Micro-innovations that make me happy
Kevin Day, March 12th, 2009Two things came out this week that will instantly make my life easier and cheaper:
Da Button Factory: Instantly create shiny buttons online. I had no idea how bad I was at making buttons until I spent 5 minutes on their site and saw what I could do. Also, within the past two days they’ve already made several improvements to the site.
Amazon Reserved Instances: The same Amazon server that I’ve been using is now going to cost 33% less with their new payment plan. A virtual dedicated server (not including bandwidth) now only costs $48/month. Awesome.
Getting Organized
Kevin Day, February 9th, 2009I just stumbled on Randy Pausch’s Time Management lecture from November, 2007. He didn’t present anything overly unique, but his overall presentation style and credibility made me think twice about my own organization. He not only knew of a lot of small productivity tricks, but I got the impression that he stuck to them very well.
Some of the highlights:
- Plan
- Organize your paper files
- Have a to-do list ordered by importance
- Do the to-do items that are important, regardless of when they are due (don’t do the unimportant ones)
- Inbox zero
- Make a schedule that fits your naturally productive times
- Write thank-you cards
- Completely clean your desk except for the one thing you’re currently working on
- Track your time
- Kill your TV
I’m doing a couple of these I’m doing already, but there’s a lot more I can improve upon. I think just seeing him as an example of how successful one can be is enough inspiration to get more organized.
Great domain name checker
Kevin Day, January 15th, 2009In the past I’ve used pcnames.com for searching domain names. They have a lot of good tools there and I’ll probably continue to use them.
However, I just found bustaname.com and it’s pretty awesome. It has a synonym finder, saved searches, grouped words, prefixes and suffixes. It’ll probably be the first site I go to from now on.
As I was using this, I thought that another extension would be to have the option to do two more searches:
1) Regular Google search for those terms, since there could be conflicts with major companies/organizations
2) U.S. Trademark search to avoid nasty IP issues.
#1 would be easy, not sure about #2 though. Compared to getting a name I like, those aren’t nearly as hard though.
(FYI: Referral code in the link above)
Still Cookin’
Kevin Day, January 6th, 2009Right now I’m actually cooking a dinner that requires chopping vegetables. It’s an Indian red lentil soup, and from the way it smells it’s going to be great.
Kristen picked out the recipe from Google Base, which reminded me that I put up a recipe myself almost two years ago. It’s received 83 views in that time. I hope people enjoyed my quick-and-dirty rice and beans meal.
Back online
Kevin Day, December 27th, 2008Had some extended downtime due to server troubles that I didn’t have time to fix. Now I’m running this blog on a Slicehost slice instead of my previous “self-hosted” setup. Should be much more reliable and headache-free from now on.
Safari Reading
Kevin Day, October 30th, 2008If you haven’t heard about O’Reilly’s online book program, Safari, you really should give it a try. I wrote about it once before when I was doing a lot of Javascript development. I was able to read Crockford’s great Javascript book within a day of it’s publication.
Some of the most useful reading can be found in their “short cut” articles. One article counts for half of a book on my 10-book limit bookshelf, and it’s about 20 pages long on a very specific topic. I used the short cut article on Google Analytics to find the correct way to configure my Google Analytics account (there are a lot of options I didn’t know about).
They have a decent selection of business books as well. I got to read Eric Sink’s well-known Business of Software the other day.
I swear I’m not an O’Reilly shill though. I just think it’s fun to read on-demand.
The Effect of Inspirational Quotes
Kevin Day, October 21st, 2008I’m sitting here reading my notes from a Toastmasters conference I went to on Saturday. It was a fun event with great speakers and informational sessions on how to improve my public speaking.
Tonight though, I’m less inspired by the great quotes from the speakers as I was when they delivered them. I guess that’s understandable, but it would be nice if I could also be inspired by a quote at 10:00 at night. I think I need inspiration the most when I’m not surrounded by other ambitious people and have to make the tough decisions myself.
Marketing trick from 1936: House of coats
Kevin Day, October 14th, 2008I was in the local used book store today and saw that they have old copies of National Geographic bound in yearly volumes. I picked up the 1940 edition and saw this picture they had taken from 1936 in Denmark:
The picture is of a store that the salesman covered in extra coats he had in inventory. It was such a site that everyone walking by stopped to look. The police were called to control the crowd that had gathered outside the store.
The caption reads:
By the time the harassed policemen had convinced the storekeeper that his coats must come down they had all been sold!
Sounds like the stunt paid off well.
The Power of Labeling Images
Kevin Day, October 6th, 2008In my Google Analytics account, I noticed a few visitors arriving via Google Image searches. It turns out that this picture got a lot of Google juice and is the first image search result for the term “smiley pumpkin“.
What’s surprising is that that term doesn’t appear anywhere in the page or this site except for within the image tag:
<img src="http://codeswimming.com/images/smiley_pumpkin.jpg"
title="Smiley Pumpkin" alt="Smiley Pumpkin" width="500" height="375"/>
This blog only has a page rank of 1, yet by including the same search term in the file name, image title, and alt text, it got to the top of Google, albeit for a low-volume search term. There also don’t seem to be any links to that image from any other site that I can find.
This only has limited SEO use, however, because that post and my blog are not in the general web search results for the same term. Google seems to keep the two sets of results completely separate.
