First off, Chris is an independent website developer and creative type in Montreal Canada, his website is all about how to build and design WordPress websites for small business owners and online marketing types, basically the same audience as mine but with a much more technical and WordPress focus.

His website, BavotaSan.com is packed full of amazing goodies such as his free themes for WordPress and a series of premium themes such as the Stationery Premium WordPress Theme , Illustrious Premium WordPress Theme and a great paid WordPress plugin called Delete Duplicate Posts Pro which surprisingly … does just that. It’s great for auto blogging website in that it scans for duplicate posts and ensures you’re not falling victim to Google’s duplicate post penalties but Chris’s website isn’t just a great resource, it’s a work of interface art. Let’s take a look at some of the features of this great website.

The Footer

I always start with the footer when I review a website, it’s often the last place a design thinks to look but the first place somebody looks when they’re lost … so it’s important. Actually, it’s a little like Walmart I think in that most people never think about customer service until they’re standing in line and really upset. Walmart is one of the few national chains that I can think of who put great thought into this fact, when a customer is trying to return or complain about something … make it easy for them, make it pleasant.

The footer on Chris’ website does just that. Finding things easily is a pleasant experience.

You can easily see the links he wants to promote in his footer, as well as a clearly defined link for Twitter.  His downloads and tutorials are organized to be effective and you’ll see this subtle use of a “Back to Top” option with an icon, a small detail often over looked by web designers in a rush. Ironically, Chris isn’t a web designer, he’s a web developer so his attention to detail is refreshing.

The Header

At the top of Chris’ website he promotes his internal links very well using a process we call deep linking but it’s done subtly and doesn’t interfere with users ability to navigate his website. In fact his menu is designed to accomplish two functions. First, he accommodates the users need to quickly reach content and two gives search engines the ability to easily feature content from his site.

Two things that I absolutely love about Chris’ website? First, his use of the Get image from post code (he uses the code as a part of his theme rather than as a plugin, which is very effective) and the great link to his RSS feed on the right.

Everybody should take a few minutes to visit Montreal Web Designer, Chris Bavota .

One of my favorite techniques at the moment is called HDR (How to add impact with HDR) or high dynamic range imaging. This is a process in which images dynamic lighting is adjusted to make blacks appear much darker while also pushing the lights to an extreme. We see it often in movies such as 300, but more commonly in magazine ads these days.

Now the question really is, how do you do it? That’s what I love about the Internet. If you go to Google and ask how to do HDR in Photoshop, it’ll tell you … which means that any young photographer out there (or Photoshop junkie) is able to do just about anything as long as they have access to Google and Photoshop!

I’d love to see some examples of your own HDR work, so if you’ve got any links please feel free to share.

The website is a fairly easy to use social networking/conversation websites designed to be extremely widget friendly. This gives each individual user the ability to interact with teh website in a completely different way, I really like that feature and to me it makes the website far more about me, which of course is always my personal objective.

The website allows you to interact with a community of bloggers through the widgets, you basically decide which information you’d like to share and your account is updated with  the latest blog posts from your friends as well as emails and a ton of other stuff.

There’s a daily news section with an extensive amount of information crawled from around the web as well as breaking news and the ability to discuss or participate in the news community, through an active discussion board.

thoughts.com is a fairly interactive community with some really though provoking and thoughtful personal web blogs, with the vast majority of content generated by an active community of users. People on thought.com seem (for the most part) to subscribe to the companies “one love policy” which helps encourage like minded people to interact in a positive way.

The site is basically organized as a review website for hosting companies, it gives a general overview of each hosting firm as well as some technical details which would be useful for small business owners and first time buyers. Overall the website is easy to read, straight forward and informative.

What I like about this website in particular is how easy it is to compare brands and search out other hosting platforms, the easy interface makes selecting a web hosting company much more simple for many first time hosting account buyers. I also love that they’ve taken the time to organize by pricing, forums, unix, Windows etc. to ensure that users who are searching for a specific type of hosting can easily find what they’re looking for.

What I don’t like about the website is pretty straight forward, businesses like this make money by promoting affiliate links. It’s no secret, they get paid to promote companies by offering reviews which in turn generate traffic and hopefully sales. This isn’t a bad thing but there’s a fine line between editorial review content and commercial promotion of a product, I think they do a good job of walking the line between the two but it’s always worth keeping in mind when judging the value of their recommendations.

