So, a few caring people opted to give you U.S. legal tender instead of wrapping up that longed after gizmo for you?
Before you head off to the mall (I thought we left mall’s behind in the 90s?), why don’t you check out our store? There are no lines. We promise.
More products are being added each week. And we are trying to stuff it full of clever humor. For you Dan Brown fans:
This picture can only mean one thing…
Update to the LlamaTails section.
In the last 4 weeks I have banned 5 people from this site. They all pissed me off in the exact same way.
Google loves us. GoogleBot indexes our site several times a day. Anything posted on this site is, for the most part, is immediately available on Google via a search. It’s a nice treat to know that Google loves us.
A perfect example of our search engine friendliness happened right after September 11th. The day of the 9-11 attacks, we posted some of our thoughts and feelings about the attack. That week, whenever someone typed in something about the World Trade Center, we ranked very highly, above most news sites such as CNN. It wasn’t until two weeks later that we were out ranked by Yahoo News.
But that very success has led to some frustration. Evidently others are figuring it out, too. Other webmasters are coming here and spamming our comment area with product links for all kinds of elixirs that promise one thing or another, or products that you wouldn’t possibly buy for anyone you actually care about.
Since Google bases part of its ranking algorithm on how many sites link to yours, people are in search of popular sites to get a link (or semi-popular ones like ours that happen to be whored by search engines across the globe). If they fail at finding a site to give them a link, they find a site like ours to somehow spam, in the hopes that we won’t notice. We do notice. And it gets that person a ban.
Yes, Google (and many other search engines) love us. Partly because part of my job is Search Engine Optimization and I know how to build SE friendly sites. The real reason is we’ve been doing this for four years now, and search engines love real content. We have four years of posts and columns - practically the length of a set of encyclopedias.
So here is the point of my post. Good SEO requires patience and good site content. Spamming links on other sites gets you banned, or at least it will here. We are not here to help you sell your products. (Though we are all web and marketing professionals, so if you want to hire us?). We are here for intellectual conversation about current, and sometimes not-so-current, topics. All we ask is that you join in and have fun.
Take your time, like I did, to learn about SEO and become a student of that technology. Don’t spam us thinking we won’t notice because we do. And we’ll ban you for it.
As an added feature to help make our lives here easier (and spam free) we have added a BlackList spam filter to the site, built by Jay Allen. Check out further info here and donate to the cause.
My favorite part is that it allows us to web publish any porn spammer that decides to hit our site again. Yes, that’s right, you porn spam us and we can spread the word to other blacklist users quickly.
Congrats to BlondLogic, the winner of our LlamaTails contest!
As a winner of the contest, BlondLogic will get some top-notch gear from The SpittingLlamas Oasis Store.
Yes gang, our first ever contest. Does the winner get fame? Fortune? Special treatement? Well, no, not really. But we will give the winner a prize. We will send you this very t-shirt from the SpittingLlamas Oasis. Who wouldn’t want official LlamaWear?!?
One of the sections of this site is the venerated LlamaTails. Now you get the chance to play along. We provide the photo, you provide the LlamaTail.
Here are the rules:
We are not looking for simply a picture caption. Quite the contrary. If you are not sure what the Llamatails are, then hop over to that section and read the intro.
Post your entry in the forum thread dedicated to this contest. One entry per person, so make it a good one. When we select the winner, we will mail them their prize, add the image and their caption (credited to the winner) to our LlamaTails section.
The winner will be chosen by the owners of this site: Taranis, Cosbysweater and Jetteva. We will apply completely arbitrary guidelines that will constantly change. Meaning, we’re going to pick the one that fits in with the Llamatails and makes us laugh the most.
We’ll notify the winner by email in order to get the proper mailing information to send the prize. I’m sure a booking on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno will soon follow.
Head over to the forum to see the image and post your entry!
This is the new site design. There is still lots of tweaking to be done. I am sure there are pages hidden in places that will be using the wrong style sheet or will be just altogether broken. In the coming days, I hope to take care of most of them.
