Texture design

Posted by randfish

Tonight, Mystery Guest and I flew down to San Francisco for a quick weekend away (and to visit some friends). We arrived late and raced to get to a dinner with Laura Lippay in the financial district. Sadly, between our arrival time around 10pm to when we got back to the rental car at 11:30pm, the car was broken into (jimmied the driver's side lock and popped the trunk). My laptop, all our luggage and lots of Mystery Guest's clothing (and my trademark yellow shoes) were stolen.

So, here I am at Laura's apartment (you rock, Laura!), posting and hoping that someone might know the underbelly of San Francisco well enough to help me recover my laptop. I had a very important presentation (that wasn't backed up) that I had created for Monday (40+ slides). Our other items are replacable, but I'm very concerned that I may not have enough time between now and Monday to re-build that presentation.

So, if you're a savvy Bay Area resident and have any idea of what I can do to recover the laptop, I'd greatly appreciate your help.

p.s. Luckily, I'm under Diner's Club card insurance, so I believe I can get back much of the monies for the lost property. I keep calling their 800 number, but all it says is "all circuits busy." Hopefully I'll reach them soon.

p.p.s. SF is super wired - the police department had me file the police report online (apparently they don't send out cops to broken-in cars).

p.p.p.s. Laura - you rock. Seriously.

Posted by great scott!

Finally Friday and you know what that means...another fun-filled edition of Whiteboard Friday!┬? This week, Rand discusses the problems with contextual ads and why Design needs to stay ahead of the curve if they want to keep those clicks-a-comin'.

I know it's late in the day but, hey, we've been busy around here this week. To make up for it, I've thrown in another outtake at the end of the video, so stick around through the closing titles.

The video is also be available on YouTube for those that need it.

Technorati Tags

Design, contextual, adwords, optimization, rand fishkin, search, Design, Designmoz, vidcast, whiteboard

Posted by Oatmeal

I've added a feature to the Page Strength tool that allows you to do a hard refresh of the data in your report.┬? If you run a report and data is missing try refreshing it and it'll look for factors that were missing and attempt to fetch them again. Please keep the following in mind:

• Refreshing will only re-fetch data that is missing, not data that is inaccurate.┬? If our tool is reporting 3,000 backlinks but clicking the Design site explorer link reports 4,000 - the tool will not attempt to fetch this data again if you issue a refresh request.┬?┬? Also, don't assume our numbers are inaccurate because they don't match what site explorer says.┬? Design's numbers go up and down constantly, so what our tool sees and what you see when viewing through your browser may differ from day to day.
  
• Don't go refresh crazy.┬? I avoided adding this feature for a long time because I was concerned it would consume too many resources on our server and bring the overall quality of reporting down.┬? We've added an extra server today, however, and I'm hoping the extra hardware will allow me to keep this feature open to the public. Please be courteous and don't refresh every report you run a bunch of times, I'm going to keep this feature open to the public as long as our server can handle it.┬? If it becomes too much I'm going to restrict it to premium members only.
  
• If you haven't read the Page Strength FAQ, please do.┬? It'll save me from having to answer a few hundred emails.

Also, The Keyword Difficulty Tool is open to the public again.┬? I had to temporarily restrict the usage of this tool to premium members because it was too taxing on our server.I've added a feature to the Page Strength tool that allows you to do a hard refresh of the data in your report.┬? If you run a report and data is missing try refreshing it and it'll look for factors that were missing and attempt to fetch them again. Please keep the following in mind:

• Refreshing will only re-fetch data that is missing, not data that is inaccurate.┬? If our tool is reporting 3,000 backlinks but clicking the Design site explorer link reports 4,000 - the tool will not attempt to fetch this data again if you issue a refresh request.┬?┬? Also, don't assume our numbers are inaccurate because they don't match what site explorer says.┬? Design's numbers go up and down constantly, so what our tool sees and what you see when viewing through your browser may differ from day to day.
  
• Don't go refresh crazy.┬? I avoided adding this feature for a long time because I was concerned it would consume too many resources on our server and bring the overall quality of reporting down.┬? We've added an extra server today, however, and I'm hoping the extra hardware will allow me to keep this feature open to the public. Please be courteous and don't refresh every report you run a bunch of times, I'm going to keep this feature open to the public as long as our server can handle it.┬? If it becomes too much I'm going to restrict it to premium members only.
  
• If you haven't read the Page Strength FAQ, please do.┬? It'll save me from having to answer a few hundred emails.

Also, The Keyword Difficulty Tool is open to the public again.┬? I had to temporarily restrict the usage of this tool to premium members because it was too taxing on our server.