While I’m not likely to switch from BlueHost in the near future, the options provided and the ability to quickly compare service providers is a welcome service.

Huge thanks to Dallas Curow for letting me work on her great new website and an equally big thanks to house 9 design for letting me do it! I would love everybody to pop over and see the great new work at Great Chefs, sign up for their Twitter feed to win great prizes, cook books and DVD’s! I also found time to start work on my new portfolio site http://christopherross.ca, comments are always welcome.

Thanks all, I’ll be getting back into a regular posting schedule this week and look forward to hearing from all of you.

A couple weeks ago, I deactivated the link love plugin here on my website then I explained my decision why I deactivated the nofollow in another article and with the help of a great graphic from Josh, I think I got my point across. Link building only works if the links are genuine, remarkably since deactivating the plugin I’ve seen a tremendous drop in comments (both SPAM and otherwise) but not a noticeable trail off of traffic to the website.

90% of the comments on my websites appear to be made by roughly 1% of my visitors.

The problem is that genuine comments tend to get lost and too many commercialized links slip through the cracks, after all working on my blog is a part time endeavor as I do actually maintain a full time job outside my blogging activities. The other problem is that while giving away free nofollow links to some wonderful websites is rewarding on a personal level, there’s no true incentive for me to keep it up which is what’s led me to deactivate the link love plugin and make the vast majority of the links on my website nofollow, including links to much my own content. 

By ensuring the majority of links on my pages are now nofollow, it provides those links which I do want to promote significantly more value with regards to PageRank.

How PageRank Works

Simply put, PageRank is Google’s measurement of authority and it controls where you rank in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS). The higher your PageRank, the closer to the first page your website will appear on any given subject. While that’s an over simplification, the ideas are basically there. 

When a web page links to another website, Google considers it a vote for the second website but it divides the ‘vote’ between all the links on a webpage except for those marked as nofollow. Simply put, the PageRank transferred is equal to the total PageRank of a page, divided by the number of links not using a nofollow attribute.

On my home page for example, there are 172 links on my homepage including 139 links to links on my own website. Of the remaining 33 links on the page there are roughly 10 links to my other websites or profiles and another dozen are for websites who link to me. Since my website currently has a PageRank of 5, the 33 links each receive a vote of PR 0.151515… from my website. If I decreased the number of links to just 10, each page would earn a PR vote of .5 from my website.

Spending Your Credibility

There are several ways I choose to spend my PageRank, and make no mistake that linking to other websites ’spends’ PageRank. Every time your website links to another website, Google assumes that you are voting for it by actually transferring a small part of your own site value to the new website. If you’re linking to higher value websites, there is no effect but if you’re helping to promote lower ranking websites Google counts your vote as your willingness to lose some authority while boosting another websites credibility. This process helps ensure link farming is discouraged while link swapping between genuine and reliable websites is encouraged.

Who I Link To

When I deactivated the Link Love plugin a couple weeks back, I was surprised by the reaction of a few commenters who’d assumed that my willingness to give a free PR5 link was something they simply had the right to have. In truth, nobody has the right to have links, not just from my website but from any website. I struggle everyday to earn quality links and honestly assume that everybody else does too. So who do I link to and how can you get a free link from my PageRank 5 website to yours? 

Write a Guest Post

Take the time to write a guest post here on thisismyurl.com like Casper Christensen and build your website traffic by letting my readers know about your website. If thisismyurl.com isn’t your cup of tea, perhaps you’d enjoy writing a piece for one of my other websites?

Feature me as a Writer

A new section of my website called “What I’m Writing” can be found on the footer of every page and features a list of ten recent articles that I’ve written for other websites including my own.

Link to my Articles

If you’ve found an article interesting or a plugin useful, include a link to the posting here and find yourself included in the nofollow free Who’s Linking section on the bottom of every page. That’s where I list genuine, nofollow free Pingbacks to articles here on my website.

