Julie Gomoll

She’s pretty damn perceptive! And I have to admit that it never occurred to me to think of the McDonald’s logo as an M “made of french fries.”

Thesis 1.8 (current version is 1.8.2) introduced a great, easy header image uploader. No more messing with code to get a custom image for your website banner.

Unfortunately for some folks, switching to this method rendered their header image not-clickable. I had a hell of a time figuring out how to make it clickable again.

Turns out it’s really easy :)

First, remove any custom code for your header image from custom.css and custom_functions.php so you don’t have to worry about conflicting information.

Second, upload your header image via the header image uploader.

Third, make sure “show site name in header” is selected in Thesis > Design Options.

That’s it! You have a clickable header!

This is not an “I hate this app” post. Far from it. In fact, I really, really like this app. But I almost didn’t bother trying it.

A while back my friend Nando Tweeted the following: “Seriously, best productivity tool. Ever. WorkFlowy.” Nando has shared some great links in the past. I respect him. So I was very motivated to check it out. I clicked, and this is what I saw:

I was immediately skeptical. What is this product? Who makes it? Why should I hand over my email when you’ve done nothing to instill trust in me?

So I closed the tab, and responded to Nando saying I wasn’t willing to sign up for something I knew nothing about. He pinged me the next day and asked me (I’m paraphrasing) if I’d gotten over myself and tried it. He said he’d been using it for months and loved it. He also mentioned that there was a short intro video if I’d only scroll down a bit.

Sure enough. There’s a video. But it’s below the fold, and there’s nothing indicating there’s more on the page. Yes, this page is perfect for mobile, but that’s no excuse any more — there are other ways to handle that.

A simple link saying “what’s this?” or an arrow pointing down, implying there’s more on the page would help a great deal. I was motivated to explore this product and I left without learning a thing. Yes, I signed up after additional prodding, but how many people come to this page and think “nope, not going there.”?

The Good News About Workflowy

The good news is this really is an awesome app. Remember when wikis were gaining a bit of traction, and we had this idea that you could just start entering info and it would sort of “organize itself?” Yeah, that turned out to be wishful thinking.

Workflowy inevitably works the way your brain works. It’s drop-dead simple and flexible. There’s a really simple, intuitive tagging system, and it works just as well on your main computer as it does on your mobile devices.

And as much as the initial experience is flawed, the tutorial once you’re in is excellent. A couple of minutes with the walkthrough and you’ll totally get just how useful this tool can be. Like Nando, I’ve been using it every day ever since.

But really, Workflowy — with some simple tweaks to your home page, I’ll bet your user acquisition numbers would skyrocket.

I’ve long been intrigued with the idea of selling or trading small bits of time. Back when I was doing LaunchPad Coworking, I wanted to have a BrainBank for members. The idea was you could deposit x of your own hours, and withdraw hours to get time with people with whom you wanted time.

And after running the hugely successful Room For Improvement at BlogathonATX, I’ve been thinking more and more about how to monetize brief, info-packed consulting sessions that lots of people hope they can get for free over lunch. In fact, I’m about to launch a “Pick My Brain” experiment to do just that.

When a friend introduced me to Allthis a few weeks ago, I thought “Cool! Someone’s figured out how to do this on a grand scale!” They were boasting something like 600,000,000 “members,” whose time you could buy, and I wondered just how this site had managed to escape my notice. Mashable gave Allthis a nice writeup in October, and seemed quite oblivious to the sleaze factor.

Back then, you could look around at profiles to see how much their time was going for. There were all sorts of luminaries listed — Mark Zuckerberg, Esther Dyson, Larry Ellison, Kathy Sierra… Right then, something felt wrong about the site. I read the “how it works” section, but couldn’t find anything that explained how or why any of these people would agree to chat with some random person for 10 minutes.

Well, it turns out they wouldn’t. And some of them are pissed off.

Rob Beschizza of BoingBoing posted a short, indignant post telling Allthis to knock it off. He explains exactly what his experience was in the comments.

Amy Hoy of Unicorn Free is says Allthis is “at best, copyright infringement, and at worse, fraud.” And Joel Houseman focuses on the copyright issues surrounding scraping public info in his post, “This Week in Douchbaggery: Allthis“.

