The growth and acceptance of the Internet has allowed someone of average means to reach out to audiences that would, typically, be closed to them. Content creators can post videos on YouTube that go viral and are seen by millions of viewers. Artists can put their comics on the web bypassing traditional print media and make a living doing the thing they love. A web designer of modest talent can build a couple of modest themes, put them out on the web, and have them downloaded over 9000 times with hundreds of sites using them still years later. One can Skype with a person 3000 miles away that you’ve known for years but never met physically and be able to see them in totality – their voice, inflection, body mannerisms, etc. Or play a video game with a friend in another state on Xbox Live. We are able to juggle vastly larger social groups with minimal effort because of the technology and tools we have today. It truly is amazing.

>Perhaps it’s because of my age that I notice this. Having grown up in the infancy of the web, having used AOL with the iconic dial up tone and chat rooms, remembering before Google was not only a site but a word, and having seen it all change – surging forth at near the speed of light in just a blink of time really puts it in perspective for me more than my younger cousins / friends / acquaintances for whom a cell phone has always been a necessity, rather than a luxury. A few years ago I got my first real smartphone – one with Android – and to this day it still amazes me that it has more power and functionality than the first laptop I owned. I’m also blessed in that my generation – more so than my parents – rode this initial wave and so we accepted it rather than feared or misunderstood it’s power and opportunity.

The truly amazing thing is this is just the beginning. While dangers lurk – threats against our privacy (many, ironically stemming from our willingness to over share), net neutrality, and “walled gardens” like Facebook (as AOL was once upon a time), etc – technology is going to progress forward. In just over 10 years when my niece and nephew are at the age I was when I first started on the web how much further will we be? How will this openness of communication and tolerance of other cultures, ideas and life choices due to increased exposure fundamentally change our society and world? It’s both incredibly promising and terrifying at the same time. Ironically, that’s exactly how it felt as a teenager, first dialing in to the “World Wide Web” promising unlimited information, potential and, possibly, danger.

So, tl;dr living in the future is amazing. More so when we stop and actually realize how blessed we are, the opportunities it grants us, and how it is truly only the beginning.

I’ve come to two realizations. One is that even if I reiterate some points that others make – specifically by attributing them – that it’s beneficial as it shows and builds my understanding of the issue as well as – by attribution and, therefore, SEO – strengthens the views expressed by the “giants” of my industry. Second is that sometimes it’s ok to “remove the mask” and show the human side. Reading the blogs of my peers and mentors has shown that they have a willingness to showcase not just industry knowledge. Through this I’ve gained an appreciation for both the person and their skill as well as a better understanding of them as a whole.

This second realization is what I wish to touch on today as the last year saw two life defining moments for me.

The first was one many here in the US felt. For almost 5 years I was the sole and principal UI developer for Helium. My code still exists everywhere on their site. Last July I lost my position with Helium.

For many, especially myself, we are defined by our jobs. First because in having a career it validates us to have a job. It shows that a company trusts our skill enough to validate us by paying us to do something we love. Something we do on our own – often without compensation. Second because it gives us purpose. Having a job is a responsibility – a reason to get up every morning, get in our car, and drive to an office. We have responsibilities to our fellow developers and to our users – something that all (good) developers feel and are motivated by.

Fortunately, in my case, this was actually a good thing. At the end of my time with Helium I was spending a good portion of my week working from home and sleeping very little. This was because I was spending most of my hours as the primary caretaker for my dad who was under hospice care. On August 3, 2012 we lost Dad.

Dad had suffered a stroke and heart attack back in 2004 and almost died then. He was never the same after the stroke but he was living and happy – and that was good enough. For the year or so before he passed Dad had been acting erratically. We didn’t realize how serious it was until he ended up going into the hospital in May and they told us. We had a scare in June and then in the beginning of July, after much cajoling – as Dad was always stubborn – we convinced him to move in with me so I could take care of him.

Losing Dad was difficult. However, in the eulogy I talked about something my Faith has taught me – seeing the blessing even in the bad. Losing someone I was close to changed my perspective on life. Different things are important to me now. I don’t worry so much about things that aren’t worth worrying about. While I falter sometimes – as we all do – for the most part I know to focus on what is really important and not to let the small things in life get me down. I’ve learned to count my blessings. For that part of it, I’m thankful.

Lately though, I’ve lost interest in being a user of Reddit and gone back to more of a lurker.  Why?  A recent event that happened to me.  While perusing my feeds I came across this.  Having been using Reddit as long as I can, I was excited – I knew this was front page material, hands down.  I posted the link (stripped and from my reader) into the Reddit search bar to make sure it wasn’t already submitted – nothing.  Just to be safe I copied the image URL and tried that – still nothing.  Awesome – not only did I have guaranteed front page material (which proved to be right) but I had original material.  So I posted it.

“But wait”, you say, “that has 0 points, how could that have made it to the front page?”  That one didn’t.  This one did.  Now this is not a story about originality – that’s obviously a different link.  And it’s not about reposting content – Reddiquette clearly states “That said, sometimes bad timing, a bad title, or just plain bad luck can cause an interesting story to fail to get noticed. Feel free to post something again if you feel that the earlier posting didn’t get the attention it deserved and you think you can do better.”  If the original user had posted the link I used (even though he posted only a day later) I could have written it off as “bad title / wrong reddit” on my part – no harm, no foul.

So, what is my problem?  This line of Reddiquette “Look for the original source of content, and submit that. Often, a blog will reference another blog, which references another, and on down with everyone adding ads along the way. Dig through those references and submit a link to the creator, who actually deserves the traffic.“  Now, my example is perhaps bad – with an image it’s more difficult to track down the original source and perhaps failblog pulled it from somewhere else (though on the page, they attribute it to an upload from a user).  The one that made it to the front page obviously took the image from failblog and just cropped out the “FAIL” part though.  They knowingly violated this point of Reddiquette.

