After several months of sifting and searching, I think I've finally honed in on the framework around which I'll be helping anyone and everyone who needs help with their web presence. As my CSS and PHP skillz improve so will this site. This is how it looks now, so take a picture.
And thanks for the encouragement.
So an interesting thing happened yesterday. I have this cool plug-in installed on this blog. It's called StatPress, and it all but lets me look back through your screen at you. It logs all traffic to this blog, IP addresses, referring links, what OS and browser you're using, and what search term you entered into Google to find my blog. If this is creepy to you, you should know that every time you're on the internet you are broadcasting this info with every single click of the mouse. It's not that big of a deal. I don't know who you are, just what ISP you use and in what general area of the world you live. I know that there's a 6 to 1 chance that you're reading this on a computer that has Windows XP on it. I know that you are most likely browsing on Firefox 3, and that if it's not that it's IE7, and if it's not that, then you're probably on an iPhone. Good thing I installed that mobile plug in...
This is all just info that entertains my analytical mind while sitting in a tour bus on the way to DelFest. Usually when I throw up a new post there's a little blip in traffic unless I post a link on Facebook, in which case there's usually a big blip. I try to save those for the really good ones. The ones like “Coolest iPhone App Ever”. The act of titling that post that way was an unwitting example of what the social marketing dorks, I mean cool people, call Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. It didn't occur to me until a few days later when someone in France googled SimpleMindsXpress, and amazingly my blog post was the first one that popped up. On the French Google. The internet is weird.
So, briefly, how Google Works...
Google is constantly scanning more or less the entire internet to add pages to it's humongous database of searchable content. The automated robot that does this scanning is called a “Spider”. The Google Spider is my blogs most frequent visitor. It's already been here 9 times today, and just fetches a blog post at random as far as I can tell. It scans the content toward the top of the blog post and then moves on. It adds that content to it's database and then that post is searchable. Google weights pages that have more links to them as being more important than others that show up with the same search terms with fewer links to them. I once read hyperlinks as being described as the “currency” of the internet. Makes sense if you consider that the more links a particular page has pointed at it, the more wealthy it's likely to be in terms of traffic, especially search traffic. Why this is important to you and your band is that you better put the pertinent info that you want Google to notice toward the top of the page. If you don't have the Page Title/Info/Author metadata correctly filled in (ask your web guy, or better yet, ask me), you're making yourself harder to find.
So anyway, yesterday some marketing guy in South Carolina went and googled up “coolest buiness related iPhone apps (sic)”. Somehow, misspelling business made my blog post show up in the top ten list of results. I didn't misspell business in my blog post. I don't know. But anyway, this guy hops on Twitter and links to my blog post. I get on StatPress a couple hours later and notice a spike in traffic to that post. So I dig a little deeper and notice the referring link to this guy's Twitter update, and the beauty and utility of SEO becomes a factor in my life for the first time. I've only been blogging since February, and I'm writing this most for my own edification and partly for my friends and associates. After yesterdays incident it occurred to me that I should probably put my email address on here somewhere. So I did. And now my brain is humming along about how and why SEO is an important thing to you and me. Oh, and trying not to put an obnoxious amount of hyperlinks into this post.
Now how can I get this other Johnny Grubb to let me in the top ten. Is that Carly Simon I hear?
So, I've been dealing with these dudes, ScratchMedia. They doing some design work on the new RRE forum. I like them and the design a lot. It'll go live sometime in the next couple of days here.
Stay tuned.
I was always more of a Miles Davis man. I guess what I'm comparing it to is perhaps if someone were a Coltrane man. I'm not sure why you need to pick one or the other, hell you could like them both as much as you want, it's just that Miles' style always spoke to me so much more. His was so understated whereas the style that Coltrane made famous was one that seems to be embraced and expounded upon by many many legions of jambands, rock bands, jazz fusion bands, etc. Anyone that really liked a long jam with sheets and sheets of notes from the soloist. Not that Miles wasn't into big long jams either, but the period of his that is my favorite is somewhere between 1958 and 1965...
