Goodbye Blogger, Hello WordPress!

Boy, it's been a long time since I posted to Blogger.

Lately, I've been tinkering with WordPress and have discovered it's now easy to create an entire website without a TON of work.  So I've done so!

Don't worry, this website isn't going away...after all, it is hosted for free.

However, if you'd like more recent updates on my life I suggest you take a look over here:

https://www.adamdace.info/wordpress/

Hopefully I'll be done with construction soon.

XBox Live

Well, I guess this is something to talk about. Recently I've been spending a lot of time(and money) wiring my home up the wing-wang. Anyways, if you're someone I know(or have known) hit me up and we can play some Halo: Reach.

So far I've got to say, it's pretty awesome. Though it signs me out a lot. ):

Pictures can be found here: Flickr Tag

Centegra HealthBridge Fitness Center

This needs to be filled in.

Looking On The Bright Side

I thought I'd write about the good things available in and around Huntley, versus the things I just plain don't like about the area. Over the next few months I'm going to write entries that focus on some of the things I really dig about living out here, and hopefully I can get some pictures going as well. We'll see.

It may seem rather boring, but besides the usual bars and shopping around the city, there's also a few places that I really enjoy. A quick list includes bowling, groceries, and a health club.

So I'm Living In Huntley, IL USA

and I'm pondering what exactly this blog should look like for the future. I'd like to keep it somewhat interesting for others to read and yet start to chronicle my personal life as well as more technical tips as I come across them.

So. I've decided I'll update this blog on an ongoing monthly basis, and what will be in those entries will vary. Besides a look into my life, I'll try to include other topics as they cross my mind. Fair warning, they may seem pretty boring on the outset.

But still, for anyone with some spare time, they'll get an interesting look into what life is in suburban America. At least it'll be a little bit different than most people's Facebook entries. I apologize I can't promise much in terms of multimedia, but I will be trying to borrow my parent's digital camera and will see what I can put together with that.

Update: Some days, I can't believe technology.  I now have a camera that does video and stills.

Pictures can be found here: Flickr Tag

Saying Goodbye To Turing.com

It may take a while(unfortunately, GoDaddy reserves the right to hang on to an expired domain up to 1 year), but I'm happy to say I'm finally done with having a major Internet domain to take care of.

My apologies to those who may be reading this trying to get ahold of the name, but at this point the next owner of turing.com is quite literally out of my hands.

It hasn't been so bad. With a combination of GoDaddy and Google, somehow I'm still getting my e-mail and I've finally said my goodbyes to Google Apps. A decent product, to be sure, but a lot of work just to maintain. Now I'm just a consumer, once again.

BTW, if anyone happens to hear what happened to this domain, I'd definitely like to know. Please let me know either here or drop me a note via e-mail.

Blogging 101

This is mostly for myself, but I wanted to document somewhere the various things I've learned from starting a couple of blogs in terms of how to integrate them into various parts of the Internet.

For the moment, this article will be rather sparse, but I'll fill it in later.

Required Items:

Alexa Toolbar - This toolbar will tell you quite a bit about what the rest of the world thinks of your site. Use it long enough, and in exchange for Alexa monitoring your web habits you'll receive some really interesting stats on how popular your website is in relative terms with the rest of the Internet.

Blogging Tool (i.e. Blogger) - One has to write their blog with something, after all.

Syndication Tool (i.e. Feedburner) - I've no idea why, but simply setting up Feedburner seems to have increased my traffic a bit. It also just makes your blog friendly, for those who wish to subscribe.

Optional Items:

Monitization Tool (i.e. OpenX Adserver) - Hey, I might make money at this someday. Why not. :)

PageRank Tool (i.e. Google Toolbar) - For those of us having a hard time getting indexed by Google, or just curious as to what your PageRank is...I don't think there's really any other way to find out.

Search Engine 101

This is mostly for myself, but I wanted to document somewhere the various things I've learned from Google's FAQs and general knowledge about how to handle search engines.

And so, in the spirit of Dave Letterman, here is my Top 10:

1) Make sure all domains are listed, with each and every search engine(i.e. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo).
2) Make sure all "www" hostnames are listed, with each and every search engine.
3) Make sure all sitemaps are actually conforming to the sitemaps specification. For instance, on Blogger this means having an additional parameter "orderby". See the server's robots.txt file if you have any doubts. I think this parameter has cost me dearly...damn.
4) Watch search engines go nuts with activity.
5) Keep up with tech support, if necessary(still waiting for crawl stats graphs from Google).

Here's my current list of websites on Google's Webmaster Tools site:

- slplacesdir.blogspot.com
- theturinggroup.blogspot.com
- www.slplacesdir.blogspot.com
- www.theturinggroup.blogspot.com
- https://sites.google.com:443/a/turing.com/the-turing-group/
- turing.com
- www.turing.com

That's it. I hope this is useful to someone besides myself. Either way, at least I have a list for next time... :-)

Last, but not least, unlisted icon definitions for Google's new Webmaste Tools page:

- Clock icon: Request queued, but pending. We will get to it, please wait.
- Exclaimation icon: Request processed, with warnings. Please investigate, something -is- wrong.
- Red X icon: Request failed. Please investigate, this request was completely denied.