I just got back from Los Angeles last night. The weekend went very well with lots of networking and interviews getting done, I also did a lot of networking and it was funny, as soon as I asked someone their email address and they began saying “firstname.lastname” I knew it was at gmail.com.

On the flight I was pondering just why it is that everyone has the mature email address at gmail. I mean, 99% of the time that’s the way it is. Then I realized why: It came about when Generation Y was entering the work force.

Hotmail and Yahoo may be as old as the Internet, but that means we all have emails like “masterblaster1968@hotmail.com” (my apologies to whoever has that email address.) They were the geek names, the identities we used online when the idea was anonymity. The Internet has grown and matured and now it is used to build your real name for school and employers.

Yahoo, a few years ago allowed their users to change their name, which is when I got a mature yahoo email address as well, but I never use it. Why? I was already established in Gmail.

Gmail simply hit the nail on the head when many of us didn’t realize the board was loose. The right interface, great storage, and the better features were all factors in a major coup for a market many considered to be a solved system.

Now sadly the Gmail interface is falling behind. We rely on tools like Gina Trapani’s Better Gmail firefox plugin, and other such apps to increase it’s usefulness. Rumor is that Google is working on an upgrade but we haven’t seen it yet. Now we’re hearing things of a company called zenbe.com (I’m working on a review of it actually) and Xobni for Outlook.

So, is Gmail the king? No, it will be dethroned. But it was a major stepping stone for the realm of email, moving us past limited space into lifetimes of email, from folders and into tagging, and more!

Two weeks ago I was searching my own name on Google to see what sort of presence I had for my name. I know there is a hockey player who has a fair bit of attention and there used to be an Olympic sprinter, so how did I fair?

I did alright, it turned out that at that time my Twitter account was higher ranked than this blog! I was shocked.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. And it means understanding, at the most basic levels, how Google (and other engines to a lesser extent) search and rank your website. Yes Google is largely based off of other links to your page, but also is a whole host of factors you as a blogger can affect. While we (SEO people) don’t know the exact formula for Google’s secret sauce, people with infinite patience and a algorithmic approach are able to determine the importance of various factors.

For example we know that having the search term in your domain is a major boost. So “PatrickJarrett.com” would immediately be better than “TrickJarrett.com.” Things like the use of the <H1> tags, the appearance of the search phrase inside the body of the page, whether it is bolded, or in links or in image alt text. The list goes on. I’ve seen lists of over 250 things which affect how your page is ranked.

All I did to bump TrickJarrett from the 2nd page of results for “Patrick Jarrett” is add an H1, add it to the title tag, modify some wordings to use the full name and sure enough this morning I’m front page and #4 on the results. With a bit more work I can be the #1 result for my name.

I awoke with a start, the room was dark and all was quiet. I heard the TV on in the other room but presumed K had just fallen asleep with it on. I listened and could hear Mattie in her cage, and it struck me that I didn’t take her out before bed. She would be nearing 8 hours without a trip outside. Usually not an issue, but she had eaten since going out. I feared the worst, thinking she had had an accident in the cage.

My sinuses have been clogged and even without that my sense of smell is iffy, so I couldn’t smell anything but I got up and pulled on jeans and a shirt. I retrieved Mattie’s leash and took her out for a quick walk. She did her business and when I got back inside I checked the cage to find it clean - thank goodness.

After putting Mattie back into the cage I crawled back into bed and proceeded to toss and turn for half an hour. Finally I gave up trying to fall asleep and got up. While in bed my brain had been crunching over a few coding issues with a project for ManaNation. I trawled my RSS feeds for anything of interest and I scanned my forums, most hadn’t had any post since I went to bed just 7 hours ago.

I settled in to work on the code and sure enough, the early hour, the quiet email and twitter, and the quiet house allowed me to really dig into the work and lay down some quality progress on the project.

It was extremely refreshing since, when I went to bed last night, I was fuming with frustration over another project. I take coding very personally and if I can’t solve a problem, or if something I do continues to be an issue, I get extremely upset. So to get up and in the early hours knock out two hours of solid progress on a project is a great boost to my morale.

RSS is amazing. It’s the natural progression of information, but it won’t be the end of that path. Until that evolution comes though (or has it?) I’m living the high life using Google Reader with my tweaks.

First, if a feed doesn’t fit my needs, I make it do so. With io9, a gawker sci-fi geek blog, it includes spoiler posts - majorly uncool. I hate spoilers in any form. I rarely watch the peek into next week’s episode of any show I’m watching, even that is too much for me. So what do I do? First I sent them an email suggesting that they offer a feed sans spoiler posts. Then I decide to take the initiative and I use Yahoo Pipes to easily filter the feed with any post which contains the word “spoiler” in its title. This same concept can be done of course with any feed that contains posts you never read.

Secondly, one thing Google Reader does poorly is implement tags. They treat them more as folders in their display rather than tagging. If they want to fix their tags they need to completely overhaul how they are presented, entered and handled. Until they do, it feels more like a non-limited folder system where things can exist in multiple folders. That being said, I’ve today created a new “tag” (folder) called “_Top.” The _ (called an underscore) is used to put the tag at the top of the listing. And this tag is used to mark feeds which I discover myself reading much more frequently than skimming. This way, when I log into Reader and have a large collection of feeds to read, the cream is at the… top.

Thirdly, I implemented a page-to-rss app for Paul Graham’s essay page. He has a link to such a feed maintained by some individual, but since I would rather put my data in the hands of corporations I worked it through a handful of sites to provide a clean and perfect RSS feed from his page.

Fourthly, I’ve begun actively seeking out utility feeds. Things like weather reports, news alerts, etc. The more I can funnel into this channel for information, the better. In addition I am able to rss things like my calendar and reminders (like my instapaper feed.)

Going back to the first example, I need to spin off and discuss Yahoo Pipes some. I think this is a tool which really isn’t getting a fair shake. It’s an easy to comprehend tool to create complex data processing applications, with a heavy emphasis on RSS feeds since they are, by design, best used for this sort of thing.

My day job is actually implementing a solution through Yahoo Pipes. We have software which has a collection of RSS feeds but inexplicably does not offer a unified feed, and so very easily we are able to create a unified feed through Yahoo Pipes. Sure, we could write our own solution, but it would take us 30 minutes of time, where this one will take us 60 seconds.

I began this post a few weeks again as ManaNation was growing, and it was about to outgrow the Godaddy shared hosting. In the process of writing it I hit a money crunch and GoDaddy revamped their shared hostings, upping limits and so I did a small service upgrade which has since allowed us to continue sitting on their server. However, I’m again considering the move, so this post came out of the dust closet and here it is.

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