Historical Web Pages – My Personal Websites

After looking up some of my old domains on the Internet Wayback Machine, I quickly went down memory lane when I started seeing some of the very first web pages I ever put online. These web pages were simple, static pages full of animated GIFs, randomly placed links and even a few surprises here and there. And just like my sites today, they each reflected the various interests I had growing up.

Froggy’s (“Cool Links and Metallica Pictures”)

In high school, a friend and I took a class that required us to learn HTML and to create a personal website for a class project. I was amazed at all the cool things you could do with web code and after splashing it with some images and sounds, you had an interactive page that the whole world could see. Unfortunately for me, our school websites were only accessible through the school so my 15 minutes would have to wait just a bit longer.

It was at that point when I decided to seek external ways to get my own web page online. Since I didn’t have any real money at the time to invest in such an idea, I quickly discovered that some web hosting companies offered free hosting in exchange for them putting some small advertisements on the bottom of each page. I had no problem with this and Froggy’s was born.

When I get other sites that worked on uploaded, they will appear on this page.

Top 10 Must Follow Poker Tweeters

Receiving real-time updates from the Twitterverse

twitter-community-pokerThe micro blogging site Twitter has more than 1 million registered users according to PC Mag’s 2011 data. Athletes, even poker professionals, prefer connecting with their fans using this platform. If you’re a fan of poker and want to get in touch with the latest trend and updates from your favorite player(s), then we have a treat for you. Below, we’ll show you the biggest poker names to follow in the Twitterverse and learn why you need to hear them out.

  1. WSOP Official Account
    Get the latest news about the World Series of Poker tournament by following them on Twitter. They post updates about what’s trending in the game as well as exclusive news for famous WSOP players. The people responsible for maintaining this account also try their best to reply promptly to fans’ inquiries.
  2. Party Poker
    This company’s Twitter account made it to our list because it provides followers with the latest and exclusive news about promotions and tournaments online and live. They even have tweets featuring the newest videos and photographs about the poker world as well as their signed players.
  3. Poker News
    Follow @PokerNews to get live news and updates about what’s happening on the felt table. Their official account also gave fans a chance to Tweet-Chat with their favorite player during PokerNews Twitter Takeovers.
  4. Kara Scott
    Fans of TV personality and poker player Kara Scott can now send short messages to her directly using social media. Learn more about her interests and hobbies outside of the felt table by reading her tweets.
  5. Daniel Negreanu
    The most popular professional card player known on the micro blogging site as @RealKidPoker has more than 250,000 followers. He also shares useful information including his views about life, the latest happening in the game, and his newest Vlog entries.
  6. Joe Navarro
    A former FBI agent, @Navarrotell, Navarro tweets about the art of reading body language. It’s not just helpful to card enthusiasts, but also to those who are interested in the learning about the psychology behind the moves.
  7. Chad Allan Holloway
    Sports fans get your updates from the Senior News Editor of Poker News @ChadAHolloway. He talks about football team Miami Dolphins and even some bits of movie buzz.
  8. Phil Ivey
    Fans want to learn from one of the best players around. If you’re wondering about where to get tips and tricks of the game, follow Phil Ivey. He answers queries as well as share photos about everything under the sun.
  9. Phil Hellmuth
    Are you interested in learning the secrets of living a good life? Follow Mr. Hellmuth (@PhilHellmuth) and you’ll get an idea of how a big winner relaxes with his family and friends.
  10. Bill Rini
    Blogger, poker fan, and traveler Bill Rini (@BillRini) shares his insights about his hobbies, especially those that concern the felt table. Read his tweets and share in his enthusiasm as you tweet-chat with him about the facets of the game.

WebMeUp – New Online SEO Tools

SEO has become an industry in and of itself and staying on top of it has become more of a chore than maintaining your website in the first place. There are few options in this arena and one of them is to fork over hundreds or thousands of dollars to hire SEO professionals to optimize your website and steer you in the right direction of gaining online exposure.

Or you can use the data tools that WebMeUp has put together to help you get the most granular snapshot of your website(s) possible.

