Meanderings in Blogland

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. I’ve been so busy with other people’s websites it’s been hard to keep track of which projects I’ve been supposed to work on, much less get the work done, or much lesser bill for the work I’ve actually finished. Arg.

So I haven’t had time to write about the play I just acted in. I’ll try to get to that later.

I haven’t had time to write about the photo workshop I taught in Westport. Ditto.

I haven’t had time to write about the election or other political happenings. There’s plenty o’ folks doin’ that.

I haven’t had time to either take or write about interesting photo/hiking trips. Gotta do something about that one.

But for now, a little note about a recent theme in the world of Other People’s Websites.

Three of my recent projects involve taking over a site created by someone else. All three of them involve some fairly sophisticated PHP scripting. There aren’t many PHP developers here on the Mendocino Coast, so local people with a need for such things consistently manage to find me.

It’s an interesting task to reverse-engineer one of these beasts. I start by slogging through the site the end user sees, the PHP scripts that generate it, the style sheet, the graphics, the database, and the other elements which come together to make the site. Once I start to figure out how the thing works, I can do the updates, re-do the visual design, improve the search engine optimization (SEO), or whatever else needs to be done.

Sometimes this experience is educational. I find PHP functions I didn’t know about, or different ways to protect a contact form from injection attacks, or ways to accomplish a task more efficiently than I otherwise would have done. But often, I’m baffled as to what the original designer/developer was thinking. Other times it’s clear the d/d was pretty much clueless about an important aspect of the task.

Not to dump on the other d/d guy, but to educate others, I present a brief case study in SEO. I recently started working on the Troll Mother site. The visual design was fine. The content was adequate. But the site was an SEO trainwreck. Each page had the same title. The pages were generated by a script which used the “GET method” to identify the particular page. The GET Method uses URLs with a question mark to pass data to the scripts, so you wind up with a URL like this: http://www.trollmother.com?page=trolls.

It’s a broadly held consensus in the SEO world that the GET Method is bad practice. In this case, it didn’t keep the googlebot from indexing the pages, but it may well have kept other bots out, or hurt the rankings. I converted the site to “clean” URLs, so that the same page is accessed with this URL: http://www.trollmother.com/index.php/trolls. I modified the scripts so they can take the page info from either method, but once you’re in the site, all the links use the clean URLs.

I also set up a simple database table to keep track of page titles and descriptions for the various pages. Now each page has its own title with page-specific keywords in it.

Then, it’s on to the links. Link exchanges with my other clients should help punch up the pagerank. We’ll see how much this helps over the next few weeks as the site and links are re-indexed, and troll fans find the site in greater numbers.

There’s more info about my approach to SEO in my essay about the Three Cs of Search Engine Optimization.

I really should spend my time more productively…

I’ve caught the youtube bug lately, mostly watching and commenting on ads and news videos relating to the upcoming presidential election. Oh, my goodness there are some incredibly stupid people out there! The comment forums there are such a sewer that I figured anything I type would raise the level of discourse a little. Hey, at least I can spell and punctuate. I doubt I’ve changed anybody’s mind about anything, but all I can do is try.

One particularly irritating theme is taking something Obama says, stripping it from context, and trying to turn it into an outrageous gaffe. The classic is the now hot, but soon-to-be-forgotten, lipstick on a pig statement. Obama was talking about McCain (McSame? McWorse?) trying to position himself as the candidate of change. Obama listed a whole host of ways McCain’s policies are the same as Bush’s, and compared the re-branding to putting lipstick on a pig. An apt metaphor. But, somehow, the rightwingers are shocked, just shocked I tell you, that Obama would say such a crude and sexist thing about Palin, despite the fact that he wasn’t talking about Palin. Since Palin had used the word “lipstick” a week before, all subsequent mentions of lipstick are automatically a reference to her. I guess that’s what passes for “logic” these days.

Was it disgustingly sexist when McCain used the same figure of speech in reference to Hillary Clinton’s health care proposals? No. McCain was a POW. That makes it OK.

Anyway, since I was commenting and stuff, I figured I should type up a profile, and, while I was at it, upload a video. So I posted a montage of my nature photography. Check it out:

Floating Rocks, Living Water video

Andi (my girlfriend) and I just got back from a brief trip to the northern Sierra Nevada. There were a few adventures on the trip such as a concert with the English Beat, and a couple of nice hikes; but for the moment I want to tell the tale of our car trouble. It’s a tale of drama, intigue, and absurdist comedy which took place just a few miles from where the Donner Party spent their fateful winter. Fortunately, our story turned out better than the Donners’.

It was supposed to be the last day of our trip. Instead of the faster, but boring freeway route home from Truckee, we were heading north, with the intention of going over Yuba Pass, seeing some new country, and taking a couple of short hikes along the way.

We stopped at Kyburz Flat Interpretive Area, a mile up a gravel road from Highway 89. Kyburz Flat features historical sites from three groups of humans: Native American Washoe, Goldrush-era northern Europeans, and Basque sheepherders. We looked at the Washoe “cupules” carved into the rock, walked through the site of an old stage coach stop, and were starting to drive to the Basque site, when Andi’s 2001 VW Beetle started beeping and flashing the red temperature indicator on the dash.

