If you pay attention to news, you can hardly go a day without reading about the "social media giant" Facebook. How many people use it, privacy concerns folks have about it, and commentary about how much revenue it generates. I hate both the website and the company... but it is popular; I made a profile on there just to plug my website. It only adds about 20 unique visitors a month and that's better than nothing.

Why don't I like it? Simply put, I think it's complete garbage.

Number one, I think it's really weird how, especially younger people, are willing to just put so much information about themselves on the internet. Not just filling out a profile; they'll do "Quizzes" where they reveal intimate details of their life, fill out everywhere they've ever lived, every school they've ever gone to... If you wanted someones password for ebay or online banking, chances are you can say you forgot the password and guess the answer to the secret question by using info from their Facebook profile. If you wanted to rob their house, you'd know the coast is clear when they post that they're officially on vacation.

Real life security risks are one thing. It's someone's own fault if they post that crap publicly. I don't have a problem with that. What I meant to get at by saying the younger people post so much information about themselves... I meant that I hate how much useless garbage people post. It's worse than getting junk mail. I don't care what you ate for breakfast and I don't care that people like what you ate for breakfast (and that they even commented on it).

Secondly, what is the obsession with the friends list? I asked someone recently, "Why does it bother to show the friends list? Who cares who my friends are?". They replied that browsing through the friends list is the most fun part of using Facebook. The most fun part? How is looking at my profile and then looking at each of my friends fun? Is it fun in an "invading my privacy" kind of way? Are you hoping to look through my friends list and find dirt on me? I mean, seriously. What is fun?

And then there's the creator, Mark Zuckerberg. Does this guy honestly deserve to be a billionaire? Think about what this guy did to get rich. How did Facebook make money... enough money that the creator is worth approximately US$4 billion as of 2010? They make their money through data collection and targeted advertising. So you go and fill in your friends list, choose what you like or dislike, and they sell that information (while showing you ads for things you like and might buy). Filling in your profile is only one piece of data; they record every page you visit and every person's profile that you view. What makes me mad is that even if Mark Zuckerberg was never born, some other asshole would have eventually done the same thing and gotten just as popular. It's not like Facebook is a unique idea, it just became a popular one.

It should flat out be illegal to sell extremely personal information about people. Facebook isn't the only place doing it; the credit industry is extremely guilty of this too. Even places that claim to have a privacy policy sell your information. It's sickening; these bastards have more money than god because they sold your name, address, etc. How this is legal is beyond me. I just think it's funny when people think Mexico is corrupt because a Federali takes a 10 dollar bribe. America has much worse issues when a 26 year old kid can become a billionaire by selling your information.

When I redesigned my website, I wanted to have it be more interactive. I wanted people to sign up for the website be able to comment on anything. I chose to integrate with Google Friend Connect (GFC) instead of making my own login system.

Take my website here for example. If you look toward the top of this site, you'll notice the "Sign in using Google Friend Connect" button under the BrianClifton.com logo. Click it and you'll be able to sign into using Google, Twitter, AIM, etc.

Once you sign in, you can interact more with the website. You can respond to this blog post with feedback, you can fill out a profile about yourself, and you can sign up for a newsletter. Google wrote all of the code for you which makes the integration easy.

Here are a couple of links if you're interested in reading more about GFC...

You can setup a Friend Connect community here:
http://www.google.com/friendconnect

I would also recommend checking out the Google "Social Web Blog" which has great information:
http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/

If you get stuck while integrating, there's a developer forum where you can reach out for help:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-friend-connect-developers/topics

My website is written in C# using ASP.NET and hosted on a Windows shared account at GoDaddy.com, Inc. During the process of adding Friend Connect to the site, I ended up creating a .NET library that makes integrating with GFC simple. Essentially, this library has server controls you can drag and drop onto your web forms.

I've uploaded the source code for my library to a Subversion repo at code.google.com:
http://code.google.com/p/friendconnect-dotnet/

I've found that making a website can be an endless process. Exactly when are you done? No matter how much thought you put into a design or many ideas you have, your website will end up evolving into something completely different over time.

Whatever shape or form your website starts to take, there are always ways to make your website better. You might be thinking... What do you mean better? By better, I mean easier for someone to stumble upon your website, use it, and find whatever they were looking for. Best of all, you don't need any artistic or design skills to make your website better.

I only started looking at improving my website a few months ago. After digging in and using some free tools, I've gotten a lot more traffic and made my website a lot better.

 

Integrate Google Analytics into your website

It's important to find out who visits your website so that you can try to provide the kind of stuff they want to see. Google Analytics is a great way to collect this info and it's really easy to add to your webpages.

Open this link in a new tab or window:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

When you go there, it wants you to sign in using a Google account. If you don't have one already, sign up for one (it takes less than a minute). After you login, you can create a new analytics account. You only need to provide Google with a few items:

• Your website's URL ( e.g. http://brianclifton.com )


• Account name for this site (e.g. My Website )


• Your name ( e.g. Bubba Smith )


• Your country (e.g. United States )

After that, just agree to the end user license and you're ready to begin. The next screen has some HTML you can copy and paste into your webpages. This is the actual tracking code (what talks Google Analytics).