Going even beyond Reddiquette this leaves a poor taste in my mouth.  I generate themes for the WordPress framework and give them away freely.  While I don’t mind that people use my work on their site or adapt it to produce their own work I would mind if someone downright claimed it as theirs.  Original content creation is much the same – people work hard to write/produce something original and interesting.  When we do something like post a screenshot to imgur we’re robbing them of traffic, credit, and potentially income.  It’s just wrong.  It’s worse when it’s done intentionally.  What if someone just took a screen shot of one of The Oatmeal‘s comics, uploaded it to imgur and submitted that?  It would get down voted instantly.

My final point is that it’s not even just this case – this one just happened to hit me because it affected me personally.  If you look at this you’ll see at least several cases where people took a screen shot of a Reddit comment thread and uploaded that – directly stealing traffic (and ad revenue) from the very site they’re using.  Is karma really worth that much?  I’ve seen many similar occurrences where something is posted to imgur that is a screen shot of the original source instead of just posting the source itself.

I don’t know.  I’m not claiming it’s a majority of users – it’s not – but this minority has just left a bad taste in myself much the same as when Digg was controlled by a handful of users.  I stopped using and visiting Digg as a result.  Maybe it’s time I do that with Reddit as well.  It’s a shame because other than this it’s a really, really good site.

I actually thought about posting this to Reddit for a moment and decided against it.  Irony would be if someone else did and got a ton of karma.  I’d actually find that funny in fact.  And they wouldn’t be violating Reddiquette doing so.

1. A minimalist theme with a robust options page that includes allowing you to participate in CSS Naked Day, have an intro message on the home page, have a custom home page, and/or have a social networking area in the right sidebar.  It additionally includes a footer that will check your first published post date and build a copyright off it ([first post date year]-[current year]).  Finally, it includes 4 sidebar widget areas – blog (tags, posts, categories, etc), custom home page, page, and 404.
2. A theme template which comes prepackaged with all of #1 and good (I hope) commenting in the theme as well as a CSS template with comments (mainly via selectors – my challenge to myself was to use the least amount of classes/IDs as possible).

There’s more information as well as a download link on the theme page in my portfolio.  Enjoy.

So Twitter is interesting for many reasons.  Microblogging is a lot easier than blogging – as is evident by my hundreds of tweets and zero blog posts the past 6 months or so.  It allows you to follow interesting people and interact with them – I’ve actually responded to and gotten responded back by both WP Limits and The Ferrett.  It allows you to keep up with and see “behind the curtain” on interesting people – web comics I enjoy like Shortpacked and Questionable Content, awesome geeks like Felicia Day and Shamus Young, or even just keep up with friends or friend’s projects.  It even allows you to give feedback to companies and get replied back to.

So it’s useful for the above reasons – how can it also be useless?  Well, like blogging for every one meaningful @reply or comment you get there are dozen or hundreds of voices lost in the wind.  For the common man is there really any use?  Also, there is the follower dilemma.

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed is for people follow people incessantly.  Now, following some people is part of the usefulness of the service.  But there has to be a tipping point.  At the time of this writing, and after doing a cleanup of the people I follow, I’m following 74 people.  I see hundreds of tweets a day – if not thousands.  The fact that people are limited to 140 characters helps but even at that I tend to skim a lot.  What is the benefit for someone to follow 200 people?  500?  1000?  It’s not like Facebook where you can friend someone and then hide them – so that you can interact with them if need be but they’re not part of your “stream.”  If you’re following someone on Twitter they’re always in your stream.  I suppose lists help but even they only serve to raise the tipping point by an order of magnitude.  Is someone following 10,000 people really following anyone at all?  They’re likely not reading most – if any – of the tweets in their stream.  So why bother?

I guess the real issue I have is the “popularity contest” aspect – “if you follow me I’ll automatically follow you” mentality that some people have.  Yes, you end up collecting followers like Pokemon and have a large audience to blast out your content to – but is anyone really listening?  In the cases of celebrities, sure, I can see the point to having thousands of followers – and even following them back as it makes them feel proud and connected to say “celebrity X follows me on Twitter!”  But I’m curious if anyone else ponders the fragility of the facade for the common man.  I guess my point is that unless you’re someone who would naturally have a larger audience – celebrity, web comic, organization – you’re only fooling yourself.

I’m going to experiment more with lists.  I haven’t really yet.  Maybe they’ll change my outlook on the “following many people” aspect at least.

I just happened to check the stats today and between the two I have over 1200 downloads.  While not impressive considering some of the other themes on the site, I’m pretty happy with that.  It will be interested to see if it starts to be actually used on sites and gives me some linkbacks.

Next: I have to make homepages for the themes.  I’d also like to do some updates to them and craft a third.  Hopefully all before the end of the year.

One of the difficulties with being a programmer or anyone that works “behind the scenes” – developing, testing, or specifying features – is that no matter how hard you try or how good you are at your job you have an entrenched opinion about the site that you work on because you have made it.  It’s impossible to fully look at it with user’s eyes so no matter how much you think about a particular feature you’re always going to miss something that a user will see.  It’s just natural that you assume certain things are logical when in fact the flow, usability, or design of a page might be extremely confusing or present a high hurdle to all, or even a subset of, your users that can render the page from difficult to use to unusable.

This is where an active community is a boon.

By engaging those users – we use a message board (built on the open source SMF software) and a blog (using WordPress) – you are able to gather information, tips, questions, and insight into the finished product in the wild.  Many times it allows us to find where copy or page flow is lacking and provide instruction to users.  We have certain community leaders (which we call stewards) that many times will use the information provided by us throughout the boards to instruct other users – propagating the knowledge for us.  Other times it allows questions to arise that we may not have thought of and allow us to schedule new features or feature updates to correct deficiencies.  Finally, we may have an instance that we did not foresee or couldn’t create in our test environment and only through exposure to users do we see bugs in the site – basically turning our community into testers.

This is an extremely powerful tool that is not always used on large, non-technical sites – where users who are naturally knowledgeable in the technology will speak up of their own accord.

So how do you empower your users and speak out to them in order to have access to this tool?

