Jonathan George [jwgeorge.com] » Site Work

Shortlinks

Jonathan — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 05:20:47 +0000

Recently, Facebook decided to mark my domain as spam. Great. After long ours of work, I finally got things back to normal, and with a few surprises.

For those of you that don’t know, every time I write something, it gets automagicly posted to Facebook and Twitter. Likewise, these really cool social buttons show up to the right of my content. Whenever said articles get published to said places, they are accompanied by a link. Now to make things easier on the eyes, instead of posting a link such as “http://jwgeorge.com/year/month/day/tittle”, I post a shorter link. To accomplish this, I use a service called Bit.ly.

Over the past couple of weeks, the worlds largest social networking site decided that all Bit.ly links were spam, and it was going to tell anyone clicking on these links to my site, that I was spam. Ridiculous. I don’t even look like spam.

So, after investigation, it was determined that Facebook is truly retarded when it comes to its own algorithm of deciding whether a link is spam or not. It took some time, but Bit.ly finally found a solution. They called Facebook and told them to stop it. Problem solved.

Now comes the surprise. I own over 30 domains (no thats not the surprise). And one of them happens to be really cool. It is a domain hack of my name. My normal domain, is of course, jwgeorge.com. But I have this really cool one: jwge.org. Do you see it? jwge.org is like spelling jwgeorge, without the ‘e’. Clever huh? You can learn more about domain hacks here. But why would you want to? I’m cooler than that explanation right?

Anyway. I decided it would be really cool to use that shorter domain as a shortlink to my articles. And lucky me, Bit.ly offers a service, called Bitly.pro. So here’s the laydown. In a really cool numbered sequence. The steps of spreading my content:

Write something cool
Edit said coolness
Publish said coolness
Get long link (http://jwgeorge.com/year/month/day/title/)
Change long link to shortlink (http://jwgeorge.com/year/month/day/title -> http://jwge.org/[character-string])
Publish Title + Shortlink to Facebook and Twitter Automagicly

Pretty nifty I think. And not only is that automatic, but the share buttons are automatic too. Whenever I write, some really cool buttons pop up to the right of the content. And you should click each of theses buttons at least once for each article. You just should. Because once you push my buttons, you too will create a shortlink (twitter only) located at http://jwge.org/. Cool.

So I get shortlinks automagicly created for me, and you can create shortlinks for my content too (twitter only).

Basically the moral of this story is, if you see a link on Facebook or Twitter, and it begins with “http://jwge.org/” you can bet its coming from me, and it’s not spam.

Now I know everyone here is a Facebook user, and most of you use twitter. But for some reason, if you aren’t on Twitter, you should get one. It’s awesome, and you need it to participate in this really cool thing called a shortlink. So what are you waiting for? GET ONE NOW!

Whew. That was a mouthful. Want to learn a little more about shortlinks? Learn all you can here, here and here.

Tweet on! Facebook on! Jwge.org on!

Social Media, Here I Come!

Jonathan — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:51:01 +0000

It is with Great Sadness that I say goodbye to jwgeorge.com on Facebook. I know a lot of people were readers on Facebook, and it was well, convenient. Unfortunately, technology changes; especially when we are talking about Social Media.

Starting today, you will start seeing “Social Media Buttons” for Facebook pop up all over the blog. In addition, the sidebar has been reformatted with an activity stream and recommended pages on my domain. Each time you visit an article, if you like the post, then you should click the button, located at the top that says “like”. They look exactly like the buttons on Facebook, because they are hosted by Facebook. This will provide other people on Facebook, links to my posts.

Now here’s the coolest part. If you still want to receive updates via Facebook, that there is a new article/page/whatever here, go to the homepage, look at my bio at the top, and right underneath there is a link to recommend me to your Facebook friends. How is that cool you say? By clicking that link you’ll get instant notification via your Facebook News Feed that a new article has been written when I write one. Sweet.

So. That means you have at least two links to click right? The like button at the top of this page, and the Recommend button on the homepage. And for those of you worried about security, Facebook isn’t passing a single detail about you to me. Only your friends will see that you have clicked on a link. No one else, not even me. So enjoy, the completely safe, newly socialized jwgeorge.com!

ThankYou HostGator!

Jonathan — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:53:03 +0000

UPDATE: Read this article from @lovehostgator to see how this fantastic company came about.

I just wanted to take a little time to thank someone special in my life, and that is my hosting company, @HostGator. I’ve been through some rough times with hosting companies over the years, and no, I’m not gonna name any names. To this day, I haven’t found anyone else who does service like they do.

For instance. Just today, I was experiencing some slow load times with jwgeorge.com. Now of course, there are multiple reasons to why this could happen. A) My connection could have been slow. I have cable internet, and we all know that cable gets faster or slower depending on how many people are connected in you’re area.

B) There could have been lots of traffic at the time I was doing some maintenance. Sure I could take the site offline, but then you wouldn’t be able to read my articles.

