Sean’s Blog

Recently I’ve been noticing an interesting trend. I’ve been seeing more and more entities (people, companies, movements) give out a Google “keyword” instead of a URL. For example, the Ron Paul campaign has a lot of placards that just say “Google Ron Paul” instead of just giving a website address (ie www.ronpaul2008.com).

Apparently companies in Asia have been doing this for a while now. I’m not sure if this is because of the difficulty of acquiring meaningful domain names, or if the subject is just easier to remember.

This means a couple things (to me). One is that while I don’t think premium domain names are going away anytime soon, they may definitely become less important. The other is that namespace crowding is going to be come much more of a problem.

What I mean by namespace crowding is the the inability to control how you rank in your search results. If you are the poor guy who owns Bill Gates Windows and Door Installation, you are never ever going to be able to Google that and be anywhere near the top of the search pile. A unique URL is the only choice at this point.

Your ownership of this phrase becomes even more important. Non-related pages or bad pages become much more of a problem, and one that is sort of out of your control. If the folks at boingboing decide that they want to write a post saying “Sean Lavelle is a tool” that is going to crush whatever Google ranking I have built up. That is sort of an extreme example (Cory, Mark, David and Xeni don’t do it! Please! ) but you can see who this lack of control would give someone who is invested in a particular brand fits.

What this means for me right now is that I am still pursuing a domain name that I want, but keeping an eye on how Google (and other search engines see me) is a very important part of maintaining your brand.

So go ahead - Google “Sean E Lavelle”

So in my attempt to get back into the whole social networking groove, I finally took the plunge and joined Twitter.  For those of you that don’t spend far too much of your precious lives online, Twitter is a micro-blogging service.  No images, no movies, all posts must be less then 140 characters.

I really don’t know how useful I’m going to find it, but I was really impressed that when the California wildfires flared up earlier this year, a lot of people were able to notify their families of there status via twitter (since phone lines were down).  Now I know there is absolutely no way that I will be able to get my parents to ever go near or use something like twittter, so I needed a way so that non twitter using people could see my twitter posts (called tweets).

After looking into some plugins, I decided that I would just publish the RSS feed to a page on the site.  So if you are looking for my most current information, it will be on the Social page.  I don’t plan to use twitter a whole bunch, but we will see where things take us.  I also set up a twitter client for my blackberry (no sms, text messaging bad!) so I can update when I not at the computer.

Since most of my friends don’t use twitter, I’m sort of in the awkward position of having no one to follow.  I had Twitter scan my email addresses and all it came back with was Penelope Trunk (of the Brazen Careerist).  It just seems weird to me to follow popular bloggers who I’ve somewhat interacted with.  Maybe I am missing the point of the whole thing though.

So if you know me and use twitter, go ahead and follow me.  If you just want to follow me and don’t know me, I’d be more then happy to expose you to my ramblings as well.  I plan to give it an honest try and see how things work out after a couple of weeks.

I go back and forth with the social media thing. Granted, it has made the web a much more interesting place to be. But 90% is pure and utter crap. Instead of communication, it seems like a bunch of people making connections then having nothing to talk about.

Such was the case of the disastrous Myspace.com experiment. I got on Myspace way late in the curve. And although I ran into a couple people that I haven’t talked to in a while, it didn’t really open up any worthwhile conversations and became a spam magnet. So I left.

I’ve been thinking about it though, and it really seems that you get out what you put in. So I’m going to give it another shot. I’m going to go hit the big networks and see what I can see. Hopefully this will work out better. I’ll keep you all appraised on how it goes.

I was trolling form my name to keep an eye on the Googlegangers the other day which I do with some regularity and I got a little sidetracked. My name isn’t that common and there isn’t that much movement. My resume over at emurse.com still holds the number one spot and that makes me happy. I’d like to get the blog or the site positioned a bit higher since most people don’t search on me with my middle initial, but all and all it’s not that bad of a ranking when I think of what some more commonly named people have to deal with.

Somehow, the post about a Irish politician always manages to maintain a spot in the top five which is weird.

Regardless, after searching for “Sean Lavelle” I just though I’d try my last name and see what I came up with. I was somewhat surprised with what I found. I knew about Lavelle Rubber Manufacturers in Wisconsin, but there was more!

