What happens when you finally get that 15 minutes of fame? Your blog better be ready to handle the load. Another recommended Wordpress plugin, wp-super-cache.

Anatomy of a Fireballing

To put it simply, if you’re running a WordPress blog, you need to be using wp-super-cache. One day, someone will tell people about stuff you’re saying and you want your site to still be there when the people that listen to them turn up on your doorstep.

Nice little bit on the Google Analytics data of daringfireball readers as well. I don’t ever expect the traffic to this site to ever reach the level that a link from daringfireball.net brings, but it’s nice to know that if I did get that traffic, the site would hold up. Wordpress sucks, but there are a million ways to make it awesome. Wp-super-cache is one of them.

Hey there, just a quick note to Jeremy Turner, the same Jeremy who gets his discount shopping and DVD renting on in Oxford, Mississippi. And yes, I did just do that thing that you do when your seven years old and have to sing in order to spell the name of the second largest river in the United States. OK, where was I? Oh yeah—Jeremy.

Jeremy, I sincerely hope you and your family enjoyed Hannah Montana: The Movie. I just wanted to let you know that while you were visiting the Oxford Wal-Mart, torn between bringing home 17 Again or Bride Wars* along the afore mentioned Miley Cyrus vehicle, you inadvertently entered my email address as your own in your new Redbox account information. Oops.

Don’t worry, I’ve already contacted Redbox and everything has been squared away, at least on my end. The email I received from Redbox was apologetic and assured me they would remove my email from your account. Unfortunately this means that you’re going to have update your email preferences in your account, when you get a chance. Sorry about that.

Is our name that uninspiring that even we forget our correct email address?

“Yeah it’s Jeremy uh… whatever…. Turner…*crap* probably at Gmail… gee mail dot… I hate my 1970’s fad name! Parents… so… uninspired… COM! dot com.”

Am I the only one who gets other peoples email? Feel free to share your mistaken identity email story in the comments section. Thanks for stopping by.

*I think you made the right decision by the way, although we both know this means next time you get to rent Dragonball: Evolution.

You know them, you love them and I’m going to show you how you can have your own. If you’ve interacted with social media at all in the past two years, you’ve seen the proliferation of “Short URLs”—links people share on services like Twitter that redirect to a longer destination URL. They are the must have, Internet equivalent of skinny jeans this summer. Two Wordpress plugins were brought to my attention in the aftermath abrupt demise of URL shortening service tr.im and it’s subsequently under-explained resurrection last week. Worried about your leaving your links in the hands of some fly-by-night service? I’m here to give you some options.

ShortURL Plugin

I found out about the Wordpress plugin ShortURL Plugin in this article on Jeffery Zeldman’s Blog. After installing this plugin you get a Short URL Plugin admin page where you can paste in any URL and have it generate a short URL using your domain name. The plugin tracks the number of times the link has been clicked. You can also edit the URL’s trailing information, the default URLs end with “/u/” then an auto generated number. For example, the short URL for this post is now http://jeremyturner.net/u/3. It would be nice if this plugin auto-generated links to all of your posts and pages upon installation, but alas it does not.

I would love to see this plugin mature to the point where someone who already has hosting and a short domain name could roll their own vanity URL shortener. After installing Wordpress, this plugin, and nothing else, one could use the new domain exclusively for generating short URLs to share. My first inclination when reading about Short URL was to try this approach, but the plugin isn’t there yet. More robust metrics would be nice too.

La Petite URL

La Petite URL automatically generates short URLs from pages on your site. Once installed, the plugin auto-generates a URL for every page and post in your site. The new, shortened URL is displayed in the right-hand sidebar of the Post or Page editing menu. La Petite URL also supports the Short URL Auto-Discovery specification, a method where the preferred short URL is specified in the *head*  section of your HTML document. On the upside the auto generation of the URL is a nice feature, but La Petite URL does not allow you to create links to content outside of your domain like Short URL does. It also does not supply any metrics for the generated links.

Hosted solutions

For $49 a year, Tinyarro.ws will help you find and host your very own short URL service with support for Unicode characters in the URL. This means that you can use unicode characters like the arrow, star, and Snowman in your short URL. Somebody please register http://*unicode snowman*FTW/ for me. Great for branding, this is what John Gruber is using for his links to Daring Fireball on Twitter. All of his links have his trademark Unicode star in the URL.

