Making Life an Adventure

I recall that, as a small child, I was given tours around his iron and steel works by my maternal grandfather. He was responsible for the building of the world's very first 12,000 lb high explosive bomb called the blockbuster, and was later decorated by King George VI for his efforts. Grandpa Brooks kept a scrap book of early aviation feats during the first World War and later paid for my education at Bromsgrove School.

The 12,000 lb blockbuster built by my grandfather

My first job after leaving school was in a bank - a mundane job that I soon became bored with. I moved on to Imperial Metal Industries at their Summerfield Research Station where, on being shown around on my first day, my boss threw me a vial containing a colorless liquid. "Here, catch!" he called. I did. "What is it?" I asked him. "Oh, nitroglycerine." was the reply. I later found out that the liquid was indeed nitroglycerine, but that it was stabilized with NDPA (nitro diphenylamine). I worked in a laboratory preparing insulation materials and nozzles for solid fuel rocket motors. I believe that a number of military missiles were also manufactured there.

Outside of work I spent much of my time helping out at my dad's hotel - mostly serving behind one of the five bars. I was a member of a group of friends (the crowd) who used to frequently meet at country pubs to consume draught bitter. I also spent time either hitch hiking in France and Germany, or on a couple of occasions touring in a hired vehicle. But I was still not content, and so after much consideration, I applied to join the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy.

HMS Eagle at speed

My years in the Navy were full of adventure and thrills. I got to fly at 200 feet and below over the Omani desert, over the Malaysian jungle and the Scottish Highlands and, most of all over the sea. The flying was not without its moments. I recall flying over the sea low level when "ba-ba-ba-ba", four live thousand pound bombs fell from the aircraft before time and a quick thinking pilot pulled much g to become vertical and avoid any possible blast. I recall being involved in a mid-air collision between two Hawker Hunter jet fighters as well as a controlled crash landing of a third after engine failure at 24,000 feet.

The Hawker Hunter in which I crashed - and survived

On leaving the Navy in 1972, I decided to further my adventures by emigrating to Rhodesia. By the time I arrived there I had already visited some 24 countries - now it is up to 37! I will never regret my decision to move to Africa, although in hindsight I may have fared better on a different continent.
During my time in southern Africa, I got to add a few more countries to my tally and even managed a few free trips to Europe in the back of a sanctions-breaking DC8 full of Rhodesian beef. I became involved in repertory theatre, and spent many hours treading the boards. It was during this time that I had numerous trysts with some very beautiful ladies, got married and fathered a beautiful daughter. I visited numerous burned out farmsteads with an armored police escort, saw a few dead terrorists, but after the Mugabe take over I left the country and went back to the UK.

A burned out Rhodesian farmhouse

I had been appointed Senior Air Traffic Controller at Biggin Hill, Britain's busiest general aviation airfield. However government red-tape refused to recognise my Rhodesian ATC license, and so after six months - back to Africa and the Johannesburg's Jan Smuts International Airport. A spell there and at Abu Dhabi before I decided to quit ATC. Anyway I have to confess that I was getting a little long in the tooth for active controlling. I developed a keen interest in the then infant Internet, and secured a position at a large private school running their computer networks and administration computers. It was here that I got to meet Nelson Mandela. At about this time I met my second wife, Liz from North Carolina, on the Internet, and soon after she arrived in South Africa to visit me my then wife handed me divorce papers. Divorce had been on the cards for a long time and we had been separated for several years.

Martindale Farm

Liz and I got married, I retired and we purchased a small farm in Martindale, close to Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. It was there that I started writing, and when I last counted I had well over 6,000 articles published on the Internet. This was also when I started writing my memoirs, The Graceful Retirement of an English Gentleman which is now well on the way to completion, and of which this narrative could, I suppose, be called a precis.

Myself and Liz on the Dinner Train

Liz returned to America in 2012 when her passport was about to expire - we didn't want to risk getting a new one in South Africa. I stayed behind to sell the farm and eventually followed her 2 years later. We have now been married for 12 years without a single fight or argument. I am now well aware that I have entered the winter period of my life. I have certainly made it an adventure - one that is ongoing and hopefully will go on for a few more years.

Is SEO dead? – A new look at Content writing.

Last night I had a dream – in it I was working for an IT company as a Content Writer, and was severely admonished for leaving work before the CEO, who just happened to be a self-made and self-proclaimed SEO expert. After the dream, and when I arose from my comfortable bed, I got to thinking – most so-called SEO experts probably have their own fixed idea of what a content writer is, namely a writer (often an Intern) with limited experience, but one who can turn out a pretty turn of phrase in exactly the way the SEO wants it. In addition it is interspersed with the right percentage of keywords and so on. I’m sure that is the way that they look at me.