1. Provide tools for them to reach out and communicate with you. Besides the normal help e-mail area we have public facing tools that allow users to engage us and the community for answers.  Some of the tools we use are:
   • A wiki for our help section – allowing quick searching of a large, complex living document to quickly provide answers to new users.
   • A blog for community instruction and brand building – also searchable we discuss features in new releases, reasoning behind features, and other items which are not targeted at new users necessarily but require some sort of “stickiness.”  Sometimes a blog post is moved to the wiki to become part of the living help document.
   • A community board for user-user and user-employee engagement – besides help sections where users can question logic or features we also have simply community areas where users can just engage each other, build relationships, and have fun.  This means they are not providing direct value (content) to the site, however, we’ve seen for the most part that it promotes user happiness and, indirectly, that increases productivity on the site.
2. Have employees engage users directly. We have employees from every division practically communicate with users even though we have a department specifically created to do so.  Development members like myself, vice presidents, and even our CEO have communicated with users via our boards and blog.  This builds rapport and trust with users.  It can be frustrating at times and takes away productivity from assigned tasks but the benefits far outweigh that as our users love and respect that they can ask us questions and gain insight that they can’t from other sites – even if they realize sometimes we can’t answer them fully because of proprietary information protection.
3. Be as transparent as possible. Let users “behind the scenes” – they love it.  Let them know why a certain feature works a certain way.  Have fun with users.  Make them a part of the team.  This is especially important in a “Web 2.0″ or “user generated content” site as they really are part of the team.  Be honest with them when you can’t share proprietary information and why you can’t.  They’ll respect it.
4. Empower motivated, hard working, driven, intelligent, and / or respected users to take control of parts of the site. One of the programs instituted where I work is our steward program.  Basically it gives users some amount of power of sections of the site.  It might be as small as a leaf channel, larger like a base channel, or in some users cases they have control over our community boards.  Does this open the door for abuse?  Of course.  But communities are self-policing and we’ve had few, if any, abuse issues.  For the most part stewards have gone above and beyond what we’ve asked them to do because they are invested in the success of the site just like we are.  If we fail, they fail.  If we succeed, they succeed.  It’s a powerful motivator.
5. Really listen to their ideas. I’ve participated in a lot of good debate on our boards about current and future features – what users like, what they want, what they feel they need to succeed.  This is ammunition in your pocket.  When meetings are held about features the ability to say “users on the boards requested this” or “some users on the blog mentioned that this feature could really use this little extra thing” is extremely powerful. They won’t always get what they want but many times what they want is “low hanging fruit” that can be a big win.  There’s nothing like a feature that takes 2 days to build and is lauded about by the community.

Most of these should be common sense however most sites ignore their users – thinking them too ignorant or that they are not proficient enough to know what they really want.  Sometimes it’s true – users don’t always have the “big picture” vision to take your site to the next level.  However, they do have the knowledge of the nuts and bolts of your site in order to polish what you currently have.  Many times, it’s much easier and a better return on investment to improve your existing infrastructure instead of simply plowing forward with new features.  While everyone likes the “shiny new toy” if your base is not solid you won’t succeed.

Anyways, that’s my thoughts, opinions and insight after having been a part of an amazing and active community for over 2 years now.

• Marketing position - involves either designing e-mail campaigns include HTML e-mails, which are not fun at all, or some sort of SEO / social networking skills to drive traffic to the site.
• Jack of all trades – involves 7+ years experience in design (Adobe Suite), front end (XHTML & CSS), middleware (PHP, Java, Ruby, etc) and MySql.  Basically able to design web applications from the ground up.

So, I don’t know.  Maybe I’m looking with the wrong terms or in the wrong places?  Doesn’t anyone just need a good UI developer nowadays?  I mean I have excellent XHTML and CSS skills.  I can design for cross browser compatibility.  I can quickly turn design flats / mocks / comps into UI code.  I’m learning quickly when it comes to design skills (Adobe Suite) and I have a Commercial Arts background – granted it was in high school but I studied art and drew art by hand for 4 years.  I’m willing and eager to take on the design part of the UI – something I haven’t been able to do in my previous positions.  I have some Javascript – including Prototype and jQuery – skills and would be interested in eager to take on more with regards to the UI aspect of these (effects, etc) although not really the parts that go more into middleware (form handling, etc).  I have some middleware capabilities as they pertain to the UI – logic checks, loops, role checks, variable insertion, etc in Ruby, ColdFusion and PHP – as well as experience building on the WordPress framework in PHP.  I have experience in SEO including crafting with web standards and internal linking strategy to maximize organic SEO as well as instructing a user base on social networking strategies to grow inbound links.  Finally, I have experience working with and educating a large user base as well as identifying usability issues for that user base in future design features.

So, being a realist, I have to assume the deficiency is with me.  However, I’ve worked for two separate professional organizations and both needed someone that was only a subset of what I’m looking to take on.  So is there no middle ground?  Can you only do the icing or the whole cake?  I hope not.

The main issue lies in that to be a good UI developer you have to focus on the changing field.  New browsers are released every year and updates are made.  You have to be aware of what bugs exist in major browsers – especially Microsoft ones – and understand quickly how to fix the rendering issues in those.  You also have it identify web trends (web 2.0 design, AJAX integration, etc) and include them in beautiful and usable designs. By broadening focus too much – to middleware or backend development – you lose the ability to do that.  I realize you don’t want to be too specialized but I feel crafting a beautiful design, coding it with web standards and cross browser capability in mind, and inserting any jQuery effects that add to it is a pretty big slice of the pie, so to speak.

Also, design and UI work is more artistic versus middleware / backend which is much more logical and analytical.  So it’s very difficult to be of those two minds.  I just feel expanding the focus to that is going to dilute the whole output.  Finally, it really is of no interest to me to design controllers or write queries so I feel my output would not be as useful or good as something I’m passionate about like the front end.

So I don’t know what the answer is.  But I’m discouraged moving forward.  It does make me wish I had taken more time to grow my freelance portfolio as this would be the perfect time to make that jump and see if I could make it on that.  Unfortunately, it’s just not an option.

Advice or insight welcome.

In actually making a theme, instead of modifying one I found, I learned a great deal about WordPress. It’s a very interesting and powerful tool. And the WordPress codex is invaluable in getting the full power out of it.

