For the past week, I have changed by default browser on both my home and work computers (Apple iMacs running Mac OS X Snow Leopard) to Google Chrome. I have not previously used Chrome and have been a long-time loyal user of Firefox, but I’ve heard good things and figured I’d give it a shot. Knowing I wouldn’t get much out fo it just downloading it and surfing for a half hour, I decided the best way to really get to know it is to not use other browsers and exclusively use Chrome.

The Good
The absolute first thing I noticed when I opened it up is that if I had blinked, I would have missed it. When it comes to opening speed, Firefox is, well, slow. I had previously thought Safari was quick to load, but Chrome even makes Apple’s default browser seem sluggish. Beyond just opening, page loading is also speedy and smooth. Also a terrific feature is the ever-growing selection of extensions. This is something that I’ve always enjoyed about Firefox and is a great first step if Google wants me to switch over to their offering. Even the interface itself is clean, intuitive, and simple to use. Overall it is a very appealing browser and is constantly being updated with new features trying to stay ahead of the competition.

The Bad
I’m not a big fan of the search box and address bar merger. I have a ton of different search engines that I use regularly and the ability to rapidly toggle between them. Chrome, sadly, does not make this an easy task.

The Ugly
There were more than just a handful of sites with nagging visual errors that just simply are not there when using Firefox or Safari. I can overlook just about every other issue I have with Chrome, but incorrectly displaying pages that I frequent is a dealbreaker.

After a week, I will admit I am impressed. Although Google Chrome will not be usurping Firefox as my primary browser, it has earned a spot in my Applications folder and I will be continuing to use it as a secondary browser.

This has been the most active month that this blog has ever seen. I’d like to personally thank everyone who has stopped here at Chai Life throughout October of 2009, but with a total of 12,096 unique visitors, that would be tough to do. Instead, I’ll just post my thanks here. Thanks for reading!

As you may or may not be aware, today is the third annual Blog Action Day. According to their own description, “Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.” With that in mind, the topic for this year’s event is Climate Change. I’ve put a lot of thought in to from which angle I wanted to tackle this urgent subject, as it is effecting the world in countless ways and have decided to use this opportunity to express my views a phrase that continually gets under my skin, often used by those who stand to profit by climate change and the sheep who follow them.

“Do you believe in climate change?”

This question, or variations of it, is one I have constantly seen posed in the mainstream media, asked on talk shows, posted on the Internet, and been asked in person. It seems innocent enough to those who would look no deeper in to it, except for one underlying issue: Climate change is not a belief. A ‘belief’ is something in which you offer your blind faith that it is true without having actual proof. One can choose to not believe in climate change, but that requires at least a certain level of ignorance. The changes in Earth’s climate that have been occurring over the past 50 years and continue to escalate today have for a long time now by accepted by the international scientific community (those kids that you cheated off of in high school) to be caused by human actions. In fact, every time they perform another study on the topic they do nothing but reaffirm their findings. In the past two years, not a single nationally or internationally recognized scientific organization has offered an opposing stance. With that amount of support from the smartest people around the world, there is no conceivable way that the term “belief” can somehow be applied.

Climate change has long since gone beyond the partisan-politics played by those who stand to gain financially and managed to convince the masses that this was some sort of lie. It is time not to bicker over whether or not it is really happening, but to act. There are plenty of ways that your or I can make a difference, such as switching to more efficient lighting, recycling, driving more efficient vehicles, or installing solar panels. Likewise, businesses can do these same things and make an even bigger impact that just one household can. The biggest and best way for the world to change as a whole, however, is through governmental legislation that not only changes policy, but helps change how the world views energy usage and renewable resources. The US government is currently working on a climate change bill as I type this, so put some thought in to contacting your congressman or senators and telling them how you feel.

If you, like the 13,194 other people who signed up for this year’s Blog Action Day, want to help do something about climate change, you can start by simply correcting the next person who asks you if you “believe” in climate change and telling them that it isn’t a belief and explaining to them what they can do about it.

I was putting together a list of essential plug-ins, tips, and tricks for a friend who is starting a new WordPress-based blog and was looking for advice, but I figured this can help more than just him, so I’m publishing it here. The following guide will help you get your new blog off the ground, recommend some essential plug-ins, help you get your blog listed in search engines, and some basic WordPress SEO tips. I’m writing this guide assuming that you’ve already download and installed WordPress and everything is already working fine. If you haven’t even gotten that far yet, you should probably take some time and read through this guide.

