David Chan’s Blog

My coworker Nick Simpson is truely amazing.  He is one of the most knowledgable sys admins I’ve known and I’ve been with many different companies (ie. I’ve been around the block).  His blog is neatly designed and he stumbles on many neat things.  Just recently I’ve been introduced to a new Facebook app to keep track of birthdays, and I got that information from his recent post titled “Facebook iCal birthdays“.

But if you do a search for “Facebook iCal Birthdays” on Google, you won’t find Nick’s post.  Even a search for “Nick Simpson” doesn’t return much from his blog.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the permalinks for his blog posts are in a very machine unfriendly format.

This doesn’t translate into any searchable keywords, and makes it hard for anyone to find this via a keyword search.

I’m a big fan of searchables and many readers of my blog find my content via search engines (actually, only through Google…is there any other search engine?).

I hope Nick reads this and changes his permalink structure to include the post’s title, or the post’s keywords, as part of the permalink for the story.  You may already know this, but in WordPress, going into Settings->Permalinks will allow you to choose a suitable link for your posts.

What good is creating content if no one can find it?

A mid-term mission of mine is to appear on the first page of the Google (US search) index for the search phrase “David Chan”.  I’ve been working on it on and off, studying SEO here and there on my free time.

A tool I use to check my search engine ranking position (SERP) is the Top 100 Rankings Position Checker.  Not noted for its looks, it’s pretty useful in finding if an url is within the top 100 Google results for a particular keyword or phrase.  Best of all is the ability to bookmark your query so you can validate your ego in one click!

Hmm my current rating is “very nice”, but as this tool points out, it’s not good enough.  More work on this in the future.

You’ve probably read something on the web which has shocked you, made you angry, and down-right pissed you off. Whether it’s a blog post, a tweet, or even an instant message, you couldn’t help but to feel strongly about what was being said.

It’s a good thing.

I find that a lot of people don’t like to express their opinions for the the fear of being judged or inciting conflict. No one likes to be judged, and no one likes conflict (okay, that last one isn’t totally true), but not being firm and opinionated means you’re being wishy-washy. And besides, people with opinions are much more interesting than the me-too’s.

You can’t make everyone happy, so just say what you want. Put the expression back into self-expression. Otherwise, why are we all on this “social web” anyways?

Pretty much everything you decide to do adds value in one way or another. Sometimes, the value of a task or job may not be apparently clear. For those situations, I like to use the following preposition:

“The point here is”

It’s a good way to focus your attention to the impact of a task, a change, or a decision. If you can’t finish the sentence and explain the value of what you’re working on, then it might be a good time to think about doing something else.

Everyone was born with a poison in their veins. It may be a slow-spreading poison, or it may be a concentrated and fast-acting poison. No one knows what they have been given. As the days pass, the poison inside us spread throughout our bodies, making us weak, slow, and frail. There is no way to stop it.

People are aware of this ultimate ending and try to counter the poison through various gimmicks. Eventually people pass away when the poison completes its job.

How do people deal with poison? A natural reaction in an attempt to remove poison often involves suction from the point of injection. But how about “sucking it up”? There is no way to remove this deadly poison which we have received at birth, but we can make the best of it by becoming better, living fuller, and moving forward.

The poison in your body just spread a little bit more today. Don’t waste the day by sucking.

The 37signals’ recent Sunspots post had an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on the metabolism of hummingbirds.

“[Hummingbirds] also typically consume more than their own weight in food each day, and to do so they must visit hundreds of flowers daily. At any given moment, they are only hours away from starving.”

This reminded me of something I once heard which also dealt with urgency in everyday life.

Gazelles and lions live together in the savannas. Everyday, the lion must feed and the gazelle must escape from predators. A lion must run faster than the slowest gazelle if it wishes to feed. A gazelle must run faster than the fastest lion to guarantee survival.

Are you a lion or a gazelle?

I’ve found an older article on reading patterns which I think is still quite relevant. It states that a user reading web content typically reads in an F-shaped pattern, with long and short horizontal sweeps along headers and vertical scans down the left margin (the article illustrates this with heat maps on various web pages).

Quote from the article:

Users won’t read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won’t.

