I’ll be talking Google-centrically because Google will likely account for the vast majority of your inbound search traffic. Additionally, if you rank highly on Google, you will probably do pretty well on other search engines anyway.

I’ve been writing with SEO in mind – and using best practices as best as I can – on kadavy.net for over 6 years now, and my search traffic has steadily increased.

Consistent use of SEO best practices will lead to lots of free traffic

Why SEO is Important

SEO is the “location, location, location” of doing business on the web. If you have a bicycle shop on a busy street, you’re going to sell some bikes. It doesn’t matter how high your prices are, or how rude your employees are – you are going to sell some bikes. Likewise, if you rank highly on Google for “bicycles,” you are going to sell a lot of bikes, because a lot of people search for “bicycles.” That is your foot traffic.

I don’t want to make the mistake of assuming that everyone knows just what it means to rank highly on a keyphrase. If you are selling a product or service, ranking highly on keyphrases related to that product or service is essentially free money. If you rank first on Google for “bicycles,” (which is darn near impossible, by the way) you will get a huge number of visitors on your site looking for bicycles, and it will cost you nothing. This is called “organic” traffic, and it’s what SEO builds for you.

But, some businesses pay big bucks for such traffic by buying Google’s AdWords. In doing so, their site shows up next to Google’s organic search results, and they pay whenever someone clicks through to their site. For “bicycles,” those businesses pay an average of 71 cents per click. For “cambria bicycle” they pay an average of $12.55.

Paying for traffic like this can be profitable if the campaigns – and conversion within your site – are managed carefully; but obviously free traffic is ideal, and translates to big sales. This is why SEO is important.

Choosing the right keywords

Before you make sure you’re using SEO best practices, it’s helpful to have some idea what keywords, or keyphrases, you would like to rank highly on. But, just because you pick a descriptive keyphrase, doesn’t mean people will find you. It has to be a keyphrase they are actually searching for. I kick ass on “lump in mouth” because that’s what people search for when they have a mucocele. Most people don’t search for “mucocele” because they don’t even know what one is – until they get a lump in their mouth – and search for it.

Ideally, each page on your site should compete well on a couple of keyphrases that are descriptive of the content on your site, have reasonable search volume, and on which you stand some chance of competing.

You can find out the volume of keyphrases by using the Google Keyword Tool. If you’re just starting a site where you sell bicycles, it would be nice to compete well on the keyword “bicycles,” which has a monthly search volume of over 7 million searches per month – but you don’t stand a chance as a new site. If your site is for a bicycle shop in Chicago, then you’d probably have better luck competing on “bike shop in chicago,” which has a measly 390 searches. Once you dominate that keyphrase, then you can start trying to compete on “chicago bicycle shop,” which has 1,300 searches.

A good place to start to find keyword opportunities from your site is your existing data. If you don’t already have a stats package set up on your site, you should. Google Analytics is great and it’s free. If you happen to already have Google Analytics installed, you can find the keywords that visitors are using to get to your site under Traffic Sources > Keywords. Here you can see what keywords are bringing in the most traffic, and if you’ve set up e-commerce or marketing (such as lead-generation) goals, you can see what keywords are actually converting into business. You are likely to find a few keywords you didn’t expect, that you happen to rank pretty highly upon. It’s a good idea to aim to build upon this success by targeting these keywords further, or targeting related keyphrases. Look for synonyms that you may not already be using (bump ~ lump, mouth ~ lip), and update your content accordingly.

Ranking highly for your target keywords/keyphrases

There are endless complex theories on just how a site ranks highly on search engines. Some of those theories have no basis at all. The truth is, nobody except little robots at Google knows just how a site ranks higher than another. What we do know is that 1) the content of a page, and how it is coded, and 2) the authority of other pages that link to a page – especially for the topic in question – are the most powerful dictators of how well a page ranks on search engines.

Content and coding

The content of a page – meaning the words within that page – have a huge impact on how well a page ranks for given keywords. If your target keywords don’t appear on your page, you will have a hard time ranking highly for that keyword. It’s not impossible, but I’ll get to that later. Relevant content has to be within your page – as code (meaning not as an image) – for search engines’ crawlers (the robots that read your pages) to read that content, and rank you for the appropriate keywords. This is a strong reason why Flash websites do poorly on search engines, and former print designers that just slice up a design on a WYSIWYG program make poorly-performing websites: the real content gets locked away, where crawlers can’t access it.

It’s also essential to use good coding practices in building your pages. There are standards for writing HTML content, and they help rank chunks of content within a page in order of importance. This helps search engines know the difference between the important – and less important – information on a page, and thus rank that page for various keywords.

Following is a run-down of important content-based factors that dictate how your pages rank on search engines.

URL

Before a search engines’ robot can read the HTML on your page, it will read the URL at which that page resides – and the content of this URL has pretty heavy influence on how that page ranks on search engines. So, if my bike shop is at http://bikeshopinchicago.com, it will rank very highly on “bike shop in chicago.” If I have a page for Cambria Bicycles, I may want to put it at http://bikeshopinchicago.com/cambria-bicycles. Note that you shouldn’t automatically pick your top keyphrase to be the domain that you purchase, as branding – and planning for the future expansion of your business – are both important; but you should have search engine (and human) friendly URLs that are in plain english instead of http://example.com/?p=34.

