Rebooting is standard procedure for nearly every computer I own or have ever owned.  I’ve noticed however that whenever I have to reboot my Mac, it makes me mildly angry.  I’ve become accustomed to running my six standard applications (Firefox, Mail, Adium, iCal, iTunes, and NetNewsWire Lite) all the time.  I literally never turn them off.  When my computer goes in my backpack, it’s sleeping and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Uptime is [...]

I learned in Isys 532 (not really, but this post is fishing for a grade. Dr. Liddle, this one is for you). I’ll just throw out the warning up front that this is not a typical blog post. For my Information Architecture class, I’ve been instructed to condense a semester’s worth of learning into one blog post. So my goal with this post is not to rehash all the research and work I’ve done throughout [...]

Not everyone is excited about Google’s Website Optimizer. Google uses AdBot, a version of GoogleBot, to spider through the landing pages that are entered with AdWords Campaigns. AdBot judges the contents of the landing pages and assigns them a Quality Score. The higher your score, the lower your minimum bids and the better position your ads achieve. So in order for your Pay-Per-Click Campaigns to work well, you better be doing Search Engine Optimization well. [...]

I found this article through Slashdot today, and I’m embarrased to call myself a Utahn. Apparently our legislature has just passed a law that bans keyword advertising. Not all keyword advertising, just the ones that use something that could loosely be tied to a competitor’s trademark. If you’re in the same industry, couldn’t any keyword fit that description? Apparently the law only applies if the ad is displayed in Utah or the advertiser/keyword vendor is [...]

Awhile ago Matt Belkin wrote about A/B Testing and mistakes you should avoid while doing it (recommend reading for the online marketer in you). He talked about the differences between A/B Testing and Multivariate testing. Multivariate testing is changing more than one thing at a time. True A/B testing takes discipline and patience, neither are often prominent character traits of web developers. Google Website Optimizer to the rescue. From the homepage of the latest Google [...]