Lately I have been wondering how to increase traffic to this blog. I would also like to increase traffic to my YouTube channel and so I ran a little experiment. First I have to give credit to my wife who gave me the idea. She said that I can't just post stuff. I have to share the posting with as many people as possible. When you do that via e-mail, it is called SPAM. When you do it on social media sites like Facebook, it is considered normal.
I wanted to share a business article on LinkedIn and so I looked through my most recent posts. I could have chosen a video game review but I don't think that would have been received well. LinkedIn is just not the right audience for that. I also wanted to see if I could drive traffic to my YouTube channel at the same time. So I created a simple teaser that said something like, "Thinking of ditching your career and becoming the next YouTube celebrity?" I then provided a link to my "How to Make Money on YouTube" post. It fit the criteria I wanted as being business like as well as referencing my YouTube videos all over the place.
Traffic to my blog skyrocketed compared to normal. I had five times as many regular viewers for that post on the first day and three times as many the next. Furthermore I had people contact me via LinkedIn that I hadn't communicated with in years. I have to say that the first goal of getting more viewers to read my blog was a huge success.
With everyone reading an article about YouTube I thought that there would be a huge jump in video watching as well. Surprisingly the number of views for both of my videos never increased. That seems pretty strange because I usually get quite a few views of my Goblin Valley video every day with no promotion on my part. Nope, for the past 3 days the count has remained constant.
I also thought that my LinkedIn associates would see my blog and start looking at some of the other articles I have written. Nope, the only article being viewed is the one that I referenced in my post to LinkedIn.
I learned a lot with this little experiment. From now on, when I create a business post, I will make sure to post it to LinkedIn. It will help drive traffic to at least one article. It also beats doing nothing. Now if I could only figure out how to drive millions of views to my YouTube channel.
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Saturday, February 23, 2019
My New Favorite Website
This coming week I will be heading out on another adventure. My son reserved a yurt (a very sturdy tent with a wood-burning stove and bunk beds) in the Uinta Mountains and we will be skiing to it. Once we get there, we will have a nice dinner and a relaxing evening. Then the next day we will hike around to some peaks in the area and ski down them. It should make for a fabulous adventure assuming the avalanche danger doesn't thwart us from making the trip.
My son came over this evening so we could plan out some details for the trip. I pulled out my map of the area and discovered that the scale of my map is just too small for where we will going. I wanted a much larger map with more detail and so my son sent me to CalTopo.com. Then I just zoomed in on the map until I had the right detail for the area we will be visiting.
Next I added a marker on the map with the GPS coordinates of where the yurt is located. That took a bit of conversion as I had degrees, minutes, and seconds but CalTopo wants just degrees with following decimals. Fortunately that just took a quick change in the configuration and I had my marker and label.
I wanted to print a very detailed map and so I decided 2 maps would be helpful. One for the hike in and the second for the mountains to the south of the yurt. The second map will be for our skiing. I easily created a PDF of both maps and then printed them on my color laser printer.
Right now I can just put the maps in a zip-loc bag and not worry about them getting wet. In the future I would like to have maps printed on waterproof paper and so I did a quick Internet search. Sure enough, there are a number of sources for the stuff and so I ordered 500 sheets of "Rite in the Rain" paper. I had a $20 gift card for the online store I used and so it only cost me another $50. It should pay for itself in no time at all because I use a lot of maps for my numerous adventures.
I'm pretty excited about the upcoming trip and being able to find detailed information is very helpful. That makes CalTopo.com my new favorite website.
My son came over this evening so we could plan out some details for the trip. I pulled out my map of the area and discovered that the scale of my map is just too small for where we will going. I wanted a much larger map with more detail and so my son sent me to CalTopo.com. Then I just zoomed in on the map until I had the right detail for the area we will be visiting.
Next I added a marker on the map with the GPS coordinates of where the yurt is located. That took a bit of conversion as I had degrees, minutes, and seconds but CalTopo wants just degrees with following decimals. Fortunately that just took a quick change in the configuration and I had my marker and label.