WebMeUp

This online SEO service provides you with a central dashboard that displays everything you need to better optimize your website. This screenshot gives you an idea of just how much data can be found in your account:

WebMeUp

WebMeUp treats your websites as projects and depending on which plan you go with, you can have anywhere from 3 to 30 projects and up to 10,000 pages per website being crawled and monitored. I’ve been using the service for about 3 weeks now and I must say that I’m not sure how I attempted SEO before!

It’s easy to throw up a WordPress website and load it with various SEO plugins and other tools to help optimize your content, but most of these tools make changes site-wide and don’t really tell you why the changes help or more importantly, how you can use these changes to get your visitors engaged and focused on your content. When I log into WebMeUp, I’m able to see current stats on how my site appears to the major search engines and how well it’s performing on the top social networks. If there’s an error, I know about. If one of my page titles is too long, it tells me. If I have broken links, I can resolve them. And all of that is just on the first page!

Site Structure

In dealing with your individual pages, Site Structure is one of the best features due to its ability to drill down to very specific details regarding incoming and outgoing links for EACH page on your site, whether or not an image has an alt tag, what the Page Rank is for each link, is it follow or nofollow and does it provide a 301 redirect or not.

Here’s a screenshot of my own summary page:
WebMeUp Site Structure

If you want to see further detail, simply click on the Details tab and you can go right into every single folder that your site has to see all pages, all links (incoming and outgoing), PR, etc. on everything! Have you ever wished you could remember which pages and posts your site links to? Have you ever forgotten how your “web” of a website is intertwined and would like to visualize the linking structure without having to go through each page manually?? This one section on WebMeUp would save you tremendous amounts of time!

More Tools

Ranking Factors – Take a quick look at your Alexa Ranking, Compete Rank, Google PageRank and overall visibility. This toolset also shows you basic domain information, whether or not your site appears in popular directory lists and how much interaction you have on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

Keywords and Rankings – This is where SEO masters will thrive! Start by adding specific keywords and phrases that are related to your site and within seconds, you can get an overview of how well you rank on the major search engines or worse, whether you rank at all. Having this tool allows you to better optimize your pages and links to gain higher rankings for your chosen keywords.

Competitors – One of the more interesting features of WebMeUp is the ability to place competitors’ websites right next to yours in just about every data report, giving you a real-world comparison between how well your site is doing and that of another website ranking close by. This tool can help you focus directly on one or more websites in an effort to maximize your results without the guesswork. Say goodbye to manual searches!

Backlinks – This section will show you all the backlinks your site has and what the PR is of each page the link is on. Now you can pinpoint where your best traffic is coming from. I was able to use the feature to find out about a related website after they linked to me on their top page. Of course, I was able to link back to them and we have since developed a partnership in which we share links and information.

My Two Cents

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not the greatest at SEO and every time I feel I’m getting the hang of it, I notice my rankings don’t always stay near the top. SEO is a very interesting segment of managing a website of any size and one that often changes frequently and needs constant tweaking and updating. Like many of you out there, I do this site as a hobby and I don’t have the capital to spend on hiring someone full time just to keep up on SEO.

Instead, I’ve been able to use WebMeUp to keep everything organized and managed in one nice little package. It’s one thing to get someone to optimize your site or to use a free WordPress plugin that can set things up the way they’re supposed to be, but it’s another to not have the right data to know if these things are actually doing your site any good. WebMeUp isn’t free, but I can assure you that even just a few of the many features I’ve covered are worth the monthly cost, yet you will get everything and more! But seriously, don’t take my word for it…go get yourself a 2-week free trial and see what I mean.

VYou.com – Video Responses To Life's Questions

In the NEVER-ENDING quest to socialize online, expand your reach as a blogger or to become an internet star, VYou brings together the desire to post videos online with that of providing opinions on everyday questions from everyday people.

