Technology

Some time ago I received an email sent to the development team in my office linking to a highly disturbing YouTube video created by Google. This is it below:

“Less than 8% of people who were interviewed today knew what a browser was.” This is in Times Square, and most of the people in the video seemed to be internet users.

This is equivalent to 92% of the people driving down the freeway not knowing what a car is.

Many of these people have kids on the internet, or are banking on the internet or are voting on technology related issues. Our computer systems are being designed around the 92% of the population who are wandering blindly. Imagine how efficiently things could run if users were expected to have the same basic education we expect from automobile drivers.

Imagine being a 16 year old going on your first drive with your dad and he sits down in the passenger seat and says “Okay, now put your windshield wiper in the gas tank and your foot on the motor oil,” and have him expect you to understand what he means.

If you know the difference between a web browser and search engine and the difference between a CPU, a hard drive and a computer, do me a favor. Next time someone asks you what kind of car you drive, tell them AM/PM or Chevron and make them explain the difference between a gas station and a car. Maybe then they will understand our pain.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about here’s a basic explanation of the difference between a search engine and web browser.

I’m just going over my whole Wordpress setup for this site in case anyone is interested or wants to give advice. If you know anything about Wordpress and see me doing something stupid, please go ahead and write a “Hey dumbass” response to this post or my previous post about the wordpress plugins I use.

I use the Inanis Glass theme, basically because I couldn’t find anything better. Most of the free themes look like crap. I’m not a designer by any means, but I know enough to say that most of the wordpress themes I could find just don’t look good, especially for a science-fiction themed website. I did a search for “best SEO wordpress themes” and came up with this site: http://wphacks.com/best-search-engine-optimized-seo-wordpress-themes/ and this one: http://www.seohosting.com/blog/blogging-tips/5-free-seo-wordpress-themes/. Both sites list a bunch of wordpress themes that they claimed were well-optimized for search engine optimization (SEO), but only one or two of the ones listed actually existed when I searched for them in the theme listing in my dashboard.

However, based on their lists of criteria for a good SEO theme, Inanis Glass seemed decent. It’s got the content at the top and seems to come close to validating for properly formatted HTML, though I’m not sure why that’s relevant. I did make a couple changes though, like changing the <H1> tag at the top to show the name of the post instead of the blog title, since I’ve read that’s really important to SEO to have your keyword rich title at the top instead of the site title. I still need to figure out my tagline.

I also almost completely removed the footer where it had a little windows style start menu with search and login features and stuff, as well as some popup menus that didn’t look very good. The pages seem to load a little faster since getting rid of that.

If you have any suggestions for a better theme or other theme-alterations I could make (particularly SEO related), I would greatly appreciate it.

Last week I finally decided to jump in and do what I’ve been thinking about for years and rekindle my online writing presence. I looked into a system called MovableType, a content management system (CMS) for running websites. I was attracted to it because it’s open source, which appeals to me since I’m an anarchist and want a system where I know if I see something I don’t like, I can dig into the actual code and change it, like I did for my Android phone when I discovered none of the music players could display my music files the way I wanted them to. Plus open-source is almost always free, which certainly doesn’t hurt.

After a failed installation of Movable Type I discovered that WordPress is also open-source. For some reason I thought it was a hosted solution with a programming interface (API) that you had to plug into. Instead it’s just a big package of files that you put on your server and then do whatever you want with.

I must say, I’ve been quite impressed with WordPress, especially the plugins and their ease of installation. The interface, while a little laggy (probably result of my host), is very straight-forward and easy to use compared to many systems, such as my host, GoDaddy which has the most convoluted website I know of.

I can’t get WordPress to do exactly what I want it to, but it seems I can always find a plugin to get it pretty darn close, and I know that if I have the time, I can improve my CSS and PHP skills and actually dig in and personalize it.

I spent all last weekend playing with WordPress and nearly falling in love with it. Web technology has certainly advanced quite a ways since my old successful days of isellpot.ws, and even though I build internet applications for a living, I’ve never actually worked with this kind of thing before.

Then Monday night I played with Facebook and was not nearly as impressed. I don’t really get Facebook… like what does it actually do? I’m gonna keep at it though.

Tuesday night I explored some website promotions options, specifically automated link submission tools. On their promotion page, Social Bookmarks Demon kept saying how it’s not a spam tool, but then went on and on with all this advice about how to avoid being marked as spam. Haha. I need to be really careful about how I use that kind of software, but if done reasonably and sparingly, I think it could work for me. I guess we’ll see.

Then Wednesday evening I went out around downtown Seattle and looked at Condos… “Gonna buy me a condo… gonna buy me a Cuisinart… get de wall-to-wall carpeting, and de wallet full of credit cards…”

But the night before I started working on this, I got an email from someone on the other side of the planet who remembered my website from years ago and decided to look me up. He said, “your former website, isellpot.ws, was a cornerstone of my teenage-hood.” He’s a professional writer now, which makes it even more flattering.

At the height of that website’s popularity, I had 10,000 visitors per week, until it was ripped out from under me by a domain-name stealing spam-bot. But maybe it was for the best. I just hadn’t been happy with it.

So tonight I read a wonderful story he wrote, then got into reading some of my stuff from my old anarchism/marijuana legalization website. I was surprised at how quickly I could move from a brilliant and moving paragraph into something completely ridiculous and off-putting. I still think there’s some salvageable stuff there and intend to cut it apart, do a little editing and post it in future blog posts, or, if it’s lucky, on a page in the sidebar

Oh, Lord it’s late… I need to get up for work in five hours. Then this weekend I’m back up to my eyeballs in website.