Section 1: Plug-ins
The following list are a few highly popular plug-ins that anyone who’s serious about their blog should have installed. Each plug-in has great documentation and support, so they’re good for beginners and essential for the most seasoned WordPress veterans.

• WordPress.com Stats
  If you’re at all concerned over who your readers are, what brought them to your blog, how many people read your blog, or what search terms people are typing to to search engines to find it, then this plug-in is absolutely essential. It’ll tell you pretty much everything you need to know about your blog’s visitor statistics.
• Akismet
  If you don’t plan on having comments enabled, then you can completely ignore this plug-in. If, however, you do want your readers to be able to leave comments on your posts, then this is an absolute must. As far as comment spam filtering goes, there is absolutely nothing better than Akismet. It is extremely accurate and only maybe once or twice since I first started using it has there been true spam that got through and I had to delete or a false positive that I had to approve.
• Google XML Sitemaps
  This excellent SEO-related plug-in automatically generates a Google-compatible sitemap file of every single post and page on your blog. Every single time you create a new post or page, it will automatically recreate an updated sitemap for search engines to index. As if that isn’t awesome enough, it will then automatically ping Ask.com, Google, Bing, and Yahoo letting them know that your sitemap has been updated and that they should re-check it. Just having this installed and running is enough to start getting your site indexed by all of the major search engines.
• All in One SEO Pack
  The All in One SEO Pack has pretty consistently been the most popular WordPress plug-in of all time. To be honest, some if not all of it’s features should just be built in to WordPress, but because they aren’t it is still around. I can’t even begin to list all of the great SEO features that this offers, so just visit the download page to view them.

Section 2: Themes
You’ve got WordPress installed and you’ve added some key plug-ins to make it work even better and help with SEO, but now that it works great behind the scenes, you want it to look awesome to your readers. Here’s are some great theme resources to check out, all of which are free.

• Official WordPress Themes Directory
• Top Wordpress Themes
• FreeWPThemes.net
• 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes – Smashing Magazine
• 40 Excellent Free WordPress Themes – Six Revisions

Section 3: Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (commonly called SEO) is key to getting your blog noticed by the search engines and ranked will for certain search terms or keywords. There are entire books written on the subject that still don’t cover the subject, which is constantly evolving, so I’m not going to attempt to teach everything there is to know in this small paragraph. What I will instead do is offer some tricks to getting your blog recognized by search engines, quickly indexed, and some basic tips to improving the ranking of your blog.

• Link Structure – You’ve probably been to some websites and noticed that they have long hard to understand links, whereas others have shorter links that are easy to read and often have the title of the post in the link. If you look under the settings section of the admin section of your WordPress blog, you will notice a link that says “Permalinks”. If you click this, it will bring you to a page where, if your web server supports it (most do, ask your webhost if you’re unsure), you can change your link structure. The default is the “ugly” style of links, but I prefer the “Month and name” or the “Day and name” setting. Play around and find a link structure you like, but be aware that once you choose one, you should stick with it.
• Search Engine Submission – Many search engines have a submission page where you can enter your URL and it will be added to a presumably very long list of websites for their spiders to crawl. This works, but isn’t always the best solution. Pinging the search engines with your sitemap, as I described earlier, is a good way to get them to recognize your site. The best way for search engines to find your site, however, is for them to find a link to your site on other sites. Talk to your friends with their own blogs and ask them to put a link to your site on theirs (if you’re really nice, you’ll do the same for them). Add a link to your website in your signature or profile page on any social networks you’re a member of as well as any forums you post on. Not only will some people see the link and visit your site, but the search engines will see it and start to be aware of your blog. My last little trick is to click this link, type in your URL, click submit, and then click every link in the list that will appear on the next page.
• Anchor Text – When you’re adding your link to the places I mentioned previously, be sure to choose a good anchor text where you can. The anchor text is the what text appears as a link. For example: Chai Life is a link to this blog. The anchor text for that link is “Chai Life”. The more consistent you are with your links’ anchor text, the better you will rank in search engines when someone searches for that term. Using a few different anchor texts will help you rank better for those different keywords, but I would recommend choosing only a few keywords and sticking with them. Too many will saturate your results and not really be any help.
• Content – Having original content is very important. For most blogs, this isn’t really an issue because you’re writing your own posts. Keep in mind, however, than most search engines, Google included, will essentially just regard your blog as trash if it has duplicate content (articles, blog posts, etc) from other sites on other domains.