Do Something Amazing on Your Blog

Every week (sometimes more often) I write a summary article of what I’m reading on the web today, it also appears in the footer of my website and usual features a half dozen great links to wonderful articles I’ve enjoyed reading this week. It’s a great way to promote yourself.

If you’d like to learn more about how the PageRank tool works, I would encourage you to visit Ian Rogers great article on the subject.

My decision earlier this week to deactivate a dofollow plugin here on thisismyurl.com stirred up some pretty interesting feelings and resulted in a lot of interesting comments both publicly and via email. So what’s with my choice? Well as I explained in my post earlier it has a lot to do with keyword spamming but there’s also a few fringe issues I’ve been grappling with here on the site and I hope that by deactivating the dofollow aspect of my site, I’ll actually increase the value to those who post here regularly.

So how does adding the nofollow tag help many of you? Actually it’s fairly straight forward and for those of us who read Matt Cutt’s posts regularly, you’ll agree that I should have done it years ago. To quote from SEOmoz.org:

Matt’s exact words – The “keep the number of links to under 100″ is in the technical guideline section, not the quality guidelines section. That means we’re not going to remove a page if you have 101 or 102 links on the page. Think of this more as a rule of thumb. Originally, Google only indexed the first 100 kilobytes or so of web documents, so keeping the number of links under 100 was a good way to ensure that all those links would be seen by Google. These days I believe we index deeper within documents, so that’s less of an issue. But it is true that if users see 250 or 300 links on a page, that page is probably not as useful for them, so it’s a good idea to break a large list of links down (e.g. by category, topic, alphabetically, or chronologically) into multiple pages so that your links don’t overwhelm regular users.

In a nutshell, if you follow Google’s guidelines for the nofollow attribute you quickly realize that 

1. There is no stigma to the tag, being labelled nofollow isn’t a bad thing it just isn’t a good thing.
2. When calculating how much PageRank to transfer Google uses the number of links per page to help calculate it.

More links = less love

One, easy way to understand how removing the plugin will help my regular readers is to understand that Google only indexes 100 or so links per page. At the time of this posting, my homepage featured 500 links to articles, content and other webpages. With that volume of links, nobody was truly benefiting from links.

Now, with the new site design that I’m working on each page is limited to 250 links where 200 of those links are nofollow’d. Even my own internal pages on the new design are designated nofollow unless the links appear specifically in fresh content. This means that instead of watered down link love, the links that are posted to the site will have a concentrated value. 

For those of you who are still interested in earning a great link from the website, it’s super easy … drop me a Twitter message or an email about something awesome on your website and if it works with an upcoming post I’ll be sure to mention you with a super concentrated awesome PR5 link.

Here’s a wonderful piece that combines my love of gaming with my love of WordPress,  Peter’s done a great job of making the process of setting up an online gaming community clear and easy.  If you’re running Windows Vista and you’re struggling to get WP to work, there’s a neat piece here.

Darren put together a nice new theme for writers, but more importantly it’s worth checking out his site simply to see what every WordPress website should look like. Back to work now, I’m using WordPress to build a new website for the Great Chefs television program, so be sure to check it out in a few days!

First, I’m getting slammed with keyword spammers. These are people who constantly post comments using names like “Car Sales” and “Dog Treats” in hopes of generating back links from my website to theirs. In theory I don’t really mind but this week it’s become a significant issue so I’ve elected to deactivate the plugin for a while to see if it helps calm the keyword spam a little.

My second reason for deactivating the plugin is that I’m getting ready to make a few significant changes around the site. A lot of you may have noticed that my blog’s changed looks significantly over the past several months. This wasn’t an accident, I’ve been trying different design elements and marketing combinations to determine what designs and content works best for me. After a long period of experimentation, I’ve finally determined what I need from thisismyurl.com and so I’ve started programming a new theme in earnest to help build a better online presence.

What does nofollow mean?

When a person creates a link from one website to another, it’s voting for the second site and telling Google that site A believes site B to be of equal or greater value to the web. That’s great for people like me who post links to other websites because it helps Google know which websites I have faith in but the problem comes in that when people post comments on websites, they can promote their own content regardless of how I feel about it.  That’s where the nofollow tag comes in. In effect, it tells Google that while I’m willing to link to the other site I don’t want to ‘vote’ for it.

