fuzzyraygun

I run into a lot of over planning in my job. This is a big problem in a majority of companies because “over planning” sets up roadblocks to their ability to get something done. Take a blog for instance. There are a bunch of companies who think that this is a necessary thing on their website (especially web 2.0 companies) but in planning for this they rarely think of the most basic idea behind it. Who will write it? and Do they have something to say?

The over planning part comes in when they mistakenly believe that their blog will be an instant hit and everybody will want to read it. So, starting from this wrong premise they start thinking about bandwidth and hosting rather than articles, tone and readership. I have seen this happen over and over. A company puts up a blog and puts up a couple of posts and then forgets all about it. It becomes another marketing dead-end rather than a great extension of their companies voice.

Here are a couple of basic tenets for company blogs. These apply to small and large scale blogs and companies.

1. Post
2. Post
3. Post
4. Post
5. Post

OK, maybe this is a bit simplistic but it gets across the point. If you do not have content and it is not updated frequently, what is the point of the blog? Why not just have a company news section? Maybe it’s not as hip, but it just might be something that is more manageable in your organization, and it is better to have something that gets some “love” in your organization than to have something that is cool but nobody uses.

All kidding aside here is what I think would be a good starting point for companies who want to have a successful company blog.

1. Find people in your organization who like to talk about your industry and your products and your business in general. This does not have to be the CEO or president. It doesn’t even have to be the VP of marketing. Get multiple people to make it easier to get lots of content. But if you don’t have someone with something to say, your blog will most likely be a ghost town of old posts and no comments.
2. DO NOT start off worrying about the design. You can change the design all the time. You can add sections and search and all sort of neat goodies, but don’t even think about it right now. People might even read your content without, GASP!!! coming to your site!!! Yeah, its called RSS and you should be so lucky to have people subscribe.
3. Cut all the red tape involved with them posting. Do not make walls of approvals, security and legalese in front of each post. Make sure that the people writing it have easy, secure access all the time. You can even set it up so that they can email their posts to the site.
4. Link to and promote things you like in your industry and outside your industry. This could even be your competitors!! This seems like a crazy idea, but it works. Do not become another company press release blog that only talks about YOUR company and YOUR products. If people wanted to hear about that they would read the rest of your website. What people want to read are insights, knowledge, tone. They want to know that you are thoughtful and that you see parallels outside your industry that are interesting and worth noting. This is how you can create a blog about, propeller design, and attract a huge audience of not just your industry but the larger web community as a whole.
5. And in case you didn’t read the first bulleted list. Post , post, post, post, post

Once you have all this in place and you have a growing readership then you can start worrying about things like bandwidth and traffic and you know what? You should be so lucky to have those problems. But DO NOT plan on these problems. DO NOT make your initial plans around problems that you do not have.

I have been having a tough time feeling like I am increasing my dev. knowledge. This week didn’t help when I had to do some CSS at work and I was waaaaaay out of practice. Have to design and implement some CSS for the a new Drupal 6 support portal was the holy crap moment. I need to get my brain working like that again. I have been doing design and Flash stuff for so long that I have gotten behind in my CSS and HTML.

I have decided that I will concentrate on Drupal, CSS and Rails. I think if I can get some stuff working in that direction of the next year, I will feel like my skills are moving forward.

Those times when you wake up and you have been drooling all over yourself? Or making strange noises in your sleep? This is what you are dreaming about. The 1958 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder recently set a record as the most expensive vintage car. Selling for over $10 million dollars at an auction in England. I love cars.

Please buy me this one. I like Black

Alanna and I had a nice weekend of bowling, barbeque and some work time on Sunday. I did some song writing for a side project “Liquor Store Venus” as well as doing some basic mixes for the wedding record. I also made a Flash countdown for our wedding site at www.tomandalanna.com. Hopefully it will not stress us out to see the number ticking away.

