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After reading Colin's excellent post on search engine optimization, I decided that my personal blog could use a little fine-tuning to hopefully index it a little higher in search results.

Google, at least, will rank each page it indexes based on several criteria. The mains ones being the actual URL of the page, the page title, and how the content of the page relates to both. Since I built my blog using Ruby on Rails, it was easy to customize the URL based on each blog entry. If you click on the title of a post, for example "Search engine optimization", you will be taken to a URL that looks like this:

http://www.travisonrails.com/2006/09/07/Search_engine_optimization

The title of the blog post now becomes the URL of the page. This definitely helped my search ranking, but my page title remained the boring "Travis on Rails" no matter what page you were on. So, I recently decided to change the page title to reflect the title of the post as well. Thanks to Rails, in one line of code and less than five minutes time I now had page titles that echoed my post titles. So now if you go to a post titled "Search engine optimization", you'll see the URL from earlier as well as the new page title "Travis on Rails - Search engine optimization". So the title of the post will appear three times for each page: the page title, the URL, and in the content of the page. This should definitely boost each individual page's search ranking.

I got a free iPod Nano when I purchased my MacBook thanks to a back-to-school promotion by Apple. So, to recoup some of the cost of the MacBook, I put the Nano on eBay. The starting price was $149.99 with a "Buy it Now" price of $175. About two hours before the auction ended (no bids had been made) someone hit the "Buy it Now" button. I got the following cryptic email from them about an hour later:

Hello,
Good Morning to you,how is business,family and all other things, hope all are in good condition. well I'm Bonner Goldbach from CA(Sebastopol),but Presently i'm leading a trade fair program in Australia.I saw your item above at ebay(150022885893)and i will like to buy it for my grandson that study in a Computer science school in University of Lagos at Nigeria Next week as a gift,i will like to informed you first of all that i will be handling the shipment on my own risk over to Nigeria.Do not worry about the shipping of the item,i have an account with FEDEX and will be sending you my FEDEX account number for the shipment, and if you decedided in sending the item to so that you can add the shipping cost to the cost of the product you can still do it and you will have to calculate the cost over to Ikeja,Lagos state,23401 Nigeria.Moreover i would have prefer to send you a cheque but due to the fact that i want you to ship the item first thing monday morning,i will be sending you the payment vai PAYPAL,and so make sure you get the package ready for monday shipment ok And kindly send me your paypal email address,so i can direct the payment to your account right away.
Best Regards
Bonner Goldbach.

I immediately sent a reply giving him my PayPal email address and telling him that I didn't quite understand his email, but that I could only ship the iPod within the United States by USPS.

I didn't hear from him for two days, so I re-sent my PayPal email address and reminded him politely to please pay promptly. Well, finally after three more days, I got the following email from "PayPal" (pay attention to the grammar):

Pay With Pay Pal,
Pay Pal makes it easy to receive Dineen Villaruz money, to received this payment into your account,you will have to sent the shipment tracking number to our customer care department at the link below(payp.alcustomercare@consultant.com) for shipment verifications, then we can process and credit funds into your account. We are sorry for the inconveniences we might have caused you, as this is our new policy to protect both the Seller and the Buyer from fraudulent activities. And if there is any problem within you and the buyer you are to contact our customer care representative in the immediately. For more information please contact our customer care at the above link.

The terrible English and obviously falsified email address finally convinced me that this guy was just some moron trying to scam me out of a free iPod. This is the email that came right after the "PayPal" email:

Hello,
I have made out my payment to you for this item purchase (150022885893),So check your mail for the comfirmation mail from paypal.Get back to me immediately if you receive the confirmation mail from paypal and don't forget to send me your physical contact address and your phone number so that i can arranged for the shipment okay,and the exact time you will be at home tomorrow.So that i can schedule Fedex to come and pick it up from you in other to reduce the stress of you driving down to their location to send it.Then i can send you my grandson's address and fedex account number.Hope to hear from you soon.

Well, I was furious that I had to waste a week waiting for this guy, just to find out that he was trying to commit fraud. I sent a pretty heavily-worded email back to the guy telling him what I thought of him and his scam.

I guess this should serve as a lesson to other people that this might happen too. Pay close attention to everything.

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).

I recently purchased a MacBook and I'm slowly getting acclimated to its 13.3" widescreen. My old (PC) laptop had a 15.4" screen with monster resolution, so I had no problem with screen real estate. While I am getting used to the smaller screen and resolution, I am really looking forward to trying out Spaces, one of the new additions to Apple's upcoming release of OS X Leopard.

In the meantime, Adam turned me on to a great Mac app that functions very similarly to Spaces. It's called VirtueDesktops, and it has greatly helped me in getting used to the MacBook's smaller screen. While it does have a few bugs (you can turn on motion sensor switching to take advantage of the internal sensor on MacBooks and MacBook Pros, but a too-hard tap on the keyboard or a coworker banging on the desk will cause your active desktop to switch; more than a little annoying) it will definitely fill the void until I can get my hands on Spaces. The main drawback that I've encountered with VirtueDesktops is that, while you can move an application window from one desktop to another, it's way too much work whereas Spaces allows you to drag and drop application windows between virtual desktops. But, this will definitely keep me in business until Leopard is released.

I received a jubilant email today from Shawn that contained a link to this article officially announcing that Mac OS X Leopard will indeed be shipped with Ruby on Rails pre-configured.

For anyone who's followed these great directions to get RoR up and running on a Mac knows that it takes a fair amount of time and a good bit of focus to get everything correct. Having everything pre-installed will save many people a great deal of aggravation.

On top of having Ruby and Rails in the box, they've promised other packaged goodies like Mongrel, a Ruby alternative to FCGI that I've heard is much more efficient.

It's not like I needed another reason to look forward to the OS X update, but now I'm truly excited to get my hands on Leopard.