#how to rank your website on google

[rigvedaads]

[thewebflying]

A Beginner's Guide to URL Parameters

Introduction: Embarking on your journey into the digital realm, understanding URL parameters is akin to acquiring a compass for navigating the vast landscape of the internet.  These seemingly enigmatic strings of characters appended to web addresses hold the key to unlocking profound insights into website functionality and optimization. In this beginner’s guide, we’ll unravel the mysteries…

[staricrypto]

Top 10 Tips for Boosting Your Website's SEO Ranking in 2023

Introduction: Boosting Your Website’s SEO, Welcome to the digital era, where having a strong online presence is crucial for any business. One of the key aspects of establishing your brand and attracting more visitors to your website is search engine optimization (SEO). In this article, we will explore the top 10 tips for boosting your website’s SEO ranking in 2023. So, let’s dive in and discover…

[bdum24net]

We provide Professionally Social media Services. If you want to Grow your Business ahead, then you should be Hired me.

[hitechshahid]

How to work on Blog Commenting Sites

Hitech Digital World are providing free high quality Backlinks.  Hi-tech Digital World is established in 2022 Managed By Shoiab Ahmad Ganai. One of the expert of Digital Marketing over 6 years of experience in Digital Marketing Specially in SEO. The main mission to create this Website is for SEO information. We are providing free information about SEO and providing free Backlinks to rank on google. We have millions of sites for Backlinks..

https://www.digitalshoiab.com/

[dedalvs]

Is there something up with the High Valyrian wiki?

https://wiki.languageinvention.com/index.php?title=High_Valyrian_language

I've had this link bookmarked since ages. I can't seem to load the page. I've tried all sorts of browsers and it is still not working. i wanted to get back into actively learning HV again and duolingo is kinda annoying so. Is there a different page/resource the wiki has moved on to? I also seem to recall an old forum for HV with a bunch of really good resources for it. is it possible for you to provide a link? Thanks so much anyway!!

Good question! This wiki, which you can find here..

...is a labor of love—not just from me, but from a team of dedicated individuals who want to get information about my languages up somewhere more or less permanent, editable by many, and all in one place.

For years I have had a hosting plan from DreamHost. For a fixed fee, DreamHost allows you, essentially, infinite storage. I've got a dozen or so websites hosted by the same DreamHost account. I have to pay for the urls (a yearly fee; everyone pays these), but the hosting itself is covered, no matter if I had one website or a hundred.

Creating a wiki that would function like Wiktionary was my idea. I love Wiktionary, and love the idea behind it. For example, let's say you wanted to look up mate. This is an English word. It's also a subjunctive form of matar "to kill" in Spanish. It's also the word for "saliva" in Swahili. It's also "dead" in Tahitian. It's also a word in several other languages. It's kind of cool to take an abstract form—going just by spelling—and seeing that it's a word in a bunch of different languages, all with different etymologies (some related, of course. For example, mate has something to do with death in a lot of Oceanic languages. In Hawaiian it's make, which looks like an entirely different English word!).

In Dothraki, the word tor is the number four. It comes from Proto-Plains *tur (and so would be tur in Lhazareen). It's also the word for "tower" in Hen Linge (this is one of the words coined by Andrzej Sapkowski, not created by me). In Noalath, from The Shannara Chronicles, it's the word for "wolf", and in Shiväisith, the language I created for the Dark Elves from Thor: The Dark World, it's the word for "sword". While it's true I didn't create the Hen Linge word, I created the others, so you can see it's a form I'm fond of, where the shape is possible.

Anyway, that's kind of cool! And that was the point of the site.

As it happens, the High Valyrian section of the site is…massive. To give you an idea, at the moment, the wiki has over 220,000 pages. Most of those are High Valyrian pages. This is because there's a dedicated team for High Valyrian that has added pages for every single noun, adjective, and verb inflection for every existing word on the wiki. To give you an idea, every verb of High Valyrian has around 200 forms (ipradagon "to eat", ipradan "I eat", ipradā "you eat", ipradas "s/he/it eats", etc.). Every single form for every single verb has its own page. This was accomplished primarily with a program that populated the inflectional pages, but however they got there, they're there.

Certain things on the wiki are templates that need to go through and "check" every single page. Additionally, a webcrawler goes through and checks every single page on the wiki. This requires a lot of RAM. As a result, periodically, the entire website just...shuts down.

