#eventually instead of updating this somewhat aged website

[am1vf]

Fun(?) fact! I got my current job by applying to a company that said in their website had no current open positions.

A (then) coworker said to trust him and apply anyway. His partner worked there and knew they were hiring. Later the department lead would tell me they were planning to update the web page but just hadn't gotten around to it.

No, you can't trust anything. Everything's a mess.

Not giving advice to apply anyway, just sharing frustration.

Starting a compilation

[regiwi]

It’s been a while. What I’ve been up to.

Hey, so I dunno who still follows me on here, I tend to avoid a lot of social media now and don’t really look on tumblr like I used to years ago, still I’ve been working on something lately and wanted to use this blog to advertise it to anyone who’s interested that might follow this etc. I’m afraid this isn’t me returning or anything (granted it’s hardly like I did much exciting with this blog anyway). With that said, I wanted to wait until I was a bit more used to doing it and had at least a bit of content on there already before saying about this thing here. I want to make it clear before I carry on this isn’t anything big, just a ‘project’ I’ve been doing for fun that I decided to do a little more with.

So, for the last couple of years now I decided to do something I always wanted to but felt too big of a thing. Being the massive Super Smash Bros and Nintendo fan I am, I always wanted to play the various games the characters have come from etc. Over the years I played a fair few and started some but admittedly never got far on them, although I usually trawled websites reading spoilers eventually regarding them anyway. As a way of finally doing this and clearing a fair bit of my backlog of games I’ve never finished, I decided to make a list of every single game represented in the Super Smash Bros series, from playable characters all the way down to spirits and trophies. Yeah, I know the obvious response to that is ‘you have way too much free time on your hands’ and, yeah there’s no real argument against that. Still, what I decided to do, was where possible pick a game to represent every element present in Smash, the priority being it’s a game where the character is playable or the location is present or the item plays a key role for example. My main aim for this was I wanted to sort of see what stories these characters and locations etc came from, granted some don’t exactly have stories, but my favourite aspect of crossovers is seeing characters with vastly differing narratives meeting together so I wanted more context beyond just reading of their origins.

Following making the list, my big plan with this was to do sort of ‘Super Smash Bros canon runs’ so to speak, where I try to play through the games using setups as close as possible to how they appear in Super Smash Bros. As an example, Robin appears in Super Smash Bros with the default avatar settings, the Tactician class with various tomes, a Levin Sword and Bronze Sword. Therefore for my playthrough that was the equipment I mostly kept him with when I could. As part of this simply for my own amusement I would take screenshots of my playthroughs and try to perhaps get a comparison shot in Super Smash Bros. Here’s an example using Lucina.

As you can see I tried to keep her as close as possible to her look in Smash. So, I have played through quite a few of the games at this point and I decided that I wanted to maybe do something with all this rather than just keep it purely to myself, especially as I’d gathered a lot of screenshots by this point. It was with this I decided as I’m not really capable of making videos of my playthroughs (especially as I’ve done a lot of them already) that I wanted to start a new blog and write some posts going over my playthroughs of the various games. There’s info on anything you could ever want to find regarding most games and things now on the internet, so instead of just doing straightforward reviews or something, I decided to make these posts a lot more personal to me, going over my history with the games often relating it to my past and going over how my playthrough of the game for my list went. I also detail other things like writing bios for the subject (currently just the playable Smash Bros fighters) and detailing what setups I used on my playthroughs for characters etc.

So, that’s basically it, I’ll link the blog at the end of this post for anyone who wants to check it out, there’s a few options at the top such as the ‘Blog Map’ where you can find links to all the posts I’ve done so far, ‘My Goal’ where I go over everything I can regarding the blog, what I’m doing and what I’d assume would be common questions from people on it, and finally ‘The List’ which is an updated version of the list I’ve been using for all this, with the games I have yet to complete at the top and the ones I’ve already played through at the bottom. With new characters, spirits and stages still being added to the Smash series as well as new games where possibly characters who weren’t playable before become so for the first time, I’m always tinkering with the list adding in games. Age of Calamity for example I recently added because it has the Champions, who are spirits, playable for the first time. I realise this is ridiculously nerdy and if you’re looking for deep analysis of these games and a critical eye I’m afraid you’ll probably be disappointed. Unless it’s something I really find frustrating I tend to be more on the positive side most of the time with these games (there are one or two down the line I’ll probably be a bit more critical on.) so don’t think of these as reviews or anything like that is what I’m saying. These posts also aren’t necessarily recommendations, I know I tend to be very easy to please to the point I’ll pretty rarely find something absolutely awful to play. This is mostly just my way of going over my experiences with these games and having some fun with them whilst hopefully making something somewhat entertaining to read for a couple of minutes.

Finally, as I said earlier, I’m not really coming back to this blog, but I have just opened asks on my other blog so if you have any questions feel free to ask and I’ll try to answer there. Other than that, here’s the link, hope you enjoy.

My Smash Playthroughs.

[tracritesoftware]

In a day and age where convenience is a deciding factor for many, the question that remains for many restaurants is “is it worth it to implement our own delivery / take-out system, or use a 3rd party platform?” In order to determine this, you need to undertake a critical analysis of your needs and capabilities, looking at everything from food costing, to pricing, and even inventory management to gauge the viability of using such a service. By doing this, you’ll have a much greater understanding of how delivery and take-out will affect your operations, and ultimately your bottom line. We’re going to take a deep dive into what needs to be considered before adopting either solution, or none at all.

3rd Party Platforms

We’ll begin by looking at what is associated with adopting a 3rd party platform such as UberEats or SkipTheDishes. These differ from traditional delivery / take-out systems in that their presence is almost entirely digital, the ordering process is largely out of the restaurant’s hands, and customer service is handled through the platform provider instead of on a one-to-one basis. Let’s start by looking at what these platforms bring to the table that will benefit you as a restaurant operator.

Pros

At their core, these services provide an additional revenue stream to your restaurant if you do not currently have a delivery and/or take-out program in place. For those of you currently operating your own system, it may prove to be more beneficial to use a 3rd party platform depending on your restaurant’s operations. Why?  We attribute this in part to the cost constraints of hiring staff on an hourly basis to run deliveries, and maintain the delivery / take-out system, as well as the cost of implementing the system itself.

In many cases, the platform provider will provide the hardware in order to run the system. This generally comes in the form of a table to manage orders. As many people are familiar with tablets, the training in the operation of such systems can be adopted at a much faster rate than learning something like a new POS system. This then leads to a faster turnaround on implementing the system and using it to its fullest capacity.

One of the largest yet ultimately unsung benefits of using a 3rd party platform is the built-in advertising. By being listed on their marketplace of restaurants, you’re provided with what essentially free advertising to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of potential customers, all of which are looking for your product. While this benefit can be difficult to track on an ROI basis, the increase in sales that cannot be directly attributed to the service could be partially attributed to this brand awareness.

Cons

On the other side of this coin, there are potential downsides to operating delivery / take-out by using a 3rd party platform The primary issues are fee structures, inventory management issues due to variable demand, and technology glitches.

The fee structures for many 3rd party platforms, these can be quite substantial, reach heights of 30-40% of sales. For many restaurants, this additional cost can drive them into the red on every order, and is simply unsustainable. In this case, you have 3 potential courses of action. The first is to simply abandon the platform and either not offer delivery / take-out options, or offer them in-house. The second is to take a closer look at your inventory management and food costing processes to see if the cost of dishes can be further honed to create larger margins. The final option, which can be a difficult pill to swallow for many restaurants, is to increase your prices. The reasoning behind this being the final option, and somewhat of a last resort, is that it has the greatest direct impact on your customer base, and can generated the largest negative impact via word of mouth.

The second issue is inventory management. Managing your restaurant’s inventory levels can be a difficult process as it stands. by adding in delivery and take-out from a 3rd party platform, it becomes even more difficult to gauge the demand and order properly. Ultimately, you may be left with too much inventory that eventually goes to waste, or too little and not being able to meet demand. Using restaurant inventory management software like Optimum Control can help to combat some of this variable demand, making your processes and operations run smoother, with less hiccups along the way.