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Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve run into this issue in a variety of forums. The question is, if you want a blog or a homepage should you host it yourself or use a managed server? The responsible answer (that most people suggest) is it depends. I’m going to take a different tack. If you want to learn about web technologies, are serious about blogging, hope to ever make money with a website, or just build your “geek cred” then you need to self host.
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Earlier I posted about some of the traffic fall off I’ve experienced recently. While I know “content is king” and am actively working on it, I have also been looking into some of the more technological ways to get the word out about the blog. One of the things I’ve found is the ability in Wordpress to customize what blog directories are “pinged” when you write a new post.

The only line in there by default is rpc.pingomatic.com which is a service that contacts multiple blog listing sites. When I went the actual site though, there was only 16 directories listed (plus another 5 specialized that i haven’t listed):

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Ever since I moved to a self hosted blog, I’ve had a fall off in traffic. I expected this, but not to the degree that it has happened. I’m getting double on triple the traffic on the existing sites that I had at wordpress.com even though I haven’t updated these sites in months. I am somewhat convinced that after the problems I had upgrading my wordpress installs my page ranking was affected as well.

One of the weird things that I’ve been noticing is that sometimes the Google Analytics numbers and the Stats plugin for Wordpress give different numbers. Normally, I would attribute this to Analytics seeing traffic outside my blog, but it seems that Wordpress Stats plugin will give the higher numbers. I think that the Google Sitemap plugin might have some issues since I am running 2 separate plugins for my 2 wordpress installations. I’ve also turned on stats at my webhost, so hopefully this will give me a little more insight.

So to rectify this, I’m trying several things. I’ve installed the All In One SEO Pack Plugin. I’ve resubmitted my sitemap to Google. And today I am updating my pinging services (on which I’ll post later today or tomorrow). Hopefully this will lead to some improvement. If any of you pro bloggers have any other ideas, let me know.

Salon.com had an article about how to stop junk mail that I saw the other day.  Most of the ways they focused on to stop it were paid services and according to the article, they have done a pretty good job of stopping junk mail at a pretty reasonable cost (between $14-$41).  Being somewhat strapped for cash at the moment I was looking for something free.  Then at the bottom, I found this - OptOutPrescreen.com.  It is a way to opt-out of the preapproval offers from credit card companies that make up a good portion of my junk mail.  The site opts you out for the big four credit buereus (Experian, TransUnion, Innovis, and Equifax).

Just doing a little more browsing, I found out that state DMVs can sell your information, but are required to offer an opt out.  My state (Ohio) requires an opt in, so they should not be giving my info away but you may want to check with your Dept of Motor Vehicles.  The Direct Marketing Association also offers an opt opt-out program for $1.

As always, you should make sure your phone number is on the Federal Do Not Call list.  It currently expires every couple of years, so if you did it when it first came out, you may have to reregister your number.  I actually just saw on the news that congress is going to make the list permanent soon.

Since I moved my blog over to seanelavelle.com from Wordpress.com, I’ve had to deal with an unfortunate reality.  All my great google links  as well as the stats that came with it went away.  Basically, I get to start over from scratch and it kinda hurts.  Not so much as if I was getting thousands of visitors a day, but I had build up a decent readership.

Now the whole thing has been a good learning experience (and a crazy amount of work), but it has given me some good ideas for topics.  I am pretty sure that posting more regularly will get things back to where I need (which I promise to start doing).

As for Google rankings, My new site is the top of the second page on a search for Sean Lavelle.  The real problem is that there are links on the first page that point back to to the old Wordpress Sean’s Blog.  I’ve locked that blog down and made a static “I’ve Moved” page, as well as ported all the old content over to the new site.   I guess, thinking about it, that I should probably just delete the site.

Gaaaahh. So i just had a preliminary interview with a major technology company (one that I would REALLY like to work for), and although it was just a preliminary interview they hit me with some technology based questions. Now I’ve done sysadmin work for probably 10 years on Unix systems, and I am pretty proud of my level of skill, but I completely blanked on questions that I should have been able to answer. I guess that is my fault for not being more thouroly prepared. Well, no harm no foul. If I didn’t do as bad as I thought, then everything is OK. If I knocked myself out of the running, I am still happily employed at I company I like.

The painful part was that I am not currently seeking a new job. This company just pinged me out of the blue. And it was maybe one of three companies that I would consider leaving my current job for. Well, that is the way the cookie crumbles.

<plug>Anyways, I’ll have to send Alex over at Emurse.com a nice thank you letter. Just a day or two after they turned on there Contact feature I was contacted. So aside from consistently maintaining my resume as the highest ranking page in most of the major search engines, it seems alot of of major companies HR folks are using it as well. So if you are looking for a job, or just want to see what is out there, I would highly recommend Emurse.com </plug>