Blind Ape Seo

America Online, formerly known as AOL has decided to rebrand.

Right now, this is a case study in how to utterly destroy a brand. (Not that the company was ina  good shape before that).

Enjoy the fail named Aol.

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PS: For additional cringes, watch the video.

The old ape thought this was interesting as hell:

Wired Magazine article on Demand Media

enjoy,

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Darn!

I completely forgot to organize this years WebWriMo, simply because I am too busy.

But, if you want, you can join me for an insane month of web creation.

The old ape himself just started on two big web projects, svereal uBot creations and more. November will therefore be spent in a productive trance, typing and thinking until his hands fall off, the brain overheats and turns into a mush, and he collapses at the desk.

You can share your own stories in the comments.

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Or:

How to get from this

Before uBot automation

To this:

After uBot Automation

With a few clicks of your mouse.

Update:

Get your own bot army for only 199$ with promo code: blindape199

As every one knows, I love automation. Automation makes webmaster life worth living again, simply because it takes care of the drag involved in a lot of SEO activities.

Now Seth dropped uBot on the community, and it is a bomb - a bomb dispensing gold coins, chocolate bars and playboy magazines.

What uBot is

uBot is a visual scripting environment for web browser automatisation.

I guess you are not alone if you just muttered a “huh?”. So let me put this another way.
Anything you can do with a browser (and a few extras) can be automated with uBot AND you don’t have to write code to do so!

uBot is a tool that lets you build any bot with a few clicks of the mouse!

Clear now?

What uBot is not

uBot is no automated tool that builds you a SEO empire out of nothing.

Instead, it is a tool that lets you build all kinds of little scripts to do your bidding.

Have some ideas:

• web2.0 account creator - yep
• stats checker - yes
• Wordpress commenting - can do
• sending mail via web interface - you guessed it
• Page scraping - no problem
• Search engine scraper - check

What you have to know

Yes, uBot does have a small learning curve in store for you, but it is nothing in comparison to learning a proper scripting or programming language.

Everything you need to know can be learned easily from the tutorial videos on the site or / and the uBot commando guide (reference guide didn’t sound as cool).

Actually, everything I needed to write this reddit user creator learned in the very first video. It took me about half an hour of clicking around and done!

Reddit bot - half an hour of clicking

That is half an hour with no prior contact to the uBot software!

You can download the .uBot file here, so you can expand on this.

Or you can get the full reddit acount creator .exe file instead, as uBot allows you to compile a bot, so you can run it as any other programs, or give it to your oversea workers or sell it to whoever wants it.

What you do need to have is knowledge of HTML and web forms, but that can also be learned easily.

Who uBot is for

Anyone. Anyone who wants to automate web stuff without heavy programming.

Hell, I can code, and I use uBot now, simply because it is faster and easier to do a lot of things this way. For other things, an uBot can serve as a quick prototype and proof of concept.

My recommendation: Buy it NOW!

I am just leaving this here, because I was looking all over for something like this.

Web Wireframe Stencils for Visio

Especially the pencil sketched look warms my heart and should be useful in conveying the idea of a purely planning stage.

Enjoy,

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As a recent thread on Wickedfire has had me searching for some introductory texts, I stumbled across this neat little introduction to web design by Robbie Manson.

I know that readers of this blog have likely surpassed this level, but I still wanted to share.

Enjoy,

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One acronym that will get spoon.fed to you anytime you look at marketing methods is AIDA.

AIDA stands for

• Attention
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

And provides a solid (and easy to remember) foundation for marketing efforts.

However, it took me quite some time until it finally clicked in my head about how to use this in landing page design. The key to me was that a user reads a page from top to bottom.

Keeping that in mind, you can easily apply AIDA to a landing page.

So, before I keep boring you any further, I will just link directly to an example page, that should provide a pretty self -explanatory AIDA page design.

It is built using the blueprint framework, and you can get the .zip file directly from the page.

Enjoy.

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Fugue icons

pinvoke has some neat icon packs to use in your web projects, called Fugue and Diagona. All they are asking for is a link back, or a modest price. The fugue icon pack, pictured above, has over 2000 icons in it, the diagona icon pack 400 of them.

All icons are easy to read and look nice, while the diagona icons are a bit more simplistic than the fugue icons.

Go check them out.

Have a look at this list of tools for hacking stuff together on the fly.

A lot of the times, these tools either suffice or they serve to proove a concept. Yahoo pipes, for example is an easy way to throw together a scraper that can then be made more sophisticated when coding it for real.

I especially enjoyed the article on using Google spreadsheet to scrape wikipedia.

Enjoy.