NateSees(.com)

Well, one week into my initial test, none of the search engines have indexed my secret word. Maybe I need to be more patient. But if my patience is in fact sufficient, I would venture to say that the first two test pages I built are unsatisfactory to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. So I added 2 more pages with some altered code. I’ll give it another week and see if the big 3 will be nicer to me. Speaking of being nice, maybe I was not being cordial enough to their spiders in my first post. Here’s another go:

Dear Google, Yahoo, and MSN,

I bid you good tidings. You are hereby invited to partake of the scrumptious content of Nate’s Testing Grounds for Search Engine Optimization for Flash Websites. Index as much as you please.

Your BFF,
Nate

I’m listening to U2 right now. They are really good. I would like to make a prediction: U2 is going to hit it big someday.

You heard it here first.

(As a side note, I think Adam Clayton looks like Bill Gates in this picture. You heard that here first, too.)

I am proud to announce that my past grieving over the loss of my faithful 4Runner has come to an end (but I will never forget you, dear one!) A month ago, we purchased a new Scion XB. My wife fell in love with it right away, but I was reluctant to show any excitement initially. I knew it was a great car SUV wagon box ride, but I wasn’t ready to be emotionally attached to another inanimate object quite yet.

I was impressed by the large list of standard options, the coolest being the iPod attachment which allows the stereo (and steering wheel) controls access to the playlists, etc. (As of yet, the iPhone is not supported). Also stock are 4-wheel disc brakes, a Camry engine, a buttload of airbags, and a surprising amount of interior space.

Although the XB continued to grow on me, it wasn’t till two weeks ago that I received the confirmation I needed to call the car my own. I have two friends from Hume who are, in fact, the earth’s official decision makers of what is cool and what isn’t (and I need to check with them to see if “cool” is still a cool word to use). Anyways, when Karley and Eric came down to see us, they seemed to be more excited to see our new car than our house. When I showed them the Scion, they used words like “sick” and “pimpin”, which I don’t know the definitions of, but the tone of their voices made it appear that my new mode of transportation was cool! Who knew?

My apologies to those of you who only check this site for the latest gossip on your favorite superhero. But, in an effort to further conceal my secret identity, here is some stuff that should reinforce my civilian-like career as a nerd.

I’m testing to see if the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) will recognize and index different types of HTML markup. I’m am entering the realm of what other nerds call Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

So far, no search engines (that I’m aware of) recognize any text or content inside flash movies. Therefore, if I create a super-fancy, all-flash website, it won’t be ranked on the major search engines as high as an HTML site with the same content. Fortunately, Geoff Stearns’ SWFObject offers a great resolution to this issue, but there are still some things I would like to find out with respect to the different indexing algorithms used by the search engines at hand.

So, without further adieu, I would like to invite the spiders from Google, Yahoo, and MSN to get on your marks…get set…go!

I’ll be checking the ranking of a made-up word on each of those seach engines to see how they rank the test pages. If you’ve actually read this far, you will probably be interested in a fantastic test by Mike Davidson on Google’s ranking results.

Live long and prosper. And go pound another Mountain Dew…you deserve it.

Many of you know that I have recently moved from Hume Lake and taken a new job. What some of you may not know is that my “real” new job is top secret. As a token of gratitude to the millions of loyal fans who check this site daily, I will share this classified information, but you must promise to keep it on the down-low. (Well, you can tell other people ONLY if they promise not to tell anyone else.)

The truth of the matter is that a privately-funded organization has hired me as a superhero. In order to conceal my secret identity when I am in the public eye, I have to wear glasses as well as wear my underwear under my pants. I have also had to behave in a less-than macho way…pretending to not know how anything about cars, using a luffa in the shower, and not going to the gym. As you might guess, it has been a big adjustment for me. But, I understand the importance of anonymity in this line of work.

