I’ve talked about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 even beforeit hitthe stores. Given that I am one of the people who actually boycotted the game, I never got the chance to play it. Instead, I chose to wait for a couple of months to support a game that actually supports the PC gaming community: Battlefield: Bad Company 2.
By chance, Activision decided to let the game be free this weekend. They also lowered the price, possibly both as a bid to deal a blow to the continuous migration of players from their game to the competitor’s, or as a last minute move to promote the game before shit hits the fan. Whatever the reason, the key here is that I get to play MW2 and compare it with BC2.
So how does the “biggest launch in entertainment history” compared to the current underdog?
This is the third time an Indian dude (I checked the IP address) took time to go to my contact page and answer the CAPTCHA just to send spam about SEO; I think it’s a good time to speak my mind about SEO in general.
But first, let’s talk about how wrong this approach is.
If you’re going to offer to do business with me, you should have at least read my About page. There you should have realized that (a) I’m not doing this site for money, popularity, or the like and (b) I am an experienced software engineer and I could probably do better than you in SEO if I put some effort in it.
This display of ignorance alone is enough to make me throw your mail into the spam folder of my mailbox.
And now, back to the topic of SEO.
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To me, Search Engine Optimization is like investing in stocks. You can go the slow-and-steady Warren Buffett way, or you can go the “get rich quick” day trading way.
Most SEO (including the spam I got) falls under the latter; both this “hardcore” SEO and day trading promises huge profits for little effort. In reality, it’s the opposite—in the long run, the costs of using these two approaches often overshadow whatever profits you would gain.
A better approach for both SEO and trading would be to stick to the basics and take things slow. Here’s just some of the basics:
Make your site SEO friendly, but don’t go overboard. For a WordPress site, this would mean getting a domain with your name on it, enabling pretty permalinks, installing All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps, and adding either Google AdSense or Google Analytics somewhere in your themes. Anything beyond that is overkill IMO.
Write interesting posts. Getting people to want to read your posts is really the best SEO you could do.
Rubbernecking or writing stupid controversial things are fine (hey, it’s your site!), but I personally won’t recommend it. You might get a lot of hits at first, but don’t expect that to last once you get labeled as a douchebag.
Join relevant communities and talk to people. If you’re nice and interesting enough, you don’t even need to advertise your site address—they’ll be the ones to look it up.
Be consistent. You don’t need to post something everyday, but try not to leave your site un-updated for more than a few months.
Granted, some of the basics take a lot of effort (like writing interesting posts) and may even take more time and effort than “hardcore” SEO, but you’ll be more certain of getting higher exposure in the long run. The key here is that you shouldn’t focus on putting your site on the top of the result lists. Instead, you should focus on the quality of your site: getting on the top of the result lists will automatically follow.
Dale Carnegie liked to say that the two sweetest words in the English language were a person’s first and last name. He maintained that using them liberally in conversation was the surest way to connect with a person and disarm them. After all, who doesn’t like to hear their name on other people’s list?
I’m not sure Dale was right. To me, the sweetest words in the language are “Thank You.” They’re not only disarming and pleasant to the ear, but they help us avoid so many problems. Like apologizing, thanking is a magical super-gesture of interpersonal relations. It’s what you say when you have nothing nice to say—and it will never annoy the person hearing it.
-from “The Twenty Habits That Hold You Back from the Top” from the book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There”
That book still lies unfinished on my desk because of this section alone. Out of all the business and human relations books I’ve read in the past year, none has been so naive, so misguided, so “let’s feed the fantasies of middle managers everywhere!” than that book, and this section highlights it so well.
Dealing with old computers after an upgrade is very a common problem. Sure, there are the obvious solutions like selling them or giving them away, but these approaches carry some problems (e.g. personal warranty, recipient not happy to receive a very outdated unit, red tape, etc.) that make them somewhat impractical.
There is another option: turn them into a firewall/router using pfsense.
Tech-savvy readers might ask what’s the difference between doing this instead of just upgrading your router’s firmware using DD-WRT or the like. Well, for starters, most of the routers sold in the Philippines are nerfed versions of those sold outside the country and don’t support custom firmwares. This simply means that it’s much easier to setup a pfsense server in this country than to setup DD-WRT.
In terms of features, pfsense and DD-WRT have features to distinguish themselves from the other. Obviously, you can’t control wireless signal strength in pfsense, and DD-WRT has some firewall features that are missing in the former. On the other hand, pfsense allows packages to be added to it like squid and nmap. It also has these funky RRD graphs:
The one feature that really caught my eye is support for load balancing. This allows you to consolidate two or more internet connections on your router, whether it’s for simple load balancing (bandwidth usage is spread between the ISPs) or for failover (when one ISP fails, the connections are routed to the other ISPs). With this, you could subscribe to two crappy DSL providers like, say, PLDT and Globe, and still have a relatively higher uptime than you would normally have.
You could buy a dedicated load balancing router, but the cost difference between that (PhP 4,000+) and an extra lan card (PhP 100-PhP 150 in surplus shops) and the thought that your old PC would probably be much more powerful than the puny chip inside that router make pfsense a more logical choice.
The biggest downside to using pfsense instead of dedicated router devices is the power usage, which can be anywhere from 5 to 20 times that of a typical router. Expect a slight increase in your power bill, especially if your “old” PC is one of those power guzzling Pentium 4s or Athlon XPs. You can try to underclock them, but I don’t expect to see much of a difference.
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With all that talk out of the way, let’s move on to the actual installation.
Red asked me to give a talk in Ignite Manila 1 mainly because he remembered that I tend to break character once in a while back in our old workplace. It should be easy for me to give a presentation on something related to anime given my level of experience in the matter.
Problem is, even if I focused on just anime and manga instead of the entire Japanese hobby culture scene (which would include cosplay, collectibles, etc), I still have literally dozens of possible topics to talk about.
After thinking about it for a day, I went with the topic that I could say that I am really passionate about: the story of how we reversed the fortunes of UP AME; from being a hopeless anime organization into a thriving one. Not only is it a significant part of my life, the topic would also be relevant for most of the audience (I doubt that most of them aren’t inside a club or community of their own).
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I put a decent amount of effort into this talk, not only because I don’t want to embarrass myself or the org, I also don’t want do look like a hypocrite after bashing the presentations in last year’s Y4IT.
Most of my effort went to the slides. It took me at least 3 days to finish them mainly because of my lack of experience (dammit, I’m a software engineer, not a graphic designer!) and because I had to look for good pictures from various sources. I also had to re-read Presentation Zen since it’s been a long time since I’ve made presentations.
Preparation for the talk itself was difficult, though it’s not as hard as the slides. I’d have to thank Scott Berkun for this part, his Confessions of a Public Speaker as well as his Ignite talk on giving Ignite talks gave me invaluable tips for making my talk.
One thing I learned on my own about Ignite was that Ignite presentations are more like song performances than presentations when you have more than 4 points to make. My talk had 7 different points so the timing is important. It didn’t worry me, though, since I have experience singing in front of a lot of people. I just had to practice enough that my mouth goes auto-pilot when on the stage, ignoring the inevitable effects of stage fright.
My script went through at least a dozen revisions throughout my practice sessions. With at least 3 runs per revision, I’m guessing that it took me 60 partial runs (just a 1-minute section) and about 30 full runs to get the hang of things. As you would see below, even with all this practice, I still had to ad-lib and adapt to the situation.
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Oh and yeah, Ana Santos of Sex and Sensibilities talked before me. Talking about hardcore geeks after a talk on sex was kinda awkward. D:
Habit #17 Failing to express gratitude