Obviously this is not cool. I asked DreamHost about it, and though we have infinite space, we don't have infinite RAM. The first step was to disable all web crawlers. You know about SEO, and how you can do things to increase the page rank of your site? Well, we needed to do the opposite. We needed to make the site disappear from the net, effectively. And we did. This is why even if you type "David J. Peterson wiki language invention" into Google you get nothing. It's like we don't exist. We're there, but you have to know we're there and go to the site specifically. That helped, but our own programs still shut things down.

The second step was to get a private server (technically a virtual private server) for the site. This cost me an extra $25 a month ($300 a year) from what I was already paying. This definitely helped, but sometimes things get to be a bit too much, and so the site still shuts down. This is what you experienced.

You know how Wikipedia begs you for money every year? It's because of this. It's one thing to create an awesome resource; it's another thing for people to actually use it.

Hosting already costs me about $250 every two years, and every year I renew the urls for about 15 websites, which is another $300 a year. If I upgrade the VPS to the next level, it's even more money every year. And that's just me paying it.

Right now, we're in an okay spot. The site shuts down every so often, but most of the time it's more or less stable. Unless I start making a lot more money regulary, that's the way it's going to stay.

So if you go to the site and it's down, I'm very sorry, but it will be back. May take a few days, but it'll come back (as long as I'm alive, anyway).

[maniculum]

Bestiaryposting Plan

So the poll is still running, but I think I'm safe in saying there's sufficient interest, so I'm going ahead and typing up a "how we're going to do this" thing, which I will schedule to post after the poll ends properly. As of the time I'm writing this, over 500 people have voted for the "yes I want to draw things" option, and I had been expecting to get maybe a dozen, so we definitely have enough participants. Let's get started then:

Our Source

I had originally planned to translate an Old or Middle English bestiary, but haven't been able to find a good one -- the best option I was able to dig up only has thirteen critters, which I feel like isn't enough to really have fun with. I was debating the idea of translating a Latin one -- this would have been far more time-consuming since my Latin is terrible, but also I do need to practice it, so I figured it evens out -- when I found a solution that doesn't involve me spending hours and hours on translating.

It seems that when Aberdeen University created their digitized version of the famous Aberdeen Bestiary, they released it under a Creative Commons license. (Assuming I'm reading their copyright policy correctly; I'm not a lawyer.) It does not seem to specify whether the transcriptions and translations they attach to the scanned images are also covered by Creative Commons, but since all of those are already freely available online through their website, I can't imagine they would have a problem with me posting them here as long as I provide attribution (which I am hereby doing right here on this post) and am not using it for commercial purposes (which I am not).

The Aberdeen Bestiary is missing a few pages, but there exists a very similar manuscript, the Ashmole Bestiary (they're sometimes called "sister" manuscripts), which is not missing those pages. And I happen to have a translation of the Ashmole Bestiary in hardcopy on my bookshelf, so I can just use it to fill in the gaps. Edit: whoops, the one I have is the Bodley Bestiary. They are in the same bestiary "family", though, so it still works well enough. (I think that should qualify as "fair use", since I'm only taking excerpts and not using them commercially.)

The upside of using the Aberdeen Bestiary is that it means when I round up all the art of each critter, I can include their very nice illustrations alongside the reveal of what animal was being described.

The downside of using the Aberdeen Bestiary is that since it already is free online, people might be tempted to "cheat" by looking up the entries and finding out what animal they describe. For that, please see the next section...

Guessing the Animal

Guessing what animal is being described is not the point of the exercise. (Feel free to have theories and whatnot, but please keep them to yourself so as not to influence the artists.) If you see an entry and think, e.g., "oh that's describing a raccoon"*, and then you create a picture of a raccoon... well, you could have done a perfectly good raccoon at any point and didn't need this framework to do it. So just don't worry about what animal is meant, and do your best to draw (or paint or stitch or whatever else) based on the description! You're not getting ranked on accuracy and there are no prizes forthcoming, so... just have fun with it.

*Example chosen as something that will, for obvious reasons, definitely not be in a 13th-century European bestiary.

Edit after starting to type these things up: some of these are going to be super easy to guess, though, to the point where I don't know how possible it'll be to block out prior knowledge. Sorry about that.

General Procedure

I'm going to schedule a post every Monday (I'm thinking of queuing them for 6pm Eastern Time) with a new entry. It will be the translation of an entry from the Aberdeen Bestiary with all references to the animal's name replaced by a randomly-generated nonsense word. (Henceforth to be referred to as "nonsense-names". I'm Googling* each one before using them so I don't accidentally generate one that actually means something.) These posts will all be tagged maniculum bestiaryposting, so you can follow that tag if you want to make sure you see them.'

