Kyle Ritter

I am never an early adopter, particularly when it comes to new search engines and new social networks, but I have to say, I find the new search engine Blekko to actually be an useful tool. Not so much for it’s search results, but more for the SEO data is provides. I suspect those in the web business will find more uses for it than the average users. I was most excited by the Duplicate Content tab, since BarFly often experiences content theft. However, it needs refined. Even presenting a little bit more data, for instance the full path of the page that contains the duplicate content, and an example of the duplicated content, would be a pure a winner.

If you look at the currents results for duplicated BarFly content, it’s hard to decipher what (of the thousands of pages) content has been duplicated and on what exact page? Is the Oregonian really stealing our data?

Doubtful, but I do hope this is refined more – could be an incredible little tool.

I always forget about moldy old sites I own, and then I saw another automatic renewal for Point-of-sale.us, which covers point of sale systems.. I think the content on there is about 5 years old. Maybe I should clean it up. Maybe.

Opera released version 3.0 of their mini mobile browser today. I’m a-gonna have to download it. I’ve always been an advocate of developing sites that were mobile friendly (provided they are sites that a mobile user would find useful.)

They are of course dropping the “web 2.0″ buzzwords, but have some added nifty features such as secure connections, which makes me little less hesitant to use my Razr to check my bank account (that is, if my bank had a mobile friendly website…which they don’t.)
Perhaps this latest version of Opera will do for the mobile web what Netscape did for the standard web: create a positive feedback loop where more users creates more demand which creates more sites which creates more users.

Anyway, here is the link.

I added a message board to BarFly Magazine the other day.

I had problem when I initally did the static urls, it wasn’t letting me get into the PHPBB admin panel. Not sure what was causing that.

I also recently did some work for Remote Control Mail. Interesting service they are offering, it was a quicky design done about 12 hours before launch. There is alot of work that it needs done before it is truly ready, but it was done enough for launch.

I’m also looking at building a site for people relocating to Portland. My friend Carla Muss Jacobs does an incredible job of finding homes for out of towners to purchase, I’d like to help her business out a bit.

After taking many custom orders for octagon gable vents, I figured it was time to add them to TheBuilderStore.com. It only made sense, since we were probably missing out on traffic from those kinds of search queries.

Dr. James Kilgore, a plastic surgeon in Portland, has recently expanded his service offerings. In addition to offering botox in Portland, he is also offering Restylane and Hylaform Plus®.

It’s great to see that my clients keep up on updating their sites with new information. That will always translate into more revenues for them.

I’ve been recently watch many of my sites climb to #1 – #3 spots for their terms across all of major search engines. This has been a slow process, for some sites it took years. I hadn’t even checked my logs for monthes on one particular site, and when I finally did, I saw that it’s traffic had quadrupled in that time, mostly from the SEs. This opened up a door to explore more business relationships that were previously closed to me. While this is still shaky ground, if google decides my sites aren’t all that special, then it’s back to square run. Such is business though. It’s amazing how this kind of positioning improved my business clout, when before I had nothing to bring to the table. It all sounds so silly, like such an intangible and unstable piece of collateral. Very strange indeed.

Seems that where ever I live, I always end up making a website or twenty about it. So now I’ve been back in Portland for 8 months or so, and what do I do? First my pal Jason the Videographer and I built our Portland Bar review website and blog. Now, when I really should be doing other work, I started up the Portland Oregon Directory.

If you know me, I’ve got a fairly large hard-on for using geeking phrases like “geo-targeting”, so I think that is why I keep building these freakin’ sites. Anybody wanna buy some of my regional-centric domains that currently do nothing?

I have recently added Rectangle Gable Vents to TheBuilderStore.com gable end vent inventory. This has lead to an increased number of inquiries from homeowners due in part to search engine traffic and Froogle feeds. While my true goal is to sell to home builders, contractors, and architects, increasing the sales volume from homeowners does help with exposure and our marketing efforts. I am very excited about the future of this website.

Adobe to buy Macromedia for $3.4 billion

This could either be the best thing, or the worst thing in the world for a few reasons:

(1) Getting rid of Macromedia Freehand and just using Adobe Illustrator would be great
(2) Getting rid of Adobe GoLive and keeping Dreamweaver would be awesome.
(3) Using the web graphic tools in Fireworks and scrapping Image Ready.

To quote the article:

Adobe is best known for its PDF, or Portable Document Format, technology for presenting text files online. Macromedia’s flagship product is the Flash animation software.

My retort to this is: Adobe’s Acrobat PDF reader is best known for bringing the processor to it’s knees, and causing your browser to lockup for minutes on end. Flash is known to annoy the living shit out of most websurfers due to long load times, browser hijacking, intros, background music, and unintuitive navigation.

Should be interesting, I wonder if the renounded Photoshop filters such as the ridiculously overlame “LensFlare” will be incorporated into Flash. Yargh. My head hurts.