Though I’ve been recording my workouts for over a year, it wasn’t until I started using the Multi-Year application on my iPhone that I started to see some more improvements. I installed this application a few weeks ago and have been using the Big 6 program.
Once installed, the Multi-Year asked a few questions: weight, height, age, diameter of the wrist and diameter above the ankle. It uses these various measurements to determine where to start. A long read through the website will tell you want it does with all that information. No worries. Let’s go.
Being 6’5″, 215, and 45 years old, my strength pretty much sucked. For many days, the charts showed be below above average. Not fully sure what that mean (see long website pages for that). I charged my macros, thanks much to My Fitness Pal, and my strength started to climb and my body fat percentage slowly dropped. So did the pounds. Within two weeks, I was done nearly 5 pounds. When the weight started to come back on a bit, it was all muscle. This past week my body fat percentage dropped before 21% for the first time. Excitement.
Having returned to weight lifting more than a year ago, it is quite wonderful to finally be up to below average. My new charts looks like this:
English: a chart to describe the search engine market (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Writing a blog is a good way to attract potential customers to your business, but there is an art to the science. The web is crawling with all manner of experts who claim they know how to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and that will rank you high on results for terms your potential customers use. Great. But they all claim it and they all can’t be correct. After all, how many different websites will be using the terms you want?
Do a keyword search using Google’s tool and you will see how popular certain search criteria are. Really think these experts will get you ranked high on those? They will say choose different ones that are not so competitive. If your are selling jackets and sweaters on your site, why would you want to rank high for terms like wool thread or outer clothing? The terms need to be relevant or it will nor work properly.
Regular readers of this blog will start to wonder if I’m repeating myself as there are several posts here lamenting the plights of SEO and the rip-off artists that prey upon those who have new domain registrations. True and this is not a repeat as much as it is a flow of consciousness rant. Google keeps changing their search engine rules and staying up to date on the latest techniques is exhausting. My blog doesn’t even rank highest for my name, Bryon Lape. Why is that?
A few weeks ago, I moved all the content for my blog to a domain that is my name. I’ve had bryonlape.com for quite some time, but I was using a permanent forward to the old domain. The content was exported and then imported to a newer WordPress server. Several of the posts have been pushed to Twitter and the old site has been redirecting to a BlueHost capture day for weeks.
And so what?
Searches for phrases from the old site reveal that Google has not yet followed the content. The results that are shown are still the old domain and must be fetched from Google’s cache to be viewed. I even searched for my name this domain was nearly at the bottom of the list. How is that? My name is in the title of this blog and in the domain. Surely that should rank higher. My nickname of Brainmuffin ranks worse with Google still believing I’m really wanting bran muffins. Arg!
I’ve had several nicknames over the years, with Brainmuffin being the most recent and given to me nearly 20 years ago. Two others of mine, Ropeman and Schnurmann, go back to high school nearly 30 years ago. Perhaps I should blog on their meaning and origins too and see if Google ever ranks them high enough to recognize.
There are times I truly do not understand Google’s algorithms and why pages rank as they do. Microsoft uses this lack of understanding on the part of users in their Bing ad campaigns. It is not too infrequently that Google will return a mismatch of pages and one has to use the phrase remove feature to remove them. Search for a business opportunity review and it gets worse.
This latter inquiry is not all the fault of Google though. Remember those SEO experts? Some of them have a service behind them that puts your content all over the web, with changes made here and there to make the search engines believe the content is different. It is this manner of inorganic content that Google is trying to combat with all their algorithm changes. Sometimes it works, other times it really hurts the small business website.
So, now here I am. I make new content and post in different places. I wait a day or two and search for terms in my content. Often the pages returned are irrelevant and the old site continues to be returned. I have moved. When will Google see me?
In mid 1995 when Anne Langley gave me the nickname Brainmuffin, I was the only one. I added the history of it to my “Be of Schnur” page which explained the origins of my other two nicknames: Ropeman and Schnurmann. A search for Brainmuffin in those days brought only my pages and items from Lambda MOO as I used it as the name of my character.
Over the years, I used Brainmuffin as my e-mail address on Yahoo, as my character for Enemy Territory and Battlefield 2, among other sites. Search people on Flickr and you will find me. A general Google search now though, will return all kinds of fake Brainmuffins.
In the words of the president, “Let me be perfectly clear.” I am the original and only actual Brainmuffin. All the others are fake and frauds. Anne created the nickname from the way she heard Southerns say my first name “Bryon” and Frank Zappa’s favorite word, “Muffin”. One day she turned while using the Silicon Graphics Indy computer we had in the Hodges Library, Systems Department, and called me Brainmuffin. Bob Patrick agreed with the name.
Accept no substitutes. If you want the real Brainmuffin, this is where you look.
Time (Photo credit: Moyan_Brenn (back soon, sorry for not commenting))
Since the creation of this blog, it has been hosted at BlueHost. Fairly inexpensive, it was a good place to start. As there was originally an idea of trying to make money with the blog, a more marketing directed feel was used and a commercial package purchased. The domain for my name, Bryon Lape, was purchased later and was always intended to replace “The Road To The Future”.
The admins at BlueHost never seemed able to change the answering domain for my blog, so originally bryonlape.com was given a permanent forward via Go Daddy. That worked for the most part, but wasn’t what was wanted. Also, the other two domains for the site became old and useless, but try as I might, I couldn’t get rid of them.
Despite the advertised price, the cost for hosting at BlueHost ran more than $400 a year. This was ridiculous for a WordPress site that generated no income. Time to move on.
A few searches revealed several competitors. Also, it was learned that WordPress would export the content for importing into a new site. Excellent.
The new hosting service chosen was HostGator. Like Blue, they also allow for reselling of their hosting services. I’ll look into that later, perhaps. Now it is setup, update DNS for the domain with Go Daddy, wait a day for it to propagate (where is TTL these days???), connect with the WordPress backend and install plugins, and then upload the old content.
During the import, there were a few errors, but the content looks to be there. There may be a couple of files that will require moving later, not sure. The first blog post “When Not To Be In Business” is there with the date of April 29, 2011. Wow, three years I’ve been at this and still no one reads it.
Time to move forward. The old site will get retired soon. The old account deactivated. They should have done what I asked.
