Matt Mauldin

I just completed a new site for one of my good friends, Brooks Rogers.  Brooks is a fishing guide on Lake Fork, Texas.  Brooks has fished on Lake Fork since the timber was still green, and he’s guided there for well over a decade.  He knows where the fish are!  Brooks is one of the best bass fishing guides you’ll find, and he works on one of the best bass lakes in the country.  You can see the new site at GuideBrooksRogers.com.

The Old GuideBrooksRogers.com:

New and Improved GuideBrooksRogers.com:

The site is built on WordPress to give Brooks great control over the content.  Brooks regularly writes new fishing reports and WordPress is excellent for this because each new fishing report will be written as a blog post.  Most of the new site is an improvement over the old site, without a lot of new features.  But focus was given to usability of the site, effective navigation and internal linking, and especially the SEO-ability to get better rankings in the search engines.  Here’s the top features or improvements of the site:

• Fishing Reports on the home page – it’s currently set to show the most recent three posts.  If Brooks posts two or three fishing reports a month, then each post will move off the home page about the time the fishing patterns change.
• Date stamped posts – fishing is very seasonal, so archiving by date is perfect way to save fishing information from past years.
• Archived posts – on Brooks’ previous site only one fishing report was on the site at a time.  This limited amount of content really didn’t do so well for SEO.  So having the additional content of past fishing reports on the site should help Brooks out in the rankings.
• Comments – Brooks takes hundreds of people out on Lake Fork each year.  The Comment system will allow these people to comment on Brooks’ work and on their experience.  His old site didn’t have a comment feature, so I think this will be an excellent improvement.
• Videos in Posts – Brooks reguarly does interviews with other guides about Lake Fork, so it was important that he had the ability to post videos of these fishing reports on his site also.
• New Photo Gallery – The new photo gallery uses the highslide method of displaying images.  It’s much better than the old version because some of these pics are really big.  It’s easy to go from one to the next and quickly view each big bass picture.
• Book a Fishing Trip – Now you can book your guided bass fishing trip through GuideBrooksRogers.com.  It’s often hard to firm up plans for a trip like this, so payment and scheduling is still done offline for the customers convenience.  Once a trip is booked online, Brooks will personally contact each of his customers to work out the detalis (like I said, he’s a great bass guide).
• Lake Fork Info – The site also has a tie to Weather.com to show the next few days of weather on the lake, and an interactive map of the lake that customers can easily zoom in and move around on to see lake details.

Overall I’m very happy with this site.  More importantly, Brooks is happy with the site.  This site will be easier to read and use for Brooks’ customers, easier for him to maintain using the WordPress admin, and should provide better rankings in the search engines.

More Screenshots:

Book a Trip on GuideBrooksRogers.com

Example of a Video Report (Brooks is on the left)

See the new site at GuideBrooksRogers.com.

Popularity: 35% [?]

This hilarious clip is from tonight’s O’Reilly Factor.  Bill does “Miller Time” with Dennis Miller every week, and this time they covered (in part) Jon and Kate Plus 8.

I was only able to find the full Miller Time.  Watch the whole thing if you want, but the good part happens at 3:00 – you can skip ahead watch for about twenty seconds to have a good laugh:

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!!!!

Who’s the polonesian kid????  Miller cracks me up.

Popularity: 50% [?]

I finished reading The Dragon Reborn yesterday, book 3 of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan.  Going by the estimated word count of the first three books of Wot, I’ve read about 821,000 words so far, and this is the first time I’ve actually felt some resolution in the story.

Oh, the story is far from being complete; it’s not that kind of resolution.  But there are two reasons that this book jump-starts development:

1. Major characters stopped acting like children and started acting like heroes.
2. Several important plotlines were resolved.

First off, Perrin finally found his falcon.  And he seemed happy about it.  I liked the way Jordan had all parties slowly making their way to Tear, all for different reasons.  There were also very few scenes from an opponent’s point of view.  Overall, it was a well crafted book.

Nynaeve, Egwene and Elayne

Let’s start with Nynaeve, Egwene and Elayne.  All three are finally raised to Accepted (Nynaeve was raised in the last book, but didn’t really do anything special).  This is when their plotlined really start to take shape.  Being Accepted, they don’t have to grovel about and kiss everyone else’s butt.  In addition, the Amyrlin gives them the task of hunting down thirteen members the Black Ajah led by Liandrin.  This hunt leads them to Tear, and during their journey they actually act like real Aes Sedai rather than a couple of farmgirls and a spoiled princess. These three have been set up as important characters in the series, and now then finally they have come to terms with their future of being Aes Sedai, something especially Nynaeve was uncertain about, and they are using the Power with skill beyond a bunch of newbies.  But most importantly, they see themselves capable of taking down Liandrin and the other Black Ajah.  So no major plotlines are resolved with these three characters, but at least they are coming into their own.

Mat

Not even halfway through The Eye of the World, Mat was afflicted with a sickness when he took the dagger from Aridohl.  Since then he’s been paranoid, whining, lazy or too sick to help out anyone.  The few times we saw him in Emonds’s Field he seemed like a little kid with nothing better than mischief to do.  But Mat is cleaned, finally, from the disease a few chapters into the book.  About time – all his negativity and whining was starting to get annoying. It’s at this point that Jordan does an excellent job of turning the tables.  From the minute Mat wakes up after his healing, he’s a different person than he has been in over two books.  His negativity takes a humorous tone, and he’s actually got some motivation now.  It’s quite a different Mat than we’ve seen before. Mat’s clensing from the dagger is one of the major resolutions Jordan completes in this book.  As one of my favorite characters, and I felt like the real Mat finally showed up once that was completed. His scenes were flat enjoyable to read because he’s got a different outlook.   I mentioned in an earlier post that I expected his character to change after the trip through a special doorway (no spoiler here), but after reading The Dragon Reborn my memory proved to be wrong.