The premise is simple…ask a question of someone and get a video response back and/or find questions already being asked and create your own video response. In either case, VYou is providing a large database of searchable answers to topics of interest. As a user of some other ‘answer’ sites like Yahoo! Answers or Answers.com, I actually find this service to be pretty damn cool. While most of the questions I’ve watched so far seem to be merely opinions, there are a few people who consider themselves experts in various topics and do provide detailed responses.

Features

Just like any respectable social networking platform out there, VYou offers the ability to follow other users, create status updates and link your account to Facebook and Twitter. However, the entire service is all about videos. This means that instead of posting savvy one-liner status updates to your wall, you’re actually posting videos. You can no longer hide behind your keyboard!

On a technical side, VYou is highly portable in that you can embed your videos and/or entire profile just about anywhere. There doesn’t appear to be an official WordPress plugin, but given that the videos are embedded using a simple iFrame, there really doesn’t need to be one. What’s really cool is that because these videos are short and to the point, you can embed them directly into your articles without having your visitors sit through any fluff or advertising. As an example, I’ve posted a video answer here for your viewing pleasure.

That’s pretty much it. 🙂

My Two Cents

I have yet to record my first video, but so far I like the idea of this site. As an example of a serious use of this site, I was thinking how cool would it be for politicians or other people with clout to be able to sit down and record a series of short video answers to questions that all us regular people send in. Google+ has Hangouts, but it can be a process to set everything up and even when it’s all live, you still only get 9 people max in the session.

Celebrities can use the service to reach out to their fans. While Twitter and Facebook offer ways to do the same, the video response is far more engaging than simple tweets and Wall updates.

MyMagic+ by Disney – New Brand Loyalty and Sales Generating Bracelet

Anyone familiar with the experience of visiting a Disney park will tell you that a lot of the day’s fun will be sucked up by having to stand in lines to do (and buy) just about anything. On top of all that, if you’re traveling to your destination, you must plan well in advance to ensure you have everything in place: a booked hotel room, the tickets are purchased, spending money is set aside, food and snack budgets generated, etc.

Once you’re there, you also have to plan your day(s) so you can see and do everything you want. Over the years, Disney has been great at providing the latest and greatest in technology and service aimed at enhancing and speeding up processes at their theme parks. At Walt Disney World in Florida, they have streamlined almost everything by creating somewhat of a miniature community just for their guests. But even with transportation between parks, passes that get you into every theme park, FastPass on select rides and even Disney currency, they are still going a step further.

MyMagic+By spring of this year, Disney park-goers will be able to handle many of the mundane transactions using only a fancy wristband. On paper, this sounds amazing. Imagine not having to wait in line to buy tickets. Imagine never having to get a physical FastPass again. Imagine never having to remember you room key. In fact, with the new MyMagic+ system, you wouldn’t even need to remember to bring your money! All of you personal information is stored on this bracelet and can be accessed simply by tapping it to the ticket machine, cash register, FastPass dispenser and your hotel room.

Amazing it might be, but scary it is as well. It’s bad enough losing a cell phone loaded to the brim with personal information, contacts, emails, photos and more, but now we have to worry about losing our little magic bracelet too? Disney claims they are aware of the privacy concerns and has stated they have measures in place to not only protect that privacy from prying eyes, but also to restrict it from Disney itself. For example, one of the features would allow children’s names and basic information such as a birthday to be encoded into the wristband allowing character meetings to be far more personal than ever before, but parents can opt out of this feature. No longer would Snow White have to ask for a name…she can now receive this information via the wristband. I’m assuming this would still have to be voiced to her by another cast member through an earpiece or something, but the kids will be amazed nonetheless.

Right now, this technology is being brought only to Walt Disney World, but if proven successful, will no doubt be in every Disney theme park worldwide. From there, it should move to just about every other theme park as well. Disney is at the helm of the theme park industry bringing in some $12.9 billion annually and any change they make in the way they do business is sure to change the way others do it as well.