Title Tag

The Title Tag of a web page is the strongest piece of information indicating what a page is about. Many businesses make the mistake of naming this page “Home Page,” or ignoring it altogether (this is why there are so many pages on the web called “Welcome to Adobe GoLive…”). For any given page on your site, your Title Tag should contain the exact keyphrases that you want to rank highly on. If it is the home page – or if your business name contains your target keyphrases, you could then follow that with your site’s name. So, if you’re business is David’s Bike Shop, your title should be “Bike Shop in Chicago – David’s Bike Shop.”

This clever title tag is part of the reason this site ranks #1 for Chicago Graphic Design Firm

Meta tags

The meta tags also contain some information that search engines give strong authority to when evaluating a page. There are several different meta tags, but the one that you should concern yourself with is the “description” meta tag. This is a very short (like around 200 characters) description of what the page contains, and search engines not only use its content to evaluate what a page is about, but also to display to users when your page is listed in search results.

The words under this search result do not appear on the page - they are from the description meta

Headers

Then we have the headers within your HTML document. These are ranked in order of importance: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. There should only be one H1, and this should probably be used for the actual title of your page (which may or may not be the same as your title tag). Some people like to use the H1 for their logo and link to their home page – it depends upon how narrow of a focus your site is. So, if you have a long document, full of text, it’s a good idea to break it up a bit by inserting some useful headers that also happen to contain some of your target keywords.

Content – EM, STRONG, IMG

Finally, you have the actual content of your page, which is hopefully helpful, interesting, and – incidentally – contains your target keyphrases. In addition to your target keywords, your content will probably bring in visitors on a number of “long tail” keyphrases that just happen to show up naturally within your great content.

Within your content, you will hopefully have some images, since they are useful for users. Much like the URL of your page is important to search engines, the file name of your images is also important, and should be descriptive. So, if you have a JPEG of a mountain bike, your image should be called mountain-bike.jpg, or – even better – include the color and brand: mountain-bike-schwinn-blue.jpg. The “alt” attribute of your IMG tag should also be descriptive, so “blue schwinn mountain bike” would do. Don’t forget, you can end up with a large amount of traffic from Google Image Search, if you use descriptive alt attributes.

The italic and bold HTML tags (EM, and STRONG, respectively) also hold higher authority in an HTML document than your plain content (which sits inside of P tags). When you italicise or bold words within your content, it lets search engine crawlers know that those words are important and relevant to the point of the page in question, so it’s a good idea to do a little of this – provided it supports the experience for your human users.

Authority of linking pages

Ranking highly on Google is ultimately all about the authority of your page or site on the keywords in question. This concept of authority also applies generally to your site just being an authoritative site. Google uses a ranking called “PageRank” to measure how much authority a given page has, on a scale of 1-10. There is a complex algorithm behind PageRank that you shouldn’t concern yourself with, but Google does provide a Firefox plugin called Google Toolbar, which shows what the PageRank of a page supposedly is. 7 is considered a very high PageRank. NYT.com is a PR 9. Kadavy.net’s home page is a 4, which is considered to be decent for a personal blog.

Google Toolbar says kadavy.net is a measly PageRank 4

There are a number of factors that go into determining a given page’s PageRank. While the actual algorithm is an ever-changing secret, here are a few factors that are widely accepted to be a part of the algorithm:

• Age of domain: how long has the domain been registered?
• Authority (or PageRank) of pages that link to the page from other domains.
• Date of expiration of domain: is the domain expiring soon, or has the owner registered it a couple years into the future? This is in one of Google’s patent filings.

Content of linking pages, and of anchor text of link

To put it very simply, when other pages on a given topic link to your page of a related topic, search engines generally will rank you higher on that topic. If the PageRank of the page linking to your page is particularly high, Google will rank you higher for that.

Also important is the actual “anchor text” – or the content between A tags – of the link that links to your page. So, a link that says “Bike Shop in Chicago” will do more to rank “David’s Bike Shop” higher for searches for “bike shop in chicago” than if the anchor text says “David’s Bike Shop.” I’d be remiss to not mention that people once did this on a mass scale before (known as a Google bomb) such that the top hit on Google for “miserable failure” was once the Wikipedia page for George W. Bush. Such a Google bomb was implemented by tons of people doing this: miserable failure.

The A tag also has a couple of attributes, such as the “title” attribute, which can have descriptive text applied to it. I haven’t seen anything to make me think that using this title attribute helps with SEO, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt. The rel attribute can have a value of “nofollow” which tells Google’s crawlers not to follow the link, and therefore to not give the page any extra authority based upon the link. Most blogs give all links in comments a rel=”nofollow” attribute to discourage SEO-minded spammers from exploiting the comment functionality.

Everything in moderation

So, if you took all of this knowledge literally, you might stuff all of your pages full of keywords to the point that they didn’t make any sense, and contact site owners all over the web, purchasing links, and stuff all of your pages full of links – full of your keywords – to other pages. You may even obscure these links by making them the same color as your background, or hiding them with CSS.

Using some of these tactics in extreme moderation may even help you a little bit, but anything more than that will be heavily frowned upon by Google. They supposedly take very sophisiticated measures to detect use of these tactics, and will downgrade a site for doing so – which is something you do not want to experience (think immediate loss of tons of business). There are tons of shady tactics for getting links. As a general rule of thumb: if it feels like its deceiving someone, Google probably has some way to detect it, and won’t like it.