However, what they do not know is that in my case I wrote my first program (remember Fortran?) when most of these upstarts were still in diapers – and in some cases before they were even a twinkling thought in their parents’ heads. Even before attending that long-ago Computer Studies course at the North London Polytechnic, I was flying around the sky with some of the then most sophisticated and highly secret analogue computer equipment available. Before the Internet caught on and during a brief sojourn to the Middle East, I designed a database for all air traffic passing through the region. A few years later was in charge of three computer networks comprising no less than 70 or 80 PCs, and I remember the excitement when the networks first went ‘live’ on the Internet. I am not bragging, but merely trying to put everything into perspective.

What I am trying to get across is that Content Writers are not necessarily interns straight out of college. Many of us are widely traveled and have had a great deal of experience of worldly affairs. I personally have traveled through or to every continent, have had well in excess of 6,000 articles published on the Internet, and have six of my own websites. Of course SEO is not yet dead – just dying maybe. It is no secret that, as search engines introduce new algorithms they prefer more and more good content that is well written, free of spelling and grammatical errors, valid and to the point.

I am enjoying my last few months in South Africa before relocating to the colder climes of New England. South African SEOs in particular should start examining the content they have used in their websites in the past. There is nothing worse than coming across a website in which the content is badly written. South Africa, with its eleven official languages, is particularly prone to this. In many cases the content is exacerbated where the webmaster or SEO, wishing to save a few dollars, has outsourced content to countries such as India, Pakistan, the Philippines and China. Get your act together guys – let’s start seeing some high-quality content – you’ll find it pays in the long run.

New New Hampshire website

It has been a while since I last posted here, mostly because I have been kept busy writing for clients here in South Africa and in Myrtle Beach, SC.

Most of my regular readers will know of my plans to relocate to North Carolina, and of how my wife Liz flew back to the States more than a year ago while I stayed behind in the Eastern Cape to finalize the sale of our smallholding. After spending a year staying with her daughter, circumstances forced Liz to move on from Louisiana, supposedly to NC. However, things have changed. I was not happy about Liz arriving in NC under the conditions that were forced upon her, and so I asked my daughter Julie in New England if she wouldn't mind Liz staying with her for a while, and this is why Liz is now firmly ensconced in the Granite State with Julie and my three grandchildren.

To cut a long story short, Liz is so happy in her new home that we have decided that it is to be our final relocation destination, and I can't wait to get there. These new circumstances have led me to creating a new website, which, at the time of writing is just partly finished, although coming along in leaps and bounds. The design is all there, and it is now just a matter of populating it with good content and then marketing it. We have based the design on our info-nc and info-sc websites, which have proved so popular in the past, and the pic for the header was taken by Liz a week or so ago.

There seems to be no shortage of writing work on the other side of The Pond, unlike here in darkest Africa. Many of the domains ending with .co.za have been populated with content that leaves much to be desired, clearly having been written by someone not fluent in the English language, and of its subtle nuances and many idioms. This is just another sign of the times in South Africa, and is something that goes hand in hand with the neo-apartheid policies of the present government. The new upper class in South Africa is the reason for many of the setbacks experienced in the country. Much of the government and industry is corrupt, and the new leaders are filling their pockets at the expense of the poor. Why, only last week a local government official here in the Eastern Cape, after resigning from her position after only 5 months, was given a handshake of R2.5 million!  Only in Africa!

I will not miss this country one iota. I'm ready to leave - just need to sell the farm. Which brings me to one final point. A couple of days ago I received an email from some asinine idiot offering me R200,000 cash for the farm (I have just dropped the asking price to below R1 million). With the Rand crashing the way it is, I will consider any sensible offer, but I have only one reply to sheer stupidity - kma.

Google Penguin 2.0 – Its implications for your Website Content

At the time of writing it is just 2 weeks since the release of Google’s Penguin 2.0 algorithm, and already many websites are feeling the pinch of the new code. In Google’s Matt Cutts’s own words, the algorithm penalizes websites that show questionable SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, link building and the deliberate use of duplicate content. This is bad news for many website owners. So-called Black Hat webmasters have been paying for inward links to their websites in order to trick search engines, and in particular the Google algorithm, into assessing that the website is more informative and trustworthy than it really is. These are the sort of links that Google wants to penalize.

The websites that will benefit from this new algorithm are those publishers who focus on providing high quality and authoritative content. This algorithm and future tweaks expected later this year will penalize bad content, including mis-spelling, bad grammar and low quality writing. Such bad content is particularly evident in a country like South Africa, where there are no less than eleven official languages. As an example, much of the content found in South African websites has been written by individuals for whom English is not their first language. In addition many webmasters have outsourced content to countries such as India and the Philippines in order to save a few dollars. In consequence many websites ending in .co.za are found to have exceptionally bad content.

Webmasters who suspect that their website hits may be suffering from penguinitis should have their content checked, and if necessary re-written by a professional - one that has an excellent command of the English language.

