While you may be into politics, or not, you may just want to connect with Barrack Obama on LinkedIn. Did you know that he has a profile on LinkedIn. You can connect with him here:http://www.linkedin.com/in/barackobama

I cannot tell you how many times computer and IT people tell me that Firefox is so much better than IE. Rest assured I have my own opinions about both, however when the computer repair folks are jamming Firefox down your throat, it eventually becomes offensive. The sad news is that for so long they were right. With such great accolades from self professed “geeks” comes fame, and with fame comes vulnerability. Hackers love to make a mockery out of websites and software that claim they are superior and Firefox is no exception.

Bit 9, the leader in application white listing(as they call themselves) has issued their “Dirty Dozen” for 2008. In a press release entitled “Threats in Plain Sight: Bit9 Identifies ‘The Dirty Dozen’ – 2008’s Most Popular Applications with Critical Security Vulnerabilities” they identify the 12 applications that have issues and Firefox is NUMBER 1! Welcome to the big time Firefox. You asked for the attention, your followers supported you through and through and now the hacker world is coming after you.

Maybe it’s time that our computer friends keep in mind that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

UPDATE 5:00PM MONDAY
Power is back on in our home. Trying to deal with the remaining issues of the refrigerator…uga. The office will be open for business on Tuesday at 8am.

Day 1…
So for some odd reason, we woke up at 3am to find that the power was out. So as we continue to find out more, we find out that every single town in our area has no power, literally no power for 20 miles in each way around us. Draw a circle and you will find no power in that area. I checked the office and no power there either. We have not had many power issues in the past so I am not too concerned about the power coming back on. I am hearing that power might be out for at least a couple days if not longer, I really wonder how long this will be the case.

We decide to hunker down for the night and stay at our home in Gardner. Although we are warm, the temp in the house has dropped to 50 degrees, so now I am starting to get a bit concerned, as I don’t know how long it will take to freeze our pipes.

Day 2…
Looks like they have named the storm Operation Big Ice, how prudent is that? We have decided to take our dog Hershey, and some things to my mother-in-laws house in Leominster. She has power, no cable or phone yet. It seems like Leominster was hit in patches. They lost power for about 5 hours.

Day 3 of Operation Big Ice…
No resolution in site, I woke up this morning all aching from sleeping in a recliner. I headed out to Gardner to check on the house. Temp is showing 42 in the house….uh….this is concerning. When will it reach 32 and freeze some pipes? I set the drip the night before so that things wouldn’t freeze but you just never know.

We leave here and head out to Hubbardston to check on my brother-in-laws house. A tree came down and took the power line off his house. Looks like he will need an electricion. I recommended Victory Electrical, of Lunenburg Mass. We checked the temp in his house and it was lower than mine, we found it at 38 in the upstairs, 40 mid level and 42 in the basement.

My brother-in-law Mark got together with us and got us a generator hooked up. Thank you Teri for letting us use the generator. We have been able to get the heat up to 70 in about 4 hours. My neighbors came over tonight to sleep in a warm house and will go get a generator in Auburn Mass tomorrow. We have been listening to WTAG AM 580 for the entire time that the power has been out ( in the truck, via radio plugged into the generator).

Day 4 of Operation Big Ice…
Today it is reaching 50 degrees as we begin to thaw out all the ice, however we still have no power. As of this writing, 2pm, we have the generator running our furnace to continue to provide heat and I have also hooked up the freezer outside in the garage to try and save our all frozen food. Power is on in downtown Gardner, and at our office, however the phones continue to remain out. I went to the office this morning to check on things and the phones were out at that time (10am).
I talked to Tom (Leominster DPW worker and good friend of mine) today in Leominster; he was supervising 2 tree crews that clear overhanging limbs from the public ways. Another crew of out of town helpers was also doing the clean up, taking all of the brush piles from the side of the roads.
More updates to come.

Mark Hawke, Mayor of Gardner, was on WTAG AM 580 today at 3:30pm.
Slowly returning to a sate of normalcy.
3000 people still without power, 60% have powered. Over 100 National Guard troops in town.
The Main Shelter is now the National Guard Armory on West Broadway near Salvador Used Cars.
Mark Hawke says “…We are trying to keep our head above water…”.
Gardner schools are closed through wednesday.
Main Street in Gardner should be open within the hour.

Mail and the Newspaper just got delivered.

…More updates to come.

Every site should have a robots.txt file. It can often be overlooked but it doesn’t take much to add one. Wikipedia says “The robot exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by webmasters to proofread source code. The standard complements Sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.

A robots.txt file on a website will function as a request that specified robots ignore specified files or directories in their search. This might be, for example, out of a preference for privacy from search engine results, or the belief that the content of the selected directories might be misleading or irrelevant to the categorization of the site as a whole, or out of a desire that an application only operate on certain data.
For websites with multiple sub-domains, each sub-domain must have its own robots.txt file. If example.com had a robots.txt file but a.example.com did not, the rules that would apply for example.com will not apply to a.example.com.”

Titles are an important factor in ranking well. Think of the newspaper, if they didn’t have titles for the articles, then no one would read the articles. These titles help the search engines identify relevant pages to deliver to the search engine user. If you don’t have a title page that includes relevant information for the search then your page may not be shown to the user. Your title should help the search engines identify your content and it should clearly be related to the content. You can put your business name in the title, but my recommendation is that you put it after your key phrases and descriptive information.

Yahoo has just released their Top 10 Searches for 2008. Included in the Search are “American Idol”, “Britney Spears”— (Still? Haven’t we heard and seen enough of Britney?)– and Barrack Obama.

It is not surprising to see many searches for a younger audience appear in this list and I think that might also be why President Elect appears as well. Many people believe that the younger population voted more for him and therefore I don’t think it’s a stretch to see him in a list with Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and American Idol.

This also begs to question about how much market penetration Yahoo has for the younger population, generation z or whatever we are calling them now. It seems that the top 10 searches are all relevant to people under 21. It make me wonder if businesses should be spending any money on Yahoo Pay Per Click advertising if their target market is above 21. However….it seems if you offer a product or service and really need the “tweeners” to buy into it, Yahoo PPC should be right up your alley.

To see the full list click here: Yahoo’s Top 10 Searches for 2008