I’ve also been playing with some other open source stuff including a wiki, forums, comicpress and buddypress.  Depending on how useful I see them being, I might bring them public on one of my domains or subdomains.  I also have 2 new domains, one of which I hope to make as destination page for all things me – which will then link to my various efforts like this blog (including my portfolio section which needs updating), my open source contributions, my social media (delicious, twitter, etc).  But until they’re ready, I don’t foresee making them public facing just yet.

As for the open source software I’m really impressed with Buddypress – and the forums that you can tie in which I actually like a lot better than SMF, which I use for familiarity.  Buddypress basically allows you to use the wordpress-mu (multi user) to create a social network.  Who needs more social networks though, right?  Well, I have a niche one that might be interesting.  Or it could be closed off to only my family/friends if they’re interested.  Either way, it’s a fun and interesting tool.

Going back to the forums thing though – if you have a more useful tool than SMF I’m listening.  I’ve tried PhpBB and was not impressed.  I forget the one that ties in with Buddypress – I only have it locally configured on one of my boxes now – but, as I said, it was interesting.

So that’s about it for now.  All that takes time so updates will be infrequent to this blog.  Although they’ll be more frequent than recently (i.e. not once every 6 months or so hopefully) but less frequent than I was when I really used this.  Granted though, my aim is to use it for meatier topics – talking about new open source projects I’ve developed (themes, plugins, etc) and web design – rather than the more mundane topics in the past.

If you want to know about the more mundane aspects of my life or what’s caught my interest (and until I tie them into my site and/or blog) feel free to check out my shared Google items, my twitter, or my delicious.  Be warned though that they are more personal than professional.  Given that I have a cynical and sarcastic nature that I tend not to show on professional endeavors you may not like, or maybe even be offended, by some of the things on there.  I apologize if so, but it’s a simple fix – don’t read them.  I don’t anticipate it to be so in most cases but in this “PC” world, you have to be careful.

My thoughts are that overall, we’re all flawed and human. The more transparent you are – within reason and privacy concerns – the more people can understand you.  Perhaps seeing my cynical side, myriad of Magic the Gathering links, or other personal aspects of my life will make you enjoy my work more.

Or perhaps you’ll think I’m a tool.  That’s the risk we run when we share.

Random Tidbit: P2 is an interesting use of WordPress.  It seems that WP is becoming a very popular platform to expand on because of it’s open source nature and large community of developers expanding it.  It’s basically – if I understand it correctly – a group blog that combines aspects of Twitter and Basecamp.

By the way – if anyone knows an open source tool like Basecamp, especially if it’s written on the WP platform, please let me know.  I’m cheap.  I know they have the free Basecamp plan but it doesn’t really meet my needs.  We use it at Helium and it’s – to be frank – amazing.  37 Signals is a bright group of people.

The point? He summed up Charlton Heston better than I ever could and I just wanted to give him some credit.  Maybe I can turn a few more people onto his work.  You may not like his personal blog but if you play Magic and ever do multiplayer his works on MagictheGathering.com are a must read.

Random Tidbit:  In case you don’t read Smashing Magazine they did an excellent article awhile back that asked some of the top designers 6 questions about their experience in the web design industry.

I accomplished none of those – yet. Hopefully some will be checked off my list soon, but no guarantees.

The second reason was work. Don’t get me wrong – I love my job, a lot. They pay me a good salary to do something I love. I have basically full control over the UI so that I can design with web standards – something I’ve gotten progressively better at even though I’m no Meyer or Santa Maria. However, when you do something all day it’s hard to come home and relax by doing more of it – even if it’s for yourself and something you enjoy.

The product of this recent work is of course the Helium Marketplace. This is something we’ve had in beta for awhile, had been a big success, and that we wanted to launch with extended features. This is also something – along with our rating engine – that sets us apart from every other site on the web. Which I enjoy because that means my stock options might be worth more than the paper they’re written on someday.

The basic premise or buzzword associated with this sort of entity is “citizen journalism” – of which you can read a sometimes slanted view of here. This was started really by the blog surge of the past 5-10 years. Normal, everyday people could write about what they know and become a “citizen journalist” – someone who might not have formal training and is not part of the main media machine, but that still has an opinion or knowledge about a subject that may be of value to someone.

Although some blogs are huge, it’s a rarity. Some gather a good niche audience of friends, family, and people with similar interests – my friend Paul’s blog would likely qualify. Most blogs – as I have experienced first hand with mine – experience little or no traffic. So 90% or more either toil on in obscurity or fail.

Helium was originally founded to help with this. Instead of one person writing in obscurity they could come to Helium, write about what they know, and be ranked against dozens or hundreds of others who did the same. Helium would grow much, much faster than a blog, would have the resources to market itself much better, would have better SEO, and, therefore, would have a much larger traffic base. In return, Helium shares it’s ad revenue with those same writers based upon their contributions to the site. This was citizen journalism – except on a much more massive scale than seen before and with many voices instead of one – like Wikipedia.

It takes awhile to build a good knowledge base, to train your writers to think beyond the – typically short – blog post writing, and to market that resource to the web community. As we did, a new need in the writing community became apparent – freelance writing. For the most part, when a magazine or website needs an article that their normal staff cannot produce – either because of under staffing or simply using freelance writers to save on the cost of staffing – they turn to the freelance market. They use different sites and services that allow you to list what they’re looking for and in the end it becomes like a job posting. They “interview” many candidates, pick one, pay a fee, and get an article.

The issue is the freelance community is small and you pay before you see results. This was fine because it was the only method of supplying the need. However, we found a new method. We had a collection of motivated writers looking to become more legitimate and make more money. So the premise was simple. You, as a magazine editor, need an article on “Real life Gardening stories.” You can go the old route, pay $500 for a freelance and get 1 article. Of you can post that title on Helium Marketplace, dozens or hundreds of writers will write on the subject, we will rate the articles, and then for $25-100 you can have your pick of the one (or two, or three) you like most.

It’s a win-win-win situation. The magazine gets many articles to choose from instead of one at a fraction of the cost. The writer gets a – for them – hefty payment and a byline in a real media source. Helium gets a small percentage for brokering the deal and the ability to add any unpurchased articles to our knowledge base.

