w00t! After a year of waiting I finally snagged crims0n.com! For now It’s just redirecting to crims0n.us but I will be migrating the site over pretty soon. I have big plans for the site, so expect some changes.
/ecstatic
About a month ago, I went on a one week facebook and twitter cleanse. As promised, I will share my thoughts on how it went, and what I learned.
Bottom line? You need to try this.
It was a bittersweet ordeal. The first few days were the hardest, I almost subconsciously found myself at the login page a number of times before I caught myself. I didn’t realize how many times I had the urge to check up on friends and family in a single day. I felt like I was missing out… somehow disconnected. Fortunately that feeling was short lived. By the fourth day, I had almost forgotten about the sites entirely. By the seventh, I found myself questioning future usage of the services.
Looking back, it was a great learning experience. For one, I learned that many people overall don’t have a whole lot of interesting things to say. After the week was over, I found myself logging in only once a day, to catch highlights more or less. I wasn’t missing much. Without the temptation, I found myself much more productive as well. I even started spending more time away from my PC, which is a good thing.
I should probably mention that the last two paragraphs were mostly pertaining to facebook. Twitter is a different story. To be frank, twitter I can do without. Very few of my friends actively use it, so the only people I end up keeping up with are superficial “friends” who could care less whether you posted updates or not – and are more likely to unfollow you over your lack of activity than anything else. Of course, there is also the spammers who plague the service and just make it more of an annoyance. People won’t follow you unless you follow them back, and everybody pretends to be interested in what everybody else has to say simply out of fear of being unfollowed. You can’t get ahead without playing the game, and the game isn’t worth my time.
Needless to say, you probably won’t find me updating twitter too much anymore. It was a fun little fad, but unless my friends and colleagues start using it more actively, I don’t see the point.
Facebook I will continue to use, although I find myself logging in a lot less. Like twitter, you still have to deal with the superficial BS, (particularly people you barely know wearing their heart on their sleeve), but at least you can say you met that person at one point or another.
If you are like me, you probably use twitter and facebook way too much. In fact, lately it has gotten to the point where I am beginning to think that visiting these sites is simply a “cognitive itch” of mine. When I realized how much it was cutting into my productivity, that was the last straw. Starting immediately, I will not log onto facebook or twitter for no less than one week.
I’m doing this for two reasons. Firstly (and most obviously) it has been taking up way to much of my time. Secondly, I need to prove to myself that I am as strong willed as I like to believe I am. I’ve got the fitness thing down, I’ve got the diet thing down, now I need to break this damn social networking habit!
I am posting status messages up now, notifying friends and family of my online absence. I thought about blocking the domains entirely, but then I realized that would be making it too easy on myself. This is a test of willpower, and I aim to succeed. I will however, continue blogging. I think that writing meaningful and well organized ideas are probably more interesting to you (and more meaningful to me) than a simple status update. I have linked feedburner to twitter, so you will see whatever blog posts I have recently written show up there as well. Alternatively, you can simply subscribe to my RSS feed.
I will compile my thoughts on this “cleanse” into a new blog post when this is all over. I want to shoutout to Matt Cutts for the idea. Wish me luck!
Good evening everyone.
I finally got around to fixing my blog, and designing it the way I want it. What do you think? It’s a custom version of the iNove theme by NeoEase, and it should do for now.
After much thought, I’ve decided the last thing the world needs is another SEO / Internet Marketing blog that is rarely updated, so I’ve decided to move in a new direction and instead focus on things that I am passionate about. From this point on, my blog will focus around four core themes:
Life – This includes personal events in my life, random thoughts, experiences, etc. This also includes my love for healthy living, fitness, and nutrition.
Philosophy – Recently I have fell in love with philosophy, and I am going to start sharing and critiquing some of the more famous ideas and theories.
Technology – I’m a geek, I’m a coder, I’m a hacker, and I love everything in-between. Naturally, a great deal of this will come out in my blog.
Entrepreneurship – Although I am not wildly successful (yet), I still consider myself an Entrepreneur. The more I learn, the more I share. Due to my current ventures, this will still contain a great deal about Internet Marketing.
That is pretty much all I wanted to say in this post. Now that I am writing about things that actually hold my interest, my audience (that’s you!) can expect quite a few more posts from here on out.
Cheers!
My blog is a mess after a theme update error, so I am working to fix it up a bit. I’m going to change some things around as well… so if you get 404′d I am sorry 
I know I know… I’ve been naughty and haven’t been blogging. I’ve just been very busy! I promise I will be getting to it soon. I’m going to try to take this blog in a more personal direction, with a little less business involved.
