Jeffrey Aho

One of the top concerns of any new website (such as mine) is how will you attract a readership. The most common way that random people will be able to visit your site (and even know it exists) is through search engines. I’ve been passing my website URL around and advertising through MSN and I’ve been getting decent traffic. Also I’d like to thank several of my friend who have been linking to me. See, the most common way that people usually find websites are through search engines like Google, and recently blogs through Technorati. I’m pleased to announce that I now have the number 1 place for both Google searches of “Jeffrey Aho” and “Jeff Aho“. (Heh…this post will actually help more )

The fact is, the better your place on search engines results for keywords that relate to your site, the more traffic you will receive. That makes placing high in results one of a webmaster’s key goals (especially if it is a business! Traffic is profit!). Search engines run software. This software is founded on a set of rules and criteria how it relates the most relevant websites to keywords. That means they can be exploited to give you better results. The one catch is that most of these criteria are out of the reach of the webmaster to exploit. These include the number of links from other sites which you generally can’t control. (Actually Mike suggested I post on some influential blogs with my URL, thus creating more links) There are however several things that you can do to give you a head start.

Google was revolutionary because of the technology that it used to search the web with. It worked so well that it stole business from it’s rival Yahoo. Google uses a set of algorithms collectively called PageRank which grade a website’s relevance and popularity. By knowing the specific criteria that PageRank uses, a webmaster can improve the position of their site. While Google has a page where you can submit your URL to them, the reality is all it does is sent a bot to view the page and in the end rank it. The real way to get business is to take advantage of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) factors that Google uses. Several of them can be exploited by a webmaster through the code that they write.

These factors all contribute to the way Google views your web page. It actually gives you a rank…a PageRank. For example, (you can check yours out if you have a web page), mine is ranked 0 (which isn’t surprising because I just launched it) while Mike’s is 5. This results in Mike’s site coming up before mine when searching a related topic on both, like Mechatronics. The thing is, PageRank is mostly based on linking to other sites, and there is quite a few other factors that are considered. These additional SEO Factors play a large role and are weighted compared to each other. For Google (see link), some of the big additional factors are having the keyword in the title domain, and in meta tags. I recently added meta tags to my site just to give it a little extra boost. I can only hope they help me out (even a little).

An example of these other factors playing a big role is how the Tron Eng ‘10 class (Which ironically doesn’t even exist yet and is only the work of a very initiative filled future student) beats our class, Tron Eng ‘09 (The most active class website in UW Eng!) when “UW Mechatronics” is googled. How can this be? Tron Eng ’09’s PageRank is 3 compared to Tron Eng ’10’s PageRank of 0 is clearly more. If you look at the list, keywords in the title are very high up, so it gives Tron Eng ‘10 the advantage (by a few results pages!)…when clearly we are the better site to visit.

It seems I lucked out with my domain being able to jump to first so easily. Probably because of my last name, Aho, which isn’t that common. To finish off, just a quick comment: I got the Genius Bowl directorship, so I’m quite happy. Genius Bowl is a termly engineering quiz event to find the “smartest class in engineering” and I’ll be partly responsible for organizing it. Back to studying…:( (0/6 exams)

Currently Listening to: “Thief” – Our Lady Peace

It is now less than two weeks before I’m back in TBay. Can anyone say The Hoito? I can’t wait to get back and see everyone. All that stands in my way is 13 days, 6 exams and 1440km…wow…this is going to be a brutal next two weeks. I can’t believe I’ll only have a few weeks home, and then off toWindsor. Damn Co-op!

The most exciting thing in my life still is my iPod Mini. It is so great! I keep on finding more and more features for it. Today I found out that you can rate the songs easily on the iPod and it propagates back to iTunes when you sync. I also started Podcasting, which I’ll talk about later. First I’ll talk about one of the features that I always enjoy on music players. I’m not one to sit down and plan out a full play list, mostly because I’m lazy and because I’d end up making a new one each time I went to listen to my music. What I prefer to do is get a song going and then as it is playing search through my music. when I find a song I’d like to listen to in the specific session, I then add it to the queue (Gah! Algorithms and Data Structures final premonition!) so that it will play when the current one is done. This just makes lots of sense as you can easily expand your play list for the session.

When I went to look how to do it on my iPod, I found it isn’t as simple. I’m a little disappointed that it isn’t as easy as I wanted it to be, but I’ll explain the process how I managed to accomplish the same thing. iPod has a special built in play list called On-The-Go (OTGP). You can add songs to the OTGP by highlighting the song and holding the select button until the name flashes. To set up the queue how I like it, I had to first find a song and put it in the OTGP. I then selected the play list and started it going. The next step was to go through my collection and add the songs to the OTGP, just like a queue. It managed to accomplish what I wanted it to do, just with a little extra work on my part at the start. It just takes a little getting used to and then I don’t even notice the extra work.

