Geoffrey Rickaby

So you think you can carry? – Wisconsin Conceal Carry Law

Geoffrey — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:36:45 +0000

Now that Wisconsin Conceal Carry act has been written into Law, you like hundred of thousands of other Wisconsin Residents flock to their local sheriff’s offices or the Wisconsin Conceal Carry Website to be first in line to submit their application to conceal carry. First off, I no way am I providing legal advice about this license. If you have any questions please go to the Wisconsin Department of Justice website regarding the conceal carry permit.

While it seems that anyone with a hunter education certification can apply and obtain a conceal carry permit before you do I want you to ask yourself a question. If you were in a situation where you had to rely on your concealed weapon, do you know when can use it and that you are using it correctly? I say weapon because the law includes firearms, electric weapon such as a Tazer, metallic knuckles (brass knuckles), a nunchaku or similar weapon, a shuriken or similar pointed star like object, or a manrikigusari.

However what you don’t read about in the new law is how and when you can use your concealed weapon. This is where I personally feel most accidents are going to occur. Sure you got the permit, but are you educated enough to know when you can use it. For example, current Wisconsin law states that if the assailant is within 21 feet of you, you are permitted to use your weapon. However if that person is at 22 feet and you pull your trigger or throw your ninja star and kill that person, you are no longer considered a victim but instead you are labeled murder.

With that I strongly encourage that you educate yourself by checking out some of the NRA classes in your area.

Search Engine Optimization for Photographers – How to control the Robots

Geoffrey — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:57:29 +0000

In my last article, The Search Engine Process, I talked about how search engines see your website, and how they base your pages rank based on keywords, content, URL and meta descriptions. In this article I am going to talk about how you can control what content get’s indexed and the methods that are practiced in today’s industry.

What are the Robots

Search engine robots can also be referred to as spiders or crawlers. They comb over your site and index content based on several factors that are built into the search engine’s algorithm. A search engines algorithm is a group of programs that interpret the data that the robots acquire from your website and give your page a ranking based on keywords, site URL, meta description and content.

What do Robots Look For

When a search engine robot hits your website the first thing it looks for is a robots.txt file that is contained in the home (root) directory of your website. What you place in this robots.txt file will tell the search engine robot if it is allowed to index your site and what areas of your site you would like to keep it from visiting.

The second thing a robot looks for is tags contained within the HTML tags of each of your individual pages. With tags you can tell the robot to follow the links on that page and index them, or not to. In most cases you want robots to have full access to your site so it can index more content, however tags are great to use if you have duplicate content that you do not want to get index, since duplicate content can affect your sites ranking.

The Robots.txt File

The robots.txt file is fairly simple and easy to create and should always be placed in the home (root) directory of your website. So if you are like me and don’t care what content the robots look at then you can make a robots.txt file look similar to this.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

The User-agent: * command let’s you specific which robot is allowed to do what on your site. For example if you wanted to block Google robots from looking at your content then you would do something like this.

User-agent: Google
Disallow:  /

Now if you really want to block Google from indexing your site then you shouldn’t expect to get a lot of visitors. So looking at my robots.txt you can see I allow all bots to access all portions of my website. Let’s say you have a members area of your site or an admin section that you would like to keep to yourself you could create an entry in your robots.txt like this.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /members-area/

There is also a way you can restrict access to your site, but allow access to a single area. This can done by using the “Allow” command followed by the content you want to be indexed. Search engine robots are defaulted on your sever to be allowed full access as this is best practice for any website.

The Tag

Meta tags are always placed in the HTML tags on your website. If they are in other places, search engine robots will not understand what they mean and most likely you will throw a compliancy error. Meta tags within your tags tell the robots what to do with your page when they find it. Here is an example Meta tag that I currently use on my site.

What this Meta tag is telling robots is that I do not want them to use site descriptions that are found within the Open Directory Project as my title and description in search engine results. For example, if someone added an entry for my blog in the Open Directory Project as:

Geoffrey Rickaby – A photographer and web developer.

And you did a search for Geoffrey Rickaby, you would see a result that looks like this in Google:

Geoffrey Rickaby
A photographer and web developer.
www.geoffreyrickaby.com/blog/ – 40k – Sep 20, 2011

So by using the noopd in your meta tag it will pull either your meta site description or a blurb of content from your blog. The noydir is the same has noopd, execpt that it tells Yahoo not to use the description or titles found within their Open Directory.