Is fraud really what’s going on here? Is what they’re doing all that much different than other sites? There are all sorts of “profile” sites I seem to be listed on that I never signed up for — Intellius, PeekYou, BusinessCard2 seem to have found their way onto the first couple pages of search results for my name. And there are new ones sprouting up all the time.

Hell, Facebook pushes the privacy and copyright envelopes all the time. The unveiling of Seamless Sharing (or Frictionless Sharing) has all sorts of unpleasant ramifications. And we all know how easy it is to inadvertently opt-in to oversharing. Personally, I won’t use Facebook as an OAuth login, because I simply don’t trust them.

So why is Allthis inspiring all this acrimony? Because they imply that all these people have opted in when they haven’t. Mike Monteiro’s succinct Tweet sums it up nicely:

Does @allthis realize the hostile interaction they set up between me and someone who “bought my time” feeling I owe it to them?

It’s entirely unacceptable IMO. But is it fraud? Or is it just a clueless group of people making some really, really bad business and product decisions? Personally, I have a hard time believing they don’t know exactly what they’re doing. I think they’re being intentionally deceptive, and trying to grow a community without doing the hard work of actually building that community.

But I’m willing to be proven wrong. Anyone out there willing to try to convince me that Allthis is a good idea?

Nobody questions the value of most metadata in helping with SEO. Every SEO 101 article will explain the importance of page titles and meta descriptions. And for a long time meta keywords were considered a must-have. For the last year or so, though, the value of meta keywords has been questioned and debated. Even Google has publicly stated that they don’t use meta keywords in ranking.

A common conclusion is “well, they might not help, but they don’t hurt providing you don’t abuse them.” I reached that same conclusion, and have expressed that very sentiment to my clients.

Not any more.

Definition of Metadata

While metadata actually encompasses a huge range of values (see the Wikipedia definition of metadata), for the purposes of this article, I’m referring to Meta Titles (also referred to as Page Name, Custom Title Tag, or Page Title) and Meta Descriptions.

The Meta Title of an article is what appears as the primary link on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It may or may not match the actual title of your article. The Meta Description is the brief paragraph that appears on the SERP right below that link. Without an explicit Meta Description, what will appear are the first 150 characters or so of your post.

(click to embiggen)

Notice the title of the post is different than what the SERP shows, and that the meta description on the SERP is not the first 150 characters of the post.

If you’re using WordPress, you can modify these using a plugin like All In One SEO Pack. If you’re using Thesis (as I do on this blog), you don’t need a plugin — it’s built right in. For me, the fields for SEO details appear right below the text editor, and look like this:

Why I Won’t Use Meta Keywords Any More

Yesterday I read this excellent article on conducting website audits on Tamar Weinberg’s blog casually mentioning the fact that Bing flags all pages using meta keywords as spam.

What?!

So I did some digging. And the evidence began to pile up. When I saw that Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land talked with a senior product manager for Bing webmaster outreach who confirmed that meta keywords are basically a bad idea, I was convinced.

There’s no need to panic here. It does seem that Bing, like Google, penalizes you for using useless keywords more than anything. But if the mere presence of keywords is a signal for possible spam, it seems best to err on the side of caution.

So. No more meta keywords for me.

Are you still using them? Does the Bing news change your mind on the issue?

The slogan is mine, but the original art is by vhm-alex.

I’ll be on the Hot Seat at the Austin Content Marketing Meetup on Friday, June 24 (noon, at the Flying Saucer in the Triangle). Several folks have asked what I’ll be talking about. This particular meetup isn’t a “talking about” kind of event — it has a much more interesting format. Basically after a brief intro the attendees can ask me anything.

I’ve been immersed in the online world since 1993, when I built my first websites. And I’ve been immersed in some flavor of marketing, social media, and content marketing since 1996, when I sold my company, Go Media, to Excite. I’m a generalist, so I know a little bit about a lot of things. Some of you might be wondering what might make a good question for me.

Here are some of the things I’ve done, and what they mean in the context of content marketing. Hope this gives you some ideas :)

I’ve helped 3 microbusinesses and 2 small businesses achieve national recognition in under a year.

Things I got really good at as a result:

• multi-channel marketing strategy (get the word out in the right places)
• Users/goals assessment, information architecture & wireframing (provide the right content for the right people in the right format)
• Creative, organic traffic-building

I started a new blog, Queen of Points, a few months ago. After only 6 weeks I was appearing on the front page of Google for significant keywords and phrases.