Rand

Rand had only a few pages of first-person action in this book.  In Rand’s mind, the only way he could be rid of his doubts that he is the Dragon Reborn (hence the title) was if he could take Callandor from the Stone of Tear.  That idea was put into motion in the first pages of The Great Hunt when Siuan Sanche explicitly told him, and Rand’s obsession with proving that true or not was sell developed by the first few pages of this novel.  By bookending with Rand and leaving him out of the middle of the book (minus a few words of Rand’s half-mad rambling and visions), Jordan let our own imaginations take over.  It was incredibly effective.  Rand’s unseen drive, his speed of travel staying ahead of Moraine and group, and the snippets that we caught of him all added to the image of a crazed Rand.

Callandor

The Dragon Reborn has been announced to the world.  Like Mat’s rebirth, this is where the entire series really begins.  All the characters are on their respective paths they will follow through the rest of the series.  And Rand is the Dragon Reborn, proven to himself and all others by taking Callandor and the Stone of Tear.

Now we can begin preparing for the Last Battle.

Upcoming: The Shadow Rising

Popularity: 50% [?]

What is the deal with messianic Cheetos?  Earlier today it was reported that a Houston couple found a Cheeto that looked like a praying Jesus, but this is just the latest find in a long string of similar sightings.

May 19, 2009 – The latest Cheesus find comes from a couple near Houston, Tx.

July 30, 2008 – A woman in Dallas, Texas found this Jesus Cheeto:

July 29th, 2008 – A woman in Montana found a Cheeto she thought looked like Jesus on the cross.

March 21, 2008 – A youth minister in Houston has kept a Christ-like Cheeto in his office for a couple of years before it got out.  He even had it in a little display case in his office:

After todays Cheesus, one blogger asked why don’t Jews see things in their food.  My take on the answer: it wouldn’t be kosher.

Enough Already.  Get some Baked Lays.

What’s the big deal?  Every time something like this happens,whether it’s a Potato Chip Jesus, a holy sand dune, or any number of other religious sightings in food,the news media goes crazy.  These stories spread like wildfire across the news wires, the blogosphere, and even on primetime news.  Why?  I mean, it’s food.  I seriously doubt that Frito Lay has a secret marketing plan to get free publicity out of this stunt.  Trust me, they are not stuffing a Cheesus into every 100th bag of Cheetos.

Seriously, after a sighting of the Virgin Mary on a turtle’s belly, havent’ you had enough?

After you find a Cheesus, the real question you must ask yourself is:

What do you do with the crumbly cheesey crumbs on your fingers?

Popularity: 84% [?]

If you’ve logged into your Google Webmaster Tools lately, you’ll notice at the top of the page an option to “check out our new look.”  Why re-do the look?  According to Google:

“we’ve constantly been adding and updating new features. The result was a set of tools we’re pretty proud of—but also a site that had become pretty unwieldy and often difficult to navigate. That’s why we decided to redesign Webmaster Tools from the ground up.”

Here’s a quick preview from Google’s post about the new look:

My Thoughts on the New Look

I’ve only spent a little time kicking around, but the new site is pretty good. The first thing you’ll notice is a different home page showing all the sites you have verified in your account.  The Sitemaps link and the verify columns have been removed.  Instead there’s a “details” link on the right that takes you to your verification page and also has some helpful information about verifying your site for yourself, for multiple users, and what verification means.  This is helpful because just a few weeks ago I had to dig around Googls help docs to find out how to allow a site in more than one account. (the answer: upload a verification file for each user you want verified and that site will be accessible from that persons account.)   If your site is not verified, the details link is not there, but shows a “verify my site” link instead.

The best enhancement is the Dashboard, which has replaced the Overview, for each individual site.  Following suit with the redesigns of AdWords and Analytics last year, Google provides a dashboard of some common data, specifically the Top Search Queries, Crawl errors, Links to your site, and Sitemaps reports.

The navigation has been redesigned from six top menu items to three collapsable menues.  That immediately speeds up navigation because you don’t have to reload a page to get to a report from a submenu.  Nice.

Most of the reports remain unchanged, although they have been cleaned up or enhanced a little bit.  Still, you’ll recognize most of the same information.  For example, the Keyword report shows the top 200 most common keywords, where previously you could only see the top 100 keywords, and the external links is easier to read and shows more pages at a time.

One item I’m still not sure with is the dropdown menu that switches between websites.  Previously, all websites were shown except the one you were currently viewing, and only a few were shown at a time.  The old menu made it a little weird to quickly know where you currently were and if you wanted to move up or down.  This new menu, though, does not contain all of the sites.  Instead, the new menu only shows up to the last six site profiles you have visited, and a “View All” link that takes you back to the home page.  I’ve got 21 sites in my account, so this requires me to go back to the home page if I’m reviewing more that the most recent sites.  And I do so at least on a weekly basis.  But for the most part I stick to only four or five sites.  That’s why the verdict isn’t in on this feature for me yet.  I’ll have to spend some more time with it befoce coming to a final decision – not that I could change it at this point anyway.

Popularity: 51% [?]