I wanted to print a very detailed map and so I decided 2 maps would be helpful. One for the hike in and the second for the mountains to the south of the yurt. The second map will be for our skiing. I easily created a PDF of both maps and then printed them on my color laser printer.
Right now I can just put the maps in a zip-loc bag and not worry about them getting wet. In the future I would like to have maps printed on waterproof paper and so I did a quick Internet search. Sure enough, there are a number of sources for the stuff and so I ordered 500 sheets of "Rite in the Rain" paper. I had a $20 gift card for the online store I used and so it only cost me another $50. It should pay for itself in no time at all because I use a lot of maps for my numerous adventures.
I'm pretty excited about the upcoming trip and being able to find detailed information is very helpful. That makes CalTopo.com my new favorite website.
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Hackery vs. Mastery
Several years ago I had the pleasure of having lunch with Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Canonical which is the company that develops Ubuntu Linux. The conversation turned towards "Hackery vs. Mastery." Sometimes the forms of the word "hack" are positive and sometimes they are negative. When someone hacks your bank account and steals all of your money, it is a bad word. When you work to hack together a good solution to a complex problem, it is a positive word.
Our discussion put the word "hack" in a negative light as we discussed how sometimes people will hack together a solution instead of taking the time to do things correctly. A short while after our discussion, I had the chance to work with another group in our company that is famous for hacking together solutions. They prided themselves on building software quickly. Unfortunately none of their projects ever had to last very long and so as our team worked with them, we had to help them move from hackery to mastery.
It is very easy to throw together software proof of concepts that serve as a model for how the finished product should work. It is quite another to actually build production software that can hold up to the pressures of large-scale use. Think about something as simple as a database. While you are building a proof of concept, you don't have to worry about data loss. If something goes wrong, just reinitialize everything and keep testing. Put that same system into production and you need to make sure you are taking regular backups. If it is important data, you may want to leverage replication to a standby database that can be switched at a moment's notice. Then if something goes wrong, you quickly swap out the dead server for one that has all of the data and is still running.
Sometimes mastery can mean extending the development time significantly. This group I had the pleasure of working with didn't comprehend that. They couldn't understand why other parts of the company took so much longer to do the same thing they could do so quickly. Once we started educating them about all of the possible scenarios and what could go wrong, they discounted our advice. Then we moved from prototype to production and they saw that some of the concerns we had actually had merit. It only took one or two issues to arise before they started looking at things the way we saw them. Ultimately we all became software developers from the experience and that is part of the path towards mastery.
Our discussion put the word "hack" in a negative light as we discussed how sometimes people will hack together a solution instead of taking the time to do things correctly. A short while after our discussion, I had the chance to work with another group in our company that is famous for hacking together solutions. They prided themselves on building software quickly. Unfortunately none of their projects ever had to last very long and so as our team worked with them, we had to help them move from hackery to mastery.
It is very easy to throw together software proof of concepts that serve as a model for how the finished product should work. It is quite another to actually build production software that can hold up to the pressures of large-scale use. Think about something as simple as a database. While you are building a proof of concept, you don't have to worry about data loss. If something goes wrong, just reinitialize everything and keep testing. Put that same system into production and you need to make sure you are taking regular backups. If it is important data, you may want to leverage replication to a standby database that can be switched at a moment's notice. Then if something goes wrong, you quickly swap out the dead server for one that has all of the data and is still running.
Sometimes mastery can mean extending the development time significantly. This group I had the pleasure of working with didn't comprehend that. They couldn't understand why other parts of the company took so much longer to do the same thing they could do so quickly. Once we started educating them about all of the possible scenarios and what could go wrong, they discounted our advice. Then we moved from prototype to production and they saw that some of the concerns we had actually had merit. It only took one or two issues to arise before they started looking at things the way we saw them. Ultimately we all became software developers from the experience and that is part of the path towards mastery.
