“You can’t add dynamic text to your ad until you’ve finished creating your campaign or ad group.”

So I had to delete the dynamic keyword insertion parameters in order to save and activate my campaign. As soon as I pressed Save, I went back and edited the Destination URL in my text ad to include dynamic text to capture the keyword data in my analytics software. It’s not a huge problem, just a little annoying and frankly I think it’s completely unnecessary. I mean, if you think about it, they had to actively program the software to block this functionality in order to serve this error message, which makes no sense to me whatsoever!

I have Verizon FiOS for my internet and cable TV provider and for the most part, the service has been amazing. Comcast screwed me many times before in the past and I swore that I would never return to Comcast or XFinity. However, the past few months, I’ve had nothing but problems with FiOS, especially when trying to watch shows on demand. Oftentimes, I will try to watch a show that I pay to subscribe to or even a movie that I had purchased only to get an error message prompt saying that the video was not available at this time and to please try again later. Most recently, I have been getting the error message VOD_212 which does not provide any kind of insight whatsoever as to what the problem is or when the service will be restored. I tried Googling VOD_212 and FIOS VOD 212 error messages and it appears that I am far from the only person this is happening to. There are tons of threads and posts on the official Verizon FIOS forums from people all over the country experiencing the same problems. If you check out the official FiOS Facebook page, you will see tons of people complaining about outages of their services all throughout the country. I’ve also gotten the error message VOD_123 in which I have no idea what that means.

It appears that the VOD_212 error message occurs most frequently alongside a “planned outage” in which Verizon is updating the programs available on demand and during that time, on demand access is completely unavailable. The problem is that these so-called outages constantly happen right around midnight and last for several hours, as was the case last night when I tried to watch the AMC show The Killing. Instead, I was going insane trying to troubleshoot my Set Top Boxes and using the Verizon In-Home Agent to diagnose the issue so I could finally watch a show I wanted to watch. But apparently, there is no solution for how to use on demand whenever Verizon decides they want to block you from using it.

This is a big problem because I am paying over $200/month for TV, Internet and Phone service and we actually only watch TV a few hours a week, but when I do, I want to be able to watch shows of my choice anytime I choose. It is simply unacceptable for huge companies like Verizon FiOS to be able to provide lackluster service and even worse customer support but yet still can manage to charge hundreds of dollars a month without any repercussions. I am seriously considering contacting the Federal Trade Commission to see if the FTC can help resolve this VOD_212 mess once and for all.

Otherwise, I may actually switch back over to the other dark side, Comcast XFinity if Verizon FiOS does not fix these VOD 212 error messages!

Lionel Messi 5 Goals Video

According to Wikipedia on Big Data:

“Big data is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target currently ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set.”

and

“The practitioners of Big Data Analytics processes are generally hostile to shared storage. They prefer direct-attached storage (DAS) in its various forms from solid state disk (SSD) to high capacity SATA disk buried inside parallel processing nodes. The perception of shared storage architectures—SAN and NAS—is that they are relatively slow, complex, and above all, expensive. These qualities are not consistent with Big Data Analytics systems that thrive on system performance, commodity infrastructure, and low cost.”

and finally

“The impact of “Big Data” has increased the demand of information management specialists in that Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP have spent more than $15 billion on software firms only specializing in data management and analytics. This industry on its own is worth more than $100 billion and growing at almost 10% a year which is roughly twice as fast as the software business as a whole.”

As you can see, Big Data is going to continue to grow in the next 5-10 years so the opportunity is ripe for software vendors to come up with big data analytics tools.

My question is – is there a way to add an RSS feed parser to a MODx site without the use of snippets? The getResources snippet only works in versions 2.0 and above, so that’s not an option. Otherwise, I am screwed until the client gets in touch with the other company, which who knows how long will take. Meh.

Now I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. Is it related to file permissions on the live server or the new dev server? Ahhhhh… I’m clueless!

So everyone agrees on both of those points. However, not everyone agrees on whether or not varying anchor text in links is better for SEO. Meaning, if you had 100 links pointing to your website, is it better to have all 100 links have the anchor text “dog treats” or is better to have 40 links with “dog treats” and 20 with “Bob’s dog treats” and 20 with “treats for your dog” and 20 with “click here for delicious snacks for your puppy.”

One school of thought is that having exact anchor text links for all of your links or as many of them as possible is better and that it’s just a waste of time to worry about varying your anchor text. I have done a lot of research on different websites’ in random industries and analyzed their backlink profiles and it seems time and time again, the sites that tend to rank the best are the sites that have the most exact anchor text links pointing to their sites. This should not be surprising since search engines are still technically in their infancy and they’ve always counted exact anchor text links signals to determine what a site is about and they obviously still consider them to be very important since these kinds of sites continue to rank very well.

However, the other school of thought is that it is critical for varying your anchor text in links because if you have 1,000+ brand new links just prop up out of nowhere and they all have the exact same keyword phrases in the anchor text, then these links are most likely unnatural and are only created simply for the cause of manipulating the search engine rankings for that keyword phrase, which the search engines definitely frown upon. Your site may get an instant boost to the top of the rankings if you have 1,000 brand new links with exact anchor text, but you will definitely drop eventually, whether due to an actual penalty of your site or via simply de-indexing all of these suspicious backlinks.

So my verdict – exact anchor text links are still very important and should remain a top priority, but it’s also important to vary your anchor text for the best chances of staying power. The search engines are constantly evolving and getting smarter, so the more varied and more “natural” your backlink profile is, the better off your site will likely do in the long-run. It’s not only important to vary your anchor text, but it’s important to vary the sources and the neighborhoods of your backlinks – meaning it’s good to have links from blogs, press releases, articles, quality directories, social media such as Facebook and Twitter, reputable community sites, forums, and so on.