*Later Note: Did you know that if you search dozens of nonsense words within a short span of time, Google makes you prove you're not a robot? Repeatedly?

Anyone who wants to draw the critter being described should do so. (You are encouraged to describe your thought process re: why you've depicted it the way you have.) You can put it in its own post, or reblog the description with an image, or however you want to do it. Then tag your art with the nonsense-name I've given to the animal.This will let me and others find it. (You should probably employ copy/paste there to make sure the spelling is the same, since nonsense words are hard to spellcheck.)

A week after posting the bestiary entry, I'll go through that tag and round up all of the art contributed. Then I'll put the images in a big post (or series thereof, considering how many people might participate), along with an @ and a link to your original post.

If you want...

to not have your work included in the round-up post

to have only a link to your post included and not an image

to have me include a link to your website / other social media / etsy shop in addition to or instead of your tumblr

to have other information included alongside your work

anything else along those lines

... then just say so in your post and I will follow your instructions to the best of my ability.

I will also include, at the end of the round-up post, an image of the creature as depicted in the Aberdeen Bestiary and what it is actually called.

All posts I make on this will be collected at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting so that people can look at previous ones without scrolling through the tag.

Various Notes

I'm going to trim out any religious digressions in the original entries -- bestiary authors had a habit of adding stuff like "and the raccoon is symbolic of god in such-and-such fashion, which teaches us...", and I just don't think that's relevant here.

The entries will also be presented in a random order. This is because they're sorted into categories in the original text, so if I don't change the order we're going to get stuck with, e.g., a few months of All Birds All The Time.

You should all be aware that the animals described are not guaranteed to be, you know, real. There are several entries describing animals that straight up do not exist -- some of which are mythical creatures familiar to most people, others of which are extremely obscure.

Explanations of the animal's name within the entries will be redacted.

If other animals are mentioned within the entries, they will not get replaced with nonsense-names. Originally, I was going to make the switch globally, so that if, e.g., the entry for "raccoon" read "a raccoon is about the size of a possum", and the random generator had decided that a raccoon was a balzikhear and a possum was a flunggrish, the "raccoon" entry would now read "a balzikhear is about the size of a flunggrish". However, I decided that it will cause more problems than it solves to obscure any comparisons to other animals -- so the name-switch is now localized only to the specific entry. A possum is a flunggrish only in its own entry, and remains a possum everywhere else.

I was originally going to do one post for every single entry, but there are a lot of them and they vary wildly in length & quality. So I've cut it down to exactly 52 posts, meaning that if I queue them up for once a week, this will run for roughly a full year.

Most of that cutting-down mentioned above was done by combining a bunch of the really short entries into categories -- the last half-dozen posts in this series will be group entries. You can choose to make art of any of them that strike your fancy, or do a group portrait, or just ignore them --I dunno, I'm not a cop, do what you want.

I did also directly cut some, mostly domesticated animals because there's a somewhat different approach to them based on author and audience familiarity.

So yeah, that should cover everything.

[writtenbygracewilliams]

Peerages & Titles: everything you need to know

[A heavily researched 6.5k+ hyperfocus from my Google docs, to help your fanfics]

Disclaimers:

Sources are not consistent. You’d think they would be. They are not. I’ve corralled several reliable websites and books into something that I think makes sense, is accessible, and fits [largely] with portrayals in Bridgerton/modern media.

That being said, Bridgerton/modern media make mistakes. You might notice in reading through all this that there is something different to how it is portrayed in media. Feel free to discuss with me, I could very well be wrong, but also know that you are consuming fiction and this is intended to be fact.

However, whilst trying to be correct, many sources are modern and it is difficult to confirm how titling and forms of address may have changed in the past 200–300 years. Though, I imagine not greatly given the peerage and aristocracy still exists.

Where possible, I have used Bridgerton characters as the examples so that it is easier to make sense/contextualise it. Names in red are not characters, just placeholder names. Hence I have reduced, reused, recycled these names.

On the note of using names from within the Bridgerverse, the Marquess of Ashdown was not married when we met him. I’d also like to know what Julia Quinn has against Earls and Marquesses, Marquesses especially.

Second note of using names in the Bridgerverse, I refuse to use Baron of Kent because it is a factual/historical disaster. More on that here.