So far it’s taking off and there has been a lot of buzz. It’s a huge niche that needed filling, we’re the only one filling it, and we’re learning more every day. It was an awesome learning experience to help build it – even my small part in it. Most importantly the community loves it. We have community boards in which I get the privilege of interacting with the intelligent, active, fun, and (sometimes intensely) passionate “Heliumites.” It’s a learning experience for me as I’ve grown from someone who simply went on there to read what users thought, to someone who explained features and informed the community on things like social book marking and networking, and now to someone who (surprisingly for me) has become a respected voice in the community. It’s a rewarding, sobering, maturing, and sometimes downright scary feeling.

I don’t cross link too frequently. However, since this has become a cross between a “Helium History” post and a press release I might as well . You can see my Helium articles here – most, if not all, have been dual posted on this site in the past (granted with formatting, links, and in some cases revisions). You can see my board contributions here – though you are warned some of my early ones are bad and I freely admit to making mistakes.

I look forward to working at Helium as long as they’ll let me. I definitely feel I would wear out my welcome before I would decide to leave. Besides doing something I love and getting paid for it I also get to work with some really great people (best development team, or team period, I’ve been on, ever, by far), learn a great deal about new technologies (Git, Ruby on Rails, working on a Mac…), drink beer at work (paid for by Helium == awesome), and when we need a break (work hard, play hard) break into a game of Nerf war or hackey.

And now back to my regularly scheduled insomnia.

Random Tidbit: In a truly random tidbit, my favorite pastime Magic the Gathering is releasing it’s new set Shadowmoor soon. Which means I will be spending way too much money on boxes of tiny cardboard cards and way too much time opening and then sorting said cards. Perhaps too much time placing them on Ebay as well – a painful subject I may yet expand upon in the future.

In the end though, the more I think about it the more I come to the same conclusion. The Giants simply outplayed us. They wanted it more. This very thought frightens me.

The Patriots always won because they wanted it more than the other guy. They might have less talent, less speed, lack of star players – it didn’t matter. Somehow they’d pull it through at the end. My fear is that after 3 Super Bowls, after years of success, and after being labeled as the new dynasty by everyone else that they started believing their hype.

We’re used to seeing Brady with the ball, under 2 minutes on the clock, and seeing fear in the other teams eyes. They know he’s going to drive down the field. They know he’s going to pull the come back. They know that their worst nightmare is about to be realized.

The last 2 years we’ve gotten used to a different sight. Brady with the ball, under 2 minutes on the clock, and the other team stopping us.

Maybe it’s just other teams catching up. Maybe it’s parity catching up. I really hope it’s not us losing the core of our team. That hard work, blue collar, underdog philosophy that made us all proud to be Patriots fans. I’m thankful for what the Patriots have given us and for players like Bruschi. I realize we can’t win every year. But to get so close to the perfect season, to the greatest season in football history, to Mercury Morris finally shutting the hell up… and to fall short. I just don’t know.

Sadly, I find myself for the first time in a long time not wanting to watch football. Not caring about the draft. Not caring that we let possibly one of the best cornerbacks in the league go to sign an aging and (playoff) under performing wide receiver. Not looking forward to next season.

I miss that anticipation and love for the sport. I want it back. I fear it’s death on a Sunday in early February when the undefeated became perhaps the greatest disappointment in football history.

I wish I knew where we went wrong.

Random Tidbit:  Being a self-proclaimed – ok maybe publicly proclaimed – geek I found this blog post on why geeks make good lovers to be self-satisfying.  Is it true?  Find out.  Date a geek.

In order to SEO a site a dual strategy is needed.

Internally, a site must have good technical design and well-written content. This makes it more attractive to search engines and helps with “natural indexing” a search engine spider finding a single link to your site and being able to traverse the entire site tree to add it to it’s database.

Externally, a site must rely on strong inbound links in order to build the trust factor associated to its domain by search engines (mainly Google). Means of accomplishing this include using social book marking sites (Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia), social news / technology sites (Digg, Reddit), popular blogs (TechCrunch), and niche link building (inbound links from other sites that rate for the same search terms).

Internal Design

Internal design should focus on semantic web design and well-written content. On the web, it’s said that “content is king.” Well-written content will trump any attempts at “keyword stuffing”, hidden keywords, or any other “black hat” SEO strategies (those frowned upon and/or banned by search engines). While black hat strategies might earn a short term gain inherently the search engines catch onto the strategy resulting in a long term loss either in reducing the site’s trust so they rank lower or simply banning them from the index altogether.

Semantic design is the process of writing HTML code so that content on the page is contained in semantic elements. This movement came about after the fiasco of 1990s web design including “table-itis” using tables and other semantic elements non-semantically in order to display the page the way the designer wanted. With the widespread acceptance of CSS and the (mostly) widespread implementation of it in browsers such as Firefox, Opera and IE 6+ the move to semantic design seriously began and started gaining a foothold in the web standards community.

At it’s heart, semantic design is basically wrapping content in elements that describe it semantically paragraphs in p tags, lists (many times navigation links) in ul (or if ordered ol) tags, tabular data (like graphs or excel documents) in tables, definition lists in dl tags, and headers in h1-6 tags. The use of non-semantic tags divs and spans mostly along with liberal use of classes, ids and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) then allow the designer to have semantic content in semantic tags but still display it in any manner that they wish.

The reason semantic design is important is because it tells search engines what the data means it outlines header hierarchies to allow for keyword sensing and allows it to sense how data is formed and related (paragraphs under a header being a “section” etc). Since search engine spiders can only parse and not actually read the data this allows them to parse the site more intelligently and results in better keyword matching for the site.

The final internal design facet is likely one of the most important the title tag. This is a tag that is only shows at the top of the browser window, above the address bar and is thought in the SEO community to be the most highly weighted element by spiders. Having unique, meaningful, concise, and useful titles on each of your pages is the first step to being indexed for the terms you want.

After the title tag is surmised that the header elements h1-h6 are the next most heavily weighted internal element because they perform a function like a “table of contents” for the page. These should be used intelligently and not abused though as this can be considered “black hat” as well.

External Link Building

Beyond good internal design, a well-executed inbound linking strategy is key to SEO. In the SEO community it is thought that this is actually the most important overall part of the process. Search results tend to sway towards this thinking as many times a site that has poor internal design but strong inbound linking for terms will rank higher (many times much higher) than well designed sites with poor inbound linking.

