If you are interested in reading about far away places and destinations, you should take a look at World of Peter. It’s a blog done very nicely by Peter le Roux, brother of the now famous Paul le Roux of Webwobot. I believed I have introduced this little blog before to you guys before, but it deserves another introduction for those who have missed the first one. You can read about exotic travels and places which you have only dreamed about traveling to. I know, it’s not the same as being there, but this is the next best thing.

And oh, check out this little post on South Africa. The ironic thing is that it is posted under the category Short Stories. I wonder how long will the post be if is posted under the some other category? 1 million words?? Anyways I have always enjoyed reading stuff like these. You know, stuff like brand new places, it’s history, it’s beauty, interesting events and the people and accomplishments they done there. And Peter writes it so well, makes me all both weepy and fuzzy inside. I didn’t know that South Africa has so many natural beauty and landmarks. It makes my head spin! After reading Peter’s blog, I feel the urge to drop everything and row my little leaky raft from Singapore to South Africa. If I only knew which way is West and if you can stand me saying “Are we there yet?” every few minutes. I mean, comparing Singapore to South Africa is like comparing this blog to Matt Cutt’s. There is no real fight. In Singapore, we have just the hot sun and ugly concrete buildings. The women here are not even pretty.

Let’s drink a toast to our South African friends with extremely strong alcoholic drinks!

PS: My keyboard is a bit flaky these days. The spacebar seemed not to work at will, so if you find the some words are stuck together, blame the keyboard, not me. Or just blame the years of accumulation of bits and pieces of food stuck beneath the keys. Have any of you wonder what lies beneath the keys in your keyboard? I don’t want to even think about it. Yucks.

Take a look at BitLet. It looks like now you don’t need to install any software in order to download a torrent file. Well, not exactly, it makes use of the Sun Java Applet platform to perform the download for you. All you need to do is the copy the torrent URL and paste the link on their address bar and click on “Download Torrent”. I tried a few times with different URLs but all failed. It says that it could not “download metafile”, whatever that means. Anyway, it’s in beta or perhaps even in alpha, so you should keep your fingers cross and hope that they will improve this system. It could mean a lot to people like me who enjoy abusing every network I see.

Anyway, I find this little project very interesting. No software to install. You can download torrent files in your office PC without your IT administrators knowing that you are doing it since there is no software installed. You still need to open up ports 6881-6889 on your firewall to allow incoming connections though. This is too bad as any IT administrator with half a brain intact will block those ports to stop the staff from using bittorrent which may suck all the bandwidth. It would work better if the applet allow us to change the ports needed for bittorrent access.

I would also recommend you to use a full-featured Bittorrent Client in your home. The Java Applet site is the simple and basic torrent client without any frills or additional features. That’s not what it is supposed to do and I am sure that the developers will not concentrate on adding features to their applet. And it looks like Java is now taking over the Internet.

Yes, in the great little SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forum called Digital Point Forums, somebody claimed that since he/she couldn’t get results from SEO, it means that SEO and PageRank doesn’t work. I don’t exactly understand what PageRank got to do with rankings on Search Engines, but this is exactly what he /she claimed! What happened is that this person spent a lot of money buying videos on SEO and SEO books but nothing works. This person that proceed to buy a software which “post to groups” like 100,000 posts per day, but instead of getting the results he/she wanted, the only thing was that his/her site was “taken down.” Worse, he/she claimed that although his/her site reached number one for “some terms” but there were little traffic from it. I mean, what gives?? If the terms don’t bring in traffic, it doesn’t mean that SEO doesn’t work, it means that you are targeting the wrong terms!

I am very surprised that people who read and study SEO, don’t actually understand SEO at all. It’s mainly about keywords and getting the right terms to attract Search Engine traffic. It also involves getting links and choosing the correct anchor text (which comes from the keywords and keyphrases). But it is not really as simple as that. A lot more effort is needed for SEOers to further optimize their websites. These include constantly updating content, keywords density, networking among your peers, linking, directory submission and so on. It’s true that SEO is not an exact science, but more of an act. But the basics are always there, and if you work on the basics, you should be able to do pretty well. Oh, and SEO is an continuous process, you will have to constantly improve and update your site to get ahead of the game.

I had mentioned web directory submission as a good method to help optimize your site. Directory submission is a pretty easy way (and sometimes even free) to get backlinks to your site and this in turn helps you rank in the Search Engines. I would recommend beginners to start by choosing some good keyphrases and do frequent directory submissions. It’s easy and it works. Just make sure that the listings in the web directory is crawl-able by Search Engines.