AFS, you will need a Google Adsense account.

A while back, when I started this blog, I installed the DoFollow plugin which removes the nofollow attribute of the URL of your commenters and any URL included in the comment itself. The reason I installed this plugin was to quickly get many backlinks to this blog.

Indeed, when your blog is “dofollow”, you get featured on many sites or blogs that give list of dofollow blogs. Doing this got me listed on a few hundred blogs in no time creating a large amount of backlinks, which is probably the reason why my blog has a PR4.

The downside of this as you can imagine is that you get quite a bit of spam comment. Akismet handles most of it but from time to time I had to manually delete comments. But most people commenting on my blog just to get a link back are actually very well behaved. Most didn’t abuse it and left genuinely interesting comments. In this case, I didn’t delete the comment.

Today I decided it is time to go back to the nofollow rule. My blog is clearly not intended to make money or anything like that so I really don’t care about traffic and Google PR, which in my opinion doesn’t even mean anything anyways. Besides, I will probably remain listed as a dofollow blog on many sites so I don’t think I’m gonna suffer any link juice dicrease.

WordPress just released version 2.7 of their software and I have to say that it is one big update! Although there is not much change in the overall functionalities, something that changes is the overall layout of the admin panel. The WP team has spent a lot of time and put quite a bit in the way of resources towards making things both look and work nicer. This release doesn’t contain any security fixes that I am aware of, but it definitely feels quite a bit faster. Well, at least in my rather unscientific tests, it does. Your mileage may vary, of course…

As usual when you update, there is a risk of screwing something up. What I always do before updating is exporting all my post. This way, I know that if there is a problem during the process, all my posts will be safe somewhere on my PC.

If you’ve updated to a previous version before, you may have encountered issues such as not being able to login for example. As I was able to verify before, the most common problem comes from the plugins.

The best way to avoid any problem with you plugins is to access your server and rename your plugin folder, right before updating WordPress. For example, I rename my plugins folder to “plugins-old”. Then I update WordPress, update my database and when this is done, I go back to my plugins folder that I previously renamed “plugins-old” and rename it “plugins” again.

My hosting company, DreamHost, automatically creates a new “plugins” folder when I update to a newer version so I always have to delete this one first before renaming my folder to “plugins”.

Doing so avoid losing all your plugins or having to reactivate all of them individually. Hope that will help some of you.

• www.AforAndroid.com is a blog that aggregates news about Google’s (not so) new OS’ Andoid. I am a firm believer that Android will kick the iPhone’s ass some day soon. I still love my iPhone but I will switch to Android in a heartbeat. This blog has no purpose but sitting around. One day it might be worse millions, who knows… Just kidding.
• www.FforFranchise.com is the same as A for Android. It just aggregates franchise-related news from various places. Why a franchise site? Because that’s the industry I’ve been working in for the last 4 years…
• www.FranchiseBrief.com is also a site about franchising. It lists over 500 franchise opportunities, making it one of the largest franchise directories out there. I haven’t touched this website in months and it went from a PR 4 to a PR 0 :(
• www.iForiPhone.com is, once again, a news aggregator for iPhone. Nothing really creative about it. It’s just sitting there and I have nothing to do with it to maintain it as it is auto populated with content.
• www.iPhoneDownloadBlog.com is my main iPhone blog. It actually is the blog on which I spend the most time. This blog is about hacks and cracks for the iPhone. If you’re an iPhone owner and you still rely on Apple for your applications, well, sorry, but you’re missing out. Jailbreaking your iPhone is the best thing that can happen to it and it will set you free from Apple’s evil claws.
• www.iPodMediaSelection.com was my second domain name and it made me a lot of money last year. I don’t do anything on that site anymore. It’s just sitting here, generating an affiliate sale every once in a while.
• www.Podpaganda.com redirects to iPodMediaSelection.com. I am not sure why I bought this domain name in the first place but I remember finding the name pretty cool. I don’t know if you noticed how I am playing with words: podpaganda = propaganda. Yes? No?
• www.SebastianPage.com is my name misspelled and it redirects to SebastienPage.com.
• www.SebastienPage.com is the blog you are currently reading. Mostly nothing really interesting to most people. Some people might like it though as I get decent amounts of traffic.
• www.YogaZee.com is a yoga blog that Tina works on. The goal is to make it a large yoga class directory, with news and articles that are related to yoga.

Some of these domain names are pretty ugly… To my defense though, I think the domain name doesn’t matter much. As long as it doesn’t contain hyphens or numbers or as long as it’s not more than 15 letters, it is good. After all, I am not trying to create an online empire here…

My latest thing is domain names starting with a letter + the full word, such as “F for Franchise”. Such URLs are short, easy to remember, and they are available!

The Barbie USB Stick

The USB Shrimp Stick

The USB Thumb

I’ve also been following Android, Google’s OS for mobile. While I had not been impressed before by Android’s features, I have to admit that the latest demo kicks ass!

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a video is probably worth 10,000… So here are some videos of the latest Android version.

Basic features:

Google Streetview with built-in compass: pretty amazing!

Go to AndroidCommunity.com for more demos of the latest Google Android.