1958 actually saw him in a marvelous quartet with the aforementioned Mr. John Coltrane. Personally this is my favorite period of either artist. My all time favorite jazz record is one called “Relaxin with the Miles Davis Quintet”. There's a tune on there called “You're My Everything” that is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. The piano player, Red Garland, starts the tune after Miles calls it (this is one of the four albums that Miles cut on the same day, there's lots of rough edges which is part of what I love about it. They keep a lot of the studio chatter on the master). Miles cuts him off and tells him to play it completely differently, which Red does with hardly a pause. It's heartbreaking. Coltrane's solo still gives me goosebumps after listening to this album for almost 15 years now.
Another amazing Coltrane solo is his from “Blue on Green” from Kind of Blue. I'm not a guy who ever sat around and really got off on other people's solos, but these two are very much worth checking out if you don't already own the recordings.
1965 saw Miles putting together his second “great” quintet. This is the one with a young Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter on the bass, Wayne Shorter on the sax and an 18 year old Tony Williams on the kit. My personal favorite tune of theirs is called “Madness” from the album Nefertiti. Miles was starting to get more than a little out there by this point. He was breaking down the traditional walls of form that he'd begun taking out with Kind of Blue. The level of talent and drive of this quintet took it way beyond where he was able to go with Cannonball and Bill Evans. I'm not really sure there is a form to the tune Madness, but it's worth a listen. I never consciously realized this in college, or even until recently, but Tony Williams doesn't touch a damn thing on his kit except the ride cymbal for the entire tune. If any jazz student out there wants to know what it sounds like to “swing”, start here. Most of the tune after the head is Tony's ride and Ron Carter's bass, swinging like a wrecking ball. The solos are nice, but what really kills me about how powerful this tune is is all the space, and how ballsy it is to leave so much of it there. Believe me, leaving space is way harder than filling it up, but it always leaves the listener more satisfied. Hearing this tune again this morning for the first time in a while reminds me of that and makes me wonder if I'm not in the wrong band sometimes...
It's kinda difficult. I feel bad for not really having much to say, but I've been pondering (probably excessively) over what direction it should really take.
My good buddy Anders, of Greensky fame and fortune, let me know that he checks it out from time to time. “Some of it's really technical”, he says. Stacy says the same thing. “but then occasionally you'll write something” pertinent. So, I've been pondering how to take it and relate it maybe to something else that makes the dryness of database theory a bit more palatable.
For instance, my post a while back about “Development Platforms”. That was a bunch of tripe that would only make sense if you were already a propellerhead. What I should've said was something like this:
A development platform, and choosing one to develop on, is sort of like deciding what style of music you want to play. If you really like the blues, you don't have to invent the blues. Someone already did that and all you need to do is write some lyrics for your song, because the same 12 bar form has been there for decades now. That could be iPhone development. You want to build cool websites? The AABA form has been used to great effect to write countless jazz tunes since the 20s. All you need to do is pick a key and make up a progression. May I suggest rhythm changes? Ruby on Rails, well that'd probably be the blues since there's the least amount of configuring to do before you get to the creative part.
Make more sense? My other buddy Jay (of Donna the Buffalo fame and fortune) has a great analogy for database theory that I'll get to when I have a chance. I have way more free time on the road than at home these days. See y'all later...
Facebook made this announcement yesterday through the Developers section of their site:
Today we are excited to announce an important step toward greater openness through Facebook Platform. For the first time, we're opening the core Facebook product experience — the stream — with the new Facebook Open Stream API.
What this says to me is that Twitter is having a major impact on the evolution of the internet right now, namely in the heat they're putting on Facebook to innovate.
Now, the close up view of Twitter and Facebook looks pretty similar. Facebook is a place where people can make their own little website and stash pictures there to show their friends, etc., but the real innovation of Facebook has been to tap into the collective ADD of humanity and provide a place where you can tell people what you're doing and read about what they're doing, in small chunks. Twitter is a place where you can tap into the collective ADD of humanity and tell people what you're doing and read about what they're doing in small chunks, but the real innovation of Twitter is their API.
