Matthew Botos

You’ve climbed to the top of Google, or at least to the first page. Now how do you make sure you get that click through to your site?

Quick, describe your site in 155 characters or less - that’s how much of your meta description is going to be displayed below your (already optimized) site title. Here’s what I came up with:

Nature, sports, & event photographer for hire in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. Blogs on the intersection of technology & modern life.

In Wordpress, you can set this in Admin > Settings > Description. In Gallery2, it will be the description of your album, which you can override in the theme if needed. Google may take a week or two to reflect the changes.

I was recently invited to join Naymz, a professional social networking site like LinkedIn, but with more emphasis on reputation. Going through the initial setup and looking around, several features caught my eye:

(more…)

I happened to click on a LinkedIn Company Profile today, and realized it provides metrics that most companies themselves don’t. These range from things that are hard to track (where do people go on to work afterwards), to ones human resources more closely guards (age and gender). Of course, these are just from the LinkedIn crowd; some companies aren’t as young or diverse as that subset appears. In any case, it’s one more source of information about employers, and potentially a gauge of how Web 2.0 and social network savvy a company is as a whole.

Amusing bit from Wil Wheaton:

While I was signing books, a girl about my age walked up to the table. She extended her hand and said, “Hi, Im Gina.” “Hi Gina,” I said. “Its nice to meet you.” “Im a blogger,” she said. “Oh? Cool” I said. “Whats your blog?” “Its called Lifehacker, and –”

It makes me wonder; if you could get your favorite bloggers in a room, would they get along? Would they have anything in common beyond your eclectic interest?

The amount of spam I get on the blog has been going down, and most continues to be caught by Akismet. A German trackback spam slipped through today, though, and even through it was in German, I could tell it was spam. The use of short, phrases in bold and something about a free film transcended any language barriers.

This could actually make for some hilarious sci-fi parodies; imagine if they had to negotiate all every tense intergalactic situation metaphorically using home mortgages and natural male enhancement?

We have a Websense filter at work that is an alternating source of amusement and frustration for me. Last week, it started trashing the layout of Gizmodo and Lifehacker. Upon closer inspection, it was actually blocking gawker.com, which is where these sites get their CSS, Javascript, and images. An odd decision on the part of their web architect, but easily fixed using my latest Greasemonkey script:

Unblock Gawker Media sites (Gizmodo, Lifehacker, etc.)

To some, blogging is already passe, giving way to microblogging sites like Twitter or even Facebook’s status line (now with optional “is”!) . For sure, this makes sense given our increasing ADD tendencies, but there’s another way to expose your continuous attention profile: social bookmarking histories.

My bookmarks on del.icio.us are a good indicator of what I’ve been reading and found worthwhile enough to save. It’s also fascinating to watch your friends and co-workers bookmarks via RSS as they wander from one topic to the next, occasionally over to one of yours, and so on. When you know people are watching, your comments section becomes a microblog, highlighting what you thought was important or making a more explicit original comment.

And the beauty of it is that it takes no effort on your part beyond the self-serving act of storing your own bookmarks and thoughts. To me, this is where the real power of social networking resides: leveraging actions that serve the individual to serve the community.

I’ve been using RoundCube Webmail for the last month or so, and it’s pretty slick for an early release. One feature really bugs me though: it defaults to blocking all images in messages until you click to load them, and doesn’t provide an option to toggle this behavior.

If you have good spam protection on your account already, you can automatically load images by finding the following block of code in program/steps/mail/show.inc and changing it to read:

// check if safe flag is set $MESSAGE['issafe'] = 1; // override to always display images // if ($MESSAGE['issafe'] = intval($GET['safe'])) // $SESSION['safemessages'][$MESSAGE['UID']] = true; // else if ($SESSION['safemessages'][$MESSAGE['UID']]) // $MESSAGE['is_safe'] = 1;

A growing trend in submitting support tickets is to redirect you to an existing answer using text analysis, search, and recommendations. Most of these systems miss the mark, but I have to again say how happy I am with my hosting company, A2 Hosting, for providing a suggestion that was spot on, and revealed they already had a solution for my problem. Instead of another question to answer, their helpdesk actually got a compliment in their inbox instead!

I sold three items on eBay this week: a camera lens, a cell phone, and a suitcase, all starting at 99 cents. Guess which one had the highest final bid?

The lens got some initial bids, but the last-day bid up finished short of what I had hoped. The cell phone got nothing until the end - I didn’t think it would even sell, based on some other unsold listings - and ultimately fetched a tidy price. The suitcase really surprised me, though, selling for 80% of what I paid for it, despite its use, bulk, and more expensive shipping.

I’ve sold occasional outdated or unneeded things on eBay over the years, and it’s always surprising what price the market sets for them. It’s a good reason to clean out your closets and basements and “find” some money in the process. Another good reason: eBay has simplified their listing form and PayPal makes it quick to get paid and print USPS and UPS shipping labels.