I haven’t really touched the code behind this site in months, but I finally got a bit of motivation while preparing for my upcoming trip. One of the problems with my site has been in the SEO area. Not that I really need a lot of SEO, but looking at my results in Google one day, I realized I had very very bad titling set up. Each and every entry is titled the same, which is of course, not good.

So, I decided this evening to fix that little problem. While I was at it, I blocked my photos area from being crawled — not because I don’t want it crawled but because I also have some page title problems down in the Gallery. I can’t quite figure out where the Gallery software stores the page album or photo title information, so I can’t figure out how to get it up into the TITLE tag. Oh well. That can come later.

Anyway, the main blog is now fixed, so I’m happy and ready to let Google and others take their time at re-indexing. Hopefully that won’t be all too long.

Tomorrow night — packing! Maybe. :)

Oh, I might as well mention that I’m double blogging. Once here, for personal gratification. And here for work related topics, which I’m sure will be of very little interest to the most of you. But, hey, that’s what I’m up to. As a teaser, here’s an image from that blog, found on this posting.

The ongoing series of photo archive commentary

* WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM ID 2052 * Back in 2000 or something like that, my company took literally everyone to Orlando for an “All Hands” meeting. Being as boring as that was, a small group of us, led by “the gays” of course, decided that we would fly to Miami for the weekend after the meeting was over. The Cardoza was where we stayed. We had some great food, and went out to Crobar. For some reason we had a contest to see who could kiss the most guys and pretty much everyone lost. Except somehow me…who met a cute guy named George (below), who I brought back to the hotel with us. In any case, we actually made what was a stupid trip into something interesting and memorable. * WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM ID 2054 *

Writing this now, I’m sitting in Chicago waiting for the last two hours to go by so I can jump the train and head out to the airport for my ride home to LA. The work part of the trip has been excellent. And the play parts excellent too. I’ve learned that I know how to “miss” someone again (see previous post) and learned that I no longer “miss” Chicago as my home. Pride in NYC was awesome, with energy, openness, the embrace of soooo many religious groups, and the meeting of numerous new momentary friends…maybe even a permanent one or two. Seeing Tommy was again was great. He’s become a great NYC host. And seeing PJ was awesome too. I found myself wishing for Rusty to show him around, but that time will come if it’s meant to be. And now I’m ready to go back home to my kitties Quark and Clyde. Overall, a good and productive time.

It’s been less that 24 hours since I initiated the process of getting this thing going and WHOA! I finally called it quits last “night” towards 6am as the sun started to beg the definition. It’s been exhilarating so far, reminding me of the over-nighters I used to pull back in college when obsessing over a game called Civilization. My brother will remember it well.

In the last, let’s call it 12 hours, I’ve learned that 1) blogging is easy, 2) setup of blogging is easy (at least from a technologist viewpoint), 3) open source tools such as WordPress are quite full-featured. Linking is a cinch. Categorizing is embedded. Even WYSIWYG is mostly there. I suspect a simple setup of one of these at work will prove a few points and probably be very, very useful in a number of applications.

Time will tell.

Hi Tommy. Hi Jamie.

* WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM ID 3083 *It’s sad, but it took a project at work to finally get me to spend some time on my site. I suppose it doesn’t matter why, as long as I do, eh? Regardless, it’s nice to finally be making use of the web hosting I’ve been spending more than $250 a year on. And in the process, I get to share my life with the world … which is after all the whole point.

Basically, I’m the new content guy at work – so I get to create the tools by which others contribute to the site. And I figure I better know what I’m doing. As I write, blogs are like the most common form of content submission out there. So, we’re gonna go bloggin’. At work I mean. So I gotta know how. So here you are.

Oh, the shout outs above are my friends that I know are already Web 2.0-ers. They were inspiration. Give ‘em some love!

And with that…

Ready! Set! Go!