This only applies to aristocracy of Britain/UK [minimally Ireland, read here], if I do more of Europe/anywhere else I will link it below but let me know if you want that.

All of these posts may be edited/expanded at any time as my research continues.

Further posts:

General info, start here!

Glossary

A brief history of the peerages/titles

The different peerages [England, Great Britain, United Kingdom, Scotland, Ireland]

How royal titles work

Peerage applications and functions in the modern day

Privileges of the peerage

How titles apply to the child of peers

Rank and precedence within the peerage

Titling rules for non peers

Other roles and titles I can give address information for

Female inheritance of titles

Territorial designations, and when the surname differs from the title name

Haven’t decided if I will do a post on grammar rules when writing peers because despite studying etiquette and titles for over a decade, and linguistics and grammar for seven years, the grammar/capitalisation rules of writing peers broke my final straw of sanity. Let me know how much you want it, or just drop any specific questions.

Put any questions about any of this in my ask :)

–GW xo

[lemonflavoreddishsoap]

no one asked for this but I'm writing it anyway. Also time doesn't exist in this thing, that or Ghiaccio's computer time travelled

Ghiaccio with an S/O who plays Papa's Freezeria on his computer

---------------------------------------------------------------------

This was it. The biggest step in your relationship thus far. No, not marriage.

Ghiaccio agreed to share his computer with you.

You didn't have one of your own and amongst other expenses you just never got around to buying one. So, with a lot of deliberation and building trust, he sent you a message saying that you could make an account on his. You would have to wait until he got home though, so he could show you how.

Unfortunately, you either didn't read or disregarded that last part of the message, and with a childlike glee flung yourself to his desk, loudly click clacking the keys and brute forcing your way into figuring out his password. You must have woken it up from it's sleep because there was nothing open when you got in. Then, you sat back and tapped your chin for a while...what exactly were you going to do first?

Then, like a prophetic vision from God, a wave of nostalgia brushed across your body, making you literally shiver. A flash of color and music and ice cream played in your mind. The name "Papa..." escaped your lips in a longing sigh.

In a flash, you've got google open, searching up Coolmathgames. Holy shit. HOLY SHIT. THE LINK IS PURPLE. Racing through the website, briefly noticing an account signed in, and nearly breaking the mouse as you clicked on the link for "Papa's Freezeria".

....HE HAS A SAVE FILE!! RANK 20!??? When the hell does he have the time to play this??

Despite your sense of curiosity absolutely HOWLING, you knew you had already snooped more than enough, so making your own save file it is, you suppose.

-

Has it been an hour? Maybe two? Who knows, there's no use in me asking anyways because the time certainly hasn't crossed your mind. You're glued to the game, having a nearly perfected strategy executed with each and every cartoon-y costumer. You probably don't even remember whose computer you're playing on - this reality and the reality of Freezeria have entirely merged to you.

At least, that's the case before you feel one hand clamp down on the back of your chair, and another landing on top of your own hand that's gripping the mouse.

"I thought I told you to wait?"

Ghiaccio is clearly restraining himself, there's a rasp in his voice that you only hear when he's giving his all to not shout. Your lips are sealed shut, unsure how to justify your current situation. He must have then taken a good look at the screen because next thing he said was-

"And why the FUCK are you playing THAT!?"

Shit, you legit didn't have an answer. As he's standing there giving you a weirded out look, you remember the hypocrisy in his anger. You stutter wildly, still trying to reach for some explanation, as you duplicate the tab to start the game again - you swear you see his face drop. You point at his save file with a "huh!!" sound, and suddenly he's red in the face, hand retreating from on top of yours as if the contact suddenly burned him.

"Fine!! Whatever. Just finish the fuck up and..." he groans. It always feels good to embarrass him, and plus you know he can never stay mad at you for long.

"I will, I'm almost done with this day. Last order," you promise, clicking back to your original tab and getting right back to work. Ghiaccio has nothing else to do but stand and watch you play. What you don't see is his face slowly contorting in disgust as you sloppily dump toppings over the dessert.

"That's not how you place the cherries!!! That one's supposed to be centered, and the other two have to be NEATLY placed apart! They're gonna fucking hate it!" Ghiaccio exclaims, stabbing the screen with his index finger. You roll your eyes, it definitely doesn't surprise you that he's a perfectionist in this video game.