The final issue that presents with 3rd party platforms is that of technology, and its potential to fail at times. As these platforms are exclusively web-based, if there is an issue with system updates, hardware failures, or internet connections, then these systems will fail to operate and sit dormant. This leads to not only a loss in orders, but also customer discontent, as they will be frustrated by not being able to order from you. In this sense, being technologically advanced can be the downfall for some restaurants.

In-House Take-Out / Delivery

In looking at in-house take-out and delivery options, there are a wide variety of options available, ranging from custom built ordering websites and online ordering software, to simple phone orders with paper slips. Each of these systems have their benefits and drawbacks that make them as unique as the restaurants that use them.

Pros

In-house delivery systems, much like their 3rd party counterparts, offer an additional revenue stream that may not have been previously available due to either a lack of capital to implement, or the capacity in which to operate such a system. If your restaurant has the capacity in its operations, but not in its seating, this is when implementing a delivery / take-out system may be advantageous, and when indoor seating is unavailable, necessary to remain open.

The second advantage to going in-house is the ability to either implement or craft a system that works specifically for your needs. By using a 3rd party system, your operations have to confirm to their specifications. This may not be ideal, or even possible, for many operations based on staffing levels or restaurant layout. By being able to pick and choose what you need for your restaurant specifically, you’ll be able to design a system that works within your existing operations, and abilities.

Cons

Operating your own in-house delivery / take-out system does have its potential shortcomings, especially if you’re not prepared to deal with them on your own.

The first of these issues begins in how you develop your system. 3rd party systems provide you with a roadmap of implementation, and while creating and implementing your own system provides you with flexibility, it does present a unique set of challenges. The first of which is forcing you to take a critical look at how both your front and back of house operate, and create a plan that works both in, and with, your existing systems. The reason this is a challenge, is because it may expose weak points within your operations that need addressing before the system can be built out.

No In-House Take-Out / Delivery

While this may limit your possibilities for adding a potential revenue stream, not all restaurants may be able to handle having a delivery / take-out component to them. Perhaps your operation can’t handle the additional orders coming in, or you don’t have the ability to make such an offering profitable due to scheduling or hiring the appropriate number of stuff to handle the delivery and management aspects. You can only optimize your food costing to a certain degree before other aspects must be focused on to ensure profitability in such an undertaking.

The key to operating in-house delivery and take-out is that no matter how large or small that aspect of your operation, and how important you may see it becoming, it must be profitable in order to make sense. Whether that be creating your own system, or implementing a 3rd party system, you’ll need to take the path that provides you with the greatest earning ability.

[natasha1988p]

What are the best SEO and competitive intelligence tools on the market?

The leading tools in the industry that offer both SEO management and competitive intelligence worth looking into are MOz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs.

MOz:

Moz is a pioneer in SEO (previously known as SEOmoz) having been around for 16 years. It started out as a blog and an online community where SEO experts collectively shared their knowledge and ideas. They grew to become a small consulting firm, and eventually to create some of the industry’s most reliable and comprehensive SEO tools. In addition to its tools, MOz also offers a wealth of SEO information online through their blog, guide and training & workshop programs.

MOz offers free tools as well as a paid premium service. Their free tools include Keyword Explorer, Link Explorer, Moz Bar, My Online Presence, Free Domain Analysis, and MozCast. MOz Pro, their subscription-based SEO tool is a comprehensive solution that offers services for crawling, keyword management, and webpage optimization.

Keyword Explorer is used to perform a keyword and SERP analysis on your webpage. It can predict how much search volume a keyword will receive with 95% accuracy and generate a keyword list that best suits your website’s audience. Keyword Explorer also helps decipher your competitor’s most important keywords.

MOz Pro Solutions is a tool used to find and fix technical SEO issues on your website. It automatically crawls and audits your pages weekly to find any broken redirects, missing title tags, or other issues that may be preventing your page from better indexing and achieving higher a ranking on SERPs.

Link Explorer provides you with backlink research. It uses the industry’s most trusted link metrics to help you to learn why your page ranks where it is, and monitors inbound links. Link Explorer not only helps to increase the number of quality backlinks, it also looks into your competitor’s backlinks.

SEMrush:

SEMrush on the other hand is an all-inclusive marketing tool with over 5 million users and 11 years of experience in the industry. It not only provides you with analytics on your consumers, it also assists with your SEO strategy and offers digital marketing services through their toolkits for PPC, social media, content marketing, and market research. These toolkits include reports and tools that are customizable to help you understand your campaign better.

SEMrush toolkit services:

The SEO Toolkit lets you run a technical SEO audition on any site, track daily rankings, analyze competitor’s SEO strategy and research keyword ideas.

The Advertising Toolkit features assistance for your PPC strategy by monitoring your competitor’s ad copies and landing pages, and analyzing their Google Shopping campaigns. The toolkit also offers services that include keywords: both finding keywords and optimizing negative keywords.

The Social Media Toolkit can help create, launch, and manage advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. You can see how your audience and engagement changes over time, learn and compare your competitor’s social media strategy, discover the best-performing posts, and schedule and post to 5 social networks.

The Content Marketing Toolkit can help generate ideas for your specific audience by helping you discover the topics that will engage your audience, manage your editorial plan, provide you with a tailored template for SEO-friendly content, check and optimize content quality in real-time, track mentions and analyze your overall brand presence.

The Competitive Research Toolkit ensures you’re staying on top of your competitors by allowing you to learn about any company’s web traffic and visitor engagement, discover your competitor’s best-performing marketing channels and identifying new opportunities and markets for your business to grow.

Ahrefs:

Ahrefs is one of the most used SEO tools on the market. Its easy-to-use and intuitive interface is preferred by those who aren’t SEO experts, and its full service features attract those who are. It’s a paid monthly tool that offers keyword research, SEO monitoring and position tracking, content-specific research, and competitive domain comparison.

Site Audit helps your business to audit your on-page SEO performance in order to optimize your website’s ranking potential. It crawls your website’s pages, provides an overall score, flags issues and recommends ways to fix them.

Site Explorer lets you analyze your competitor by looking into the backlink profile of any website or URL. This competitive intelligence tool provides you with organic traffic research to let you see the keywords your competitors are using, backlink checker to let you see which websites link to your competitor, and paid traffic research to let you gain insight on your competitor’s paid advertising strategy.

Keywords Explorer keeps you up-to-date with keywords that are relevant to your customers. It runs the world’s largest third-party database of search inquiries with more than 7 billion keywords, updated every month.

Content Explorer lets you find and analyze your industry’s top performing content. It also helps increase your backlinks by discovering broken links that needs to be fixed. Content Explorer will then recreate the dead page and ask those linking to it to link to you instead.

Rank Tracker helps you to monitor your rankings and chart your performance against your competitor.

SEO Powersuite:

SEO Powersuite is another popular solution that offers a set of tools. It contains Rank Tracker, SEO SpyGlass, Website Auditor, Link Assistant within a package. It lets users enjoy all 4 tools with its free membership, however the capabilities are somewhat limited.

Rank Tracker accurately ranks the data of your SEO campaign, analyzes your website alongside 10 of your competitors and lets you take advantage of its 18 built-in keyword suggestion tools.

SEO SpyGlass audits your website and your competitor’s backlink strategies. This tool finds and neutralizes links that may be harmful by checking the quality of each link for things such as domain age and authority, anchor texts, and keywords.

Website Auditor checks the health of your SEO by looking for structure and coding html flaws. Website Auditor fixes broken links, eliminate page loading problems, and fixes titles and descriptions. It also works to boost site indexation and crawling, optimizes page contents, and monitors metrics and traffic stats for each page.

Link Assistant manages all your link data in one place. This tool is used to find link opportunities for your website, automatically verifies yours links, and generates link building reports.

5118:

If you are helping website for SEO in China, 5118 should not be missed out. It is one of the Chinese leading website crawler that improves onsite SEO. It crawls both small and large websites while allowing the user to analyse the results in real-time.

Keywords Explorer audits the overall keywords of your website ranking on Baidu SEO , 360, Shenma and Toutiao. It helps to identify other related keywords in order optimize your website’s ranking potential and recommended keywords for SEM purposes.