In order to save the lives of those who are dying to know what my supername and superpowers are, I can unfortunately only give you a few hints:

1. Although very super, the word “super” is not in my supername.
2. I work alone. (The Sidekick’s Union has been on strike since I’ve been on the job.)
3. I’m a human, raised by humans.

If you haven’t guessed it, just pay close attention to the evening news.

I hope this news will help each one of you rest in peace tonight.

Sweet dreams,

“Nate Sees”

Dear 4Runner,

I am sorry we had to part ways. You were always good to me and my family. Remember, friends are friends forever if the Lord’s the lord of them…too bad cars can’t go to heaven. Be kind to your new owner.

So long,

Nate

Ok, our DSL is now hooked up and, as promised, here are some photos to help tell our story from the last 2 weeks.

On Wednesday, December 12th, we loaded up a trailer with our golf cart and a few other things and headed down to get the keys to our new house. On the way, the kids got a little restless, so we stopped half way down to take a breather…and a picture.

An hour later, we met our realtor at the house and got the keys…yipee!

That Friday I drove back up to Hume to get the rest of our stuff loaded up in the moving truck. A lot of nice people pitched in to make the move very easy. In particular, my friends Chester and Damon both helped load up a bunch of stuff Friday night, which allowed us to get on the road Saturday morning. Hume was cool enough to let us use one of their big trucks to haul all of our stuff…although I thought it might have been easier to rent a semi and tow our singlewide (full of our stuff) down to Clovis.

When the truck arrived at our house, we had another crew of people who helped unload, which took all of about 45 minutes.

By the following evening, we had most of the downstairs rooms set up. It was nice to have some places to come relax while other rooms were still in disarray.

Now, a week later, we’re almost completely moved in…just in time for Christmas. It’s been a fairly tiring couple weeks, but very satisfying. It’s amazing to see the Lord do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine.

Happy Christmas.

Wow. We’re actually moved in to our new (20-year-old) house! Yesterday almost all of our worldly posessions were hauled from our 700-square-foot trailer at Hume Lake to our new 2100-square-foot home (with no wheels) in Clovis. We had a number of friends work very hard to help us out with the move, and it went without a hitch. We don’t have Internet hooked up yet, and I haven’t figured out how to post photos from my iPhone yet…but I’ll post them soon.

Over the years, we’ve managed to cause quite a few DVD and CD players to stop working. Some of this has probably been due to the fact that we’ve only purchased cheap inexpensive equipment. Based on this assumption, we splurged last spring and bought a Bose 3-2-1 GS home theater system. We really liked the fact that it only had 2 speakers apart from the subwoofer, and the sound it produced was amazing. We were also able to save $100 on it by purchasing a refurbished unit from a Bose outlet. We were stoked.

Unfortunately, after only 6 months of use, the DVD player started to intermittently freeze. We went through the owners manual and followed the troubleshooting instructions, but availed not. So I called the outlet that we purchased the system from and they said that it was still under the 1-year warranty, and that they would swap it straight up for another unit. Best of all, I only had to bring in the receiver, not the entire system. The only drawback now was to make the 6 hour trek to the store. Fortunately, it happened to be on the way to Santa Barbara, where I had already planned on traveling to.

I ended up spending about 10 minutes in the store and walked out with a new receiver that was covered under a new warranty for another year. Even though it was a bummer that we had problems at all, Bose definitely gave us good service to fix the problem.

Through an email from Sitepoint, I recently discovered VectorMagic, which is a tool to convert bitmap images to vector graphics. (For those who are not nerds and/or graphics enthusiasts, you will not hurt my feelings if you stop reading right now.) Vector Magic is a vector conversion Flex application built by some geniuses at Stanford. Though this is not a new idea, the Stanford guys have really stepped up the quality of output, which happens to be leaps and bounds about Adobe Illustrator’s fairly new LiveTrace feature (arguably the best tool for vectorizing bitmaps…until now).

The samples prove the quality. And best of all, it’s a free online app! I can’t wait to actually use it.