I have spent the better part of three days giving my blog and RSS feed an overhaul.  I can see the writing on the wall and as a software engineer I know that in 2 years, those that do not have a solid online presence, will not even get an interview. 

I mean think about it, if you have a list of 10 candidates, and 8 of them have a blog with relevant links to their other web based personas you can weed out those that are obvious freaks, and you can get a much better feel for a person then by just spending two hours with them in a very un-normal process such as an interview. 

I would rather watch the beast in it's natural habitat, that is going to give me a better feel for what kind of person they really are.

Anyway, here is what I have been working on for my site:

Domain Name

I now have both www.beebe4.com and http://beebe4.blogspot.com serving up the same content... this blog.

Feed Burner

I have setup my feeds in Feed Burner to allow a better feed.  Better why? Because of the following reasons:

  • Simple to add social networking links, such as del.icio.us, digg and stumbleupon
  • Allows for traffic analysis... sure I have Google Analytics setup also, but the feed is another data point, and it also lets me know how many people are subscribed
  • Automatic flare for most of the common readers
  • Pings a bunch of blog directories and aggregators

Random Videos

I have started using Google Reader to read all the blogs I am reading these days.  Google Reader has a nice share feature that is available as a feed and they also have a widget that was easy to add to my blog via blogger's API, and I think it is pretty interesting.

Random Videos

Blogger has added a video bar, so for now I am going to keep it on there and see if people enjoy watching random videos.  When you add the widget, it asks you to type in some key words to search for videos... mine where "beebe4, funny, tech, google, blog, jacksonville, code search."  Feel free to provide feed back if it is interesting.

Twitter

According to Wikipedia, Twitter is:

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific. Twitter was founded in October 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp.

Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and also instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter web site, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, or through an application. For SMS, currently three gateway numbers are available: short codes for the USA and Canada and a UK number for international use. While the Twitter service is free, posting and receiving updates via SMS may incur charges from the wireless carrier.

Guest Map

If you scroll all the way to the bottom, I added a guest map which allows users to add their location, so that over time I can see (along with the rest of the world) where people are checking into read this blog from.

Archive Links

I switched the archive links back to listed out as I am not sure how GoogleBot will crawl the links if they are in a drop down list.  My thinking is that the list will allow more pages to get indexed, and therefore get more traffic.

What is RSS?

For those of you that are still learning how to use this fancy Internet, RSS is a very important feature that most web sites (blogs, news sites, etc) use to provide a syndicated feed of changes that have been made to their site.  This allows a user to simple subscribe to the RSS feed and use a tool such as Google Reader to aggregate them and tell you when there is new content from your favorite sites.

I would recommend that if you are not doing so, but instead going around and checking out different web sites or waiting for them to send you an email you should really do the following: