I've been learning a lot recently about optimizing sites for search engine rankings, which is clearly one of the most important business components of any website. If a customer can't find your store, how can they buy what you're selling? Think about your own experiences with Google or other search engines (there are others?!?)---would you look through more than 2-3 pages of search results if you found anything decent on the first page of results? I wouldn't, and you can bet the average customer wouldn't.

You can see for yourself what a difference search engine optimization can make by googling my name. You'll find it eventually, at #26, on my Plexus staff page. Before I worked here, I can remember going through the list pretty far past 10 pages (10 links each), and not seeing the real CoJo at all. At first, I thought that this increase in my internet fame was just due to the number of incoming links to the Plexus domain, but after a little digging in the source code, I had an epiphany: the word "colin" is littered throughout in URLs because we use Ruby on Rails, and "colin" is part of a route we�ve mapped to all the pages that have to do with me. So you end up with URLs like this:

• http://www.plexusweb.com/staff/colin/blog

This colin-ized route appears in tons of link tags in the markup, and search engines are finding each instance (and ranking accordingly). Yet another reason to let us build your site with Ruby on Rails.

Alright, enough is enough with the posts about this movie. I haven't seen it, and I won't write about how awesome it must be, but I will direct your attention to the fact that the new Guster album has a snake in pain from wrapping itself around the sun.

You guessed it - this is about "Snakes on a Plane."

I went into this thinking it would be "campy" but entertaining. Even Travis told me "it was worth seeing." I guess that should have clued me in. But alas I did fork over my $7.00 for a chance to be part of the hype.

I thought I had seen the worst movie ever when I saw "Summer of Sam" by Spike Lee. I came close to walking out on that one. I didn't make it 30 minutes through "Snakes on a Plane" before I had to leave. I don't think it was 10 minutes before a woman's {insert body part} was attacked by a snake in the airplane's bathroom. After that it was all over for me. Within the next 20 minutes I saw a woman's toungue get chewed off, a woman's eyeball get maimed, a man's {insert man's body part} gets attacked, and several other people necks, heads, and other various body parts get bitten.

I decided to cut my losses early. I'm betting that after we left, there were many others following. We were the first ones brave enough to make a run for it.

I'm not a movie elitest. I love bad movies. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite movies was "Deep Blue Sea" - another Samuel L Jackson campy flick. This one was just over the top stupidity, bad acting, and complete lack of plot or suspense.

Snakes on a Plane...

This weekend, I went to see possibly the greatest motion picture ever made (according to Samuel L. Jackson), "Snakes on a Plane!" It may have been the greatest and worst movie I've ever seen. A lot of the acting was pretty bad, and the plot was just plain terrible. However, the thing that redeemed it for me was the fact that the movie didn't take itself seriously. The film-makers knew they were making a bad movie, and took advantage of how low everyone's expectations would be. In any given scene, if you think to yourself 'It would be great if *this* happened,' chances are that's exactly what's about to happen.

I don't think this movie will be winning any awards, but it sure was fun to watch (but only once; I don't think I'll be seeing it again).