Getting the content / getting the links

Having a site full of relevant keywords, and being linked to by sites with relevant keywords, is a means to an end, not an end itself. You achieve this by using good coding practices, generating content, and generating useful and compelling content that others want to link to.

Here are a few legit ways – that Google doesn’t frown upon – to get content and links to your site:

• Have a blog. To rank highly on keywords, it’s pretty much a must to have useful content, rich with your target keywords, that is updated on a regular basis. A blog is the best way to have these attributes. Unfortunately, Google still ranks some pretty shitty content really high, so I’d say that having some not-so-well-written content is better than having none at all; but hopefully this will change when they improve or someone gets around to building a better search engine.
• Directories. DMOZ is the highest authority directory, and is free – but it’s nearly impossible to get into. There are plenty of paid directories out there, but the only ones I know of that are definitely high-authority are Yahoo! Directory and Business.com. Be wary of other directories or consult a professional. Then, still be wary.
• Write guest posts on other sites. Find a high-authority site that your target audience reads, and pitch a guest post to the author. They’ll get great content, and you’ll get links, and exposure to their audience. Ramit wrote a fantastic article on writing and pitching guest posts.
• Write link bait. The best way to get lots of links is to write content that other people will link to, share, and talk about. A really thorough, information-rich how-to (like this post) is a good example, but writing posts that are very controversial works well, too (unfortunately). Such posts then get shared on social news sites such as Digg.com, and on Facebook and Twitter. Do lots of research and make some pretty graphs, and your chances of getting lots of links increases again.
• Find your audience. When you’ve written really great, useful, and interesting content, get as many people in your target audience to see it as you can. Submit to a social news site in a category where those people hang out, or buy traffic in your target category on Stumbleupon (5 cents per visit, with a chance of unlimited free traffic). Another good tactic is to find an already popular post on your target topic, find other sites that have linked to it, and pitch to the authors of those sites.

See?

You already knew all of this stuff about SEO, but applying this knowledge is all that you need to be well on your way to ranking highly and having money streaming into your business. There are probably some very reputable SEO firms out there who are great at applying this knowledge, and more; but be wary – because there is so much mystery behind SEO, the field is rife with consultants that overcharge and use tactics that will either only work in the short-term, or will get your site downgraded.

I’m sure there are tons of other great tips I didn’t cover – or maybe I’m just plain wrong about a thing or two. Talk about it in the comments!

Related around the web:

• Search Engine Ranking Factors – A survey of SEO professionals on what is important to search rankings.
• WordPress Optimization: How I Reduced Page Load Time by 75% – Google also recently started ranking based upon page load speed

No related posts.

Google did say that their new speed standards will only affect about 1% of searches; but this graph makes me believe that portion will increase. If a site can be crawled faster – and requires less resources (clarification: time & money, not CPU) to index, doesn’t it stand to reason that it will be rewarded with higher search rankings? Additionally, I’ve heard from a number of people that they’ve seen higher CTR on ads when they improved performance – since so many sites have Google AdSense, Google will make more money by directing users to these faster sites.

Cheaper indexing, higher revenues on visits = speed is good.

Here’s that beautiful page load time graph from last week’s WordPress performance optimization post again.

No related posts.

A few weeks before Google’s announcement, I decided it was time to start looking at site performance. I moved a couple of my sites, including this one, from my Dreamhost Shared server, to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) on The Rackspace Cloud. Additionally, I implemented a few other performance enhancements that I’ll cover below. From all of these changes, I cut load time of pages on kadavy.net by 75%, and my Webmaster Tools performance graph now looks like this.

Also, Googlebot now crawls my site 90% faster. A summary of what’s to follow:

• I reduced average page-load time from 12 seconds to 3 seconds, saving my visitors almost one week of time per month.
• I did this by first switching from a Dreamhost Shared server to The Rackspace Cloud.
• I then used the W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin, and served my media files from Amazon’s Cloudfront CDN, from multiple subdomains.

Great web publishing platforms like WordPress have made it easy for just about anyone to publish information and have it seen by the world, but as Google starts favoring sites that have the resources and knowledge to optimize page load time, some publishers’ messages may not have the reach they once did. Exacerbating this problem is that information on website optimization is somewhat complicated and assumes a considerable amount of technical knowledge. I hope to share my experience with improving the page load time of my WordPress site in as plain of language as possible. I’m a designer by training, and get by how I can as a developer. So, maybe some folks out there who know more than I do about this stuff will have some knowledge to offer. Maybe I did something completely wrong, in which case, let me know in the comments!

Servers: What’s the difference between Shared and VPS?

With shared hosting – such as Dreamhost‘s – your sites are all on one machine with a whole bunch of other sites, sharing all of the resources (CPU usage and RAM usage). You also don’t have much control over the configuration of your server, such as what PHP modules are activated (of which, there are probably way too many), and the configuration of your PHP.ini file.

With a VPS – The Rackspace Cloud, specifically – your “server” is a piece of a machine, with CPU and memory resources dedicated just for your piece of it. You can choose what flavor of Linux you have installed, how your Apache server is configured (if you want to run Apache at all), how your PHP is configured – you can control pretty much everything. The drawback is that you have to administer it all yourself. This was challenging for me to figure out, but as you can see the speed payoff is pretty amazing.

