Image alt text and a href title text
I’ve been doing some research on alt text in image tags and the difference between that and title text in a href tags. I’ll confess that I never use a title tag on an a href, but apparently doing so with a text link shows the title tag when you hover over the link.Hover over this link for an example:Internet Retail BlogNobody (other than Matt Cutts and company) can know for sure whether there is any SEO benefit to adding title text to the a href, but we do know that the engines put a strong weight on the words that are actually linked (in this case “Internet Retail Blog”).When linking images, however, what you see when you hover (and what is subsequently passed in the form of anchor text) is the alt text on the image tag. So using alt text on an image tag is a great opportunity to provide some anchor text while title tags should be used primarily for navigational reasons.(Thanks to Zach for bringing this issue up)
No more Philip Morris tour
I have been on vacation in Virginia for the past week and I was really excited to go see the tour of the Philip Morris Manufacturing Facility (ie, the place they make most of their cigarrettes) in Richmond. We drove all the way down there only to find out that they no longer do the tour.I can’t say I’m suprised - the tour was full of paraphanelia glorifying tobacco and they took a lot of heat for doing tours through their “factory of death.”Note that I’m not a smoker - the tour was just amazing because you literally saw 100’s of millions of cigarrettes being produced - I was interested in seeing the manufacturing process now that I’m an adult (though even as a kid it was by far the most interesting field trip we ever went on).
Buying a computer
It’s been a while since I bought a new computer but I recently needed one for work and figured it would take a couple of hours of research - I was wrong. It took about a week researching my options for about 1-2 hours/day.What made it so difficult was that I needed a laptop that could power a 24″ display as a second monitor and I wanted a high resolution - after deciding to buy a Sony Vaio I spoke with a manager there that informed me the max resolution for an external display with their highest-end laptop was 1320X1080 - not the 1920X1200 required for a decent image on a 24″ monitor.I finally realized that my only options were a gaming laptop (read:expensive), one of the new Dell Precision’s or a new Gateway (I didn’t even consider Mac yet because Bootcamp was not realeased yet but I probably wouldn’t have got one anyway).So here I am on my new Dell laptop and I have been very impressed - it’s got a dual-core processor and I have not noticed a significant decrease in speed while using it in lieu of my desktop at work. If you’re in the market for a new laptop I highly recommend the Dell M65 Precision.As a side note, I called our rep and told him that I didn’t want it to come with all of the stuff that tends to make Dell machines suck (useless antivirus, branded spyware, etc.) - they gave me a fresh install and it runs a lot faster than any bloated Dell I’ve ever got.
My quote in Internet Retailer
I was quoted this month in Internet Retailer concerning Goodmail (an email certification service allowing marketers to get through the strict filters at AOL for a small fee).I am in favor of Goodmail (as you can ascertain from the article). They told me that I would have a picture in the print magazine so I guess I’m almost famous (though my co-worker told me that my hair was “messed-up”).Anybody serious about doing business on the internet should sign up for a subscription with Internet Retailer - it is free and has great articles that (most importantly) are extremely relevant to doing business online. They also have a tradeshow in Chicago in June called IR2006 which I will be attending - check out the conference agenda.