Open up the HTML for your webpage. You can paste the code into the area shown below:

<html>

  <body>

    <h1>Welcome</h1>

    <div>Hello and welcome to my website</div>

    <!-- paste the snippet below this line -->



    <!-- paste the snippet above this line -->

  </body>

</html>

Pasting the snippet they provide you into that area is literally all you have to do (make sure to put it on all your webpages). Once it's in place, you can login and view a ton of information. Here are a couple cool examples of data you will have access to after you integrate with Google Analytics:

• Which country or state people viewing your site are from. Is your site popular in Japan? Find out!


• How many unique visitors come to your website ( by day / week / month )


• How people found your website ( Google searches, links from another site, etc )


• Which web browsers people are using

Sign up for webmaster tools (Bing, Google, Yahoo)

Each major search engine has a webmaster area. I would highly recommend signing up for this. For example, here are the two I am signed up with:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Once you sign up for a webmaster site, you have to validate that you own the webpage by placing a meta tag in your HTML. It looks something like this:

<meta name="google-site-verification" content="ddffddsfasdfasdfasdf" />

Once that's in place, you can verify your site and it'll start collecting information for you. For example, you'll be able to see:

• Crawler information for the search engine's bot (errors, stats, etc )


• Popular keywords your site has


• What searches found your site


• View what the search bot sees when it parses your webpages

There's also links to help documents that can help you get the most out of your website. I recommend looking at any documentation you can get your hands on if it will help get traffic. I only listed Google and Bing above, but I would recommend checking out Yahoo's webmaster also.

Read the Google search engine optimization document

This is a really good document. You can download it from here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html

This document covers a lot of the fundamentals of optimizing your site for search engines. More important than that though, I think the document really helps provide guidelines for making a good website.Some of the topics it covers that will help you make your website better include:

• Use the title tag to give each webpage a unique and meaningful title


• Use the meta description tag to describe a webpage


• Use lowercase for URLs and webpage names


• Pick easy to remember URLs (e.g. Stay away from www.website.com/zz4872/TEST/abc.aspx?OBJECTID=234&P=32)


• Use a robots.txt


• Have a sitemap.xml and submit it to every search engine

Conclusion

The info above has probably given you some really good food for thought. If you have any questions or need help, leave a comment on here or email me and I'll help you figure things out.

Starting in 2008, every year GoDaddy.com holds the TechFest event at the F1 Race Factory here in Phoenix. The event is for all the folks in the hosting department and features employee lead courses, food, and go cart racing.

When I was there, I met up with the GoDaddy.com girl Candice Michelle:

I use Linux a lot at work and I'm starting to like it. When it comes to development I still prefer Windows but Linux has definitely gotten much better than when I had first started using it. I'm mostly familiar with Red Hat distributions like Fedora and CentOS so I wasn't sure what to expect when I came across Ubuntu.
http://www.ubuntu.com/

I haven't tried Linux on my home machine since Mandrake 9 came out so I burned a Live CD for 8.04 LTS (desktop) and tried it out on my Shuttle SG33G5. Ubuntu booted up quickly and I honestly liked the look and feel. Even though it appears to be targeted at newbies, there is a huge amount of support online for it. Using it for a few minutes was enough to convince me to jump in and configure my machine for dual booting.

On my home computer I primarily use Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. I do a lot of Windows programming at home and really enjoy it. One of the great features built into Vista is the ability to resize your partitions on the fly (before this, you'd have to use a 3rd party tool). After doing some searching, I resized my partition using these notes:
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial133.html

Basically you just go into Disk Management in the Computer Management administrative tool. When there you can right click the partition and choose "Resize" to resize the partition as needed. I shrank the disk to allow to reserve approximately 50 gigabytes for Ubuntu.

When I install Linux, I like to use the ext3 filesystem with these partitions:
/boot - 100 MB
swap - 2048 MB
/ - rest of available space
The first thing I noticed about Ubuntu was that vi was screwed up; it wasn't behaving properly. For example, I would go into insert mode and using the arrow keys would start typing letters. After a little research, I found a fix:
sudo apt-get remove vim-tiny
sudo apt-get install vim
After getting vi squared away, I needed to fix the nVidia drivers. Don't discount the Shuttle SG33G5 because of it's small size; even though it only has a 250 watt power supply, you can comfortably shove in a GeForce 9800GT 16x PCI-Express card.

I found a great article on the Ubuntu forums about getting the driver installed and working.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=862203

After getting the nVidia driver up and running, I figured I would check out Mono. I've been extremely interested in learning more about it, especially given how much C# and .NET development I do. There is a lot of great documentation available on the homepage:
http://monodevelop.com/

You can just open a console window and grab these packages:
sudo apt-get install monodevelop
sudo apt-get install mono-gmcs
sudo apt-get install automake
Once you do, you can open up MonoDevelop. It has a very similar look and feel to Visual Studio. I made a few quick and dirty C# applications and I am impressed!