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2008 Florida Vacation Pics

by Rick on March 18, 2008

Sunset at Holmes Beach

Last Saturday (the 9th), Alicia, her parents, and I embarked on a road trip to Florida for a week of rest, relaxation, beach, sunshine, and more. All-in-all, we had a great time, did a lot of stuff, and I saw the ocean (well, the Gulf of Mexico, anyway; it’s saltier!) for the very first time.

I’ll be upfront honest: The ocean did not live up to the hype; frankly, I’m much more in awe of the universe above me, and next to it, the ocean is but a gallon of water on this bucket we call Earth. Still, it’s mind-bogglingly big, and I had a great time collecting some shells, walking in the beach, sunbathing, and spending a small fortune on souvenirs.

I also took a lot of pictures, which I’ll get to in a moment. However, I want to point out that I am no photographer. My wife is light-years ahead of me when it comes to photography skill, and her camera is vastly superior to mine as well. Also, I was not very careful in keeping my camera batteries charged, and so about halfway through our trip to the zoo, my camera died. My personal vacation photograph record ends with a shot of a tapir.

All that said, I do want to share my pics. These are all straight off of the camera, un-retouched. If you’re interested (there’s over 160!), browse over to my 2008 Florida Vacation set on flickr. Enjoy!

Oh, and you’re encouraged to comment on them! All you need is a free flickr (or Yahoo!) account, and you’ll be up and running in no time.

BONUS! As a special treat to my readers, you can also check out a short video of the sun setting; the file is in MPEG format and weighs in at 1,263 kilobytes. There is no audio, the quality isn’t terrific by any means, and the cutie who briefly jumps into the shot waving is my loverly wife. Sunset at Holmes Beach

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Refactoring RickBeckman.org

by Rick on January 8, 2008

Update: I’ve disabled a few plugins (you’ll probably never miss them); I’m not sure which was slowing things down so much, but since doing so, the site loads 2-4 times faster for me, according to my page load timer. That’s a definite plus, but it isn’t a bandwidth savings and I’d still like to trim the fat in that area a little bit, to help out my visitors still afflicted with dial-up Internet (hi, Dad!).

I’ve considered doing this for quite some time, and if I don’t do it soon, it’s going to drive me crazy.

Fairly recently, I became aware of Yahoo!’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site; these best practices comprise 14 guidelines which, if followed, ought to provide an optimum experience for users of a website.

Using Yahoo!’s YSlow, I’ve been shown that currently RickBeckman.org is far from adhering to Yahoo!’s guidelines. Indeed, on only four of the guidelines does YSlow award the site with A grades; on two it gets Cs, two are not applicable (apparently), and on six the gets Fs.

So over the course of the next few days (though the process could take longer), I’m going to be refactoring things around here. If you read this site via the syndication feed, you shouldn’t notice too much (and thanks for subscribing — you rock!); if, however, you visit the site to read it, you’ll likely notice all sorts of changes.

It’s going to be interesting to see if there are any noticeable improvements in the site’s performance throughout the process; I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Fasterfox’s page load timer throughout my experiments!

Edit to add: Actually, it may be a few days before any big changes are noticed at all; I’m going to set up a dummy blog to try out my ideas for optimizing this site, and once everything is working beautifully there, I’ll transfer the code over. Until then, sit tight!

[edit to add] Progress thus far: New style chosen, perfect “A” record in YSlow achieved (for all applicable points), and numerous style tweaks made. Stay tuned!

Popularity: 4%

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phpBB3 SEO Tips

by Rick on December 7, 2007

Just a heads up to any phpBB3-using webmasters out there: I’m compiling a list of of phpBB3 Search Engine Optimization Tips if you would like to tweak your way to better Google or Yahoo! rankings. Your feedback on the list of tips is welcome in its topic, and you’re welcome to share even more.

I’m still not done adding all of the tweaks in use on my board, and I’m hoping that I can continue to discover (either on my own or via others’ recommendations) new ways to improve phpBB3’s SEO state.

Popularity: 43%

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