Ryan Trembath (dot) Information

The ???????? ????? ????????Flash in the Can Roadshow is coming through town this Saturday, are you going?

I was looking through the list of presenters and came across Jason Theodor’s website, there is no box.

Jason, like many of us, is busy and has found it helpful to keep small a reminder list to keep him on track in both his personal and professional life. Enter, his Mundane LifeFocus Cards!

The goal of the cards is to provide a simple framework that will help you keep important tasks and goals at the forefront of your busy day to day life.

You can download fillable PDF templates for a seven day, foldable card set at his website. Then just fill in your reminders, goals and to dos and go from there. The card also has a small space to track how much sleep you got each day (’cuz sleep is important!)

Don’t forget to track your progress.

I’m putting his system to the test to see whether it can work for me. I’ve tried Google calender, setting reminders in my phone and carrying lists with me before but all have fallen by the wayside.

The fact that a single piece of paper is used for seven days puts more emphasis on me actually maintaining the sheet and not losing ??????24 fox ringtones verizon ringtones nextel real music ringtones free cingular ringtones 24 ctu ringtones cell phone ringtones wallpaper cell phone ringtones verizon free cellular phone ringtones cellular phone ringtones samsung polyphonic ringtones free sprint cell phone ringtones 24 tv show ringtones hotlink caller ringtones free samsung ringtones hotlink maxis caller ringtones free motorola razr ringtones free motorola ringtones free t mobile ringtones for cell phone free t mobile ringtones free samsung x427 ringtones it (hopefully).

I’ll report back on how it’s working for me.

Yesterday, a friend and I were doing some basic searches to see if his name came up online. Having deleted his myspace profile weeks ago, nothing should come up right?

WRONG!

Check out this little scraper site operating under the guise of a Myspace search engine. Looks like they’re scraping profile information and (for your added benefit!) putting their own Yahoo! and Kontera ads on the page.

There is nice little disclaimer noting that:

All profiles and associated pictures are copyright their respective authors. MySpaceProfiles.org is not affiliated or associated with MySpace.com in any way.

Does that carry any weight? I’m not a lawyer.

I did find, via the remove my profile link, that you can paste this code:

META NAME=”MYSPACEPROFILESBOT” CONTENT=”NOINDEX”

into your profile so that their robot won’t index your page. This will also (apparently) delete any existing profile on your id. But what if I already deleted my profile?

There is a form where you can enter your id and request it removed, which I have done for my friend. I will keep you posted on whether or not it’s actually removed.

Managing your image just got tougher.

This falls inline with Lisa Barone’s post yesterday. Lisa made all of her personal facebook information private and still ended up in the search results. Turns out that her friends don’t keep the same privacy settings she does.

Where’s my publicist!?

Big companies spend time and money managing their online appearance and now you will have to as well. It’s already a well documented fact that most employers will do the Google, Facebook, Myspace search on you. This wonderous two point oh world of search, social and advanced scraping has the potential to be a headache for us all.

Are you prepared?

At my old job, the “Lifestyle Shot” was a topic of hot debate in the boardroom every time a new site was being designed.

Unfamiliar with the term?

It’s used to describe the main photograph, usually involving people smiling and doing something, on the homepage of a site. The “lifestyle shot” is supposed to help your customers feel comfortable and “see themselves” in your site. Check out how happy you are about insurance, or meet a friendly dentist up close and personal.

Get it?

If you’re designing a site with this look/feel, always keep in mind that your users may not perceive the image(s) presented the same way you do.

For example, I worked on this online pharmacy site. The call center staff said that our customers would often ask why we had two gay old men on the front page. From the perspective of the design team, it had just been two friends, healthy and strong, saving on their medications.

Another example is this vegetarian dating site. Some guy grinding a model holding a bowl of uncooked tofu? Seems a bit…lame. Do they really know their audience?

Bottom line here would be: people like to see themselves in your content, just make sure you’re on target with who “they” are or you might be doing more harm than good.

Sorry the site was down. Let this be a lesson in redundancy. If your site is important, make sure it’s on the web in more than one place or you’re in trouble when things go wrong.