It’s no secret in business that knowing what your consumers want and need is the main ingredient of success, however many consumers don’t offer this information up freely or some businesses never ask. At Disneyland here in California, exiting guests can always expect to see those iPad-holding cast members asking all sorts of mundane questions such as, “How many rides did you go on today?” While they seem irrelevant to us, Disney uses this information to find out how guests are using their parks. With the MyMagic+ system in place, they no longer have to ask…the bracelets will be able to tell them EVERYTHING. Much if this information is likely going to be anonymous—things like how long you waited in line for rides, how often you stopped to take a break and how many churros you ate are not required to be linked to any specific person, but the question will always be in people’s minds…how much of my personal information is out there?

Disney says the bands themselves do not contain any personal info. So it seems that the band would be just a unique identifier that connects to the system and then retrieves info as needed. They went on to say that a pin number would be required for purchases over $50 and the bands could also be deactivated by a cast member or via the smartphone app should one become lost. These features should ease the minds of those who fear the loss of theft of such a device.

For as many fears that this technology brings to light, there are just as many pleasantries. Disney plans to eliminate the turnstiles at the front gates because you would only need to tap your wristband on a small pole when walking in. They can remove the FastPass system entirely and move it to the smartphone app so you can reserve a FastPass at any time. They can alter their workforce to be more efficient during busy times, while saving money when it’s slow.

My Two Cents

As a well-versed Disney Annual Passholder, I can say the benefits from this system will trickle down to everyone. While it won’t reduce the amount of people still in the parks, it will allow me to customize my day around the crowds. In time, I hope that Disney will use the statistical data from this system to better inform all guests of the best times to do things as well is NOT to do things. I also imagine that MyMagic+ will be able to generate almost perfect wait times for the signs at the beginning of each ride.

I’m an advocate of protecting personal information, but I’m also a huge fan of streamlining processes. If Disney can uphold their end of the bargain by protecting customer data, this could be the biggest shift in business Disney parks have ever seen! There’s not mention if the bracelets are going to be re-usable or just a crappy throw-away device, but I can bet that Annual Passholders would be able to buy a more permanent solution…perhaps even some custom design that can be personalized and possibly even fashionable. We already carry our passes on us anyway…we might as well put it on our arm, right?!

We have yet to see what a full implementation of this system looks like, but so far it looks like a good move on Disney’s part.

FISA Amendments Act Could Pass – Should We Be Worried?

FISASpeaking not only as a blogger, but as a citizen of this country, I feel that ANY legislation being considered to regulate the Internet is a very slippery slope to head down. Be it censorship or the ability to freely monitor it for criminal activity; to me it’s all the same. As it stands, the Internet is a wide-open world of free thoughts and speech from everywhere on the planet. Since its exponential growth in the early 2000s, the Internet has changed the face of everything from how we communicate to how we do business. For better or for worse, this connectivity is now sewn into the fabric of our lives, but even with all the negative side-effects of that powerful machine, there comes very real positive elements. This positive technology is now being threatened…again.

What I’m talking about today is a new legislative Amendment, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allowing intelligence agencies to monitor international communications via the Internet in hopes that they might stumble upon some activity deemed to be illegal. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) properly defined what the FISA Act means for all of us:

The FISA Amendments Act continues to be controversial; key portions of it were challenged in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court this term. In brief, the law allows the government to get secret FISA court orders—orders that do not require probable cause like regular warrants—for any emails or phone calls going to and from overseas. The communications only have to deal with “foreign intelligence information,” a broad term that can mean virtually anything. And one secret FISA order can be issued against groups or categories of people—potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of Americans at once.

To me, I understand this as being illegal search and seizure! While I’m all for catching the bad guys, I’m not willing to do it at my own expense. This is like opening your front door a couple of times a week to allow the police to search your home for any illegal activity on the off chance that they’ll find the “real person” they’re looking for. This has got to stop! Otherwise, we’re going to be a nation of lemmings marching to the beat of the government drum. Step out of line and you’re dead.

But fear not, Sen. Rand Paul has our back! He is proposing a new Amendment called the “Fourth Amendment Protection Act” which re-asserts the protections of the 4th Amendment as well as extending it’s protections to third party searches conducted by intelligence agencies. These searches usually target the likes of AT&T and Google by forcing them to expose stored data on their customers.

