Due to the increasingly popularity of WordPress (WordPress is outperforming Typepad nowadays), it’s not a surprise that there have been a great number of WordPress Theme sites launching across the web, including many Premium Theme Galleries.  Check out Google Trends for WordPress and you’ll see that the popularity trend is stable and is probably going to continue growing.

There are a great number of valid WordPress theme galleries out there but there are also some “not-so-great” galleries or “old” and “outdated” themes still pulling up high in the good ‘ol Google Search (you know you’ve seen them).  Here’s a few places to start if you are looking for a great WordPress Theme.  There’s the gallery hosted by WordPress at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/, also wpsnap.com, freewordpressthemes.com and a newer site called newwpthemes.

If you still can’t find your perfect wordpress theme on any of those sites, maybe think about investing into an unique wordpress theme.  I know a few places to start (one of them being: ewebscapes.com).  Depending on your budget, you can really play the field on getting the right theme for you.

(Source: Bored-Night)

**Update October 23rd, 7:24pm: 2 more fires have started in Camp Pendleton. Soot in Oceanside is becoming bigger. City of Oceanside is watering down hillsides. Some residents are hosing down landscaping.

Photo taken of sun: October 23rd, 1pm

If you are local San Diegan, please donate blankets, sleeping bags, pillows, children’s clothing, shoes, toothbrushes and cell phone chargers to a local evacuation center. Stay only within local areas, as the freeways need to stay clear for emergency personnel and stay off of cell phones if at all possible, to reduce congestion with cell towers.

For those watching the news the fire and smoke is extremely bad down here. At this time, my home is not in danger. I live in North County San Diego, Oceanside. 8 fires are tearing through San Diego, burning much of Rancho Bernardo, Fallbrook and many eastern southern regions. Wild wind changes from the Santa Ana winds are causing much chaos for the firefighters here. Evacuation centers have opened in Oceanside. Our family is sending supplies there now.

Even in Oceanside, you cannot go outside without tasting/smelling the burning in the air. Soot is being kicked up from the vehicles driving on the roads, the air quality is very bad, I can’t see the sun and it appears foggy…smoke is everywhere.

Fortunately the people of San Diego are hanging in there together as a team and family through this process. Warning was early enough for many families. We are working together. Hopefully, the Witch fire (which is 1% contained at the moment) is tamed within the next 24 hours. The fire is being the most destructive and working its way west.

I may not be updating the site this week while I try to help out.

For information:

North County Update To Date Info

SD County Emergency

Donate:

Red Cross - they are also running low on blood supply. Last I heard was down to a 2 day supply

Companies can also donate

What’s going on?

There is talk within the search community that PageRank will no longer be used because it has been abused by some who have inflated their rankings unfairly.

If this speculation is correct, Google may remove PageRank from every website.

Slightly disappointing, as I have a few sites that I was anxiously waiting to reveal a Page Rank… Although, I see some positiveness in this potential action by Google.

No more paying attention to the little green bar….

So many website owners and SEO’s have focused on getting tons of links to their site, forgetting to focus on developing a useful or quality site.   By Google removing PageRank, there is a potential of content value increasing.

Although links are important to Google Ranking of a website, they are not necessary attached to PageRank.  PageRank is not the most important detail to revealing how well your site ranks.

There are plenty of sites that have a PageRank of 2 and are listed at the top of the Google Search results, above sites with higher PageRank.  Placing high in search results should really be the most important factor.  You’ll have a higher success rate placing #1 for your most relevant keywords.

——————

Some of the best movie blunders in existence.

In the “Battle of Carthage” in the Colosseum, one of the chariots is turned over. Once the dust settles you can see a gas cylinder in the back of the chariot.

During the scene when Dorothy and Scarecrow are fighting with the trees, Scarecrow says “I’ll show you how to get apples” and he gets hit by the apples. The very next scene if you quickly look at Dorothy’s shoes, you can see that she is wearing black shoes, not her ruby slippers.

When the stormtroopers break into the control room, the stormtrooper on the right of the screen hits his head on the door frame. On the DVD release they’ve added a thump when he hits it. THUD! While unintentional, it’s still one of the best moments in all the Star Wars films.

In the second half of the film, Frodo has a scar on his lower right cheek, close to his chin. Many times throughout the rest of the film the scar changes position and size on his right cheek. It also appears on his left cheek in flipped shots (most obviously on the slopes of Mount Doom when Sam is cradling his head).

In the scenes where there’s a video link to the docks shown on computer, there’s a bar moving along the bottom of the screen, showing us that it’s actually a video that’s just playing on the computer.

In the scene where Jeff Goldblum is getting the alcohol out of the fridge, he opens the fridge door and it is full of food. When his ex-wife puts the bottle back in the fridge, it’s virtually empty. It’s full again when Jeff reaches back in to get the bottle back.

(Source: BSNews)

I’m reading it everywhere. Many people are wondering if they are losing traffic, page rank or search ranking because Google has discovered that they were selling paid links.

