Here in Ballard, my little studio is short walk to the Locks and the Puget Sound so along with the occasional gull, boat horn or allure of salt in the air, I occasionally enjoy a charming evening phenomena that other coastal people will probably recognize; an atmospheric changing of the guard. If the day has been warm enough, the water warms up faster than the land and a sea breeze develops. The provides a modest prevailing wind off the water blowing inland throughout the day. This continues until at some point in the evening when the temperature difference shifts. At this point, the wind quickly changes direction and a land breeze, blowing out to sea takes over. This is a pretty common phenomena in coastal areas, but I don’t know if this next part is typical…
Anyone that has seen my gear list know that I’m a pretty satisfied user of ultralight canister stoves. The combination of cleanliness, control and convenience usually meets my needs 9 times out of 10 when hiking and camping. I do have a strong admiration for the weight, design and ingenuity of many of the other stove concepts used in hiking; in particularly the alcohol stoves and traditional fuel stoves (which used foraged combustibles).
While perusing the goodies over at Go Fast and Light, I came across an offering by Vargo. I own one of Vargo’s early titanium versions of the now ubiquitous “soda can” alcohol stove and although it didn’t really suit me, I was curious about their Wood Stove after a recent discussion with a friend about Kelly Kettles (another traditional materials stove solution).
Google Swirl is a beta search results interface that compliments Google Images. Instead of the standard grid of single level navigation, Swirls returns results in an “intuitive” tree interface that allows you to explore images matches based on visual and semantic similarities. It works best with fairly ambiguous terms because the beta only has about 400k terms, but could probably be made more robust as development continues. I made a short demo video of a sample search and navigation…
Very sore and sunburned but I’m back. I had considered kayaking out to one of the islands in the Puget Sound but my lack of experience with tides and currents, as well as not really knowing my limits I decided for something a bit more modest. With the help of my sister, I put in at the northern end of Lake Washington near the mouth of the Sammamish River, with the intent of making my way down the western shore and into the Lake Union area and finally disembarking at the Ballard Marina, roughly 16 miles overall.
“Content is King” is one of those search engine optimization maxims that gets thrown around a lot but many folks still don’t realize that what they see on a web page with their own eyes isn’t exactly what search engines “see” in terms of content. Some of the richest, highest impact sites are all but invisible as far as many search engines are concerned.
So how to do you get “Search Vision” and a better understanding on your content’s technical visibility? One quick, easy and free method is by using Google’s Text Cache. You don’t need any special tools, just a web browser and a few seconds.
I think it all started with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies but I have honestly lost track of the number of books that have sprung up in the “Classics Parody Cultural Horror Mash-Up” genre (or whatever future literature critics will call it). I finally broke down and started reading the aforementioned Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and frankly I’ve been enjoying it immensely. At the risk of a pun, Grahame-Smith’s hilarious take on Austen’s Regency drama-fest really breathed new life into an authoress that has always been somewhat lukewarm for me.
I’m not sure how much longer the trend can go before it implodes, but here is an inconclusive list that I’ve come across (but hardly read) so far:
CS5 and Photoshop in particular has a lot of great new features. Most of the jaw droppers have already been covered in great detail elsewhere and, sure, you could wade through the bullet points and release notes, but here is a way to become familiar with them as you use Photoshop from day to day.
At heart what’s wrong with Search Engine Optimization? Make your content as accurate and accessible as possible so that it gets indexed correctly to help visitors find your site on the SERP. But in practice it is a classic class of “Too much of a good thing, is a bad thing.”. While it’s easy to throw around distinctions like “White Hat”, “Gray Hat” and “Black Hat” to try to segment the tactics and legitimacy of various SEO practices, the bottom line is that it is not only tempting for anyone with a site to optimize but increasingly it is absolutely necessary. And that’s where the escalation begins.
Instead of accuracy, instead of advertising, we have a room full of people yelling so loud that. increasingly, actual factual results fade into the background. It is no secret that Search Engine companies are constantly updating their methods in order to avoid abuse, but I think we’ve passed the point of abuse and hit the wall of a fundamental flaw with how current search engines work. The SEO abusers are no longer chasing the Search Engines, but quite the opposite.
I never thought I’d see the day Google was chasing Bing in the search engine arena, but there you go, huge background images started appearing on Google’s home page this morning. I’m all about visual appeal but one of the best things about Google’s search page has always been its clean, uncluttered and professional appearance. Just the SERPS, thanks. This trend seems to follow fast on the heels of their experiment with a busier (if arguably, more feature packed) page layout a few months ago. I’m not sure I like the trend. Google’s original lean approach was one of the many things that separated it from the search engine pack (Yahoo!, AltaVista, HotBot etc) back in the “wild west” days of search engines.
For those of you that feel the same there is some relief. While you can’t completely revert the page at the time of this article, you can replace the background images with something a little less distracting. From the Google home page…
Just a last minute reminder that tomorrow, May 22nd, is Seattle Works Day…
“Seattle Works Day is a fun and easy way to give back! You will be one of 1,500 people working hard in neighborhoods throughout the city. Plus, because it’s Seattle Works, we finish things off with a bang – a party at Seattle Center.
And it doesn’t stop there! Not only will you enjoy a great day of service and celebration, but your contribution supports our year-round work to connect local organizations with enthusiastic and dedicated volunteers.”