You both watch in anticipation as the costumer tastes their ice cream, and when a 72% score appears over the "top station" button you let out a cheer. You swivel your chair to face Ghiaccio and gesture to the screen, "see? they liked it!!"

He scoffs at the score, "it sure wasn't deserved."

"What!?" you put a hand on your chest in fake-hurt, "how dare you. Louie would never treat me like this!!"

Ghiaccio blinks at you with wide eyes, needing several long seconds to process what you just said.

"...Since when were you on a one-name basis with Papa Louie!?"

[seaurchin0]

As a fellow cyberstalker with much less skill, you amaze and inspire me!!!

- 🐁

thank you 😊 since i'm feeling generous here is some advice for anyone that needs it 🩷

a lot of this depends on if you know them online or irl, but here are some that helped me a lot:

-Look up usernames and irl name if you know it

-If you have pics of them or just any pic they sent you of whatever, reverse image search them, maybe they posted it somewhere else

-Analyze the background of images they're on or they took

-If you're looking for their location, use google maps. Useful af

-Take notes if you dig something of them up, it will help you recognize them online (interests, past experiences, hobbies etc)

-Look at post history obviously

-Check precious usernames and how long they've been using that account and when they registered

-If you find an account that you're unsure of if it's really them, keep that saved too, it could be an alt

-Look at their comments and interactions

-Note down everything. Everything. Make a txt file where you write these, or keep a diary, or save their social media links in a folder or do whatever but i can't stress this enough, somehow, someway, save or note them.

And a ranking of websites based on how good i think they are for cyberstalking:

amazing:

twitter, reddit, facebook

Twitter is especially amazing because you can't hide your likes or followings, you can see a pretty clear post and commen history, just like with reddit. Facebook, if you want to get to know more about their family, personal lives, friends and stuff like this.

ok:

instagram, snapchat

Nothing special about them, good for when you wanna find out what they're up to but not dig up anything too personal.

ehh..:

tiktok

Could be useful but profile views are a huge disadvantage, and since there's no way to tell if they have it on or not you'll just have to take a wild guess and risk creeping them out.

no:

pinterest, tumblr, spotify

Unless you wanna know what interior design they like, pinterest is useless. Same with spotify, unless you wanna know what type of music they like it's useless. Tumblr is kinda dead tbh.

Hope this helped anyone that was looking for smth like this 😊 I can post more if anyone if anyone wants me to.

[mcytblrsexymen]

May I ask, how do you seed a bracket? Do you just try to roughly divide the most powerful competitors into different sections?

so the good news is, as long as you can come up with a seed for each competitor, the "making the bracket" part is easy. you can just google how many teams/competitors you have and the words "seeded bracket", or you can go to a website called "challonge" and you'll be able to have it automatically generate the bracket for you.

for the record, the brackets are generated so the higher your seed is, the 'easier' it is to get to the end - the highest seed should always face the lowest expected seed remaining in their next match. so in a 64-person tournament, the 1 seed faces the 64 seed first, but then it will face the outcome of 32/33, because "32" is the expected winner and should be the lowest remaining seed if every match goes as expected. (this is as opposed to their next match facing the outcome of 2/63, because while facing the 63 seed would certainly be easy, 2 is expected to win, if that makes sense.) this propagates down the bracket.

however, like i said, you won't have to worry about that much, because generating brackets is a solved problem you don't have to do yourself! genuinely do recommend challonge for generating brackets it is very, very easy.

okay. so, that's the easy part - once you have seeds, the 'correct' way to generate a bracket is a solved problem that other people can do for you. what about the hard part - what is a seed?

so in our tournament, we determined the "strength" of our competitors via "number of nominations". this mostly worked out - due to stuff like the fact we didn't circulate as well in dsmp circles as we wanted until too late, or the fact most low seeds had very similar numbers of nominations, these weren't perfect measures. (techno and quackity were especially under-seeded, i think, and a lot of the low seeds were treated by the bracket as more wildly far apart in power from each other than they actually were.) however, if you have something like "number of nominations" or "previous tournament rankings" or "ELO score" to work off of in your tournament, you can seed using that!