How will sites be penalized? The word is that Google could prevent links from a site or pages in a site from passing Page Rank and drop or remove a PageRank score from ones that already have it. Some webmasters have reported drops of 1-2 scores. To confirm suspicions, Search Engine Land

confirmed with Google that Page Rank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links. In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.

I’ve read numerous posts on this and Search Engine Land summed the positions of all arguments perfectly:

• It’s Google’s search engine. They have every right to say that if you sell links, they might penalize you.
• Google is not telling people what to do with their sites, which is a popular argument point. Google is telling people what to do if they are concerned about doing better in Google. Don’t want to be harmed in Google? Don’t sell links.
• Don’t care about Google? Sell links all you want.
• Despite Google’s policy and even this latest action, they’ll never catch all the paid links. It’s part of the reason I’d like to see them back off the paid links war and instead work out other ways to determine if a link deserves credit, paid or not.
• I don’t want people who innocently sell links to be harmed.

Ugh…Who knows how far back Google has or will be reviewing their database to apply penalties to websites.

I’ve compiled some great articles/posts on SEO/webmaster experts take on Google’s move. It’s very interesting to read the comments.  Please take time to read some of these articles to decide what you want to do with your website. Right now it’s extremely important to think about your TextLinkAds relationship (if you have one), no follow attributes and protecting yourself by creating a robot file (exclude folders from search engine robots/spiders).

Articles:

• Search Engine Land
• Daily Moolah
• Yaro Starak
• David Airey
• Jennifer Laycock
• Garry Conn
• Not So Boring Life (Instructions refer to creating a robot file to get out of supplemental index, but the same method could be used to hide folders you don’t want Search Engines, like Google to see…)
• Matt Cutts

I don’t know how far Google is going to dig up dirt on selling paid links…it’s going to be interesting and a bit scary.

1) Rowan Atkinson Invisible Drum Kit

He is also one of my personal favorites. Rowan Atkinson plays the invisible drums.

2) World of Warcraft Toyota Advert

Here are a couple of my own YouTube findings:

1) Darth Vader being a smartass

2) Mother’s Day

If you’re not familiar with Alexa it tracks the frequency of visits daily to various websites over a period of three months from users who have the Alexa toolbar installed. The traffic is based on “reach” (number of times an Alexa user visits a particular site in 1 day) and page views (number of times a page is viewed by Alexa users).

If you haven’t already, it’s quite easy to download/install the Alexa toolbar which will send data to the central server while you surf the web. Each time you visit a web page utilizing the toolbar, information is sent to the server indicating your IP and the page you are visiting from all users.

Is It Really That Important?

Too many people mistaken concentrating entirely on improving their Alexa ranking.  Getting a low Alexa ranking gives the impression that your site gets a lot of traffic.  Thus, the #1 spot would mean that your website would essentially be receiving the most traffic in the world, which is currently being held by Yahoo.

It seems that if you manage to make it in the top 100,000 it’s a sign your site obtains a reasonable amount of traffic. Currently SusanSuarez.com is currently ranking at 140,260 but I’ve been wondering, is it really worth anything?

Alexa numbers can be wildly misleading and manipulated. How so? Alexa’s free toolbar is used to report back tracking of those utilizing the toolbar. Since not every Internet user has the toolbar installed, Alexa will multiply the number of visitors by a specific margin to estimate the total number of visitors a site may typically get.

For instance: For every Alexa toolbar user that visits a page, Alexa may assume that another nine non-toolbar users visited the same page. For every 100 toolbar visitors, Alexa may estimate 900 non-toolbar users are also visiting the same page within the same 24-hour period.

Can you see where this goes? If you happen to drive a higher percentage of traffic from Alexa toolbar users vs non-toolbar users to your site, you can increase your Alexa rating faster. Alexa doesn’t account for users preferences or habits. Toolbar users tend to visit particular types of sites more frequently…users like webmasters or internet savvy marketers. So if you are an internet entrepreneur and you attract similar people to your website, most likely they will have the toolbar installed which would inflate the Alexa rating.

To sum up, here is a breakdown of pros/cons of using Alexa:

Pros

• It helps advertisers and webmasters determine the real marketing potential of your site. Blogs and ordinary websites get ranked the same way
• Useful tool to compare against a competitor’s site to measure marketing efforts and popularity

Cons

• Fairly small sample size of audience (those that have the Alexa toolbar installed) to measure marketing efforts
• Due to the small sample size, there are millions of websites that may get a lot of traffic but are not ranked by Alexa
• Many people feel that Alexa traffic can be “gamed” to therefore show inaccurate results.