Media Explorer analyzes your brand and competitors’ brand digital footprints in China. For instances PR release, articles, mini program ranking, assets and etc. This competitive intelligence tool provides you with great vision of competitors’ activities and potential strategies that could help your brand.

Backlinks Explorer keeps you up-to-date with backlinks that are relevant to your website or competitors’ websites.

Aizhan:

Aizhan is another leading SEO tool for China market. It is easy-to-use and provides actionable insights regarding search ranking and website traffic. Compared to 5118, Aizhan still has its own competitive advantages by having extra features. Namely website auditor, Whois checker, IP checker and ICP checker etc.

As knowledgeable and established as your company may be, there’s always something you can learn from your competitors. Whether that be practices worth emulating or mistakes to avoid, competitive intelligence is an important aspect in helping your business grow, especially when it comes to SEO strategy. Selecting the right tools is an important feat as it helps to keep your business on track with its goals.

Readmore Baidu SEO Marketing Guide 2020 : Everything You Need to Know

[kerishaharris]

Going, going, (not quite but almost) gone: the sad state of local newspapers

True story: As a young, would-be journalist, I applied at the behest of my high school journalism teacher to the Hugh N. Boyd Minorities in Journalism Workshop. The program was a two-week intensive workshop open to high school students across New Jersey with an interest in journalism. It promised to provide the 15 or so selected participants with real-world experience in the field absolutely free of charge, as local newspapers across the state sponsored the event, covering all expenses for selected students. Having always been rather introverted and somewhat shy, I didn’t think my writing was good enough to make the cut. But to my surprise, I ended up being selected and was sponsored by my hometown newspaper, The Record of Bergen County, aka The Record (or, so it was called at the time). The experience was transformative for me, and gave me my first insight into life as a journalist. I’d go on to study journalism as an undergraduate student at the University of Florida, starting off in print but switching to broadcast, and working professionally in the field for more than a decade for CNN, NBC, ABC, Univision, and more. And for a time, I briefly took a job as the lead social media editor for none other than the local newspaper that helped give me my start in the business: The Record of Bergen County.

(fun fact: The Record broke the 2013 George Washington Bridge lane closure scandal which made national and global headlines) This week, I chose to take a closer look at local newspapers, and in doing so, briefly examine why they’ve struggled to remain relevant in a changing industry (I’ll only scratch the surface, because I could probably write an entire dissertation on this topic). It’s actually quite sad, as I firmly believe that local newspapers and beat reporters are critical to freedom of the press and unbiased, balanced, and fair reporting. Sadly, the digital age has done irrevocable damage to this industry. And I hate to say it, but digital and social media are almost solely responsible for the demise of newspapers, and sadly, I’m a part of that problem too. As a tail-end millennial who came of age with the internet, if the news isn’t on my smartphone or easily accessible via an app or a free website, I quickly lose interest and seek my information elsewhere. I can’t remember the last time I had a newspaper subscription, or even purchased a newspaper. I recognize how important they are, I just have so many other options for news consumption now that I just don’t turn to newspapers anymore. Freedom of the press

Local newspapers have been part of the fabric of this country since as early as the 1600’s. Every journalism student remembers studying the great circulation wars of the 1800’s between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. If not, everybody remembers how fun it was when instead of class, our teachers took a day off from teaching and instead showed “Newsies” on VHS in history class. It never gets old. 

(truer words have never been said, Jack Kelly) But the rise of television news, and eventually digital and social media, pushed local newspapers aside, as audiences had a quicker, easier way to access news on-demand instead of waiting for the morning paper. According to a recent report by researchers at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 300 more newspapers failed since the fall of 2018 bringing the death toll to 2,100. That’s 25 percent of the 9,000 newspapers that were being published just 15 years ago. It also noted that there are about 200 “news deserts,” or communities without any local newspapers. Most of those news deserts are in economically challenged rural areas, but more and more, even the economically advantaged suburbs are feeling the pinch too. 

(via UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media) The danger here? Local papers highlight and elevate local stories we might not otherwise know about, but we absolutely need to care about. What’s going on in our schools, with our local elected officials, within our communities, local zoning and budget decisions that impact our daily lives. They provide a micro-level guide to the things that impact us every single day. So if nearly all of your news is coming from social and digital media and their sometimes questionable algorithms, or television news that’s almost undoubtedly biased (at least in the U.S.), you really have to question whether you’re receiving fair, unbiased coverage. Dying, but not (quite) dead It was encouraging to see that while the industry is undoubtedly suffering, there are still some people who often consume their news via local newspapers. According to the Pew Research Center, people aged 65 and older account for most of the existing newspaper audience, roughly four in 10 of whom say they still often get their information from newspapers. This is about what I would expect from the older generation, but this sadly doesn’t say much for younger generations and their newspaper consumption. Only 18 percent of people age 50-64, 8 percent of people age 30 to 49, and a mere 2 percent of people age 18-29 say that they often get their news from newspapers. 

And even among those 65 and older, newspapers are a pretty distant second in terms of the source they visit most often for news, as 81 percent of people in this age group cite television as the source they often use for news.

If you can’t beat them, join them In my brief time as social media editor for The Record, it was obvious to me that the paper was trying hard to adapt to a changing world, opening themselves up to methods they’d never had to use before. The same was true of most newspapers, even national newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. It has been interesting to see the ways in which these newspapers have branched out into new forms of media to adapt to the way people consume news today. I highlighted this in a previous post, but I’ve been impressed by the NYT’s foray into LinkedIn Live, creating immersive, engaging conversations on key stories, and giving the audience the chance to actively participate with the media. At its core, I’ve always said that the best thing about social/digital media was that it took what were always one-way conversations, and made them into two-way experiences for the audience and the content creator. And speaking of the Times, their efforts on Instagram are among my favorite. Beautiful portraits that would once only live on paper are now shared in a beautifully curated feed that is always so pleasing to the eye. Often, these are stories that wouldn’t typically make the front page of the paper, but the visuals are so stunning that they tell a story in and of themselves.

(via the New York Times on Instagram) Using local newspapers as a communications professional

Part of my renewed interest in newspapers came about when I was a communications manager for a small nonprofit organization. Our primary goal was to engage in state level advocacy on behalf of the state’s charter schools. Effectively that means, catch the eyes and ears of lawmakers and state your case so that when budget time comes around, they’ll make sure to enact a budget that ensures the survival of these schools. I learned that these lawmakers and influencers pay close attention to newspapers, perhaps even more than other forms of media, and so getting our agenda into the local newspaper was a large part of the work that I did. I would write (well, ghostwrite) opinion pieces for senior leadership, students and parents, and pitch them for placements in the local papers in the districts of the lawmakers we needed to reach, I would develop relationships with local education reporters, invite them to press events, give them quotes for their stories, organize editorial board meetings and more. Newspapers became a critical part of the work that I did, as were the relationships I built with members of the newspaper industry, and I’d imagine the same is true for other communications professionals. Much to my (pleasant) surprise, there are still some brands doing important work with traditional print newspapers. According to FORBES, “MasterCard placed a two-page spread in The New York Times, almost unheard of these days, to articulate its support for the LGBTQIA+ community and MasterCard’s support for GLAAD’s NEON Legacy Series, a photo and video collection produced by Black LGBTQIA+ creators. The ad states MasterCard’s commitment to equal treatment, equal opportunity and equal rights. The ad features both the MasterCard logo and the GLAAD logo.” I can’t find a photo of the ad anywhere, but I’m sure it was great! Of course, this is very different from the way the general public engages with newspapers, as they’re looking for unbiased updates on what’s going on in their communities. But it’s still nice to know there are still some communicators out here tapping into the power of local newspapers to promote their brands, and I was one of them.

(sigh. a beautiful sight)

A sad future for local newspapers Sadly, none of the statistics point to a revival of newspapers anytime soon, although I’m holding out hope. With fewer local papers, and increased reliance on (often biased) television and (often wrong) social media for news, I worry that this is just one of the unfortunate ills of the digital age we’re living in. Sadly, many local papers are unable to stay afloat despite employing every possible adaptation in the book, often succumbing to major buyouts by huge conglomerates, resulting in newspapers that are controlled by corporate interests and offer no true local, unbiased reporting. 

And as for The Record? It suffered a similar fate in 2016 after it was ultimately bought out by Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain. For folks like me from northern New Jersey, it was the end of an era. I still remember being saddened when I learned the news, even feeling a tad guilty that I didn’t stick around long enough to perhaps contribute to a more favorable outcome. While my time there was brief, I worked alongside some of the smartest, most passionate and hard-working people I’d ever met. They lived and breathed northern New Jersey, and they put their heart and soul into every letter of every story that went to print. But what happened with The Record has sadly happened to so many local newspapers with no signs of slowing down. As communications and marketing professionals, we certainly can play a role in trying to help revive the industry, but my fear is that any efforts we make would be too little too late.

[tyrantisterror]

I just saw Spider-Man: Homecoming, and it left me with some THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS as a person whose teenage years were heavily influenced by Spider-Man comics.  I don’t talk about Spider-Man as much as I do, say, Godzilla, but Spider-Man was one of the characters who helped me survive the tumultuous teenage years of my life.  You could almost define my life by the (so far) three heroes that inspired me through each era: Godzilla for childhood, Spider-Man for my teens, and Sherlock Holmes for college.  I’m not the biggest Spider-Man fan, because like most big superheroes, he’s been in a lot of garbage, but when Spider-Man is in a good story, he’s my fuckin’ dude.

Which is why I’m so ecstatic at how this movie turned out!  My thoughts and feelings on it are good ones, but also spoilery ones, so I’m putting a cut.  I wish I didn’t have to because one of those spoilery thoughts is SUPER IMPORTANT TO THE APPEAL OF THE MOVIE, but this is the world we live in.

Ok, so, first off: they finally made a good adaptation of Mary Jane.

Mary Jane Watson is an incredibly important part of Spider-Man, and yet she’s also one of the most frequently misunderstood parts of the story as well.  Spider-Man is a teenage dramedy/soap opera as much as it is a superhero story, and like a lot of teenage dramedies it uses a Betty & Veronica style love triangle as a plot device.  That is to say, you’d have Peter Parker as the Archie, a stable, dependable girl as the Betty, and a more volatile, “flawed” girl as the tempting Veronica.  The general assumption in these love triangles is that Archie will end up with the Betty in the end, since they’re an obvious match, and the Veronica’s role is more to stir up trouble and put some bumps in the road to that inevitable end while never really being a contender for the “true” love interest.

Peter Parker went through a LOT of Betties over his career, but for the longest time he had one main Veronica, and that Veronica was Mary Jane.  The Betties, be they Liz Allen, Betty Brant, Gwen Stacy, etc., varied a bit, but generally were sweet and disliked this Spider-Man guy.  They wanted Peter Parker to settle down and follow a more normal track in life, and yet also tended not to challenge him that much. (This is a generalization and yes you will find moments that contradict this – Gwen Stacy in particular was really well fleshed out during her tenure as The Character Stan Lee Intends to Be Peter Parker’s Future Wife).

Mary Jane was designed to contrast them.  She didn’t want to settle down, she loved excitement, she was acerbic and clever. She was the one love interest that wasn’t designed to be someone who would be content with being Peter Parker’s eventual wife – she was never intended to be THE love interest, but rather a roadblock.  She was the Veronica – flashy, sometimes selfish, and not content to be a satellite in the male main character’s orbit.  She was a much more independent character by design, which made her dynamic with Peter more interesting.  Peter and Mary Jane’s interactions were those of two people who might not be destined to be together, two people who didn’t have to like each other all the time or work to fulfill their character arc. Hell, often Mary Jane would even push Peter away, and the comics eventually revealed that she had figured out Peter’s secret identity very early on, which put the moments where she was encouraging of and even fascinated by Spider-Man’s heroics in early comics, as well as her not wanting to get involved in Peter’s much-more-complicated-than-he-lets-on life, in a whole new context!

This actually made it much more satisfying when they did come together in the comics, because their relationship actually felt like something that developed from a mutual chemistry, rather than because the writer felt Peter needed a girlfriend.  Comic book Mary Jane had her own shit going on, and eventually, after a lot of push and pull, she decided to let Peter into her life. Y’know, like real people!

And then adaptations make Mary Jane a Betty, who basically exists for Peter to faun over while she’s disappointed that he doesn’t show up for her theater performances or whatever the fuck.

This movie actually understood what kind of character Mary Jane is, and updated her for modern times wonderfully.  SPOILER: Zendaya’s character is Mary Jane.  Well, not quite – her first name is given as Michelle, but at the end of the movie she says she prefers to go by “MJ,” and I flipped out when she did because I was fucking hoping she was Mary Jane as soon as she was introduced.  Zendaya’s MJ is acerbic, aloof, funny, and just utterly fucking cool.  She’s not the movie’s obvious love interest for Peter (that role goes to Liz Allen, who was Peter’s first Betty in the comics), but the movie drops a few hints that she’s just a little interested in Peter (but denies it when put on the spot), and also hints that she might know his secret identity.  Like… they get it!  They get that Mary Jane is more than just some damsel in distress who wants Peter to quite being a hero and make a housewife out of her already – they get that Mary Jane is a character rather than another character’s motivational prop.  We finally have a good Mary Jane!

(For a more detailed/better explanation of Mary Jane’s character in the comics, as well as how she contrasts with the other love interests in Spidey’s history, please read the essay “Why Did It Have to Be You, Mary Jane?” from this website here)

The movie doesn’t just get Mary Jane right, either.  It also understands the importance of giving Spider-Man a supporting cast.  Again, Spider-Man books are as much a coming of age dramedy as they are superhero stories, and the early comics gave Spidey a well-rounded cast of supporting characters. However, both adaptations and modern Spider-Man comics tend to either forget that cast, or worse, horribly misuse them.  Spidey’s original supporting cast was slowly killed off over the years, and while they were often brought back, many writers didn’t seem to know what to do with them once they returned from the shallow comic book grave.

This movie understands the complexity of Flash Thompson – that Peter’s rival isn’t just some dumb jock bully, but actually just another kid who (somewhat rightfully) thinks Peter is a flake who relies on talent instead of hard work to get ahead.  Flash’s beef with Peter always had a bit of a justification to it – from his limited perspective, Peter was this smart kid who’s intensely unreliable, letting everyone down time and time again because he’d rather mysteriously disappear than help his classmates out.  Flash wasn’t a perfect kid himself, but his grievance with Peter was more than just inexplicable teen bullying. MCU Flash understands that, and updates it a bit.  MCU Flash is a nerd like Peter, but isn’t quite as smart as Peter is.  Being smart also doesn’t come to him as easily, and you can see why Flash gets so pissed when Peter seems to get more praise for his intellect than Flash does while simultaneously trying far less.

The movie even adds to Peter’s supporting cast, giving him an indispensable friend in Ned Leeds (a fellow nerd and the sole person Peter has told his identity to, albeit accidentally). Their dynamic is kind of the heart of the movie, with Ned at once cheering Peter on/living vicariously through Peter’s superheroics, while also grounding him with a normal person’s view on the superhero world.

Like… it’s marvelous, this movie.  It takes the better understanding of Peter Parker as a character that the Andrew Garfield movies had, adds in the actually good storytelling of the Sam Raimi films, and then throws in a superior understanding of the Spider-Man story dynamic as a whole along with a better script than any previous Spider-Man movie to date! It’s just… it’s Spider-Man!  It’s my Spider-Man, the Spider-Man that inspired me as a teenager, the Spider-Man that’s Spider-Man at its best.

Also it was a Marvel movie that had a villain who wasn’t a Smug Guy who Wants to Rule/Destroy the World but Is Kinda Bored By It.  The Vulture wasn’t quite as good as Ego the Living Planet, but he was different, and I appreciated that a lot.

[newsjerk]

How Google Book Search Got Lost

Google Books was the company’s first moonshot. But 15 years later, the project is stuck in low-Earth orbit.

