Best Coffees
Mar 11th, 2010 by admin
This movie created by Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers talks about the 2008 Let’s Talk Coffee event that was supported by ACDI/VOCA under our USAID Colombia Specialty Coffee Program. Through our program, ACDI/VOCA strengthens the specialty coffee sector in Colombia and provide tools for smallholder farmers to become more competitive in the international market.
Duration : 0:5:41
Mar 11th, 2010 by admin
Jm Sherbine from Caribou Coffee at the Cool Fool Kite Festival talks about the event and Caribou Coffee. Cariboue Coffee is a sponsor of this event and gave out free coffee and hot chocolate to the folks.
Duration : 0:1:12
Mar 11th, 2010 by admin
Learn French with Mark and Anna from Coffee Break French. Each lesson features a Video Extra which allows you to review the vocabulary of the lesson. Find out weekly podcasts at http://www.coffeebreakfrench.com. In this edition, Mark and Anna cover some Christmas vocabulary.
Duration : 0:6:53
Mar 11th, 2010 by admin
Home roasting green coffee Bean with a hot air popcorn popper.
good how-to article
http://knol.google.com/k/dan-bergstrom/home-roasting-green-coffee-bean/aff8b5m4qccu/2#
Duration : 0:6:43
Mar 11th, 2010 by admin
You have done your research for that new car you want to buy. You have narrowed down the choices, checked the gas mileage ratings, checked the maintenance history, checked the typical resale value, and gotten opinions from others about the various local car dealerships that offer your choice to understand the rating they get for post-sale service and support.
But do not ignore an aspect of this whole thing that is probably every bit as important as the actual make and model of the car that you choose, which is financing the car or truck with the best deal possible on a car loan or truck loan. You need to gain some knowledge about financing if you do not understand long-term financing, because the whole deal with financing is that you have more options than you think you do, and even options that look identical on the surface, like cars, are entirely different when you take a peek under the hood. In other words, getting the best car loan or truck loan, whether a new car or truck, or a used car or truck, is MUCH more than just the monthly payment amount that you are quoted.
Of course the car dealerships anticipate this. You are in the spotless showroom with the free coffee and the shiny new vehicles on the showroom floor just itching to be driven by you, and your right foot is already twitching with the thoughts of getting this baby on the road to see what she can do. So the car dealerships have “guaranteed financing” programs already setup, all you need to do is sign your name and the car keys will be in your hand.
Do not fall for it, at least not until you have done your homework. In fact, this is a part of your homework that you can do prior to even setting foot in the dealership. Do your homework and perhaps even get pre-approved from a lending source before you go to the dealership. More often than not, if you tell the car salesman that you have already been pre-approved for financing, you can often get an even sweeter deal. But by all means, do NOT tell them how MUCH you are approved for, since then he will feel obligated to get as close to that amount as possible.
While it may be attractive to get a 6 or 7 year car loan, perhaps even longer, when you look at the monthly payment figure, this is rarely a good deal based on the amount of interest you are going to be paying. You need to look at what you have paid for the vehicle at the end of the loan period. For example, on that $40,000 new car on car finance plan 1, you might have paid a total of $55,000 for it, including interest, whereas on car finance plan 2, you only paid $48,000 for it. That is an extra $7,000 that went flying out of your pocket needlessly, and I know you can think of better uses for $7,000 than the toilet. Yes, the interest rate alone can indeed make that much difference.
Bottom line: do your car financing and truck financing homework as carefully as you did research on what type of car to buy, and you can save a ton of headaches, as well as keeping much more of your hard-earned money in your wallet.
Jon Arnold
http://www.articlesbase.com/finance-articles/how-to-get-the-best-deal-on-a-car-loan-103774.html
Mar 11th, 2010 by admin
What is Gratitude?
Personally, I think that many people don’t really understand what gratitude really is.
How many times have we heard things like “He’s not grateful for the money I gave him!” or “She’s not grateful for this or that that I have done for them!”?
First of all, we have no way of knowing the gratitude that the receiver feels in these situations, but I can tell you this much, if you are making statements like the ones above, you are not giving freely or with an open heart!
Some people have a hard time expressing gratitude outwardly.
Sometimes all you will receive in return is a simple thank you when inside the recipient of your good deed is welling up and ready to burst into tears of gratitude.
We are trained to hold our emotions in, including the ones of gratitude!
When you give a gift, be thankful that you can!
When you give of yourself don’t look for anything in return.