Awe.sm provides a similar service as Tinyarro.ws, for $99 a year, and seems to offer more robust analytics and integration with third party services for tracking your influence on others. I haven’t tried either of these services so I cannot comment on their pros or cons other than to say if you want a snowman in your URL, go with Tinyarro.ws.

In addition to these options Wordpress.com has announced that they have implemented short, “wp.me” URLs for every post and page for every site hosted on Wordpress.com. How awfully nice of them. I don’t have a Wordpress hosted site so I’m not sure how this is implemented, but if you have one let me know how it works for you.

I like the idea of having as much control as possible over the links you provide to others ensuring they don’t end up broken, or in the wrong hands. Are there any other plugins or services that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

Now I never really used live.com to search for anything other than my own name, but it looks like Bing has added images to the top of the search results that live.com used to provide. Who knows, maybe they’ve always been there. Anybody who used live.com previous to this “re-imagination” please leave a comment to set me straight. So to be clear, none of those images results are of me. I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping pictures of myself off the Internet. Yay for me.

One of my favorite images that came up when searching for jeremy turner had to be this one:

Jeremy Turner: There but for a handful of peyote buttons and a Rage Against The Machine CD, go I.

I know I’m sure the photo makes sense in context—well, as much sense as dressing up for historical reenactments can make, which in my mind is very little. Like most Americans who’s ancestors took the idea of Manifest Destiny way too seriously and ended up responsible for Oklahoma (both the territory and the musical) I can claim some Choctaw (or Cherokee) blood myself, however I am definitely not as dedicated to my heritage as this Jeremy Turner. Not sure I’d ever participate in a 18th century French or Indian War re-enactment, at least not without proper preperation and plenty of water. And, as if this guy wasn’t going to have enough trouble getting through airport security:

Our wars were no different than the war that the U.S. is engaged in now. We were just trying to keep the European invaders from destroying us and our homes. American Indians have been fighting terrorism since 1492!

OK. So while Jeremy here keeps it real, I am going to keep posting until I get to number one on Google. See you next time.

Theme

This new layout theme you see before you is called Inuittypes was developed by Bizzarctic. It is beautiful. If I had the patience and the downtime this is really close to exactly how I would design my blog. A lot closer to what I was looking for when I started using “Unstandard.” It’s coded with simple, “best practice” SEO (a full list of which you can read about here) in mind which is important to me. It also has a fabulous integrated control panel for setting up most everything you’d ever want to, without having to futz around with the source code. It also supports widgets, which I’ve not had too much experience with but have installed the Twitter widget nonetheless. It came pre-loaded with a Flickr sidebar widget so I figured “what the heck” and fired it up. I am really digging this theme.

But who cares, right?

I could write about the polar reversal of my schadenfreude, and how Jeremy “Happyballs” Turner is once again back on the first page of Google while this site continues to appear and disappear at the finicky whim of some bipolar algorithm, or how my Twitter account started showing up hundreds of results higher than this site. Or I could write about how Google “Profiles” have started showing up on some SERPs, the original objective of this site becoming an even more emberrasing piece of performance art. It would go like this:

Google Profiles

So here’s the skinny: enter the search query me in to Google and you will be greeted with a faux AdWords ad inviting you to sing up for google profiles. From there you enter information about yourself–there is a minimum required in order to show up on the SERP, although it can be filled with dirty, dirty lies–and viola! Your profile name and picture show up at the bottom of the first SERP, along with others a select group of others that share your name.

Or something like that.

What I don’t want to write about right now is how I just performed a vanity search to see how my Google Profile is doing (still #1) and saw that this blog is now ranked #4 for the query jeremy turner, right behind two entries for the landscape photographer and one for the musician who I am sure someday is going to beat my ass. If I had to guess, I think this has something to do with adding this site to my Google Profile but, like most things with Google, I can’t be sure.

I could also write about how 60% of my open applications right now sport an icon that is a variation of a blue sphere, requiring extra cognitive power required to decide which one to select in the Application Swicher, cognitive power that I just don’t have at the moment. I was saving this topic for a full post sometime in the future but seeing as how my Twitter abuse has helped in distilling ideas so succinctly I may have just said all that I need to on the subject.