What I learned/did right:

• I SEO’d the shit out of this blog. Turns out it’s not rocket science.
• Best practices for categories, tags, and meta-data
• Best practices for using images to boost SEO
• How to use Google’s tools — Keyword tools, speed test, webmaster tools
• All sorts of great apps & plugins helped a lot

A few other areas I know pretty well:

• graphic design
• project management
• social media
• web development

Did I miss anything?

Looking forward to the Hot Seat tomorrow. I’ll take any and all questions :)

I was looking for an iPhone app that would let me use my voice to send text messages when I came across HeyTell. I was actually searching on behalf of a friend, so I was surprised and thrilled to come across an app that is changing how I use my iPhone and how I interact with friends.

HeyTell does one thing, and does it well. It lets you send instant voice messages to other users. Think of it as a kinder, gentler, warmer alternative to text messaging.

There are so many uses for Heytell:

• Use it while you drive. Wait, no! Don’t! Um… We’ve all heard about the dangers of text messaging while driving, yet many of us (most of us?) still do it. HeyTell lets you send a voice message to other HeyTell users with the touch of one button. And if you leave the app open, you can hear the response without so much as a glance at your phone. Try it as a passenger, please.
• Use it as an alternative to voicemail. Sometimes you know ahead of time that your going to get someone’s voicemail when you call. And you know you’re going to have to listen to an annoying, dispassionate voice  give you directions for leaving a voicemail as though it were 1980. HeyTell is super-fast. Hold the button, talk, let it go, and your message is there.
• Use it if you’re blind or visually impaired. Or if you have trouble with the technology or text size for any reason. You can even assure your grandma that this is not a scary app.
• Use it to connect with your friends in other countries. Phone calls are expensive, and you can’t always manage a Skype call. With HeyTell you can leave a free voice message without having to worry about the time zone. You can leave a message for your mom letting her know you’re safe so she hears it before she wakes up and hears about the latest natural disaster or cultural revolution!
• Use it as an alternative to texting to save money. Tired of sms overage fees? Don’t want to spend the money for your kid to have an unlimited plan? HeyTell is free. Really.
• Use it because you’re all thumbs. Fat fingers? HeyTell is a graceful option :)
• Use it for random acts of kindness. Make someone’s day. Leave a HeyTell message for your friend just before she has to go into an important meeting telling her how much she rocks. It’s a nice thing to do.

A few things to know:

• HeyTell looks to your phone contacts for people to voice message.
• You can connect it to Facebook. Almost scary note: when you invite a Facebook friend to use the app, it posts the invitation to their wall. It will look to you as though it’s public, but it’s not. Other users don’t see the post on your wall, nor do they see it on the invitees wall, even if they’re a friend.
• You can opt to show your location to people you’re messaging. A toggle button turns the top half of your screen into a map. Be sure to turn this off if you don’t want to broadcast the location of your home, or of the place you happen to be at that moment.
• When the app is open, you get a relatively unobtrusive “ting” noting an incoming message, and the message plays automatically. If the app is not open, or completely closed, you get the same ringtone as you get for a voicemail (This is on the iPhone. Might be different on Android)

HeyTell is free, and available for iPhone and Android. If you’re not convinced, go watch the ~1-minute demo on their website.

In-app extras for purchase at $1.99 each include Message Wipe, Emoji (extra icons), and Voice Changer. (Fun for kids. Yeah, kids. Ahem.) Group broadcast is also available for $2.99.

Be sure to check out the reviews. Then try it out — let me know if you think this could be a game changer too.

Thanks to Susan Price for the most enjoyable test session!

Type It! is a new iPad app that promises to turn your photos into beautiful typography.

I don’t believe you, Type It!

As a huge iPad fan and type geek, I’d normally buy this app without a second thought. Sadly, this epic fail of a promo not only lost the developer a sale, it flagrantly bolsters the stereotype of coders being inherently bad at design.

For starters, Brush Script?! Brush Script has to be one of the ugliest typefaces out there. Comic Sans would be an improvement! Ok, maybe not, but it wouldn’t make it any worse.

And what’s with the double primes instead of real quotation marks? On top of that, this slogan doesn’t need quotation marks. There was absolutely no need to make this typography 101 mistake.

