Michiel van Vlaardingen

SEOmoz seemed to have some nice tools,  so  we decided to give it’s PRO account a try.     And indeed the tools are quite nice.   I especially like the idea of Linkscape and  Ranktracker.    Linkscape shows you exactly what pages are linking to your site.  And better: you can easily filter them to see which do not come from your own website, which ones have  nofollow on them, etc.     Ranktracker does what you expect from the name:   track  search engine positions for different keywords over time.    There is a bunch of other tools as well, but those are not really impressive and maybe even a bit outdated.

However,  the site and tools are SLOW,   a significant portion of my requests  fails or take ages.     I’ve tested it during multiple days, so it’s not a one-time thing.    In my opinion  as a programmer I’m better of reproducing the tools with some small scripts,  because unresponsive sites really annoy me, especially if I pay $79 a month for them.     I do not think  I lost that first payment though, because there is also some great paid content over there.  But that’s not nearly enough to justify paying  $79 every month.

An Idea I do like it that I can take a questionnaire after I cancel  and get another week for free.   Because on our sites people usually don’t want to take the effort to tell us why they cancel.

Almost two years ago  I got some paint and a canvas for my birthday, but I never got around doing something with it.  Until today:

I think it came out a bit weird, but I’m happy with it for a first (and quick) effort.

I had a design for our business card lying around for more than a year.   There was a nice offer from VistaPrint so I thought I’d give it a go:

It’s quite ok, but I think having the blue printed as a single color, instead of using CMYK would give it a better look.  Also I would really like to put the illustration we have on our website  on the back, to make it a bit less formal.

Anyway,  I don’t really need business cards,  so probably the next edition will not be printed soon 🙂

What I never expected a few months ago: I actually like twitter.    Although it seems like an overflow of non-interesting information at first sight,  it’s actually pretty useful.  For me it’s especially keeping up to date with new developments without having to read through tons of lengthy blog posts.      For myself I try to keep a schedule of at least one twit a day. That should not be to difficult to stick to.  Finally I’ve added the feed to this blog (bottom right).

I gave twitter another chance.  I created an accounts months ago, but never got past the first message.  I reconsidered it’s usage yesterday.   Why?

1:  I like the Facebook status updates and a lot of people seem to update them from twitter, so why wouldn’t I like twitter as well?

2: At MovingLabs we build software for the web,  how can we build the best if we don’t understand what’s going on?

3: I was (re)reading a discussion about the usage of twitter for marketing purposes. It seems to fit in perfectly.

So after my first day I think I’m going to persist to use it for a while.  I especially like the concept that you can follow someone without the need for some bidirectional (friendship) relation.