(side note: a lot of sports tournaments actually do rounds of what's called 'swiss' day one in order to determine seeds for a bracket day two, as do a lot of card game tournaments, but i'm assuming you want to do something like us, for which the concept of rounds of swiss wouldn't help and we weren't structured well for. but know that's also an option, if you're running something that's structured in a way that you can do that.)

however, let's assume you DIDN'T have our nominations phase. in this case, you're going to have to make judgement calls to decide who is which numbered seed. the thing to remember here is that your seeds are effectively the "expected" placement order in your tournament. the person you expect to get first is the 1 seed. the person you expect to get twentieth is the 20 seed. so on and so forth. you'll need to make some judgement calls on who you expect to get what place to decide these numbers. it's okay if it's not perfect (and for stuff like a sexyman tournament tbh it's gonna be HARD to get it perfect), the idea is for it to be around correct, so that theoretically, you've made a path that makes the "most exciting" match the last one.

so yeah, that's how you seed a bracket! hopefully this ramble helps and isn't just confusing! :D

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT SEO & MARKETING NEWS FOR ECOMMERCE, March 2024

Welcome to my roundup of SEO and marketing news and useful resources for ecommerce businesses, March edition. There is a lot going on with Google, and some really strong marketing pieces this time around, so let's get right to it.

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES 

Google launched both a core algorithm update and spam updates on March 5, with the spam update ending on the 20th. Core updates now include the Helpful Content algorithm. In early observations, Etsy and Reddit both picked up visibility in the UK. 

The Helpful Content algorithm updates late last year destroyed a lot of sites’ Google traffic. Avoid the things they had in common.  You can read the full study here. 

Ecommerce sites were some of the biggest losers in Google visibility in 2023, with Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Etsy, Target and Best Buy in the top 10 of sites whose Google appearances slipped. 

New to Google SEO? They’ve revamped their SEO starter guide for people like you. And if you are more advanced and want to learn how to optimize your website product pages, this is a good overview. 

This lengthy article on backlinks for ecommerce websites covers pretty much all the angles, including the really difficult ones. 

Reminder that if you want to rank on Google for a search term, you need to look at what is already ranking, and make decisions based on that content. [video and transcript] This works for most search engines, not just Google. 

Yes, Google crawls “high quality” content more often. I used to refer to this as Google thinking the page is “interesting”, so I guess I will need to change my wording...

While Google sends the most traffic to websites, people spend a lot more of their online time elsewhere. Market where people are, not just where your stats say they came from. 

Sadly, Google has stopped providing caches of website pages in its search results. While you can still see the caches of some pages by using the Google search Cache:[page link] as in cache:https://cindylouwho-2.tumblr.com that will eventually stop working as well. Bing still provides caches, but unfortunately both it and the Wayback Machine do not crawl often enough to give really recent results most of the time. 

Missed Google news in February? Here’s your update. And just in case you are really behind, here is January. 

Not Google

Unsure if your website has enough good backlinks? Bing Webmaster Tools will now tell you if you don’t. 

Yandex - the top search engine in Russia - was sold by its Dutch ownership group to a consortium in Russia. 

SOCIAL MEDIA - All Aspects, By Site

General

A US study of social media use found that the most popular site was YouTube, with 83% of adults using it. Two-thirds of American adults use Facebook, while TikTok is up to ⅓ of the US population. 

Because they do change periodically, here are the latest image and video sizes recommended for the top social media platforms. [infographic]

Bluesky is now open to everyone - it was previously invite-only. 

Facebook (includes relevant general news from Meta)

Meta has introduced several changes to its Ad options, applying to Facebook and Instagram. 

Meta had a great 4th quarter in 2023, with revenue, users, and earnings per share up. “Fast-growing upstarts Temu and Shein, which originated in China, have been pouring money into ads on Facebook and Instagram. Li said on Thursday that revenue from China-based advertisers accounted for 10% of sales for the year and 5 percentage points of growth.”

Instagram

An updated post on Instagram's algorithm and how it works. 

Instagram is still beta testing longer Reels for some users. 

If your account is a brand account, you can now run ads on Instagram with coupon codes right in them. (Some Facebook users can already do this.)

LinkedIn

Among other recent changes on LinkedIn, the algorithm is now looking to boost important content longer than just the first day or two after publication. 

Pinterest

Pinterest has its own stats package, called Pinterest Analytics, but only for “Business” accounts. They show how many people clicked on the outgoing links, how many people saw your pin on their screen, and much more. Here’s everything you need to know. 

Reddit

Reddit successfully launched on the stock market this past week, but questions remain about how this will change the site. 

Google is paying Reddit to scrape its content through the API instead of from the web. 

Snapchat

Snap was a little later than most tech companies doing layoffs recently, waiting until February 5 to let 10% off staff go. 

