I’m not even talking about posting here – I’m talking about since I got real work done. I mentioned this when 2010 rolled by, but for roughly the past 12 months I have been pretty unproductive. I’ve done some random consulting here and there, but nothing to call mine own.

So this week finally marks my return. There are now 3 projects I am actively working on. Two of them are completely mine, and one is a bit of a JV. One of them is strictly local, one of them has a local flavor, and one of them has nothing to do with local.

Fun times ahead.

I used to be really good at soccer. I wasn’t tall – but I was pretty wide, which made me a solid right fullback. I was a no nonsense player – no flash, no glitter – I got rid of the ball as soon as I could. Then ten years ago I partially tore my ACL. It wasn’t painful – just frustrating. Just over a year ago I started to play soccer again – and this time fully tore my ACL (while cracking both menisci … one so bad it flipped into the joint). Soon after I decided that I was not very happy with what I was doing, and started to make wholesale changes.

I’ve had very little to do with iBegin for the past 6 months, and as of this year pretty much down to zero. A few people already knew about this, but in general I’ve been pretty tight-lipped about it. I personally have spent the past few months catching up on reading, exercising, and just watching sports/movies/etc. I’ve gone from hyperlocal (neighborhood) to local (Toronto) to quasi-local (multiple cities) to stupid-local (full country). In retrospect I think the winning solution is to stick to “local” – even today, more than 25 months after iBegin Toronto was ‘turned off’ the site garners 10,000-15,000 pageviews a day.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some Plato to read.

According to Google, twitter.com has 61 million pages indexed

Also according to Google, api.twitter.com has 20 million pages indexed. Pages which are identical to normal twitter.com/username pages.

Oops. download скачать бесплатно порно проститутки ильичевска

I was recently talking to the Yipit team on why I have no desire to take funding – and part of it was that it took away my ability to try out new stuff.

So to help out a friend, I’ve been playing around with the Twitter.com and its various API methods. When filing an IP whitelist request, what I thought would take days was pleasantly approved in 24 hours.

So while playing around with it, and their OAuth method, I came across a confusing bug – and after an hour of trying to figure out what the hell it was, I went to the forums. And it turned out to be a real nasty bug. A bug they deemed critical. And with that single click (the bug wasn’t just High Priority – it was Critical) I moved from the pantheon of the masses to the select few to make Twitter.com run around and try to figure out what went wrong.

But that really wasn’t the point. Twitter API support was fast. Blazing fast. Withing moments Doug and Matt were on it, and within 5 minutes of filing the bug it was claimed.

Twitter.com may be maddeningly slow at times, but I can see why so many apps around Twitter as springing up – those guys kick ass in making sure everything is being taken care of.

So Google now lets you control the max crawl rate through a nifty slider. While most sites start at a max-allowed rate of 0.5 pages/sec, I’ve been able to get a few sites to 10 pages/sec.

I had some large sites that had pretty low max rates (eg 1 page/sec), and it took me some figuring out how to get Google to go faster quicker – sitemap. By submitting a sitemap with a sizeable # of pages, we were able to boost from 1 page/sec to 2.5 pages/sec in roughly 96 hours.

Across all my sites Googlebot hits me at least a million times every day.

I’ll be in Toronto for the full week of Jan 25 to Jan 30 – if you want to meet up, be sure to contact me.

We were testing it – and now it is out on iBegin.

Our own estimates are roughly 5000+ sites are using this plugin already. I expect it to go up a lot as we refine it and make it simpler to install.

The post title references a classic Jackie Chan movie, replete with awful (and hilarious) dialog combined with bizarre fight sequences involving props galore.

While most of what I talk about here (and really think about daily) revolves around the local space, I do a lot more than that. I’ve been building (proper) websites since roughly 2000, and did not enter the local space until 2005. Enthropia Inc was incorporated in early 2003. This means we were obviously up to other stuff than local – and we continue to.