The process of voting for a website gets more complicated when you take PageRank into account. Effectively, when I ‘vote’ for a website, I’m telling Google that I trust the website enough that I’m willing to stake my reputation (my PageRank) on the content of their website and that Google should transfer part of my reputation to them. Again, this is wonderful for websites that I truly support and read but not good at all for websites that I don’t actually read or support (such as those people who keyword bomb my site).

Is my website now only nofollow?

Not at all, in fact I believe my decision to turn off the fantastic LinkLove plugin will be beneficial to all my regular readers because it’ll cut down on spam comments but more importantly it’ll give me the time I need to start really focusing on helping others build their online reputations by reviewing and promoting websites I love to read.

If you’d still like a free, nofollow dofollow quality link from thisismyurl.com to your website there are a few easy ways to earn it:

1. Invite me to be a guest writer on your website. Boy do I love writing and this can be a win-win for you! With the new design almost finished, I’ve included a special area for posting links to articles I’ve written around the web. These are prime, dofollow quality links that will be used to help promote websites I love to work with.
2. Offer to be a guest writer on my website. I know it might not always seem like it but I do appreciate that I don’t know everything, so why not help me out? Contribute an article to the website and earn a strong link back to your site.
3. Send me a Pingback by posting a link to my content on your website. Next time you’re writing an article, why not take a look to see if there’s anything here on thisismyurl.com that you could use to support your article? Pingbacks happen when your blog posts a story with a link to a story on my website and will always appear nofollow free.
4. Sponsor the site by placing a 125×125px banner on the site, it’s a great way to help show your support as well as increase links back to your website.
5. Do something amazing on your website and tell me about it on Twitter. When I retweet it’ll appear here on the site as well as travel out to over 1,000 followers.

While I’m not actively pursing photography as a career anymore, I still love taking photographs of interesting people when they’re passing through town.

This was one such case where a Suicide Girl happened to be in town and we spent a bit of time shooting.

My rather meager online photography portfolio can be seen at modelmayhem.com

Usage

To use the Easy Technorati Tags for WordPress plugin, simply download and install onto your WordPress website. You can then add it to your theme by inserting the code <?php echo timu_technorati_tags() ;?> to your blog theme files or to a sidebar widget.

Output

The tag generates a comma separated list of tags complete with Technorati links. I choose to return it as a value rather than write it directly so that if you’d like to make changes or process the results, you can do it easy.

You can download the plugin directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Don’t forget to rate the plugin if you’ve enjoyed it.

How You Can Help

I love developing plugins for WordPress and do my best to always keep them free but of course it take a lot of time and effort to build these plugins so if you’d like to say thanks, the best way is to take a few moments and write about the plugin on your own website, include a link to my website from your posts or download and rate the plugin on the official plugin directory.

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

photo credit: foundphotoslj

First, let’s establish that your career is irrelevant. I know that’s a tough thing to admit but I want you to honestly feel the power of that statement, even say it out loud. Your career is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter, it never did. 

Secondly, look at what is in your wallet. What matters can be found in your wallet, open it up and look at the pictures of your loved ones. If you don’t have pictures of loved ones, it’s time to find some. If you got hit by a bus today what would your wallet say about you? If who you are is defined by the name on your business card I’ll give you tip, you can print business cards for around $49 per 1,000. You can be the Queen of England if that’s what makes you happy, so stop identifying yourself with your job title.

Look at your cell phone. Now … the tough question. Who’s in your favorite five? Take a few seconds and look at your iPhone contact list and ask yourself how many of those people do you love and how many love you in return? If you can’t find a half dozen people you’d trust with your cat in that list, you’re in trouble. If you can’t find at least two that you’d trust with your life, your job has taken over your life. What’s my point? People matter, jobs do not.

We spend our lives in high school trying to get good grades so that we can go to a good college, and we spend college trying to get good grades so that we can get good jobs. We move out of our neighborhoods, away from family and even across the country to pursue a dream of working for big name companies. Once there, we form relationships with others at those companies and then when our company closes or we’re laid off we lose our social networks and start over. It’s not the loss of a job that you mourn, it’s the loss of a tribe.

