“What should I do with myself this weekend? What’s something both fun and geeky that would provide value for someone?”

And it came to me: Finally wipe that horrible old paperweight of a desktop computer and turn it into a music server for the office!

So now the fun begins. Its a pretty limited machine — I have to look into it again, but I think I was able to UPGRADE it to 512MB RAM! Booya :P And I’m wondering if I should just re-install XP or go Win7? But I guess we’ll find out this weekend.

I have another hard drive for it somewhere, too. So I’ll see if I can find that and add it to the box.

What good is a music server with only 200GB of storage anyway?

I am at a point where I feel like I really need to step up my game outside of work.  That means getting better organized, getting more active in general (both on and offline), etc, etc.

Well, as a professional in an industry where sitting on my ass drinking coffee and tea is an all the time thing, I came to realize a few things:

• Changing so much of my daily life will not come quickly
• Its going to take sustained diligence
• I’ve come to this realization a few times already

And with 2011 being right around the corner, normally someone might wait until the new year to make this “resolution”.

But I say screw that.  I want to be well on my way towards kicking life’s ass by the time 2011 comes around.

So I’m here to say: Don’t wait for the new year. Make a change now to prepare for the new year and increase your likelihood of success.

Is 33 days enough time to prep?  I guess we’ll find out….  Day 1 starts today.

Just wanted to pop in and say that things have kicked up quite a bit here in the past couple weeks, and I just haven’t had that much time for blogging.

I have a few drafts in the works, however; but I just need to finish them up and publish.  But that might take a little longer than expected, as things are still quite busy.  I’m hoping that by this time next month, I’ll be able to get back to daily blogging.  In the meantime, however, I’ll just have to get to it when I can.

Tutorials and Help articles.

I suppose it really started with the Installing Rails on Ubuntu 9.10 post.  So as I’ve been spending a lot of time looking for conclusive and truly helpful tutorials on the wide variety of subjects/projects I’ve undertaken, it occurred to me that there really aren’t very many truly helpful tutorials out there.  At least not for newbies like myself.

So I am going to start making posts on ways I have found to be the best for new beginners.  The primary focus with this will be on people doing these tasks for the first time; as that was what I found my largest struggle to be when I was just starting out.  There are so many different ways to do things depending on your specific environment and there are just as many tutorials out there that will only end up spinning you around in circles.

I would like to be a pragmatic voice saying, “If you’ve never setup a LAMP environment on Ubuntu X.x (for example), here’s how to get going.”  And in that vein, I think I will dub these as a ‘series’ of sorts called “Tutorials for n00bs.”

Stay tuned! More to come…

Ok ok, so I’m really not sure how much boredom this will really save me from (as I am incredibly busy these days), but this is definitely one more thing to add to my list of projects; and make a priority!

A colleague of mine at Covario (formerly Netconcepts) once presented the greater group with a magical Google Spreadsheet that did all sorts of neat things like suggest websites to get links from and show top 10 competitors for a given search term.  This really opened my eyes to a new world of possibilities.

Being as busy as I’ve been, however, I haven’t really had a chance to look into these possibilities until just last week.  And I’m here to say that Google Spreadsheets can help SEOs a LOT.  Sounds kind of funny, I know, but its true.

Using them can help you with things like tracking indexation across the major engines along with keeping tabs on inbound links or even exploring new opportunities for inbound links… in a more automated fashion.

Pairing up the power of Google Spreadsheets with a good scripting language like Python or PHP, and leveraging both via the Google Spreadsheets API, could end up being a very valuable tool for SEOs.

So I am going to spend a lot of time this week digging my head into figuring out what resources I can leverage to make this happen.  Python is exciting and I would like to play with it some more, but right now I’m thinking PHP may be the best way to get it done.  There’s definitely a Spreadhseets API library for PHP, and it is my main focus as a language right now, so it will probably make most sense to just use PHP.

Stay tuned and follow along to find out what I can do to help SEOs by leveraging Google Spreadsheets and PHP.

Cheers!

These would be things like using the targeted keyword in the video name, Title tags, etc along with some other factors like reviews, ratings and comments. Typical on page factors, really.

Well conveniently enough, Search Engine Land just put out an interesting post on this subject yesterday: The Key To Top Video Rankings On YouTube & Google.

In that post, there is mention of a recurring and oh-so crucial theme when it comes to SEO; applied to video.  Can you guess what that might be?  That’s right, LINKS!

There is a video included as well.  One where Matt Cutts is asked why one video may rank so well vs. a different video.  And surprise, surprise, he comes back with something like: “Off the top of my head I would think that the video ranking well may just have a very powerful link pointing to it and maybe has more PageRank or link authority.”

Well thanks a lot, Matt.  That really helps.  No, really… I’m not just being facetious.

Bottom line once again: Links are probably the single most crucial factor when it comes to achieving and maintaining good search engine rankings (once any technical/content barriers have been hurdled).   Have valuable content, people will link to it.  Have a video that people like, and they will link to it.  Get many high quality inbound links and Google “rewards”.  Its almost that simple.   And it doesn’t necessarily just apply to web pages now, either.

Since the launch of blended search and roll out of the Caffeine update, it seems that Google is switching their focus from “pages” to “Documents”.  And clearly Videos are included.

Happy Friday!

After hearing all about this crazy new thing, and not being able to play with it until an entire day after some of my colleagues, I am here to say that it really isn’t crazy/cool at all.

