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Hello from a phone

Well I got a new cell phone to replace a phone that was getting pretty old. The new one is android based and as I use it the more and more convinced by it as I play with it more. Style is finely becoming more convincing that they really know what they are doing.

Super Image test

Really better test this system.

Important test blog Post

Tutorial O’ The Day: Be A Better Blogger
By Michael Calore February 5, 2007 Categories: Programming

Fullspeed

This week’s theme for the tutorial o’ the day is how to be a better blogger. But by “better” we don’t necessarily mean wealthier — you might want to hang on to that day job — nor do we mean more popular. By better we mean more discoverable.

There are a number of ways that you can improve your blog’s relevancy in search engine results that have nothing to do with getting high profile inbound links. Perhaps the most important thing you can do is write good headlines.

For a case study in how not to write headlines, I offer myself. In case you haven’t noticed from this site I suck at coming up with catchy headlines and it only gets worse when I write for my personal site. To address this decided lack of creativity I started culling headlines from song titles and lyrics (duly credited of course).

The problem with this is that when my articles turn up in a Google search (which isn’t often) the headline offers the searcher absolutely no clue how the content of the page might relate to their search. This is dumb, a colossally bad idea.

A much better way is to write, if not for Google, at least bearing in mind how Google is going to index your page. Obviously I am not the person to look to for advice on this matter, rather I suggest you turn to John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who wrote an article some time ago called Writing for Google. Not coincidentally it is the number one result for the Google search “write for Google” — I rest my case.

BoingBoing also had a relevant post over the weekend in which Cory Doctorow attributes at least some of BoingBoing’s high ranking in search results to their headline writing skills. “I actually think that this is part of the secret of our success,” he writes, “we write headlines like wire-service stringers, headlines that are meant to be easy to grok from a cluster of RSS links, search-results, and so on.”

Then there is of course the older, but still relevant advice of Jakob Nielson.

Of course no matter how good your headlines are if you content is poorly written you’re not going to get much traction with readers, but for that one you’re on your own. It’s also worth noting, as the BoingBoing post linked above does, that in some ways the web has ruined the pithy headline that print rags live by.

And that my friends is how I justify my own failure to take my advice. Bring back the pithy headline! Damn the search engines and full speed ahead! Of course you might actually want people to read your blog, whereas the idea that anyone reads my blog quit