Why not use Dreamhost’s PS?

As I evaluated my options, I considered simply upgrading to Dreamhost PS. All I would have had to do was press a button to do this, but I had heard not-so-good-things about Dreamhost PS – and most importantly, my MySQL database would have still been on a shared server. I would have to pay extra if I wanted my database on a nicer server. This seemed pointless to me, and didn’t sound like a VPS at all. I wasn’t keen on administering my own server, but after help from some nice people at Jelly (especially Chris Chandler from Flatterline) things are going okay so far.

How much does the Rackspace Cloud cost?

I’m not really sure yet, because I haven’t gotten a bill, but it looks like you can get started for around $12 a month, with a server with 256MB of memory. There are bandwidth and storage fees on top of this, but they seem pretty low. The coolest thing about The Rackspace Cloud so far is that you can scale your server up and down in a matter of minutes, and only pay by the hour, based upon the size of the server. My two WordPress sites, totaling about 60k pageviews a month, are currently on a 1024MB server, which I hope will cost me less than $50 a month, but I’m starting to make money on my properties, so the expense is worth it for me. If you don’t have much revenue, it may not be worth it for you – or you could increase your revenue: something I hope to write more about in the future.

Using the Rackspace Cloud

Once I signed up for Rackspace (they called me within 15 minutes of signing up, to confirm, before I could start using it), I signed in and created a server. When doing this, you can pick the flavor of Linux that you want to use. I didn’t really know what this meant, but I was advised by a friend to choose the latest version of Ubuntu they had. So I chose 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I also could have chosen one of various Windows servers. After selecting the Linux flavor, I was able to name my server, and select the size of server that I wished to use. I started off with 256MB, but I very easily scaled up later on. After a few minutes, the server was all set up, and I got a confirmation e-mail, with my dedicated IP address, and login and password.

You can quickly and easily resize your server on the Rackspace Cloud

Setting up the rest of the LAMP stack

Now that my Linux was set up, it was time to install Apache, MySQL, and PHP. I SSHed into the server using Terminal on the Mac. That command looks like this (but I used my actual IP address):

ssh root@111.111.11.111

Setting up Apache, MySQL, and PHP – and phpmyadmin – was super easy thanks to this great article in the Ubuntu Documentation.

Transferring the Data

Now I was ready to get the data over to my new server. I SSHed into my Dreamhost server (you may have to contact support to get this enabled), and created an archive of kadavy.net:

tar -cvf kadavy.tar kadavy.net

I then transferred that archive over to my Rackspace Cloud server using Secure Copy:

scp kadavy.tar root@111.111.11.111:/home

Then I decompressed the file on my Rackspace Cloud:

cd /home

tar -xvf kadavy.tar


Setting it up

I then used PHPMyAdmin to export my database from Dreamhost, and import it onto my Rackspace Cloud instance. I had to change a few settings in the options table of my database to match the IP address of my server, rather than my domain, so that it would run properly before setting up my DNS. I also made a few changes to my wp-settings.php so the installation was pointed at the right database.

Using the easy instructions from the Ubuntu documentation, I set up the virtual host on Apache, and started up the server.

After I felt everything was right – and after messing around with optimization tricks below – I pointed the DNS to this new server. Rackspace has a DNS management tool, but I found that GoDaddy (my registrar) had more user-friendly DNS management.

Optimizing WordPress / The Front-End

Now that I was on a much faster server, there were a few other things I learned that made my pages load even faster. After learning these tricks, I found that there was one WordPress plugin that used many of these tricks. I used the YSlow Firefox plugin to benchmark the speed of page loads, and also to get tips on ways I could optimize my pages. Here’s some of the more important tactics I learned.

Page Caching

The most popular WordPress optimization advice I found was to cache the pages. Instead of having to hit the database every time a page is called, caching allows your server to serve up static HTML. The server doesn’t have to process all of that PHP and build the pages from the database. There are several plugins for WordPress which automate this, one of them being W3 Total Cache, which I’ll talk about more in a minute.

Using a CDN (Amazon Cloudfront)

This was the most intimidating sounding advice I received, but it turned out to be pretty simple. A Content Delivery Network is basically a bunch of servers around the world through which you serve your larger files, such as images, CSS, and Javascript. When someone visits your site, the assets are served from the closest server to them, thus speeding up load time. I had heard of Amazon Web Services many times before, not really understanding what it was, but their Cloudfront service is a very cheap CDN (looks like it will cost me less than $1 a month). You can sign up for it at aws.amazon.com, and can freely upload assets using S3 Browser, amongst other applications.

Once you’ve signed up for Amazon, you can create a “bucket” on Cloudfront by clicking on the Cloudfront tab, then Create Distribution. Name your bucket, and you can set up CNAMEs (media1.mydomain.com, media2.mydomain.com). You’ll have to set these up in your DNS with your registrar as well. I’ll get to why you would even want to do this in a bit, but this gives you various subdomains you can use to access the same resources in your bucket. In addition to these subdomains, you’ll be able to access your resources at locations indicated under “Domain Name” and “Origin Bucket.”

Using Amazon Cloudfront, you can set up a bucket from which you can serve your media files

You can get the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key required to upload resources via S3 Browser by creating an Access Key under Account > Security Credentials.

