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Robert Gremillion

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Do Keywords in Domains Still Matter

I read an article the other day that basically said that domains don't matter any more for SEO. I don't know if that's true or not, but maybe it has been diminished substantially.

Some time later, I set up an index page for one of my domains. I wanted to see if it had any traffic. I simply created a page that spit out the Domain name and included a stat counter link.

A few days later I started getting traffic to that domain.  It wasn't type in traffic.

It turns out that people were going to Google and typing in that exact domain to search, then they would follow the link back to my page.

So this makes me think that YES keyword domains still matter, since people are using search engines to find those domains...

Perl Timeout Example Logic

I wanted to call an API but did not want my code to break if the API
was unavailable.

Found this Perl code example on the Net (don't remember where) that
does a eval / timeout.

Worked well... but I had to take out the while loop.


use warnings;
use strict;

$SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "timeout" };

eval {
alarm(10);
while(1){
#do something you want to timeout here
}
alarm(0);
};

Moved my Blog from WordPress to Posterous

I finally moved my blog from WordPress (on Dreamhost) to Posterous. It was really a simple process. I had to go into the WordPress Admin section, then generate an Export File.  Then I went back to Posterous and uploaded the Export file to their system.  They took care of the rest.

The next step was to update my domain name to point to Posterous.  I am using GoDaddy, so I followed these steps: http://help.posterous.com/godaddy-dns-setup-step-by-step

My hope is that I will post more often since Posterous is so simple to use!

The Drudge Report Could Use a Favorites Icon

The Drudge Report is one of my favorite websites. I visit it multiple, multiple times each day to find out what's going on in the world. But there's one thing that has always bugged me about their site. There's no favorite icon! I know that the Drudge Report purposely keeps their website clean and simple. In fact I can't remember any significant changes since I started monitoring their site. But it sure would be nice to have an icon displayed in my bookmarks. At first I was going to hire someone at Fiverr.com to create an icon. But the artist never responded to my "gig" request. So I decided to create it myself. It turned out to be a SUPER simple process. Here are the steps I took to create a favorite icon for the Drudge Report. Step 1. I wanted to use a D as the favorite icon. It just so happens that the Drudge Report has an iPad application that uses an icon. So I simply took a screen shot of that icon and emailed it to myself. Step 2. I opened up the screen shot using a Paint program in Windows and cropped out just the D. Step 3. For the next step I used Google to find an online favorite icon generator. I decided to use Favicon.cc. First you click on the Import Image link and then you select your graphic to upload. The next step is to click on the Download Favicon link and save the image to your PC. Step 4. Once you have the favorite icon, the next step is to upload it to your website, then to add a link to your HTML. The link would look similar to the code below: Below is the icon image that was created. My dream is that Drudge would consider adding a favorites icon to their website template.