How to change your life

First, there is always one tribe that you’re part of. Go see your parents, they know you better than most people and they’ll be honest with you. Plus, your mom will make you pudding. Smell the house you grew up in, look at pictures of yourself in old cowboy outfits and try to remember who you really are. Too many people I know woke up one day and had no idea who they were or how they got there. Remember Ben Wades quote even bad men love their mommas? It works the other way too, go ask her how you got where you are today and maybe she’ll tell you where you need to go tomorrow. 

Secondly, have a good look at your life. If you need to have a good midlife crisis, do it. Take a plane to the other side of the planet and learn to kick box in Thailand or stay home and learn to mix drinks behind a bar. The technology industry is a tough beast, maybe what you really need is to get out and relax. I have a good friend who was killing himself working hard in the film industry, he left it a couple years back and now he’s the happiest man I know. If your career is killing you, quit.

Third, know what matters. This is critical. You might have been an IT wiz kid for the past 20 years but maybe it’s time to be a chef or a plumber. Look at your beautiful house and ask yourself if you need it, ask your wife if she’d be just as happy with you owning a gas station or working at the local hardware store. Knowing what matters will help you know what you need to do.

Finally, follow my simple three step guide to happiness:

1. Set realistic goals.
2. Reach your goals.
3. Repeat.

Something a little more helpful

Need something a little more helpful to get yourself back on track? OK simple … let’s talk about what you are and how you fit into the world. You’re an expert in your field or at the very least you should start believing that you are. Remember there is always somebody just behind you on the learning curve so it’s time for you to start writing a blog every day, help others understand what you know, so you can learn more.

I know that sounds counter intuitive but the more you talk about what you know, the more people help you learn more. They correct your assumptions, add to your knowledge and increase your understand of your subject. I once heard an old Chinese medicine theory about ginseng, apparently medicine men would give you ginseng for just about everything, if it cured you then it worked and if it didn’t cure you, you didn’t drink enough of it. Knowledge is the same, if you have enough of it you’ll always be successful. You only fail because you lack enough of it.

There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance. - Ali ibn Abi-Talib

Keep that in mind, I don’t care if your 35 learning to be a 3d animator or 55 learning to build shaker cabinets for the first time, knowledge is like a fresh mountain stream, the more of it you take the better you feel but unlike water it never runs out. In fact, the more of it you share the more is returned to you. That’s why writing a blog is so powerful, in order to write quality content you must first read quality content. Writing a blog isn’t about always being right, in fact something it’s about being corrected by people who know more than you do.

My 30 day challenge to you

Over the next 30 days I want you to wake up every morning an go for a half hour walk. Here’s what you’re going to do on that walk:

• Smile at the pretty girls in the coffee shop, or wave to the local barber
• Hold a door open for somebody or help somebody in a small way
• Buy fresh fruit from a produce shop and enjoy it

When you get home, read ten blog posts about a subject that interests you and then write one of your own. If you don’t already have a blog, I’ll set one up for you for free. If you don’t know how to find blog posts that interest you, search Google Blogs.

Subscribe to a dozen job sites using an RSS reader. Every day, after you’ve written your blog post take the time to send a personal email and resume to no fewer than ten positions. Point them to your website, let them read about your experience and expertise. 

Do that everyday for 30 days and I guaranteed you that you’ll be turning down work by the end of the month.

The Mi-24 Hind helicopter pictured below is apparently serving with a Canadian unit in  Afghanistan (I’ve had a couple people tell me this helicopter isn’t with the Canadians although there seems to be some debate as to who’s it with). If anybody can confirm (or deny) this and let me know who to credit for these great photos I would really appreciate it.

A shot of the bird in the air:

A close up of the artwork:

If anybody can provide me a link (or two) of who this pretty little bird belongs to, I’d love to credit the correct people. Thanks.

Write something your believe in

Take a stand on a subject, don’t be afraid to let people know what you really believe and follow it up with solid facts. Your readers might not agree with you but honestly, who cares?

Write something emotional

People love puppies and kittens more than they move pointy sticks so write something to connect with them on an emotional level, let them know that you’re not just a robot tossing out recycled content.

Write something to calm their fears

When I talk to prospective clients, you know why their current websites usually suck? They’re afraid of technology, the Internet and the web. My entire blog is about helping to take away that fear.

