Caydel’s SEO Blog

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything meaningful here. But, now papers and exams are behind me, and I am on to the rest of life.

Some may remember that originally this blog was centered more or less around the Ruby on Rails programming language. Well, years later, I am still a Rails man, although seperated now by a few months. I’ve recently taken up Rails again to develop a few small apps, including one that I will be releasing as a service within the next month (depending on how long I remain an unemployed graduate…).

It feels good to be back in the programming groove again - I’ve been very distracted with politics, marketing, Canadian history, and web design, not that there is anything wrong with any of those.

Keep an eye on this blog - I plan to begin updating more regularily!

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So, today begins my ‘official’ job hunt.

I will be graduating in a few months with my B.Sc. in Computer Science, with a Minor in Mathematics, with a good chunk of Physics in there. I am hoping to get a job either as an SEO, or as a programmer utilizing my talents in Java (SE or EE) or Ruby on Rails. I think I have a lot to offer employers, so we will see how it goes.

So far, I have a Monster.ca account created with my resume on it, and I have applied to a few jobs through it. I’ve even fired off a request to the Canadian Forces to see if they have anything suited to my education. There don’t seem to be tons of openings so far for entry-level jobs though - most listings I am finding on job sites require a minimum of 3-5+ years of experience.

The main problem I am trying to overcome is a lack of professional related job experience - since I am fresh out of school, I only have a coop and a consulting gig to place on my resume. While I have held a number of other jobs over the summers while I was in school, none of them are related. Should I put them on my resume?

Most of my resume information is available on my as well. If anyone knows of any openings that could use a bright, talented, and flexible CS grad with a good knowledge of a bunch of different disciplines (SEO, Programming, Web Design, heck… beekeeping, treeplanting, cabinet making, construction and more!), or can suggest any other places to look for jobs, feel free to pass on the information to me, either by commenting or emailing me at . (remove random underscores :p).

Since this is my first serious job hunt, I really appreciate any and all help and tips! I would really appreciate hearing from any recruiters about any suggestions they could make!

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So, the holidays are over and we’re all back at work.

Fun, isn’t it?

My nose is back to the grindstone today again, which isn’t so bad, actually. Over the holidays, Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Ed. came in from Amazon, so I’ve spent the day so far reading through the book.

You know how sometimes you find a real gem of a book? I am amazed by how great this book is - things are laid out clearly, Dave Thomas has a great style and strategy for getting across what a Rails developer needs to know. Within a few hours of reading, I already had a few pages of notes written down concerning things I could have been doing better with my Rails coding.

I am not approaching this book as a complete beginner, of course. I have done quite a bit of work in Rails before. I had already worked through David Black’s , which is also an excellent book. The two books together complement eachother in style and approach.

So, in short, if you are a Rails programmer and you haven’t already purchased it, go out and get your hands on this book - it will definately give you a much better understanding of Rails. The new edition has been heavily updated for the coming release of Rails 1.2, so it will be a good reference for future releases of Rails!

BTW, if someone wants to get me Rails Recipes… *wink*

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In the last couple of weeks I have been paying more and more attention to the logs for this site, looking especially at my referrals. I have been noticing lately that MSN has my site listed in the #1 position in the MSN Images search for the keyword ‘Medusa’. The first image there is pointing to a post I wrote this summer titled, ‘MVC: Why Everybody Should Code With Rails at Least Once‘. In that article, I link to an external image on ny.com called ‘medusa.jpg’, with the anchor text ‘Medusa’s Hair‘.

I really do not know how MSN thinks my site is related to ‘Medusa’. If anything, they should think that the site I linked to with the ‘Medusa’ keyword would be a more legitimate source for information on the topic. Especially considering that that link is the only mention of the word ‘Medusa’ on the entire site.

I am not complaining, though. This is getting me as many as 20 unique visitors per day… I just wished I understood how an why MSN ranked me so highly for that term…

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Now, before I go any further, let me make a few things clear:

• Spiceworks is an ad-supported program. By removing the ads, you are depriving the development team of their funding. In essence you are stealing the software from them.
• Spiceworks is not open source software. This means that you are not allowed to modify the code for your own uses.
• Removing the ads is probably illegal.

