GeorgeAppiah.com |||||

Does your site suck? Yeah, I know. Most Ghanaian sites are terrible, to say the least. Sometimes I wonder whether the webmasters who spew out such websites were given special orders to make the website as painful to use.

I appreciate the fact that there are just too many variables at play when it comes to web sites, that it’s practically impossible to build that perfect website that suits every single visitor or user agent out there.

But your business website is supposed to help you do more business. And if you cannot directly account for any return on your investment, then it’s total waste of time, in my humble opinion. Certain things are just inexcusable. Broken links, annoying flash intros that take ages to load, huge images, broken search boxes, broken contact forms, copy that makes you want to scream … the list goes on and on.

That’s why I’m introducing Fix My Site, a new addition to GeorgeAppiah.com. Once a week, I’ll pick one Ghanaian website, rip it apart, and present a thorough professional review, from the point of view of organic search marketing.

These reviews are not meant to ridicule anyone (even though I’m probably going to laugh my head off as I browse through some sites). I’m simply trying to bring web developers, designers and small business owners together to produce websites that get results.

But as they say, charity begins at home. So I’ve been working hard to ensure I’m not guilty of the things I’m going to talk about. So far, I’ve managed to achieve valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and valid CSS. And more features and functionalities are coming.

So if you’re not happy with the performance of your website, fret not. Professional advice is coming. And you don’t have to pay a dime for this advice. Just shoot me an email, and I’ll take a look at your site and provide you with some real suggestions. And by real, I mean real.

USB has now become the preferred connectivity option for all new gadgets. Printers, cameras, disk drives, … heck, even cell phones that have traditionally used proprietary connectors are now gradually switching over to USB.

While some of these devices can take power directly from the USB port to charge the device, the large majority do not. But what if you could just take out the battery and charge them from the USB port on your computer?

Well, that’s exactly what USB Cell, a new kid on the market does. These cells function like any other cells, until they get drained. Then, instead of throwing them away or plugging them into the wall via your charger …. you simply plug them into the USB port on your computer, and viola … they get charged.

Great idea.

[Found via: Web Worker Daily]

This morning I got up to find a whole bunch of spam in my mailbox. Some idiots are using my box (web server) to spam innocent people (including myself)! So I took a quick trip to the WordPress plugins page to find out what solution could be had. And I found Bad Behavior.

Bad Behavior is designed to integrate into your PHP-based Web site, running as early as possible to throw out spam bots before they have the opportunity to vandalize your site with their junk, or even to scrape your pages for e-mail addresses and forms to fill out.

Not only does Bad Behavior block actual vandalism to your site, it also blocks many e-mail address harvesters, resulting in less e-mail spam, and many automated Web site cracking tools, helping to improve your Web site’s security.

I’ve just installed this, and I’m waiting to see how well Bad Behavior crashes the bad guys.

Update: Looks like Bad Behavior is really aggressive — it’s kicking me out — even with the “strict mode” turned off. Sure, that means it really works … but that also means innocent people might find themselves kicked out as well. I’ve temporarily disabled it, while I dig for a fix.

Last night, while laying down in bed in the darkness, I caught myself (once again) drifting away into deep thoughts … about a whole lot of nothing. In my thoughts, I fired up Safari (yeah, it was Safari, not Firefox!) and googled (and yeah, “google” is now a verb!) this, that, and the other.

I tried them all: Wikipedia, Google, Ask, Live, Yahoo, Mahalo, Sphere, Riya, and many others. Not satisfied with the results from all those googlings, I knew I had to do something.

And something I did. When I got up this morning with the previous night’s thoughts still lingering on, I needed no soothsayer to tell me what to do: I decided to crown myself, Ghana’s Ambassador to the Internet.

Like any Ambassador, I’m the official diplomatic representative of the Ghana Government and the people of Ghana to the Internet. I’ll work my butts off (oops! that’s not a diplomatic expression!) to ensure a sound and cordial relationship between the two economies and their citizens.

In English, I’m here to bring to the world the best Ghana’s got to offer, and to Ghanaians, the best resources the Internet’s got to offer. As my diplomatic assignments permit, I’ll endeavor to answer your questions about Ghana, the Internet, and technology in general.

So keep your questions rolling in … Ambassador George will answer them!

Long live Ghana. Long live the Internet.

Kindly help me remove the “Upload Photos” button from my “My Photos” page. I can’t think of when I’ll ever use it. But if I need to use it, I’ll dig for it, wherever it may be hiding.

So kindly help me hide it now, so I can use all my computer’s screen to view my albums.

Thank you.

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George Kwabenah Appiah

Recently while waiting for my power to be restored, I grabbed my camera, walked round the house, and took some shots. My current residence is at “Dome Pillar 2″, a new, unplanned, but rapidly developing suburb of Accra. Here are some of those shots:

This is my first time of using the “Embed Slideshow” feature in Picasa Web Albums. While the free 1GB (and counting) space is great, at this time, the overall feature-set is no close that of others in this space, like Flickr. Or maybe it’s by design … I sure like it’s simplicity.

By design or not, one feature that would help is a visual indication of the total number of [hotos in the slideshow, as well as the position of the current current photo (something like 1/20). This helps the user easily determine whether he/she can invest the time to see all the photos.

Here’s a slideshow of how Guy Kawasaki built Truemours, a Web 2.0, user-generated content, citizen journalism, long-tail, social media site, for a grand total of $12,107.09. The full blog post is here.

Whoa! I signed up for immediately LinkedIn during it’s public beta stage, but never quite got to actively using it to build contacts. For a long time my profile had been languishing at just 5% completeness. But now need to actively build those professional contacts … so I spent an hour this morning to work on my profile.

I really surprised myself with how much I could do in just an hour. Equally surprising was the rather large number of college mates who are already linked in on LinkedIn — ALL of whom currently reside in US or Europe.

After the profile is in a good shape, I’ll then start actively building my network of professional contacts, which is currently languishing at just 5%

If you happen to belong to the rare breed of Ghanaian webmasters and website owners who care about web analytics, you will find Google Trends a handy tool for analyzing how often your website’s main theme (or any topic, for that matter) is searched for over time.

I stumbled upon this cool tool today as I was going through Google Zeigteist, which, I also learnt, has been replaced with Hot Trends

You can enter up to five topics and Google Trends will analyze a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.

These results are displayed in two simple graphs. The search volume graph at the top shows the number of times the keyword was searched for. The second, just beneath the search-volume graph, is the news-reference-volume graph. This shows the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories.

In addition to the search and news volume graphs, Google Trends also displays the top cities, regions, and languages for the first term you entered.

To see Google Trends in action for myself, I pitched Ghana against Uganda, sort of Using SBI’s Brainstormer, I knew in advance that there are a lot more searches containing the term “Ghana” than “Uganda”. And Google Trends confirmed this in the graph below for the year 2006.

Google Trends also shows a spike in the search volume for Ghana in July. This can be attributed to Ghana’s impressive performance in the Soccer World Cup event held in Germany which took place around this time. Indeed, the top article during this spike is about Ghana’s 2-1 win over the United States of America.