WordPress has been updated again. This time with some interesting new features.

Really there are two keys that will make managing you site easier.

1. Vastly easier linking within a site

2. A handy administrator bar to speed navigation while updating a site

There are also hundreds of minor improvements under the hood, but item 1 and 2 above are the ones that will help you out every day.

New intra site link example

I found a nice explanation of how to use the new linking feature here. Basically when you are editing a page or a post, you can easily highlight a word or picture, click on link and then search your own site for a post or a page to link to. Click! and you’re done.

The other helpful addition is an administrator bar that stays at the top of the screen while working on your site. This is really handy when you are reviewing the pages of your site and you want to jump in and edit a page, or just straight to the dashboard, or even review comments left on your site.

I might note that the Admin bar seems to have redraw issues with Google chrome. It draws the bar on the screen multiple times.

My friend Amber at National PC Solutions, pointed me to a quiz for website owners. Quiz: Is it time to update your website?

There were some really good questions, like: Does updating the content on your website require the involvement of your technical staff or a third-party web vendor? or Do you manually collect customer information and then re-enter into a separate database? or Does your site house “dynamic” content; i.e. – does the information on it change on a regular basis?

Focus Web Works has simple solutions for all the problems in the article. The one topic that was not addressed is follow-through. The internet is full of people who want to educate you up to the point where they sell you something. Then you will find that support falls on it’s face.

Before I ever sat down to code a website, I worked in the technical support industry for 7 years. 5 of those years, I trained support representatives. Before that I taught at the University of Arizona, while finishing my masters degree. In short, education is a cornerstone of what I offer clients.

The future of the Internet includes websites managed by their owners and I am here to help you get started AND keep going.

If you have any questions, just use my contact page

Click me for big version

Apple just announced the new Macbook Air. Ordinarily I would yawn this off, but this time they did a few interesting things to get my attention.

1. They made it weigh less then 3 pounds
2. It’s less than an inch thick
3. It uses flash memory instead of a hard drive soldered on to the motherboard
4. It’s almost all battery
5. Price starts at $999

In a net shell, you get a notebook with 5 – 7 hours of battery life, that would fit in a notebook. It has a full size screen with a dedicated graphics chip. Everything loads super fast. Virtual memory is super fast. It wakes from sleep instantly. No moving parts to fail (except for the keyboard).

I could easily see myself carrying one of these around all the time. It’s super light and could get me through a work day just about anywhere.

I’ll probably post more on this as my thoughts gell.

On June 8th, Google announced on their company blog that they were using an new searching algorithm (method) for keeping track of all in information on the web. They named this new system Caffeine.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

Google claims that Caffeine provides 50% more up-to-date information than their old system and has more stored information about the Internet than ever before.

Why is this big news: Analysts listen to and watch Google (G) because G’s search engines often provide more traffic to a website than when people just type the address into a web browser.

Google’s… old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

Recently Google posted an article on their webmaster blog explaining their ranking methods. It’s all about quality. Google’s advice to owners of new websites is simple. Get involved in an online community and contribute with substance. Avoid fluff. Humor is OK, but don’t waste people’s time with ads and other junk. They discourage the purchase of links from unrelated sites or doing random link exchanges (where you trade links on sites with people who have nothing in common with you.) It is definitely a long-term game. Getting good rankings on Google is about consistency. It is not for sprinters. This race is for the turtle. Finally, Google suggests that you make it easy for novice users to link to your site. Notice below that you can post a bookmark to