Jordy Blog

When you do a Google Toolbar spellcheck while editing a post in WordPress, bad HTML is inserted secretly onto your post. This HTML isn’t visible on your WordPress post, but it does show up via RSS (and when you view the page source) –even after you substitute the green links. If you subscribe via Bloglines, for example, you’d see a big list of the words that you misspelled (or that Google didn’t understand) at the bottom of your post. To fix it, you can just view the HTML of your post while in edit mode and delete all of the Google spellcheck garbage out.

You can see this could be kind of embarrassing, so I thought I’d let you all know. I purposely misspelled a bunch of words and used Google spellcheck on this post so you can see what I’m talking about. Anyway, it’s probably best to spellcheck elsewhere until this is fixed.

The PageRank for Software for Starving Students (via Google’s toolbar) went clear from 0 to 5 with the latest data update. That’s pretty indicative of the almost immediate success the project has enjoyed. The site has only been up since the very end of December but has had some really incredible growth. Just check out the Alexa traffic:

As the project’s volunteer marketing director, I’ve had a valuable lesson cemented in my mind. SoftwareFor had practically no link recruitment; we just focused on making a really cool (free) product. We included top-of-the-line open source programs and gave it a sleek GUI. About the only “marketing” involved me staying up all night and polishing up some very good quotable text for the webpages. In other words, we focused almost exclusively on making a cool product –which (after all) is what the market wants.

The project got almost 1000 Diggs (thus the traffic spike) because it was cool. People from all over the world linked to it because it was useful to them, not because a bunch of suits spent a lot of money trying to jam it down their throats. Our traffic spiked and our PageRank jumped because we provided a service that people legitimately wanted.

Conclusion: The market doesn’t care how much you spend on it. Instead it wants to know what you can do for it. If what you offer is cool, then your “customers” will market your product for you. A cool product (or service) almost sells itself.

Although link recruitment (for SEO purposes) and reaching your market are important, many people and companies take the wrong approach. It’s not about beating the system via comment spam, round-the-clock commercials, or anything else. It’s the classic standoff of “Push vs Pull”, and with today’s technological sounding boards, “pull” always wins.

The best way to market your products is to give the market what it wants. In other words, just be cool. Be remarkable, and people will remark.

My friend Gary told me he was just hired on as a contractor for Provo Labs doing php and mysql development.  It’s funny that I heard it from him rather than at work.

Gary is really into BSD and is a big supporter of Software for Starving Students.  It’ll be fun working with him.

AOL sucks for blocking my emails to AOL customers. From their mail FAQ:

===
504 – (RTR:BB) The IP address you are using to connect to AOL is a dynamic (residential) IP address. AOL will not accept future e-mail transactions from this IP address until your ISP removes this IP address from its list of dynamic (residential) IP addresses. For additional information, please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com.
===

In these cases, the mail is being rejected because AOL believes it is being sent directly from someone’s computer, rather than through their ISP’s legitimate mail server, a common sign of malicious or abusive email. This can be fixed by them using a stable, legitimate mail server.

You mean I can’t email my brother because I’m a Gundy rather than a Comcast? Way to turn the WWW into the CPW (crappy proprietary web)! This is just one more reason that AOL totally sucks.

The NameVoyager is one of the coolest uses of Java applets that I’ve ever seen. It’s based off of public name data provided from the Social Security Administration, but really adds an incredible graphical element. The blog that it links to is also really interesting (to me).

Besides names, there are lots of cool ideas that could use this mechanism for tracking occurrences of data over time. For example, my logophile friend, Michael Eager, wants to map the popularity of words (on the internet) over time -an idea that Gabe happened to mentioned to me the same day I showed this site to Michael. This could obviously be very useful.

DevUtah’s February Geek Dinner will be held at the Miller Business Innovation Center on Wednesday February 22 at 6 PM.

Here’s the full DevUtah announcement.

Please spread the word through email and blogs.  Also, be sure to RSVP at the site.

A few Provo Labs companies will have booths at the Big Business & Technology Expo at UVSC on March 8 & 9. Should be fun.

Jake Spurlock IMed me pointing out that the Mac version of the Software for Starving Students CD is listed as Apple’s featured download for Mac OS X. This is great exposure for the project. Good work team. :)

Pete Ashdown (founder of Xmission and candidate for US Senate) will address UVLUG this Saturday:

Pete will present “Democracy 2.0: Open Source Government,” showing how the Federal Government can learn from the open source movement. He will talk about how the government can stop ignoring technology and use it to better the lives of all Americans. He will also take questions on any issue.

This will undoubtedly be a great discussion for people interested in technology and government in Utah.

Pete’s discussion will start at 12:30 in room CS-404 on UVSC campus. For those who’d like to stay, there’ll be a Linux installfest directly afterward.

UVLUG will host Dave Heldenbrand’s presentation on IPv6 this Saturday.

From Answers.com:

“IPv4 supports 4.2 billion addresses, which is inadequate for giving even one address to every living person, much less support the burgeoning market for connective devices. IPv6 addresses this problem by supporting 340 undecillion addresses. For scale, this would allow an average of about 430 quintillion unique addresses per square inch of the Earth’s surface.”

With these kind of numbers numbers, I hope to be able to boast a static IP address for every bacterium in my stomach…

Anyway, it should be pretty cool. I hope to see you there.