On Programming and Prose

A huge thank you to Robert for this opportunity to write here today. He's a fellow programmer, which makes him a brother -- a pasty-skinned, carpel-tunnel suffering brother who can probably think of a few computer science jokes on the spot. I'll go first: Q. How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? A. None. It's a hardware problem. When I first solicited help in organizing a virtual book tour, Robert was quick to respond, and suggested I write about writing a book. Douglas Adams once said that writing is easy. "You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds." I'm not a writer by education; it's a career I kind of fell into. When I came up with the idea for Red Planet Noir, it was on a lark, more of an academic exercise than anything, but when I stared at that first, completed page, I thought, "This isn't terrible." Which was pretty good for me. I'd spent most of my life writing terrible. I knew terrible. "Not terrible" was a pleasant change. A year later, I'd written eighty-thousand words. It wasn't always easy. (I wrote a third of the novel during my downtime in in Afghanistan.) But ultimately, I followed a few simple rules I learned in computer science to bring the project to conclusion. 1. Adherence to ritual. When I was a student, I haunted the LSU Unix lab at the same time every evening. I followed (bizarre) naming conventions for my code. (Just for the record, every program was named after an animal howl of some sort. AHOOO or ROWR or BAROOO or whatever -- that is what extreme levels of caffeine do to the human brain. It made sense at the time.) And I worked consistently, with short breaks to decompress. Unless there was an unavoidable deadline, I left at the same time every night. Writing fiction is not much different. For most of the book, I arrived at the office every morning around 6am. (Because the office didn't open until 7:30, I really impressed everyone with my devotion to the company.) That gave me a good hour and a half of silence to focus on the literature. At 7:30, I hit Save and put it away. Ritual helps take the focus off how difficult the project might be, and reframe it as something that's just done every single day. Writing is not like on television or in the movies, where an author rents a villa in Tuscany and hammers out a quick novel between dinner parties. It's a job. 2. Obey Carmack's Law. In his famous Black Book, Michael Abrash coined Carmack's Law as "Fight code entropy," stating, "If you have a new fundamental assumption, throw away your old code and rewrite it from scratch. Incremental patching and modifying seems easier at first, and is the normal course of things in software development, but ends up being much harder and producing bulkier, markedly inferior code in the long run." The Carmack in question was, of course, John Carmack of Id Software, and the project the two worked together on was Quake. Editing a manuscript is no different. Red Planet Noir took a year to write, and six months to edit. The edits were two and three hour sessions, seven days a week. (I worked in the evenings due to the amount of time required.) Early on, much of my time was spent learning how to edit. I tried the piecemeal approach, changing a word here and a sentence there, and at one point I spent an entire week on a single page. It never occurred to me to apply Carmack's Law to literature. But when I did, the project sped through to conclusion. Instead of getting lost in adverbial clauses, or scraping my brain for a better way to describe a building using pre-existing text, I liberally tore pages from the manuscript and started fresh. The rewritten pages were always an improvement. 3. Seek elegance. Famed computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra often wrote about the importance of elegance in programming. It's not enough to write code that is mathematically correct. By that standard, unwieldy spaghetti-works of kludgy, obfuscated code is acceptable. Elegant code, on the other hand, not only works right, but feels right. It's simple and thoughtful. Though hard to describe to "outsiders," programmers can identify elegance on sight. It's like Mozart on strings versus a child banging on a pot. It is a thing of beauty. The same is true for literature. However, just as an inexperienced software developer cannot inherently write elegantly, neither can an inexperienced reader. To write ten thousand good words, an author must read ten million good words. Reading is an inescapable requirement for writers. The more one reads, the easier it is to spot not only good prose, but to understand why that prose is good. Raymond Chandler was a master of elegance. Consider this paragraph from Trouble Is My Business:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
Or perhaps the master, Vladimir Nabokov, as he opened Lolita.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Rare is the writer who deserves mention in the same breath as Nabokov or Chandler, but writers should always strive for the example of elegance set by the two men. Good, mechanical, grammatically-correct prose is never good enough. To quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, "Stretch out with your feelings..." This is but a smart part of the process. Next week, on author Mindy Blanchard's blog, I will give a nuts-and-bolts description of the business of books -- what happens once an author types THE END on his or her baby. Tomorrow at writer Marian Allen's blog, I'll be discussing voice and style in the noir genre. I hope to see you there. --
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D.B. Grady is the author of Red Planet Noir. He can be found on the web at http://www.dbgrady.com.

PHP Function to Convert Seconds into Days, Hours and Minutes

I needed a function for CalFeed to turn Seconds Until into Days, Hours and Minutes. I found an existing function on the web and made some modifications to it. Here's the function... function secondsToWords($seconds) { /*** number of days ***/ $days=(int)($seconds/86400); /*** if more than one day ***/ $plural = $days > 1 ? 'days' : 'day'; if ($days > 0) { $day_string = "$days $plural "; } /*** number of hours ***/ $hours = (int)(($seconds-($days*86400))/3600); if ($days != 0 or $hours != 0) { if ($hours > 1) { $hour_string = "$hours hrs "; } else { $hour_string = "$hours hr "; } } /*** number of mins ***/ $mins = (int)(($seconds-$days*86400-$hours*3600)/60); if ($mins != 0) { $min_string = "$mins mins"; } /*** return the string ***/ return "$day_string$hour_string$min_string"; } If I can find a link to the original function, I will post that later.
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