Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

NPMMO (Nebraska People Making Money Online) now has a website. I haven't put much on it yet, but you can view it at npmmo.org . If you forget and do .com, I have that registered as well. In any event, I just wanted to announce the new site and ask for some input on it. If anyone wants to contribute a better logo or make content suggestions for the site, I'm all ears.

Next week, I'm organizing the NPMMO meeting (Nebraska People Making People Online). We're going to talk about optimizing your site for search engines, but rather than a boring speech, I'm going to ask for sites to take a look at from members and we're going to go over them giving suggestions along the way. At SES, this is known as a Site Clinic, but we're not going to charge $1800 to attend this. :) If you're in the Omaha area and can make it, please RSVP here and plan on attending. Space is limited, so make sure to reserve your spot early.

Apparently, ToolBarn.com is 1 page out of 1 Billion plus on the internet discussing tools. I'm sure there are lots of types of tools (web tools, power tools , photo tools, hand tools, blogging tools, David , etc.), but today Google says we're the best when it comes to tools. Thanks, Google. I appreciate the compliment. Now, if I could just get those people to buy something. Yeah, head term conversion rates stink, but they're sure nice for branding. It's also causing yet more server load issues, so it's really good we went memcached heavy over the past few weeks so we can handle it without a terrible load on the database server. That leads to the question... now that I've hit the biggest target in our industry, where do I go from here? The joys of doing SEO well on a big site. :)

I was listening to a Nascar podcast on my way in to work today and realized something. They always talk about the balance of a racecar to get optimal performance, and SEO is no difference. If a racecar is too tight, it won't turn. If your SEO is too tight, you won't be able to change directions quickly either. If a racecar is too loose, the back end comes out. If your SEO is too loose, you get a lot of tail action but don't lock in on the main terms. If you get the best balance, your site takes first place and your racecar goes to the lead. Funny how much of life is about balance, and it's funny I hadn't noticed the similarities before. Oh, and both require lots of attention to the details and fine tuning once you get to the track... er... web.

Today, we had an XML process change so invalid XML was being returned (or changed invalid XML, because it's always invalid, but we had a fix for the prior version). Instead of just affecting us while the bad data was being returned, it actually lasted a little while longer. Why? Because we use memcached to store the result, lessening the load on our inventory management system. While it isn't normally an issue (most people don't deal with this oddball system), if we were storing those results longer than we had been, this could have been a huge issue. It was rendering product pages non-functional, which isn't a good thing. As a result of this, we're going to start doing more error checking and trapping. Oh what fun it is to deal with systems that don't care about being valid in the slightest and having Perl modules that require it.