Sean’s Blog

I’m getting married on August 16th.  And while I’m running around like a crazy person, I’ve found some tools that make things a lot easier for us to keep somewhat organized.  I’m not talking about marriage websites like theknot.com or similar.

What has been saving my skin time and time again is Remember the Milk and Google Docs.

Remember the Milk should be a no brainer.  I’ve created a task list called wedding and added things as I think of them and then check them off as they get completed.  Adding payment dates has been really helpful as well since I can see them coming up and take care of them as well as get reminders when they are due.  Looking back, I probably should have had Jess get an account so we could share and assign tasks to each other.

Google Docs has been the other big life saver.  First I shared the invite list with Jess so that we could both add the people and addresses we were going to invite.  I could then share this file with my parents so they could give it the once over and see if i missed anyone.  We wrote up all our invite wording collaboratively on Google Docs.

We’ve also put together a budget with the Spreadsheet and have been trying to track our spending with another spreadsheet.

Making sure your communicating about what needs to get done is by far the most important thing and Google Docs makes this painless and easy.  Or at least as easy as I can be

I’ve been running Firefox 3 for a while now, and really only have good things to say about it.  I install it when I installed Hardy Heron (FF3RC5 was the default browser).  It seems to be faster, less resource intensive and have some great new features.

I have noticed though that on my work PC is does seem to crash every once in a while.  This only happens on Windows.  My linux PCs seem fine.  Maybe another reason to switch? 

If you haven’t yet, take the time to upgrade.  It’s painless and quick.  Here’s the link

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”

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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I was reading a post over at the Brazen Careerist which was something I’ve been thinking about recently as well. Anybody that blogs or writes pretty much anything on the interwebs occasionally gets comments to the effect of “Learn how to spell loser” or “Your grammar sucks”. I’ve had my share. It also sounds like Penelope got one too many of those comments as well. The fact is, these comments are not only unhelpful, but they are almost saying to a writer, the only thing worth talking about in your post is how bad your grammar/spelling is.

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Flock is billed as the Social Web Browser. Being somewhat anti-social, it didn’t seem to be anything that I really would use. I mean, I blog, have a flickr page and use LinkedIn, but I really didn’t use any of the “Social Networking” sites. This weekend though, I wanted to upload a bunch of pictures to Flickr and saw that Flock had built in Flickr support. So I though I would give it a try. After playing around with it for a couple hours, I thought I would give my impressions.

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I’ve been sick and having wireless problems this week. Both of which have sapped my resolve to stay on top of the blog. I think the wireless card is crapping out in my desktop since I placed the AP in the same room as the computer and still got a 0% signal. Who knows…

Here are the links:

The One Day Sabbatical - David at LifeClever has a great idea on taking a one day sabbatical. Just taking a day to get out of your routine and spend some time looking over the big picture. Step back from the projects and normal daily grind of your life. It seems like an interesting idea and I am going to to give it a try here in the next couple of weeks.

17 Tips for Getting Bloggers to Write About You - Cory (who runs BoingBoing.net) at Information Week has a good column about common sense steps to make your blog as link friendly as possible. Most of these things are common sense, but I have seen then too many times to count.

How an Information System Helped Nail Eliot Spitzer and a Prostitution Ring - Larry at ZDNet has a great aricle that uses the Spitzer case to show how banks and the government work to find illegal transactions and money laundering. This is a really clear description of some very complicated stuff. An interesting read.

NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows as Agency Sweeps Up Data - Siobhan Gorman at the Wall Street Journal has an article on the rebirth of Total Information Awareness, a NSA spying program that was scrapped several years ago do to privacy concerns and general outrage. It appears that it is attempting to be resurrecting int the new government surveillance bill.

I’ve just run across Alltop.com.  It is a handy new sight that aggregates the top sites in many catagories and shows the headlines.  I don’t think it will replace my feed reader anytime soon, but it is a great place to browse what is on the blogs right now.

http://alltop.com/

One of the really great things about the Firefox web browser is just how extensible it is.  Using extensions has really allowed me to make my browsing a much better experience.  With all these free extensions available, I am still shocked by how many people don’t actually use extensions.  I thought I would list some of the plugins that I really like and use all the time as well as a couple that i haven’t used that frequently, but are just really great ideas.

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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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