As a quick example – I found value in domains, and picked up a few that I developed out. Some worked, some didn’t. Two top domains that were once owned by me were beat.com and webmaster.org. Both were developed out at one time – until a more lucrative offer (or better opportunity) made their sale an easy decision.

Local to me is a long term project that will not be solved in 1 year, or even 5 years. It requires a seismic shift in thinking – in how the YP business operates, in how consumers perform local search engines, and in how small business owners treat and operate with the internet (clearly exemplified in my last post on people being jackasses). Right now, I feel like local search is a swimming pool. We were on the edge with our feet sticking in, and sites like Yelp.com and Menupages.com have pushed us fully into the water (albeit the shallow end). Product inventory and companies like Yipit and LDC are pushing us towards the deep end – but everything has to come together before we can finally enjoy and have fun in the deep end.

But of course – all of that will take time. And while as a company we are growing very well in the local space (giving us the capital to expand in new directions – more on that next year), we have other areas that provide us with revenue too (being self-funded requires creativity). Occasionally I will point at one of our efforts – in fact, I had two posts I wanted to write about, but one of them I imagined would get incorrectly construed with local. And so this post to clear the air.

I spend maybe 90% of my thinking time towards local. That still leaves 10% to do some other interesting stuff.

For every 20-30 emails we get at iBegin asking that we fix an issue, 1 of them always has the veiled threat of a lawsuit. “Fix my # or I will sue you!” “We have moved – fix it or I will have my lawyer deal with this!” etc etc. Of those threats, 1 out of 10 are just downright unstable. Capital letters. Abusive language. Even the occasional threat of bodily harm.

What boggles my mind is how these people stay in business. Yes bad information sucks. It can be annoying. But what is the harm in asking nicely? I can understand if you have emailed us before and we didn’t reply – but that doesn’t happen

Sadly enough – another reminder of the recession. The threatening tone in emails has increased – the more stress you put on the business owners, the more likely they are to pass it on.

I should note that while I can be crass here (and in other areas), all emails are always civil. Even with the random person who replies to me with mentions on how I must be working with the terrorists because of my Islamist name (true story).

So in my previous post I talked about one of my favorite companies – LDC.

Next up is Yipit. But this isn’t just about how awesome Yipit is. No no – today they launched profile pages, and in the process, further convoluted their home page. So this post is about how I would look over their site, and improve their UI and SEO.

To me, SEO is about giving the user what they want. In the case of a local search site, that relates to what they want (fishnet stockings, lava lamps, Company X, etc) and where they want it (New York City, Greenwich Village [neighborhood], 10015 [zip code], or some other informal space). It is also very possible that the user has a general idea of what they want but do not know how to exactly define it.

So – off the bat, the home page for Yipit is rather confusing. We have 1 2 3, where #1 is a non-standardized (in general UI terms) breakdown, #2 is slightly more confusing (it is pre-filled as NY – which doesn’t match either of their three criteria), and #3 is … something that should not need to be defined. Under it we have a list of Top Furniture and Top Discount Furniture stores, with a crap-ton of ‘popular searches’ that somehow relate to each business (but how?) On the right is a quick description of Yipit that seems stuffed with keywords, then twitter updates, then more popular searches, and then popular business searches.

What in God’s name of stuffing is this?

On a slight tangent – the English language can be hard. What may be X to me may be Y to you. Taxonomy is not an easy business. But the complexity in taxonomy is far simpler for Yipit – by focusing on furniture (more later), the verse of words people could be possibly looking for is greatly narrowed. Instead of a drop down – just have a box saying ‘What kind of Furniture?’ Best of all – this lets them generate a list of keywords based on what users are searching for. Eventually they may learn that 75% of people use ‘fold-out bed’ while 20% use ’sofa bed’ and 5% use ‘bed that opens up’. Sure they may miss it the first few times someone searches for it (as it would not be in their taxonomy) – but over time they would have this incredibly rich database of words people search for relating to their own internal category. Back to the topic – replace ‘Near’ with ‘Around (optional)’ and have it pre-filled with New York City. Then a simple search submit. All of them next to each other, no #s, and maybe a few examples under the two input boxes. Forcing their categorization on me was an unsatisfying UI experience.