Google is the largest search engine and likely the one that values this most. Although it’s algorithm is unknown many hypothesizes have been put forth by the SEO community and results seem to provide validation.

The first hypothesis is that search engines (specifically Google) place an amount of “trust” on a domain and page (sometimes confused with PageRank). This trust for search terms shares a one-to-one relationship with how that page and domain rank for those same terms.

In order to build this trust, a site must be thought of as an expert for the terms. Typically this is show by inbound links that meet a combination of criteria. The most important is number of links combined with some sort of freshness multiplier. The more inbound links for a term the more trust. The freshness multiplier comes into effect when, for example, an older site might have more links for a term however has not had any recent links for those terms. A newer site with less overall links but many recent links for those terms might then have more trust. The logic is that data is timely so more new links earn more trust than many old links.

Beyond total number of links is links from other sites that have trust for the terms. So, for example, if a site wishes to rate for “dog breeding” having inbound links from other sites that rank well for “dog breeding” show to spiders than those trusted sites consider the linked to site a peer.

Finally, the terms in and around the anchor text of the referring link assign terms. So a link set with the text “dog breeding” in the previous example would pass on trust for that keyword phrase. This is thought to be the least heavily weighted method.

There are many other hypothesizes, however these seem to be the most prevalent and well trusted.

Inbound links are typically generated though networking in the niche community a site is looking to enter as well as using popular social networking sites (Digg, Reddit, StumpleUpon, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia) to increase the exposure of the site and, hopefully, gain inbound links from various sources. A campaign of using social networking sites intelligently to garner inbound links is typically referred to as “viral marketing.”

In conclusion, SEO relies on both internal and external methods. The most important is a strong campaign of collecting links from valuable sources preferably in the same niche. The second most important is strong internal design so when a spider reaches the site it has the highest chance of success to index it correctly and rank it for preferred terms.

Random Tidbit: Want to learn more about SEO?  Try reading some of the 15 most popular SEO websites.  If you use WordPress learn more about improving it’s SEO – I actually use a different plugin called Add Meta Tags. Finally, check my SEO page on Ma.gnolia for more interesting sites and tools I find.

I had lost 3 other ferrets at this point. Mugsy had been the first in my family and the last to go. She was the most loyal pet you could ask for. She would always cheer me up when I was down. Somehow she always knew how I was feeling.

People will judge you for being too attached or close to a pet, but I don’t really care. I had her for 7 years and, except for a few trips I made, was responsible for her care every day. She came with me to Virginia Beach and kept me company in a place where I knew no one. She was my navigator for the many trips home as well.

Like any pet owner I have many regrets – things I should have done or shouldn’t have done or should have done more. But you do the best you can and hope that it’s enough. I think my ferrets had a good life. I hope so.

Unlike my other 3 ferrets who died from cancer, Mugsy had survived cancer for several years. She had a different type that we were able to control. But she was getting old and her vision and hearing was not as good as it used to be I think. A friend was holding her, I picked up a plastic bag and the noise was enough to startle her. She leapt from my friend’s hands and hit her head on the floor. I think he blamed himself, but I never did. I did blame myself for a long time because I scared her and because I didn’t check her well enough after. She seemed ok, but shortly after my sister said something was wrong and when I looked at her my heart broke.

I spent that night with her on my chest, talking to her. I couldn’t sleep and she couldn’t really move. The vet gave me hope – I thought she would be immediately put down – but as I mentioned before that hope was dashed one year ago today.

I thought after losing the other 3 ferrets, after almost losing my dad and after my brother’s accident it would somehow be easier. It wasn’t. After I said goodbye and saw her fade, I went numb. I don’t think I felt anything for a week. I had to puppy sit for the next 2 weeks and I was so numb that as my friend lost her dog – the mother – and 5 of the 6 puppies I just couldn’t grieve anymore. I felt bad for her but my heart couldn’t hold any more pain.

It’s funny because all the things I used to get irritated about sometimes – having to take hours out of my day to let them out and make sure they didn’t get hurt, stopping them from getting into or breaking my stuff, etc. – I miss. They could break anything I have if I could see them one more time. I still wake up sometimes and think “ugh, I have to get up and let the ferrets out.” When I realize I don’t have to it only depresses me.

I don’t know what else to say other than I miss my ferrets everyday and I hope that this will never change.

Mugsy and Me – taken just a couple of weeks before she died

All 4 of my ferrets in happier times

Compilation – scanned from 35mm prints, forgive the low quality

Not So Random Tidbit: The Rainbow Bridge

Anyways, his site is called Blog de Purée and, like mine, topic hops a bit. He does have a lot of unique insight into the tech and web 2.0 world. Not only because he works with me and can harness my vast volume of knowledge (laugh track goes here) but because he has worked for several other web companies.

Some good deep reads:

1. Online rating systems can be manipulated by crowd-hacking
2. Can an online brand support gated or average content?
3. Helium member writes about being a member and earning money on the website
4. WordPress as a content management system for niche communities
5. Social networking is no fish story on Angler’s Web site

Paul is a funny guy who I enjoy working with immensely both for his good attitude and irreverent sense of humor – which comes across in some of his writing. Definitely check out his blog.

Random Tidbit: So posting a link to my friend’s site isn’t random enough? Ok, how about a wiki composed of video game wikis? Pretty cool stuff.

The book was quite simply awesome. It’s amazing that they did all that and are still alive to talk about it. From overdoses and car accidents to prison terms and insane groupies – they lived the rock star dream.

I thought the way the book was set up was kind of interesting as well. They keep switching view points between the members of the band and key members of their entourage. So every chapter is in a different tone from the last and many times explains events from multiple aspects.

I thought the key thing that I took away from it all that was even though they had made millions of dollars, sold millions of records and lived a life of excess – deep down they still felt like the goofy kids they were in high school (in some cases, Nikki Six sticks out the most as he admits this several times).

Makes you feel a little better knowing that even rock stars can be insecure.