Using S3 Browser, you can upload your media files to your Cloudfront bucket

The most daunting thought about using Cloudfront was uploading all of my resources, and pointing my code to them, but there are a number of WordPress plugins that automate parts this process, including W3 Total Cache, which I’ll cover in a bit.

Using Multiple Domain Names

Why did I set up multiple subdomains on my Cloudfront media bucket? It turns out, the HTTP spec states that “A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy,” and, even though this spec was written in 1999, many browsers still adhere to this specification. So, if you are accessing more than two assets from one domain – be they images, CSS files, or Javascript files – many users’ browsers will only download them two at a time.

The workaround for this is to set up multiple subdomains that all point to your Cloudfront bucket (media1.mydomain.com, media2.mydomain.com, media3.mydomain.com, media4.mydomain.com), and rotate through them as you code URLs to various media assets. I’ve been advised that 4 subdomains is plenty, as this will allow any browser to download as many as 8 files at once.

Multiple subdomains, one Cloudfront

Doing it all (almost) with W3 Total Cache

The caching component of the advice I found has been around long enough that not only is there a WordPress Plugin called WP-Cache, there is also another plugin called WP-Super Cache. Now, there is the amazing W3 Total Cache, which not only caches your pages, it also minifies (removes line breaks to save space), and uploads files in your media library to a CDN, such as Amazon Cloudfront.

While W3 Total Cache does upload to a CDN your wp-includes, theme files, CSS, Javascript files, and any other files you specify, it does not soon will change the paths to any images within your CSS files , and in your theme files, so you have to do this manually. But, since W3 Total Cache doesn’t soon will support the multiple subdomains I was talking about, this is probably for the best. I manually inserted different subdomains into my CSS and theme files.

W3 Total Cache will cache pages and upload all of your media files to Cloudfront

Be careful with minifying your Javascript files, as I found that doing so broke Google Website Optimizer tracking code.

Other Optimization Tricks

• CSS Sprites: This is the technique of putting all of your design graphics in one giant file, and selectively displaying parts of it through CSS. This reduces the number of HTTP requests, and the total size of graphics to be downloaded, this reducing load time by quite a bit. It’s also a bit of a pain in the ass, so I’m saving it for a future redesign.
• Putting CSS and Javascript inline instead of in separate files (for pages that are usually the only one visited): Since I have a couple of pages that visitors hit from a search engine, and then tend to leave, I did this on a dedicated template for a few posts. This really only helps if the page in question is the only page a user is likely to visit on your site. This is not a good technique for visitors that visit multiple pages, as they will have to re-download all of your styles.
• Gzip files: but Amazon Cloudfront does this automatically.
• Yahoo outlines some other best practices you may want to try, depending on how much effort you’d like to put in.

It still remains to be seen whether this performance enhancement will improve my Google rankings, but I hope this document helps some less technical publishers understand just how much impact they can expect from the choices they make in hosting platform and front-end development.

P.S. If you do decide to use The Rackspace Cloud, I sure would appreciate it if you signed up through this link. Clearly they’ve worked well for me, but I wouldn’t mind the referral bonus.

Elsewhere on the web: How to speed up your blog (the non technical guide)

Related posts:

1. Google Crawls My Site 90% Faster: Why Speed Will Be Important on Google

• If you are a Windows user and don’t want to go through all of this hacking, you can buy iTunes Transfer software at my partner site. It will help you back up your library – with playlists – and transfer it to your other computer.
• If you’re trying to transfer music from your iPod to your computer, unfortunately, Apple won’t let you do this freely, but you can buy iPod to Computer software for PC (free trial download), or iPod to Computer software for Mac at my partner site that will allow you to do this.
• if you just have the hard drive of your old PC, Ben has shared with us how to make the transfer
• if you aren’t keen on messing with XML files – and play count isn’t important to you - Oden has a simple process, involving smart playlists, for retaining song ratings when you transfer your iTunes library.
• Collin has a simple way to find out those duplicate songs that you may end up with when transferring your catalog.
• Aaron devised a clever way to transfer while retaining playlists in your collection.
• If you are transferring between Macs, pbaron has a method involving FireWire mode.

[Original post]

Since I’m moving, I wanted to transfer all of my music from the iTunes library on my work computer to the iTunes library on my home computer. This is pretty simple – just transfer my music from my work computer’s iTunes library onto my Firewire Hard Drive, take it home, and transfer the music onto my home computer – but I rely on all of my song ratings, accumulated over thousands of hours of listening to iTunes while I work, to populate my iPod Shuffle with songs from the “My Top Rated Songs” Smart Playlist. I couldn’t find any information on how to transfer my iTunes music, while still retaining my song ratings, but I finally figured it out.

Move Your Music Library

Before you do this, you’ll have to first transfer the actual files to your new computer. You may choose to burn CDs, DVDs, or use a thumb drive; but using a FireWire cable is easiest for large libraries, unless you have a portable hard drive.

Move Your Metadata

Here’s a video tutorial I put together. Written instructions are below.