Threads

Threads is so new that the algorithm is bound to change a lot in the next year, but for right now, here is how it works. 

TikTok

There is an overwhelming amount of info out there on the US attempt to either ban TikTok or force its sale, and much of it is incomplete, so I will let you Google to your heart’s content if you want to learn more. If you are relying on TikTok to drive sales, this would be a good time to make sure you diversify your promotional strategy. 

You can now track trending terms on TikTok through the Creator Search Insights section. “Creator Search Insights will highlight frequently searched topics, which creators can organize by category (for example, tourism, sports, science) or tailor to their content type with the “For You” option. Additionally, creators can filter for “content gap” topics, which are highly searched but have relatively few videos on TikTok covering them.“

TikTok may be testing a photo app, which would obviously compete with Instagram. 

Twitter

What? Twitter may have lied about its Super Bowl ad performance? I’m so not shocked. 

Tumblr

Tumblr will be selling data access to AI companies. 

YouTube

This is a pretty decent article on YouTube SEO. 

(CONTENT) MARKETING (includes blogging, emails, and strategies) 

Small and micro-businesses need an email list. An email list is:  

portable (unlike most social media followers or marketplace buyers) 

is available to almost everyone, as we all need at least one email address if we are online

less susceptible to the whims of algorithms (unlike SEO, marketplaces, social etc.)  

I keep seeing people argue that no one opens emails, but the chart in the article above is proof that is still wrong. (My blog email list averages close to a 70% open rate, depending on the topic and the time I send it. My jewellery email list - which I hardly ever send to - still has an over 30% open rate. My click rates are well above the industry averages, usually 30 to 40% of all recipients for the blog list. These are much better numbers than social, and astronomically better than my clickthrough rate on Google and other search engines.)

Gmail and Yahoo both changed how they handle bulk emails such as newsletters in February. Here’s what you need to know on the basics, including authenticating yourself so your email gets through. 

Find out how to get people to read all the way to the end of your content. 

Get ready for April marketing with 5 topical ideas. National Handmade Day is April 6. 

We should all think twice before deciding to use AI to create content. “Circa 2024, generative AI does not produce new ideas or even develop its own conclusions. Rather, it regurgitates information that it has indexed.” Not convinced? Here’s another article. “AI-generated content represents the literal “average of everything online.”

ONLINE ADVERTISING (EXCEPT INDIVIDUAL SOCIAL MEDIA AND ECOMMERCE SITES) 

Google Ads can now be tracked in Google Analytics 4. 

Both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising were up in the 4th quarter of 2023. 

STATS, DATA, TRACKING 

Google Analytics 4 tracks organic traffic differently than the previous version. Here’s how to figure it out. 

BUSINESS & CONSUMER TRENDS, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE 

I’ve probably posted this specific article before, but it is worth another read: how to communicate with customers.  For example, “Mirroring your customer’s tone lets them know you’re on their side. If a customer is formal, for example, hold back on the LOLs. If they’re more casual, relax your tone.”

According to a US study, Generation Z is skewing the traditional marketing funnel. “Per Archrival’s data, 77 per cent of Gen Zs and 79 per cent of millennials in the US are actively seeking style inspiration at least monthly, with almost half of those looking for style inspiration on social media. When asked where they learn about new brands, products and experiences, video reigns supreme: YouTube is the most popular platform with Gen Zs, followed by TikTok, then Instagram.”

Trend alert: bag charms are back. 

IMAGES, VIDEO, GRAPHIC DESIGN, & FREE ONLINE TOOLS

Almost all of these 12 video tools are free, and some can be used on your phone. 

MISCELLANEOUS

This is an older piece, but it checks out: IKEA Hacks for Craft Show Displays. A few of these could be done with non-IKEA items. 

Want to stay up-to-date on a nearly daily basis? Follow me on Bluesky or on LinkedIn, or become a member of my Patreon.

[safety-pin-punk]

Hi!

I’m sort of still getting into punk and learning about everything. You’re blog has been really helpful with resources and everything. Plus your cool.

Okayyy, now my question. I’m a junior in high school and I want to go to college. Pursue further education and all of that stuff. Learn more about the world and critical thinking. But I don’t want to pay a ton of money to a bunch of old ivy dudes.

What’s the right direction to go in for this? Is college a good option if I want to learn? What schools are good places? Where do I learn more about this stuff?

Sorry if this is a lot. Thank you though!

Hey! Thank you for your kindness!!

