Greg Hartnett

One month ago today I returned from a boarding trip to Whistler. The trip was truly amazing - we got approximately 6 inches (15-20 cm) of new snow every day, and despite a minor illness that crimped my style, I was able to get six days straight on the hill(s). Pics - Day 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 . Videos here and here.

Six days straight of snowboarding in fresh powder on some of the most challenging terrain I have ever been on definitely sent me home with some sore muscles. Sore in a good sort of way. Sore in a way that I haven’t felt in 10 years. My arms felt a bit tighter, my legs burned, and my stomach muscles were screaming. I felt good - the best I had felt in some time.

So I decided to keep the ball rolling. I wanted to continue physically exerting myself on a daily basis - pushing my body in an effort to build strength. I had decided to go get a work out bench and some free weights, but before doing that, I wanted to make sure that my body was ready for it (no need to get a bench and have it sit around collecting dust). So the day after my return, I started a daily exercise routine of push ups and sit ups (crunches).

I started with sets of twenty push ups and twenty crunches, 3 times daily - once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the evening. Over the course of the next few weeks, I increased the repetitions and the numbers of sets, and introduced some cardio work into my daily routine (jumping rope). In one month’s time, I have shaved two inches off my waist line and increased my upper body strength considerably. I find myself paying attention to nutrition information (I can’t believe how much crap is in so much of our food) and making healthier choices (grabbing some fruit instead of a Snickers).

I have since begun lifting weights a few times a week, but I still make sure to do my push ups and crunches each day. Now I have gotten into the following routine: two times during the morning, I do 35 push ups and 25 crunches; twice in the afternoon I do 45 push ups and 30 crunches; some rope jumping in the afternoon (10-15 minutes); and, twice in the evening I do 35 push ups and an additional 25 crunches.

I have made push ups and crunches the cornerstone of my exercise program. They are quick to complete (less than 3 minutes per set), and can be done anywhere (no excuses for traveling). Start with a handful of push ups a day, and slowly increase the number of repetitions. Once you get into the swing of it, increase the number of sets you perform. After a couple/few weeks, introduce some cardio work (this really helps to shed the pounds). As long as you can commit to a minimum number of sets and reps per day, you too could be on your way to a healthier body.

Jumping the shark - “a metaphor that was originally used to denote the tipping point at which a TV series is deemed to have passed its peak”.

Has Digg jumped the shark? I think so, and if you’ll follow along you’ll see I’ve got some very unscientific data to bolster my argument.

When I first opened my Digg account, like every other newbie, I was alone. Not a friend on my list to help get my stories to the front page. In an effort to strengthen my profile, I befriended 170 of the top users. Not really rocket science - I just used the top Diggers list to choose from the top users (and collected a couple of hundred friends). When one of these users submits a story, I Digg it. Many of these users noticed that I was Digging their stories, and in turn befriended me.

So things steadily improved for me at Digg. Many times I’d submit a story, and in a matter of hours, it would wind up on the front page. With the votes from top users, and with a little help from my friends, I hit my stride. In fact, currently 35% of all stories I have submitted have made it to the front page - not too shabby.

In an effort to ebb the growing influx of crappy content and battle the fascination of the SEO crowd, Digg engineers made a few changes some months ago. One of the most profound, and controversial, of these changes was the removal of the top users page. With no pay for their services, top Digg users felt that the least Mr. Rose and company could do for them was to honor them with a spot in the top users wall of fame. Removing that honor may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

When you are logged in to your Digg account, on the right hand side of the screen is a section monitoring your friends’ activity over the last 48 hours. Back in the day (uhhh six weeks ago??), the number of stories submitted by my “friends” typically hovered between the 400-500 mark. Which meant that the 170 people I had befriended had submitted approximately 500 stories or so over the last 48 hours. Now these are top Diggers we’re talking about here - people I chose as friends based solely upon their high user ranking.

Fast forward to this morning, and my account shows a total of 156 stories submitted by these same users. For the mathematically challenged amongst you, that represents a decline of almost 70%. 70 freaking percent! That’s not a minor decline - I’d even go so far as to call it a landslide. These top users have abandoned their accounts, and are now probably wasting their time online with some other web 2.0 time-suck.

So this is how I see it playing out: more and more top users will continue the exodus, which will in turn contribute to the deterioration of the quality of the content being submitted. The SEO crowd, and others trying to game Digg, will continue with their efforts, and an even greater percentage of front page stories will have gotten there through artificial means. Average users will grow tired of the spam (or perceived spam) and return less and less often. Daily visitors will diminish over time, resulting in a front page story that generates a couple of hundred visitors. At this point, the SEO crowd will realize that the ROI is no longer there, and they’ll move on to the traffic generator du jour. In their wake, they’ll leave Digg in shambles - a mere shell of the site it had once been.

In the end, Digg founders and investors will be left scratching their heads at what went wrong.  You should have nurtured your top users - not screwed them.

Is there an archive of SERPs from Yahoo, Google, and MSN?

Our travel stuff has owned some pretty competitive keyword phrases for years, and I need to be able to show somebody that I have a long history of having top positions across the big three. Is there anywhere that I can point somebody to check on search queries from present and past?

For instance, I would want to tell them to look at a query on “widgets” in Google from six months ago, 12 months ago, 24 months ago, 36, etc…

I’d hate to have to dispel the impression that we are some Johnny-come-lately that recently got lucky.

Yes? No? Sometimes?

Unfortunately, for reasons unbeknownst to both myself and my host (MidPhase) my blog went down last week. I got the standard Wordpress error screen that I couldn’t establish a connection to the database. I have gotten these many times in the past, and I figured that the problem would correct itself in a matter of minutes (or hours at the long end). After 36 hours of no change, I decided to escalate the issue and contact MidPhase technical support.

After just a few minutes on hold, a representative submitted a ticket to the tech department, and assured me that my issues would be addressed post haste. After a handful of hours, I was disappointed to see that the issue remained unresolved. Another phone call to MidPhase tech support brought me the same results, and further assurances.

A weekend trip to San Francisco with the family pulled me away from the computer, but I was unpleasantly surprised to see on Sunday that the damn blog was still down (now bringing up a blank page at the index). When I finally returned home, I was able to check my email and found that MidPhase felt it was a plugin that was keeping things from getting cleared up.

After deactivating each of the plugins and resetting my blog to the default WP template, I was delighted to see that I could at least access the blog. Regrettably, all data between late January and early March had been lost. On the bright side, I have been very neglectful in maintaining my blog, so I only lost a couple of posts.

Lesson learned: make frequent backups of your data. There are lots of ways to do it, and it’s pretty simple. If I was a real blogger, this could have been catastrophic.  There are perks to obscurity