So, why am I posting this? Well, for a few reasons:

• I was having issues with the ads loading - they were timing out, making each page take 30+ seconds to load, and making the software somewhat unuseable.
• Many tech people have adblocker software that is blocking the ads already.
• This is to illustrate a point that I plan to make in an upcoming post.

That said - here is a quick way to remove the ads in Spiceworks. What tools do you need? Nothing. You need notepad, and the Windows Explorer.

An immediate observation I made when first looking at Spiceworks is that it is written in Ruby on Rails. All other things inside, that immediately indicated that somewhere, there was an .rhtml file which contained the layout code to include the ad block.

So, immediately, I performed a serach of the program directory, and found all the .rhtml files.

The two which you need to edit are:

• C:\Program Files\Spiceworks\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\spiceworks-0.8.3616\app\views\layouts\common\_ads.rhtml
• C:\Program Files\Spiceworks\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\spiceworks-0.8.3616\app\views\layouts\common\_sidebar.rhtml

To remove the ads, simply open both the above files in notepad. Remove all the contents from _ads.rhtml, leaving it completely empty. Remove everything within the “adbox” div tag.

If you would rather place your own ads in the sidebar, or the other content of your choice, perhaps links, or other content, you can also edit

C:\Program Files\Spiceworks\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\spiceworks-0.8.3616\app\views\ads\adiframe.rhtml

replacing the contents within the tage with whatever you want to appear there. You could even place your own ads into the spiceworks install if you wanted.

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Now the point of this post is not to rant and rave about how good Spiceworks is like some cheap PR release, or paid post. Rather, in implementing Spiceworks, and seeing their architecture, and the unique way that they market themselves, it got me thinking about a few issues in Software development and marketing that I will flesh out a bit in my next few posts. But, I figured an introduction to the rpogram, and what it does is probably good background material…

At the beginning of the summer, my employer was thinking about setting up a type of network/system monitoring solution to keep track of the 50+ systems we ahve in our office and shop. We looked into a couple of options at the time, and started to set up IRM. IRM (Information Resource Manager) was a great program for what we needed, or so it looked. Of course, the setup was monstrous, with hours spent handbombing in information and data, copying CD-keys, tons and tons of work. We stuck with it for a few days, and finally put that project on hold due to other deadlines coming up etc. etc. etc.

Fast forward to yesterday. A friend of mine on an IRC channel a frequent sent me a link to Spiceworks.com. I looked at Spiceworks, and it is really slick - just need to download it and install it, and it automatically scans your network, picks up systems, determines which OS and software is installed, which services are running, etc. It alerts you to any problems in your network, monitors drives for space, or out-of-date antivirus information and more. Best of all, it’s free!

Actually, not true - the best thing is the Spiceworks is written in Ruby on Rails…

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So, today I learned about RJS for Rails… RJS, or Remote Javascript, is a method which allows you to write complex AJAX scripts using Ruby syntax etc. Using RJS templates, it is possible to create extensive effects.

Now Rails has for a long time naturally includes some built-in functionality for AJAX, via the PrototypeHelper and ScriptaculousHelper libraries. Unfortunately, these two helpers would only allow one element in the DOM to be updated in an AJAX operation. That did not suit for what I wanted to do. Luckily, since Rails 1.0, RJS has been including. In addition to providing a simpler way to write AJAX functionality into your project, it also allows you to modify as many parts of the DOM as you wish per AJAX operation.

Of course, there doesn’t seem to be any good tutorials concerning RJS on the Internet. After looking for a while, RyanB from the Rails Forum suggested purchasing RJS Templates for Rails from O’Reilly. This is a great book - it comes as a PDF, and is only 60 pages or so, but is jam-packed with information on RJS, with code examples, and everything.

Because of this, I have been able to start implementing some AJAX functionality on a project for my employer. The visual effects from script.aculo.us are pretty cool, but the real benefits come from the increase of useability for the end-user. No longer does a user have to wait for page reloads etc. everytime he changes a vaue on the page. Plus, it is simple to link the AJAX pieces into your database, yielding an extremely ‘live’ page.
So, the moral of the story is, if you utilize Rails together with AJAX in any way, look into RJS - it can and will save you tons of time and energy, while vastly improcing your site design and useability!

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