to: Admin - If You want to delete your site from my spam list, please sent url of your domain to my emai: stop.spam.today@gmail.com And I will remove your site from my base within 24 hours
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I usually get pretty funny spam emails at work or spam comments caught by Wordpress’ Akismet, but I must say this is the dumbest spam I’ve ever seen from a spammer.

Yeah sure mate, I’ll just email you to unsubscribe from your spam mailing list. Mmm mmmmm…spam.

Funny how majority of spam involves mens insecurity about their penis sizes. These include viagra, pharmaceutical drugs, penis enlargement, random horny girls who want your photos and get rich schemes.

I guess in some ways, spam is a reflection of what society places priority on. There’s some truth to that.

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Yay it’s my birthday today. I official turn 23, and no more the younger twenty-two-een. First to wish me was Bee but she cheated though by wishing me at 10.20pm. Then it was followed by my family members.

Oh, and I was talking to my girlfriend on the phone last night and it was like 12.20am, so I went “umm…aren’t you going to wish me?”. Slight pause. A heartbeat passes by. “Oh crappppp….I set my alarm at 8.30pm and I was going to wish you”, she exclaimed. But it was like 9.20pm her time already? I don’t get it. Hong Yi is in Malaysia at the moment, so she’s 3 hours behind. I gave her crap after that haha and she’ll probably give me crap now for this hehe.

So I woke up at my usual 7.10am on my birthday, did the usual, went to work. Was planning to have lunch with my colleagues but my 11am client meeting went for so long that I only got out at 1.30pm. By that time they’ve all had lunch already.

Boohoo, so I went to galleries victoria and had thai lunch by myself. Emo. Immediately I thought of Celine Dion’s song, All By Myself.

Then I bumped into Pee-tah at boost and off I went back to work. They bought me blueberry cheesecake from Michelle’s patisserie which was yum.

So the hours passed and I finally finished work and had dinner with my cousin as some secluded Korean place called Mandang. Lots of meat which I liked. Ate till my belt moved a notch, thinking to myself, “Hmm…gym tomorrow”.

Here I am, back at home. Home sweet home. It’s good to be home after a long day’s work. Checked Facebook and saw over 30+ notices of people writing on my wall. So…

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have messaged me via sms and also left messages in Facebook. Thank Facebook for reminding them it was my birthday today haha. I would like to individually reply to every single message but that would take me all night and so I’m a bit lazy, daunted, and overwhelmed by the feat.

And finally thank God for all the blessings that have been poured onto me, for giving life meaning and purpose, for being actively involved in people’s lives and for his saving grace.

Goodnight all and it’s back to work tomorrow!

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In my line of work, there has been a widespread belief that Google is unable to crawl “unoptimised” URLs and that ideally all URLs should be in a directory structure. This is totally untrue as mentioned by Google’s blog post.

In fact, Google actually says that they might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URL if you try to change it to look like a static URL.

However, this post will give you my opinion on why URL optimisation should be considered and to what extent should we optimise it to.

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You may have read my previous entry on performing a 301 redirect from Blogger to Wordpress, where I wrote a script that will capture all traffic to your old Blogger site and redirect it to your new Wordpress site. Ideally you’d want to do the 301 redirects from the web server, but unfortunately Blogger doesn’t allow you to do that and thus, you’re left with the client-side solution: Javascript.

First of all, let me clarify briefly on my previous post and inform you what the core strengths of my script are.

• Client-side redirect will not work without Javascript. Pretty obvious huh? What that means is that search engine crawlers aren’t able to follow the redirect. Nasty limitation in a simplistic sense.
• Strengths of my script are:
  1. It works.
  2. You need a client-side solution if you’re on Blogger. No other way.
  3. It captures and redirects all traffic from your old site to your new site.

That being said, let me now expand on these two major points: the limitations of search engine crawlers and why is capturing traffic important.

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The 80/20 Rule

You may have heard of the common business principle of the 80/20 rule, such as 20% of employees do 80% of an organisation’s work, or 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. The list goes on.

Well, this post is meant to address the issue of “when is too much, too much”? How can we spend 20% of our SEO/Search Engine Optimisation efforts to achieve 80% of the result from a purely page optimisation perspective?

Why Organic Rankings and Traffic?

There are a lot of theories and ideas from various people on how to optimise a page to rank organically for search phrases and drive organic traffic on search engine results page (SERP). The value of organic rankings and traffic is that it does not cost you money as opposed to spending money on advertising to drive traffic and be seen for what user’s search for (such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing).

So what does that mean? Imagine if your website is listed on the first page of Google’s SERP for the phrase “buy digital camera”, your traffic would be sky rocketing with an estimate average search volume of 135,000 (as reported by Google Adwords Keyword Tool) and thus, driving digital camera sales since the phrase shows the intent of the user, which is to “buy”.

And it hasn’t costed you anything in advertising.

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I just read an article from the BBC news about a riot by Jews during the Jewish holy day of atonement, Yom Kippur.