1. Export the source iTunes library as an XML file (File>Library>Export Library…). This will create a file that holds information about the location, song filenames, and *song rating*!
2. Replace the file paths in your XML file with the path that the songs from the source library will be in when you import them. This path may point to your FireWire Drive, a DVD you have burned, or a temporary folder on your hard drive that you have copied your music to. Just to be sure of the new path, copy one of the files from this location to your library, export your destination library, and look at the file path to that song in the resulting XML file. To actually replace the file paths, I did a Find/Change in TextWrangler but you can just use TextEdit (Edit>Find>Find…).
3. Set the preferences in iTunes in your source library to “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library.” This is under “Advanced.”
4. Import your library (File>Library>Import Playlist…).
5. Delete redundant files. If you’re like me, you have some duplicate songs in your multiple libraries. This is a tedious task, but I plan to do it over time.

Of course, you can prevent all of this by being organized in the first place. I probably should have just had an iPod that I synched with my home computer and brought to work.

If you need help getting the actual files over to your new computer, this video will show you how to copy your music to your new computer using iTunes Home Sharing:

UPDATE, May 24, 2010: There are tons of comments on this post, so you may want to discuss your iTunes and iPod migration issues on the Transfer iTunes forum.

No related posts.

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Christopher Lock et. al.

Written in 1999, and published in 2000, this book was an appropriate introduction to a world-changing decade. It’s a collection of “95 theses” explaining how authentic, global, person-to-person communication would transform the way businesses interact with their customers. Through e-mail, message boards, and blogs (implied though not mentioned), the power behind information distribution would soon be shifting from that of large corporations, to that of individuals – human beings. My favorite thesis: “Markets are Conversations.” This was an exciting book for me to read because it was clear this power shift could change much more than just how business and customers interacted – it was the signal that soon the truth would always be more clear.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

This 2000 book was another fitting introduction to a decade because it presented the phenomena that would be the champions of the decade. The “Connectors” and “Mavens” – through blogs, message boards, and social networking sites – would soon be seeing more power to expand their vast networks of acquaintences and validate their expertise; making them the most sought after customers in companies quests to make their products go “viral.” Of course, it would all really depend on the “Stickiness Factor” of said products. This book was important to me not only because it helped me understand how ideas spread, but I found Malcom Gladwell’s style of writing and packaging of concepts to be inspirational, and helpful to observe.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

With the amount of information a person encountered in a given day rising exponentially, a new way of working was needed. In 2002, David Allen published this book, outlining a system of how to route all of that stimuli into a system that allows one to prioritize, delegate, and DO all of the things that need to be done. It was followed with religious fervor, and the whole concept behind the book came to be known as “GTD.” This book spawned countless GTD-related blogs, software tools, and physical-world hacks such as The Hipster PDA Keychain. This was an important book for me because it responded to the pain that I – and I think everyone – felt with managing a tidal wave of information, and the now seemingly endless possibilities that each day presented.

Four Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, & Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss

By virtue of our changed ways of accessing, interacting with, and managing information – the way we interacted with our physical world changed as well. With asynchronous communication techonologies such as e-mail and IM – now accessible from the palm of your hand, suddenly the whole concept of needing to be at a particular place at a particular time, just to make a living, started to look more antiquated. By use of the 80/20 rule, outsourcing, and running small tests with technologies like AdWords, Tim Ferriss’s 2007 book showed the world just how far one could stretch their potential. One can automate their income, freeing up time to pursue their passions, all while traveling the world. The bombastic title turned off many people; but I believe this book will stand as a marker in a revolutionary change in the way we work. This was an important book to me because it validated and made more clear just what it was about 9-5 that didn’t make any sense to me.

The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits & True Growth by Fred Reichheld

With a good portion of power now undeniably within the grip of the individual, organizations had to change the way they did business. This 2006 book outlined a concept, called Net Promoter Score, that has become a standard metric in today’s top organizations. By asking “The Ultimate Question” of your customers, “how likely are you to recommend X to a friend?” companies can now identify their “promoters” and “detractors,” and link a metric to a customer’s experience in any given interaction with their company. NPS leaders, such as Enterprise Rent-A-Car, innovate on customer experience from the bottom up – distributing ideas developed by the employees that have the closest contact with the customer. This was an important book for me because it was exciting to see how the internet had changed the way top companies viewed their customers.

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart

With most of the basic needs of the American middle class met, and easier and cheaper sharing of information, the environment was a hard issue to ignore. This 2002 book exposed not only the broken industrial system that was (and still is) harming our planet and our health, but the faults in our attempts to fix them (for example, recycling is really “downcycling” – degrading materials each time). Braungart and McDonough promote a Cradle to Cradle concept that employs waste-free systems that make optimal use of “technical nutrients” and “biological nutrients.” This was an important read to me not only because I found it to be practical and realistic approach to a cleaner and healthier environment; but it introduced me to thought frameworks that can be used in other areas to design an integrated lifestyle.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

Yet another book whose popularity was made possible by a shift in power, The Omnivore’s Dilemma called in to question our relationship with one of the most essential – yet underconsidered – sources of life: the food we eat. While America owes much of its success to our access to cheap food, the side-effects are emerging. Food safety issues, obesity, diabetes, and a lack of transparency of where our food comes from are all products of industrial agriculture and public policy that is enmeshed with our apathy toward our relationship with food. In this 2006 book, Michael Pollan dissects the sources of our food to reveal a lack of biodiversity, cultural apathy, and a broken political system. Since publishing this book, Pollan has published In Defense of Food, and appeared in the movie Food, Inc. and concern for the source of our food has become a mainstream topic. This book was important to me because it opened my eyes to the link between what I eat, and how I feel.

