Social media is becoming pretty hyped out there, and a lot of people are trying to tell you what to do with it and how to handle it. For most of these “gurus,” you can pay anywhere from $27 to hundreds for their social media system.

In my experience, it comes down to the simple principle of treating others the way you would want to be treated, and in twitter’s case: “tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.” So for all you wascaly wabbits out there, just keep that in mind and you will grow the be successful.

Here’s an awesome video from Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing, talking about interruption marketing:

So, the people behind this video also have a book that I’m reading right now:

Inbound Marketing Book, Click For Amazon.com

I am thoroughly enjoying this book.
Not only does it show examples and
good ideas, but it gives specific tasks
to follow for you to put the ideas to
work for your website and/or business.
(I will write a full review soon)

One major security issue online is trying to protect your email address. Whether you’re a website owner or just someone who needs to post something online, your email is one of the parts of your identity that you need to keep close.

So, there is a great solution, which lets you hide your email address in the form of a url, and its called src.im:

What scr.im does is create a page where it checks if the user is human before revealing the email address, therefore protecting against bots and many hackers.

See an example here to email me: http://scr.im/thewebleap (notice they give you a custom URL)

The best part about it is that its free, and it works well.
Just go to http://src.im to create your page and start protecting your email when you want to make it available for real humans online.

Enjoy!

Google will be updating its algorithm soon after the Holidays and is set to affect almost every website indexed on its pages. Google Caffeine is Google’s next step in innovating its search engine algorithm, giving a whole new feel to search result indexing.

An early web scoop claims that the following criteria will most likely be the major factors that will affect search engine rankings:

• Website speed: most websites that are indexed in Google’s search pages are quick in delivering content/images, so it’s no surprise that page load speed will be a deciding factor if your page will make it to the top of Google’s first-round draft picks.
• Broken links: just like the web is interconnected and interweaved, the Google crawler makes sure that the website is not only content rich, but also intact when it comes to links. It is a plus factor that all links are working properly, because not only do they affect your potential surge in search rankings, but also do they affect your visitors’ impression of the site.
• Bad neighborhoods: reputation is all-the-more important when it comes to getting Google’s attention. If your website is part of a spamming syndicate or hosts a few links that lead to those spam sites, don’t expect too much positive net reputation & site optimization. We do not know for a fact if a barrage of back links promoting your website would still work on the soon-to-be implemented algorithm Google has in store for its users. But just to be safe, regularly check the comments you receive on your website and make sure you’re not doing something dastardly, say for example posting useless content on a high-ranking website without taking into consideration the potential effect this will have on your website.
• The over-all quality of your website: Content is everything, experts say. If there’s one commonality we notice on high-ranking websites – it’s the overall content and layout of the website, which pleases our senses, that makes it stand out among others. Original content and SEO-optimized articles are the key factors that make a huge impact on search engine rankings. Too much clutter or widgets will only worsen the status of your site. The idea is as simple as this: write rich content, get rich results.

To be sure that you’re Caffeine-ready, make a checklist if you’ve accomplished the following tasks:

1. Check your comments and linkbacks for spam content/urls. Google does not like when one website promotes a spam site. Clean up on the content a make sure not a trace a of spam is in your website.
2. Refurbish the design if necessary. If your website is lacking the snazzy appeal top-ranking websites have, invigorate it by applying a neat-looking, fast-loading and user-friendly template. People like the minimalist and intuitive features of Twitter and Facebook – that’s the reason why they flock into these sites.
3. Google favors social bookmarking. If you’ve been missing out on the fact that most websites get much of their traffic driven by social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and Furl, guess what – it’s time to take the leap by using these bookmarking sites to your advantage. Not only will you get loads of traffic if the content your produce catches their attention, but also will you get to know more about how the web community works. There’s no end to the massive community social bookmarking sites produce.
4. If you’ve already done all of those listed above, remember that it is not enough that you follow protocol, don’t stop there… innovate. If there’s one thing both the average user and Google like about a website, it is always authentic and most often offbeat content.

What are your thoughts on Google Caffeine? Please reply below.

Recently, I got an invite to preview google wave, so I’m on the inside now and loving it

Also, I will be giving away a google wave invitation to a reader very soon, so keep your eyes out. (Subscribe if you’d like)
I will make a post for people with information.

So, now to the real content – how to add HTML to google wave posts.
I used this handy feature to add youtube video to a google wave.

What you do is…

1. Once you are in a wave blip, click the “add gadget by URL” button:
   
2. Than, in the popup window, type in the following URL:

   http://wave-ide.appspot.com/html.xml

   and click “Add”

3. Next, you should see a box in your wave that looks like:
   
4. Simply click on the “Edit” link and it will reveal an html editor:
   
5. Put in your HTML and click “view” – and you are done!
6. *For youtube videos, copy the “embed code” from the youtube page
   and than paste it into the HTML editor.

The one thing I don’t like about this that google should fix is that you have to remember and type in the widget URL every time.
To fix it, they can simply have a “recent widgets” in the popup for “Add widget by URL”.

What do you think? Any other good ideas for Me, Google and/or Wave specifically? Drop a comment.

P.S. For all the wavers out there who want to add me, just shoot me an email: kyle@thewebleap.com

The wonderful and popular “Beatiful jQuery Slider” worked great, but I ran into some questions that I, along with many others before me, had to figure out by looking through all the code, much of which is not necessary.

Here is a screenshot of the slider: (pretty nice eh?)

I created a slightly modified version (free, of course) with notes in the code to guide you in different ways.

Some of the features you will find:

1. A cleaned up scripts.js file
2. Easy-to-understand notes in various files to guide in customization.
3. I changed some the css id names, etc for increased integrability for an html or blog page
   (f.e. removing the body css and dispersing necessary attributes to other classes)
4. 2 different folders: 1 for the default slider with notes, the other is ready to integrate into a page.

Big credit and a shout-out goes to Ravindra from dream css for making the original slider. We love it! I just wanted to answer some of the questions in the files and clean it up a bit to make it easier to use for people.

In the notes, I answer questions like:

1. How to change the dimensions of the slider without loosing any functionality i.e. gaps, etc.
2. How to adjust the black navigation bar properly and change its size
3. How to change the delay between transitions
4. How to change the speed of the transitions

And I made it all much easier to understand!

Download Kyle’s Beautiful jQuery Slider

So, If you have any other insight on this, or comments, etc.
Please reply below, because I wanna hear it!