Wish me luck, post coming in the next day or so!
Well hello again and welcome to another episode of me not updating my blog for over a month. I’ll be you host, Patrick McDowell, so let’s get started!
Alright seriously, hello from beautiful Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I am here celebrating a traditional get-together with my family, while getting some time to relax as well. I hope everyone is doing great and enjoying life to the fullest! WordPress wanted me to let you know that I updated to version 2.8.4 (although secretly I think they are trying to score some free advertising, but don’t tell them I know this!)
Project Updates
Okay so the SEO Tip of the Day was obviously put on a hold, with the last update being on July 12th. Basically the story behind that is it’s been way to busy to think of a new topic daily, then write 500 words on it. I am considering moving it to a weekly tip instead of a daily one, but I’ll keep you guys updated.
Some time ago I mention plans to launch a step-by-step of an affiliate marketing project, which would show users not very farmiliar with the industry how to make some money online. After much procrastination, I am finally planning all of it out, and it will begin when I get back next week. I’m pretty excited about it, as it is going to be a huge project and I think you guys will learn a lot.
Just wanted to get this blog started again, I’ll update more here soon… it’s getting close to 1AM so I’m going to hit up some Sopranos. Cheers!
Welcome to day two. From here on out, these tips are going to be quick and to the point. Time is money, and the less time you spend reading the more you have to act. Today’s tip is going to be on optimizing your images for Google Images.
Why would you want to do this you ask? This is something a lot of people miss out on that can be a gold mine if done correctly. If you can get in the first page of image results for your keyword, you acquire both maximum exposure and potential links (one of the rare instances where hotlinking isn’t bad). Still not enough of a reason? If you can get in the top handful of image results, you could also show up in the regular organic results. Take the keyword carrots for example.
Google bots can’t “see” the image you have, so they rely on its name(s) and the content surrounding it to place it properly. Naturally to have the best change of ranking high for your target keyword, your image has to be well optimized for Google. To do that we are going to add div tags around it, then drop the keyword into the actual image name, Alt image tag, and meta file summary. The example below uses yesterdays post on 301 redirects, and we will be optimizing the “SEO Tip of the Day” image on the top right.
Welcome to the first in my SEO Tip of the Day series! If the title is not self-explanatory enough, I will be providing you with daily tips in SEO, Internet marketing, and web design to help you learn the business, or keep your memory fresh. So without further delay, today we will be covering the importance of 301 redirects.
Any time you make a major change in your website, search engines need time to figure out what you did, and update your rankings accordingly. If you do not properly “instruct” the search engines on what you changed, they can no longer find the page that is in their results. As you can imagine this effect would be disastrous, so how do you change a URL without being penalized for it?
Let’s look at an example. Your doing some on-page SEO and you decide to change this:
yourdomain.com/startrek_novel_01.jpg
To this:
yourdomain.com/novels/science_fiction/startrek.jpg
Obviously you made a wise choice, as the second URL is much more organized, and thus will rank better. However now potential customers that may have bookmarked this page can now no longer get to it, and it won’t be long before you loose any and all rank you had for that page in the search engines. Luckily a quick 301 redirect will fix both of these issues. Simply add one line to your .htaccess file:
(If you are not sure what or where your .htaccess file is, it is a small text file located at the top level of your domain. It is possible you may not have one, and if that is the case just fire up notepad, save it as whatever, upload it to the top of your domain, and rename it “.htaccess” without the quotes.)
That’s all you have to do. Now anytime a visitor or a spider goes to the original URL, they will be automatically redirected to your new one. As mentioned before, this is particularly important for search engines, because if you use 301 redirects your rankings will be preserved. Just remember, it would be wise to do this for every URL change you make. Never assume the search engines understand what you are doing, regardless of how simple it may seem.
If you would simply like to redirect everything on one domain to another, use the following:
Redirect 301 / http://www.yourdomain.com
Note the “/” before your target URL. That indicates everything from the top level of your old domain down should be redirected. You can also redirect dynamic content, however that is beyond the scope of today.
Well that wraps up our first day. Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments below. Until tomorrow, cheers
In my previous post I stated my apologies for a lack of updates. I am very excited about what I am going to be doing with this blog from now on. Here is a little preview:
There will be plenty more content, so if you haven’t already, you may want to:
Subscribe to my RSS feed.
My best wishes to you all, and my many thanks for reading