Every city has one of these events. The kind of event where a whole population just lets it all hang out and takes a big exhale. Bay to Breakers has become more and more just a big walking party. Yeah, sure there are people who are running, but there are also people who didn’t sign up and will never finish. Its not about finishing, at the least for some people. Its about dressing up, drinking beer, bringing your beach chair and your camera and being part of the great big city party for the day.

There are serious people who just want to run, there are people with messages, people with serious amounts of alcohol just trying to stumble to the finish, there are people with great costumes and there are people with no clothes at all. As far as the eye can see there are people. This year there seems to be more strippers than Elvis’, and more alcohol than water. I guess everybody just needs a nice sunday to go bat shit crazy and howl at the noon day sun or fog in this case.

Later on they will clean up the plastic cups and hose down all the corners an everybody will try to make it work tomorrow.

I have kick butt hosting through Dreamhost, but I was having some slowness issues around all my Wordpress sites that run content from a database. I decided to try out a virtual private server and wow… what a difference.

You can only get it if you are already a Dreamhost customer. You use a simple slider to pick the size of your virtual server container including processor and RAM and then bamm. You have a server container all your own.

I think I will contact Dreamhost to see if I can post pics of the control panel because it is great. It charges you for the amount of processor and RAM you use and you can even use the slide at any time to increase or decrease your virtual server container.

The power is out at my work, so the only things on backup are our servers and the internet routers. Laptops directly connected work though! We have to kinda sit around and wait for the power to come back up. I give it an hour before we just give up and go home.

This is what you call extreme power usage time. Lots of people running lots of A/C. Screw it, lets go and get a beer.

I ran across a strange thing today. I was looking through my site stats and I starting noticing strange site referrers. Upon further investigation I found a link farm site that was taking a post I made harping about customer service at musicians Friend and using it as part of a link farm site that would redirect users to guess where???? Musicians Friend…..

To give you a better idea what link farm is, link farming is the practice of Black Hat Seo companies to artificially stuff search engines with false links to drive traffic to certain sites.

The user will see the link and think that they are going to a legitimate article or story or blog post etc… But the user is instead sent to a farm page.

The farm page will look kinda strange because it will not have any of the content that you came there for. In fact you might not even see this page because the browser will then be hijacked and forward you to a site of the link farms choosing. In this case Musicians Friend.

How exactly did your content get a user to this page? Well if you remove the “styles” from the page you see that your content is actually in the page after all but the Stylesheet is keeping it from being seen. But the search engines see it. They see it just fine. To the search engines this page looks like it is stuffed full of content. The search spiders just look at the content on this page and chomp at the bit.. No pun intended.

The tough part comes when these sites get kicked by search engines and the good money that a company pays to drown out or re-direct all the content they don’t want associated with them comes roaring back into the listings. Sometimes the search engines will even punish the target re-direct as well. Many companies have been driven out of business when they are kicked from the search engines for this kinda traffic driving. The seven sites that I found link farming my content were all hosted at Rackspace.com (expensive enterprise hosting) and all had Domains by Proxy hosting, meaning they didn’t want anybody to know who they were.

(Pictures used so as not to give these retards more traffic)

So this begs the question… Is Musicians Friend paying these guys to increase rankings? Do they even know how they are doing it? I don’t think that these companies are stuffing links to Musicians Friend out of the kindness of their own heart.

My next question is oh course Who is Ben Meisner? This may not be obvious but work with me on this. You see if you do a tracert (traceroute command) to any of those Rackspace servers you get a certain IP address, when you lookup the person or company associated with that IP address you get something like the record below which says that it is in Australia and linked to a Ben Meisner. Who runs a series of labyrinth like link farm shell sites that all lead back to him and Labscorp in Potts Point, New South Wales Australia.

Thankfully this particular set of link farm sites was only operating on Microsoft’s Live Search. Another reason Google kicks ass.

Todd showed me this great presentation by David Heinenmeier Hansson from 37signals.com

So many people are so focused on making the next Facebook that they don’t realize that most businesses start on a small scale with good ideas and grow over time.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but it’s hot. I mean open the windows all the way, sleep on the fire escape kinda hot. I think I’ll go pour some water down my shorts and go to sleep now.