It’s a shame that our current administration seems hellbent on destroying everything that’s great about this country. And they do it under the pretext that they are protecting us which makes it much more sickening.

6 Reasons To Leave Facebook For Google Plus – And 3 Reasons Not To

Google Plus is the new kid on the block and compared to Facebook, it’s still a small kid. However, Google Plus has been gaining huge momentum in the last year that it has been available. Part of this gain has been from the fact that Google operates on so many levels within the web community and Google+ interacts seamlessly with almost all of them. Plus, it helped that Google began forcing all YouTube users to link their accounts with a Google+ profile. So even though Google+ has over 400 million users, only about 100 million are active on a monthly basis.

It might seem like a daunting task to start fresh on a large-scale social networking site considering that you’ve likely been on Facebook for so many years now, but after my experiences with Google Plus, I’m about ready to drop Facebook completely! But let’s not jump the gun completely…check out the pros and cons below to see if Google+ is right for you.

Reasons to jump ship

  1. Advertising – Facebook is full of it. It’s not always so apparent too. With all the adverts for game requests, sponsored links and now promoted wall posts, Facebook has become a haven for cyber junk that you are probably getting really sick of. I know I am. Now, this doesn’t mean that Google+ doesn’t have the potential for falling into the same traps, but my guess is that since Google has more than one service, they don’t need Google+ to be their cash cow. Whereas Facebook now has shareholders to answer to, it’s very possible that advertising could get worse for them.
  2. Integration – Facebook integrates well with other online services and websites, but it’s still a very separate platform. Google+ is basically the backbone of the majority of Google services so when you log into Gmail, you are already logged into Google+, YouTube, Drive and more! The best part is that practically all of these services are well-integrated and they cross-manipulate one another.
  3. Google+ Events

  4. Google Events – Yes Facebook has events, but they are like Google’s. On Google+, you can create an event, invite all your friends and instantly it turns into Party Mode. This feature allows all attendees to upload photos to the event which then threads them all together for everyone to see.
  5. Google Hangouts – Remember the days of video conferencing or webcam chats? How difficult was it to get more than two people in on the event? Well Google+ now allows live streaming events to be hosted online and joined by others and/or watched by everyone. From a business standpoint, this allows much more integration between employees and clients.
  6. Muppets Google+ page

  7. Communities and Pages – Google+ offers users the ability to create pages for their businesses just like Facebook as well as starting their own communities like Facebook groups. The difference is that the integration is much tighter with Google+ and everything is instantly linked to search results related to your content. On Facebook, you might have to pay for advertising to get similar results.
  8. Future proof – Google+ is banking on long term goals with product integration and it starts with Google search. With the rise of micro-blogging and the sharing of content all over the internet, the power of Google search can only help get that content to the people. As a blogger myself, Google+ has even allowed my search results to appear next to my name and a photo to help make them stand out among the competition.

It seems that there isn’t much if anything that Google+ can’t do that Facebook can, so why would anyone not make the switch? Let’s take a look at some of the things that are holding me back…for now.

Reasons not to jump ship

  1. Entrenchment – There’s no doubt that Facebook is vastly more widespread than Google+ is. In fact, “facebook” has almost become a ubiquitous term for social networking, much like “google” has become for finding things online. As a result, it’s much easier to find people on Facebook.
  2. Vanity URLs – This might seem like such a small detail, but having the ability to tell people they can find your Facebook page by going to facebook.com/ledfrog is far more enticing than trying to tell people that they can find you on Google+ by going to plus.google.com/114683976907069457614. However, I should point out that Google has already started rolling out vanity URLs to verified celebrities and corporate brand pages. One such example is google.com/+hughjackman. The use of the little ‘+’ is also used to tag names in posts or search for people.
  3. Integration – Although it’s also mentioned above as a pro, Facebook does have a leg up with website integration in terms of being able to login to external websites, but that’s all starting to change.