Monday, February 18, 2019
My Time as an Expert Witness
Quite a few years ago I had my first experience as an expert witness. My grandfather had a law practice at the time and needed help with one of his criminal defenses. His client had been caught cheating on his wife and so naturally the wife kicked him out. Afterwards she went through his computer looking for any other activities that she might be able to use in a court of law to make his life miserable. She found a lot of pornography and some of it happened to be illegal. There were 7 images that could put my grandfather's client in jail.
I had the job of coming up with a plausible defense. Fortunately I had an idea of how to create reasonable doubt. The guy's soon-to-be former wife taught computer science at a major university. She had the knowledge of how to change the computer's clock, download an illegal image or two, and then change the clock back to the current time. All I needed to do was prove that the poor guy got framed. I never needed to look at any of the images which worked for me as I never wanted to see them. I just looked at the creation timestamps for each of the images in question. The 7 bad images all appeared on the computer within a 2-minute period and had creation dates that didn't match when the husband would have been at home. In fact, he would have been at work and that information could be verified through his employer.
Basically the wife had framed her husband but didn't do that great a job because she set the computer's clock to a time when he wasn't at home. I had my defense all prepared and was ready to go to court and help this poor guy. Then I learned that nobody ever wants to go to court and so my grandfather's client has struck a deal with the prosecutor and I was no longer needed.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago and my wife came to me with a similar case. My wife works for a local law firm and I need to be careful about privacy so I can't go into too many details. This time I would be working for the wife that discovered her husband cheating on her. This time the wife is pretty sure her soon-to-be ex-husband likes to view pornography and wanted someone to check if there might be any illegal images on his computer.
I have to be honest, I really dreaded this second case. I am not someone that views pornography and know how addictive it can be. I didn't want to have to spend my time going through movies or images and so I had a plan to simply identify questionable content and work with the wife to have her determine if it is legal or not.
The computer arrived at my house and I sat down with my wife to start going through it. I pulled out my video camera and directed it to the screen so that should I need to have anyone review the steps I took, I would have a visual record. I turned the computer on and it wouldn't boot. I ran through a few troubleshooting tips but ultimately couldn't get the computer to come up enough to do anything useful. Ultimately the wife will have to have someone get the computer in working order before anyone can search for illegal images.
I doubt I would have found anything of interest on this latest computer. For my first case, Internet speeds were slow and so people would collect images on their hard disks. Now those speeds have increased and it is easy to watch a streaming movies (clean or otherwise). About the best I could have hoped for is going through the browser history and seeing which websites have been visited. Of course, that assumes that the husband wasn't smart enough to use the incognito mode. Times certainly have changed.
I had the job of coming up with a plausible defense. Fortunately I had an idea of how to create reasonable doubt. The guy's soon-to-be former wife taught computer science at a major university. She had the knowledge of how to change the computer's clock, download an illegal image or two, and then change the clock back to the current time. All I needed to do was prove that the poor guy got framed. I never needed to look at any of the images which worked for me as I never wanted to see them. I just looked at the creation timestamps for each of the images in question. The 7 bad images all appeared on the computer within a 2-minute period and had creation dates that didn't match when the husband would have been at home. In fact, he would have been at work and that information could be verified through his employer.
Basically the wife had framed her husband but didn't do that great a job because she set the computer's clock to a time when he wasn't at home. I had my defense all prepared and was ready to go to court and help this poor guy. Then I learned that nobody ever wants to go to court and so my grandfather's client has struck a deal with the prosecutor and I was no longer needed.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago and my wife came to me with a similar case. My wife works for a local law firm and I need to be careful about privacy so I can't go into too many details. This time I would be working for the wife that discovered her husband cheating on her. This time the wife is pretty sure her soon-to-be ex-husband likes to view pornography and wanted someone to check if there might be any illegal images on his computer.
I have to be honest, I really dreaded this second case. I am not someone that views pornography and know how addictive it can be. I didn't want to have to spend my time going through movies or images and so I had a plan to simply identify questionable content and work with the wife to have her determine if it is legal or not.
