Murray Todd Williams

I came across an article about tech resumes that just brought an indescribable amount of relief to me.
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Thanks to the wonders of Safari’s built-in RSS viewing, I can scan through about 400 possible news articles from a variety of sources—Washington Post, New York Times, Slashdot, Digg—in about 5 minutes, not counting those articles I’ve launched in another tab for actual reading. I love how I can keep up on the sorts of news that I’m interested in while keeping my reading time down to 30-60 minutes a day tops.

There are probably 2-3 articles per day that I wish I could highlight in my own blog and comment on. For example, today’s Washington Post has an incredible article on the shrinking American middle-class neighborhoods. I’ve experienced this first-hand as my own condo has appreciated by 200-300% over the last couple years. This is great news for me since I own it, but that also means that over the last three years I myself could no longer have afforded to buy a home in Los Angeles had I not already done so. This is profound to me because in a way it means I’ve being downgraded from median-middle-class to the lower site of the growing class-separating gorge.

But that’s not really what this blog is about. As I’ve written before, I’m in the planning phase for the next revision of my web site. I’ve seen other web sites that have sections that automatically get filled (via some sort of feed) with links to other articles. I guess some service decides what new-and-cool article links to put on your site. It’s an artificial way of “creating fresh content” if you’re lazy. I’m going to create a section that just lists all the articles I find incredibly interesting but don’t have time to comment on. It’ll be like my own personal Slashdot. Hmm. Maybe I can create a special “category” in WordPress for those articles with the article URL as a special field and write my own template PHP code… (thinking to myself) Anyway, stay tuned for the changes. We’ll see how long it takes me to get to them.

Over the past week I’ve “graduated” to the level where I feel pretty confident modifying a WordPress theme, tweaking various PHP commands to display certain information, etc.
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In the ongoing rants about web design… now that I’m paying attention to the design and layout of every website I visit, I’m beginning to really cringe at the horrible trends that are going on. Here’s a perfect example. I think it’s downright comical.
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…or maybe the title should read “Murray’s Website 4.0″ This all started last week when I found a possible client for my friend Alley who does web design and, more importantly, knows about web advertising and Search Engine Optimization. (The client was asking me about SEO and as you’ll see, I knew nothing.) So one day last week as Alley and I were doing an analysis of the client’s website Alley started talking about the client’s PageRank^TM.

I feel like a complete idiot for not knowing about this thing, like I’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few years. Alley explained how a PageRank of 2 was a pretty good starting place (for this client), how values of 3 or 4 were fairly realistic targets, and that values of 6 or higher are often reserved for super-powerful corporations with major websites. I finally downloaded the Google Toolbar for Firefox—that’s how you see PageRank values for specific web pages—and started looking at all sorts of websites to compare their rankings. There were a number of surprises.

First of all, my friend Dale’s website has a PageRank of freakin’ 7, thus placing him under the official title of Demigod! (Any pearls of wisdom for us mortals, Dale?) It also beats the ranking for the California Democratic Party and a lot of other major organizations. (Note: he’s tied with the national Democratic Party site.)
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