Good weekend! Wordcamp and Spartan Race

Yeah It's already Friday and I'm just now writing about last weekend, proof that it was a good one I guess! 

Wordcamp Austin 2012

I attended the Wordpress conference (I have several wordpress sites) Saturday and I've got to say I was impressed. There was a great lineup of speakers and I gained a lot of great knowledge from being there. I was most impressed with a talk from a guy with a local media/web company, check them out at Castle Media Group. To summarize extremely quickly, Mr. Umstattd's talk was about the secrets for effective blogging. Not something I personally care to much about, obviously. I just blog for the heck of it, I don't care if anyone is reading or not. But, if you have a business, product, or cause to promote through your blog, then his presentation would have been great for you. He gave some 19 different secrets which I will not list but just touch on. He quoted first Matthew 20:26, to be a leader, you must first be a servant. Give your followers value, be remarkable, share something helpful. One way to do this is publishing infographics and sharing them on pintrest (to broaden your sphere of influence). The first real topic was "search". You need to focus your blog to a single topic for better google results. Optimize your images and give them meaningful file names, such as "Homemade-Italian-Lasagna.jpg". I personally am a visual searcher, I love to use google images to find the best result for my query... When I search for a recipe, I pick the one that looks the best, and then follow through to the blog for directions. When you hyphenate your filenames, google will parse and separate the words and they will have better search results. Also, don't wrap text around your images to keep people's attention. I know I'm probably not following that rule too well right now. If you've read this far, your probably screaming inside for a break.. some necessarily white space between paragraphs and images.Also, figure out how to use headings properly for better search results. Only one h1 per page, and scale down from there. Make sure you attach twitter and facebook to your blog for the retweets and shares, it's all about low-friction sharing - make it easy! The golden rule is to only ask for something once for every 9 times you provide for your followers, because then that one time is forgivable. Be a bold blogger, no one wants to read timid writing. You also need to focus on writing magnetic headlines that sell. After all readers are "buying" your post with their time, and they will be shopping around, time is their most precious asset. When it comes to RSS, there are a rules to follow... give your full post in RSS, not a stupid excerpt. I don't like having to click through to read the rest of your post. Because I'm using an RSS reader on my phone and don't have time to wait for my web browser to load your page, I'll usually skip reading posts that make me follow through a link. Also, look for places to host your feed, like linkedin. Does your website pass the radio test? Meaning if someone heard it on the radio while driving, will they remember the URL when they get home? Or, in my opinion, at least a unique searchable pattern to find you as I believe urls are dead. If you just read through this entire post, you must have the attention span of a dedicated monk, nice! I'll leave you with a final though from this interesting speaker:

Blogging is more like farming than it is link hunting. In hunting, you go out for a hunt and come back with a big kill and everyone is happy. This is not possible in blogging. You must work it, season after season. As it starts to mature you will see the outcome of your hard work. Don''t be afraid to write guest posts and invite guest posts to have your blogger friends to help till your land.

Church is starting and I'm running media, gotta run!

Spartan Race

Wow. That's about all I can say. I was amazed. Spartan race was awesome. I've done a few 5K mud races before so I thought I had a good idea of what to expect - wrong! The others were more of a "fun run" and as it turns out the Spartan is more of an endurance race. About half way I figured there is no way it's just a 5k (3 miles).. It turns out it was almost 6 miles long, through the woods, creeks, rocks, and hills. And the obstacles? Wow. Some of them were really designed to knock you out.

Self-cloning crawfish research!

I was browsing RocketHub (similar site to kickstarter) and couldn't believe my eyes! Someone is doing DNA sequencing on the marbled crawfish. I just had to chip in a bit for this one.If you can't know, the marbled crawfish is the only crustacion known to reproduce asexually. They are all female with males in existence.The goals are to compare the replicas to see how identical they really are. I've been keeping marbled crawfish for some time and have an interest in using them for aquaponics. The only thing I fear is about them escaping captivity. They could potentially take over the world. Think about it, only one of them has to escape. They hatch hundreds of eggs at a time, and can clone themselves 3+ times per year. Mine has already had two litters this year alone, then all of those babies start cloning themselves at about 3-4 months of age. So, why don't you give a little bit to this project so we can learn more about these little creatures. :)