Books can do anything. As Franz Kafka once said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

It was Kafka, wasn’t it? Google confirms this. But where did he say it? Google offers links to some quotation websites, but they’re generally unreliable. (They misattribute everything, usually to Mark Twain.)

To answer such questions, you need Google Book Search, the tool that magically scours the texts of millions of digitized volumes. Just find the little “more” tab at the top of the Google results page — it’s right past Images, Videos, and News. Then click on it, find “Books,” and click on that. (That’s if you’re at your desk. On mobile, good luck locating it anywhere.)Google Book Search is amazing that way. When it started almost 15 years ago, it also seemed impossibly ambitious: An upstart tech company that had just tamed and organized the vast informational jungle of the web would now extend the reach of its search box into the offline world. By scanning millions of printed books from the libraries with which it partnered, it would import the entire body of pre-internet writing into its database.“You have thousands of years of human knowledge, and probably the highest-quality knowledge is captured in books,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin told The New Yorker at the time. “So not having that — it’s just too big an omission.”Today, Google is known for its moonshot culture, its willingness to take on gigantic challenges at global scale. Books was, by general agreement of veteran Googlers, the company’s first lunar mission. Scan All The Books!In its youth, Google Books inspired the world with a vision of a “library of utopia” that would extend online convenience to offline wisdom. At the time it seemed like a singularity for the written word: We’d upload all those pages into the ether, and they would somehow produce a phase-shift in human awareness. Instead, Google Books has settled into a quiet middle age of sourcing quotes and serving up snippets of text from the 25 million-plus tomes in its database.Google employees maintain that’s all they ever intended to achieve. Maybe so. But they sure got everyone else’s hopes up.Two things happened to Google Books on the way from moonshot vision to mundane reality. Soon after launch, it quickly fell from the idealistic ether into a legal bog, as authors fought Google’s right to index copyrighted works and publishers maneuvered to protect their industry from being Napsterized. A decade-long legal battle followed — one that finally ended last year, when the US Supreme Court turned down an appeal by the Authors Guild and definitively lifted the legal cloud that had so long hovered over Google’s book-related ambitions.But in that time, another change had come over Google Books, one that’s not all that unusual for institutions and people who get caught up in decade-long legal battles: It lost its drive and ambition.When I started work on this story, I feared at first that Books no longer existed as a discrete part of the Google organization — that Google had actually shut the project down. As with many aspects of Google, there’s always been some secrecy around Google Books, but this time, when I started asking questions, it closed up like a startled turtle. For weeks there didn’t seem to be anyone around or available who could or would speak to the current state of the Books effort.The Google Books “History” page trails off in 2007, and its blog stopped updating in 2012, after which it got folded into the main Google Search blog, where information about Books is nearly impossible to find. As a functioning and useful service, Google Books remained a going concern. But as a living project, with plans and announcements and institutional visibility, it seemed to have pulled a vanishing act. All of which felt weird, given the legal victory it had finally won.When I talked to alumni of the project who’d left Google, several mentioned that they suspected the company had stopped scanning books. Eventually, I learned that there are, indeed, still some Googlers working on Book Search, and they’re still adding new books, though at a significantly slower pacethan at the project’s peak around 2010–11.“We’re not focused on shiny features and things that are very visible to users,” says Stephane Jaskiewicz, a Google engineer who has worked on Books for a decade and now leads its team. “It’s more like behind the scenes work and perfecting the technology — acquiring content, processing it properly so that we can view the entire book online, and adjusting the search algorithm.”One focus of work has been a constant throughout Google Books’ life: improving the scanners that add new books to the “corpus,” as the database is known. At the birth of the project, in 2002, as Larry Page and Marissa Mayer set out to gauge how long it might take to Scan All The Books, they set up a digital camera on a stand and timed themselves with a metronome. Once the company got serious about ramping its scanning up to efficient scale, it started jealously guarding details of the operation.Jaskiewicz does say that the scanning stations keep evolving, with new revisions rolling out every six months. LED lighting, not widely available at the project’s start, has helped. So has studying more efficient techniques for human operators to flip pages. “It’s almost like finger-picking on a guitar,” Jaskiewicz says. “So we find people who have great ways of turning pages — where is the thumb and that kind of stuff.”Still, the bulk of the work at Google Books continues to be on “search quality” — making sure that you find the Kafka passage you need, fast. It’s an unglamorous game of inches — less moonshot and more, say, satellite maintenance.

To understand how Google Books arrived at this point, you need to know a few things about copyright law, which essentially divides books into three classes. Some books are in the public domain, which means you can do what you want with their texts — mostly, those published before 1923, as well as more recent books whose authors chose to release them from standard copyright. Plenty of more recent books are still in print and under copyright; if you want to do anything with these texts, you have to come to terms with their authors and publishers.

Then there’s the third category: books that are out of print but still under copyright, known informally as “orphan works.” It turns out there are a whole lot of these — “between 17 percent and 25 percent of published works and as much as 70 percent of specialized collections,” a study by the US Copyright Office suggests.

How many books is that? No one knows for sure because no one can say with any certainty exactly how many total books there are. The statistic depends on how you define “book,” which isn’t as easy as it sounds. In 2010 a Google engineer named Leonid Taycher wrote a blog post that examined Google Books’ metadata and concluded that the number (then) was about 130 million. Others looked at this work and called it “bunk.” The actual number is probably somewhat lower than Taycher’s figure yet considerably higher than Google Books’ current 25 million-plus.

Some large chunk of that large number, then, are “orphan works.” And until recently, they weren’t much of an issue. You could borrow them from a library or find them in a used bookstore, and that was that. But once Google Books proposed to scan them all and make them available to the internet, everyone seemed to want a piece of them.

The legal battle that ensued was, essentially, a custody fight over these orphans, in which Google, publishers, and authors each sought to control the process of ushering them into a new home for the digital age. The three parties eventually agreed on a grand compromise known as the Google Books Settlement, under which Google would go ahead and make the orphan works available in their entirety and set aside money to compensate rights holders who stepped forward. But in 2011, a federal judge rejected the settlement, ruling in favor of advocates who feared it would forever ensconce a private for-profit company as the registrar and toll collector of the universe’s library.

Once the settlement collapsed, Google went back to its scanning, and publishers pursued the burgeoning business of selling e-books, which had leapfrogged Google’s lead in the future-of-books race due to the success of Amazon’s Kindle. But the Authors Guild continued to press its lawsuit, charging that Google’s arrogation of the right to scan and index books without the permission of copyright holders was illegal. Google is wealthy, but not so wealthy that it could ignore the threat of multi-billion dollar copyright infringement penalties (thousands of dollars per book for millions of books). This was the proceeding that dragged on until the Supreme Court put it out of its misery last year — establishing once and for all that Google had a fair-use right to catalogue books and provide brief excerpts (“snippets”) in search results, just as it did with web pages.

That ruling represents a foundational achievement for the future of online research—Google’s and everyone else’s. “It’s now established precedent — everyone benefits,” says Erin Simon, Google Books’ product counsel today. “This is going to be in textbooks. It’s supremely important for understanding what fair use means.” (Simon also notes with a chuckle that when the suit was originally filed, she hadn’t yet started law school.)

The Authors Guild may have lost in court, but it believes the fight was worth it. Google “did it wrong from the beginning,” says James Gleick, president of the Guild’s board. “They plowed ahead without involving the creative community on whose backs they were building this new thing. The big companies have a droit du seigneur attitude toward creative work. They think, ‘We are the masters of the universe now.’ They should have just licensed the books instead.”

You’d think a Supreme Court victory would have meant a renewal of energy for Google Books: Rev up the scanners — full speed ahead! By all the evidence, that has not been the case. Partly that’s because the database is so huge already. “We have a fixed budget that we’re spending,” says Jaskiewicz. “At the beginning, we were scanning everything on every shelf. At some point we started getting a lot of duplicates.” Today Google gives its partner libraries “pick lists” instead.

There are plenty of other explanations for the dampening of Google’s ardor: The bad taste left from the lawsuits. The rise of shiny and exciting new ventures with more immediate payoffs. And also: the dawning realization that Scanning All The Books, however useful, might not change the world in any fundamental way.

