Now that the dust has settled on this year's NCAA March Madness Tourney (congrats to all you Duke fans out there), it's time for me to settle up on a little wager I made. Each year I look forward to Matt McGee's SEO Madness bracket challenge, and each year I walk away disappointed... not because of the challenge itself, but because of my rare ability of not being able to correctly pick winners. This year was no exception.

I picked 30 of 63 correct on my bracket (48%), which would normally earn me a seat at the back of the bus. However, I was 1 of 2 people in our pool that placed Duke winning the championship, and so I was able to jump from 22 of 42 to 2nd place.

But... nonetheless 2nd place is not 1st place and therefore I need to man-up, and congratulate the winner with a link.

Congrats George Bounacos of Silver Beacon Marketing for a well structured bracket.

Labels: fun

Looking to get your hands on the new Apple iPad being released this weekend? I'm sure most of you techies and Apple Fan-Boys are. Well, I know of a way you can win one for FREE, and have a little fun in the process... that is, if you're clever enough to "catch the Raven".

My good friends over at Raven SEO Tools - developers of some of the finest Internet Marketing tools on the planet - are hosting an online scavenger hunt contest, dubbed RavenHunt, where the grand prize is an Apple iPad. Each day this week, the fine folks at Raven will release 2 clues (riddles) which will guide hunters throughout the Internet to find hidden letters. Be the first to collect these hidden letters and use them to spell out the secret word on Friday, and you win. It's that easy, and fun!

Here's an official breakdown of the contest:

1. RavenHunt is free for anyone and you can start playing at any time.

2. There are two RavenHunt clues released each day.

3. The object of RavenHunt is to collect the secret letters you find when you solve riddles.

4. On Friday, the second RavenHunt clue will include a form for you to input the unscrambled secret word (using the secret letters you've found).

5. You need to follow Raven's Facebook and Twitter accounts to be updated on when clues are released.

For RavenHunt contest rules and prize information, visit: RavenHunt.

For a better understanding of how to play RavenHunt, visit: How To Play RavenHunt.

The contest started this past Monday and ends on Friday. Now, I know what some of you are thinking, it's too late to get in on the action. However, honestly, it's not. Only 2 clues are given out each day, which means there is plenty of time to visit the Raven Facebook Fan Page, get the clues that your missing, solve the riddles, collect the letters, and catch up. For a chance to walk away with an Apple iPad, not to mention several other spectacular secondary prizes for taking 2nd - 10th place on the hunt, there's no excuse not to play. Now get out there and HUNT!

Well, not exactly. I haven't created an application, per se, but using the iPhone's "Add to Home Screen" feature, I've created what looks like an app and an easy way for iPhone readers to get their marketing fix via my blog. Here's how you can get the Karl Ribas Consulting blog iPhone "App" on your phone:

Step 1
Open up your Safari browser.

Step 2
Go to the Karl Ribas Consulting blog: http://blog.karlribas.com

Step 3
Click the "+" at the bottom of the screen.

Step 4
Click the "Add to Home Screen" option. This will create a home screen link (to my blog) on your iPhone using my specially created icon.

Step 5
This step is completely optional, but for spacing issues, you may want consider renaming the home screen icon from "Karl Ribas Consulting Blog" to "KRC Blog". Doing so will keep things nice and neat on your phone.

Step 6
Enjoy... you're done.

Some day there may be a need to create an actual iPhone app for my website, but until then, please enjoy this creative workaround.

Labels: karl-ribas-consulting

I'd like to clarify something before getting started with today's post. In regards to my last entry, "This blog has moved", I just wanted to state that my blog hasn't really moved. While I did change my hosting provider, my blog, as most of you see it, hasn't changed or moved in anyway. This post was auto-generated and published via Blogger in accordance with the Blogger migration process.

However, with that said, now may be a great time to review over your subscription settings. My blog can still be found at http://blog.karlribas.com. For those of you that receive my posts via email, I'm fairly certain that nothing has changed for you. For those of you receiving posts via an RSS subscription, you may want to double check that you're using my http://feeds.karlribas.com/blog-and-newsletter feed, courtesy of Feedburner. If so, you're good to go. If you're not sure, you can always click on the orange RSS icon (on the left) and get the most updated feed.

Moving on... like so many other users, I am not at all happy about Google's recent decision to remove FTP publishing capabilities from Blogger. Google is mandating that all Blogger blogs now be hosted on Google's servers, which is something I believe to be a huge mistake. Eliminating FTP capabilities will only limit the options that users have when managing their blogs. In my mind, eliminating options is always a bad thing. However, according to Google, having FTP capabilities is a significant drain on their ability to improve the platform.

"Only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing."

I'll just have to take Google's word on this, and assume they had no other option but to completely cut-out their FTP program. Well, that's not true. I could have jumped ship and went to another blog provider, but I've been dedicated to the Blogger platform since day one and would really hate to leave now. I'll just have to roll with the punches for the time being.

Last Friday, I decided to move forward with the migration process. I had been dreading it since first learning of it back in early February. However, with the deadline vastly approaching (May 1st, 2010), I needed to knock it out with enough time to troubleshoot any potential problems I might run into. I also wanted to make sure I had enough time to assist my company and clients with their migration efforts too.

Surprisingly, the process itself was not at all difficult. The Blogger team created what they refer to as a "Migration Tool", which made the whole experience extremely easy to handle... even for non-programmers. This tool handled all of the file transferring from my current hosting to Google's hosting. More importantly, the tool also handled all of the necessary page redirects using rel=canonical and meta-refresh tags. This means that all the SEO value that I've built up from the past 5+ years of blogging won't be disappearing. Blogger also created a secondary tool / option to assist users with correcting links, files, and images that may become broken during the migration process.

I'd say that from start to finish, the Blogger migration process took me somewhere in the neighborhood of about 45 to 60 minutes - 90% of that time was sitting back and waiting Blogger to do its thing. I imagine that times will vary depending on the size of your blog.

In addition to the Migration tool, Google also provided some very helpful resources to assist with the migration process. They created a video walk-through, a blog, and even a forum to address specific problems one might be having. I found each of these resources to be extremely helpful, and would encourage everyone to keep them handy.

Overall, I'd say I'm very pleased with the migration process the Blogger team has put together. While migrating itself isn't something I completely agree with, they made the whole experience fast and easy. Kudos to you, Blogger. However, in closing, I will say that I have yet to see a major difference between the 2 styles of publishing. Other than being able to instantly publish with zero wait time and a few minor design issues I'm dealing with, not much has changed. And you know, I'm not sure that's such bad thing either.

Labels: karl-ribas-consulting