Home Improvement

Such a typical thing of me, to have a blog post that has absolutely no relevance to the title.. well I guess there is a reason I would entitle this post ‘Home Improvement’ but it seems I’ve already forgotten, but if a reason existed, it still makes this post title meaningful.. I hope. Despite opening up with random babble, I do have some things I’d like to get out on his post so I guess I’ll start with site improvements, or just little things I’ve been messing around with that involve the site.. this could be the reason for the title too.

Umm, so I had a read through a few articles that basically said Facebook, like any other one of several other social networking websites, were setting theirs sights on implementing and rolling out vanity URL’s for their users, it’s a bit late for Facebook to be catching up in this regard, but at least they are going to get around to it even if it does mean they are idiots for not doing it to start out with. If you’re not quite with me atm, an example of a Facebook vanity URL would be: www.facebook.com/mark — but yeah, it’s something you’ll see with a dozen of other social networking websites, but not with Facebook, why?

Facebook is late to the game, once again.

The reason is a combination of a bad choice by Facebook and the all too common notion that is, “we’ve come too far to turn back now” but yes, it seems that Facebook has to go towards vanity URL to promote themselves as a more accessible service, identifying users by a long random ID number just isn’t practical. Okay so we, or rather Facebook, have identified the problem so why don’t they just go round and fix it? the problem is pretty simple. They have 200+ million users, if each user has the option to claim a vanity URL for their Facebook account all at once, it isn’t going to work too well with Facebook’s servers.. so the sheer scale of their userbase is preventing them from rolling out a ‘must’ to their users.

Improvements?

Annyway, so where am I going with this? improvements to the site, I thought to myself.. if I can’t get myself a vanity URL how can I let anybody I know an easy way to find my Facebook account? the solution was found after trawling through the comments on a few of these articles. It really is quite genius, I have to admit: www.mpears.com/facebook — yeah! by setting up a 301 redirect, I’m able to easily tell friends and family an address that will instantly get them to my Facebook account. Yeah so I’ve applied this method to all of my social networking links on the site and I realized something interesting! in a way, it protects me to a certain degree. Whilst the actual location to where my 301’s redirect to exist on the Internet, if I make only the 301’s public on my website then someone cannot tell where the actual link is without clicking it, so any cached pages or recorded links will all be www.mpears.com/twitter instead of twitter.com/mitchellpearson — this essentially gives me control, because I can turn off the 301’s at any time, rendering the cached information stored on the Internet useless.

You'll have time to do this now that you don't need to type another 20 keystrokes.

Um so yeah, in addition to a Facebook and all the other social networking websites I use on the right, I made a few redirects for sheer convenience.. these include /email /contact /lifestream /kansai-gaidai /about /google /live

Ahh.. I also added a few no follow’s to most of those social networking websites, and I’ll see how that goes for me, currently I figure I don’t need more people to become aware of the individual pages but instead I’d prefer to people to come to this site, particularly my Mitchell Pearson page if they want to visit an external website.

Oh and in addition to that, in related news.. my page rank dropped to 0.  

Annd on a Japan related note! less than 3 months now til I leave the shores of Australia and start a 9 month tour of duty as a exchange student at Kansai Gaidai University on the Asian Study Abroad Programme.

Can.. Not.. Wait.

If the excitement doesn’t kill me, the experience will send my head into overdrive.