Central Perk

miercuri, 31 octombrie 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Celebrity Halloween Costumes
Steve Jobs' Yacht Venus Unveiled in Aalsmeer, The Netherlands
DIY Yourself Lego Halloween Costume
15 Fake Photos of Hurricane Sandy Gone Viral
Halloween Statistics 2012: Creepy Calculations [Infographic]

Celebrity Halloween Costumes

Posted: 31 Oct 2012 06:55 PM PDT

Have a look at some of the awesome costumes that these famous faces brought out for Halloween...

Paris Hilton

Kim Kardashian

Rosie Huntington-Whitely

Adrianne Curry

Christina Aguilera

Alessandra Ambrosio

Stacy Ferguson

Neil Patrick Harris

Steve Jobs' Yacht Venus Unveiled in Aalsmeer, The Netherlands

Posted: 31 Oct 2012 06:08 PM PDT

Steve Jobs's yacht is making its first public appearance in the Dutch city of Aalsmeer, more than one year after his death.

Jobs's family is reportedly on-hand for the revealing of "Venus" which features a lightweight aluminum exterior measuring up to 260-foot long. Another image shows six of the seven 27-inch iMacs found in the yacht's interior, reportedly designed by Philippe Starck.

The cost of this superyacht is unknown, though Jobs was obsessed with completing it near the end of his life.

DIY Yourself Lego Halloween Costume

Posted: 31 Oct 2012 12:59 PM PDT

Another good Halloween costume idea - Lego brick costume.

15 Fake Photos of Hurricane Sandy Gone Viral

Posted: 31 Oct 2012 12:18 PM PDT

These types of fake imagery appear every time there is a flood, a storm, or any other type of natural disaster. It's almost as bad as the fake celeb deaths on Twitter!

The most popular one so far is the Statue of Liberty, shown with an epic storm looming in the background. (pictured below) There is also the shot of the soldiers at attention, and many others.

Halloween Statistics 2012: Creepy Calculations [Infographic]

Posted: 31 Oct 2012 11:05 AM PDT

We break down Halloween 2012 by the numbers to reveal what is most important to Americans on that spookiest of nights. Learn about the top costumes, what parents are doing on Halloween night, how much people are spending and what are the best Halloween movies, songs and more!

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Halloween Statistics 2012: Creepy Calculations

Via HalloweenCostumes.com.

#Mozinars: They're Back, and They're Free!

Posted: 31 Oct 2012 12:51 AM PDT

Posted by Erica McGillivray

You've been asking and waiting patiently for them. Well, Mozzers, today's your lucky day! Mozinars are back and better than ever. Now you can join us for any upcoming Mozinar or watch previously recorded webinars as we've opened them up to everyone. That's right; they're now free for everyone's viewing pleasure! Think of it as a big hug from us to you.

Free Hugs (or Free Mozinars)

Photo credit Tristan Reville

Because we're committed to bringing you interesting and fun online marketing tips, we've booked some amazing voices from our community for the upcoming Mozinars. We hope you'll enjoy them and learn a ton.

Take a gander at our full Mozinar line-up with Mozinars booked through March 2013, and even a few more scheduled further out.

Or, scroll through these awesome topics and presenters:

11/1/2012 - Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, on Big Picture Conversion Rate Optimization
11/6/2012 - Dana DiTomaso, CEO of Kick Point Inc, on You Probably Think This Citation Source Is About You, Don't You?
11/15/2012 - Rick Smith of NoahsDad.Com on Story-Optimization: How to Get More Links, More Traffic, and Change The World By Optimizing Your Brand's Story
11/20/2012 - Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, and Nathan Latka, CEO of Lujure, on SEO for the Social Media Mind
11/27/2012 - Zeph Snapp of Not Just SEO on Foreign Language SEO: The New Long Tail
12/6/2012 - Tanner Christensen, Marketing Director of CLEARLINK, on From Nothing to Expert: How to Blog Like You Mean It
12/11/2012 - Justin Taylor, MD of Graphitas, on Designing for SEO: Improving Site Visibility and Enhancing UX
12/18/2012 - Mike Ramsey, Founder/CEO at Nifty Marketing, on Be Where Local is Going
1/10/2013 - Monique Pouget, Director of Content Marketing at Thunder SEO, on Building a Community Without a Big Ass Budget
1/15/2013 - Robi Ganguly, CEO at Apptentive, on Standing Out in the Sea of Apps: Building an Audience of Fans for Your Mobile App's Success
1/31/2013 - Colby Almond, Viral Marketing Ninja at 97th Floor, on Pinteresting Marketing and Content
2/5/2013 - Nick Herinckx, CEO of Obility Consulting, on Advanced WordPress SEO: Actionable Advice for Ensuring Your WordPress Content is Found
2/12/2013 - Aleyda Solis, Director and Co-Founder at Orainti SL, on Good Practices to Maximize Your Mobile SEO
2/28/2013 - Brian Skarin, Search and Content Development Specialist at Thunder SEO, on A Foolproof Process for Scrubbing Your Local Footprint Squeaky Clean
4/2/2013 - Shawn Massie, Director of Search and Social Media at Thunder SEO, on Using Instagram to Promote Your Brand and Increase Site Traffic
6/25/2013 - Jonathon Colman from REI on Beyond Content Marketing: Jump Into Content Strategy

