I probably shouldn’t even be posting negatively on this topic at the moment but I’ve been working with some online marketing services lately which all seem to basically be over priced web hosts that suggest they can drive uncanny amounts of traffic to the content you create. This is all usually just a big search engine optimization and leveraging service which nearly anyone profiting off the internet wants but what really gets me, maybe it’s because I spend a lot of time doing web development, is that most all these services skip Step 1! I know this just goes right over the heads of everyone utilizing those services but isn’t it logical that the very first step, and often most critical one when approaching SEO, be to ensure that the source code of the content you are trying to drive traffic to is 100% understandable and obviously focused on the topic at hand to the search engines and other network web services that provide the traffic?

Here’s the deal: You can obviously create a single page on a (dot)com and toss in a bunch of widgets, gadgets, bookmarking tools, a ton of text, and affiliate links to associated amazon (or other profitable) products focusing on key words within the context of your post you believe are at least generally focused to the topic you’re promoting (generally about a product you are directly selling) and then push a link to your (dot)com out to all the social bookmarking sites and your facebook, twitter, and wherever else you have 20,000 people you don’t know following you who will see it. Just as a precautionary step you can have all your 20 online friends with active blogs and healthy page ranks and traffic throw your new URL in their blogroll for a short period of time. Yeah, it works to generate traffic that way. Probably not for long since search engines are always being abused as soon as people figure out what “the Google” is looking for. But for now it works. I get it. Why in the heck does that mean you can completely ignore all the base line rules about creating VALID INTERNET CONTENT!

Please.. Someone tell me why it’s OK to create content that does not follow any kind of standard? I’m not even talking about the common reference to accessibility: physical handicaps which, by the way, if your blind I really feel for ya. Bitch at me if you want to but I catch up on all those long blog posts and some documentation on long drives by queuing it all up and letting it rip with a screen reader. The percentage of sites that are even mildly accessible in that manner is a very very very small percentage (yet this site isn’t even very easy to navigate with a screen reader either so I can’t complain much).

OK, everyone has stopped reading by now. I’m done complaining. I’m going to go back to coding and continue to complain to myself about how all the SEO tricks in the world are nothing more then short term tricks while creating clear, valid content that search engines can actually understand guarantees long term results.

Step 1: Create content that follows internet communication standards so all the other web services (including search engines) can accurately decipher your content.

So why do all these marketing services ignore step 1?

Internet Marketing Service Provider: www.quansite.com
Validating a random page created in quansite: w3c-validate:Tribalseduction.com

Since I switched to contract/freelance work I have spent a lot more time coding then I have in the past. Aside from wanting to polish up my personal projects and picking up more freelance jobs I really think It’s because I’m getting a lot better at it. When I first started to learn how to write software I spent a heck of a lot of time staring at lines of code and as I got better at actually writing it I ended up producing tons more. Now that I’ve been writing PHP apps for 10 years I have to say that I finally feel extremely efficient at it. After spending a little time working out the logic of an application I can now code as if I were writing a book. It’s a really good feeling that is only making me enjoy coding applications more. With that said I’ve taken it on myself to re-write the largest piece of software I’ve created to date and I’m loving it. It’s an all encompassing insurance sales and support system. It combines so many technologies and so much business logic that it never gets boring. It’s also entertaining to look at huge chunks of old code and laugh a bit before easily refactoring it to be much more efficient with significantly less code, or even better is to do that to large chunks of logic spanning across multiple classes. It continues to amaze me that even though I’ve been writing efficient, functional, well documented object orientated PHP for quite some time I can still go back to something I coded even just a year or two ago and ‘make it better’. I’ve always been able to look back and see that I’ve been getting better at coding but I don’t feel that it’s ever ‘clicked’ as well as it does now. I couldn’t tell you what threshold I had to cross to get here but I sure can say that I love what I do more then I ever have and I’m damn good at it!

Now if I could just make one of those silly simple $1 apps that sells a million subscriptions so I could just keep coding as I am forever without having to concern myself with actually getting paid for it. I will be coding for the rest of my life regardless of whether it’s what I do to pay the bills.

Zippy and I headed out to Fountain Colorado to welcome my bother Matt home from his 3rd tour of Iraq. The boss let us out of work early on Friday so we got to hit the road around 2:30. We didn’t waste any time getting out there and drove straight across Kansas until we got burnt out and took a nap in the car. I woke up behind the wheel and got us to Matt & Crystal’s house around 9:am on Saturday. It didn’t take any time at all for us to pack up and head out on our Colorado Adventures! After loading up the BBQ in Matt’s truck and a quick stop at Safeway we jumped into the Labor Day weekend traffic and found an awesome spot at the Garden of the Gods. If you’ve never been there, the Garden of the Gods is a sight to be seen. Lots of very large boulders, rock formations and sheer cliffs with trails weaving in and out of them. It’s a great place.

There are TONS of pictures.
My Flickr
Crystal & Matt’s Flickr
Zippy’s Flickr

I love em all. After we ate lunch and wandered around Garden of the Gods for a while Matt decided to take us up to the summit of Pikes Peak! Crystal wasn’t a fan of the ride up, especially after it started sleeting/snowing/raining. I thought the ride up was great and with weather brewing the summit was crazy. ‘Snow’ flying everywhere, electricity brewing. If you lifted your hands up in the air static electricity would start to crackle on your own hair! I thought that was just a trip. It felt strange. Some of the girls could get their whole head of hair to start crackling with electricity. After an hour or so up at the top of Pikes Peak we idled our way back down in 1st gear like we were told to do.