The sample picture? This isn’t typography. There’s no way to make a painting transform into type. This is a photo with a bunch of typographic characters on it. I think. I don’t know what most of those characters are, but they’re not a typeface I’ve seen anywhere.

Lastly, “beautiful” and “typography” are not a proper nouns, and do not require capitalization.

(Yeah, I’m feeling kinda bitchy this morning.)

How often have you wondered what the pixel measurement of a given image or space was on a web page? How wide is that column? How much room do I have for a banner?

Kevin A. Freitas has created a brilliant add-on that works with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari called MeasureIt. Once installed (in Firefox, anyway) you’ll see a small ruler-like icon in the lower left corner of the browser window. Click on it, and you get a crosshairs cursor that lets you measure anywhere within the browser window.

Figuring out web page measurements used to be a pain. If I wanted to know the size of an image, I’d copy the image and open it in an image editing program to check. If I wanted to know the size of an available space, I’d make an educated guess and do trial and error until I got it right.

Those days are gone, thankfully :)

Here’s an example – I went to Google and measured (roughly) the size of the Google logo.

Go get the add-on or plug-in or whatever your browser of choice calls it and give it a try. Then let me know what you think!
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Sorry, Bobby, you’ll need to ride on the Condensed Bus

When I left my house at 1:45 for a meeting, it wasn’t raining. 10 minutes later, after parking my car downtown, I got caught in a deluge. This wasn’t just runoff — it’s been raining for the last couple of days here. It caught us all by surprise. I needed to cross the street I filmed here. What fun it is, showing up drenched for a meeting at an art museum :/

I love, love, love this ad. So much is said in 30 seconds, it kind of blows me away. The look on the dad’s face goes from mortified to embarrassed to relieved to absolute love in a matter of seconds.

This ad gives me hope. It encourages me to keep believing that the world is changing for the better.

I wish Renault still sold their cars in the US. I’d be first in line to buy one, just because of this ad.

via sexgenderbody and HT to @penguirl for pointing it out

Six posts into my new blog and 5 of them are about dogs. Yes, I’m a big dog person, for sure. But don’t worry, cat loves. I like the kitties too.

Every week my friend Jan and I go the the Austin Humane Society to “interview” cats. We write bios for their web site to encourage people to adopt them.

AHS is a really great place. It’s a no-kill shelter, and the animals their get great care and tons of attention.

It’s hard, sometimes, not to go home with another animal, but so far I’ve resisted. I can’t say the same for Jan, who recently fell in love with a sweet kitty and had to bring her home.

To be honest, if I were sure my dogs would handle the addition of a cat, I’d probably get one.

Any guesses as to whether or not Tip got a bite?

Over the past 2 months I’ve had as many as 8 dogs living at my house. I have 3, and Tina has been visiting with anywhere from 3 to 5 of hers. In between Deb visited with her dog. There’s been the occasional kerfuffle, but mostly it’s been awesome.

Nonetheless, when Tina left with her pack yesterday, it was a bit of a relief to be back down to just my 3.

This morning at 6am, my pack started barking. A lot. I assumed at first it was some critter crossing the fence that’s withing view of my bedroom windows, but  quickly ruled that out. By 6:15 I was wide awake, got up, and let them out. They immediately ran to the back of my house and resumed their rather frantic barking. It was still dark out, so in the interest of not totally pissing off my neighbors, I went outside to calm them down.

I saw a large creature across the street. I could only see his eyes and a vague outline of his body. I was pretty sure it was a dog, although it seemed big enough to be something else, but nothing else realistic came to mind.

Once he saw me petting my own pooches, he trotted across the street and introduced himself.

This was one big dog. I’d guess 90-100 lbs. All black, obviously a lab mix, but a mix with what I didn’t know. Rottweiler? Newfoundland? Maybe just a huge lab? He had some purple on his tongue, so there was certainly some Chow in the mix.

Anyway, my pooches loved him, and he loved them. They played for hours. I posted info about him on several lost-pet sites, tweeted about him, and sent info to the neighborhood mailing list, to no avail.

I had to leave around 11. I got home as early as I could, around 3:45, by which time he was gone. I hope he found his way home.

I’m not at all sad he wasn’t here when I got home. NOT AT ALL. Nope, not one bit. Not even a little.