Random Tidbit: Some interesting thoughts on Silicon Valley.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a tricky subject but one of the most widely accepted processes is having numerous, quality links from outside sites builds trust in a page and domain, helping both page and domain to gain value in rankings for the keywords associated.

There are a few widely accepted facts (since there are no certainties in SEO) I’ve discovered and seen in action that follow in (relative) order of importance (and not comprehensive):

1. Deep links are better. Using a blog example a link to a post is better than a link to category page. A link to a category page is better than a link to the blog’s homepage. Why? Because each link gives a little “link juice” (value that search engines associate with a page) from the referring site. Typically the more broad a page the stronger it’s natural link juice. Basically your home page naturally has more link juice than a new oist on “Why kittens are cute.” This is because of the way web page hierarchies are setup (it’s too long to go into detail here) so the “link juice” passed from the referring site will make a bigger impact on an post (which has very little “link juice”) than the home page (which already has a lot of “link juice” both from internal and external links). Think of it like this – you have an ounce of real juice to share. Your home page is a swimming pool, a category page is a kiddie pool, and an post is a cup. In which one would you see the biggest impact? The cup.
2. Niche links are better. An article about “Why kittens are cute” will get more “link juice” from a site about (and recognized as being an expert – ranking in search engines – for) animals (good), cats (better) or kittens (best) rather than a site about golf. Why? Because search engines (SEs) give more value to links from perceived experts in the niche. If you were buying a computer and one friend you had was a computer programmer and the other was a ditch digger in whose opinion would you place more value? Probably the computer programmer – same thing with SEs.
3. Links from sites with greater site age and trust are better. Trust is built through many ways, but basically it’s a catch 22: if other sites trust you (link to you) for keywords, you are trusted for those keywords (and can then pass on that trust). Site age refers to how long a site has been indexed in the search engine – the longer it’s been indexed the more trust. Google especially weights in site age and trust more than any other SE. Trust is also built in part (it seems) by how often your site is updated. Sites that have been stagnant for a long time (months, years) gradually lose trust to more recently updated sites under the impression that the information goes state and/or becomes dated on updated sites over time. This can be offset if others sites are regularly linking in to the site. Example: on a certain keyword a site that has been updated recently and regularly gets lots of incoming links is better than a stagnant site with lots of fresh incoming links or an updated site with few fresh incoming links which are both better than a stagnant site with few fresh incoming links.
4. Links with keyword built text are better. This does not mean make a link that says “cats, kittens, animals, ….” etc. SEs can pick up on that and call it “keyword stuffing.” This does mean that a link to the kitten article is more valuable if the link text (the words between the opening <a href=”..”> and closing </a> tags) says something like “an article about why kittens are cute” than “kittens” or “cats”.
5. Links with titles are better. The anchor tag (<a>) has an attribute called “title” in which you can put further keywords. This is especially good for links that are auto generated. A good example is “read more” links you see sometimes on blogs that link to the whole post. This can also be used to make a normal part of a sentence a link but still get the keyword effect. Example: … Check out this <a href=”site.com/kittens” title=”Why kittens are cute”>great article about cute kittens</a>.

Some of those are basic and more for beginners (my intended audience when I crafted it) but there is still some value for the intermediate SEO out there.

Conclusion: there’s more to SEO than to simply have a lot of sites link to you. One good site (a trusted authority in your niche) is worth dozens, hundreds or even thousands of links from smaller sites, blogs and web directories.

Random Tidbits: Sticking with the SEO theme I found 2 great items on SEOmoz (view source for an example of title tag use on that link – not that SEOmoz is going to get a lot of link juice from the likes of me).

1. Matt Cutts on Nofollow, Links-Per-Page and the Value of Directories – Matt spreads some knowledge on several hot button SEO topics including use of nofollow, which is sometimes misunderstood. Matt works for Google (SEOmoz calls him their “spam guru”) and is one of the best sources to understand Google.
2. SEOmoz’s SEO Expert quiz – test your SEO mettle in 75 questions. See if you can beat my horrible impressive 55%. Seriously, the best part is at the end it shows you the correct answers along with a brief description. Unfortunately, you can’t save that page to keep that information – unless you print it as a PDF to your computer.

I did have a thought the other day, as I try to get back into the swing of things, about video games. I read several gaming magazines and of course most of the discussion lately has been about the next generation systems and the slow dying of the last generation systems. An idea spawned in my head that I’m sure someone must have thought of before but if not I figured I’d take credit.

A big push lately has been for retro gaming – bringing back SNES, Sega Genesis, etc games to XBox Live and the Playstation equivalent as well as smaller new games that come out in these formats rather than as a full retail release – Geometry Wars comes to mind. My thought was that many people can’t afford the next generation systems – especially considering to take full advantage of them you must also have an HD television – but they do have the last generation. I’m thinking specifically the Playstation 2 and XBox – both robust, powerful systems.

Would it not make sense then for a newer and/or smaller developer to put out titles for these systems? It would seem that the cost of development and publishing would be much lower. Even better would be if that after the parent companies considered the life cycle of the system to be over that they would open this avenue by providing free or low cost development and publishing kits.

They would lose some money because as I envision it they would not be taking in a royalty with these games. However, they would be supporting an audience that probably wouldn’t affect their sales any. My theory is those that can afford the next generation would and wouldn’t buy these games.  Those that can’t afford the next generation wouldn’t and, therefore, would not be giving them any money anyways.

This would also enable people to create their own video games, thus going back to the roots of garage development – a few friends trying to make an original, cool intellectual property.

I’m pretty sure Sony and Microsoft would never go for it, but it seemed like a cool idea to me. It’s very disappointing that I can no longer get any new titles for my XBox. Even when a new graphics/processor chip or new operating system comes out my computer still is able to play many (though of course not all) of the new games coming out. You would hope that consoles would work similar – I seem to remember hearing about people having kits to make SNES games. I suppose that in our profit driven world that’s simply too much to ask for.

Random Tidbit: Don’t know why I never visited this site before, but since I hadn’t thought of it until now, maybe you feel the same.

My uncle was a deacon, a father, a husband, a brother and above all else a good man.  I didn’t know him as well as I wish I had, especially considering the fact that he was my Godfather and my father’s big brother.  But from what I do know about him I know that I respected him a great deal, that he had a great sense of humor that could make you laugh at the oddest times at the oddest things, and that if when I die if they say I was half the man he was then I can consider my life worthwhile.