This F-shaped reading pattern reminds me of the inverted pyramid style of writing. Layouts, spacing and pictures can benefit or obstruct this reading pattern. One thing I like to do is inject whitespace and images into blocks of text, which helps to make the content seem less dense and easier to scan and pick out keywords.

The name David Chan is definitely a common one. Firstly, the last name Chan is the Asian equivalent of Windsor or Smith. Lee and Wong top the list of most popular Chinese surnames, but Chan, which is sometimes spelled Chen, is definitely in the top five. Secondly, the first name David happens to coincide with that of a certain Biblical King of Israel. You get the point.

I’ve met several people with the same name in Vancouver, and even went to high school with one who is the same age as me. There’s no lack of David Chans in the world, but what about on the internet?

Searching for “David Chan” on Google.com will give roughly 17.7 million results. As of this writing I am result number 52:

In the Google.ca search I occupy results #45 and #46. My search position is not bad given the relatively short span that I have been running this weblog, however my goal is to make it into the top 10. Unfortunately, looking up http://blog.dekandustry.com on a Page Rank calculator reveal that this url currently has a Page Rank of 0, out of a possible 10.

Positive linking, and optimizing the site to web crawlers are things which top my current research list. Other popular blog rating/ranking sites like Technorati and Digg are also of interest and they contribute to my daily visit count.

I look to break into the top 40 David Chan search results soon, and will be writing about my findings and experiences in experimenting with increasing internet traffic.

Wisdom Wednesday is a writing exercise I am experimenting with. Every Wednesday I will attempt to take a popular phrase or quote and connect it to a recent event in hopes of generating a new point of view.

Wisdom 1:

[Brain Barn,] where thoughts are raised and sometimes slaughtered

Yes, that is exactly the one-liner from my blog. I did not have the time to find a suitable quote/phrase today so this will have to do.

I came up with this tag line when I conceived the name of my blog, which I considered to be an informal place for me to throw my thoughts and ideas out to the internet. The thoughts/ideas would be incubated and debated, or be critiqued and discarded (be “raised” or “slaughtered”; it’s a play on the whole barn concept).

However, I could not have imagined that people would slaughter ideas in the literal sense.

I’m sure most people have heard about the death threats against Kathy Sierra. The recent post about this issue on her weblog has been a total gong-show, with readers leaving comments ranging from sympathy to hatred. I haven’t even read all the comments yet (the comments are now disabled), and I probably won’t. Death threats are not acceptable, online or offline, and they definitely have no place in or near blogs where thoughts and ideas should not be held back by fear. Bad posts and ideas can be critiqued, modded down (Slashdot) or buried (digg). The blogosphere has enough controls in place to allow us to be a self-moderated population.

No articles are ever harmed or mistreated at the Brain Barn.

Guy Kawasaki recently blogged about an article he found on Science Daily, which stated that bonuses are better than raises at increasing employee performance. A snippet from the source article used summarizes the concept quite well:

“… simply spending more on employee pay would yield minimal results … the [analysis] results suggest that providing a strong pay-for-performance link for bonuses rather than raises had the greatest potential benefit, predicted to improve employee performance by nearly 20 percent.”

I was immediately reminded of another piece I have read which warned against incentive-based compensations. Sitting on my co-worker’s desk is the Joel on Software book, and although it has been months since I last read it, somewhere in the Managing Developers section is the article “Incentive Pay Considered Harmful” (web version is very close to the one printed in the book). I revisited the piece and was not surprised to find the following excerpt, taken from a reference article:

“… at least two dozen studies over the last three decades have conclusively shown that people who expect to receive a reward for completing a task or for doing that task successfully simply do not perform as well as those who expect no reward at all.”

I am mindful that Joel’s article focuses mainly on software or technical firms and their employees, however it is interesting to see that there is a conflict between the studies. I would come to a conclusion that the compensation method depends on the recipient and the field.

Personally I would like to have a compensation package with both a base salary and performance incentives. The bonuses would be determined by very specific performance goals. These goals should be black and white with a simple pass or fail criteria, similar to sports players whom may receive bonuses if they scored a certain amount of points, or played a certain amount of games. The hard part would be coming up with these performance targets, but it should be no problem if the manager and employee created the goals together, and mutually agreed on them.

This also has the added benefit of setting goals for employee and aligning him/her with what the company needs to do.