We went back to Matt & Crystal’s house after Pikes Peak to sit around a nice little camp fire in their back yard. They still had some of the wood we left from our last snowboarding trip! Actually, they still had our Skis and Snowboards that we accidentally left behind last time as well. lol. We sat around a fire all Saturday night talking and catching up on sharing the good times over a few beers. It was a great time, as always.

Sunday morning we woke up, made another trip to Safeway and headed for the Royal Gorge Bridge! Again, if your scared of hieghts then a walk/drive across that thing probably isn’t going to put you in a good mindset. It’s the highest suspension bridge in the world. Zippy and I really enjoyed ourselves n’ spent quite a bit of time sitting on the back of Matt’s truck drinking a couple beers simply taking in the view. Most all of Colorado is really amazing to look at. Matt, Crystal and Liam sought out the petting zoo while Zippy and I enjoyed the sites. We initially drove across the old bridge n’ parked on the other side. Eventually all of us walked back over the bridge and snapped a bunch of pictures. Matt, Zippy and I ended up going back across the bridge yet again to get the truck. This time Zippy and I sat in the bed of the truck for a better view as Matt drove the truck across the bridge navigating pedestrians.

When we packed up and left there I was beat. 100% beat. My body hit the pause button and I immediately crashed out at some early hour while Zippy, Matt and Crystal sat up chuckling at me n’ trying to get me to wake up to the smell of beer. No such luck. I had too much fun and burnt too much energy. It was a great time. It was sad to leave Monday morning after breakfast.

Matt, it’s great that you made it back safe! Now fire up the grill!
Crystal, I think we need another excuse to immediately return to Chicago!
Liam, You’ll start remembering Zippy and I pretty soon!

Thank you guys! I can’t wait for next time and if we are lucky Chris will get stationed out there with ya! That’d be quite the calling!

Check out all the pics on my Flickr.

Zippy, Morgan, Garf, Blayne, Paul & I camped at Harry S. Truman State Park in Warsaw, Missouri last weekend and the weather could not have been any better. We didn’t go swimming (mid 70’s during the day) but we made up for that by spending twice as much time in front of the fire. Immediately after arriving we setup camp and went biking. That area of Missouri is pretty hilly so the biking was a bit of a pain but you could really haul ass on the way back down.

I bet we got the best camp site in the entire grounds. It was actually a double site, we just got both at the very end of a nice little private loop with our own trail down to the lake.

The lake looked great as usual.

After biking for a while and breaking into the beers, Zippy was quick to wrap one of the picnic tables in cellophane effectively turning it into a “Tie Dye Workstation”.

She even Tie Dyed my Genius shirt. lol.

I’m confident everyone had a great time. I think everyone except Paul slept great too. (Note: Paul says sleeping in a Honda Element is not advised) When we all got up Sunday morning we hung out lazily as Zippy produced an awesome breakfast over the fire.

It wasn’t until 2:pm (which happens to be check out time) when we actually got motivated enough to break camp and head out. Paul brilliantly suggested we all take a trip to Warsaw for some good eats and a great view. Unfortunately the restaurant in Warsaw was closed so we took a bigger step and went down to Lake Ozark to eat at JB Hooks. Definitely a killer idea. JB Hooks has a patio with a 14 mile panoramic view of the Lake of the Ozark shorefront.

Our Trip:

View Larger Map

Blayne! I hope you enjoyed your short stay in Missouri. Remember: “You’re always welcome in Missouri State Parks” hehe. We’ll definitely make our way out to Oregon sooner or later.

Garf and I canoed from Sparrowfoot in Clinton, MO to the Warsaw dam. Garf says it was a 30something mile trek on non flowing water. Check out all the pictures on my Truman Lake Canoe Trip Flickr Photoset.

We started out late Friday night and canoed until it got dark. We didn’t figure out how to sign up for one of the very few proper camp grounds so we ended up sleeping on some land owned by the Missouri Corpse of Engineers from 1:am to 6:am. We woke up and broke camp when the sun came up. As Garf said it, “A parade of fishermen came through”. There was a large bass competition that morning originating in Bucksaw.

Although we didn’t have any flowing water to help move us along, the whole trip was pretty leisurely. Only in a few spots where the water got really choppy did we put any real effort into paddling. We didn’t have to pack much in the way of food or drinks becuase there are Marinas all over the place. We stopped at Bucksaw Marina for breakfast, then Long Shoal for lunch. We paddled for about 7 hours the night before to get to our camp site. Then roughly 9 hours to get from Bucksaw (where we camped) to the Dam. We could have accomplished the whole trip in one day but it was nice taking it slow.

The weather was absolutely perfect. Highs of 77 with lows in the mid 50’s at night. Perfect for water and camping.

You can’t ignore the fact that this part of Truman only really exists becuase of flooding. There are trees everywhere. When the water is high and you don’t know the channels you can really destroy a boat out here.

Hwy 7

Leaving Long Shoal. The people here thought we were nuts for canoeing that distance. It doesn’t really seem like anyone does much canoeing/camping in Missouri. As odd as it sounds we couldn’t find a single person that had even heard of someone paddling from Sparrowfoot to the Dam.

We stopped a few times to let things dry out. The water was pretty choppy in spots. We also needed to stretch a lot.

We portaged the canoe across the dam. Our next mission is to start at the Dam where we left off and head on down the river. It should be a ton easier and quicker with the flowing water! This is where it came to an end.

– Insert Rant about Missouri –
Missouri really does not facilitate camping. Missouri conservation and corpse land is apparently only for hunters. Missouri has tons of conservation land and corpse land but you can’t camp on any of it for any reason. The only places you can camp are the commercial camp sites and there really aren’t as many of those around as you’d think.