See the thing is, I don’t find any of that stuff very interesting to write about. Seriously, this has been a torturous exercise for me. Somebody help me. I will gladly take suggestions in the comment area as to what I should be writing about. Please, don’t be shy.

One last thing. Here’s a link to a blogging panel at South By Southwest, hosted by two of my absolute fucking heroes, Merlin Mann and John Gruber. The panel is all about blogging, credibility, and creating something worthwhile. It’s also very funny. If you don’t know who they are, you should. Especially if you create content on the Internet. Daring Fireball (Gruber) is here and 43Folders (Mann) is here.

OK, so there’s a lot of stuff I don’t want to write about. Hopefully next time I’ll have something more worth our while. Thanks for stopping by.

I’ve decided on a New Year’s Resolution: 1920 x 1080. David Friedman (ironicsans)

Jeremy Turner here with a brief post about a few new Wordpress plugins that I’m trying out on this here blog.

Twittar
Just like the rest of the Interwebz I am totally addicted to Twitter right now. This Wordpress plugin inserts a blog commenter’s Twitter avatar to their comment. If no Twitter avatar is present, it pulls from Gravatar. I don’t know much about Gravatar, but it seems like cool enough idea. It’s a service that lets you use one picture for all of your social network identities. Sounds like a good idea to keep your branding consistent across platforms. Somebody let me know if they’ve had any experience with it, good, bad, or otherwise. If neither are found then you get the default avatar, currently Domokun. Twittar is not perfect however. What it is doing is matching your Twitter account email address with the email address you use to post a comment in order to pull your avatar, but I still think it’s a pretty neat way to link up with the social media platform of the moment.

TweetSuite
Just a few days ago this plugin was called TweetBacks and had only one main feature, but in the days it’s taken me to get around to writing this the plugin has been updated and spun off in to TweetSuite with a host of new features. This is another Twitter related plugin (told you I was addicted.) which “Show(s) tweets that mention your post as “tweetbacks” in your comments section. Basically it adds any “tweets” about your article as a comment on your blog, even accounting for the four major URL shortening services in the process. Highly recommended if you want to integrate your blog with Twitter. TweetSuite also adds a link at the bottom of your post to let people easily add a link to your post in Twitter.

Twitter Updater
Automatically updates your Twitter feed with a link to your blog, with options to tweet when you are tweaking a blog post, starting a new blog post, or just thinking about maybe writing a blog post sometime next Tuesday. Three of those things are actually true. This plugin can quickly turn your Twitter account in to a stream of spammy posts if you leave all of the options on, and/or if you are constantly updating your blog, so proceed with your own level of discretion.

AddThis
Pretty much the same functionality as the ShareThis plugin I was using, I just decided to change it up a bit for the aught-nine. In my opinion AddThis has more robust reporting capabilities than ShareThis—who doesn’t love charts and graphs?—and is also more universally recognizable, e.g. I see it more often than AddThis so everybody else must too because everybody’s life experience is just like mine which is why I don’t understand why you’re being such a dick about this, I mean don’t you get it? Anyhoo…

Now that you are completely amazed at how easy it is to integrate your Wordpress blog with Twitter, please feel free to leave a comment about how all of this makes you feel. Thanks for stopping by!

As you may have noticed, last week I decided to change the primary domain for this blog from jeremyturner.info to jeremyturner.net. As previously reported The Goolge has held a ranking grudge against dot info domains ever since GoDaddy had a fire sale on them a while back. Conceptually I still thought that jeremyturner dot info is more appropriate for this site but I realized that I may be hindering my progress towards my ultimate goal. Jeremyturner.net has always redirected to this site, but we all know that redirects don’t add up to much on The Google. So I went through all of the necessary steps with my hosting provider, temporarily removing subsomains and redirects, and changing the redirect and DNS info with my domain registrar. I also used this plugin to do a super find/replace in my wordpress database, changing all instances of jeremyturner.info to jeremyturner.net. Worked like a charm and was much easier than going through the pages one by one to fix all of the broken links.