Ways To Improve Ranking

Since there are programs such as TextLinkAds that utilize Alexa ranking, it may be of best interest to amuse yourself with using it. Once installed, here are a few ideas to boost your Alexa ranking:

• Download/Install the Alexa toolbar and surf your own website
• Place the Alexa widget on your website to entice visitors to use it.
• Write on topics that internet-savvy individuals would read and promote it on webmaster forums or social networking sites. Or include your url into your forum signature. There is a higher probability that they have the Alexa toolbar installed
• Write great articles that could gain you a Stumble! or a Digg which could open you up to a network of even more Alexa users
• Get your friends to download the Alexa toolbar
• I haven’t used this before, but I’ve heard you could use an Alexa redirect. Placing http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect? in front of your website’s url will get Alexa to take into consideration clicks on redirected links if the visitor doesn’t have the Alexa toolbar.

Even though the results may be inaccurate due to the requirement of needing the Alexa toolbar installed, a lot of individuals feel that it is valuable for direct advertising and useful for monetizing a site since Alexa focuses on traffic rather than the number of links to it.

—————-

An elderly man in Miami calls his son in New York and says, “I hate to
ruin your day, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are
divorcing. Forty-five years of misery is enough.”

“Pop, what are you talking about?” the son screams.

“We can’t stand the sight of each other any longer,” the old man says.

“We’re sick of each other, and I’m sick of talking about this, so you
call your sister in Chicago and tell her,” and he hangs up.

Frantic, the son calls his sister, who explodes on the phone, “Like
heck they’re getting divorced,” she shouts, “I’ll take care of this.”

She calls her father immediately and screams at the old man, “You are
NOT getting divorced! Don’t do a single thing until I get there. I’m
calling my brother back! , and we’ll both be there tomorrow. Until
then, don’t do a thing, DO YOU HEAR ME?” and hangs up.

The old man hangs up his phone and turns to his wife. “Okay,” he says,
“They’re coming for Easter and paying their own airfares.”

—————-

Three explorers are walking through the jungle, as explorers do, and they come across a tribe of cannibals.

The cannibals take the explorers prisoner and call the chief.

The chief informs the explorers that they will tested to see whether they will live. Their task is to go into the jungle and collect 100 pieces of the same fruit. He’ll explain the rest when they get back.

So off the explorers go, one returns with 100 apples (yes apples grow in the jungle :P) and the chief says “Right, your task is to shove each of them up your arse without changing your facial expression. If you manage it, we will let you go. If you fail, we’ll eat you”

The explorer gets about 3 apples into it before wincing, so the cannibals eat him.

The second explorer returns with berries. After hearing the task he’s sure he can do it. He gets to about 95 when suddenly he bursts out laughing. So the cannibals eat him.

At the pearly gates the first explorer says the second explorer “What happened?! You were home free! Why did you laugh??”

Second explorer says “I saw the third explorer coming back with pineapples!”

—————-

This elderly couple were watching TV and the husband said, “Agnes, I am going to take a walk to the ice cream store. Do you want anything?”

The wife says “Sure, get me a hot fudge sunday, whipped cream, no nuts and a cherry.” The husband nods his head and starts heading out the door. The wife yells at him, “Henry, you should write down what I want. You have been forgetting alot of things lately.”

The husband snaps back “For Christ’s sake, Agnes, I will not forget your hot fudge sunday.”

About 1/2 hour later the old geezer gets home and hands is wife a hot dog with ketchup and onions on it.

“Damn you, yells the wife. I told you I wanted mustard.”

—————-

After every flight, pilots fill out a form called a gripe sheet, which conveys to the mechanics any problem they had with the airplane during the flight. The mechanics read and correct the problem, and then explain in writing on the lower half of the form what remedial action was taken.

The pilot reviews the gripe sheets before the next flight. Never let it be said that ground crews and engineers lack a sense of humor. Here are some actual maintenance problems submitted by QANTAS pilots and the solutions recorded by maintenance engineers.

By the way, QANTAS is the only major airline that has never had an accident.

(P = The problem logged by the pilot.)
(S = The solution and action taken by the engineer.)

P: Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.
S: Almost replaced left inside main tire.

P: Test flight OK, except auto-land very rough.
S: Auto-land not installed on this aircraft.

P: Something loose in cockpit.
S: Something tightened in cockpit.

P: Dead bugs on windshield.
S: Live bugs on back-order.

P: Autopilot in altitude-hold mode produces a 200 feet-per-minute descent.
S: Cannot reproduce problem on ground.

P: Evidence of leak on right main landing gear.
S: Evidence removed.

P: DME volume unbelievably loud.
S: DME volume set to more believable level.

P: Friction locks cause throttle levers to stick.
S: That’s what they’re there for.

P: IFF inoperative.
S: IFF always inoperative in OFF mode.

P: Suspected crack in windshield.
S: Suspect you’re right.

P: Number 3 engine missing.
S: Engine found on right wing after brief search.

P: Aircraft handles funny.
S: Aircraft warned to straighten up, fly right, and be serious.

P: Target radar hums.
S: Reprogrammed target radar with lyrics.

P: Mouse in cockpit.
S: Cat installed.

P: Noise coming from under instrument panel. Sounds like a midget pounding on something with a hammer.
S: Took hammer away from midget.