Sep
16
Dogpile dumps the doo-doo
Filed Under Search Engines | Leave a Comment
In a serious industry with most discussion that’s far too serious, it’s nice to see something that lightens it up a bit, like this discussion
So they’ve changed the name to WebFetch, still canine. When you keep throwing something like a ball or crinkled up ball of tin foil, a slipper or whatever, to send a dog to get it and bring it back to you, that is called playing “Fetch.”
Incidentally, some cats will also play fetch. My daughter had a cat named Buster who played fetch. He was a dsysfunctional cat who was so hyperactive I nicknamed him “Psycho-Kitty”. The cat would run across the room to get speed up, then run up the walls - and back again, over and over.
So DogPile is still on the dog thing, what’s with them?
Sep
15
Marcia Who? And Why the Hoo?
Filed Under Marcia Personal | Leave a Comment
Marcia who?
First of all, the one who’s blessed to be the proud Mom of Samantha, who helped me get my first Windows computer and got me started on this adventure called the internet. I started net life as an iVillage member with the handle mamafoofoo the first day logged on and in a couple of months began hosting message boards and chats. I haven’t stopped yet, though I did move on from there.
Having begun doing web design and SEO, from iVillage I moved on to WebmasterWorld, where I became the first moderator of Commercial Exchange and then, the first Mod of the WebmasterWorld Community Center when it changed to that from a tech announcement and testing forum. I was an Administrator there as well as one of the Moderators in the Google News Forum for a few years, until stepping down as an Admin last year to lighten the load.
The commitment of being an Admin and moderating three forums, and being possibly over-conscientious about it, had grown to taking an average of 30+ hours a week and it was time for some personal breathing room. I continued on as one of the Moderators of the Google News Forum there, which is busy beyond belief, until the end of June, 2004 when I decided it had become time to resign as a Mod and have a time of personal refreshing, both in terms of time allocation and perspective.
My workload remains heavy and time-consuming, but it’s been a summer of renewed inner strength and peace. I’ve found the time to begin updating my own sites that have been long-neglected, and regained perspective, including a renewed appreciation for my first love when I first began, which was personal websites. There’s something about the “I” of a personal site rather than the “we” of a business site that makes the internet a very enriching experience.
Why the hoo?
The Marcia with almost 7K posts at WebmasterWorld alone at the date of this writing can’t find any of them without remembering part of the posts or exact words and Googling for them, which isn’t easy and doesn’t always work. Not to mention all the other scenes of my crimes called posts at other forums that also can’t be found.
PLUS - and it’s a big plus, if not the biggest one, how about all the great resources, articles, papers and forum discussions out there that can’t be found again either? Like the Mike Grehan interview with the guy from Yahoo where the meta keywords tag was discussed, and Grehan’s paper out there on linking. Sheesh, it isn’t easy. If I could remember the words used in that last one I’d have found it.
Then there was the quick interview with someone from Google right around the Florida update, where mention was made that Google is looking for breadth of content. It was posted in a forum thread, ended up getting nuked, and that was that That is not an insignificant piece of information, and having kept it in mind it’s done rather nicely by me since then.
Something like a personal police blotter, if you will. I think of it as a dysfunctional look at the world of search engine optimization, internet marketing and website promotion, as they relate to web design and development. I have to add that I most humbly consider myself to be well qualified to render dysfunctional views and opinions, by reason of having long personal experience with dysfunction in its various forms.
Thus the hoo.
Sep
15
MarciaHoo Credits and Thanks
Filed Under General | Leave a Comment
Lots of credit has to go to the folks over at WordPress for creating the most idiot-proof blog_thingy yet, outside of Blogger. It’ll be a great way to start getting my hands dirty with the intracies off CSS beyond the simple stuff I’ve done so far, and also, to jump into a bit of PHP.
Thanks to Shawn for the lovely graphic on the site. I have no idea how he knew what I look like without ever having met me, but he did a great job of it! I chose this particular style just to use it.
Thanks go to Barry Schwartz of Rustybrick.com, who is also a Moderator at Search Engine Watch Forums, who when seeing a few things I’d written warned me that I would have to be tactful.
It won’t be easy, but I’ll try.
Heartfelt thanks are also very much in order for link I found that led me to some ODP editor’s profile at ODP
A picture is worth a thousand words, and every time I start to think like one of those again, I go back to look at that picture. Thanks to kctipton, who will never know how much that photo means to me personally.
Sep
13
The Summer of the CMS Moronathon
Filed Under CMS and Blogs | Comments Off
Some things are easier than others, and there’s a good argument to be made for having idiot-proof documentation for everything, especially when it comes to technical things. The idea hit at the beginning of Summer to do a personal type site using a Content Management System for the first time. It started with a post back in July asking for opinions at Search Engine Watch Forums:
Since then, it’s been over two months of looking at options for CMS and blog scripts on and off, as time permitted, installing, trying and uninstalling several of them multiple times. A lot of people are hunting around for CMS options lately, like in this discussion at WebmasterWorld
The search was finally narrowed down to five contenders: Mambo, Drupal, Blogger, NucleusCMS and WordPress. What it’s finally come down to, after the lengthy process of evaluation and elimination, is that there will probably have to be more than one site, with WordPress being the obvious choice for this purpose. Without going into the features and flaws of the others, aside from Blogger, which has them naturally, WP is by far the easiest to handle for creating search engine friendly URLs, and also search engine friendly page titles in the archives.
Thanks to Alex, one of the developers, who keeps an archive, there are dozens of WordPress template styles to choose from, and installing them couldn’t be easier, though it takes figuring out on your own how to do it. It’s also comparatively simple to make modest modifications to the styleshieets
There’s an active wiki for support, though you have to know what you’re looking for. At this point the documentation is sketchy - like this example from the WordPress Docs
For more information about Trackbacks see Trackback explained. (Which doesn’t exist yet.)
It’s actually kind of cute, isn’t it? I actually started to feel like a moron it was taking so long to find something simple enough, and if this can be up and running this fast, it doesn’t get simpler. As a matter of fact, as an alternative to relying on tech-type folks to write some idiot-proof instructions, it just might take the right idiot to put their hand into it. I think I might know just the right idiot.