Let’s say you have a page that you don’t want a search engine to index, what would the meta tags look like? Well its fairly simple, just add this to your header:

Since robots are already defaulted to index and follow all links on your site, you do not need to use the index, follow commands within the meta tag.

To Sum It Up

Robots are what search engines use to find and index your content, without them your website would not exist in search engine results. So be sure to check out your website source code that you are using the correct robots meta tags and that you are not blocking robots from your site in your robots.txt file.

Coming up next, I will get into how to optimize your content so that search engines can effectively index your site using the keywords that you want.

Search Engine Optimization For Photographers -The Search Engine Process

Geoffrey — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 18:56:48 +0000

When I say SEO, what do you immediately think? Some may answer and say isn’t he that guy from the Matrix Movies, others may reply and name it correctly but they may not understand its meaning.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the natural (organic) or un-paid search results. In general, the higher ranked and more frequently your site appears in the search engine results, will translate into more visits from search engine users.

The Process

A search engine indexing (collection and storage of site data) from your website is used to produce fast and accurate information to the search engine user. Search engines index your site based on a list of defined parameters in a giant algorithm that is maintained by the Search Engine designers. Each search engine has its own unique algorithm that is proprietary and kept a secret.

For example, when I first launched www.Intimate-Boudoir.com, my site was showing on the first page of Yahoo and Bing for the term Boudoir Photography, however Google ranked my site on page 14 of its results. While the Yahoo and Bing rankings were a huge surprise to me, they eventually evened out and I lost that coveted first page ranking. One the many reasons my site dropped on Yahoo and Bing was due to the algorithm changing.

Search Engines index your content by crawling your site and based off of what you have listed in your robots.txt or your robots tag will effect what content and where on your site you permit the search engine crawler to index your site. Wait a minute, robots, crawlers, spiders what is this? A another Harry Potter movie? A search engine spider or robot are what search engines use to crawl or comb over your website and index your content based on what keywords, page title, url, alt/title tags, and page description is found within that specific pages content. Then the search engine assigns a value to that page based on the keywords within the page, this is where your site ranking comes from.

A Flashy Website

When a Search Engine crawls your graphically enhanced or Flash website, what exactly does it look like to the crawler? Well take a look for yourself and go to www.Seo-Browser.com and type your website into the Address box and click simple. Guess what the crawlers sees? TEXT! Nothing but text! So this goes back to why I constantly preach to photographers who use Flash as their main website content to switch to something like a blog or simple HTML website. If you are one of those flashy photographers don’t get mad at me and stop reading. With technology in programming languages advancing tremendously over the past couple years we are able to achieve the effects of flash without using flash. So you can talk to your local web developer and transform that Flash Website into a content rich HTML based power house.

What have we learned

In conclusion we learned what SEO means, how a search engine crawls your site, and what your website looks to a crawler. Based on this you can start to draw a picture on how important it is to have content rich websites that is relevant to the keywords and url of your domain. My next lesson I will go into how to control search engines and how to protect content that you don’t want to get indexed.

Search Engine Optimization For Photographers – Introduction

Geoffrey — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:32:05 +0000

Currently I have been in the internet industry for almost nine years and only recently have decided to make a push to turn my hobby of photography into a semi-professional career. With that I started to sign up for online forums and Facebook Groups related to the niche market that I was looking to break into.

After a few weeks of trolling these groups and forums I noticed that the topic of Search Engine Optimization and Social Networking was a common question amongst the Photographers. So naturally with my current experience as a seasoned Web Developer, I started to respond to some of these questions. Next thing I know, I’m getting emails and requests to help with some photographers websites.

So over the next couple weeks I am going to produce a series of 101 style blog postings relating to the topics of Search Engine Optimization, Social Marketing (which includes using Twitter, Facebook) to your advantages.

In closing I’m going to throw this right out there. In my industry I am in no way considered an SEO or Social Networking expert. I however have learned a lot of what I know about SEO and Social Marketing from trial and error, and have applied it to my own personal projects. I consistently have seen positive results to make me believe that I have an above-average knowledge on these subjects.

