Category: Digital Life

Musical Interludes Over This Week

Carl Setzer2 Comments
person doing tricks on cassette tape

Music plays a huge part in my life. One of my “gifts” is the ability to tie pretty much any phrase, event, or whatever with a song. I’ve had plenty of opportunities this week.

I’m currently working on a project with the Edmonds Waterfront Center. They have several musical activities over the course of each week. And I can hear these from my office. One of my favorites: a ukulele class. They play a wide range of songs, which often transforms me in place in time. The ukulele is a wonderful instrument that I delight in hearing. With this, I was explaining to a chum about some of the artists who have created albums with the instrument. The two that readily come to mind are Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam fame and Amanda Palmer.

Eddie has a great ukulele album titled, less creatively (I guess) “Ukulele Songs“. This is, perhaps, my favorite from that album.

Amanda Palmer has written some fun songs for the instrument. This one is my current favorite (FYI, not completely safe for work).

A few days later, a friend of mine mentioned her drink of choice was tequila. That always make me think of this song:

And, yesterday, while seeing article after article about AI, this song popped into my head.

Affiliating songs with events is not something I work at, just natural reflex. The results of my misspent youth, I guess.

Being Strategic With Social Media

Carl Setzer
facebook application icon

I’ve known people whose business is dependent completely upon a single platform. YouTube is a huge one, but I also see people 100% dependent on Instagram, TikTok, or even Facebook, for their business. I’ve been thinking a lot about that recently.

A friend of mine, due to the LastPass hack, lost access to his YouTube channel. Then there’s the drama over at Twitter, with people being banned from the platform on the whim of Mr. Musk, and I can continue. So, I hope you’ll understand that I highly recommend that you DO NOT rely 100% upon a single platform where you have no control.

Social media sites are great tools for connection, but they’re best for directing people to a website. One you own, you control. Encourage folks to subscribe to a newsletter, or the website. Then, by combining your website with blog posts and newsletters, and you have a very powerful tool to stay connected with your audience even if you’re blocked from a key social channel. Also, if you have a website connected to your social platforms, your audience has a way to find and reconnect with you if you lose access to YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, whatever.

I particularly like sites built on WordPress, as it’s extremely portable. Wix, Squarespace, and the like are tied to a single provider, too. With WordPress, I can port my website to another hosting company with relative ease (related: make sure you back up your files somewhere other than on the hosting platform).

Be strategic with your digital portfolio. Be prepared for various calamities, as well as for the eventual falling out of whatever must-use platform the people abandon next. Technologies evolve. Audiences evolve. Platforms evolve. Business sustainability requires you to be thoughtful and strategic.

The Web and the Future

Carl Setzer
black laptop computer turned on showing computer codes

Ah, web dev! The path of the future! Well, that’s been my thought for the past few years. I believe that web interfaces are a key part of most every software system we’ll be dealing with over the next few years (not sure what I mean by few…but, you know).

With that focus on the future, I want to consider what the future of the web looks like. I’ve explored web 3.0 a little bit, but there’s quite a bit more to wrap my head around. The key parts seem straightforward: immersive experiences and dispersed architecture. How much of that is the “metaverse”? What’s the role that blockchain will play? That is quite hard to glean right now.

As with any frontier, there’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot of risk. And, let’s be fair, a lot of fraud/snake-oil/charlatans. But there’s also great opportunity. Discerning between the two is the challenge. And those that get that figured out the earliest will reap the greatest rewards.

Cybersecurity Podcasts

Carl Setzer
person in black hoodie hacking a computer system

Cybersecurity is not a main focus of mine, but it is something that I have an interest in: it impacts my work as a web developer and project coordinator. Earlier today a friend and I had a brief discussion about the news. We both stated we get much of our tech news via podcasts. Then we had the idea of creating a list. So, here is the summation of our brief discussion.

If you have ideas or additions, please let me know. I’ll update this list as I discover more.

Some Thoughts On GaryVee’s “The Power of Gratitude”

Carl Setzer
black android smartphone

Lately, Gary’s videos and podcasts have given me lots to think about. I really appreciate his focus on thinking higher. Why are we doing what we do? Why are we pursuing whatever goals we have?

I’ve long held that gratitude is critical to living a good life. Thus, I think he’s spot-on here.

It’s roughly 4 minutes and think it’s well worth your time.