Granted, I am VERY new to this whole thing, but my first experience gets me thinking that perhaps Google Buzz is a repackaged Google Wave Lite?

Sure, maybe Buzz is more focused on Social Media, but the collaboration piece completely and totally reminds me of how Wave works. And it doesn’t seem like it would be very hard to take pieces of Wave and plug it into Gmail for some limited functionality.

I really hope my opinion will change over time and with more usage. But as it stands right now, I am not impressed. I was expecting maybe a little more from you, Google.

Or as a colleague of mine so eloquently put it, “Do we REALLY need yet ANOTHER Social Media tool?”

Cheers, everyone. Control your buzz. ;-)

When changing themes, make SURE your web analytics tracking code is carried over.

To give a wee-bit of insight, I learned this the hard way just recently.  As you may have noticed, I started blogging pretty much every day of the work week.  Missed Friday of last week since Thursday was my birthday (the big 24 – officially mid-twenties now. Scary.), but I felt I did pretty well.

Well I have been through almost 6 different themes in the 2-3 years I’ve had this site, and usually I am anal retentive when it comes to making sure that tracking code is carried over.  Well, I got a bit lazy in the past 6 months, I guess.

Changed my theme using WooThemes, which has an admin Theme option for inputting footer scripts like tracking code.  Well needless to say, I took that for granted and did not check the source of my pages to be sure.  And frankly, at the time, tracking code wasn’t important.  I just wanted to play with a new theme :)

Moral of the story: Check, check and check again to be sure that you have the correct tracking code placed wherever it needs to be on your pages.

I think I lost about 2 months worth of site data.  Really nothing to get upset about, since I think I’m averaging a piddly 3-4 visits/day, but that’s still valuable data that I cannot get back.

Good thing I got it back on in time for my bday tho!  I think I got a whopping 15 visits on the 4th and 5th! WooHoo! :-P

Stay classy.

And as a haphazard installation implies, I had issues.  Sadface.

But as with any fresh OS installation, things are running really well.  So naturally, I wanted to make sure I do it the right way when I go to install Rails this time.

I, being the noob that I am, turned to Google in search for a great how-to guide/tutorial.  Well it didn’t take long to find at all.  The very first result did the trick:

Install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, Hackido!   I just followed the steps and voila… things are looking good.  Granted, I stopped after completing Step 6 since I was really just looking to setup a local development environment.  So I can’t necessarily speak to Steps 7+, but if I get good enough with Rails, this is where I will be turning to when I go to setup a live Rails app on a web server like Rackspace’s Cloud Sites or Slicehost.

Enjoy!

“Well no shit, Shirlock,” some may say, but I’m serious.  SEO has been established as an extremely feasible and relatively cheap way of getting more and/or new business.  As a result, EVERYONE wants in.

So in the last couple years I have seen businesses of all sizes jump on the bandwagon.  I’ll share a little insight, too: they ALL want to be #1.

Obviously that’s just not possible, so in these past few years I have spent a lot of time getting clients’ sites to rank as high as they possibly can for as many of their key terms as possible.  And in doing so, I have worked with some sites that just have too many barriers to even have a chance in their current state.  I’m sure any  SEO that’s been around for a while has come across those.  But that isn’t what this post is about.

This post is really geared to speak towards those sites that may not have a ton of barriers, and may in fact have a vast majority of SEO best practices implemented, but just aren’t seeing the results they’ve been expecting.   This may actually be more common a case than most people think.  I have had many site owners come to me saying, “why, why, WHY aren’t we ranking well for [X] term??”

The truth is that the answer to their question may not be something they really want to hear.  The truth is that it comes down to a matter of perceived value.  Let me explain.

I’m sure most people reading this have come across at least a few videos of Matt Cutts answering questions from people in the web community.  I think some could/would also say that MOST videos of Matt Cutts answering the “how do I optimize my site for search?” question ends with the same tune.  Well I believe there is a reason for that.

That familiar tune to which I am referring is the age old “just focus on generating good content that people will want to link to” line.  I think you know what I’m talking about.  I, myself, found that to be a bit of a cop out at first.  But then I got to thinking…. Why does he just keep saying that?  Could it be a company line? Sure.  But I like to think that it has more meaning than that.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here are a couple of links:

• http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5179191836301432169 (The whole thing is great, but skip to about 1:35 to just hear what I’m referring to)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I (another great video, but again, what I’m referring to is about 1:00 into it.

In both videos, Matt states that generating good content (that people will want to link to, wink, wink) is one of the single most important parts of doing well in SEO.

So what? That doesn’t really answer the website owner’s question about why they’re not ranking well for a certain term.  Well, actually, it does.  So here is the candid secret to good search engine rankings:

HAVE A GOOD WEBSITE!

Sounds a little silly and even TOO remedial, doesn’t it?  I would agree.  But seriously, think about it.   Why would Matt Cutts keep saying to just focus on your users and having good content?  It comes back to what I said about perceived value and a scope even larger than just SEO.

Truly good websites will tend to do well in the search engines because some portion of the web community deems them as being valuable.

So regardless of your website’s purpose (ecommerce, lead-gen, publication, etc), you need to ask yourself one question: “How can I make my website content more valuable to my users?”  Answer that, and you will already be well on your way to great search engine rankings.

Cheers!