Guide to pants off living
June 2006
More fantastic Balloon Art!
Wednesday, 28 June 2006
I hope my man Davey is watchin' out for this guy since his work looks pretty damn neat; Balloon Artiste meet mr Jason Hackenwerth.
More links and pictures can be found over at Drawn!
Posted by travo at 3:52:07 PM
More Google Fun : Sitemaps + Analytics
Wednesday, 28 June 2006
I'm having a great time using the new Google apps Sitemaps and Analytics - they're really useful tools!
It took a little while for me to get the invitation code to use Analytics after they launched it - I think Google got quite a flood of webmasters going "Great! Google monitored web stats - me wanty!" and I can understand why; there is a lot of trust and good will associated with the big G. That's really a topic for another conversation though.
Analytics have proved to be very useful for the Yamaha Music site at many levels (and I haven't really started to use it to it's full capacity); monitoring traffic - accurately, page overlays - for a quick examination of user behaviour; setting goals and examining conversions. Very interesting and challenging.
I've also just setup the Sitemap for Yamaha Music and over the next week or so I'll be checking to see how that activity will affect google rankings and also what information it will provide me to improve my google ranking. Hopefully it'll also help me manage broken links and whole bunch of other pain-in-the-arse type stuff that happens when you run a website.
Posted by travo at 1:22:17 PM
Link-a-licious!
Wednesday, 28 June 2006
After an embarrasing social meeting a few weeks ago, and a day yesterday spent organising and tagging all of my bookmarks I now have my bookmarks all online at del.icio.us. Even more surprising was that I could actually get the username 'travo' - sometimes that's impossible - especially after del.icio.us being online for so long...
None the less it was during lunch with James Ross that I realised that if I'm going to get real about the social internet, I should get online and get a few of these things happening. I didn't use del.icio.us because it was fairly ugly and in truth, I didn't really 'get it' - social bookmarking? Huh?
It really solves a couple of problems for me; 1, I don't have to export my bookmarks from work and mail them home, which in truth is really dumb; 2, I can bookmark and tag stuff using my own taxonomy - which is truly the greatest thing about folksonomies (incidentally bookmarks taged 'occasionally' is stuff that I read occasionally, how much sense does that make!); 3, I haven't been bookmarking a lot of great stuff that I find because I find my managing my bookmarks at a browser level can be a real pain in the arse. I realised yesterday that there was a lot of duplication.
The other thing I realise is that I'm not really on board the RSS train. I know I should be, but I actually enjoy visiting a website and seeing whether or not there is new content there, and how that content is presented.
Hey, we like going to our local from time to time to see how the place is decorated. Sure, we could get some take-aways from the bottleshop but to have a couple of pots in the lounge and soak up the atmosphere... meet a couple of new friends; it's great, it's part of the experience!
Posted by travo at 9:52:16 AM
Soccer - a cruel mistress indeed.
Tuesday, 27 June 2006
Meli and I went to be early on Monday night and set the alarm at 1pm so we could get up, drink tea, eat wafers and have our hearts broken two hours later.
Clearly this post is late, and there has been plenty of discussion and rationalisation of the horrible minute and in all honesty the years after this will be much more positive and triumphant for Australian Football than we can measure.
But It hurts!
Oh well, I'll get over it soon enough... ooooh look - A bird. He heh hehh heh ehhhe ehhe.
It was kinda nice too, getting up in the middle of the night and huddling under the doona with your loved one, drinking tea and eating wafers. I reckon we should do that more often.
Posted by travo at 1:53:26 PM