The slides for the presentation are finally available, along with a zipfile, on the Presentation: You’ll Be Seeing Ruby page.
It’s been a month now since our last performance, but it all comes back every time I look at the slides.
Archive for May, 2006
Slides for “You’ll Be Seeing Ruby”
Released May 17th, 2006Search Engine Marketing and Google’s new trending tools
Released May 11th, 2006Now that google has anounced their new Google trends site I couldn’t help but mention it. If you spend any type of money at all on SEM you need to check your keywords against this site.
There are a couple of intro articles about the new service at TechCrunch.
To get a real feel for how important this information will be you should try out a few queries for yourself. Take a simple query like “motorcycle” and then look at the regions tab. A lot of the queries about motorcycles originated from the Philippines. Now look at “pizza”, most of the queries there originated from the US. That should make it much easier to target your audience with your advertisments. The trending is nice as well and should give marketers a better idea of when to boost spending to maximize exposure.
This follows another tool Google just release for their AdWords service. You can read more about it at the adwords blog. That tool gives you a different view of the search trends and is more like what you get from Yahoo’s advertising system.
Search Engine Optimization
Released May 10th, 2006Recently I’ve been collecting links on interesting SEO topics. I figured I would dump a few of them out with quick reasons why I think they are good to read.
A technical read on how search engines work in general. It focuses on google but has a lot of good general information in it.
This is a recent article on how to optimize your site. I like it because it has an acronym on how to do it “camelot”.
SEO chat has a lot of information in its forums.
An article from a guy who works at Google and goes into what the search engines have to deal with to keep people on the up and up. It goes into some of the stuff you don’t want to be doing to try to get your site at the top of a search. For some reason I found it interesting that this guy is from kentucky.
Another good article on the “SEO Code of Conduct” AKA what you should not be doing to get your site at the top of a search.
A nice tool to help you find words to go with your website: WordTracker
How to build the PHP rrdtool extension by hand
Released May 9th, 2006I think by now most sysadmin types know about rrdtool and the nice graphs it makes. I recently wanted to create some graphs by hand using PHP so I turned to the php-rrdtool extension. I found that it takes a little work to get it to compile but that could be because I’m not constantly recompiling PHP and just don’t know better. You can get this module as an rpm for fedora (php-rrdtool) but I like to compile php by hand so I couldn’t use it. I’m going to assume that you know how to compile PHP normally with whatever other items you want to include and that you have the rrdtool development libraries installed or have compiled and installed rrdtool from source.
Step 1. Get the PHP rrdtool source
Go to the contrib directory on the rrdtool distribution site:
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/pub/contrib/
There are a number of files in this directory that mention rrd. You want the one named: php_rrdtool.tgz
Firefox Saved Form Data Frustrations
Released May 2nd, 2006Have you ever mistyped your login name in firefox, only to have it save the wrong entry as well as the correct one? How do you get rid of the wrong entry? You could clear out all of your saved information, but why just for one mistake! Frustrating huh? Even more frustrating is finding the completely undocumented answer. Well I’m documenting it now.
Go to the form where the mistake is. Put your cursor in the text entry widget and hit down until the incorrect entry is highlighted. Now press shift + del … voila. You’re welcome.