Also, we will be fiddling with the font sizes and such to make sure the readability stays where we want it to be. So, for the next week or so, bear with us as we work out the kinks and polish up this new design.
The site should be fairly compliant for both XHTML and CSS standards and most modern browsers should render it almost identically.
Since our meager and humble beginning three years ago, we swore we would never bow to the scourge of banner advertising. We wanted this site to be driven by content and we wanted our readers to be free of assaults by banner ads, pop-ups, pop-unders and all the other ways advertisers are raping the Web.
In other words, this site is a labor of love that we have poured our ideas, thoughts and money into for the sake of prompting good discussion among people who like to talk about a variety of issues. With more than 1,200 readers a month, I’d you all agree!
Fear not fellow Webizens, we won’t fall to the dark side. But, In the spirit of capitalism and an attempt to augment the growing expenses of the site, we have opened a small but growing store with a handful of products. I think you will enjoy them. My favorite is the thong. Yes, the SpittingLlamas.com thong. What wonderful lady wouldn’t want it??
We plan on growing the store exponentially over time with a variety of products and limited time only specials. In the past we have received many emails from people suggesting we do this - encouraging us to apply our humor and point-of-views to bumper stickers, t-shirts and coffee mugs. Mostly we lacked time to get it started. (And we can’t forget our wonderful wives that have tolerated our growth and the expenses that have come along with it.)
Currently the store is hosted at CafeShops.com but we plan on moving it to our own e-commerce package in time. These products will also be given away as prizes for contests we plan on running in the future. We are also working on a major revision to the site that we should have ready soon. Yep gang, we’re taking it up a notch!
So why don’t you wander over to the SpittingLlamas Oasis check out some products, and maybe support our site a bit. Tell your friends. And keep an eye on the store. Like I said, it’s going to change quickly!
Well, I am working on cutting up the new design as we speak. Once I get the code ready, then we can load in the MovableType templates, and voila! I also got the forums back to the way they looked before. Frankly, it matches well with our new design, so my planned skin may not come about.
Jetteva did most of the work on this design cribbing a few things from another template he had. We will attempt to be 100% XHTML compatible and 100% CSS, but I can’t promise anything right now. The new design is a great deal more detailed and graphic heavy, so I may cheat and use a few tables here and there.
Speaking of CSS and tables, SitePoint has announced their new book: HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS. I downloaded the sample chapters and it looks pretty interesting. I was thinking last night about how CSS and XML/XHTML have really changed the landscape of web design. I sat wondering what the next big watershed change will be. Hopefully, I will think of it and can be paid millions to write books and give seminars. It’ll be like winning some lottery, only greatly legitimized.
Stay tuned for the new design!
My favorite words. Next to Deep Fried Cheesecake, that is.
Strangely, the three folks here at Spitting Llamas are this week a veritable microscosm of life in the U.S. For whatever reason, we have become a living commentary on the state of the union.
Cosbysweater is out in Las Vegas sowing some wild oats. He’s been living the high roller lifestyle amidst splendor and bared breasts. The opulence of his surroundings is matched only by the hedonistic pleasures hidden in every corner of that fabulous city. His trip represents all that is good and right with America.
Jetteva is starting his new job today, after being laid off. His employment drama is indicative of our economy’s sad state of affairs. Like many in this country, he is struggling against the undertow of inflationary prices amidst war fears. Job security is not only nonexistent, but seemingly not even something that employers strive for any more. With consumer spending hitting all-time lows, mortgage rates and other interest rates falling steadily, what can be done to keep folks like Jetteva from bouncing job to job?
While those two langour at the extremes of the American experience, I sit entrenched in middle class warfare. A fairly steady, but unfulfilling, and underpaying job bouys my purchase-oriented lifestyle just enough. Meanwhile, I am doubling my depression medication and fretting over the lack of spirituality in my life. I suppose I am the epitome of the middle class warrior who is trampled under the foot of the upper crust, but keeps the service class alive with unbounded spending.
We are not always in these roles. We probably move from day to day, but we are here and now a rather pure example of what Bush would seem to think is an OK state of the union.