Be satisfied in knowing that you have done the right thing, that your blessing has helped another and you will be blessed in return, maybe not the way you expect it, but you will be.
Gratitude comes from within, it is an appreciation of all that is good and welcome in our lives. Gratitude is expressed when we openly give thanks for those things.
When someone does something for us we are trained to say, “Thank you”, but how often do we really feel the thank you that we are giving?
Think back to a time when you were just so overwhelmed with something someone had done for you and you just had to blurt out a thank you.
That feeling of thanks, of gratitude, could not be contained.
If you were to stop and feel the thank you each time you gave it, you would be living in gratitude.
If you were to stop and feel how much you love and enjoy any little thing in your life, you would be living in gratitude.
Some people think that gratitude has to go deeper than giving thanks for the “things” in our lives and be more spiritual.
I say that every little thing in your life that gives you even the slightest bit of joy, every little thing that makes your day a little easier is worthy of true gratitude.
True gratitude is spiritual and fills the heart with warmth and joy!
When you can stop and say, “I really do love my coffee pot! It brews me a wonderful cup of coffee and I enjoy every sip! If it wasn’t for that coffee pot I may not have such a great cup of coffee!”, and truly feel the love and appreciation for the coffee pot, the coffee beverage and even the cup you are holding, to feel the joy that those things bring into your life, that my dear friends, that is feeling gratitude!
Mary Angela
http://www.articlesbase.com/spirituality-articles/what-is-gratitude-730435.html
Mar 11th, 2010 by admin
This article is a follow-up to my last entry about search engine optimization (or SEO), which you can find here on Articlesbase. While the first article provided a broad overview of what SEO is and how it can help you market your business, this one is meant to provide a more detailed outline of how the process works and some of the tasks you should perform in order to optimize a site. My intended audience for this article is web design firms and marketing companies who are looking to break into the world of SEO, but need a primer to help them get started.
Getting Started
There is one key piece of information to keep in mind throughout the entire optimization process, and it can be said like this: Search engines have one goal, and that is to return the most relevant results for any given search query. SEO is essentially the process of ensuring that those search engines understand that your site or your client’s site is, in fact, a good, relevant result for certain queries. For example, if you or your client owns a coffee shop in Philadelphia, then their website is absolutely a relevant result for the query “Philadelphia coffee shops”. However, the search engine algorithms can’t determine the relevance of a given page on their own if the site isn’t properly optimized. Let’s take a look at the key steps that are involved in optimizing a site, thus allowing the search engines to realize, “oh! This is a very relevant result for the query I was given”.
Choosing Your Primary Keywords and Phrases
Choosing the primary keywords and phrases which you will be optimizing for is one of the most important pieces of SEO. You need to find what I call a “middleground” keyword – something that’s not so broad that it’s useless to optimize for, but not so specific that no one is searching for it.
Consider a client who asks you to optimize for the phrase “real estate”. With very few exceptions, this is a perfect example of a keyword that is simply too broad to be worthwhile. Anyone searching for “real estate” will immediately realize that they need to refine their search beyond such a broad term. For example – are they looking to buy real estate, sell it, invest in it, or find a real estate agent? And are they looking for commercial properties or residential properties? To buy or to rent?
It should be immediately clear that optimizing for such a broad term is almost always a wasted effort. Not only because the optimization process itself will be excessively difficult, but because, more than likely, the traffic generated will not result in any sales ( “conversions”).
Now, let’s assume your client is ABC Real Estate in Bala Cynwd, PA, and they are residential real estate agents specializing in the Philadelphia market. They might ask you to optimize for “ABC Real Estate Bala Cynwd”. This is an example of a keyword that’s incredibly simple to optimize for (I probably wouldn’t even call it “optimization” since there is only one ABC Real Estate in Bala Cynwd, pretty much guaranteeing you the #1 result), but this keyword is almost useless for driving new traffic to the site. People searching for the company name already know about the company and probably know what the company does. You want to drive traffic from people who are searching for a product or service the company offers, even when the potential customer doesn’t know about the company yet.
“Homes for sale in Philadelphia” is a keyword to think about in this instance. We know from this query that the person performing the search is looking for homes for sale in Philadelphia. Our client is prepared to provide not only home search capability, but real estate agents who are willing to help the searcher in their quest for a new home. This is the kind of traffic you want to drive to the site. You should choose 2-3 similar keyword phrases to serve as the primary search goals. It’s important to note that your site will not be locked into appearing for only those phrases, if you perform the optimization correctly. Now, let’s take a look at how you actually go about doing that.