Next: SEO of Photographers – The Search Engine Process

Light Painting LED or Glow Sticks

Geoffrey — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 18:54:30 +0000

The form of light painting has been around since the camera was invented, and only with the growth of technology have I seen an increase in the use of light painting. While there are many forms of light that you can use such as fireworks, LED’s, Glow Sticks and flashlights. However today I am going to show you the difference between using an LED and a Glow Stick.

LED

LED or a Light-emitting diode is a semiconductor light source that uses a small amount of voltage to power it. LED’s come in eight different colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, purple and white. There are two other LED’s that are in the color spectrum but our eyes cannot see the light they emit, those are infrared and ultraviolet. Most of these LED’s you can buy from your local Radio Shack which is where I purchase mine and they are fairly cheap.

For this demonstration I am using the larger 10mm Ultra-High brightness Red LED, and a 1.5v watch battery. I prefer the larger LED’s because they provide you with the most light, and they are easier to handle then the smaller 3mm or 5mm LED’s. To hook the LED to the watch battery I simply take some black electrical tape and slide the ends of the LED into the tape with the positive leg of the LED on the positive side of the watch battery, as well as the negative sides. To activate the LED I just pinch each side of the LED and go to work. With a few quick movements I was able to pull of this great photo.

Glow Sticks

Glow sticks are great if you want to add different colors that can provide a glowing effect to your photo. Glow sticks can come in several colors and shades and if you visit your local Dollar Store they are generally cheaper to buy then an LED and a watch battery.

In this photo I was using an shutter speed of 30 seconds, and over the 30 seconds you can see how a glow stick adds a great glow to the models body.

Pro’s and Con’s to LED vs. Glow Sticks

LED’s are great if you want to write words, or if you are looking to add very defined lines to your photograph. Since LED’s output a more lumens then your glow stick, they require less exposure time to the camera. The downside to these is that you have to face the focal point of the LED at the camera which can make your hand turn in strange ways to get the effect you’re looking for. Overall LED’s can cost more than a Glow stick but they can provide you with those defined lines you are looking for.

Glow sticks are cheap, only last maybe 12 hours and emit less light than an LED. However, they can do things that LED’s can’t. For starters they can create a glow effect surrounding them which can give you dramatic shadows or create a mystical glow. Since glow sticks emit less light, you have to decrease your shutter speed greatly. When you do that, you run the risk of appearing in your photograph when you are moving around behind the glow stick. When I did the shoot with the model from the photo above, that happened in several photos and in some cases ruined a fantastic photo.

Overall both LED’s and Glow sticks have their advantages and disadvantages, what you need to decide is what kind of effect are you trying to achieve with your light painting.

Two reasons to get your business on the internet

Geoffrey — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 20:59:02 +0000

Great, just what you want to read. Another article screaming about the importance of putting your business on the internet. It’s not like you haven’t read this a dozen times before and balked and rolled your eyes at it. However, why are you reading another article about it and not acting on it? Are you trying to justify the marketing investment? Well let me give you two more reasons, and my opinion are the two most important.

If you’re not in Google search results, your business doesn’t exist.
There are countless businesses out there that have been well established who do not use the internet as a means to market their company. However, they are missing out on a huge chunk of exposure as well as potential clients. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 240 million users from United States were active users of the internet in 2010, that is almost 200 million more internet users than in the year 2000.

How does Google tie into this you ask? Once again let’s toss around some more stats. As of July 2011 Google had 80% of all searches where as Bing and Yahoo! only bring in about 8-9%. With that you can see if you have 80% of the population searching on Google for let’s say, a home Maid Service, you are missing out on a possible 192 million people finding your website.

With this technology age and the dawn of the smart phone, marketing your business on the internet is almost as valuable as putting your business on an radio or print ads. Now don’t make me pull out all the stats on how radio ad’s don’t supply as good of a Return On Investment (ROI) that the internet can provide you. You have to stay on the cutting edge of marketing strategies that is available to you so that you can grow your business to the next level.

Social Networking – What are people saying about your company?
Social networking is defined as a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations), and one of the fastest growing aspects of the Internet is Social Networking.

