Posts

Time management thoughts, Part 1

I'd recently admitted to some friends that, ironically (and funnily enough) the topic of time management has been on my mind. The irony being that this post comes more than halfway through October, with the greatest gap in time that had transpired since the blog was launched in May. Here is a quote from the TV series "Bones", which has a protagonist whose behaviour I can relate to quite well. She's being interviewed by a bubbly morning chat show hostess in the following exchange: Courtesy of IMDB : Stacy Goodyear : I'm Stacie Goodyear and joining me on Wake Up, D.C. is Dr. Temperance Brennan. She is the author of the best-selling mystery novel "Bred in the Bone" and she's also - now tell me if I get this wrong - an anthropologist who works with the F.B.I. to solve crimes? Dr. Temperance 'Bones' Brennan : Yes, that's correct. I use the bones of people who have been murdered, or burned, or blown up, or eaten by animals or insects, or

Why I won't link to your blog

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Today I received the above comment, unsolicited, and after about two minutes' investigation I moved it into the Spam category. Here's a numbered list explaining why: Although my name is part of the blogspot domain I use, and promote in most places, the message addresses me as "Webmaster", which is possibly today's equivalent of "to whom it may concern". Actually, I have interchangeably experimented with the vanity URL provided to me via my alma mater, such as on Technorati and STC.org. The request is for cross-linking, which already devalues the proposition (as it's a "black hat" practice). If this person truly valued my blog, he would link to it without asking me to link to his. The request uses my domain, implying that it is a "keyword". I've blocked out the destination URL and the keyword he asked for (which, although partially reflecting his website address, was also far too generic to stand a chance at ranking well

How I syndicate web content

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Like most individuals who are working on establishing an online presence, I have multiple SNSs (social networking services) on which I wish to share content. The four main services that I use currently, along with my audience demographics are as follows: Twitter : mostly topics of professional interest or music, and breaking news, scientific articles and alma mater related newsbits. My twitter follower audience is still small and largely impersonal, which encourages me to be mindful that tweets may be mined publicly by anyone. Google+ : add to my preferred Twitter topics, photos that I've begun to upload to Picasaweb, which is primarily Vienna-related. On + my audience is academic and more professionally allied than on Facebook, with very little overlap. Facebook (The link to my FB profile is not publicly available, which was my deliberate choice): most of the above, plus the occasional "true status" - things on my mind that only actual friends would find of slight int

Bing's "SEO Fundamentals" are everyone's fundamentals

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  As a followup perhaps to the Bing/Yahoo! quality checklist, Searchenginejournal.com subsequently provided 18 points of what Bing expects web content publishers to implement for SEO . Well, it seems to me that all their advice applies equally as well for those aiming to optimize their web content for any search engine. I think perhaps that there should have been a disclaimer associated with point 1, which concerned the implementation of robots.txt and XML site maps. It's still my understanding that both of these files only provide a set of suggestions for search engines, and their parameters may not necessarily be obeyed by crawlers. Point 8, create an RSS feed, also may imply quite a few additional points, such as that new content is expected to be published with some frequency and that said feed can be easily subscribed to by those who may not know how to hack the URL (via point 11, enablement of social media). In fact, segmented audience studies have shown that the pu

Trying out Technorati (claim code)

Their FAQ advises against using redirects, so this may not work - nonetheless, here it is: M467DDBXQN92 I may need to re-claim with my actual domain URL.