Write something to motivate users

Help your users be better at what they need to achieve through quality writing and articles designed to stimulate their goals.

Write something that gets a response

I get emails from users all the time commenting on articles here and not always in a good way. Honestly, I love when people call me out on stupid things I’ve posted here … it helps me write better content.

It works by placing a small JavaScript in the header of your document.

=== Plugin Name ===

Contributors: christopherross
Plugin URI: http://www.thisismyurl.com/wordpress/plugins/no-more-frames
Tags: frames
Requires at least: 2.0.0
Tested up to: 2.7.0
Stable tag: 0.5.1

Many websites try to load your content into their own frame, to help sell ads on their sites. This simple plugin ensure your site is protect from this using a simple piece of code in your document header.

== Description ==

Many websites try to load your content into their own frame, to help sell ads on their sites. This simple plugin ensure your site is protect from this using a simple piece of code in your document header.

== Installation ==

To install the plugin, please upload the ourprogess folder to your plugins folder and active the plugin.

== Updates ==

Updates to the plugin will be posted here, to [thisismyurl](http://www.thisismyurl.com/plugins/no-more-frames)

== Donations ==

If you would like to donate to help support future development of this tool, please visit [thisismyurl](http://www.thisismyurl.com/)

How You Can Help

I love developing plugins for WordPress and do my best to always keep them free but of course it take a lot of time and effort to build these plugins so if you’d like to say thanks, the best way is to take a few moments and write about the plugin on your own website, include a link to my website from your posts or download and rate the plugin on the official plugin directory.

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

This plugin automatically generates a copyright notice from the first post in your blog to the current year. The Auto Copyright notice plugin fetches the first and last year of posts from the database and displays the results as a copyright notice on your website.

This process allows blog owners to add content retroactively, knowing that the  website will automatically find the first date a post is published as well as the last published date or the current year (whichever is later).

To use the plugin, simply download it and add the code  <?php echo  autocopyright();?> to your website where you’d like the copyright notice to appear.

How You Can Help

I love developing plugins for WordPress and do my best to always keep them free but of course it take a lot of time and effort to build these plugins so if you’d like to say thanks, the best way is to take a few moments and write about the plugin on your own website, include a link to my website from your posts or download and rate the plugin on the official plugin directory.

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

So what am I going to do with my new fancy page rank of 5? (that’s right Bavota … I kick butt) well, I’m going to keep doing what I’ve always done I suppose, I’m going to keep writing content which I hope adds a little bit to the rich tapestry we call the Internet and I’m going to try  to help people learn about technology and with luck, I’m going to be able to keep linking to amazing websites who will in turn think something I’ve written is worth linking to.

Thanks to everybody who reads my blog, I love hearing from you and hope you’ve all had as great a holiday season as I have. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s my anniversary and I have a turkey to cook.

What I’m asking for is a recommendation, from your website to mine. Simply a link to one of my articles, an interesting sample, a free download or even a review of what you’ve learnt from my posts over the past several months and you’ll help me achieve my goals. 

Google Stats for thisismyurl.com

As of this morning, Google reported that 78 other websites link to me. That’s pretty good but I’d love to see that number five time higher so I’m willing to give away something valuable to me in return for you giving me your link.

My time.

It’s actually the only thing that I have, so here’s the deal; for every new link from a unique domain to my website between now and New Years eve, I will personally donate one hour of my time to a charity or non profit group to help them build a better website, improve their online presence or increase their marketing savvy. I’ll give away free hosting to help their cause, register domains to save them money or assist them with the latest version of WordPress.

If you’d like to participate, simply link from your website, blog or forum to any of my pages. You can also Digg this story or other articles on my site to help increase awareness of the campaign.

Thanks to everybody who’s helping.

For those who love the Princess Bride, no character was more memorable than Inigo Montoya the charismatic Spaniard, searching the globe to find the six fingered man who killed his father. Since he was a boy, Inigo swore revenge and dreamt of the day he’d face the name and say “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die.”

Oddly, all I could ever picture when I heard this was one of those cheesy eighties style conference stickers. This design was originally penned onto those very stickers but later I printed it as an t-shirt for myself  and my kids.