The week that was
First, hats off to The Wife for finally getting off her pregnant bum and finally updating her woefully neglected blog. The U.S. Census publishes content more often she does. In her defense though, she has been busy at work and is growing a child. Plus, it’s hard to blog when you go to bed directly after dinner every night.
Nothing earth-shattering occurred this week, but several smallish nice things have managed to string themselves together to make for a perfectly acceptable week.
The beginning of an empire
I hadn’t thought of looking before, but earlier this week the urge to google the word “modernish” struck me. I was pleasantly surprised by the results – the ol’ site turned up as the second search result! Now I can rest easy knowing that people randomly looking for the nonexistent word “modernish” will find their way here. Phase One of the global domination plan is complete.
Less exciting was the realization that I forgot to add meta tags into my site template when I switched to the new look. For those of you who aren’t as web-savvy as moi, Google grabs its descriptive text for pages directly from the meta description attribue. If it can’t find one, it just grabs the first twenty or so words it can find.
So, for those who look up TMF in Google, they get the exciting description – “The Modernish Father. Now 100% less gray. Search. Switch to blue Switch to green Switch to orange Switch to maroon. Choose a color …“ – quite literally the first twenty-three words listed on each page.
How horribly embarrassing for someone who supports his family by designing and maintaining web sites for a living. Truly shameful. It’s been fixed, but it’ll take a few days for the Googlebot to catch the changes.
Take this job…
I officially put in my two-weeks notice at my current job last week, meaning that I’m now free to divulge the uninteresting nature of my work to all you nosy, nosy people. I have been (and will be for another week) the Internet Coordinator for our local newspaper, The Bryan-College Station Eagle, and its network of seven web sites.
The title Internet Coordinator is pretty meaningless, as I’m doing the exact same thing as when I was just a lowly Online Editor – pretty much everything involving the internet for our company. The hours suck, but I do have soon-to-be defunct business cards.
I’ve handled daily posting of the news, shot video of breaking news and sports events, maintained a completely inane blog about gas prices and even hosted a podcast about college baseball. I’ve had a lot of fun there, but unlike the cast of 7th Heaven, I have realized that it’s time to move on.
Anyhoo, it’ll be interesting to see if I get canned in my last week of work since I’ve now completely blasted the corporate personal web-publishing policy. I’ve got enough vacation left to cover it I suppose.
A week from Monday, I’m moving on to my next great adventure – running web sites for the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. Although I enjoy my current job and will miss a lot of people I work with, I’m looking forward to getting to have a normal work schedule and working on-campus again.
In the mean time, I’ll be randomly inserting obscenities into news stories and stealing office supplies. Anyone want a printer? (Note to the corporate suits: Just kidding….maybe.)
Since I’m giving away any flimsy pretense of anonymity I may have had before, I’ll go ahead and mention the two side jobs I’ll be keeping. I’ve operated the Starplex Cinemas web site since its inception in 1998 and am currently selflessly volunteering my time to run the very lame site for the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors.
An easy Fourth
The Fourth of July was pretty uneventful. We spent the day at the in-laws’ new house at their retirement community (I’ve got a ton of material on that subject just waiting for a rainy day.) We had some good steaks, some great watermelon and managed to escape without having to donate a kidney or a lung.
The Boy was pretty tired and the weather was pretty crappy, so he went to bed before the soggy fireworks show began. I guess he’ll have to wait until next year before seeing his first disappointing municipal fireworks display.
The Boy did, however, get his partying in over the previous weekend.