What is the What? by Dave Eggers

Through 9/11, the internet, and increased gobal travel, this decade brought us more awareness of the people with whom we share this world, and brought life to the inequities that were once nothing but news headlines. What is the What?, a 2006 novel written by Dave Eggers is a product and reflection of that. It follows the life of Sudanese refugee, Valentino Achak Deng from boyhood as his village is ransacked by the murahaleen, and as he walks through Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya, suffering and witnessing unbelievable horrors and losses. Accounts of his days in Africa are interspersed with stories of his subsequent struggles in America as a member of the Lost Boys of Sudan program. This book was important to me because the accounts of Deng’s experiences were a conduit through which to understand the suffering that exists in the world. It was humbling to read, and made me not only appreciate my life; but it reinforced my belief that we rarely have as much to lose as we think we do.

I think the 00′s will be remembered as a decade when everything we take for granted about how we live our lives was called into question. The models for how we access, understand, and distribute information were violently disrupted, exposing the now obsolete frameworks within which we live our lives. In the 10′s we will rebuild those frameworks.

I’m looking forward to rebuilding with you in the 10′s.

No related posts.

It’s called Being Yourself for a Living; and while it’s been done before – but reserved to those of massive celebrity and resources – it’s becoming more feasible for more people each and every day. Technology has brought us channels that allow us to express our unique personalities, to share our unique knowledge and experiences, and to explore our curiousities.

You may have just one burning passion. Some may say that BYFL will be easier for you; but not necessarily. In today’s world, boundless curiousity is once again an asset. You’ll have to know a little HTML at the least. The Renaissance Person is back.

It will start with a blurry flurry of snowflakes. “You lack focus.” But eventually those snowflakes stick together. Technology has brought us feedback mechanisms by which to see just which of those snowflakes stick. You now have a snowball, and the ground upon which you stand has been blanketed. Start rolling!

Hi, my name is Kadavy, Inc.. What is your name?

No related posts.

No related posts.

1. The iPhone - Nobody can deny the brilliant utility that is the iPhone. Sure, it sucks at making calls; but who likes talking on the phone anyway? From public transit directions on the go; to tons of time and frustration saved through the many Timer app uses; to the countless apps eliminating the need to own a multitude of devices from a calculator, to a guitar tuner, to a flashlight – the iPhone is one of the biggest winners when it comes to helping you live efficiently.
2. A Macbook / Macbook Pro - Along with the iPhone, these can eliminate the need for alot of other posessions: a home stereo system, a television, and – with a decent internet connection – cable, or even trips to the movies. Best of all, you can take it all with you wherever you go. And with the Remote app for iPhone, you can control your media from afar.
3. 

   Every heated mattress pad comes with a remote to turn you...*it*...on.
   Heated Mattress Pad - Huh? You say. Don’t you mean a heated blanket? Hell no! Heat goes up genius, haven’t you heard? So why would you put heat on top of yourself, when you can have it coming from below. I was skeptical at first, too; but these things are amazing. On those cold winter nights, why heat your whole place, when you’re going to be staying put for the next 8 hours? You can even get the two-sided model so your sleeping partner can control her or his own side of the bed – or you can just leave one side off for the nights you snooze solo. There’s no simpler way to lower your heating bills – and reduce your carbon footprint – than with one of these. At least until they release the heated Snuggie®.
4. Sonicare Tooth Brush - I held out for so long, but just couldn’t wait any longer, and I’m glad that I didn’t. These things really make a difference in the health of your teeth and gums. When I finished brushing with a manual toothbrush, my teeth still felt like pumice rocks when I was done. Now, they feel like pearls. With the prospects of eternal life on the horizon, I’m holding on to my teeth for damn sure.
5. Faucet Water Filter - Your water is regulated by the EPA, which is stricter than the FDA (who regulates bottled water), so it’s got to be clean, right? Well, yeah, for the most part, but what about those miles and miles of pipes delivering that water to your Kleen Kanteen? Since I know you live in a relatively dense area to keep things in walking distance, you probably live in an area with some pretty old pipes. Instead of drinking out of bottles that use double the water inside of them just to make themselves, filter the water at the source. If you’re a stickler, the Aquasana has the most complete data about its filtering capabilities, but the Culligan is more reliable and cheaper up-front.
6. 

   This rice cooker can program your VCR.
   Rice Cooker - I know I lead a sheltered childhood, but would you believe I had never seen one of these until I lived in California and had an Asian roommate? Rice makers rock! Especially for those who are wheat-free. You throw rice and water in, press a button, and you have rice for days. Since you’re probably smart enough to not consume evil white rice, but don’t have the patience to stand around to wait for water to finally soak into your brown rice, you’ll love that many of these have a scheduling feature that allows you set what time you’d like the rice to be finished. You might want to drop some extra coin on a Zojirushi: it comes with a recipe book for a bunch of delightful dishes (like Jambalaya) that you can make with the touch of a button. How does it do it? I has artificial intelligence. It knows. Oh, it knows. If you don’t want to spend that much, you can always set up a Craigslist alert.
7. Sleeptracker Watch - Ever get a full night’s sleep and wake up feeling like the living dead? You probably woke up during the wrong stage of sleep. Sleeptracker is a watch you wear that monitors your body for signals of your more alert periods of sleep. Then, it picks the best time to wake you up – within the 60-90 minute window you’ve set. It sounds crazy, but everyone from Dr. Phil, to 37 signals’ own Jason Fried uses these to wake up. If you get the fancy model, you can even upload your sleep data to do all sorts of creepy things with.
8. A Library Card - Okay, so this isn’t technically a gadget per se, but have you seen lately what one of these things can do for you? Sure, it’s no Kindle when it comes to eliminating to need to own physical copies of books; but it can get you movies and audiobooks too, and costs you little more than what you’re already paying Uncle Sam. Oh, and the books you get there have nice full-color pictures and such in them. I like to place books on hold through my local library’s web site, and they get delivered to my closest branch within days. Magic! If you haven’t used your local library lately, do it today.