The other feature that I’m now addicted to is Podcasting. Mike told me about it a few weeks ago and I read a little about it before. It’s one of those features that you don’t even know you want until you actually get it, then can’t do without it. (Liketabbed browsing in Firefox) Essentially what it is are audio recordings that are downloaded to your iPod whenever you sync with iTunes. Sound Boring? The neat thing is how you get them. You subscribe to RSS feeds of different types of recordings. I got several feeds to start me off including This Week in Tech and iTunes new music podcast. I was a little hesitant to go with an iPod because it didn’t have an FM receiver (Every so often I just want to listen to the radio) but Podcasting makes up for it. It’s like carrying your favourite radio shows with you and being able to pause, scan and re-listen to them whenever you want.

There has been alot of discussion about podcasting and iTunes. The latest version of iTunes has it built right in, and the firmware on my iPod has it built in. The thing is that podcasts are free…so why is Apple writing software for it? They don’t make direct profit from it…but look at the name PODcasting. Though it is generally referring to any music player that can play the feeds, the community of users as adopted the name “podcasting”. By adopting it, Apple just adds another feature that can help sell more iPods, and boy if I knew how good it was, I wouldn’t have waited so long to get my iPod! Some interesting sites to check out are Odeo, a start up for podcasts by the developer of blogger, an article by John Gruber on Podcasting, and the Audioblogging Manifesto. It will give you an idea of what is happening in the new field of Podcasting. (Even though some of it is criticism)

A few notes about my site. There were a few problems with my Del.icio.us feed in the past few days, hopefully it’s been all fixed up. Thanks again to Mike I’ve also been informed that I’m using “slugs” (URL is different from title) for the names of my entries, because I like to have interesting titles for my blogs…even if they have nothing to do with the entry.

Currently Listening to: “In The Garage” – Weezer

It arrived! My iPod Mini that is! I bought the silver 4 Gb one. I’m so far very impressed. It took no effort to fill it up with all the songs that I wanted. My previous music player supported WMA format, so most of my music was in that form. I buy CDs and rip them to my computer (I prefer to have CDs permanently) and before I used Windows Media Player to do it. I had a particularly rough time last week converting all the files and importing my library to iTunes. I was getting discouraged, even frustrated with iTunes and I began to dread using it as my default music player. My old music player had a drag and drop file transfer system, which I liked alot. I was sceptical that iTunes could give me a hastle free ability to transfer music to my new iPod. So I was cautiously optimistic (maybe even pessimistic).

Apple made up for it. When I ordered my iPod I was cheap and opted for the free shipping. It said 6-12 days shipping. I accepted that for saving $14. This is where I’m very happy. I recieved it today, THREE buisness days after ordering it! Now that’s service! It came by FedEx, and I was tracking the package on their site. It arrived in Toronto yesterday morning and in Cambridge last night. Here is the FedEx tracking:

Date/Time, Activity, Location
—————————————————————————————-
Jul 27, 2005
11:14 AM, Delivered, WATERLOO, ON
9:59 AM, On FedEx vehicle for delivery, CAMBRIDGE, ON
7:20 AM, At local FedEx facility, CAMBRIDGE, ON

Jul 26, 2005
5:51 PM, In transit, MISSISSAUGA, ON
6:57 AM, At dest sort facility, MISSISSAUGA, ON
3:45 AM, Departed FedEx location, MEMPHIS, TN
12:56 AM, Arrived at FedEx location, MEMPHIS, TN

Jul 25, 2005
5:31 PM, Departed FedEx location, ANCHORAGE, AK
4:48 PM, Arrived at FedEx location, ANCHORAGE, AK
10:27 PM, Left origin, SHANGHAI CN
10:18 PM, Picked up, SHANGHAI CN
1:40 PM, Package data transmitted to FedEx

That is pretty good! It got from China to my hand in 3 days. It cost me $225 CAN + tax, which is the student price. It was well worth is, and Apple far exceeded my expectations for service. I ordered it online because I was able to get the laser engraving done with my name and Class (Jeffrey Aho/Tron Eng ‘09). Thought it was good also for security issues. There is a serial number on it (wow it is really really small!) and iTunes registered it, so I figure there is some security there (because only iTunes can change up the music). The wheel is my favourite thing about it. It’s so intuitive and simple! It took no time at all to get used to it. Now that I got over the initial trouble with iTunes, they sync so well together that it only took a few minutes to fill up my iPod and then it was operational.

Since I now have music (Note: My sound card died a few months ago and I haven’t had the time to replace it), I’ll now add at the end of my blogs the song that I like most while writing my blog. This one is really great. I’m very impressed with the album (Move Along) which I blindly bought because I loved the first one so much. I suggest you go listen to it!

Currently Listening to: “Can’t Take It” – The All-American Rejects