Site Structure
The first thing to look at when tasked with optimizing a site is the structure of the site itself – the HTML code, the URL/link structure, and the title and meta tags. If the site doesn’t exist yet, but you will need it to be optimized once it’s built, this section still very much applies, so read on.
Navigation
One of the most common problems I see with poorly-optimized sites is a navigation system that is effectively invisible to search engines. Oftentimes, the main navigation was created with javascript or flash, and no alternative sitemap or links are provided. While search engines such as Google are getting much better at identifying links embedded in javascript and flash, it is still a much better idea to provide a plain HTML/CSS based navigation system. You can do this without sacrificing any of the javascript or flash functionality or changing the user experience at all, so there is no reason not to do it. If your navigation is javascript based, make sure you are using a “pure CSS” menuing system, meaning that you can code your navigation as if it were a normal
A Note about flash based sites
If your site is done completely in flash, you may want to re-think your design, instead using flash for a header, footer, and/or borders, but leaving the main content as HTML and CSS. Otherwise, I recommend essentially building two full versions of the site – one in HTML and one in Flash. As I mentioned above, search engines are becoming much more effective at indexing flash pages, but you are still doing yourself a disservice in terms of SEO if your site is 100% flash based. Also, completely flash driven sites can often degrade user experience, but that’s a topic for another article.
URL Structure
Now let’s talk about URLs. Search engines like very clean URLs, the kind you see at the top of this (or any Wordpress-based) blog. Even if your site is driven by dynamic content, you will want to rewrite your URLs to look like static pages. For example, rather than having /product-view.php?fromcat=5&id=32, you will want a url that looks more like /products/32/this-is-the-product-name.html. Not only is the actual URL part of what search engines look at when determine what a page might be about (which is why we include the product name), they also have a much easier time indexing static URLs as opposed to complicated dynamic URLs with a string of variables at the end. There are many ways to accomplish the rewriting, and it’s usually not very difficult. The easiest way is to use Apache’s mod_rewrite module, which lets you transparently redirect one URL to another, while the visitor only sees the original. If you are using ASP.net on IIS, there is an excellent rewrite module for IIS6, and IIS7 has built-in rewriting capabilities. Finally, development frameworks such as Fuse for PHP or Ruby on Rails have extensive “routing” functionality which allows very fine grained control over the URL structure.
Title and Meta Tags
The and description tags are very important in SEO. These tags are your first chance to explain to a search engine what your site is all about, and you should follow some guidelines when generating these tags:
Content
It is a common SEO adage that “content is king”, and although the SEO process has gotten a bit more complex over the years, it is still largely true.
Your site should contain as much useful, unique content as possible. Simply plastering bits of text all over the site won’t do you much good, but the best thing you can do to optimize a site is to provide high quality content that people actually want to see or read. Developing such content can be tricky, but here are some basic guidelines:
Inbound Link Building
Another essential piece of the SEO puzzle is getting other sites to link back to yours. There are several ways to do this, but also some pitfalls to avoid.
Conclusion
Hopefully this article provided insight into the SEO process, and can act as a “getting started” primer for companies who are looking to expand their services offerings. I do not recommend that business owners attempt to optimize their own site, because you will not get the results you expect, and your time is better spent running the business. Hire a competent SEO company instead, and work with them to position your site for ideal keywords and phrases.
Jim Keller
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/how-to-search-engine-optimize-seo-a-website-736210.html
Mar 10th, 2010 by admin
Here are some cute, fun notebooks perfect for throwing in your purse or pocket. Great for RAK gift or stocking stuffer. Check out my blog for more fun projects at http://RoxPaperScissors.blogspot.com
Duration : 0:9:3
Mar 10th, 2010 by admin
Skinny Kevin starts the day with a balanced diet of caffeine and nicotine… | Tuesdays 8pm, Channel 4 |
Watch Supersize vs Superskinny FREE on Catch-Up http://www.channel4.com/video/supersize-vs-superskinny/catchup.html
Visit the official website at channel4.com http://www.channel4.com/programmes/supersize-vs-superskinny
Watch 1000s of Channel 4 clips http://www.channel4.com/video/
Duration : 0:2:0
Mar 10th, 2010 by admin
A very quick run through of roasting coffee in this dandy little home roaster.
Duration : 0:3:3