Linux

Most of the time drupal.org has all the information you need to achieve something with their web content manager. However, there are a few things that simply are difficult to explain with just textual input.

I found a part-solution to this in the Drupal Therapy web site as put together by Sean Effel. With the use of web cam and screen recorder he has made the process of learning about modules such as views really easy.

We need more people like this in the grey zone between developers and users!

Geoff, my geeky brother-in-law, is again getting himself media attention. What is now over two years since the creation of 'meta', the open source segway, Geoff's work has rated a mention in New Scientist magazine's December issue and has now also been published in Gizmag also.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) and site rankings are really a kettle of fish unto themselves these days. Being a marketer who went on to study in Information Technology I am suprised at how many people out there boast to be specialists in SEO.

In order to take a closer look at what is going on behind the scenes I have spend the last 24 hours monitoring guru.com for SEO requests. I have been in touch with some of the businesses putting out SEO requests and have also used their 'project' to understand the skill set of the person offering the solution.

My findings were that most SEO providers ability to understand the true scope of what they acronym means was very sadly lacking. To match, we have almost 36% of those 'employers' that I surveyed not understanding the full scope of SEO either meaning that they were really not qualified to make a good service purchase unless one of their bidders 'enlightened' them to the simple fact that SEO is a two-edged sword. You can have the most 'optimised' site internally but unless you spend time looking after the externals also then you may still fall on your sword.

Most of the bids that I have been given to review included only internals such as and is not just internals like 99% of bidders were bidding on implementation of meta tags and robots, robot tags, html clean ups, site map installation as well as being a loyal provider of optimisation updates and ranking reports.

Another odd project I found was of an 'SEO expert' that wanted to farm out the internal work of clients and not only did he desire the above things but he also wanted the selected supplier to provide 'integration/optimisation themed pages'. Now I am not sure what this person actually means as depending on where you put the emphasis it could mean several different things. My best guess is that he's looking for someone who can build content managers which are optimised for crawling that can have templates overlaid to meet the clients needs.

Other things that are missing internally has been the 'accessibility' approach also. I mean, how many of us who do web development actually take the time to put in our alternate text and descriptors. We all know that some search engines love them, right? Ah, but those extra three seconds of typing may mean I miss something too. Just check out my site closely enough and you will find that it is not up to strict XHTML standard let alone having the appropriate meta data in place.

Now, putting my marketing hat on I wonder what businesses actually understand SEO to be? Clearly a large percentage of businesses posting projects on Guru did not. In the most simplistic of terms it includes a marketing approach to getting your site noticed and linked to in a manner which brings in the keywords that you want you site to be high hitting with. But do marketers know how to achieve this? I'd hope so with the nature of marketing education being increasingly loaded with conferences on 'Search'. But time will tell and some clients will still not be able to see the trees for the weeds in that process.

In relation to this I was interested to find that only 8% of SEO jobs were posted in marketing and 92% were in technology. It would be interesting to see whether this becomes more balanced over time as marketers get their heads around what search is really about. So last night my little Alexa site ranking tool told me that my personal web site ranked in at #19 million and a bit, globally speaking, after my big web site reorganisation leading to a huge number for 404's. . Today, it is at #3, 201, 472. I did just one thing to make this happen, without spending a cent, and it wasn't anything on any of my web sites. If you are interested in doing this for your own business then it may be worth contacting me at the office to find out more.

Michael got home from Blackhat a few days ago now and he was discussing some of the issues raised there with Arjen Lentz and I. One issue raised was finding out information about people through the use of an email address and the humble 'lost password'.

Now, let me paint a scenario. You, unbeknownst to the public, are a member of alcoholics anonymous. Unfortunately for you, you upset someone so significantly that they go dirt digging on you. Since you have an email address and they know it, dirt digging can be easy to do, especially with a script.

How many web sites are there with membership or account forms? How many do you belong to? Most people have accounts and most sites have a 'lost password' option. Nine times out of ten, that I have found today, most have a process by which you are required to enter your password. If you are a member it emails your password to you and the screen usually displays as much and if you are not a registered member it returns that tid-bit of information to the screen.

By putting your email address into the form someone can very quickly tell if you are a member at that site or not based on the message that is returned. From that they can deduce whether you are a member or not. Oh no, your alcoholism is now exposed! Now think what can be achieved with a smart script which can hit thousands of web sites!?!

Hopefully, by now most technology people should have already seen the solution because I hope that someone will run with implementing it into content management and forum systems for user privacy reasons.

For those who can't see the solution all you need to do is change the displayed response. So how will they know if their request has been effective? Tell them that they have been sent an email either with their account details or details on how to set one up. Then email the account the relevant information or send them a how to register message.

