The blog of mavrck

Quick Facebook Insights

mavrck — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:12:32 +0000

In following the flow of socal media news, two Facebook articles jumped out at me today.

First, it interesting to see the dominance in traffic Facebook continues to build. The traffic of the top sites is staggering. Secondly, it’s interesting to see the evolution Facebook has taken with advertising throughout it’s lifecycle. As much as I hate shady marketers, the information presented is interesting to consider. Is shady advertising really part of a normal growth pattern? His opinion is interesting, even if you don’t agree with him.

Changes are a coming

mavrck — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:23:22 +0000

This is just a quick heads up to everyone that I plan to expand this blog outside of SEO and development based topics in the near future. I’ve been spending more and more time working on new strategies for up and coming media (read: bands), and lessons learned with marketing and management. You may even catch a concert photo or two as the tour continues on. This feels like a natural extension from where I’m at currently, and will hopefully also help make posts more frequent.

Alternatives to Google Analytics

mavrck — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:45:02 +0000

Google Analytics has become the fast, free and first choice for metrics for many sites. The sites I produce are no exception. But what happens when your client/boss doesn’t want to use Google? Check out these sites with worthy offerings:

What alternatives do you use?

SEO: where is the proof for pr sculpting?

mavrck — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:12:39 +0000

Oh SEOmoz, you continue to force be to have a love-hate relationship with you. You are not alone in your trollish nature of followers, but you seem to be a great example of it.

So the backstory – Yesterday I was catching up on the backlog known as my RSS reader and came across an interesting post from eariler in the week. In this post, Rand at SEOmoz presents an argument for “link consolidation”, or the grouping of pages into a single page sets. While the idea is not entirely bad, and certainly has it’s place, the thread of comments are just sad.

The premise of the disagreement was this: A group of SEO “gurus” have pushed the practice of pr sculpting and the benefit of this practice was recently debunked by Matt Cutts. If this group truly has solid numbers for the sculpting technique, (1) how could they not catch the removal Google’s use of this for over a year, and (2) why can’t anyone show real, factual data to support their claim?

This is the type of activity that makes SEO consultants looks like snake-oil salesmen. They are hurting what should be a respected industry and making my life harder by forcing me to spend massive amounts of time building trust with clients who have been bitten by these fly-by-night people. In both science and in business, you go through analytics to review data. In the case of science, you then go on to formations of theories and peer review. Where is the peer review element here? Why must people get defensive when you ask for solid proof? It’s really just a simple, valid request.

File Naming Conventions

mavrck — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:12:52 +0000

Recently I’ve been working behind the scenes trying to come up a file naming convention that will receive formal support. I could play on the “designers are unorganized” stereotype here, but I won’t. Working in a mixed designer/developer shop you come to better understand the varying mindset that we all have in naming our files. Some of us use version numbers to differentiate documents, others use dates or letters. At this point the naming is dependent on the designer(s) assigned to the project. This can become a real issue when many designers come and go on a project, as well as when multiple designers work concurrently together. Can we always rely on the “modified” date? Of course not. The mobile nature of files, being copied from station to station removes this possibility.

So with the stage set, I am leaning on proposing a format similar to the following:

...
01.00.mockup-a.psd

Coming from the code side, this is something that makes sense to me. I’m likely to modify this structure as I continue to talk to some of the designers, but I think it’s a good start. I see some clear benefits, including: automatic sorting and identification of latest files, removal of useless/confusing information like the designer’s name and date, and standardised document names (mockup, home, etc.).

While this process is sure to drag on through a number of dicussions and revisions, I’m looking forward to getting a standard in place and moving on to my next push – PhotoShop layer comps.

Auto tuning a developer is a bad idea

mavrck — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 01:12:28 +0000

On vimeo.com via sbahns.com

Auto Tuning from Casey Donahue on Vimeo.

Finally, A Google Analytics API

mavrck — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:20:25 +0000

I can’t express how happy I am that Google finally released a public api for analytics. Let the barrage of 3rd party tools start coming!

Google Group

Code Code Documentation

Blogspot Blog Post

Great Explination of LSI & Referential Integrity SEO Techniques

mavrck — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:29:00 +0000

I came across a couple of great SEO videos today. The pair explain why worrying about LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is pointless and why you should instead be focusing on “Referential Integrity”. I recommend this videos for everyone out there, as they break down the concepts to even the newest of users.

Development Related Apps I Use on the PC and Mac

mavrck — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:34:57 +0000

So, lacking anything witty for today, I’ve decided to post a list of some tools/apps that I use.

On the PC side:

Filezilla (PC/Mac) $FREE

This app handles both FTP and SFTP. I prefer a simple app for this process and Filezilla delivers. It includes synchronized browsing (a big time saver), stored sites and priority levels.

KeyPass (PC) $FREE

Trying to store a number of ftp/ssh/email settings and passwords in anything other than a dedicated (and secure) app has only failed for me. This is another simple and free app to handle the task. The data storage file can even be stored on a networked drive, giving shared access to a single password file.

Putty (PC/Mac/Linux) $FREE

I’m a minimalist when it comes to Telnet/SSH access. This client is a small .exe app that does the job. I always stick it in the windows directory, giving me the option to quickly type ‘putty’ in start/command line.

IE Tester (PC) $FREE

For quickly testing websites on IE6/7/8, this app is great. You can quickly add tabs with your selected IE rendering engine version. Word of warning though, I’ve noticed that it’s not always 100% acurate for each engine.

SVN/Subversion (PC/Mac/Linux) $FREE

So this is more of a overall tool listing, rather than an app. I use the Linux server components to host my repositories in a central location.

Tortoise SVN (PC) $FREE

This is a PC client for SVN which creates ‘hooks’ that show up as menu items when right clicking a folder. It’s easy to checkout/update/commit right from a windows folder view.

Versions (Mac) ~$52

This is a subversion client for Mac, that has the familiar Mac styling. It’s easy to recommend this app to other users, as it’s rather intuitive for new subversion users.

Pidgin (PC/Mac/Linux) $FREE

Pidgin is an instant message client, with support for FaceBook and Twitter. I find it simple and to the point. It only adds bonus points that it’s free and open source!

TweetDeck (PC/Mac/Linux via Air) $FREE

TweetDeck, for the 5 people who haven’t heard of it, is a twitter dashboard client that shows friends tweets, replies and direct messages. It does the job, though I’d gladly switch when something better comes along.

Anxiety (Mac) $FREE

This is a to-do list app that supports multiple lists and does not make things more complicated than needed. There are a number of similar apps for both Mac and PC.

Geek + Bad Rap == Funny

mavrck — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:48:12 +0000

I’m without many words for this. Sadly, the lyrics are accurate, so I can’t find much fault.