The most recent issues came about when I used Fantastico to manage my wordpress installations for this site and another site I have.

It seems re-installing Wordpress on my other site caused the database for this one to be deleted without me knowing. A little TOO quick and easy. I managed to scrape the one post that wasn’t backed up from the Google cache of this page.

Thanks G, you’re always looking over my shoulder when I need ya.

Can anyone say bandwagon? Myspace is sooo last year and since I need to be on top of the tech tidal wave I finally surfed up a facebook account.

Over the past week I’ve been able to unite with many of my friends from myspace under this new (pardon the pun) face. Back to being internet hip (for now).

We can thank this new trend in social media for the devaluing of the term friend. Soon enough everyday conversation will require clarifying statements. Is this friend in your immediate meatspace or virtual? Are they top 8? pfff….

Since originally writing this post I’ve returned to the spammy haven known and loved as myspace. The music keeps bringing me back. Soo many good bands at the click of the button. When are they gonna let you make playlists? I’d pay a small amount to be able to stream lists of songs from their site in the order I choose.

I had never searched the word ‘hogzilla‘ until about 3 minutes ago when I found out that he had fallen to number 2.

Monster Pig reigns supreme.

Captivated by Jamison’s victory hunt, I knew the full color autographed poster would have to be mine. Jamison’s dad had registered his domain with Godaddy, so their fast shopping cart was an obvious choice for e-commerce. He just wants to share his boi’s triumph in 11 x 17 color!

Quick, easy & accessible right?

Things could have gone better…

1. It was ugly and clunky looking. I don’t trust that.
2. I put my Paypal information in the login page 2 times before realizing the text stating I didn’t have to login to the store. My mood drops thinking I’d been phished again .
3. I entered my billing information only to be told that my Canadian postal code was invalid. WHAT?!

Had I not been carrying the momentum of Jamison’s courageous kill with me as I made my payment I may not taken the shot. Channeling MacGuyver episodes gone by I used the only American postal code I know, 90210, and put my explanation in the “special comments”.

It’s unfortunate that the most accessible tools purchase are often the least accessible to use.

I’m left wondering about my poster and waiting; dreaming of the day I land that 11 footer lurking the Manitoba praries.

My blog looks so bare, where’s all the ads? As a user I’m sure you’re thinking “Am I on the internet?”

Since ads make the world go round, I’ve decided to help keep your online experience consistent and find an ad company to push “relevant contextual advertising” to you, the viewer. The search begins!

You’re welcome

1. Friend Posts Bulletin
2. I think “whoa! pics from her crazy vacation…” I click link.
   Timed out session?
3. I type in my login info and press ‘enter’
4. Where’s the pictures man?
   Then I notice the red text saying check the URL in the address bar.

Netted and clubbed. Left to swear, laugh out loud and quickly go change my password.
(more…)

I was looking for an inspiring background using the TPC method:

1. Type keyword.
2. Press ‘images’
3. Choose Killer Background.

Where’s the images button?

Buttons? On the left?

That’s not how it works!

Dear Google,

I am an avid user of your service and now I’m skewing the A/B page test results by blogging instead of searching! The stream is drying up! the ads are getting cold! the design is no good!

oh wait…

Google stock is over $460/share.

This IS NOT a bubble people.

I’m going to go AJAX my mouth for speculating and lay down for a bit.

Mitchell Baker (CEO of firefox) gave a good interview over at APC. Seems Microsoft isn’t the only company looking at breaking the stranglehold that Flash has on motion graphics.

The “Cairo” project, possibly included in the next Firefox browser release, will handle 2D stage based motion graphics. Ya know, like FLASH.

This can’t be good news if you work at Microsoft. First, you show up 10 years too late (i’m talking to you Silverlight), then these open source hippies try to trump you. Mitchel pointed out that they were aiming to open a motion graphics format that was non-proprietary and indexable by search engines.

Strike one up for the hippies! By packaging the rendering engine (i.e. Cairo) with the browser, Firefox will be set to out pace Microsoft in no time.