I encourage people to take this proposal to their open source projects because I would like to be able to choose who knows about the online memberships I participate in and am sure that I am not the only one.

... and they say bad things happen in threes too.

Well, this last week I have lost my PC - completely had it - major power supply issue. Mind you this was one of Michael's hand-me-downs from around 5 years ago so it has served me well in that time (even if it meant rubbing it down with ice in Summer to get a few minutes to check email). Michael has relocated my secondary drives but has not yet given a plan for the files located in the master. He is currently in Vegas for a 'school reunion' (as I call it). Yep, he's catching up with a bunch of Aussie friends in Las Vegas at Blackhat.

I have also been struggling with my Thinkpad (R-series) for a while now. I am not sure what the cause was but the case has begun separating at the top left corner. I have pondered at whether the sheer weight of this series caused hinge-pull from the screen but nothing seems to point directly to that as the cause. As for resolving it, it was suggested that I use twist ties and duct tape. Of course, I laughed at the suggestion only to go back to my desk and seriously consider whether it was plausible but it really was not all that practical a suggestion in light that all down the left side are I/O ports as well as air intake. As of last Friday it has also taking to 'zapping' me when I hit the backspace key. Not every time I touch it but it seems to build residue over the space of around 20 minutes before giving me a kick to the middle right finger. The zap is not painful enough to overnight establish my new laptop but certainly strong enough to improve my typing accuracy. I hope to have a new laptop, my first Toshiba, geared up for my presentation at SAGE-AU conference in a weeks time. Sweet!

So what is the third? I don't know and was hoping you could tell me so I could plan the redundancy measures for the servers as they are the only things I have left!

Well, busy would be an understatement for this week I am sure. The good news is that I have reached my mini weight loss goal for 2008 already. There are more details in Health.

Okay, so this has been kicking around for ages. But I had to blog it because the song it's been put to ('Here come the hot stepper') has me reminscing of my younger days...

On U-Tube there is a serious demo of the candy of Beryl with a very predicable snippet comparison against Vista Aero.

Okay so that's enough fluff for one day!

I had thought about putting in a talk proposal for linux.conf.au 2008 but shyed away as the cut off was before I found out about my proposals for OSDC. However, as fate would have it, I am sprawled on the couch, 5 days overdue with Baby Bennett the 3rd, surfing blogs, to find that Rusty mentioned that there was a 'last chance' for submissions as the submission portal has not yet been closed.

So, why not put in a proposal - it's not as if I am going to do anything else considered 'productive' today?!?

So, my presentation proposal is in and is entitled: "Why do I care? The foreign language of 'freedom'."

What's next?

There is a more involved story behind this too! Sometime last year, when Karl was around 18 months we decided he needed a stand-alone PC to play some games he was given for Christmas (they only ran on M$ Windows). So DH grabbed one of our oldies installed Windows 98 and the games. Two days later Karl was caught changing the BIOS settings and by day 5 he had deleted COMMAND.COM. Hence to say that Windows 98 no longer worked. We did not rebuild as we determined that all efforts were futile.

So, the past 6 months Karl has been doing the Ubuntu thing on DH's PC. He quickly worked out how to log in using a username and password (that was scary enough), he then set up a quick launch button for Tux Paint (pretty nifty), he then changed the icon for Tux Paint in the menu bar to an 'accessibility symbol'?!? (Oh, and I forgot the scrolling share prices too!)

So, we got back from LCA in Dunedin and Karl must have had an over-inflated sense of skill. He stopped (by that, I mean outright refused) playing Tux Paint and decided he would toy around with Blender. After a week or so he pestered DH & I for assistance, of which we could not be, since neither of us have a clue with that app. So, Karl eventually got over this spiked interest and returned to Tux Paint.

This was the point where I thought we were safe but *NO* we couldn't be more wrong. Karl knew how to shut down & reboot (causing chaos to our MythTV recordings) but we have never had him reboot in single-user mode. Hmmmmm...

Hence to say DH found him playing with the config and got a little upset. So, Ubuntu people - this is what happens when you give too much control via a GUI. As for Karl - what's next?

FYI Karl is almost 2.5yo

We'll the drive home was an awesome time to reflect on the weekend. After dropping Rusty and MD at the airport it was just me and my thoughts all the way home.

The weekend was really awesome and I certainly appreciated the break from the kids. But when all was said and done, when the meals were finished and drinks were consumed there was still the little empty piece of my heart. I guess my family really was one of greatest contibutors to fulfillment in my life.

I love my family heaps and was *really* glad to be home.