Filed under: Breakfast, Food Porn Daily, Comfort Food

Saturday mornings call out for an extra lazy hour in bed followed by a leisurely brunch. This weekend, think about whipping up a batch of pancakes or waffles instead of heading out to a local restaurant. These fluffy peanut butter pancakes might just make a tasty meal. You can find the recipe here.

Don’t forgot to stop by the Slashfood Flickr Group and join up!

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Filed under: Deals, Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), Time Warner (TWX), News Corp’B’ (NWS)

Joining the contest to see who will own the No. 2 search engine, Time Warner’s (NYE: TWX) AOL is reportedly in talks with Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO). News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) is already in intense talks to see if it can arrange a deal that will block Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) bid for Yahoo!

According to The Telegraph, “AOL’s determination to present itself as the most attractive of the white knights available to Yahoo! follows the formal rejection last week of Microsoft’s $31-a-share offer for Yahoo!”

With a market cap of $60 billion, Time Warner couldn’t buy Yahoo! outright because the portal company already has an offer for $44 billion from Microsoft. But, like News Corp., it could offer to put AOL into Yahoo! in exchange for a piece of the firm. With AOL currently valued at about $20 billion, this stake might be as big as 33%.

In a consolidation, AOL and Yahoo! could cut large numbers of staff and Yahoo!’s search could be the de facto product for all of AOL, greatly expanding its reach. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has this franchise now, but might give up its arrangement to stop Microsoft and Yahoo! from joining forces.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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Filed under: Action, Drama, Foreign Language, Independent, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports, Other Festivals, Cinematical Indie

Am I the only one who gets Genghis Khan confused with Attila the Hun? They’re both military leaders who conquered vast territories hundreds of years ago and are viewed as either brutal killers or heroic commanders, depending on who you ask. (Quick: Which one appears in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure?) Thank goodness there are films like Mongol to set me straight. An Oscar nominee in the foreign-language category, the Kazakhstan-produced biopic is far more ambitious and cinematic than any previous treatment of the Mongol leader’s life, and it’s as slickly produced as any high-prestige Hollywood biography.

Also in the spirit of Hollywood: They want to make it a trilogy. Mongol covers only the early part of Genghis Khan’s life, in the late 1100s, before he assumed his now-legendary name. (”Khan” was a title, like “Caesar”; historians are divided on where “Genghis” came from.) Later chapters will presumably tell the rest of his story as a uniter of Mongol tribes and an unsurpassed conquerer of lands. I hope and pray that the next installment is called Genghis II: The Wrath of Khan.

We meet him as a 9-year-old boy named Temudjin (Odnyam Odsuren), the faithful son of a good father, Esugei (Ba Sen). A tribal leader himself, Esugei seeks to make an alliance with the Merkit group by betrothing young Temudjin to a Merkit girl, but on the way there Temudjin meets Borte (Bayertsetseg Erdenebat), a headstrong girl his age. They choose each other, and Esugei concedes to let them be engaged, even though he knows the Merkits will take it as an insult.

Continue reading Portland Film Fest Review: Mongol

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Building a solid blog that Google wants to rank highly is not easy task to start with but it’s made much harder by blog content management systems being designed using every SEO faux pas you can think of apart from Flash.

Most people have now figured out the obvious tips such as improving your url structure to include keywords, adding a unique title and meta description to each page and preventing indexing of noise pages such as comment feeds.

However lots of bloggers are still falling into a major SEO and usability trap - date based archives. When was the last time you visited a blog and browsed their date based archives? I’ve certainly never done it. The thing to remember about blogging is that maybe 90% of the content is time sensitive. If you want to read about internet marketing or some new product launch that’s great but the information is likely to be out of date in a couple of months. I certainly would never want to look back at something you wrote back in 2006 unless I knew what the post was about and that’s where the date based archives become even more useless. You can’t find a post by topic so you need to know what date it was published. How many of you remember the date another blogger published a post?

Date based archives are not just useless from a usability point of view they don’t help your SEO either. As well as possible duplicate content issues if you publish full posts in your archives the main issue is that the pages are full of unrelated content. If you group all your posts about the iPhone together on one page Google can see that the page is related to the iPhone and each post will rank higher because of it. When you group 30 posts from January 2006 together on a page Google just sees it as a page of unrelated content.

If you really want to see how well used your category pages are just check your stats software. How many people look at them? Where did those people come from? How many people who recently read an old post from 2006 found it via your archives?

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Everybody who owns a website wants it to be more popular. From the web design team at the New York Times right down to the small retailer trying to expand into ecommerce, popularity is the key to success. Reading and working with popular websites every day can sometimes feel like living in a bubble where everybody has good search engine rankings and sites are all beautiful so it’s nice sometimes to look at how “normal” websites can improve their popularity.

Invest in a good design – while people like Ling might think design isn’t everything it is one of the key aspects a site can use to build their visitors trust so you need to get it right.

Learn about usabilty – having the best designed website in the world is useless if normal people can’t use it. Sit behind some of your non internet savvy relatives and friends and watch them navigate your site and make purchases from your store. If they struggle with things you need to improve your usabilty.

Create a useful website – I know this might sound simple but having a website isn’t just a way to tell people about your company. If you really want to become popular make sure your website is actually going to be helpful to the people who arrive there. If every visitor who was pleased by your site gave you a link or told one of their friends your traffic would increase to Facebook levels in months.

Keep it up to date – if your company can’t be bothered to keep your website updated at least once a year then I probably won’t want to use it. Broken links, outdated news and copyright notices from 2003 are not going to turn me on.

Be topical – just because you are a retailer it doesn’t mean you can ignore the latest news in your niche. Having a company blog might be a bit beyond most businesses but you should at least have a news section to publish company information and responses to popular stories.

Manage your reputation – responding to your readers/customers comments is key to establishing your company as one that cares about what people say about you. You could also use the criticism to make your website better.

Learn about the internet – this might sound simple to some people but trying to explain to a middle aged company directory why they need to worry about buzz marketing is hard enough without them asking questions about what links are and what blogs do. Knowing how ideas spread through forums and blogs is essential for webmasters to understand online marketing.

Be controversial – having a boring corporate site isn’t always the best way to become popular. Sometimes you need to upset 95% of the world just to get the attention of the other 5%. After all, having 5% of the population loving your site isn’t a bad goal to have.

Be interesting – sometimes a website can break every rule in the book and still succeed. The one characteristic these sites have is they are interesting. So much content on the web is boring and repeated that having an interesting site is probably the best way to get noticed.

Learn about Google – ever wondered why some websites rank highly on Google while some languish on page 4? It’s because one of the owners understands how Google works. Spend a few days reading the official guidelines and making sure your site follows all the normal optimisation rules and you might be surprised ho