Our latest responsive design work at hi there. We’re getting into the mobile et. al. game, pretty much have to. All design should be responsive moving forward, really.
Donut Peaches?
“Sir these peaches are deformed.”
“Go talk to Marketing, tell em to call them fuckin donut peaches or something, I don’t know. I want these peaches sold, goddammit.”
We can’t even squeeze a spray bottle trigger a few times now?
How long is a quick minute?
SKEED!
iPhone4: A day in review
So I’ve had my iPhone4 for a day, up from a 3G, and here’s my first impressions :
1. Speed
What I was waiting for, it’s super-fast compared to my 3G. Worth the money just for that.
2. Screen
Is kind of unbelievable. It looks like the screen is right on the glass, everything looks crazy-good and text is just awesome.
3. Camera
Is a major improvement. The 3GS was also a big improvement over the 3G though, too. I know it’s a phone but it’s nice to have a camera in your pocket all the time, and the camera on my 3G was just to big of a piece of crap to be worth trying to capture half the shots I wanted. HD video is also really good, especially in good lighting. Definitely nice to have.
4. The Handset Itself
The phone itself is pretty sweet, high-quality looking and feeling, feels really thin to hold. I did like the way my old phone felt in my hand, but this is neat because it’s new.
5. Antennagate
No issues yet. I can pretty easily get mine to lose 1-2 bars by holding it “wrong”. Had it down to one bar and tested data speed on 3G and it was fine, so I dunno. Next call I make that’s not work-related I’m going to try to get it back to one bar and see how it goes, probably fine.
6. Battery
Battery life is noticeably better, even though I thought it was fine before (got a full day out of it with 6 hours usage). Used the phone all day including usual talk time and it’s still over half charged.
Nothing new really, it’s a pretty awesome phone.
9 Tumblr SEO Tips
Tumblr claims to be “Google optimized” and “as friendly as can be to search engines”, which are two different things. Tumblr is search engine friendly but it isn’t really that well optimized. And that’s ok, the way it’s designed isn’t meant to be. If you’re creating a blog for something where search engine optimization is really important, that is you’re trying to compete in search results on some topic, then you should go with a more flexible (therefore more complex) platform like WordPress. That being said, Tumblr is awesome, so here’s some tips for improving your SEO on Tumblr.
Roughly ordered by importance. Different themes may vary.
1. Optimize your page titles
Reverse the order in which titles are displayed on individual post pages, so that the post title displays first, followed by your blog name, i.e. “SEO for Tumblr | porcelain duck” is done with the following:
<title>{block:SearchPage}, Search results for: {SearchQuery}{/block:SearchPage}{block:PostSummary}{PostSummary} | {/block:PostSummary}{Title}</title>
2. Make your post titles h1’s
Find the {block:Text} area and change the <div class=”title”> to <h1>:
{block:Title}<h1>{Title}</h1>{/block:Title}
You’ll probably need to edit the CSS for your h1 (or create one), just copy the .title class.
3. Make your post titles permalinks to the post
We just made the post titles h1’s, so now make the {Title} a link that points to {Permalink} like so:
{block:Title}<h1><a href=”{Permalink}”>{Title}</a></h1>{/block:Title}
This is also good usability, lots of blogs link the title to the post page. You can edit the CSS so it doesn’t change the appearance, and add a “hover” state.
4. Set custom posts URLs
This one’s easy: when creating a new post you can set a custom URL in the right sidebar options. Tumblr automatically replaces spaces with hyphens for you.
5. Use heading tags in your posts
Go into the HTML editor to use heading tags <h2>, <h3> for headings in a post if it makes sense for your content. Style these to your liking using CSS.
6. Link to yourself in the footer
Add a link in the footer* with your site name that’s linked back to your blog, e.g.
<a href=”http://www.yourblog.com”>Your Blog Name</a>
*Most sites have some stuff in the footer, it just feels right. Studies by Google on their homepage actually showed that visitors didn’t realize the page was loaded without the copyright text in the footer.
7. XML sitemaps
Tumblr automatically generates XML sitemaps of your blog located at yourblog.tumblr.com/sitemap1.xml
You can add this sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools to ensure Google crawls all your pages, plus you can see other useful info, crawl errors, etc.
8. Add image alt tags
Use relevant, descriptive image alt tags for each photo you upload, for example, add something like this using the HTML editor:
<img src=”tumblr/somewhere/bacon-infused-burger.jpg” alt=”bacon infused burger” />
Also good for accessibility and standards compliance.
9. Consider making photo posts “text” posts
Unlike photo posts, text posts have headings and title tags which are important. But it’s a matter of personal preference, if you like the the photo post slideshow viewer for multiple pics, and/or the lack of title, go for it. But if you want to better optimize your photos, do it as a text post.
Regardless, name your photos descriptively using hyphens (rather than underscores, or nothing) as separators for words, e.g. “bacon-infused-burger.jpg”.
Bonus!
Make a post about Tumblr SEO, using all these search engine optimization tips for Tumblr. lol.
Habanero Dill Pickles? Make your own!
A couple weeks ago I questioned whether you could make your own hot pickles by putting some hot peppers in with some regular, un-hot pickles. The answer is yes and they’re actually really damn good. It’s easy:
1. Buy a big jar of dill pickles, I got the cheapest-ass ones I could find ($2), and three (or more) habanero peppers ($0.45).
2. Make cuts in each pepper so the pickle brine can easily get to the hotness inside.
3. Take a few pickles out to make room and jam your habaneros in, make sure they get submerged, place in fridge. And now you play the waiting game. They should be good in two weeks. *
* Have patience. They get noticeably hot after about a week, but of course I ended up eating most of them, day-by-day, before that…it was an experiment, I was monitoring the results.
Kinda brilliant.