My uncle wanted his 4 brothers to be among his pallbearers but my father suffered a stroke a few years ago and was not able to.  I was given the honor of taking his place.  At the reception afterwards, my aunt thanked me for what I had done and I was too overwhelmed at the time to correct her – that I should have thanked her for letting me pay my respects to him and honor him in that way.

When my father had his stroke, I prepared myself mentally because for awhile, it looked like he would not survive.  I was lucky in that God saw fit to grant me more time with him.  After many years of bad blood between us we had just recently, at the time, started to make amends.  The passing of my uncle led me to think of the fact that soon my parents might follow.  I wish I could say I am a strong enough man that the thought didn’t scare me to my core – but I can’t.

My uncle was a man of faith and his faith in the face of cancer strengthened my faith.  I hope that he knows that.

The added irony is I added a friend from high school… and they didn’t believe it was me.  If that’s not funny, I don’t know what is.

I know, MySpace is horrible.  I actually use Facebook more, but I keep the old MySpace around for I don’t know what reason.

As for everything else, no I’m not dead or have given up on the site.  It’s been heads down at Helium and we’re helping my brother with my niece nearly every night.  That plus other stuff has caused my site to drop in priority unfortunately.  I do have some new templates photoshopped – I just have to code them up.  They’ll probably go to OSWD or OWD as well.

Random Tidbit: Use WordPress to host your site/blog?  Check out Smashing Magazine’s WordPress Plugin and Tutorial article.

I did want to announce that I am the proud uncle and godfather of one Victoria Madison.  She was born around 5pm.  I have never been more proud of my little brother – which is saying a lot because though I may not tell him enough, I have always been proud of him.

No random tidbit today.  Possible pictures once I get permission and my Flickr integrated.

Then I discovered ma.gnolia. I had written it off as a sort of neat little lower 2nd or higher 3rd tier entrant into the field but had heard good things about it. After signing up and using it for a week now – I’m hooked. It has a much better UI than del.icio.us or blinklist, it imported all of my links no problem, it generates your own link blog that you can claim on technorati and just overall I am really impressed. It’s designed by the smart people at Happy Cog Studios who employ one of my favorite web designers / developers / people – Jason Santa Maria. If I could half the design skill and coding expertise (along with a little Meyer knowledge) I wouldn’t be half bad.

So feel free to check out my link blog or my about me – and yes, that picture with the two people is me and my girlfriend. More on that later in the week.

Sorry I’m not better looking. Don’t judge me.

Random Tidbit: Check out the LEGO Digital Designer.

Anyways, the sites are:

• Grinding Tapes Recording Company
• Mobile Man Boston

Get well soon Jason.

It has many uses and benefits that are worth looking into. I will focus on my personal choice del.icio.us – however other sites such as blinklist and ma.gnolia do almost exactly the same thing (and in some cases better from what I understand).

First, and most important to me, they serve as a central hub for all your bookmarks. Once you become a regular web user and get past the 20 or so range for bookmarks it becomes cumbersome to sync your home, work, laptop, etc. bookmarks. With del.icio.us you can post them in one place and access them from any computer anywhere. And using their tag feature you can sort your bookmarks easily so that you, your friends and even complete strangers can find them. You can add notes – which I need to do more of – to remind yourself why you bookmarked the site. For anyone that is into tech news, web design or blogging having this resource is a must.

Second, they’ve become a social search engine. I saw an interesting article about the new search engine that’s better that Google. Basically, it’s about using tags on del.icio.us to find interesting and relevant sites. There are some issues – recently I’ve noticed spam trickling in – but overall it’s a great way to find cool new sites and articles. Add the fact that you can get feeds from it – giving you SEO or CSS content daily right to your RSS reader/site of choice – and it’s almost a no-brainer. Will it ever replace Google? Probably not. But it’s an awesome substitute especially for cutting edge and web related topics.

Third, they allow you to increase your audience if you’re a blogger or webmaster. Basically, by bookmarking your own pages you are indexing your site the way you want it to be. The loss is so is everyone else, however, for a new or smaller audience blog/site it’s a great way to expand your audience and pick up potential regular visitors. It’s something I’ve always meant to do with my site but never gotten around to. If you use WordPress, your tags naturally flow with the tags on del.icio.us – so someone should (or likely already has) invent a plug-in to do this automatically.

Finally, they allow you to share your bookmarks. You can build friends on del.icio.us (they call it your network) and when you tag something one of the tags will be “for:<username>.” So if find that awesome new CSS site and want to share it with your designer friend – you can. You can even give links to people not in your network (as a reader of my blog did in the past).

You can also share your bookmarks through tag and link rolls. They also have released an API I believe to be used in mash-ups.

Random Tidbit: I found an article awhile back about 37 Steps to Perfect Markup. Pretty interesting.

The basic idea of microformats is to design a standard XHTML template for common items – for example a hcalendar for events. That template is then the standard for all items of that type. Since all of those items share common elements – in the hcalendar example a h3 with class = summary would be the event description – they are easily able to be encoded into XML and can be aggregated. So sites or programs could aggregate sites using microformats and parse them into easily understandable and standard (hence web standards) displays.

It opens the doors to easily sharing contact information, events, resumes and people relationships with friends, family or even across the web. There are even, already, some microformat plugins for WordPress and noted blogger and CSS expert Eric Meyer uses them for both his tags and his blog watch. I definitely need to track down a rel-tag plug-in to start getting indexed in Technorati – any suggestions?

I realized I’ve only scratched the surface here. With that in mind I’m going to forgo my usual random tidbit and list some links to sites I found filled with microformats information. Before I do, note that already there have been concerns about identity theft with things like hCards and hResumes so there are many bugs to yet be worked out. It’s a powerful tool though with lots of possibility.

For more microformats information check out the following or my microformats tag on del.icio.us:

• Microformats: What They Are and How To Use Them | Smashing Magazine
• posh – Microformats
• Add microformats magic to your site
• The Big Picture on Microformats
• Markup as a Craft