this winter’s motion
sunlight climbing through the sky
crocuses blooming
Winter’s Motion
Blog
This Morning’s Earworm: Kate Bush “Running Up that Hill”
Pretty much every morning I wake with a song in my mind. Sometimes it’s simply my latest auditory obsession. Sometimes I think it’s my subconscious “telling me something”. This morning I woke with Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” on earworm. I’m not sure if my brain has a message for me or this just a song I’ve long loved popping back into my awareness. But it’s not unwelcome.
Through the Rainfall
through the rainfall
as it changes to snow
the birds now confused
Found this blossom during my walk the other day. More signs that spring is almost here. Yet today we had rain, wind, snow and hail. It was quite a day, weather – wise.
Looking At Laptops
My main laptop right now is an OLLLDDD MacBook Pro. It’s nearly 10 years old, and it’s starting to really show its age. And we do have need of a laptop. So, it’s time to think of a replacement.
I’ve been very pleased with what I’ve seen of Apple’s new M1 chip. Also, my wife is most comfortable with Mac OS. And I pride myself on being OS agnostic. Additionally, one of the things I’m considering once I’m done at Edmonds college is UW’s Interactive Design program. They require a laptop and, though they don’t mandate a MacBook, they do highly recommend one. So, with all of that, I’m leaning towards an M1 Macbook Air. I still need to explore more, though. Due diligence and all that. Fortunately, I do get a student discount.
So, I’ve done a bit of research already. Check out these videos below. The first is a review of the MacBook while the second talks about the M1 chip compared to Windows PCs. Both point towards the M1 and Macbook.
Is the move from big cities permanent?
My son and a number of my friends have asked what I think about all these people moving out of cities. Well, a Twitter friend, Bernie, posted this to his blog today: Iowa shows why the move from big cities may be only temporary. I agree with his assessment: cities offer more than affordability. I lived for the better part of 10 years in downtown Seattle and loved it. Arts and culture are a part of my soul. Having galleries, coffee shops, restaurants a short walk away delighted me deeply. One my favorite times in my life.
Anyway, Bernie references an article that looks at Iowan politics that might impeded this desire to attract the coastal urban dwellers to the mid-west*: Wood: About that public narrative we’re crafting to attract out-of-state people to move to Des Moines. Summation: the state’s anti-progressive agenda will impede growth. It’s an interesting point of view. For me, personally, politics might be a part, but, ultimately, the whole urban west coast thing is who I am. Even if they had the fastest internet on earth, I doubt I’d be heading east in a U-Haul.
*As a life-long west-coaster, I have long loved calling the middle part of the US the middle-east.
A Saturday Morning Haiku
resisting waking
sunlight reaches my window
life keeps on moving
Another morning, life keeps moving. Onwards…
Under the Clouds
set under the clouds
my city moves through the rain
while fueled by coffee
A rainy day here, just north of Seattle. One that brings me memories of northwestern Oregon. The winter rains in Astoria where my feet were my main mode of transportation. I guess that came from the heavy weight of the rain drops along with their coldness.
Created with Adobe Spark.
A Summary Of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
One of my assignments this week was to read through the Google Webmaster Guidelines and summarize their general recommendations.
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Make sure your pages can get links from other pages. You will want to make sure you use crawlable links when you do that, which means using anchor tags (<a> with a href attribute).
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Create a sitemap and ensure that it has links to all the important pages on the site. They also recommend having this as a “human-readable” list of links for those important pages.
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Keep the number of links on a page to a “reasonable number”. They recommend “a few thousand at most”, which, to me, seems excessive.
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Ensure that the hosting server supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header, which is what informs the Googlebots when content has been changed since they last visited the page. It’s important as it saves bandwidth and, thus, networking overhead costs.
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Use the robots.txt file well. It is important to ensure that the web crawler bots are not crawling non-important pages. Besides ensuring the robots.txt file has the right information, you also want to make sure that it is kept up-to-date. Doing these things ensures that your “crawling budget” is utilized well.
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Another thing that you can do is manually submit your site to Google’s crawlers. This triggers them to head over to your site immediately, as opposed to waiting for it to be discovered crawling other sites.
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Lastly, you should make sure that administrators of other relevant sites know about yours. Emailing an announcement, or posting such on social media is a great tool towards creating awareness of your site and garnering backlinks.
upon the treetop
and the chill of morning fog
we are being observed
Moving slowly from winter to spring. A foggy morning, rains arriving later, shortly after the air warms in spring sunlight.
An update on education
This is from one of my assignments this week, and it seemed like a great blog post. So, enjoy!