Dominate Your Local Market!

This cartoon is a few years old, but still has a ring of truth to it.

And by the way, BigTonysAllKazooPolkaBand.com really IS taken. But unfortunately for all you Polka Kazoo lovers out there, it’s just ad AdSpam site.

From us here at BobStovall.com, we hope you are all having a wonderful holiday season. No matter what holiday you are celebrating, remember that it’s all about the people. So spend some time with friends and family and bask in the love that the season is all about.

Somehow, not only for Christmas
But all the long year through,
The joy that you give to others
Is the joy that comes back to you.
And the more you spend in blessing
The poor and lonely and sad,
The more of your heart’s possessing
Returns to you glad.
- John Greenleaf Whittier

A collection of WordPress Plug-ins to make a WordPress blog more “search engine friendly.” These plug-ins have been all been available for some time, but I consider them essential and include them in every WordPress installation I do.

Optimal Title is a WordPress plugin that mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before. This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first.
Get it here.

Add-Meta-Tags – This plugin adds XHTML META tags to your WordPress blog. The “activate-it-and-forget-it” settings use the use the categories and tags (WordPress 2.3 and above) of the post for the description and keywords. You cna specify the tgags for the home page. You can have a custom descritpion for each post by filling in the Optional Excerpt box.

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress – This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

Sociable Social Networking Plug-in – Puts user-chooseable social network link buttons on your blog. Just check the ones you want and drag them to put them in the order you want.

WP-DB-Backup – A little plug-in that makes it easy to back-up your WordPress database. Your information is only safe if is backed up. Don’t lose all of your work. Your ISP may back up your server, but having your own copy of the database files can save you a lot of time, trouble or money.

That time of year is coming on us fast! This New Year’s, when you’re taking stock of the past years accomplishments (or lack thereof) and planning for 2008, I thought it would be wonderful to have a plan to accomplish those goals by the end of the year.

Dr. Fred Grosse has a brilliant CD set called Black Belt of the Mind. If you haven’t listened to it, do so very soon.

In the Road Diaries Blog, we have an aucio that describes exactly what Dr. Fred was talking about. It’s simple, it’s ingenious, it’s there for you to listen to.

Listen to Can New Year’s Resolutions ever work?

Sounds like a big promise, and it is!

I’ve heard dozens of great audio program and read dozens of boks and articles on how to set goals and how to take those goals to the next step. This short audio (about 2 minutes) tells the story of how to turn dreams into goals into plans into actions. And it is those actions that make the dreams come true.

Listen to the dreams into reality audio here.

OK, this is getting ridiculous.

At 12:16AM today, I deleted 11,769 spam emails from the Junk folder for three email accounts. Luckily, Apple’s Mail program does a pretty good job of filtering them so I only have to deal with a very small percentage up close and personal.

The program finished deleting them at 12:17 and immediately picked up 67 more spams. I deleted them and it picked up 24 more. I deleted them and it picked up 9. Instead of deleting those 9, I stopped to write this.

In the time it took to write this, Mail picked up 4 more. It’s no wonder that more and more websurfers are using RSS to have information delivered. An RSS subscription is anonymous. If the recipient no longer wishes to receive the information, they just unsubscribe and their email address is never given to anyone. If you’re marketing on the Internet without an RSS feed, you’re making a big mistake that will only get bigger.

Open-Realty, an open source real estate listings manager, generates RSS feeds for both user-designated Featured Listings and for Recently Modified Listings. That way, RSS subscribers can keep up-to-date on price changes, etc.

It also has a Page Editor so you can add other pages such as an “About Us” or “About the Area” page without knowing how to program HTML.

Open-Realty software is open source so it’s free to use. Templates can be used to customize the look and feel of the website or you can design your own template from scratch.

Orange Cat has a variety of comprehensive Open-Realty installation, configuration, and hosting solutions. See OrangeCat.net for more information.