Well there ya have it, hippies: some necessaries, to go along with your hacky sack and bong.  

——

Cat photo from Mihnea

No related posts.

Here’s the summary:

• Search on Craigslist for the item you want, and do the appropriate neighborhood filtering.
• Click on the “RSS” icon at the bottom of the search results.
• Copy and paste the URL for the RSS feed into Pingie.com (if you’re on Safari, you’ll have to change the “feed://” at the beginning of the URL to “http://”) Of course, you’ll have to enter your phone number, carrier, and e-mail address as well.
• Next time an item shows up with your search criteria, you’ll get a text message or e-mail notification, and hopefully – just what you were looking for!

I love buying items off of Craigslist because 1) it’s cheaper, 2) it’s good for the environment, 3) you can find more interesting stuff, and 4) I even make friends in the process!

Check out the rest of the Eight Life Hacks for Health Wealth and Happiness

No related posts.

Facebook disabled my account, and didn’t tell me why. The other day, as I was trying to comment on a Lifehacker thread using their super-cool Facebook Connect integration, I received this message:

HUH?! Disabled? How could my account be disabled? How could they take away from me my main means of communicating with my friends back in San Francisco, and everywhere else? Now I can’t even play Scrabble with my own mother!? Oh, yeah, AND WHY THE FUCK WAS MY ACCOUNT DISABLED?

At first I thought maybe it was this Tweet:

I figured, probably the words “teen sex”, followed by a link, set off some sort of flag when it was syndicated to my status message. One would think they would have a more sophisticated system for screening these things, but whatever. I sent them a message explaining this may have been it.

Then it was pointed out to me that since this tweet started with an “@” it probably wasn’t syndicated to my status message. The mystery continues.

Then I remembered a message I got a few weeks ago, regarding a video I posted that included a song by Spoon.

Hello,

We have removed your video entitled “Proportional Design Technique Time Lapse” uploaded at 8:20pm February 4th, 2009. We did this because we learned that your video might include copyrighted material owned by a third party, such as a video clip or background audio.

If you are the copyright owner, or have permission from the rights holder to upload and distribute this material on Facebook, you may file a counter notice of alleged infringement by following the link below.

Please note that if you re-upload this video without filing a counter notice, or if you upload another video that infringes on the rights of a third party, our system will again remove the content. This could cause your access to the Facebook Video application to be disabled, or your Facebook account to be disabled.

For any other questions, view our Help page.

The Facebook Team

“Okay,” I thought. A little anal, considering the video is only being shared with my friends, but whatever. Typical sort of language for this thing: “this could cause your access to the Facebook Video application to be disabled, or your Facebook account to be disabled.” Surely this language is for flagrant offenders. Anyway. Done deal. I can go on with my life, and spend the rest of my days throwing as many sheep at my friends as I wish.

Well, I guess there was one other video I had up that had a copyrighted song. A little experiment I did with processing.org and a Crystal Castles tune. I uploaded this video well before the Spoon one, so I didn’t think to take it down. Besides, they’ll just take it down and send me another message. Right? Right?

So, I’m left to assume that this was the egregious violation I had committed – putting up a video with a soundtrack that included a copyrighted song. By a group that, incidentally has had some copyright troubles themselves.

It’s been about 48 hours since my account was disabled, and still no comment from Facebook, or response to my inquiry. It’s as if my very existence has just gone into the ether. All those comments from my regular status updates via Twitter – shall be no more. Unless I get my account back.

Oh yeah, and that Facebook application that I spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours developing (which was also just about killed by the new API) what happens to that?

• Something is fucked here: yes, I did violate the Facebook Terms of Use by uploading a copyrighted video. In fact – TWO of them. But really guys? Disable my account? And cut off access to a portion of my business without word of when, why, whatTF? That’s a dick move. Would the same happen were I to publish a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night, or a picture of The Lone Cypress?
• Everyone should know: Facebook needs to know that if they are going to encourage users to invest their entire social lives in their platform, and to entrust them with housing and managing all of this personal data, those users – excuse me – PEOPLE are going to need to know that access to their own personal data isn’t going to be destroyed on little more than a whim.
• So, those of you on the inside can you start one of those Facebook group thingies? Join this group (thanks, Fayza). Get the word out that Facebook is very unforgiving with their policies, and can destroy this account you hold dear without notification.

If you’re on Twitter, please tweet this:

Save @kadavy! Facebook disabled his account: http://tr.im/h7Ji Please ReTweet!

Be careful what you trust Facebook with. After this experience, I made this video about it:

Photo by willgame

No related posts.