Official Wedding Announcement
Well it’s official, I be getting married! Wohoo!
Here’s the “official” announcement. (more…)
Loooooooong Break
Wow, I have not posted in quite a while. I’ve been spending a LOT of time working on my own personal side projects. Building sites and working on promoting them. Fun stuff!
Now that I have a little group of growing sites, it’s been interesting to see the results.
Strange Blizzard Splash Screen Image
So Blizzard Entertainment has some new “super amazing something”(tm) that they are going to announce. So in true Blizzard style they are keeping everyone in suspense, with a splash screen that has been slowly showing “something” locked behind a sheet of ice.
Today you can see a pair of glowing eyes. (more…)
How Minority Rules
I now know why Democracy fails. I learned this at work. Bare with me, this is a stupid example, but so fitting.
There are 9 of us in our office. 7 of us would prefer to have the lights off. 2 people want them on and blindingly bright. So in true democratic fashion, the lights stay on all day as the majority are forced to capitulate to the loudly voiced demands of the minority.
Apparently in a Democracy all you have to do is yell and complain louder than anyone else and you get your way. And that is how minority rules.
Personal Responsibility has Vanished in America
I am just going to quote a big block of this from Glenn Beck, because I tend to agree with it so much. There is a major trend forming in America. People won’t take responsibility for their own actions.
Note: The election part of this rant has been removed because I am so tired of hearing about politics and feel that the other half of the message has a very important point to make.
Kill Bill (Gates)
What Computer Hardware are You Running?
After some great rounds of Team Fortress 2 this morning, I got one of those annoying Steam popups asking me to take a hardware survey. They promised to share the results with me, and I thought that was a pretty fair trade. What surprised me was the handy system info they were willing to share. Bare in mind, these are gamers, so there are a lot of high end computer systems in the mix, but it was still a great sampling of the current state of users’ computers and it has some things that should be considered when you start building your next project.
Primary Display Resolution
Out of 87,4450 Users
Resolution | #Users | %
800 x 600 | 13,848 | 1.58 %
1024 x 768 | 275,816 | 31.54 %
1280 x 960 | 351,374 | 40.18 %
1600 x 1200 | 16,094 | 1.84 %
1680 x 1050 | 77,349 | 8.85 %
1920 x 1200 | 19,795 | 2.26 %
Ahhh! 70% of the user base is running at 1024 x 768 & 1280 x 960 resolution. I would still consider those “low” resolutions. Only around 10% of the users are running what I would consider “high” resolution monitors.
Also interesting to note, are the operating systems that people are running.
Windows Version
Windows XP | 727,772 | 83.23 %
Windows Vista | 112,279 | 12.84 %
As you can see, Windows Vista is the gamer’s operating system of choice…
Physical CPUs
1 cpu 540,791 61.84
2 cpus 305,658 34.95 %
4 cpus 27,922 3.19 %
It is nice to see, that multi-core cpus are spreading quite nicely too.
I believe you can see the results of the Valve Hardware Survey without needing to take it.
I kinda wish it had more information. You know, random, non-important things like, usb ports, USB Hubs (and what they have plugged in), misc. devices, etc. I would just love to compare how much random junk other people have plugged into their computer compared to what I have floating around on my desk. 
Oh yeah, Happy New Year!
The Month After
Forgive me blog for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last post. So much has happened that is blog worthy and SEO related.
October 1st I found myself in Seattle, sitting in rapt awe as Rand Fishkin explained SEO gospel.
SEOMoz’s SEO training was awesome. Now, I’m a newbie, so please remember that I see things from that perspective, but I was amazed. I think my head was going to explode. The “training” could better be termed “The State of Search 2007”. Rand pretty much started at the beginning and explained the what, how and why of SEO.
It was great!
More “expert” people might say that it was to basic, but it was exactly what I needed.
I came away with two key things:
1) A Filter. There is so much crap information online about SEO. It VERY difficult to decide what is and what isn’t: useful, accurate and unbiased SEO information.
Rand gave a exact view of where the industry came from and where it is now. Based on that information it is easy to see and filter out bad / outdated information.
2) I learned that I think to small. I had a bunch of little questions that I wanted to learn the answers to. What I learned instead what that I wasn’t even thinking in the right scale. The minutia that I was worried about was so irrelevant that it didn’t even matter. Real SEO’s are playing a much bigger game.
I think more than anything the training was a mindset changing experience. It took a couple days to let everything sink in and recalibrate my thinking.
The most exciting part… I found out that I am at least headed in the right direction with my own projects. That was encouraging.
Now on to bigger and better things!
PS: Thanks Rand! You rock!
SEO Newbie
Disclaimer: I am NOT a search engine optimization expert! Everything you see here are my musings and should not be taken as professional SEO advice.
Ok with that out of the way, let me explain why this site is here.
This blog / site is really here to help me. To give me an area to take notes about the stuff I am learning and trying. Without giving away the site / project involved, (ie: trying to avoid bad cross links and too much shameless self promotion), I want to experiment with various SEO techniques in a controlled manner. I have 10 small sites to experiment with (they get between 30-200 unique visitors/month). I want to see the effect various techniques can have on a site and on traffic.
By not mentioning the site or keywords involved, I think I can keep these little experiments free of outside influences. But at the same time have the numbers and results open to public debate. The possible side effect being, that people are welcome to give suggestions and comment.