Author Archives: Jacob Gillespie

About Jacob Gillespie

Christian, web developer (and student), I have built websites with Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress and currently play around with Ruby on Rails. Currently attending the University of Texas at Dallas, studying computer science.

My View on Search Engine Optimization

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There is a particular crowd that is very interested in optimizing their website for search engines, usually using terms like “white hat” or “black hat” to describe their methodology.

I would propose that both methods are fundamentally incorrect.  Obviously so-called “black hat” SEO is bad, but in my opinion, trying to optimize a website for the sole reason of listing highly in the search engines is fundamentally flawed.  Here’s my reasoning:

Since,

  • Optimizing a webpage using “black hat” methods are a temporary fix and will eventually result in being banned from search indexes – bad idea.
  • Optimizing a webpage for a particular keyword other than the true content of the page is deceptive and therefore a bad idea.
  • Optimizing for a particular keyword that will produce the biggest return on investment runs the risk for the keyword to not be the exact true content of the page – still bad idea.

Therefore,

  • Your content markup (HTML), writing style, and content organization should have one goal – providing the best experience for the end user.
  • Search engines have the stated goal of providing the best content on a particular topic to the end user.
  • In the long run, therefore, your site will perform well in search engines, not because it was search engine optimized, but because it is one of the best sites on the topic.

Another new source of marketing / visitor power is social media marketing.  If you have properly optimized your site to deliver your content well, and that content has been optimized, people will want to let their friends about your great resource.

Put simply, it’s time to stop SEOing our sites and start creating sites worth sharing.

Resize andLinux Disk

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If you’ve ever wanted your andLinux disk to be bigger than 2GB (the space runs out pretty quickly), here’s how to do it. First, download TopoResize 0.7.1.  This will allow you to create a new disk file. Unzip and run toporesize.bat.  You will be greeted by the following screen:

Choose “create new.”  A file browser window will open.  Navigate to the Drives folder located at the andLinux install location.  By default, that location will be:

 

C:\Program Files\andLinux\Drives\

Give your new disk a name and click save.  I chose root.vdi as my new disk name. Next, drag the slider in the main TopoResize window to choose a disk size.  The value is in MB, so I tried to get as close to 10GB as possible (10240).  You won’t be able to get it exactly, but a rough estimate will do. Your screen will look something like this:

Click “Create file,” choose ext3 for the drive format, and wait for it to finish. Next, be sure that andLinux is not running.  The easy way to do this is to navigate to the andLinux directory (which, again, is C:\Program Files\andLinux\) and double-click srvstop.bat. In the same directory, open settings.txt.  It will look like this:

Create a new line under the cobd1=… line and add the following:

 

cobd2=Drives\[your_new_image_name]

So, for me, that would be:

cobd2=Drives\root.vdi

That will cause andLinux to mount your newly created disk file as a secondary disk.  Save the file, then run srvstart.bat to boot up the andLinux service. Run colinux-console-fltk.exe and login once you get to the prompt. Next, we will issue the following terminal commands to copy the entirety of the original disk to the new one.  Here they are:

mkdir /mnt/tmp
mount /dev/cobd2 /mnt/tmp
cp -axv / /mnt/tmp
umount /mnt/tmp
sudo reboot now
sudo resize2fs /dev/cobd2

This will copy all of the files and will be verbose and print out all the filenames so that you have an indication of progress and will then unmount and shutdown. Open up the settings.txt file again.  This time, remove your newly added cobd2 line and change cobd0 to be your new disk image file. You can run the df command to verify your disk size. Run srvstart.bat.  You now have an expanded disk!

Usability and Silverware

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I just discovered that this post was not migrated from my old blog, so here you go fellow people-who-think-about-silverware-usability.

I have an interest in usability. The downside, of course, with an interest in usability is frustration when using products that are not as usable as possible.

For example, at the UT Dallas dining hall, there are three holders for silverware on a table after you exit the food area and enter the dining area.  Each holder is circular and has two levels of three “cups” each that hold silverware… they can rotate as well.  So, if that doesn’t make sense, it’s like if you took six cups and attached them together in sets of threes and attached the two sets to a rod that rotated.

Anyway, they have it set up where for each level, there is a cup for each type of silverware – forks, spoons, and knives.  The cups have a little sticker on them that is supposed to say what they contain, but is often incorrect.  So each holder has a total of two cups of each type of silverware, then there are three holders.  The individual levels can rotate, so you never know what type of silverware will be at a certain position.

A text representation would be something like this:

F-S-K    S-K-F    K-F-S
  |        |        |
S-K-F    K-F-S    F-S-K
  |        |        |
 / \      / \      / \
-----    -----    -----

So, each time you go to get silverware, you have to hunt through the holders to find all your required silverware.  As you can imagine, if more than two people try to get the silverware at the same time, it usually causes a “silverware-jam.”

So, I’ve seriously though of submitting a comment card suggesting that the silverware be allocated one type to one holder and large signs be placed in front of them indicating the type of silverware they hold:

F-F-F    S-S-S    K-K-K
  |        |        |
F-F-F    S-S-S    K-K-K
  |        |        |
 / \      / \      / \
-----    -----    -----
Forks    Spoons   Knives

That would eliminate the “hunting” part of the silverware-gathering experience as you could just grab one item from each holder rather than having to look through each one.

There’s a suggestion box in the dining hall. But… should I really submit a comment card about silverware usability?  Interesting…  But three times each day, I have the privilege of thinking about the usability (or lack thereof) of UTD’s system.

Hope that makes some sense!  I’m really a nerd (or usability geek or something), I guess… Perhaps sometime I’ll write a post about the design of the dining hall walkways – not exactly ideal either.

Send to Webmail Chrome Extension Released

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Just FYI, I just released the Send with Webmail Google Chrome extension for those of you who use webmail for your email and want to have it be the default email application in Chrome. Supports Gmail, Yahoo!, AT&T, Hotmail, and several more. There’s even a custom option so that you can add your own self-hosted and/or obscure webmail links.

Check it out!

Send with Webmail Logo