With time, Google+ has great potential to become much more powerful than Facebook due to Google’s vast amount of services and products they have connected together. Facebook has been described has being a social network, while Google is described as being a social layer that covers many of Google’s properties.

My Two Cents

In the end of all this debate, many people (including myself) will simply continue using both. I have to because all of my real-world friends are on Facebook and very few of them are on Google+. I also have a couple of Facebook pages that already have fans attached to them, so until I see the natural progression of Facebook users moving toward Google+, I don’t plan on deleting any accounts.

But just like the pioneers of Facebook did when they left MySpace all those years ago, I plan to start really pushing Google+ to my friends as well as posting more updates there than on Facebook. If my friends want to continue following me…well, they’ll have to literally follow me over to Google.

Google+ Author and Publisher Connections With hAtom Feeds

That title might sound scary, but all of these things can only help your search engine rankings and improve the visual appeal of your website on Google. Let’s take a look at each one and then we’ll get into how to implement them on your site. The example site used in this article is my own and as you might already know, I’m using WordPress. Since this is more of an informative post as opposed to an actual guide, you should be able to add these items on any other blogging platform or CMS.

Google+ Author Link

Let me say first that if you don’t already have a Google+ account, you really need to set one up. Even if you don’t plan on using it as much as Facebook, get one so you can at least get your website more connected on the web.

Google sample searchThe purpose behind the author link is to tell Google that you are the author of the content being ranked in the search results. The single most important reason for this is so you can verify your content to the world. This not only helps Google weed out the plagiarists, but it also helps to single you out on the results page. Take a look at the image to the right to see a sample search I did on Google for “nexus 4.” If you’re like most people, there are two search results that probably stood out more than anything else. One of them is for TechCrunch and the other is for William Rothman. Both of these articles are benefiting from having the Google+ author link connecting their websites to their Google+ profile.

  1. On your posts, modify (or create) the link from your full name so it links to your Google+ profile, but add ?rel=author to it. For example, my link looks like this: <a href="https://plus.google.com/114683976907069457614?rel=author">Brandon Hann</a>
  2. Head on over to your Google+ account and add a new link under the section “Contributor to”
  3. Make sure this link matches exactly. For example, I put www.ledfrog.com because if I put ledfrog.com, it won’t match.

Those are the basic steps to making this connection, but if you’re using WordPress, it gets even easier! Just download the Google Plus Author Information plugin. This will create a new field in your user profile for inputting your Google+ link. By doing that, it also replaces the link associated with your name on all posts with your Google+ link and adds the proper link relationship. The other advantage for using the plugin is if you have multiple authors on your site, each one can have their own link within their user profile and have it reflect properly without any manual editing.

Google+ Publisher Link

Google Publisher sampleSimilar to the author link above, the publisher link also creates a cohesion between your website and Google+, but this time the link connects to a Google+ page. Just like on Facebook, you can have a profile and a page with Google+. The difference between the two is that profiles can have friends in their circles and pages can only have followers.

To create a Google+ page,

  1. On your Google+ profile, click Pages at the bottom of the menu on the left.
  2. Click on Create New Page and choose a category.
  3. Fill out the necessary information and save.
  4. When you add a link to your company (or blog) website, click Verify Link.
  5. Add the following code to an area on your site. If you use WordPress, add it to your header or footer so it appears on all pages and posts. <a href="https://plus.google.com/[yourpageID]" rel="publisher">Find us on Google+</a>

If you don’t want to have an actual link on your site, you can use the span tag to implement the link on your site without the text itself. I found a great guide on how to complete all the steps required for your site automatically. Since there doesn’t appear to be a WordPress plugin yet, this is the best way to implement the required code. Check out the Google+ Publisher guide at MarketingTechBlog. This guide also outlines the manual steps of adding authorship links if you’re not using a plugin.