To many bibliophiles, Google’s self-appointment as universal librarian never made sense: That role properly belonged to some public institution. Once Google popularized the notion that Scanning All The Books was a feasible undertaking, others lined up to tackle it. Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive, which stores historical snapshots of the whole web, already had its own scanning operation. The Digital Public Library of America grew out of meetings at Harvard’s Berkman Center beginning in 2010 and now serves as a clearinghouse and consortium for the digital collections of many libraries and institutions.

When Google partnered with university libraries to scan their collections, it had agreed to give them each a copy of the scanning data, and in 2011 the HathiTrust began organizing and sharing those files. (It had to fend off the Authors Guild in court, too.) HathiTrust has 125 member organizations and institutions who “believe that we can better steward research and cultural heritage by working together than alone or by leaving it to an organization like Google,” says Mike Furlough, the trust’s director. And of course there’s the Library of Congress itself, whose new leader, Carla Hayden, has committed to opening up public access to its collections through digitization.

In a sense each of these outfits is a competitor to Google Books. But in reality, Google is so far ahead that none of them is likely to catch up. The consensus among observers is that it cost Google several hundred million dollars to build Google Books, and nobody else is going to spend that kind of money to perform the feat a second time.

Still, the nonprofits have a strength Google lacks: They’re not subject to the changing priorities of a gigantic technology corporation. They have a focused commitment around books, unencumbered by distractions like running one of the largest advertising businesses in the world or managing a smartphone ecosystem. Unlike Google, they’re not going to lose interest in seeking new ways to connect readers with books that might, a la Kafka, melt a frozen mind.

In popular mythology, interminable lawsuits turn into hungry maelstroms that drown the participants. (The archetype is Dickens’ Jarndyce v. Jarndyce from Bleak House, the generations-spanning estate fight whose legal fees eat up all the assets at stake.) In the tech business, court battles like the celebrated antitrust suit that plagued IBM for years tend to pinion giant corporations and provide new competitors with an opening to lap an incumbent. Google itself rose to dominate search while Microsoft was busy defending itself from the Justice Department.

Yet the Books fight was never as central to Google’s corporate being as that kind of all-consuming conflict. And it wasn’t all a waste, either. It taught Google something valuable.

As the Authors Guild’s Gleick points out, Google started Books with a “better ask forgiveness than permission” attitude that’s common today in the world of startups. In a sense, the company behaved like the Uber of intellectual property — a kind of read-sharing service — while expecting to be seen the way it saw itself, as a beneficent pantheon of wizards serving the entire human species. It was naive, and the stubborn opposition it aroused came as a shock.

But Google took away a lesson that helped it immeasurably as it grew and gained power: Engineering is great, but it’s not the answer to all problems. Sometimes you have to play politics, too — consult stakeholders, line up allies, compromise with rivals. As a result, Google assembled a crew of lobbyists and lawyers and approached other similar challenges — like navigating YouTube’s rights maze — with greater care and better results. It grew up. It came to understand that it could shoot for the moon, but it wouldn’t always get there.

It’s possible that Google might someday take another run at solving the orphan works problem. But it looks like it’s going to wait for others to take the lead. “I don’t know that there’s anything that we could do without a different legal framework,” says Jaskiewicz.

As I worked on this piece, I kept thinking back to a book I’d read a few years ago called Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a whimsical, nerdy novel by Robin Sloan. It’s about a secret society dedicated to solving a centuries-old Name of the Rose-style mystery that’s rooted in bookmaking and typography. Google plays a critical supporting role in Penumbra, as the protagonist attempts to unravel the riddle at the story’s heart. As it turns out, even the company’s unrivaled informational prowess isn’t enough to do the trick. That takes a chance encounter between the protagonist and a particular book that provides an illuminating insight. It takes, in the phrase with which Sloan closes his tale, “exactly the right book, at exactly the right time.”

Penumbra reminds us that Google’s engineering mindset isn’t omnipotent. Breaking a challenge into approachable pieces, turning it into data, and applying efficient routines is a powerful way to work. It can carry you a good distance toward a “library of utopia,” but it won’t get you there.

And even if you get there, it isn’t utopia, anyway. The hard labor is still ahead. That’s because when you turn a book into data, you make it easy to find quotes and search snippets, but you don’t make it fundamentally easier to do the work of reading the book — that irreplaceable experience of allowing one’s own mind to be temporarily inhabited by the voice of another person.

To date, the full experience of reading a book requires human beings at both ends. An index like Google Books helps us find and analyze texts but, so far, making use of them is still our job. Maybe the quest to digitize all books was bound to end in disappointment, with no grand epiphany.

Like many tech-friendly bibliophiles, Sloan says he uses Google Books a lot, but is sad that it isn’t continuing to evolve and amaze us. “I wish it was a big glittering beautiful useful thing that was growing and getting more interesting all the time,” he says. He also wonders: We know Google can’t legally make its millions of books available for anyone to read in full — but what if it made them available for machines to read?

Machine-learning tools that analyze texts in new ways are advancing quickly today, Sloan notes, and “the culture around it has a real Homebrew Computer Club or early web feel to it right now.” But to progress, researchers need big troves of data to feed their programs.

“If Google could find a way to take that corpus, sliced and diced by genre, topic, time period, all the ways you can divide it, and make that available to machine-learning researchers and hobbyists at universities and out in the wild, I’ll bet there’s some really interesting work that could come out of that. Nobody knows what,” Sloan says. He assumes Google is already doing this internally. Jaskiewicz and others at Google would not say.

Maybe, when some neural network of the future achieves self-awareness and find itself paralyzed by Kafka-esque existential doubts, it will find solace, as so many of us do, in finding exactly the right book to shatter its psychic ice. Or maybe, unlike us, it will be able to read all the books we’ve scanned — really read them, in a way that makes sense of them. What would it do then?

[floridaindependentblog]

Is your site starting to struggle online?

In some ways, it isn’t surprising. After all, there are now 1.5 billion websites on the internet- a number that’s only going up.

Getting ahead of that competition is by no means straight-forward. Staying ahead of it is even harder.

It’s all too easy for your hard-earned progress to start to slip away. Heck, all it takes is one Google update and your rankings can slide overnight. Your traffic and leads go with it.

Thankfully, there are ways to avoid such a fate. A website update can help to turn the tables and restore order. Everything from refreshing the layout and altering the aesthetics to a total restructuring of the site can make a mighty difference.

But how do you know when it’s time to take such steps? We can help.

Keep reading for 7 key indicators your site needs an update

1. It’s Losing Its Looks

We know, we know:

You should never judge a book by its cover.

But, let’s face it, everybody does anyway! People are naturally judgmental. We make snap judgments all the time based on nothing but appearance.

And that’s worth considering for your website.

It’s true that looks aren’t everything. The functionality of the site is vital too. However, the visual appeal makes an undeniable difference in all manner of ways.

An outdated aesthetic can make your business seem unprofessional or behind the times. Conversely, a fresh, sleek, and beautiful website design inspires confidence and facilitates trust.

2. It’s Slowing Down

Speed is of the essence in the world of websites.

The faster your website operates, the better. Why?

Because of the user experience. Google wants to provide its users with the best experience possible. Slow sites jeopardize that because nobody wants to wait for a page to load! Users click back and search elsewhere instead.

A slow-running site can, eventually, expect to suffer in SERPs. Fast-running websites will be prioritized, which will hinder your ability to earn traffic.

Remember, any user that clicks away from your site is problematic too. It represents a lost opportunity to generate a lead, or even make a sale.

Keep tabs on the speed of your website. Whenever you notice pages taking an age to load (anything over 3 to 5 seconds can spell trouble), consider investing in an update.

3. Your Content’s Out of Date

Trust is a vital component to success online these days.

Success with digital marketing (including content marketing) is somewhat reliant on it.

Consumers are more discerning than they once were. They don’t want to be sold to; they want a personal experience that delivers value to their lives. They want to see the people behind a brand before they buy from it.

Earn their trust first, then they’ll buy from you. Not the other way around.

It’s your job to have a website full of content that cultivates it.

And a central aspect of that is having relevant content that’s up to date. Outdated information such as incorrect facts, figures, and locations is bad news. Deliver false information and it’ll be hard to win back a user’s trust.