First off, Im going to stress that you are a junior and you have PLENTY of time to think about this. So dont stress too much right now.

Secondly, I want to preface this with the simple fact of college isnt for everyone. There are SO many ways to survive and thrive in life without it. And thats okay, good even! That being said, this post is just gonna be me talking about college. Under the cut of course

OKAY! So, is college a good option if you want to learn? My answer is yes! I learned a lot at college, both inside and outside my classes. I learned a lot of life lessons, I met people from all over the country (and a few international students). And I learned how to challenge my own beliefs and try to see things from perspectives that I didnt even know could exist prior to college.

But Im sure you were referring to the educational aspect. And truth be told, this heavily depends on both your school and you. Some examples: My school had a phenomenal chemistry program. You couldnt walk out of that program without having learned things if you made it through. But my school also had a very poor fine arts program. And to be quite blunt, I often wondered why any art student chose to stay. But going even further, it depends a lot on the individual as well. I was admittedly not the best student. I wasnt that interested in lab or research compared to some of my classmates, nor did I apply myself as much. And the difference is clear to see when others could rattle off different solvents and what reactions would occur from memory and I would be sitting there dumbfounded.

Next question, what schools are good places? Again, that fully depends on what you want to go to school for. But I’ll tell you what I did and how I chose my school. When I was a junior in high school, I found a list of every 4 year university in my state (I knew I wanted to stay in state, but you can do this for wherever you want to go). I then went through and gave each school a ranking out of 5 (based on vibes, chemistry program, education program, cost, and surrounding area). Once I had it narrowed down to only a few schools, those were the ones I toured. And I chose where to send applications from there.

Though, I cant stress enough how beneficial community college can be. A lot of people get all their gen eds out of the way either before they enroll in a university or over summers. Doing this will save you money and time. Literally not a single person on a university campus would look down on you for this. If anything, they will praise you for being smart. I took a few classes over the summers between semesters just to get them out of the way (and also avoid certain professors).

Where to learn more? Google. Google schools near you. Google schools where you want to go. Google schools ranked nationally in xyz. Google affordable universities. Google universities that have good financial aid programs. Just google so many things. From there, spend time exploring university websites. Read about their community and their academic programs. See if they have virtual tours uploaded. Check out their student activity board social medias to see what it would be like to be there as a student. Sign up for tours. Do an overnight visit if you can!! Or even, just walk around the campus without a tour guide

Best of luck to you on your academic journey! Hope I was a little helpful here

[takaraphoenix]

The downside of being a 90s kid who grew up watching technology and the internet grow and evolve is that you also get to see it devolve.

The way you genuinely can’t google things without quotation marks anymore... and even with them, you won’t get useful results anymore. Used to be that google actually, you know, gave you results. Things that specifically answered the questions you asked and related to the words you typed into the search bar. And logic and reason would tell you that over the past twenty years that would evolve and the results would get more specific and you’d get even better answers, but no. No, it’s all about what websites pay higher prices to be ranked higher in results so the results are even just barely related to what you typed in.

Or the stuff that comes with your computer!

I still remember when you just... got Word with your computer. You just had the official writing program with it. For free. It just went with it. Now that shit costs extra.

Mahjong. I started playing mahjong again and the mahjong that comes preinstalled on my new laptop has ads in it. The program. That is. On my laptop. Has. Ads. In. It.

That’s incomprehensible for me. That’s cursed? How am I supposed to concentrate on this game where there is constant movement in the corner of my vision? And they want me to pay 15 Euro? Fifteen Euro for fucking Mahjong just to get rid of the ad. For mahjong. A game that has since the beginning of time just been... there... on computers...

But you force your weird X Box shit and OneDrive crap onto me in a manner that I can’t even fucking deinstall and I honestly don’t understand why you won’t let me deinstall garbage I don’t want.

I’ve actually come to hate looking for things on Amazon too, because every third row of search results isn’t even related to my search results, they’re just ad placements from Amazon that seem to be stronger than any ad blocker I have on. And in the case of these, I wouldn’t even mind ads - sometimes, these internal ads do bring me to things I end up liking - but the amount of ads make it near unusable, they make the shopping experience unenjoyable and unfriendly and it just wasn’t like that back in the day.

Like, genuinely, sometimes I envy the younger people who just don’t know it differently? Who grew up in this hellscape the way it is because it makes me just so mad to see how much greed has fucked perfectly user-friendly things over.