Google doesn’t provide any information on when these changes will take effect, but it’s commonly believed that a Google+ page has to have a significant amount of followers in order to be placed in the publisher section. But it doesn’t hurt to have everything set up while you’re building up your follower list!

hAtom Feeds

According to Wikipedia, hAtom is defined as:

hAtom is a draft Microformat for marking up (X)HTML, using classes and rel attributes, content on web pages that contain blog entries or similar chronological content. These can then be parsed as feeds in Atom, a web syndication standard.

hAtom feed sampleTo Google, this is important information that can be used to show rich-text snippets in the search results. Along with the authorship connection made above, using the correct hAtom information is key to helping Google display basic information correctly. As a WordPress user, sometimes not everything is properly constructed when dealing with themes and whatnot, so here’s another quick fix to help you reduce or eliminate all errors on your site’s posts.

To begin, run a scan on a specific page on your site using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool found in your Google Webmaster Tools account. If you have no errors, great! You might be able to skip this step. However, many people are having these three common issues:

1. Warning: Missing required field “entry-title”.
2. Warning: Missing required field “updated”.
3. Warning: Missing required hCard “author”.

All three of these issues are very easily fixed. Go to your WordPress admin and open the theme editor. Begin editing your single.php file or whatever filename your theme chose for the posts on your site. Follow the follow steps:

  1. Find <?php the_title(); ?> and wrap it with a new span class, like this: <span class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></span>
  2. Find <?php the_time(‘F d, Y’) ?> (may also be listed as <?php echo get_the_date();>) and wrap it with: <span class="date updated"><?php the_time('F d, Y') ?></span>
  3. Find <?php the_author(); ?> (or some variant of that) and wrap it with: <span class="vcard author"><span class="fn"><?php the_author(); ?></span></span>

Once you save this file, re-run the test with Google again and you should see these errors gone!

Tying it all together

As mentioned before, getting all of these connections made does not guarantee any of your results will be enhanced overnight, but doing this is a great idea to keep your site organized and displaying the proper information at all times. You never know what Google will do for your search results, so it’s always best to maintain the best practices up front just in case. As for me, it took about 2 weeks for me to get the rich-text snippets and I had to do it all over again after I deleted my Google+ profile…long story on that one, but once again I’m waiting for Google to make the updates. We’ll see how well it goes this time around. I’ll post updates if anything major happens.

Be Careful When Deleting Your Google+ Account

Learn from the master…ehh…well not-so-master today. Learn from one of my biggest mistakes in quite some time!! The lesson of the day is DO NOT DELETE your Google+ account if you plan on keeping your YouTube account.

YouTube error

Purpose

I only had one reason to delete my Google+ account and it was simple—I started using Google Apps. Google doesn’t allow users to have two Google+ accounts, so my original setup was me just using Google Apps for the email service. This meant that I left everything else over on my original Gmail account. As a result of this, ever time I wanted to use YouTube, Google Drive or Google+, I had to switch accounts. There were times when this was as easy as clicking on my name and selecting the second account and then there were times when I had to log in again.

These issues weren’t so much a problem when I was on my laptop or desktop, but when I went mobile, everything went to hell. The reason for that was because all of the Google services run as separate apps and things like YouTube, Google+ and Gmail need the account to be added to the phone. I didn’t want to do this because with adding the account, I now have multiple Google accounts battling it out for attention over things like syncing contacts, calendars, Chrome settings, etc. I also didn’t want to have the second (original) Gmail account in my inbox because I was already forwarding mail to my new one, which meant that I was now getting two of every forwarded message on my phone!

Regardless of every workaround I found, it went against the streamlined setup I was aiming for—one Google account for all my devices and one login for all my services when on a regular computer. And thanks to my desire to have this account be my new Google Apps domain rather than Gmail, I have now lost everything I had in my YouTube account.

How to do this the right way!

The first thing you want to do is unlink your Google+ and YouTube accounts. However, this only works on accounts created before May 2009 as those are called legacy accounts and were created before Google owned YouTube.

