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Breaking News: Singer-Songwriter John Ashcroft To Resign as U.S. Attorney General by Paul Shrug News::Politics Anatomically Incorrect by matt Weird::Sex!? Who needs a yacht when you've got a submarine. by Verminator Culture::Camaro!

Search Engine Tips for Webmasters
By MichaelCrawford, Section Diaries Posted on Tue Aug 2nd, 2005 at 02:48:35 PM PDT
Search engine optimization is widely regarded as a black art practiced by black hats. But one can increase one's search engine referrals substantially through a few simple, honest practices. Anyone who can code HTML can apply the most important optimizations to their website themselves and thereby not only save money, but avoid the risk of hiring a black hat only to have their site penalized by the search engines when their tricks are discovered. Find out how in my new article: White Hat Search Engine Optimization Some optimizations could be done by any Scoop site with the addition of a simple feature to Scoop. Inside, A Poll: Did You Find My Article Helpful? (488 words in story) Full Story

A Brave New World
By MichaelCrawford, Section Diaries Posted on Tue Jul 12th, 2005 at 06:59:00 PM PDT
It seems that Internet pioneer David Clark wants to build a whole new internet that will solve many of the current problems that our current one has. He is accepting suggestions as to how we can get it right this time. Right away I began to wonder, what might be some of the suggestions he will receive? I also began to wonder whether he would be in a position to refuse to implement some of them. This led me to: I Don't Know What This New Internet Will Look Like .. but I am as confident as I am that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists. After all, we have the children to think about. It has a Creative Commons license. Click the license notice then read the license terms carefully to understand what that means. (3 comments, 230 words in story) Full Story

Take This Job and Shove It.
By MichaelCrawford, Section Diaries Posted on Sat May 7th, 2005 at 08:36:07 PM PDT
I have a new essay up at GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks. It explains why I want to get out of the software consulting business, even though it can be high-paying work: Self Employment: Even on a Good Day Things are Hard Inside, a Poll: Does Self Employment Suck? And a story about my client that didn't make it into the essay. You'll understand why not when you read it. (445 words in story) Full Story

Saying "No" to the Body Shops
By MichaelCrawford, Section Diaries Posted on Mon May 2nd, 2005 at 02:46:34 PM PDT
Greetings, this is my first diary here. CheeseburgerBrown told me about the place. I think I'll enjoy getting to know you all. I'm a software consultant, a contract programmer. I run my own business, but most of my colleagues don't, working as temporary employees of contract employment agencies. We like to call them body shops because of the way they profit so handsomely by farming out naive and hard-working, mostly young programmers to their clients. Their cut is supposed to be 30% of our pay, but because they keep it a secret from both client and contractor, sometimes it's a lot more. After a recruiter hounded me mercilessly while I was trying to enjoy some quality time with my desperately ill father, I wrote down everything I knew about finding work without using the body shops and called it: Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants I got an email from a recruiter once accusing me of taking food from his hungry child's mouth. Made me smile. Enjoy! (3 comments, 281 words in story) Full Story