The natural need to be connected with other people goes as far back as I can remember. Think about it this way, when the Telephone craze happened. Before the telephone we had to walk down the street, or take our horse across the country, then again we were only traveling 15-20 miles in a day. Then along came the telephone. We were able to reach out and touch those who were part of our family that lived on the other side of the United States. Then a few years later BOOM, just about every home had a telephone and we would spend hours talking to each other about absolutely nothing.

Today we now have multiple ways to Socially Network with each other. Telephones, email, text messages, Facebook and that Twitter thing. Because of that, the photos from last night’s drinking binge, where the photo of you with someone’s underwear on your head, your shirt half torn and your eyes glazed over singing karaoke can become a web sensation.

Besides drunken photos, Social Network tools such as Facebook or Twitter can be used to benefit your company. This can be done by interacting with your customer base. Through Facebook you can post new specials, sales events or even candid photos to which your customers can comment and share those things with each other. Then on top of that you can comment and interact with those clients. That Twitter thing can be used in the same way. I call it that Twitter thing because that is how other people ask me about it “You know, that Twitter thing.” You can use Twitter to post short 140 character messages that say “SALE NOW! FIRST 10 PEOPLE GET 50% OFF!” and then watch as people spread that message across the internet through Retweeting it to their Twitter.

Overall more and more people today would rather do business with someone they can trust than some random company. And you can do this by tying into the social network side of things and interact with your customer base.

In summary as you can see that by interacting with 77% of the population you can in fact increase your business by adding a website to your arsenal of marketing tools. In some cases you are able to find a decent designer and developer to put those tools in place for you. Yeah it may come with an initial investment, in the end that investment will be well worth it. Trust me, I have seen it personally and several times over with my 10 years of working in this industry.

Packers 5K Run Sponsorship

Geoffrey — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:53:39 +0000

Many of you already know of my support for Breast Cancer Awareness with the book that I have currently in the works titled “Breast Book“. What some of you may not know is that I am also and advocate for Melanoma Cancer Awareness.

Last year I lost my mother to Melanoma Cancer, because of this I started a campaign to help increase awareness of Melanoma Cancer. This campaign is called “The Melanoma Campaign“, for more information on this campaign please check out my website here.

Coming up on July 30th 2011 is the 2nd Annual Packers 5K Run/Walk at Lambeau Field, which my wife and I are seeking a sponsorship to cover the entry fee of $60. Also I would like you to spread that word and help raise money for Melanoma Cancer Research by donating to my cause, The Melanoma Campaign. We are looking for at least $75 more in donations by July 26th to help keep us on track to meet our yearly goal!

Packers 5K Run/Walk Donations

The Melanoma Campaign Donations

How to use SQLite to manage your databases in Ubuntu

Geoffrey — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 19:58:31 +0000

I was confronted by my boss today with the question. How do you navigate a database using a command line shell. So quickly I fired back and said, “I have no idea”. Encouraging I know, you’re reading an article about SQLite in Ubuntu and how to manage a database, and the author has no clue what he is talking about. How hard can it be? Well let’s find out.

First off let’s create our test database:

$  sqlite3 test-db

To see the file that we created type

sqlite> .databases

From here we can start to create our own table:

sqlite> create table tb1 (id int(10) primary key, uname varchar(255));
sqlite> insert into tb1 values('1', 'user-name');
sqlite> insert into tb1 values('1', 'user-name');

Let’s look closer at the create table command – create table tb1 is self explanatory, all we did was create a table called tb1. After that you see (id int(10), this is the first column titled id with a data type of int with a 10 character max and it’s being set to the primary key of the table. The second column is uname with a varchar data type with a limit of 255 characters, and then don’t forget the semicolon to end the command.

The insert commands are fairly basic, you are just inserting the values “1″ into column id and “user-name” into column uname. Once you complete these inserts you can look at how beautiful your table is by running a query on your table by typing:

sqlite> select * from tb1;

Let’s say you want to export you new database to a file; you can easily do this by typing:

sqlite> .mode list sqlite> separator ","
sqlite>.output test.txt
sqlite> select * from tb1; sqlite> .exit

Then we can view this file by typing:

$ nano test.txt

You should see a comma separated text file that you can edit.

