How silver is the lining in the Cloud?

There is no evidence to support the notion that the cloud is less safe than on-site computing. Trojan Horses and viruses have sent thousands of personal computer users scrambling for security fixes and backup drives. But flying through any cloud has never been without its potential perils. Here are a few guidelines to safer cloud computing:

Backups
Understand your service provider’s backup routines and policies, and if possible back up periodically to your own servers on site.

Disaster Recovery
Disasters happen. Make sure your vendor’s disaster recovery procedures will get you back on your feet quickly.

Encryption
Not all vendors offer encryption. Do your research to make sure your vendor offers secure document and data handling.

Password Policy
Create a password policy for your organization. Password protection is the weakest point of entry in the cloud, so strong passwords that are changed frequently are the best way to protect your goods online.

Technical Support
Before turning your organization’s data over to a cloud computing vendor, make sure you have phone numbers for customer service and tech support, phone numbers that reach people.

What is cloud computing?   >>

I thought something was awry. I knew I had loaded my Oasis “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?” CD into iTunes ages ago, but when I searched for Oasis on my iPod recently, none of the songs from that album appeared.

As it turns out, the tracks on that album are listed as being part of a compilation, and iTunes handles compilations and the artists who appear on them differently than other artists. If I wanted to hear anything from that album, or even see anything from that album as a choice as I browsed on my iPod, I would have to browse not by Artists but by Compilations.

This just wouldn’t do. But Apple knew I might feel this way, so here’s the solution, Part I in iTunes and Part II on my iPod.

Part I: In iTunes, if I typed Oasis into the search field, I saw all of their songs and albums, including “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?” However, if you have the iTunes browser open, you’ll see All under Artsits and one of the listings will be Compilations. Go to iTunes Preferences and, depending on your version, click either the General tab or the Advanced tab and look for the option “Group compilations when browsing.” If this is checked, the artists on compilations or whose albums are designated as compilations won’t appear when as Artists, only as Compilations. Unchecking this allows these artists to appear as artist. For browsing iTunes, this setting isn’t such a big deal. But it’s different for the iPod.

Part II: On my iPod, if I browsed under Artists, I never saw anything from the “(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?” album. I also noticed other missing artsits, particularly those with greatest hits albums. The fix is easy. For the newer iPods, go to Settings, then Music Menu, then scroll down to Compilations. If this is checked, same as above: the artists on compilations or whose albums are designated as compilations won’t appear when you browse by Artists, only when you browse by Compilations. If you uncheck this, when you browse by artist you’ll see every artist, whether they’re a part of a compilation or not.

And hence the caveat. Apple created the Compilations category and settings to keep your artist list from being cluttered with the names of all the artists who have one obscur track tucked away on some movie soundtrack. It’s helpful, but you’d be surprised how many albums are designated as compilations. I’m finding music from eons ago on my iPod that I’d forgotten I had!

For earlier iPods, look under the settings menu. You don’t have to do anything on the iPhone or, I assume, the iTouch. My iPhone shows compilation artsist wherever I browse.

Meta descriptions are the default text the search engines use under the link on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Many people think that what they find there they’ll also find on the page. With meta description tags, this isn’t always true. This is why I like to use actual page copy in the tag when possible.

My ideal SEO emphasizes proper keyword position, prominence and density along this path:

URL –> title tag –> H1 tags –> H2 tags –> page copy

Search engines love it when a single keyword or phrase lines up in succession along this path. No meta description and no meta keywords, which I hope soon fall off the SEO Best Practices list.

Here’s an interesting article from SearchEngineLand.com on thinking past SEO Best Practices.