An API (Application Programming Interface) is basically the software equivalent to a door into your application. The 3rd party developer is then able to write his own application that uses that door to do stuff with the application (or it's data) on the other side. It's cool. It's what takes your application from being more or less a mute, single-celled organism to one that all the sudden can speak with others and communicate. That's why there are so many Twitter clients coming out all the time. Twitter on it's own is cool, if a bit mundane, but that they've opened the system to others to make more fun/valuable for them is why they are changing the world right now.
Facebook is paying close attention. They've kept lean and innovative where MySpace went bloated and corporate, but they've always preferred the closed ecosystem approach. All those applications that people continually send you are cool and all, but they force the developer to work within the confines of FB rules if you want to interact with the stuff that's going on within their walls. And there is an unfathomable amount of stuff going on within their walls. Think what you could do if you could break out all those people talking to each other, all those people posting photos, all those people connecting over similar interests or old school ties and start figuring out new ways to play with all that. The possibilities make Twitter look like a drop in the bucket...
#general-development
So, as I mentioned in phases-iphone-ownership-beginning, after about my first hour or so playing with the iPhone, it came to me that this was a device that could help you get things done. No more going to the computer, turning on the computer, waiting for it to boot up, etc., just to check my email? A calendar that I always have in my pocket? These were revelations to my unorganized old-self. After the 2.0 update and the ability to add functionality to an already cool device was released, that's when the real fun began. I was on the bus yesterday and Stacy was reading the NY Times across from me, and there was that ad that Apple is running aimed toward small business owners. One of the free apps that they displayed was called SimpleMindsXpress, so I checked it out. I cannot recommend an app more highly than this one. Let me elaborate...
As you darn well know if you read this blog, I've recently undertaken the self-assigned role of Web Czar of my band. Whilst pondering over all of the various aspects of what a band like mine needs to be on top of in terms of their web presence, I've often wished I were better about writing stuff down – organizational website overviews, flowcharts of how a shopping cart experience should be, etc. I'm just not a pencil and paper guy. Luckily, someone out there figured out a way to make it much more exciting to my brain! And it was free! So, here's how I picture RRE's overall web presence:
So, great! Now I can kind of get my head around it a little better. I've broken it into 2 main categories (for my purposes. Media/PR is going to be handled by the proper authorities), our official presence and the one that is probably going to be even more important overall, the Community. They both involve using the various social networks, and in the free version you can't link a child category to 2 parent categories, so I just created Social Networks for both. Now, zooming in a little closer, you can start to organize which social networks on which you want to keep track of your presence:
and if you have a campaign specific to one of them, you can zoom in further. BTW, the auto-spell checker on the iPhone automatically changes Twitter to Twitted (decidedly inconvenient these days), and there appears to be a bug in this app that won't let you dismiss the “correct” word. Annoying, but I guess nothing is perfect. Now I'm going to turn my attention to the forthcoming fan site, which we will park at Railroadearth.net when all is said and done:
And the next Railroadearth.com:
Or the RRE iPhone app:
Holy crap!!!
So, in closing, in two hours on the bus yesterday I was pretty much able to sketch out just about every component of our entire online infrastructure, which as much or as little abstraction as I needed. God bless America!
Edit: So last night's deep thought was that I completely forgot to even mention how it works. They call these diagrams “Mind Maps”, and when you create a new one, you start off with that central blue bubble. If you want to add a category under that you just click the button. A different colored bubble shows up that you then name with the category. You can move them around and add new ones and cut old ones out. For instance, here's the revised overall scheme, to which I added the iPhone app and just tightened everything up:
Ahmad Jamal – The Awakening
The only version of Oliver Nelson's “Stolen Moments” that might actually be better than the original. Several other outstanding renditions of great standards on there as well. A. Jobim's “Wave” and H. Hancock's “Dolphin Dance” are two of them. This is one of the first jazz albums I picked up in college, before I started playing jazz. When I took the jazz history class at ASU, I wrote a paper about it. I couldn't figure out why none of these tunes follow the AABA form. My ears later got good enough to realize that they did, but that Jamal was throwing in these huge jammy vamps in between the sections. Great jazz album...
They still suck!
There used to be something here?