This is a good time to bring up the importance of a Google Webmaster Tools account. From here I was able to sumit a new sitemap for my new URL, and more imporantly I was able to easily identify the pages of my .info site that The Google had in it’s index. The reason this is important is that once I changed my domain, these links would no longer be valid. They would redirect to a 404 “page not found” page on my new site. Furthermore, none of the pages of my new site had been indexed yet so it would be like starting from scratch. This is where the magic of the 301 redirect and the .htaccess file come in. I’m not going to go in to a tutorial here, but the practical upshot is that I was able to identify all the pages previously indexed by The Google and redirect them individually to their corresponding new pages on the dot net site. Designating the redirect as a 301 tells the Googlebot that the page has moved permenantly and that The Google should update it’s index to reflect this. This is a much more responsible technique than just yanking your site and/or changing your URL, and insures the transition runs smoothly. I was able to continue on right where I left off with whatever minimal traction I had gained with The Google.

Speaking of traction, I’ve written previously about jeremyturner.com’s fall from grace because of mistakes made while updating the content of the site, among other things. I’m not sure if he even cares about this (he should be targeting queries like “staying in business” and such rather than his own name since his site has shifted focus) but I am sure happy to know that since my change from dot info to dot net I have effectively replaced his site in The Google’s SERP. Your results may vary though, as The Google will change your search results according to your search history if you are logged in with a Google account (like Gmail.)

I think the moral of the story here is obvious: you simply shouldn’t be using a .info TLD for your domain if you are trying to get anywhere with The Google.

Blogging is like masturbating into a mirror while you videotape yourself so you can watch it later while you masturbate. -Lewis Black

Hello mirror, this is Jeremy Turner and I have a question. Why? Seriously, what the hell is this? In case you don’t want to bother following the link to jeremyturner.com, let me just describe it to you. It’s sole content is a picture of a bug-eyed dog with the accompanying copy “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it sure helps!” Seriously, why even bother? Why register jeremyturner.com every year, for only one year, like two days before it expires? I know this is happening because I paid almost twenty bucks to GoDaddy.com to have them purchase it for me the moment it expired. And just when I got my hopes up. BAM! Another year of torture. At least change the picture once in a while.

A more pertinent question might be why, why does The Google rank this page so freakin’ high? Today jeremyturner.com the number three result for jeremy turner. Just goes to show you what kind of influence a TLD (“Top Level Domain” like .com or .org, as opposed to the lowly .info) will get you, even if all you have to show the world is a ripped-off image from an online greeting card company. Hey Jeremy, The early-2000s called and they want their Photoshop gimmick back!

So who is this other Jeremy Turner? What do I know about him? From checking the registration info for the domain I found an @happyballs.com email. Happyballs.com is the “The” Antennaball Superstore. According to the “About Us” on happyballs.com, Jeremy Turner co-founded happyballs.com with his wife and their dog, “Rascal.” Not nearly as exciting as you’d expect, but obviously dude was on the “ball” when it comes to registering domains, otherwise happyballs.com would not be nearly as SFW as it is now. And damn if he didn’t find his niche. I wonder if antenna balls are recession proof?

I never really understood the appeal of antenna balls. I mean sure, I “get” that people think they are cute, but I always thought that their sole reason for existing was to be stolen by bored teenagers. Go ahead and keep that virtual shopping cart filled with antenna balls and denial. “Oh how cute, this GI Jack (Green Hat) antenna ball totally won’t get stolen the minute I leave my car in the Trader Joe’s parking lot!”  At HappyBalls.com, you can fill your life with adorable little styrofoam disappointments, all sure to end up flaked with dirt weed, crammed in to the backpack of a 14 year old skateboarder from the apartment building down the street. And when the owner of the Forester you’re parked next to drops her groceries and asks just what the hell are you doing on your back scraping your arms underneath their car, will you have the courage to tell her?

In a way Jeremy, you are an inspiration. I’ve clicked on the link for this site again and again, first in amusement then in frustration, then again to research this post. If you are reading, please don’t take me too seriously. I’m sure you are a nice guy and we do share the same faddish surname. Happyballs.com is acutally an OK site, which is what what makes jeremyturner.com even more of a disgrace. Your story is the great American “move to Rancho Cucamonga and start a small-business in your garage” success story. Your use of our URL is a great American FAIL. Do know that I sincerely wish you would do something, anything more with our URL than you are doing now. Feel free to take that bug-eyed dog off of your site and post something worthwhile. Even if it’s just a new picture, or better yet a link to my site. Thanks.