Archive for the Category ◊ Geek Stuff ◊

It’s been just over a year since I wrote my initial review of the HP 1030nr netbook.  I promised then I would do a follow up, and just never got around to it.  I’m currently on lunch break during the Government Technology Conference (GTCAustin) and thought I would take some time to let you know how it’s been going.

Many people have asked me how I like it.  The quick and dirty answer is: After a year, I’m looking for something better.

I’m not overly disappointed with the product, but given a years time and seeing what’s now available, it’s time to change.

I still love the size and the look, it is a beautiful machine.  However, there are a few things that I am not thrilled with. more…

I joined the U.S. Navy in the fall of 1984, arriving at boot camp in April of the next year.  Shortly after getting settled into the barracks, there was a pretty common joke that I heard from a lot of my fellow recruits;  “How do you know when your recruiter is lying to you?  His lips are moving!”

I’m growing concerned that pretty soon people will be thinking the same thing about SEOs.

What if you were number 1 and nobody searched for you? Are you still number 1?

A while ago, I wrote about how to hire an SEO, and more recently about what questions you should be asking about your web measurements.  Both of those should help you become a more intelligent SEO shopper.  I’ve stumbled upon the site of Austin SEO company that made me realize there is still more you need to know in order to protect yourself from the snake oil salesmen. more…

With SEO, like life, it’s about the questions you ask, not the answers you get.

Not long ago, I was dropping some shirts off at the cleaners.  I had noticed that a few of my buttons were cracked and broken.  I asked the young woman working the counter if they repaired buttons.  She simply replied “No, we don’t.”  I was puzzled, I thought all cleaners did this – now I would have to either find a new cleaner, or repair them myself.  But then, possibly sensing the building frustration on my face, she added; “We can replace the broken ones if you’d like.”  What? I was dumb founded.  How could this woman be so clueless as to not understand that is what I had meant?  It seemed fairly obvious to me that I didn’t actually expect them to be sitting back there with a tube of crazy glue repairing the buttons.  Then it occurred to me, I had asked the wrong question.  Even worse, I had expected them to interpret what I asked into what I meant.

What’s your reason for asking the question?

Before you ask any questions, you have to have a qoal – or two, or 10.  What is it you want your Web site to do?  Guess what? Tony Robbins and all the other self-help dorks have something to teach us about SEO.  If you can’t measure it, it’s not a goal.  It might be interesting, but it’s not a goal. more…

Frames used to be cool

If you’ve been surfing the web for more than a few years, you may remember the days when seemingly every Web site was constructed using frames.  I built more than a few of those myself.  On the surface they seemed to be an ideal solution to many of the problems both coders and marketers had with non-framed sites.  For coders it meant you didn’t need to copy your navigation, headers and footers into every single page – saving you lots of time.  For marketers, it meant that your menus. logos and other branding information was always viewable by your site’s visitors, no matter how much scrolling they did.  In the days of Yahoo and other directory pages, it was a perfect way to build pages.

Then came the next generation of search.  Instead of relying on human provided data to build a huge list of web pages, these new search indexes used “robots”, “spiders” and “crawlers” to automagically navigate the internet.  Following links, they located pages and read their content dynamically.  This is when using Frames become a bad way to build pages.

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If you don’t ever look at the web interface, you may have not noticed something new that Twitter is trying out.  Lists – something we have all been doing in various API clients for a while now.  Below are a few screen shots of what I see from within my account as I create a new set of lists.

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