Apparently it was caused by an Arab man who drove his car during the religious holiday where there is fasting and much standstill among the Jews. So he was reported to have been attacked by youths because of his offensive act of driving on the streets.

What I don’t get is that people would go berserk over these things when it’s meant to be a holy period. Hello? Is rioting and expressing your anger seen as holy, or is even holy?

Ok, maybe the Arab guy might’ve been a tool and decided to take the piss out of Jews by driving his car during this period, but to pay back with rudeness and intimidation with anger and hostility, well I think most of them might’ve missed the point of the holiness of the event.

Holiness is to be set apart, to repay hostility with kindess, good with evil, and above all love with hatred. To do what goes against your sinful nature and to do what is right instead. Yes, it takes an active decision to be made holy and to do what is right rather than what feels right.

This is what the bible says and this is what I believe.

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I’m very upset at the Australian dollar plummeting in a blink of an eye. From reaching heights of US$0.98 in July to now closing just below US$0.68, the Australian dollar has lost 30% in value in under 3 months.

Imagine if you’ve invested $1 million into the US dollar few months ago and sold out now? You’d make the quickest $300,000 gross you’d ever imagine.

What does that mean for people like me? It means it is now more expensive to travel overseas and purchasing overseas goods. With the price of oil dropping to around US$90 per barrel, I haven’t noticed any drastic changes in local petrol prices and also airfares. That really sucks as I’m planning to travel overseas early next year.

I’m sure there’s news all over with blazing headlines on how the global markets are following the US path as confidence of investors spiral downwards and selling off whatever they can to salvage what’s left.

Sure you’ve heard of all the sweet news of the US government bailing out companies such as Freddy Mac, Fannie Mae and AIG. I suppose this is to impart confidence into investors to not go into a selling frenzy and add further momentum to the downward freight train.

Rumours have emerged that Richard Fuld, Lehmann Brothers’ CEO tipped the economic landslide with the bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers. But I guess he has no problems with his healthy $300 million in bonuses over the last 8 years. Apparently he feels horrible.

Yet despite these events, Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet’s company, has bought a $5 billion stake in Goldman Sachs, another ailing investment bank.

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I’ve just updated my code on tracking exit links in Google Analytics to skip applying the code if the href of an anchor tag is ‘#’. This is usually the case when the anchor tag is there to execute javascript or to scroll to the top of the page, thus does not contain any exit liks.

This can be found on line 29 with the addition of a condition in the condition statement, anchors[i].href != (document.location + ‘#’).

I’ve seen a few other scripts that tracks exit links but some of them I don’t think are very good as they lack error checking and also some of them overwrite the existing onclick attribute which I guess could break the site’s functionality.

Also to prove to you that my script is working, I’ve included a screenshot of the report found in google analytics.

Of course you can click through to the individual links and analyse the dimensions for further analysis. I will be working on more google analytics custom scripts to help bring and enhance more meaningful reports.

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I just wrote a simple helper function that gets the cumulative offset of the x and y position (or the cumulative top and left) of an element. This function is helpful if you want to position things around a certain element.

Although I haven’t tested it extensively yet, I think it works fine so far. If there’s any bugs, please let me know.

To use it, simply call getCumulativeOffset(element).x or getCumulativeOffset(element).y. There’s also a simple helper method to get the offsetTop and offsetLeft properties by calling getOffset(element).x and getOffset(element).y.

I’m working on a feature that allows these methods to be prototypes of HTML elements so that you can call it by element.getCumulativeOffset().x instead which is more elegant and object oriented.

/**
 *  @author:    Danny Ng (http://www.dannytalk.com)
 *  @date:      21/09/08
 *  @notes:     Free to use and distribute for non-commercial use without altering this notice. Would appreciate a link back.
 */
function getCumulativeOffset(el)
{
	var x = 0;
	var y = 0;
	var cur = (el) ? el : this;
	do
	{
		if (cur.nodeName.toLowerCase != 'td')
		{
			x += cur.offsetLeft;
			y += cur.offsetTop;
		}
	}
	while ((cur = cur.offsetParent) && cur.nodeName.toLowerCase() != 'body');	

	return { x: x, y: y };
}

function getOffset(el) { return (el) ? { x: el.offsetLeft, y: el.offsetTop } : { x: this.offsetLeft, y: this.offsetTop }; }

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I’ve had this domain for less than 3 months now and I’ve been testing how fast I can get in the 1st page of Google and Yahoo’s search engine results page (SERP) for the term “danny ng”.

As of today, my blog is ranked #7 on Google AU and #5 on Google US. On Yahoo AU and Yahoo US, I’m ranked #1. Not bad ay?

Next step is trying to get my PageRank up. It remains 0 at the moment. I should blog more but I’ve been a lazy bum hehe.

There’s a lot of things I want to do with javascript, but haven’t found time yet juggling a job, a girlfriend, a social life and so on.

I will probably write a post on where do you draw the line between search engine optimisation (seo) and usability in the future. Frustrates me when deciding whether to neglect usability for the sake of seo.

Google US

Yahoo US

Google AU

Yahoo AU

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