Great, Another Phishing Email Scam

Carl Setzer

Well, a new scam landed in my inbox this morning. Check out the details:

Google docs phish email scam example

This isn’t terribly new. I first saw references last fall (here’s a piece by Wired Magazine from last November: “Beware a New Google Drive Scam Landing in Inboxes“. Now, this isn’t terribly sophisticated, but it’s pretty clever. Now, I don’t have a David Anderson in my contacts, so this one is pretty obvious for me. But that’s a rather common name. Imagine how tempting it would be if it looked like it came from my friend/colleague David.

So, what should you do if you get an email like this? Report it! In most email tools, you can report a message as spam. If you have Gmail, you can report it as phishing, too. It’s pretty straightforward.

Gmail report phishing steps

You’ll see a dialog like this one:

Gmail Report Phishing Dialog Box

Click “Report Phishing Message” and you’re done.

Anyway, this seems as good a time as any to remind everyone to:

  • don’t click on links you’re not expecting. In this case, if I knew a David Anderson, I’d ping him independently of this email thread and ask about it. Do not reply to the email!
  • Make sure you have good malware protection and antivirus software. Here’s a great place to start: PC Magazine’s list of The Best Antivirus Protection for 2021.

The Audacity of Audacity and Alternatives

Carl Setzer
AudacityLogo

When I logged onto Twitter today I saw the alarming news that “Audacity is now a Possible Spyware, Remove it ASAP“. The TLDR: Audacity’s new corporate owners updated their TOS a few days ago to allow them to collect/harvest user data (the article above has good detail about the issue…give it a read). Needless to say, a good many folks in the Open Source community are less than pleased. So, I’m here to try and pull together a definitive list of alternatives. Also, I have a long-standing interest in finding alternative programs to expensive and proprietary ones (ie: Adobe). Here’s my list of these to date.

In this list below, the only one I’ve personally used is Adobe Audition, so the rest are a collection of options that I don’t know anything about. Please use them with caution and a dose of due diligence.

Paid Alternatives (in no particular order):

Do you have any experience with these? Are there any ones you recommend that I’ve missed? Any of them you’d recommend over the others? Please leave a comment below.

My Web Developer Evolution

Carl Setzer
List of Programming Languages

I was just thinking about the programming languages and environments I’ve studied over the past year.

  • The first one was Visual Basic. I have a basic understanding. Not sure how much additional effort I should invest in expanding these skills.
  • Though there’s some argument about whether HTML and CSS are programming languages. I’ll accept that they aren’t languages, but I’ve studied them, and they’re critical to web development. I expect I’m at an intermediate level with these.
  • The last of the web development trinity is Javascript, which is a true programming language and a lot of fun. I don’t know anywhere near what I want to, and so will be continuing in that.
  • With javascript, this quarter I’m studying frameworks, and I’ve been focused on jQuery. I really like how much cleaner it is than straight javascript. I’m just over a month in and enjoying this. Looking forward to continuing to build my skills.
  • Also, this quarter, I’m studying PHP. This has been a lot of fun. This language makes so much more sense to me, at an intuitive level than javascript.  As I’m only 4 weeks in, I’m looking forward to growing that knowledge.
  • At other points in my life, I’ve explored Java and C/C++. This knowledge is quite old and was very basic even in my hey-day. I’ve also explored Fortran and Cobol, but that really just entailed reading some books. If I have the opportunity, I want to explore these deeper.
  • I’ll be diving into tools like SQL and MySQL in the next few quarters. I also want to add Python to that list.

This is just my programming journey. I’ve also explored tools like Access, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Visio. All of this, for me, is fun. I must be a nerd.

What are the seven steps to successful SEO?

Carl Setzer
SEO Graphic
  • “What are the seven steps to successful SEO?”
    • Successful SEO has seven key steps, per MOZ’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO“. These are valuable ways to help your website be discoverable by new users by ranking high in Search Engine Results Pages.
      • Crawl accessibility so engines can read your website
        • Enabling search engines to find and index my site
      • Compelling content that answers the searchers query
        • The site needs to answer questions in an interesting and engaging way.
      • Keyword optimized to attract searchers & engines
        • Be thoughtful with the composition of the website so that relevant keywords are featured in the articles
      • Great user experience including a fast load speed and compelling UX
        • The site needs to be streamlined so that it loads quickly, yet also has an interesting and engaging design
      • Share-worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification
        • Content that engages your audience enough that they feel compelled to share it.
      • Title, URL, and description to draw high Click-Through Rates in the rankings
        • Thoughtfully considering article titles, the site’s URL, and description to make it compelling to someone, seeing it in a search, is very interested in clicking on the link and coming to the page.
      • Snippet/scheme markup to stand out in SERPs
        • Make the additional comments that show up on the Search Results Page engaging and encouraging the viewer to click over to the site.