Blogging

4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. That’s on top of the 22 million from the past 4 weeks. All the job gains for the last decade have been wiped out. Poof, gone in 5 weeks. The chart below is lagged by one week, so it’ll be much worse when a new chart is generated. States in the South and the MidWest States East of the Mississippi River are getting slammed. No wonder all those states WANT to reopen but we either bite the bullet now or deal with slow economic death, IMHO. ...

I don’t remember how I found it but I learned about the Indie web from this blog post. The Indie Web is a movement to reclaim your authorship and blog from the clutches of corporations. It’s not a move back to the ‘good ol’ days’ rather a way of putting your data back into your hands. In other words, don’t be the product. As a Data Scientist, I process lots of data every day. I use whatever we collect or is available from Kaggle datasets to build demos and POCs. I can get A LOT done by doing that. Imagine if you were a Facebook Data Scientist and was able to collect all the data that your users post everyday, for free. Wouldn’t you monetize it? Sure you get to use the platform for free because all your friends are on it but you end up buying more crap in the long run because some FB Data Scientist has optimized a model from your data and 1000’s of of other peoples. ...

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been blogging now for over 12 years. I’ve written 100’s of posts, some short and some long. I’ve had my shares of ups and downs here but in the end I’m glad I stuck with it. It’s made me realize that blogging has led to my personal growth. Blogging has become a career! What’s happened is that I’ve been reposting and repopulating old posts from my archive. I took these posts down a few years ago thinking they were of no use, but now I realize I was wrong. Sure there were some cringe worthy type of posts back then, but I look at them now and smile. I’m so far removed from them now and I realize I so different now. ...

Recently I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a new blog, just for fun. The area of focus will be on craft beer brewing and reviews. Knowing what I now know about content, content planning, and management, I started to think about how to build a site from the ground up with entertaining but valuable content. Of course, this means I need to spend time thinking about how to organize my content and what CMS will I use? If you read my last post, you’ll see that I’m back to WordPress but also evaluating Expression Engine. The reality is that WordPress is way easier when it comes to templates and since this blog will be casual, I’m not going waste time and effort with a big powerful CMS system only to have to hack together a bad looking web template. ...

Bless me Father for I have sinned. Please forgive me for my evergreen content creation and management sins. Yes, I admit I have mismanaged good content for the sake of expediency. The takeaway from this long post is this, always think about your reader first. Often I have ignored how my readers consume my evergreen content. For that, I beg for your absolution. I promise, on my CMS’s grave, not to stray from the path of good content creation and management again. Amen! ...

Recently I imported some custom reports in Google Analytics that I found online. They have been eye opening indeed! My most favorite ones are the Profit Index and Time of Day custom reports. Google Analytics assigns a page value to each and every page you have, provided you use Goals. Without using Goals, this won’t work! In my previous post, I wrote about how I started using Goals to see how readers interacted with my site. I arbitrarily assigned a value of $1 each time the reader clicked on a tag or stayed on a post for more than 5 minutes. ...

This is my first stab at trying to figure out how to optimize the SEO here. A doodle/sketch just seems the fastest in this case. Update I have since given a lot of thought to SEO on this blog as I migrated it from one CMS to another. Each CMS handles SEO in a completely different manner and over time the migrations have had, in some way, a damaging effect here. Perhaps the right thing to do is to pick one CMS and stick with it through thick and thin. That’s something really hard to do for someone like me, but I consider these migrations to be a learning opportunity. ...

I’ve been going through a massive blog post purge and deciding which posts to keep or trash. Why? I have so many posts that were like Tweets, short and meaningless. They just bogged down my performance and really provided my readers with zero information. This blog started dying at the beginning of 2020, Google made some Search Engine Results Page (SERP) changes and my blog started dropping like a rock. There were 100’s of similar blogs that were ranking better because they knew how to play the SEO game and I didn’t. So I decided to put a stop to it. ...

I have news. I’ve been mulling around the idea for this post for the last two years, ever since I joined RapidMiner. The journey at RapidMiner has been and continues to be fantastic. In those short two years I’ve worn many hats there, I started as a Pre-Sales Solutions Consultant, then moved to a Sales Engineer role, and now I’m Marketing Data Scientist. I’ve made the move from Sales to Marketing and my chips remain all in. ...

Long time readers know that I’ve struggled with blogging platforms for a long time. I finally opted for a static post approach because it’s safer than the PHP code injections that Wordpress suffers (suffered?) from. The bonus side of platforms like Wordpress is that they have 1000’s of great plugins to download and turbo charge your blog. I really liked this but I got tired of having my PHP templates “code injected” with spam attacks. ...