  1. Make sure you’re signed out of all Google Accounts and visit this page: http://www.youtube.com/my_account_unlink
  2. Enter your YouTube username and your old YouTube password from before you linked to your Google Account, then enter the verification code.
  3. Next, click Unlink My Accounts.
  4. You’ll need to re-link your YouTube account to another Google Account. You can link it to an existing Google Account that you own, or create a new one.

After the original accounts are unlinked and the new accounts are linked, you can delete the old Google+ account. Because I didn’t follow these steps, I have lost all my video uploads, video/channel views, other stats, subscribers, username, etc. I have since opened a trouble ticket with Google’s 1 on 1 support to see about possibly getting back my old account or at the very least, my username! I’ll post back here with updates as I get them.

How this happened

Ever since Google+ came out, Google has been linking user profiles to YouTube accounts. This was in an effort for Google to streamline their services under one roof and to enhance the ability to share things with friends. I had no problem with this and in fact, I linked my accounts as well. Everything was going fine until I realized that I couldn’t escape using Google+ with my Google Apps account.

Many of the services (as expected) needed Google+ configured in order to work. I begged and pleaded with Google to allow accounts to be merged, but alas, the only option was to have one account migrated to the other. This allows a user to move all their circles and information over to the new profile to allow the deletion of the old one. I did this step, but I still never deleted my old profile because it was connected to Google’s authorship feature allowing them to show my name, photo and Google+ profile link next to search results of blog posts I’ve created.

Ultimately I decided to start using my Google Apps Google+ profile and delete my old one. When I went to go delete the old profile, I was warned about everything being deleted like photos, circles, etc. Nowhere on this page did it say that I’d lose my YouTube account!!

My Two Cents

I feel that Google should be a little more clear about the real-world effects of moving things around. Normally they are pretty good about warning you what will be deleted and everything, but in this case, there were no warnings about the direct effects of how deleting a Google+ account will affect YouTube. At any rate, I’m expecting the worse case scenario in that I’ve lost this battle. I’ll have to re-upload my videos (whichever ones I still have) and start all over. I’m not too heartbroken because I didn’t have a whole lot of time invested in my YouTube channel, but I kind of want my original username back.

$450 Starbucks Metal Gift Card SOLD OUT

Metal Starbucks card sold outYesterday, I wrote about the new limited edition $450 metal gift card from Starbucks that was worth $400 in credit and about 30 cents in steel that was supposed to go on sale to the “general public” this morning. I was assuming that the sale was to happen around 9am PST because earlier yesterday, there was a little clock counting down the hours on the website. However, I checked this morning and the Add to cart button disappeared and an Add to waitlist button has been put in its place.

Granted, this doesn’t exactly mean that the card is sold out, but I’m pretty confident that it is. I’ve never shopped on Gilt.com before, but my guess is that they don’t ever tell you something sold out, but rather give you the hope that one day, the item will be back in stock. If you’re feeling lucky, here’s the link to the $450 Starbucks gift card product page.

Well unfortunately for those of who waited, getting more in stock is not an option on this item. Starbucks had said they made 5,000 of these cards and once they were gone, they were gone. The terms of the sale was that Starbucks rewards members were able to “pre-order” the card yesterday on Gilt.com and that the remaining cards were to be sold this morning at the same site. A Starbucks rewards member is basically anyone who signed up for a free account on Starbucks.com and/or downloaded the smartphone app and handed over their email address.

What struck me as odd was who did they expect was going to buy this thing?! I’m pretty sure that by the close of yesterday, this card was long gone! Within that pool, I’m guessing that almost half simply bought the card for collectors value or for resale on eBay. The rest of you bought it because you drink a lot of coffee at Starbucks. There’s no shame in that…I’m just making a point. There was no reason to believe that the card would ever make it to the “general public.”

Starbucks gift card order statusAt any rate, congrats to those who got lucky enough to pick one up!! According to the order status, my card will be delivered sometime around December 18th. Although it doesn’t say it in the screenshot, Gilt.com is using UPS 2-day Air to ship these cards out. I’m assuming that cards haven’t been made yet since there’s no other logical reason why we couldn’t expect our orders within a few days from now.