Maybe he’ll show up again tomorrow…

It’s never easy saying goodbye to a beloved pet. Finding a way to make the last couple of days good goes a long way, though.

I met Trucker, one of 5 dogs belonging to Tina, a couple of years ago. He was the epitome of a “loveable lug”. Big, gentle, slow-moving, on the awkward side, he was happy to be at the back of the pack. He had lots of nicknames — Gramps, Bud Light, Bubba — and they all fit.

When he arrived in my home once again a couple of weeks ago, it was meant to be a transition. Tina is moving from Marfa (her home for the last 6 months) to New York. She planned to take 4 of the dogs, but for a variety of reasons it seemed like a bad move for Trucker, so he was going to stay with me.

And I was looking forward to it. Dogs don’t get much more low maintenance than Trucker. He did have a tendency to wander, so Tina got him a collar that worked with my invisible fence just in case, but I really wasn’t too worried about things.

He had been behaving oddly for a couple of weeks before arriving, though, and really went downhill not long after he got here. After many difficult nights, we took him to the vet and came home with a diagnosis of kidney failure and a brain tumor. His time was up.

We got some drugs to make his last couple of days bearable and allow Trucker, Tina, and me to get some desperately needed sleep.

This morning, Tina and I took him to Longview Park, Trucker’s favorite place in the world. Friends Adam, Jenny, Sal, Rick, and Jilli were there to. For about 45 minutes he was happy as can be, trotting around and seeming to forget his aches and pains and confusion. Sal and Jenny brought him a burger and fries, which he enjoyed immensely.

Everyone said their goodbyes, and a little after noon today, he died peacefully and painlessly with Tina, Adam, and me holding him.

Bye, Trucker. You were an awesome dog, and we’ll all miss you.

Jilli Dog is quite the celebrity. She’s been on Live with Regis and Kelly, has been featured on Animal Planet, and has played poker with Bette Midler. It just so happens that her trainer, Rick Caran, is the brother-in-law of Tina Rosenzweig, who’s been staying with me for a couple of weeks.

Jilli has a big show in Dallas later this week, so Rick brought her to the San Jose Hotel for a dress rehearsal. Unfortunately she was feeling a bit under the weather, so we didn’t get the whole show, but we did get to see her say hi, dance around a bit, and shoot some hoops. This is one entertaining little Yorkie. Everyone loved her, and she loved everyone right back.

There are tons of videos on her web site if you’d like to see her in action. I’ve heard from a couple of trainers that little dogs can’t really be trained. Jilli definitely proves the claim entirely wrong.

Tonight I made Quinoa Risotto with Mushrooms and Thyme. I think of Risotto as a rice dish, so I figured it must be one of those Italian terms that refers to the cooking method rather than the ingredients. Nope — risotto is rice, period. Whoever came up with this recipe simply took liberties. I’m glad they did, because it was delicious.

My assumption that risotto might have a different meaning stems from an experience I had in Italy 10 years ago. I was in Florence, at a restaurant off the beaten tourist path. The menu, of course, was in Italian, and while I’m an adventurous eater, I found myself looking for familiar terms.

The first course I ordered wasn’t vegetables and pasta like I expected, but some kind of mixed organ meat platter. When I saw Carpaccio on the menu, I was thrilled. What better place to sample one of my favorite dishes than here? I anticipated a lovely plate of thinly-sliced raw beef.

But no.

Turns out carpaccio means “thinly-sliced and raw” but not necessarily “beef”. The dish that arrived clearly wasn’t dead cow. I look to the waiter, who spoke no English, pointed to the plate, and asked “Moooo?”

He shook his head no, put his hands in his armpits, flapped his elbows, and said “Quack, quack, quack!”

Great. Raw duck. Naturally I had to at least try it. And it was fabulous. Served with a bit of olive oil and arugula, it was some of the best raw meat I’ve ever had. It made me grateful to be willing to experiement.

A picture a day. Every day. Maybe some words too. Going with a picture gives me some incentive to delve further into photography. Every day gets me in the habit of blogging. Will it work? We’ll see.

It’s fitting that the first picture is of one of my dogs. This is Kody, resting comfortably on the couch, enjoying pillow goodness courtesy of Tina Rosenzweig, who’s staying with me for a while prior to her move to New York.