On a related note – the ‘definitions’ link looks like it is clickable – but it sure ain’t. Confused me there.

So – now we have greatly cleaned up the main search part – no forcing a user to figure out what you think they want – let them define it, and no need for the ‘duh’ 1 2 3 #s.

Next up – we have a bunch of ‘Top Furniture Stores’ under it. First off – all the profile page links go to the generic /furniture__ny/ page – I assume that is a bug. Second of all – why do we have 900 keywords stuffed in there? Having ‘new york’ stuffed in every single result leaves me with a bad taste. You have tags for each business. You should be using those.

But never mind the tags even. You guys have two objectives here – get people to use the Yipit code, or get people to find Yipit when searching for a popular key phrase / store. At the same time, Yipit’s authority in the eyes of search engines is still weak – it is new, and does not have a few links. So – instead of 12 businesses across two categories, list 4. Two are your advertisers, and two are either the two most popular furniture stores in NYC, or two advertisers. Ideally this would let you track how effective the home page is in getting people to use the coupon, and thus the value it generates. Furthermore, just list the tags you ahve for each business. No need to put in all these extra popular searches.

Now to the right side. The first paragraph is nice, the second paragraph throws me off with all that red text for links. Is it really needed? You already have popular searches – leave it at that. As for the twitter updates – honestly how many people care about that? You have a blog link in the footer – leave it at that. Leave those popular searches and popular business searches (though really rename it to ‘Popular Businesses’) – so your right is now a quick blurb on how Yipit does furniture (but should be slightly more fleshed out), and two quick lists on Popular Searches and Popular Businesses.

And bring the nice little footer image to the top please

So – now we have a home page much nicer and cleaner.

Next up – the directory pages in the footer. They are employing a Neighborhood directory, a Zip Code directory, and a Business Directory by alphabet. The Neighborhood directory expands into a bunch of pages for every category for every neighborhood, the zip directory the same, and the business directory just straight links.

Down the road this may work. But as I said before, personally I think that is stretching it too thin. Trying to run before you can walk. If I could run things, I would nuke the zip code directory, nuke the business listings, and only use Neighborhoods. The neighborhood-specific page would then have a list of just the businesses found in that directory. They have 337 in total – no worry of having too many in one neighborhood

The profile page I cannot complain about much. I would get rid of that Search Yipit drill down they have, and replace it back with the simple What/Where search box (with the Where pre-filled with that neighborhood). And instead of Other Searches of Interest, I would simply list the 5 closest Furnituer stores. Too many keywords (at this time) seem to be spreading yourself thin.

So we finally end up with the super confusing (to me) /d/xxxxx pages. Before I get started on it specifically, I noticed some links where /d/xxxxx_ny and some were /d/xxxxxxx_NY. That is duplicate content in the eyes of some search engines.

Now – the idea is smart. Search pages or tag pages – both are the same to Yipit. But that UI is just ‘what the fuck’ to me. At 1024 res that map on teh right is so squished. And way way too much information.

For example, I am looking at Murphy Beds. I fail to see why I care what the popular searches are on that page. I want to know name, info, and yes knowing their amount is nice. But popular searches are out. They could easily wipe out that entire blue box, giving the map a lot more space. Plus – you have a map – no need to put in the intersection. I think it should be just Name, Price (clickable with a tooltip to say exactly what $$$ means), address, phone, # of pieces, and a ‘more details’ link to their profile page! (profile pages are found nowhere on the search results page).

And as I said before – please just use a free-for-all input box for what.

I know I am not the only one confused by this page – the breadcrumbs lead to nowhere.

I would also slightly tweak the