The computer arrived at my house and I sat down with my wife to start going through it. I pulled out my video camera and directed it to the screen so that should I need to have anyone review the steps I took, I would have a visual record. I turned the computer on and it wouldn't boot. I ran through a few troubleshooting tips but ultimately couldn't get the computer to come up enough to do anything useful. Ultimately the wife will have to have someone get the computer in working order before anyone can search for illegal images.
I doubt I would have found anything of interest on this latest computer. For my first case, Internet speeds were slow and so people would collect images on their hard disks. Now those speeds have increased and it is easy to watch a streaming movies (clean or otherwise). About the best I could have hoped for is going through the browser history and seeing which websites have been visited. Of course, that assumes that the husband wasn't smart enough to use the incognito mode. Times certainly have changed.
Thursday, February 7, 2019
Getting Better at Video Games
So you want to get better at video games? A lot of people do. The Wall Street Journal ran an article back in July about parents paying for tutors so their kids can get better at Fortnite, a popular video game. When I started playing Red Dead Redemption 2, I did really well at the beginning but then found myself struggling. I wanted to get better and so I thought I would offer a few tips from someone that works with video games every single day.
Tip 1: Practice
Anyone who has ever learned to play a musical instrument knows the importance of daily practice. Since I have started learning to play the guitar, I try to practice for an hour a day. I am not always successful and can tell when I have taken a day off. The same applies to video games. If you want to get good at them, you need to make sure you are playing regularly. Unfortunately this may cut into other activities and so you will need to decided how good you want to get. I would much rather be an excellent skier and just a mediocre video game player and so I adjust my priorities accordingly. If you are still in school, I would place education over game-playing skill. You may disagree but you will be better off in the long run.
Tip 2: Watch other Players
Let's assume that you have decided to set aside one hour per day to practice video games. That is an appropriate amount as it acts to relieve stress and hone your problem-solving skills. Don't feel compelled to just play games in the hopes that you will get better. There are a number of forums such as YouTube and Twitch that have countless hours of game-play video.
You have your own style of play and will continue to do the same things over and over. By watching other players, you will pick up tips and tricks that you have not thought about. I suggest watching games that you have completed so you don't spoil some of the secrets in your current game unless it is repetitive like Fortnite. As you go through sections that you have completed you will find yourself wondering why you didn't think to try something while you were playing the game. Perhaps there is a secret room you missed or you used a noisy gun when a silent crossbow would have been a better weapon to take out a guard.
Watching other people play a game you are familiar with is a great way to help you develop new strategies for different games. If your game of choice is something like Fortnite, it will help you see what you might be doing wrong and how to survive longer.
Tip 3: Explore Trophies and Achievements
I used to not worry about trophies (on the PlayStation consoles) or achievements (on the XBox consoles). Then I had a coworker talk about how it changed up his play and made the game more enjoyable. I decided to take his advice and looked at the various trophies available for the games I play. Sometimes you will receive a trophy simply for changing out the various weapons in the game. I am one of those people that prefers a sniper rifle to a shotgun and so I rarely pick one up. Trying to get different trophies has encouraged me to try the various weapons in shooter games and I find myself becoming a better player overall. Don't get me wrong, I still prefer taking someone down from a distance but sometimes you don't have that option and if you find yourself in close-combat situations, it is important to know different fighting styles.
Trophies and achievements will also having you looking around for other parts of the game you may have not considered. There is one trophy in the Uncharted games where you just need to wade through a pool on an abandoned cruise ship. Knowing about the trophy had me wandering through various parts of the ship I might have ignored. Needless to say I found a bunch of different collectables and improved as a player.
Tip 4: Play other Games
I would have to say that my favorite type of video game is the action/adventure genre. I still play other types of games though. Earlier I mentioned Uncharted and that is one game where you are sometimes shooting bad guys, other times solving puzzles, and maybe even driving cars. That could be why I like it as I can get bored with the same thing over and over. There are a number of specialized games that can help. If you find yourself having trouble evading bad guys in a car, try picking up a driving game for your favorite console (Gran Turismo on the PlayStation or Forza on the XBox).
