Freelancer.com added new messaging features

Yesterday, Freelancer.com announced the release of their new instant messaging system. Features include:

• New Inbox Layout
• Instant Messaging
• Pop up chat window
• Improved Attachments

The importance of getting no-follow links

A comment I just wrote on the ProBlogger blog:

"most comment links are no-follow anyway"

I would not dismiss no-follow links or their usefulness that easily. While they may not carry the same weight as a "follow" link, SE bots do spider no-follow links and any popular website will automatically get a decent number of "naturally acquired" no-follow links for every "naturally acquired" do-follow link it gets.

Several social media platforms [add] no-follow [tags to] links, so when a site becomes popular and people start talking and tweeting about it, it will get lots of no-follow links. One could even argue that a big surge in do-follow links that is not accompanied by a similar surge in no-follow links will be suspicious as it could be an indicator of a big link buying campaign.

BlueGriffon: A free opensource WYSIWYG HTML editor

BlueGriffon is a free WYSIWYG content editor for your websites. It includes the Gecko engine (the same rendering engine Firefox uses) so your sites will look identical in your editor to the way they look in Firefox.

How to improve your site's performance with Apache and htaccess

A faster website means more revenue and traffic:

• Amazon's Greg Linden reported that 100 ms of extra load time caused a 1% drop in sales.
• Google's Marrissa Mayer reported that 500 ms of extra load time caused 20% fewer searches.
• Yahoo!'s Nicole Sullivan reported that 400 ms of extra load time caused a 5–9% increase in the number of people who clicked the back button before the page even loaded.

Reasons enough to make sure your site loads as fast as possible, so here's a tutorial on how to speed up your website using htaccess, mod_deflate and mod_expires.

90% of SEOs won't be using the Google disavow tool

We already talked about the Google disavow tool and why it is a bad idea to use it. A recent poll on SEO Training Dojo reveals that 89.3% of the SEOs who voted said they won't be using it.

Don't waste your time using the disavow tool. Instead, focus on expanding your network. Build more sites and get more links. Buy old domains and revive them. Get more social signals. In other words: building is better than snitching.

About.me is independent again

In 2010, AOL acquired the online identity platform about.me. Today, they announced they've been bought out:

Today, we're thrilled to announce that we'll be spinning about.me back out, returning to life as an independent company that is financially backed by our management team and a truly amazing group of investors who have backed companies such as WordPress and Google. Our team will remain the same for the most part, and we'll continue our roles as co-founders.
Our commitment is to make about.me the web's starting point for identity - we believe everyone will eventually have an about.me page they integrate into their email signature, add to their Twitter Bio or embed in one of their blogs.

Oracle's update didn't plug the holes in Java

An update for Java 7 - which was supposed to fix the critical vulnerabilities that left machines vulnerable to remote exploits - has failed to solve the problem, leaving the door open to further attacks.

Adam Gowdiak from Security Explorations reports:

What we found out and what is a subject of a new security vulnerability (Issue 53) is that unsigned Java code can be successfully executed on a target Windows system regardless of the four Java Control Panel settings described above. Our Proof of Concept code that illustrates Issue 53 has been successfully executed in the environment of latest Java SE 7 Update 11 (JRE version 1.7.0_11-b21) under Windows 7 OS and with "Very High" Java Control Panel security settings.

That said, recently made security "improvements" to Java SE 7 software don't prevent silent exploits at all. Users that require Java content in the web browser need to rely on a Click to Play technology implemented by several web browser vendors in order to mitigate the risk of a silent Java Plugin exploit.