Search engine optimization, or “SEO” in the biz, isn’t only for people trying to turn their Web site into a revenue machine, to make money online, but can really be useful for everyone building Web sites. There are lots of different facets to writing, designing and adjusting your Web pages to maximize the chance of them being a top result for search terms, but one of the best – and easiest – is to work with keyword density.
Imagine you were a really big company and walked into the offices at Google, saying “I’ll offer you a deal: I’ll add your advertisements to my Web Pages, you sell the ad space, and we’ll split the revenue.” Sound too good to be true?
It’s not. It’s Google’s Adsense Program and it’s the basis of thousands of different sites currently earning money each time someone clicks on an ad. Some of these sites earn just a dollar or two each week, but others are earning over $500 each day. Without doing anything special, without managing ad inventory, and without worrying about collecting payment from advertisers.
A reader of Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther writes in to ask for an explanation of the regular expression shown in this command:
du -s * .[^.]*
A reader from Austria writes:
As I’m now working through your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Jaguar, I can’t get the commands “alias” and “grep” to work. Has been there a change in the command definition from Jaguar to Panther?
If you find yourself working on the command line and need to whip out a quick statistical analysis or two, you’ll be glad to know that Wicked Cool Shell Scripts fan Josh Kotecha has sent in a very nice little shell script that does just that using the scriptbc script included in the book.
We’ve been done with the book for a few months, and today a box of books arrived from Wiley, a box filled with copies of Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML and CSS.
Another hiccup in a script included in Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, one that’s a subtle problem because it sometimes occurs because of a user-set LS_OPTIONS flag. Script #37, bestcompress, has the following sequence:
smallest="$(ls -l "$name" $Zout $gzout $bzout | \
awk '{print $5"="NR}' | sort -n | cut -d= -f2 | head -1)"
A reader of my new book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts pointed out that the capability of testing a file permission with find using the ‘+’ notation is GNU-specific.