Someone in the video game industry recommending you to play different games my come off as a bit self-serving. After all, the more games you buy, the larger my bonus at the end of the year. However it isn't necessary to buy a bunch of different games. There are a number of places to borrow games including public libraries and close friends. Even if you don't plan to complete the game, borrow one every once and a while just to get a feel for what else is out there and see if it doesn't help you improve your video game skills.
I always try to change up the genres of video games I play to keep things fresh. While there are 6 Uncharted games that you can play (including 1 on the Vita), I have never played all 6 in a row. In fact, I have only completed 5 of the 6 as I am playing other games before moving onto the last one. I also probably should have changed genres after completing Far Cry 5 and moving onto Red Dead Redemption 2. I am getting a little bored with Red Dead Redemption 2 even though it is a great game and I loved the original so much.
Conclusion
There are probably a few other tips for helping you improve you video game playing skills. These are the ones that have worked for me. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to leave a comment. It may help someone trying to get better.
Tip 1: Practice
Anyone who has ever learned to play a musical instrument knows the importance of daily practice. Since I have started learning to play the guitar, I try to practice for an hour a day. I am not always successful and can tell when I have taken a day off. The same applies to video games. If you want to get good at them, you need to make sure you are playing regularly. Unfortunately this may cut into other activities and so you will need to decided how good you want to get. I would much rather be an excellent skier and just a mediocre video game player and so I adjust my priorities accordingly. If you are still in school, I would place education over game-playing skill. You may disagree but you will be better off in the long run.
Tip 2: Watch other Players
Let's assume that you have decided to set aside one hour per day to practice video games. That is an appropriate amount as it acts to relieve stress and hone your problem-solving skills. Don't feel compelled to just play games in the hopes that you will get better. There are a number of forums such as YouTube and Twitch that have countless hours of game-play video.
You have your own style of play and will continue to do the same things over and over. By watching other players, you will pick up tips and tricks that you have not thought about. I suggest watching games that you have completed so you don't spoil some of the secrets in your current game unless it is repetitive like Fortnite. As you go through sections that you have completed you will find yourself wondering why you didn't think to try something while you were playing the game. Perhaps there is a secret room you missed or you used a noisy gun when a silent crossbow would have been a better weapon to take out a guard.
Watching other people play a game you are familiar with is a great way to help you develop new strategies for different games. If your game of choice is something like Fortnite, it will help you see what you might be doing wrong and how to survive longer.
Tip 3: Explore Trophies and Achievements
I used to not worry about trophies (on the PlayStation consoles) or achievements (on the XBox consoles). Then I had a coworker talk about how it changed up his play and made the game more enjoyable. I decided to take his advice and looked at the various trophies available for the games I play. Sometimes you will receive a trophy simply for changing out the various weapons in the game. I am one of those people that prefers a sniper rifle to a shotgun and so I rarely pick one up. Trying to get different trophies has encouraged me to try the various weapons in shooter games and I find myself becoming a better player overall. Don't get me wrong, I still prefer taking someone down from a distance but sometimes you don't have that option and if you find yourself in close-combat situations, it is important to know different fighting styles.
Trophies and achievements will also having you looking around for other parts of the game you may have not considered. There is one trophy in the Uncharted games where you just need to wade through a pool on an abandoned cruise ship. Knowing about the trophy had me wandering through various parts of the ship I might have ignored. Needless to say I found a bunch of different collectables and improved as a player.
Tip 4: Play other Games
I would have to say that my favorite type of video game is the action/adventure genre. I still play other types of games though. Earlier I mentioned Uncharted and that is one game where you are sometimes shooting bad guys, other times solving puzzles, and maybe even driving cars. That could be why I like it as I can get bored with the same thing over and over. There are a number of specialized games that can help. If you find yourself having trouble evading bad guys in a car, try picking up a driving game for your favorite console (Gran Turismo on the PlayStation or Forza on the XBox).
