Kyle Ritter

I created a simple BarFly style directory of all bars across the US. It is far simpler than BarFly, as in it allows users to write reviews, but little else.

It is more an excercise of seeing what will be indexed and what won’t, seeing as there is very little in the way of content currently.

I’m curious what it will do though, so here is the link: BarFly Bar Directory.

I also added a directory of Portland Hotels, so that will probably be useful to people as well. I’m currently updated the search function to use zip codes to find the nearby bars.

AOL Time Warner is dropping Google’s search and advertising services, according to this article

The Journal said that, under negotiations between Time Warner and Microsoft, AOL would drop Google as its main Internet search provider and switch to Microsoft’s MSN service

This will mean a major directional shift for many web publishers. AOL users are typically novice, and while sometimes frustrating (nearly every nonsensical all capslock email I have every recieved had “AOL.com” at the ass end).

While Google has the mature and refined search algorithm, AOL users are money for some people. I’m invisioning hordes of webmasters preparing their sites to rank well in MSN, and shifting from their usual google god tactics.

I’ll be watching this with great interest.

Seems people really like to search for “__________ sucks”. A few weeks ago, I posted an article written by a contributor entitle “Why Hipsters Suck“. I’m curious to see what kind of hipster and anti hipster traffic such an article might bring, and what kind of goods they could be sold on.

Launched a blog today about four of us who are trying to lose twenty pounds, which is how overweight I am. Not that I’m fat or anything, mostly just lazy. So this is my new weight loss blog.

I was screwing around today looking at ways I could bring in old posts I made on my livejournal account, and came across this great utility that exported xml files that I could then use with Wordpress. I wasn’t to hip to the livejournal thing, but it was a great way to stay in touch with old friends. Needless to say, I’m going to try to post here more often.

What a wild weekend. Most of my sites enjoy some very good rankings in MSN search, and I recieve good traffic from it. However, it looks like they were doing some algo tweaks over the weekend. I was nowhere to be found in the SERPs, while previously unlisted sites were appearing at the top. I suspected it would go back to normal today, and it looks like it has. Good thing all my eggs are not in that basket, that would just be stupid.

Here is a discussion on Webmaster World about it.

That would be sweet. Google toolbar must be having some problems today.

This is hilarious.

Jen Lane, Sarah X Dylan, and myself will also be hosting a Portland PubCrawl this Thursday. This comes on the heels of a re-design of our Portland Bar Review site.