Now let’s talk about how to open an already existing database and edit the data in those tables. In my example I am using a default database that was supplied by an IRC bot Phergie. First you want to get to the directory that .db file is, this is how I got to my file

$ cd /usr/share/php/Phergie/Plugin/Beer
$ sqlite3 beer.db
sqlite> .tables
sqlite> select * from beer limit 1;

All this did was query the beer table and display one record. The .tables command allows me to view what tables are in that specific database. From here we can use this command:

sqlite> pragma table_info(beer);

To display what columns are in the table. In my table I have two columns, name and link. So let’s go ahead and update the first record in the table by using some SQL.

sqlite> update beer set name='Great Beer', link='beer.com' where name='Good Beer';

And that’s it! Now as update and insert data it is automatically saved in the table so at this point you could do .quit, and the new data or updated data will appear in that table.

SQLite is a great little command line database viewer that gives you the power to create, edit and delete any database you can throw at it. SQLite’s command are fairly basic, but you should have a solid background of the SQL language in order to do what you need to update or create your tables.

Light Painting Fun

Geoffrey — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 02:25:25 +0000

A few years back I came across a really awesome photography technique called light painting. I have always been inspired to give it a try myself and see how easy and fun this can be. So with my glow lights, Super Bright LED’s and flashlights I was finally given the chance to try out these skills on the lovely Emily Nickles.

But first before we get to the goods let me explain how a Light Painting photograph is taken. First you start with a DSLR, or SLR camera that can maintain shutter speeds higher than 20 seconds; second a dark, really dark, so dark your scared room. You have to remember that a camera uses light to capture images, so if you have light leaking into your room it can cause you some unwanted light in your photos. Lastly you will need some form of light, either a flashlight, LED’s or glow sticks that you can wave around your subject like a mad man.

In my example for you I have a model, a very naked model, who was kind enough to hold still for up to 30 seconds for each photo while I tip-toed, danced and flung my arms around her like some crazed kid at a Rave. Believe it or not, I just gave away my technique for doing light painting. That’s right, hold your shutters open for up to 30 seconds, grab some glow sticks and wave them around like you just don’t care.

This shoot was probably one of the most fun I have had. Emily got a huge kick out of it as well. When I wasn’t trying to step on her in the dark, or hit her in the face with a glow stick, she couldn’t help but laugh. Anyway enough of the babbling, here are a few photos of the results. Oh, if you want to see the NSFW versions, check out my DeviantArt page.

The Power of the 404 Page

Geoffrey — Tue, 10 May 2011 15:14:05 +0000

With Spring slowly pecking away at the remains of Winter across the Horicon Marsh, I started to notice a trend on my website stats. I was starting to get more referrals from a website called EnjoyHoriconMarsh.com to my Horicon Marsh Photography. At first I was happy to see new and repeat visitors coming from that website, I noticed another trend, my Bounce Rate for that referral.

Let me explain what a Bounce Rate is before we go too much further into detail. According to Google Analytics a “Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance, landing page.” It’s a very short but descriptive statement, but what does that mean to a website owner. To sum it up, your “landing” page does not contain the information that a visitor was looking for, so they quickly left your site, without taking the time, to look for that content.

So when I noticed the high Bounce Rate I was getting, I dug deeper to find out that EnjoyHoriconMarsh.com had outdated links for my content in which my referrals were getting 404 File Not Found pages. So I sprung into action and contacted the Website Owner and requested that they updated the links with the ones I provided. Much to my surprise and a month later, no such changes have been made!

With that it caused me to become creative. I tried htaccess redirects to control the URL’s of those incoming sites but I still ran into 404 issues. I tried to recreate the pages but found they just didn’t work with my WordPress framework. With running out of options I thought, why not turn my 404 page into a wealth of knowledge and other suggestions for content. So I put my plan into action by redesigning my 404 page to include a giant h2 tag that reads Horicon Marsh Photographs as well as including links to my ten most recent articles.

Boom! And just like that my Bounce rate took a 75% drop! Since the pages related to the Horicon Marsh were the only ones hitting 404 pages, I wish I could say that it helped across the board but I am sure it will.

So take away from this that with proper in site into what your visitors are looking at and what they are not getting to, you can take those 404 pages and turn them into something useful rather than something feared.