Someone in the video game industry recommending you to play different games my come off as a bit self-serving. After all, the more games you buy, the larger my bonus at the end of the year. However it isn't necessary to buy a bunch of different games. There are a number of places to borrow games including public libraries and close friends. Even if you don't plan to complete the game, borrow one every once and a while just to get a feel for what else is out there and see if it doesn't help you improve your video game skills.
I always try to change up the genres of video games I play to keep things fresh. While there are 6 Uncharted games that you can play (including 1 on the Vita), I have never played all 6 in a row. In fact, I have only completed 5 of the 6 as I am playing other games before moving onto the last one. I also probably should have changed genres after completing Far Cry 5 and moving onto Red Dead Redemption 2. I am getting a little bored with Red Dead Redemption 2 even though it is a great game and I loved the original so much.
Conclusion
There are probably a few other tips for helping you improve you video game playing skills. These are the ones that have worked for me. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to leave a comment. It may help someone trying to get better.
Friday, February 1, 2019
Lengthening My Blog Posts
This year I have a goal to increase my social network following. It is something I have not worried about since I started blogging back in 2009. So why does it matter now? Well, I would like to eventually write an article on increasing blog followers and YouTube video viewers. Given my current statistics for this blog and my YouTube channel, nobody is going to believe I know anything about that topic. Truth be told, I don't. At least not yet and so this year is going to be an experiment on how to change that.
In doing a bit of research on the Internet I have come across a number of articles talking about the importance of writing lengthy blog articles (1000 to 1500 words). Of course the content is key and just adding words to make an article longer isn't going to help. However longer articles are more likely to be referenced in other blogs which adds to the number of viewers. There are some exceptions but that is how worthless lottery tickets get purchased as people believe they are an exception and not the norm.
After reading about longer articles, I thought I would experiment and made sure my last article came in at over 1000 words. I actually tried to make it 1500 but ran out of time (it takes a long time to write 1500 words). Then I sat tight and watched how many more views that article receives vs. some of my others. I wish I could say that the number of readers increased significantly. It started out strong but now doesn't seem to be getting any more traffic than a short posting. I'm not sure if that is because of the content or if all of my blog posts need to be more lengthy before other readers start to notice. Both are probably a factor and so I will need to do more work before I can draw any significant conclusions.
The only downside with writing longer articles is that I have to be a lot more organized. I also have to come up with topics that matter to people. In the past I could sit down at the airport and just write about some new technology I worked with during the week. That is still possible but I will need to take a bit more time and discuss the topics more thoroughly.
Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think. Should I keep my posts to around 300 words or lengthen them to over 1000?
In doing a bit of research on the Internet I have come across a number of articles talking about the importance of writing lengthy blog articles (1000 to 1500 words). Of course the content is key and just adding words to make an article longer isn't going to help. However longer articles are more likely to be referenced in other blogs which adds to the number of viewers. There are some exceptions but that is how worthless lottery tickets get purchased as people believe they are an exception and not the norm.
After reading about longer articles, I thought I would experiment and made sure my last article came in at over 1000 words. I actually tried to make it 1500 but ran out of time (it takes a long time to write 1500 words). Then I sat tight and watched how many more views that article receives vs. some of my others. I wish I could say that the number of readers increased significantly. It started out strong but now doesn't seem to be getting any more traffic than a short posting. I'm not sure if that is because of the content or if all of my blog posts need to be more lengthy before other readers start to notice. Both are probably a factor and so I will need to do more work before I can draw any significant conclusions.
The only downside with writing longer articles is that I have to be a lot more organized. I also have to come up with topics that matter to people. In the past I could sit down at the airport and just write about some new technology I worked with during the week. That is still possible but I will need to take a bit more time and discuss the topics more thoroughly.
Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think. Should I keep my posts to around 300 words or lengthen them to over 1000?
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