Jordy Blog

Now is probably a good time to remind you to sign up for Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty if you haven’t already. Here’s the message showing on the site:

If you want to make a significant difference, it’s time get rolling for 2010. Sign up today.

When I first read about Google Friend Connect, an upcoming service that will allow website owners to easily add social network functionality to their own websites, I immediately thought of these lines from NBC’s “The Office”:

Dwight: Why am I being forced to come in tomorrow and pretend that a website made sales that I made?
Ryan: This is a temporary measure to increase the legitimacy of the site.
Stanley: I don’t like when my clients call me to help them use the website, I’m not seeing commissions on that.
Ryan: I hear you Stanley, that is a great observation. Problems like that will not happen when we launch Dunder Mifflin Infinity 2 point O.
Stanley: When will that be?
Ryan: TBD. Phyllis?
Phyllis: Did the police solve the problem with the…
Ryan: Yes, yes they did, yes they did.
Ryan: Yes, the social networking feature of the Dunder Mifflin Infinity website was infiltrated by sexual predators.
Dwight: I don’t understand why our website has to have social networking at all.
Jim: Yeah, I actually have to agree with Dwight on that one.
Ryan: It’s all about creating a one stop shop consumer experience, alright? You’re chatting with your friends, you’re talking about the latest music, about the election; all of it is happening in our virtual paper store.
Jim: And then an older gentleman asked you “Boxers or briefs?”
Creed: I don’t get the big fuss here, I like the site.
Kelly: If I’d have created a website with as many problems, I’d kill myself.
Ryan: Do you have a question Kelly?
Kelly: Yeah I have a lot of questions. Number one, how dare you?
Michael: [slow clapping] Ryan has done a very good job, and I am not applauding sarcastically. Think about it, a month ago nobody would go on this site because we were worried about getting molested, or losing our identity, having it stolen. But now, at a time TBD, all of the problems will be in the past. Ya done good kid, ya done good.
– Source: OfficeQuotes.net

I thought all this was pretty funny, but the ability to drop social features onto your website with little more than some pasting of JavaScript might just prove us all wrong.  :)

Example:

3 of your friends liked SemiGloss Oxford White Cardstock #80.  Click here to get new friends!

A family friend recently moved to Utah so his wife could attend BYU.  He’s looking for work and has experience coding in C and Python.  If you know of any opportunities, would you please let me know?

We’ve found and hired a general manager as my replacement at work. I started training him yesterday but have yet to start looking for my own new job. If you have or know of any openings for a tech savvy business guy, please let me know.

President Gordon B. Hinckley, fifteenth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints passed away today.

President Hinckley was a noble and honorable man who spent his life in service of God and all mankind. I love and revere him for his example, his faith, his humility, his kindness, and his decency.

I consider President Hinckley a prophet of God and join his family and millions around the world in mourning his loss and celebrating his lifetime of service. There are too few real heroes in this world, but Gordon Bitner Hinckley was one of them. God bless President Hinckley!

In case you’re worried about the tax implications of Utah’s referendum 1, please take a moment to read the Utah Taxpayers Association‘s most recent newsletter or watch the “Truth by the Numbers” video they put together.

The Utah Taxpayer’s Association is very pro-voucher.

For those of you who haven’t already read this on ConnectBlogs, my friend and fellow blogger Devin Thorpe is holding an event called
Cookies and Ice Cream FOR Utah’s Kids to discuss Utah’s Referendum 1. If you’re for school vouchers or are still on the fence and would like to learn more, please consider attending this event –just make sure you RSVP.

Patrick Burne (my former boss at Overstock) and Jordan Clements of Peterson Partners will be speaking.

Isn’t the way Google wants to track everything about you a little unsettling?

At least it now lets you access your data and doesn’t publish it with “anonymous” (obvious) ids like AOL does. Still the privacy freak in me is a little troubled.

That said, Google has definitely been one of the more benevolent companies out there, at least in my mind anyway.  I’d be interested in seeing what systems they have in place to make sure employees don’t abuse this info.

I don’t know about you, but my PR was showing as a 1 forever. Not that it really matters since I’m not really selling anything here, but it was kind of annoying. Why wouldn’t Google satisfy my ego like it does for everyone else? (Actually, it was more like, “I don’t suck that bad.”) The crazy thing is that my blog feed page had been showing up at a PR 3 all along, but that made no sense to me, unless Google was using my Google Analytics traffic to determine which of my pages were important –which is very possible. I get a lot more hits on my feed than my regular pages: probably a combination of having savvy readers and a really ugly pic. :)

Still, I suspected (since my content is so darn good) that if I was not unconsciously breaking some cardinal rules, then Google must be was just toying with me using cached data from different data centers. Since I’ve now instantly jumped from a 1 to a 5 doing hardly anything, I think it was the latter; but there’s no way to be sure –it’s just too much of a black box. Being a little opaque plays to Google advantage since it keeps blackhatters from gaming the system. I like that because it makes search result more relevant. But I’ve determined that Google’s antics are enough to drive anybody crazy if they’re trying to use PageRank as any sort of validation measure. Here at home, I’m still showing up at a 1.

So I wish I’d seen this Future PageRank Tool a little sooner. I don’t know how long my PageRank was limboing in Google purgatory, but my big jump tells me it was a while. The Future PageRank Tool basically queries a whole bunch of Google data centers for you, so it’s like the Google Toolbar, only reliable. Had I used it a few months ago, I may had saved myself some counseling. :)

By the way, for those of you who don’t use the SearchStatus plugin for SEO, it’s basically the Google and Alexa toolbars combined and on steroids. If you’re still wallowing in IE sadness, the SearchStatus plugin is yet another reason to use Firefox (YAR2UFF) . Perhaps I’ll highlight the many merits of SearchStatus in some future post, but for now you’ll just have to take my word for it.

So wanna know if Google loves you after all? Check out Future PageRank. If it turns out that Google really does hate you, then take comfort in the fact that “Future PageRank Tool” is somewhat of a misnomer; it really only sees the present. There’s still hope for you and Google in the future, and even there weren’t, MSN isn’t that bad… Lots of people like butterflies… We call them “lepidopterologists”, or more comonly, “weirdos”.

OK, I’m not particularly evil, but I am officially looking for full-time work. What kind of work am I interested in? Well, I’m a business strategist and entrepreneur with strong technical skills and a penchant for Internet business, so anything along at least some of those lines. :)

In addition to any full-time employment that I may find (or that may find me), I’ll be doing contract and consulting work in the evenings and weekends. I’ll post some of the specific kinds of contract work I can do later, but until then, there’s a lot more information about me on my LinkedIn profile.

If you have any leads, especially as they relate to full-time work, please let me know. You can also help just by spreading the word.