My new favorite picture of Sebastian and me. He was refusing to get ready for bed (SHOCK!), and refusing to put on his jammies (SHOCK!).

I asked if maybe we could roll backward and his mom could put them on with our feet in the air. He agreed, and so we rolled back, on went one bootie, rolled back, on went the other bootie, rolled back, and giggled.

SUCCESS!

Hello Web Admin,

Uh... we are already off to a poor start in our relationship.

I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors,

Likely because I don't give a rat's ass about SEO for this site.

for one you do not use all three H tags in your post,

Indeed. I do not.

also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization.

And I notice you like run-on sentences. Not sure what this has to do with your invading my space with spam, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt for the moment.

On-Page SEO means more now than ever since the new Google update: Panda.

Don't make me goog for this NEW SCARY MAGIC. Oh noes, more than ever!

No longer are backlinks and simply pinging or sending out a RSS feed the key to getting Google PageRank or Alexa Rankings,

And it hasn't been that way for f'ing years, either.

Pretty sure you meant "." not "," there, too.

You now NEED On-Page SEO.

What I NEED is for spammers to leave me alone. My site blocks 2000 spam attempts daily. I'm more than a little annoyed your shit made it through the filters. Well, somewhat made it through. Made it through to the "maybe" stage anyway.

So what is good On-Page SEO?

It is the process of changing a web page structure so that automated processes can figure out what is on my page. This would be important for people seeking the information on my page if such people extended beyond just me, which they don't. Ergo, such optimization is a waste of my time.

First your keyword must appear in the title.

Sigh.

Then it must appear in the URL.

Pretty much by definition, if it appears in the title, it'll appear in the URL on this site. Not that such an automated process would have bothered checking.

You have to optimize your keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing).

Okay, finally, something to discuss.

What the fuck are you talking about, "You have to optimize your keyword..."

Does this mean repeat it a hundred times on the page? Does this mean put special semantic markup around the word? Does this mean use is as a subject of many sentences? "Optimize a keyword" means shit without specific actions attached to the phrase.

"...make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)"

And here is where, oooooooooo, you, said spammer, use big words to indicate I should bother with the site adjustments that you are recommending, that I don't want, and that I don't need. So, let's look at this for a bit.

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

Which is to say, you are recommending I use the keyword 3 to 5 times for every hundred words.

Which is to say, you are recommending I change my style of writing for some bizarro, f'd up desire to rank higher on an artificial ranking system that doesn't mean shit in my world, and I care nothing about.

Which is to say, you are recommending I sound like an idiot child repeating words over and over again because I want to make sure my parent knows I learned this new word.

Sigh.

No.

The other part? The other "big words?"

Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text.

This is the process of determining context of the words used. A word can have several meanings, based on context:

"The vampire bat was biting the cows."
"The cat bat at the mouse."
"The bat cracked on that last hit."

Using the surrounding words and context, we can determine "bat" means the flying animal, the act of gentle hitting, and the shaped wooden stick used in the game of baseball, in the three previous sentences respectively.

So, using a keyword out of place or somewhat "inappropriately" will reduce the relevance of the keyword ranking.

Which I STILL DON'T CARE ABOUT.

Then you should spread all H1,H2,H3 tags in your article.

If I were actually optimizing, this is bad advice. The h1 element should be unique on the page, and the h{2,3} should be used only semantically.

Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page.

Well, that wouldn't make for awkward sentences at all, would it now?

You should have relevant usage of Bold and italics of your keyword.

Both of which are nominally ignored by search engines. Bold and Italics ARE used for readers, you know, the REAL REASON FOR A PAGE TO EXIST (nominally), so, yeah, use them, but for emphasis on the page for the reader, not SEO.

There should be one internal link to a page on your blog and you should have one image with an alt tag that has your keyword....

I'm becoming bored of this conversation.

Not all sites are blogs.

I'll have as many images as I want on my f'ing page.

And that alt tag should have information about the image FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN'T SEE IT, not for f'ing SEO purposes, asshat.

wait there's even more

Of course there is.

Now what if i told you there was a simple Wordpress plugin that does all the On-Page SEO, and automatically for you?

I'd likely say "Fuck off."

A while ago, I read about Da Vinci's habit of mirror writing: writing right to left instead of left to right, with the letters backwards, such that the easiest way to read his personal notes was with a mirror. Being amused about this, I added the todo to my list:

Try mirror writing

That todo has been around awhile. I hadn't really prioritized it in my list, so it just sorta lingered.

Tonight, I decided to give it a try.

Except I forgot which way the mirror was supposed to go.

Da Vinci wrote right to left with reversed letters. The speculation was that, since he was left-handed and wrote left-handed (an unusual handedness of the time, as most south-paws were forced to use their right hands as children, because left-handedness was seen as a devil sign), he wrote his notes right to left to avoid smudging the ink.

More recent research, however, suggests that Da Vinci's propensity to mirror write may have been pathological or neurological, and not to keep his notes secret (as if reading mirrored writing is difficult) or smudge his ink.

Anyway, I hadn't known this at the time of my attempt, nor recalled the axis of the mirroring. Unsurprisingly, I chose the hardest mirroring, putting the mirror above the line I was writing and attempting upside‐down mirror writing. I looked into only the mirror to write, and found it annoyingly difficult, and surprisingly hard.

I eventually attempted other mirror directions, and, oh boy, is the Da Vinci right-to-left mirroring easier than upside-down mirror writing.

The whole thing cracked me up. Highly worth the entertainment value if you need a non-electronic distraction (hell, use said electronic device's screen as your mirror). I'm considering practicing regularly, just to get good at this delightfully amusing writing style.

We joke in my family about how my dad will never retire. It's not that he's not old enough. It's not that he isn't financially able to retire. It's not that he doesn't have enough wits about him to retire. It’s that my dad doesn't know HOW to retire.

In the States (with apologies, I don't know enough about other countries' cultures to comment), there's this cultural plan for everyone: you go to school, you graduate, you work at a number of jobs, you retire, you stop actively earning income. Not everyone follows this plan. Not everyone needs to follow this plan. Not everyone can follow this plan. The last step typically happens late in life, around 65, maybe 70 years old.

When I ask people what retiring means, I usually hear, "No boss!" That's often followed by, "Freedom!" and "Sleeping in!" and "Doing what I want!"

Which suggests to me I'm asking the wrong question. Their answers tell me they are thinking of a restriction-free future, rather than building a life they want to have now.

As near as I can tell, most people's view of retirement is the book version of a segment of life no longer spent working. "Book version" means you have the highlights of the main characters' actions, but you don't know anything about the details: the aches, the boring hours spent waiting for something to happen, the time spent in the bathroom, the laundry washing, the food preparation and subsequent cleanup, or the bathing.

The better question to ask is: "How are you going to fill your days?"

I think about this better question when I encourage my dad to retire. I don't know what my dad would do, and this saddens me. I don’t know how he would fill his days; his days are currently filled with his job and sleeping.

I, on the other hand, could fill up another lifetime with activities. I would build websites. I would go on hikes. I would finish the design of the locking mechanism I've been working on for years. I would visit friends in different cities, explore their areas with them. I would make new friends. I would set odd goals like "eat at every restaurant along this stretch of busy road" or "meet every person I follow on twitter." I would finally swim in every ocean.

When these thoughts come up, and I wonder how would I fill my days, I realize the answer is often, "More of what I do now," which means I’m doing something right. I mean, why wait for that mythical time to come along? Why not start doing some of those things now?