So, what can you do to ensure that your website succeeds online?  How do you ensure that your website is one of authority and will not be penalized by Google? All of the content on your website should be quality – invest in a real writer to rewrite your website content in such a way that it is written for its live, real readers – not written for search engines. Your content should be written by a content marketing specialist with a view to making it an authority on your product. Invest in features such as blogs, videos, infographics, and news that are both relevant and will benefit your customers. Don’t be satisfied with a simple 5-page website – invest in adding relevant and beneficial content in the form of articles, and do this on a regular basis.

Make sure that you retain control of your website so that you can edit its content at any time. Use Google+. Every time new content is published by Google+ authorship it is immediately indexed by Google and stands a better chance in Google searches. Publish links to new content on social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Develop relevant inbound links from germane and quality sites and from high-quality writers. Ensure that your writers have an excellent command of the English language. Above all, let Google know that your website is an authority on its subject, and be aware that if you don’t publish content on your website, penguin 2.0 will penalize it.

Why Google ?

Research into ways that computers could 'talk' to one another goes back to the early 1960s, and the first two nodes of what was to become ARPANET were connected in October 1969, when UCLA's School of Engineering and Applied Science was linked up with SRI International of Menlo Park, California. Further nodes were added in the following years. It wasn't until 1982 that Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, and another 4 years until access to supercomputers was provided. Since then the Internet has expanded exponentially, and today there are more than 2.4 billion users, 46.4 million active websites and more than 1 trillion web pages, a formidable figure that increases by more than a billion pages every day! So why Google?

As of October 2011 Google's share of searches was 65% in the US and 82% worldwide. In contrast Bing and Yahoo together took 26% in the US and a little over 10% worldwide. It is because of these figures that website owners do what they can to attract Google searches to them. There are a number of ways of doing this optimization, and this niche of the IT industry has given birth to a new profession, Search Engine Optimization.

Graphic representation of the Internet

Google carries out its Internet searches by using algorithms. These algorithms are upgraded or rewritten from time to time so as to make the results of searches more logical or appropriate. Webmasters attract search engines such as Google to their websites by a number of means. These include keywords, the careful wording of the page's title and description, and regular updates of relevant content. Browsing through some websites, especially in countries where there are more than one official language, or where content has been outsourced to such a country, shows excessive use of keywords, frequent bad spelling and appalling grammar. These are some of the points that Google's latest algorithms will penalize. 

My next blog will examine the implications of Google's latest algorithm update - Penguin 2.0 and how you can ensure that your website is not penalized by the code.  Click on the Internet above to see the services that I offer - I am a one man show, and I need the work!

Google filling up hard drives with Earth

I use a Lenovo G550 with Windows 7 Home edition, a laptop that is ideal for my writing skills. I do not do any gaming, but do make a lot of use of Skype, having family overseas, and of several web design aids. I was most disconcerted a couple of days ago when the laptop announced to me that its C drive was full, and that I should do something about it. Knowing that I had only used somewhat less than a quarter of the disc space led me to doing some investigation, where I found several other instances of the occurrence with other individuals. Liz advised me to check out a youtube video that listed the best ten system applications, which I did.

To isolate the problem I used an application called JdiskReport - you need Java to be running in order to run this program. The program analyzes your hard drive, giving a graphic description of what it contains. I found that almost 200 Gb was taken up by .sst files. Further analysis showed that there were more than a million .sst files in the Google Earth unified_cache_leveldb_leveldb2 directory, all created within a few minutes of each other. You can read about this problem on the GE forum here.

Uninstalling GE will not get rid of the unwanted files, which for me were found in C:\Users\xxxxxx\AppData\LocalLow\Google\GoogleEarth\unified_cache_leveldb_leveldb2 . Substitute your user name for the x's. You'll have to manually delete all of the  .sst files. I found the quickest way was to mark them using Ctrl and dragging the pointer over them, hitting delete and then later emptying the Recycle Bin. If you have a program such a Total Commander you can mark all the .sst files and delete them.  I later re-installed the latest version of GE , and now have 200 Gb of free space to play with again.(by the way GE know about the problem and are doing their best to fix it, but they need feedback from anyone experiencing it)

New clients for old = never

I found myself in something of a quandary a couple of weeks back. It was just after I had done some self-marketing on LinkedIn, adding a score or more of contacts to my network. I have a couple of clients that I would describe as 'bread and butter' clients, one in South Carolina and the other here in South Africa. They have each supplied me with regular assignments on a month to month basis, and I have good and well established rapport with them.

After my bit of self-marketing I received a request for a quotation from a corporate body for whom I had never written before..The assignment was for rewriting an entire technical website, something that I have done before and am perfectly capable of. However in this particular case the request was accompanied by a 38-page brief. Pages had to be written tab by tab and each one approved before progressing to the next. The whole job had to be completed in what, to me, was an unacceptable deadline, which would have meant placing my regular clients on the back burner.

The situation was somewhat delicate to me, but in the end I determined that my regular clients could never be placed in such a situation, and so I wrote to the corporate contact turning down the work and in doing so the chance of a fat cheque. The question is, did I do right?