The Random Blogger

When I moved to the US from England in 2005, I learned that a US gallon is smaller than a UK (or Imperial) gallon: the UK gallon is 160 fluid ounces, whereas the US gallon is only 128 fluid ounces.

And that’s because there are only 16 fluid ounces in a US pint, compared to the 20 that are in an Imperial pint.

But what I hadn’t realised, until today, when I was working on one of our new websites, is that a US fluid ounce is actually equivalent to 1.0408423 Imperial fluid ounces.

I’d always assumed that a fluid ounce is a fluid ounce, but apparently this isn’t the case.

So now you know!

I’ve been involved in various aspects of Internet marketing since 2004, at a guess, and I’ve seen many so-called “gurus” come and go.

I’ve subscribed, at one time or another, to most of their lists, and for reasons I’ll explain here, I’ve also unsubscribed from most of them.

You see, to me, it seems that most of these people might originally come out with something useful and/or good (although many don’t), but after that, and they’ve nothing else to offer, they all bombard you with the same emails promoting the latest “big thing”, just to try to make some affiliate commissions and get to the top of the league tables.

To me, if you’ve one thing to say, and you’ve said it, then that’s it. I really don’t want to receive dozens of emails all promoting the same product launch.

This is even more true when you realise that the stuff that has always worked will always work - without the need for loopholes and fads and fancy scripts, etc.

So after all this time, and after wading through (and mainly deleting) what must be thousands of emails, who do I still listen to?

Sadly, not very many of them.

But there is one person who is genuinely different (well, there are a few, but I may have to write about them some other time) …

… and his name is Paul Myers.

What makes Paul different?

Well:

1. He doesn’t send you a load of junk mail (aka spam) promoting stuff that he clearly hasn’t tested for himself.
2. He doesn’t send you one or more emails every single day, clogging up your inbox.
3. When he does email you, what he says is well-written, unique content that’s useful, educational, often humorous, and that offers a perspective that nobody else seems to offer.
4. When he does promote his own products, of which he has quite a few, then you can guarantee that they will be reasonably-priced (I think the most I’ve paid for anything is probably $27), and yet they offer much more value than most everything else I’ve bought (including the really expensive stuff too).

In fact, I positively look forward to receiving Paul’s emails - to the point that I wish he would write more frequently (although I accept that if he did that, the quality may not be sustainable, not that I feel that this would be a real problem for him).

So, do yourself a favour, head on over to TalkBiz News, and sign up for his newsletter.

Not only will you be glad you did, but you’ll also receive a free copy of his highly-acclaimed book, “Need To Know“.

(See my previous post, My Internal Jukebox for what this category is all about.)

(See my previous post, My Internal Jukebox for what this category is all about.)

Years (and years) ago, when I first started working in what used to be called Data Processing before it was renamed as Information Technology, there was a cartoon strip going around that was affectionately known as “The Swing”.

It was one of those things that, like Dilbert, is both true to life but sad at the same time, and my much-photocopied version has long since been lost.

However, I was delighted to uncover, tonight, an updated version of this classic cartoon, which you can find at:

http://www.dlevel.com/blogs/alex/images/software_development.jpg

Enjoy!

Anybody who earns their money from the Internet these days knows the need to generate backlinks to their site - and preferably one-way links, as the days of reciprocal (aka two-way) links are maybe not dead, but they’re certainly not in the best of health any longer.

And while you can still try to contact webmasters and ask for a link back to your site, this is a lot of effort and is a lot harder to succeed at these days than it was several years ago.

Internet marketers are nothing if not creative, and so the concept of three-way links and one-way links building services was born.

There has been some debate for years about whether Google can detect a three-way linking network, and I have to confess that I’m sitting on the fence on this issue at the moment.

But one-way link networks - that’s a whole different ball-game!

Jonathan Leger’s 1WayLinks is a great service, maybe the best - until I heard about the imminent launch of a new service called ezArticleLink.

This new service, which is due to launch on 22 February 2010, takes the one-way linking concept even further by automatically building one-way links to the sites that have one-way links back to your site.

(You may need to read that previous paragraph a few times for it to sink in.)

It looks as though they will have two membership levels - a free Silver level and a paid Gold level - and for the next couple of days, you can sign up to be an ezArticleLink JV Partner, get a free Silver account and earn passive income from people who sign up under you (as well as account credits when they have articles they submit approved).

If this sounds a bit garbled, then apologies, but I’ve only just come across this and thought I’d let people know about it, given that the pre-launch phase is almost over.

Anyway, it’s free to sign up as a JV Partner, and you do get a free Silver account, so what have you got to lose?

I’m certainly going to give it a go, and will try to report back on how well it works at a later date.

There are many ways that you can have a healthy diet.

For example, you could eat less food, although calorie-counting is not necessarily the best way for long-term weight loss and may not make your diet any healthier.

Or you could try food-combining, which can make sure your body receives the right balance of nutrients.

Or, you could eat “the right food”, whatever that may mean today (as the medical profession change their minds about what is healthy or not on an all-too-frequent basis).

And part of deciding what is “right” or not is based on the ingredients.

Which is why manufacturers nowadays are obliged to print details on the label - so you can see exactly what is in the product.

But there is, of course, a problem with this - the number of unhealthy ingredients that are in some of these foods.

As an example, let’s take a product called Chef Boyardee Beefaroni, which is basically macaroni and beef in a tomato sauce.

The version we’re interested in here comes in a 14.5 oz (or 411.068085 grams for you metric people) microwavable tub.

The first two things we look at on any food label are the amounts of trans fats and sodium in the product.

Now, the good news with Beefaroni is that there are no trans fats.

However, the amount of sodium is somewhat scary - 920mg, which represents 38% of your RDA (i.e. Recommended Daily Allowance):

Just by itself, nearly a whole gram of salt in such a small tub of food is too much …

… but then you realise that this 14.5oz tub is meant to contain nearly two servings, not just one - they claim the serving size is 249 grams (or 8.78 ounces).

I don’t know about you, but half a tub of Beefaroni is not going to cut it - even as a snack. Even a full tub needs topping up with something to transform it into something worth eating.

And in case you can’t see what the wording says on the left of the label, let me spell it out for you - it says “Big Size Bowl - For Big Appetites“.

Yes, it’s true - for those people who don’t have a “big appetite”, they also make this product in a 7.5oz (or 212 grams) tub, although I’m not sure who the target audience is for this size of Beefaroni, as even our Chihuahua could polish that off without any trouble.

Anyway, back to the label.

So, once you realise that in spite of what they say the serving size is, you actually need to eat the entire tub to even begin to feel like you’ve eaten anything at all, you find that you’re actually eating almost 1.5 grams of salt, and that means you’ll be consuming nearly two thirds of your daily sodium requirements - in a single small tub.

And that’s why they quote their nutritional facts using absurdly small serving sizes - because if they showed the size of portion that most real people eat, some of those nutritional figures (especially the sodium content) would be so high that nobody in their right mind would buy them.

While working on one of our many websites a day or two ago, I found a really cool image magnification effect that I’d not seen before.

Eager to track it down, my first port of call was my favourite site for this type of script, Dynamic Drive, and lo and behold, I found it instantly.

It’s called jQuery Image Magnify v1.1, and it’s dead easy to install (and it works on IE, Firefox and Opera).

Give it a try - you’ll love it!