Last week I was reading some online commentary about a piece by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, this one about Goldman Sachs. I first read Taibbi in Spanking the Donkey, and I usually like the dude’s cynical, New-Journalism-style writing, even when it’s a bit sensational.
The Goldman Sachs thing — at least the parts I could read, since the whole thing isn’t available online (very Time Inc. circa 2003 move by Rolling Stone) — so then I started reading some of the criticism. One of the articles I read mentioned that Megan McArdle (who I haven’t read before) from the Atlantic wrote a big response to the article, so I decided to go try and find that. I typed this into Google:
We all know search-engine listings are important, so how did HuffPost pull this one off? When I look at the source code, it seems like The Atlantic is missing some simple SEO best-practice stuff that could have helped them out here. HuffPost isn’t kicking ass at SEO coding, exactly, but they’re doing enough of the small stuff right that it’s likely that was enough to get Google to list them over The Atlantic. Running down the basic-level SEO checklist:
Friendly URLs: Sort of a wash; both URLs contain the keyword strings “taibbi” and “atlantic” at some point.
Header tags: Running into some trouble here — HuffPost has the page title “The Atlantic: Taibbi Is ‘Becoming The Sarah Palin Of Journalism’” in an h1 tag, while “Matt Taibbi Gets His Sarah Palin On” is an h3 tag on The Atlantic. That’s a weird one, particularly because there’s no other competing h1 tag on the Atlantic page and we’re looking at an individual post here, not the main page of the blog where you might use the h1 for the blog title.
Meta keywords: Keywords are one of the few meta tags that actually count for search engines, and while they’re downplayed a lot in best-practice techniques compared to the days when people would put 200 keywords into the source code, they still serve a contextual purpose. The Atlantic didn’t even use any — not good, not even as good as the cursory list on the HuffPost page.
Plenty of SEO-consultant advice is voodoo, as Google’s algorithm is a mystery to most, but low-level code tactics like URL structure, meta and header tags make a difference.
HuffPost gets some flak now and then for not doing enough original stuff (or sometimes going beyond that), but in cases like this, they’re grabbing the traffic in a perfectly legal way. Even if they do link through in the end, this is a tangible example to pay attention to best-practice coding when you’re building a site, because otherwise, web dudes will come and G up even those readers specifically looking for your stuff.
The only part that confuses me is whether newspaper websites are OK for the web users to read. If not, then that does hurt the web team’s ability to keep up on things, but if so, I think there’s no question the web is going to beat the hell out of a print newspaper for information purposes. I should make a point sometime of counting how many times per day I read something online and then go to Wikipedia to look it up. (Wikipedia may be disallowed for most academic research, but it is the bomb at providing introductory glimpses into just about anything on Earth.)
So Wednesday was the 30th anniversary of President Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. I’ve heard about this speech before as a turning point in his presidency, so I went ahead and read the full text. To sum it up in a phrase, I don’t understand why this speech was so hated upon — it seems to me to be right on the money.
I haven’t watched the video — though I posted it below, so I should probably get on that — so a lot is missing in terms of the substance vs. delivery view. But in reading it, it’s striking for sure how much of the national debate is stuck exactly where it was in 1979. Here’s President Carter talking about energy independence, new forms of energy, and the corrupting influence of consumerism. Last I checked, it’s 2009 and we’re still talking about every one of those things. The historical verdict seems to be that conservatives’ favorite punching bag scored a lot of points immediately after the speech, but then fired most of his Cabinet and made himself look yet again like an ineffective leader. The guy was definitely lacking in a lot of his Presidency, but I think the speech hateration — “unprecedented disaster”? — is off the mark.
This NY Times opinion piece is Tom Wolfe at his most annoying — exclamation! points! lots of emdashes … with ellipses! — but I think somewhere in there he made a good point about the philosophical aspects of the space program that don’t get touted.
I’m noticing that there’s all Rust Belt downtowns have a part that always conforms to the same standard. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee — you will always find a part of downtown that has a well-trafficked bus stop with the usual cast of characters, a run-down Dunkin Donuts, a parking garage and a near-total lack of office workers in the business-casual sense. (In Detroit, this encompasses everything within the city limits.) All of these elements will inevitably be present. This should probably get a name, so visitors know to look for it. Brownbagville? The Dunkin District?
For real, that could be anywhere between Minnesota and Upstate New York.
To all my NU readaz: did you know Le Peep is a franchise? I had no idea of this until I ate at one in Indianapolis this morning. Maybe I could have learned this if Le Peep were open other than 8 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. (I would like to thank Paul for that joke from the year 1999.)
Anybody ever dealt with Apple service before? My iPod is pissed at me and I need to know how helpful I can expect them to be. Thanks, yo.
Props again to Here Comes Treble to pointing me to trivia at State Restaurant — tonight my team won the competition and the $800 prize that comes with it. Nice! Check out State on Tuesdays if you like trivia and live in Chicago.
It’s a proven fact that I am a fiend for chicken nuggets. Chicken strips are also just as awesome. Put some chicken into a hand-friendly format, get rid of the bones to save me the hassle, coat it in breading of some sort and I am right up in it with a bottle of hot sauce.
But as a young dude, I want to keep fit and look good for the lady. (Lady there is singular these days, being married and all.) So I hooked up this simple recipe for nuggets that are relatively good food and aren’t processed as all hell, with all the fun chemicals and fatness that come with that. Here you go:
Healthy Chicken Nuggets
1 lb. boneless chicken parts – thighs or breasts
1 1/2 cups bread crumbs
1 1/2 tbsp Tony Chachere’s Creole seasoning – you can also just use salt to taste
2 dashes chili powder
1 or more dashes cayenne pepper
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Slice the chicken up into pieces roughly 1 1/2 to 2 inches square. Put the breadcrumbs, salt/Creole stuff, chili powder and cayenne into a bowl and stir it all up with your fingers. Take the chicken pieces and roll ‘em around in the breadcrumbs until you got them good and coated on all sides and in all the crevasses. Brush down a cookie sheet with some vegetable oil and arrange all the pieces evenly.