Well, there you have it. Is this guide the definitive guide to starting your blog and increasing it’s popularity? No way. Is it missing stuff that I didn’t go in to or could have done in more detail? Probably. Will it help someone who is new to WordPress, SEO, and blogging get started? I sure hope so!

Like this post? Read more at The Apple Vine.

If you run one or more websites and have an iPhone, not unlike myself, then you are probably looking for some apps to help you out a bit. The following list of iPhone Apps is useful for pretty much any webmaster, whether you’re a professional or a hobbyist.

1. Domain Scout – Cost: FREE
   If you’re going to be a webmaster, you’re going to need a domain name. This application is as straightforward as it sounds. Type in what you’d like to have as your domain name, choose a TLD (.com, .org, .net, etc. You can set which ones it will display), and it’ll tell you if the domain is available. If it isn’t available, you can choose to revise the search, view the whois entry, or visit the URL. If it is available, go quick register it before someone else does! It keeps a nice tidy history as well as a favorites list for those who do a lot of domain hunting.
2. CSS Cheat Sheet & HTML Cheat Sheet – Cost: $0.99
   Who has the time and patience to memorize every single CSS attribute and HTML tag? Not me, that’s for sure. When I’m at home working on my iMac, I have a handful of reference guides bookmarked. These two offer that same helpful reference, but now it fits easily in the palm of my hand.
3. HTML Colors – Cost: $0.99
   There are probably dozens more apps like this available, but HTML Colors is cheap, easy to use, and offers a nice large view of the color you’re selecting. It even allows you to see how one color of text will appear on another color background, which is vital for webmasters.
4. Ego – Cost: $1.99
   This has got everything you need all in one simple app to feed your online ego wherever you may be. Quickly and easily view your numbers, with support for statistics tracking from Feedburner, Google Analytics, Mint, and Squarespace, as well as viewing your number of twitter followers. It’s a simple and intuitive design, so any level of webmaster will love it.
5. SEO Master & iPageRank – Cost: $0.99 & FREE
   These are grouped together because functionally, they both do the exact same thing: They tell you the Google PageRank of your website. SEO Master costs a dollar and has a decent interface, will save the sites you check pagerank of, and will reload the results when you open the app. iPageRank has an interface that is about as basic as they come, but it’ll show you what you want to know and is free.
6. Analytics App – Cost: $5.99
   If you’re using Google Analytics to monitor the traffic coming to your site, this is hands-down the absolute best app available to monitor your Analytics statistics. From what I can tell, any statistic available via Google’s web interface for Analytics is available in this app. It’s a bit pricy by my app standards, but is a must-have for stat junkies.
7. WordPress – Cost: FREE
   This one obviously doesn’t apply to those who don’t use it as a platform for their websites, but if you, like me, are a devout fan of WordPress, then this is for you. It allows you to access your blogs from anywhere, change existing posts, work on drafts saved either locally on the phone or remotely in the database, and publish posts from your phone. Not enough for you? It can also approve comments, reject them, or mark comments as spam and can even upload and manage pictures.
8. FTP On The Go – Cost: $6.99
   Charting in at the most expensive app on this list, FTP On The Go does not disappoint. This FTP application is impressive by desktop computer standards, so it blows me away how much they could pack in to it. Download, edit, and re-upload files via FTP or FTPS and check them on the built-in web browser all without leaving the application. To make all of those features even easier, it even offers Find/Replace functionality and a Go To Line # command for those longer documents. Those are the core features, but it can do even more and is essential if you need to access your FTP server when away from your computer.
9. Crop For Free – Cost: FREE
   As a webmaster, cropping is probably the absolute most common image manipulation I have to do. This app allows you to do exactly what it says: crop for free. Simple enough and more useful than you’d think.
10. Source Viewer – Cost: $0.99
    A rather in-depth source viewer for only 99¢, this program shows you the source of any website you type in. The “Source” tab shows tags, keywords, and CSS are highlighted in different colors for ease of navigation. The “Links” tab allows you to view all links embedded in the HTML or CSS. You can even tap the source while viewing it to toggle word wrap on and off.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the list. If you have any other suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment and share them.

For quite some time now I’ve been looking to separate this blog from my personal domain name, Primakow.net. This isn’t something that I have taken lightly, however, and I have spent a considerable amount of time attempting to find the right domain name for this blog. I now present to you the newest refresh of my blog, now with it’s own domain:

If you came here looking for a website about a tasty type of spiced tea, you will be disappointed. The word “Chai” (pronounced from the throat, Ḥai), for those of you that are unfamiliar with it, is a prominent word in Judaism meaning “life” or “living”. The phrase “Chai Life” may a bit repetitive, but I chose it because it is also catchy, easy to remember, and is a nice Jewish twist on the idiom “the high life”.

Evan, you ask, will the site be changing? What differences will there be in store for your loyal readers in the future?

Fear not. Everything that has ever been posted here is still here and you will still be able to look forward to rants, news, political opinion, random instances of funny, and all of the other posts you may come here to read. It will just be on a new domain name. Above and beyond the random posts (both in topic and frequency) that I tend to make, I will also be slowly rolling out an online store via the excellent services provided by CafePress. More on that to come. In the mean time, please enjoy the Chai Life.

Apparently, Microsoft’s Bing search engine was holding some sort of contest to come up with a jingle for the site. For some unknowable reason, the winner (of a $500 prize) is a video named “Bing Goes The Internet” by a guy named Jonathan Mann. You can watch it in a below, but I warn you: It will get in your head, you will hate it, and you will probably never want to watch it again. Don’t worry, though, Microsoft has no plans to use it in a national ad campaign.

There have been a lot of Google “Doodles” over the years for various different holidays, anniversaries, or events. The following depicts what, at least in my opinion, have been the best of the best based off the creativity and originality in the alteration of their standard logo.

1. Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss! – March 2, 2009
2. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Birthday – June 8, 2005
   
3. First Day of Spring – Design by Eric Carle – March 20, 2009
   
4. 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick – January 28, 2008
   
5. VOTE – November 2, 2004
   
6. Leap Year – February 29, 2004
   
7. Happy Halloween! – October 31, 2003
   
8. Earth Day – April 22, 2008
   
9. Louis Braille’s Birthday – January 4, 2006
   
10. Google’s 10th Birthday – September 27, 2008
    

They had this up all day yesterday in honor of the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel (March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991), better known as Dr. Seuss.

All of the buzz on the Internet today is zeroing in on a new potential Google-killer called Cuil. Sure, there have been plenty legitimate attempts to dethrone the search king in the past, but none of the start-ups have been run by Google alumni. I’ve had a chance to play around with it and see what it is offering, so here’s the breakdown.

The Good

• It looks great. The main page of the site is extremely simple, just like it’s big brother Google, but its dark design really helps it stand out in a crowd of other wannabe Google competitors.
• Right on the front page they are brutally honest about the number of sites that they currently have indexed (121,617,892,992 at the time of this post), which is refreshing to see.
• Finally, someone rethought how search results are displayed. No more generic-looking list of websites from one to infinity. Pages are listed in columns almost looking like a news paper or magazine. You can adjust it to display 2 or 3 columns and next to many of the listings and image related to the site appears along side the description of the site.
• Search suggestions are in-place to help you find what you’re looking for, but I haven’t yet noticed much difference between what Cuil offers and Google’s parallel feature.
• Unlike the Big Brother search engines we’re all used to, Cuil supposedly tracks absolutely none of what you do. This is great to hear for those that love their Internet anonymity.

The Bad

• Where are the key features that keep me coming back to Google? If they want to become my primary search engine, they’re going to have to integrate image and product search features.
• I mentioned earlier that along side most of the search results appears what is supposed to be a relevant image. Problem is, most of the images are in no way relevant or even taken from the site listed.
• Allow more columns! I really like how the search is displayed, but for those of us with a wide screen and high resolution, three columns still leaves a huge chunk of white on the right hand side of the screen when I’m searching. I can probably fit 4-5 columns of search results on my 20″ iMac.
• Speed. This one’s a throw-away complaint. It’s a bit sluggish thus far, but it’s also presumably getting completely pounded with traffic, so that’s to be expected. To be honest, I’m surprised it hasn’t crashed, so I guess this belongs somewhere inbetween the good and the bad. We’ll see how they hold up once the initial rush dies down.

The Ugly

• The algorithm needs desperately to be tweaked. Earlier today if I did a search for “Primakow” a few pages of this site would show up, but not the main page, whereas a search for “Evan Primakow” yielded no results. Already a few hours later “Evan Primakow” brings up a few pages of this site, but mostly random posts and not the main page.

Ultimately, it has a ton of potential. In my opinion the only thing really holding it back is the algorithm. New features will presumably be added and I’m sure even now they’re tweaking the algorithm as traffic flows through. This is the first new search engine in a very long time that really has the potential to compete with the big boys – and I hope it does just that. The industry needs a fresh look and fresh ideas, so hopefully Cuil can live up to the Internet’s expectations.