Endeavor to update your website and content at regular intervals- especially on high-traffic pages that generate lots of value to your business.

4. There’s a Security Issue

The security of your website is of paramount importance.

The entire business could be in trouble if you suffer a cyberattack of any kind. You’ve got valuable customer data on hand. If that gets hacked, then you’re in for trouble.

Then there’s the financial side of the matter. One ransomware attack can set your business back hundreds of thousands of dollars. That financial burden can cripple a business’ operations.

Make sure your website is secure at all times.

Hire an IT expert to assess current levels of security. If there’s any room for improvement, then act immediately to rectify the issue.

5. It Doesn’t Work Across All Devices

This point is of enormous importance.

Your website must function perfectly across every device. Be it a desktop, tablet or a mobile, your site must load, display and operate as intended.

Any hiccups or issues is a big problem.

At the very least, make sure it’s mobile-friendly. People now consume most content on their smartphones. If your business website doesn’t function on mobile, then you lose out on that potential traffic.

More to the point, Google actively prioritizes mobile content in search results. Any site that doesn’t operate on mobile faces an uphill battle for rankings.

6. The Navigation Is Unintuitive

We can’t overstate the importance of the user experience on your website.

It must be a joy to spend time on! Users should arrive on-site in an instant, have swift access to their answers, and face no issues as they peruse the pages.

The website’s navigation is a key part of this too. A site that’s intuitive to navigate provides a much better user experience. People can get where they need to go without needing an instruction manual to do it!

Assess how easy your site is to navigate around. How straightforward is it to complete the actions you want people to make? If there’s room for improvement, then it’s time for an update.

7. It’s Been a While

When was the last time you updated your website?

It might have been years since you last went in and took a look.

If that’s the case, then it’s almost certainly time to upgrade your website. Remember, the online world moves at insane speeds! The ‘right things’ for 2015 may no longer cut it in 2020.

Everything from your SEO to the copy itself might be outdated and in need of new life. Fail to stay on top of current trends and it’s a matter of time before your site starts to suffer.

Time for Your Website Update

The internet’s a competitive place.

To stay on top, it’s crucial that you take steps that keep your site firing on all cylinders.

Hopefully, this post will help you know if it’s high time for a website update! Search ‘websites’ now to read more articles like this.

The post When is it Time For a Website Update? 7 Signs Your Website Needs Help appeared first on Florida Independent.

[canaryatlaw]

Okay, so today was good! I think I got up around 12 or so, mostly because nobody woke me up earlier lol and my phone was out of reach so I couldn't really tell what time it was if I drifted awake. But we chilled at the house for a bit and got pizza for lunch and just did our thing before getting ready to leave for the graduation ceremony at 3, see earlier posted picture of me in a romper that I'm now totally obsessed with because how did I not know that rompers are amazing??? I need all of them, now. So we all got ready and took some pictures outside the house with my cousin in her graduation robe and hat before heading off to the graduation. It was being hosted at the state college campus nearby that my aunt actually graduated from several years back, since I guess they couldn't fit everybody at the school (lol, that was not a problem at my high school graduation and my class of 49). So by the time we got there since it was a bit of a drive it was like 4, and it was being hosted in their big sports arena with all the audience being in the stands surrounding the floor, so we ended up sitting stage left right by where the stage was, which was good because my cousin ended up being seated right near the edge of house right so we could see her very easily. So then we waited as the rest of it filled up with a lot of people, and I spent most of the time on Twitter because the group chat I'm in on there was BLOWING UP with drama about like ten different things and it was all sorts of craziness that I was to varying degrees trying to either calm down, stay out of, or investigate lol. It was intense, to say the least. Just people (or person) acting stupid and stirring up drama for no reason, and then some others just responding unkindly to tweets of a certain celebrity we all like. But anyway. The service started and it was nice, not too long, nobody spoke for more than like 10 minutes or so and it got passed between a few people before they did the passing out diplomas. There were about 280 kids in her class so I'd say reading the names probably took about 20 minutes, which wasn't bad (my stupid college had one giant ceremony for everyone in all of the schools, grad and undergrad, and they were reading names for a solid hour and a half, it was torture and we were outside and it was HOT). But yeah, pretty soon after that it was done! We met my cousin outside and took a few more pictures before heading off to the Italian restaurant where they had a reservation. North Carolina has a lot of New York transplants, which means they also have some decent Italian food haha and this place was by all means quite good. I ended up getting gnocchi and wild boar ragu, which was a bit of an untraditional choice for me but I was trying to expand my picks a bit and it was really good! The gnocchi were like, really big so they got kind of plain, but the sauce was amazing and I almost finished it all lol. My cousin and I split a cannoli for dessert, which was really them bringing us 3 mini cannolis, which we each ate 1 of and then were too full to eat the last one so it got passed off to somebody else lol. At one point during the dinner the table next to us was being particularly loud, just like talking unnecessarily loudly for no specific reason, and my aunt, who was probably a little tipsy at this point, started also talking very loudly and kind of making fun of them and what they were saying and ohmygoodness I lost it and I just couldn't stop laughing haha it was so great. She has a very different personality than my mom, where my mom is very quiet and reserved my aunt tends to be much more blunt and somewhat confrontational, and there have been times where I've definitely wished my mom was more like that and would just tell a certain person off when we were in an uncomfortable situation haha but I love my mom the way she is and I can appreciate her trying to remain polite and kind even when the other person probably deserves to get told off (I'd like to think that I'm a little more willing to do so should the situation call for it). But anyway. After we finished up there we headed back to the house, and although it wasn't that late quite yet everyone was pretty tired so not much was going on. I pulled out my laptop to try to order my dad these personalized cufflinks to go with the personalized tie clip my brother is getting him for Father's Day/his birthday next week (his birthday is literally the day after Father's Day, so that's convenient, and my mom's is the same way with Mother's Day, so I always say it's like they were born to be parents lol) but the website was not working very well (I blame the crappy wifi connection since we're kind of in the middle of nowhere) so it took several attempts to make it work but I got it through. Meanwhile we started a game of uno with a bunch of us, and I happen to be rather good at such games, even when there is a fair amount of luck involved I happen to just somehow win them very often haha and tonight was no different, I was the only person who got to uno and I said it 3 different times before finally going out on a wild card. My uncle insisted he was holding back because he had several wild draw 4's he could've used at different points, but I told him that was a strategic error on his part for not using them when he was picking up tons and tons of cards instead 😂 I very much enjoy teasing my adult relatives, especially when my brothers aren't around to be obnoxious to everyone. After that I chilled out on my computer for a little while longer talking to some friends and reading a single chapter of fanfic update because I love this story and couldn't wait to read it, while everyone else had pretty much already went to bed, so I eventually did so as well, after taking a quick shower, and so here we are. But yeah, good day all around. I am enjoying being with my extended family, as I don't get to see them too much. A lot of my memories from my childhood of family vacations with all my cousins on my mom's side (I don't have any on my dad's side, but with my mom's we have her brother and sister's kids) are unhappy because I fall right in between the two age groups of the rest of my cousins, so there was never anyone my age and I always wanted to be with the older kids but they never included me in anything and it just led to a lot of me winding up running back to whatever room I was staying in and crying. This hasn't been the case for some time of course now that we're all older (this cousin who graduated is the youngest of our generation besides my little sister) but I vividly remember those times so I very much appreciate making happy memories with them instead, even if it's just with the adult-adults at this point (and my two cousins who do live here). Tomorrow is her graduation party, so that should also be fun, and yeah that's about it, it's 1 am so I'm going to attempt to go to sleep now. Goodnight dear ones. Have a lovely weekend.