We stopped, popped the hood, and looked inside. Have you ever looked under the hood of a 21st Century VW? It doesn’t look much like the guts of a traditional car. More like a spaceship, actually. I found what appeared to be coolant storage, and sure enough, it was nearly dry. Before I put water in it for the trip back to civilization, I checked the manual to make sure that that plastic box thing was actually coolant storage. The trace of fluid there was an odd reddish color, and I didn’t want to put water in a tank that was for brake fluid or some such.

Yup, the box thing was for coolant all right. BUT, the manual says to never ever put anything in there except VW’s own special coolant. No plain ol’ water, and especially no Prestone. So we decided to use Andi’s cell phone and call for help. We started with VW’s roadside assistance (the number was in the manual). Cell service was pretty poopy in that corner of the world, so it took a while to communicate. But they reiterated the no water, no Prestone thing, and suggested we call AAA.

For whatever reason, we couldn’t get a strong enough signal to communicate with AAA from that spot. We were walking toward open, higher ground to try again when a Forest Service ranger happened by. He offered to take us to a spot which had better cell network coverage. Andi went to make the call; I stayed with the car and her pets.

An hour drifted by while I walked the dogs, found some grinding holes near the pictograms, and read a little. Andi returned; AAA was on its way. We ate lunch, played frisbee, and waited for the tow truck. And waited. And waited. After a couple of hours, we managed to find a nearby spot where, if she stood at just the right angle, Andi could get a decent cell signal. She called AAA again to see if the tow truck driver had gotten the directions wrong. She said he sounded drunk and/or stupid, and he was just now heading in our direction.

Since by now it’s getting close to 5 o’clock and we have a usable cell signal, we start researching the question of where to tow the car. Can the locals in Truckee handle the problem, or do we need to get towed all the way to the VW dealer in Reno? We track down the service department of the Reno dealership. They say to fill the coolant tank with water and drive it in. Apparently, we don’t need the tow truck after all, and the last few hours have just been a stupid waste of time.

Back to AAA. When we track down the tow truck driver, it turns out he had just cancelled the call. His truck had bald tires,  he was slipping on the gravel, and we’d have to find “commercial” towing. Really fills your heart with confidence in whatever tow truck company AAA uses in Truckee, doesn’t it? Since it turned out we didn’t need the tow anyway, that part was just laughably pathetic, but what if we were really, truly stuck? What kind of towing company does such a lame job of maintaining their vehicles or hires such bozos?

So, we filled the coolant reservoir with water, drove to Reno, they fixed it the next day, grossly overcharged us, and we came home. The whole episode doesn’t feel my heart with warm fuzzy feelings about Volkswagon; and the mountain tow truck that can’t drive on gravel is truly a comedy gem.

I’ll be teaching a field photography workshop as part of A Breath of Plein Air II, in Westport, CA on September 27 & 28. Here are a few of my pics from last year’s event. One of our locations was Blue’s Beach, AKA Chadbourne Gulch:

We also walked out to nearby Bruhel Point and watched the waves roll in:

Later, we walked in the hills above Westport, where there is some photogenic debris left over from an old commune:

This year’s event includes workshops in painting, woodwork, wrought iron, and other media besides my photo whorkshop, plus continental breakfast, box lunch, and evening party.

Here’s the text from the event’s official flyer:

An invitation to
“A Breath of Plein Air II”
Westport, California September 27-28, 2008
Westport Village Society and Gallery This! invite you to participate
in the plein air outing of your choice:
Painting with John Hewitt
Oil or Acrylic with Erin Dertner
Watercolor with Carol Deetch
Photography with Garth Hagerman
Saturday activities will include:
Continental breakfast
A six-hour group outing with your preferred level of support,
from companionship to technical instruction
Box lunch
Blacksmithing by Toby Hickman and Barry Kulmann
Evening party with wine, hors d’oeuvres, and music on the
Westport Headlands
Special show of instructors’, students’, and local images
Optional Sunday activities include:
Gala champagne Brunch/lunch
Additional outing as arranged with your instructor
Saturday cost will be $125. To enroll, contact Liza at 964-1749
or e-mail: art at westportca dot org.
Benefits Westport Village Society Community Center Fund.

This charming fixer upper in Mendocino Village can be yours for only $.5 million!

Due to the recent crash of real estate prices, the price on this beauty has been reduced from $.75 milion.

If real estate prices keep falling by 33% a year, people who actually work for a living will be able to afford to own their own squalid hovels. Eventually. Maybe.

Well, uh… you see it’s like this:

my girlfriend was talking to one of her 653 sisters about her/our new camper. Sister wanted to see pictures of the inside. Girlfriend said to look at my website. So, I’m posting these two pics, courtesy of the folks who sold it to her.

I’ve stumbling onto some amusing cases of vandalism on a couple of recent trips. Maybe they say something about the Mendocino/Humboldt culture, I dunno.

It’s not just cannabis keeping locals in an altered state:

Everyone else on the planet has a blog, so why not me? 

In my capacity as a web designer/developer, I need to get used to working with Open Source web applications, such as WordPress. What better way to familiarize myself with such things than to actually use it?

Plus, I’ve been a wannabe writer for about as long as I can remember, but I never seem to have the sticktoitiveness to complete a substantial project. Perhaps writing short blog posts regularly will enable me to accumulate  a body of work and develop some writing discipline.

There are lots of topics for me to explore babble about. I’ll review some of my gear. I’ll wax natural about my hikes. I’ll tell tales of web development problem solving. I’ll even touch on political topics. Maybe some of my semi-coherent ramblings will help somebody, somewhere, somewhen.