Put the sheet into the oven for 12 minutes. Take it out and turn over each piece with tongs. Put it back in for another 8 minutes and you’re done. Makes ~ 2 servings.
Eat them with some hot sauce, ketchup, BBQ or Maggi Hot and Sweet from the local Indian grocer. The latter comes with mad recommendations from me. And I just made myself hungry again.
My iPod started acting ill today, and now I’m in the middle of restoring the factory settings. Since I have to completely re-upload all of my music, photo and backed-up files, I got some time to write. First, the news:
• At first today, it really annoyed me that the entire media-swilling world spent the day rending its garments and pulling out its hair over Michael Jackson. (It’s 10 p.m. here, and the funeral is still the top story on CNN.com.) But then I thought, “Parts of the U.S. have been doing this for more than 30 years for Elvis, so this is really nothing new,” and I felt better about our modern era — or worse about past eras, I can’t decide.
• I’ve been asking people for a percentage: how many people watching Michael Jackson’s funeral know who Robert McNamara is, and they have to understand that he was far more historically important than MJ. The common response is less than 1 percent, but I would think it’s actually up around 4 percent. Call me an optimist.
In fairness to that other 96 percent, I did call him “George McNamara” at lunch today. But to burnish my own history-nerd credentials with an even bigger bit of nerdness, I was also thinking of McGeorge Bundy at the time.
If policy now tilts too far toward deficit cutting, some argue, that would treat job creation as an option the nation somehow cannot afford, in contrast to “must haves” like tax cuts for wealthy Americans and unpopular foreign military entanglements.
True, but you also can’t ignore the fact that those tax cuts and unpopular entanglements were put in place, and now they are indeed making the job creation that much more financially difficult. I fall reluctantly in line with the spending advocates — I don’t think now is the time to pay down the deficit, because government spending at the moment really is a big portion of the money flowing into the economy. But if things do turn around, raise my taxes. It sucks, but it’s better than betting our economic livelihood on the whim of the Chinese government.
And on to frivolous stuff:
• I’m sorry to see the Penguins lose Rob Scuderi to the L.A. Kings, but they were right not to pay what the Kings paid. The dude is good, but not $13.6 million good.
• I got a Lollapalooza ticket for Sunday, August 9, hombres. Jane’s Addiction original lineup? I am hella there.
• This past Friday I went to see The Hangover. Verdict: four phats. Definitely some gross humor; definitely a weird Zach Galifinakis; and most likely worth seeing. (Though don’t take your parents.)
Even stranger, the movie featured both Heather Graham and Mike Tyson in prominent roles. Why is this strange? Those two were both guests at a 2004 arts-benefit party at the Guggenheim in NYC attended by yours truly, who by all rights should not have been there in the first place. (I’m pretty sure this Heather Graham photo is from that very night.) Mike Tyson is somehow even scarier when he wears fur, and I even made eye contact with Ms. Graham — or as I have no right to call her, Heather — for a full second.
The moral here? I really should have been offered at least a cameo appearance as the third part of that party trifecta, Hollywood.
With Saturday being the Fourth of July and the start of America’s 233rd year, I would like to honor our fine country’s independence by telling you exactly how not to honor our fine country’s independence: by purchasing, lighting and displaying Snakes, the world’s stupidest firework.
Since my childhood, I have loved fireworks. I’m not necessarily talking about the big citywide Zambelli shows where people in the crowd try in vain to remember which FM station is broadcasting the patriotic musical accompaniment; those are good, but they can’t compare to the miniaturized action-movie thrill of taking a match to something so it can shoot fire and blow up. Tanks, spinners, firecrackers, Roman candles and the infamous Mr. Cuckoo: all good for shooting across the patio and blowing holes in a coffee can. What would the Fourth be without the “PHWEEEEET … POP!” of bottle rockets resonating throughout the suburbs? There’d probably be a lot more fingers and fewer high-school kids lighting their shirts on fire — good one, Bill — but ours would be a less-jubilant nation without the ability to celebrate America through novelties from China.
Each year on the Fourth, my family would head out to one of my aunts’ houses out in more exurban parts near Pittsburgh for burgers, orange pop, water balloons and Ohio-bought fireworks in the driveway at dark. Everyone would ooh and ahh at the tanks, spinners, etc. — though probably just to humor us kids — and then it would be time for the lowlight of the night: Snakes.
I don’t even know how these things showed up every year, but inevitably someone would slide the telltale black discs out of a red box, set them on the driveway and let the disappointment begin. Here’s a video to show you just how crappy Snakes truly are. I mean that literally, too: they very much resemble a growing pile of black excrement.
One year I paid $10 for a fat, tall, missile-looking firework at Phantom Fireworks, and after excitedly saving it for the evening finale, it shot up into the night sky and fizzled as nothing more than a bottle rocket. Yet that letdown, which was substantial, will never compare to a burned-out box of Snakes for firework impotence.
Our country was born in a burst of pride, freedom and the human spirit, lit up by the fires of war with Britain. It was a powerful and vivid moment in world history, one that would shape the fate of humanity forever. There are poignant and powerful ways to celebrate those concepts, and then there is the opposite: Snakes. Screw ‘em.