C) HostGator could have been experiencing some heavy load, after all, I do only pay for Shared Hosting, so there are other websites hosted on the same server.

Any of these could have been the cause to my slow load times. Now me, being the open book that I am, decided to share that I was seeing slow load times myself, and post that on twitter. And who was there to respond really quickly? HostGator of course, here is our conversation:

Up until now, I’ve had an excellent experience with @hostgator. But it seems as though my webserver is acting haywire atm… #frustrated!

@sonnicdrummer What seems to be the problem? Have you contacted live chat or phones? Let us know how we can help. ^AF

@hostgator Nope. I haven’t because it wasn’t that big of a deal. Things just really slowed down. I didn’t want to bother support with that

@sonnicdrummer Okay is everything working fine now? What is your primary domain so I can check into it for you? Thanks again. ^AF

@hostgator It never completely stopped. Just a slow response time. Domain is http://jwgeorge.com/. Thanks.

@sonnicdrummer Things seem to load quickly and I see no issues on the server now. If you have any issues feel free to let us know. ^AF

Man. Who does that, and on Twitter too? HostGator does. Heres what I enjoy.

For just $9.95 a month, I get

Unlimited Domains
Unlimited Disk Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
Unlimited Databases
24X7 Support
Instant Backups
99.9% Uptime
and more.
ALL WITH NO CONTRACT!

Come on people, what more could you ask for?

Anyway, I just wanted to take the time to thank HostGator, and the excellent support they give me. HostGator, if you are reading this, ROCK ON!

Simple is Good

Jonathan — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 22:10:34 +0000

Most websites that win design awards are not great websites. In fact many provide a very poor experience for their users.

Awards are usually given to sites that are different and stand out from the crowd, but this often means they have non-standard navigation, lots of flash animations and unique design elements.

This means that these sites are generally less intuitive. Visitors have to think about what they need to do to get the information or result they want.

The more your visitors have to think the more likely they are to give up and go somewhere else. One click and they’re gone. Not good when you are trying to make money from your website!!

Photo of a cluttered website

“There is no such thing as a dumb web user, there are just dumb websites”.

Always design your site for your audience, not for yourself. Everything within the design should be aimed at making your visitor’s life easier. Don’t make them have to think.

Your top three design priorities should ALWAYS be to make your site:

…simple
…clear and
…intuitive.
Thats exactly what I’ve done. Over the past years, this domain has been linked to my blog. Through those years, it changed, morphed, crashed, etcetera, etcetera. Once I finally settled on a design, I wouldn’t like it anymore. So I sat and thought. There are a ton of visitors to twitter.com, and why do so many people prefer that over Facebook or Myspace? Simplicity. Users of Twitter don’t have to look for what they want; information flows to them.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on just that. Simplicity. How could I manage to make my work content rich, while at the same time, not bogging down your computers with dazzle and style. While I find this new design Stylish, it doesn’t take away from the content. You shouldn’t have to look for what you want, and if you can’t find it, there is a huge search box at the top right.

Sadly enough, I had to take down the site for a couple of days to finish and tweak what it actually looked like all together. Thankfully the Facebook version was still up. I’ve learned a lot over the years of design and content, and I still expand on that every day.

That being said, if there is anyone interested in web design, or writing that is reading this, two tips I have for you. One, Simple is better. Don’t over run your content with too much dazzle. Two, when an Idea pops into your head, write it. At the time of writing this, I have a little over 20 articles unpublished. I gotta get those out.

I leave you with this…. IceCream.

Network Switch

Jonathan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:35:50 +0000

While I have been pretty happy with the discussions @ http://jwgeorge.com/chat/, a couple of weeks ago, I had some spammers log on and flood the channel. I’ve recently switched networks to http://geekshed.net/ and hopefully that will fix my problems. I’d like to Re-invite everyone back to the chat and have some fun with the live discussions. See you there!

Facebook Chat Available Everywhere

Things Seem to be Normal!

Jonathan — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:38:16 +0000

Hows it going everyone? If you reading this, that means that my savior from GoDaddy Hosting, HostGator, has saved my butt!! I’ve gotten most of the recent content put back and place, and now I’m just working to make sure that everything Facebook wise is working. So I apologize for the inconvenience.. but now we are done. I hope. Positive thoughts. We are done.

Recovery Complete!

Jonathan — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:06:05 +0000

I was only able to recover a few files, but hey, a few is better than none. No related posts. No related posts.

Thank You GoDaddy

Jonathan — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:08:16 +0000

Now while this post appears to be a thank you, its not.. As you can see this is the only post, and its all thanks to go daddy. Wanna read the rest of the story?

GoDaddy has officially ruined everything.. I just recently was going to make some changes to my blog, when out of the blue… NO BLOG. Some how, wordpress completely disappeared, and my site was not up at all. So now I’m working to bring it all back, however, I’m afraid that none of my old posts are going to be here. Its sad but true. So thanks GoDaddy.