[jesselmnesbitt-blog]

Unturned Single Player Cheats

It is deemed an great narrative-what type only you possibly can on personal computer-but will be the code again undoubtedly worthy? You can actually take note of it free of charge, on the other hand from the pick to buy $5 to gain access to 'gold' web servers, which offer you two times xp, 'boosted loot drops', along with other strengths. Nonetheless, if you've come across ammunition, and Teaming track of buddies to combat the hordes making bases irrefutably enhances the go through, regardless of the fact website hackers have, predictably, aimed numerous web servers. |If you're capable of tummy the cut down producing values, you will probably find a specific thing to enjoy around its coarse corners. B) no it's not "pay for to dominate" as golden shoppers their particular web servers to encounter on. This is certainly his specific share: "good into your heavy steam marketing: for people which do not know, right now my essential problem is reworking the marketing to make use of heavy steam code web servers. things which will allow hosting, utilisation this web server variety along with other sleek includes. The competition has anxiously waited long time for a developer happy to need that predicament, rather this millionaire conglomerate, they come across an practical 19-yrs . old young child. reports sexton. It is straightforward that sexton was troubled by the prototypical dayz mod, and then the dedication on the undoubtedly visceral, modular, unforgiving, constantly expanding apocalypse-these aspirations are constructed from programming skillsets he honed at 15 is extremely extraordinary. |“for age ranges all people are actually requesting helicopters and motorboats along with other transport and also that i needed nearly always mentioned ‘yeah possibly, we’ll “at this time around town and also that i will be speaking,” reports sexton. [he’s] a tremendous ideas with my go through while he foretells town, which is not afraid to test out something which strays somewhat out of the uncomplicated pathway that Unturned Gps Code would probably need.ins sexton concurs the In 2014, at within the time Unturned Gps Code struck 3., you can find some concerns about the irritation of administering your This is certainly sufficient for sexton “i suspect it is just an extreme magnitude of things i do and just what i love to niche it, i believe i’d instead carry on with owning it increasingly being my leisure activity than own it turn some commercial hard cash-helping to make feature,” he reports. They bring wiz khalifa to encounter battlefield a single one and employ the service of drake to declare good factors behind fifa. |“it’s a particular being. and dev's relationship, there will be on the other hand still another niche of many people that need to be came to in still another application form. But it is acquired 17.5 thousand downloading on heavy steam, with 1.25 thousand clients participating in it previously two time. He’s gently and correctly spoken, personal-sure given his years and years, and possesses that sweet canadian burr. conducted and built in simply turn. Dying would probably abandon monumental pools of energetic green blood stream, but it is continually quick and unforgiving. “i continually lurk throughout the dayz subreddit and i also trust it had been several days ahead of when let go of i came across a share about Unturned Gps Code, and dean hall, who presented dayz, undoubtedly revealed on the site. “it was innovative through its ambiance and then the requiring areas of owning coupled with other players. “it was very styled,” he reports. Contained in the period it was subsequently at the beginning playable, sexton was able to get world so he may get responses. |But on the other hand, for his information technology program he labored onto the activity he was not well prepared in any respect to show. The thought of month-to-month news just works to make him suspect they will uninstall it. The requirement of control services and maximizing selections would then be also released aided by the personal computer release. There are additional people which are super serious. The sport easily acquired sufficient players before you head on heavy steam they can election it in. Be grateful for publishing up. Solve my laptop computer. Now, surviving a few totally free of charge-to-participate in dayz time and minecraft night time in Unturned Gps Code. |They hone on noises and lightweight, therefore in order to avoid them you need to slink thoroughly around with your display lighting away from. Even firearms demand two injections in the direction of dome to put smaller only one zed, but my very own mj��r can get rid of a spook with a single one large, big swipe. I capture a bit of stuff weapon and wads of ammunition, you can start snapping up making goods, stockpile food items, enjoy, and medicine, and in addition find a way to apply certain pants. I'm capable of thrive the earth. And, just when i have begun to appear like it is all turn much too fundamental, i've come across by myself encircled utilizing a deceased construction staff, a moldy sailor boyfriend, and two moving culinary experts. I couldn’t check out multiple-gamer due to the fact web server internet browser was from profit as a result of abrupt and large reputation out of the code (currently, it is throughout the heavy steam top ten). The entire block visuals feature has got rid of its charm. Eh, no-one’s making that you really see them - and also there is not any restriction on how many there has to be. |The zombies appear like a formidable enemy (not very fundamental neither potato ai) and it also surely provides a charm. I have done not presume a lot out of this code sometimes. Also that i am the initial human being to see it. “free-to-play” and “survival” have to date been difficult bedfellows, but there is at least an endeavor on Unturned Gps Code to keep it reasonable. Usually in the period of publishing, you will find 19,469 clients participating in Unturned Gps Code at the same time throughout heavy steam. You won't include a lot surface by himself, shed the whole thing on dying, and then the zombie horde that chiseled you a part will regularly not despawn interpretation relating to both you and your loot is definitely an army of moving and wandering undead that stench your blood stream like some twisted humanoid education of property sharks that can just. increase, it'll style delightful. The best way a “style” may possibly be “marketed” to young ones is other than me. Is not nearly always in touch with young ones. It peaks at more than 38,000 players, and possesses a normal concurrent matter of 28,000. |The sole other no-impose titles getting more players on heavy steam are crew castle 2 and dota 2, all of that offer triple-a class code participate in that lots of players would not withstand enjoying to buy. Though in addition, i believe the actual fact it is an entirely totally free of charge name that looks like either minecraft and dayz - well-accepted lev generators that will have to have a parent or guardian to hack available a savings - will much to own it on to hard drive devices. The tiny a single one below consideration was eyeing me track of a rifle, which constructed a sort of crazy incongruity. By utter chance i had the ability to thrive the blast, so at gunpoint we was required to indulge the Once i leaned to and from he fired bullets recent my ears, that most of us consider is really a fairly daunting thing to manifest when affairs never style they’re made out of excess cgi out of the 1990s code reveal. In spite of evolving into an unattractive, untidy, extremely-derivative code, Unturned Gps Code is really more complete at increasingly being dayz than dayz is. And obviously that’s all it entails, merged with a military of schoolchildren, to reign over heavy steam. It really work. in any respect situations? Start a single global. |Configuration out of the code it's really a surviving code manifest a share-apocalypse global, wherein most of the customers are changed into flesh feeling hungry zombies. There are several regions to find out more details about: you will find military bases, international airports, instructional classes, campgrounds and quite a few other municipalities. All that you do like building up a raw wood residence relating to the doorstep, or having a complete city on your own, treatments relies upon inside your imagination, perseverance apart from conviction. See my web server f1server and tnx nelson . To prevent 2.: -some products are removed -inferior droplets -underpriced skillsets -regular news, helping to make very difficult to encounter without the need for updating every day (this is a weakness and also a seasoned professional, seasoned professional seeing as offers the bare minimum 5 affairs, weakness since they time) -now and then volatile so yeah, farmville is underrated throughout the buyer results, i am just talking about, the guy who decide to Fall over 2015 now my cousin picked up prison architect, kerbal space or room course, and Unturned Gps Code on my own smallish credit account, and also that he chosen his hard cash to generate kerbal space or room course and prison archietect. But which is never to imply i really do not like it or almost everything. Unturned Gps Code is known as a share-apocalyptic surviving code created by nelson sexton-the primary developer, user, and founding daddy of smartly fitted lev generators. |Trapped on prince edward destination (pei), players can pick to outlive by himself or sign up for a web server and battle zombies in concert. In Unturned Gps Code, players are dropped on prince edward destination (pei) wherein they need to thrive the zombie apocalypse. Then, you are away from and off to the canadian destination pei. The yards registering my thirst and cravings for food-found in the underside eventually left area-happened to be presently depleting and also that i expected to make certain i did not expire from inadequate companies. Yet still crouching, i snuck up supporting a spook and eventually left-clicked to smash. I happened to run about and like tree and chipped in search engine marketing possessing a pickaxe for a high-quality second ahead of when understanding that simply an axe, fire axe, or chainsaw enables you to cut back smaller foliage. Additionally to systems, players can construct traps for Garments, for instance a doctor's coating and pink tshirt, are often constructed if you possess the appropriate magnitude of cloth fabric. Beyond the fire axe and colt pistol you will find a magnum, mosen rifle, sniper rifles, and submachine firearms. |could very well be fitted by important ��t” whereas your weapon went out. being required to spend the money for 5 $ doesn't equivalent a pay for-to-dominate plan of action, due to the fact strengths are isolated.