As you can see, we have a ton of Mozinars coming up that focus on a diverse amount of topics. Register today, and we'll see you soon!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

One Step Back, Two Steps Forward

Posted: 30 Oct 2012 04:17 AM PDT

Posted by MozCTO

When we’re working on fixing an immediate problem, especially one that’s affecting customers, it’s difficult to stop and take a breather. But sometimes, a breather is exactly what is needed to solve the issue.

One Step Back

Last month was a bit rough for our Big Data team. We spent most of the month heads-down fixing issues with Rankings and Keyword Difficulty, and our technical debt was creeping up on us. I wanted to give into my natural urge to hunker down, chew on the issues, and come up with a plan that would fix as much as I could. However, I had a weekly 1 on 1 meeting scheduled that seemed to be getting in the way of my plan to lay low and problem solve.

Here at Moz, each employee attends weekly or bi-weekly 1 on 1 meeting with managers or teammates to help keep our goals on track. 1 on 1 meetings are a chance for teammates to act as soundboards for project ideas and idea generators for solutions to issues. These meetings are an important part of our culture, but on this particular day my focus was elsewhere and I didn’t feel I had time for my 1 on 1 with Matt Peters, our rock star data scientist. Realizing that we had missed our last meeting, I begrudgingly made time to fit the meeting in. After our usual good talk on algorithms, correlations, and next steps for growing his team, we started bouncing ideas off each other on how to save money on processing. We were spending $800,000 on processing and not really getting anything for it. The current plan was simply unsustainable.

Matt, in his very scientific way, broke down the problem in exact numbers. I, however, will break them down for you in a very Anthony way:

Long-term, we knew we needed to fix the issues we were having with Amazon, but we were reacting to missing our index release date instead.
Short-term, it seemed sensible to spin up more servers and get the index done more quickly.
In reality, spinning up more servers at Amazon was only increasing our costs, and our server failures. The current solution was not only not addressing the problem, but in some ways it was making the problem worse by taking time away from the team’s efforts to fix the long-term issues.

Taking a step back from the immediate problem made it clear that our current approach wasn’t working.

300 Servers, 250 Operational Hours, Infinite Headaches

*Server photo by Kim Scarborough used through creative commons license.

Coming Up with a Better Plan

After the insight I gained in my 1 on 1 with Matt, it was clear we needed to change our approach. Matt and I and outlined a high-level plan for lowering our costs with the added potential bonus of getting indices out on time. We figured it might be a hard sell after telling the team, “Don’t miss the date at all cost,” for the last two months. They'd spent hundreds of hours trying to keep all of those servers up, and we weren't sure how open to this change they would be.

However, Carin, our stellar Manager of Big Data, brought the team together and we all agreed on the plan. Carin outlined the issues and then proposed the new approach in this snippet from her email to Rand:

The New Plan:

Run two indexes at most in AWS:

One cluster on 80 cc2.8xlarge machines - these are HUGE and more expensive, but should complete an index in less time, making them cheaper over the month.
If necessary, run a backup index on 200 smaller c1.xlarge machines (current setup).

Continue to maintain an index size of 60 - 70 billion URLs to keep processing time reasonable.

This plan allows for engineering time to tackle the larger problems: develop a testing environment and improve the Mozscape code base. Most importantly, though, we can distribute PLDs across processing shards in a more efficient manner, which could lead to significant time savings in processing.

Two Steps Forward

Luckily, Rand approved the plan, and the time and energy spent to take a step back really paid off. Newer, better, bigger equipment did the job, with no server failures and no operational headaches. The October index release is the result of the change. It finished in record time and only cost $100,000, compared to the $800,000 spent last month.

80 servers, zero operational hours, completed index

*Server photo by Kim Scarborough used through creative commons license.

We learned quite a few things from this experience, but this was our most important takeaway: the times when you feel like you don’t have time to step back and reassess are exactly the times when you should. It may not always save you $700,000, but there is a chance that it might. The time spent gaining a new perspective can bring solutions to light that you’d have never seen if you’d kept that nose to the grindstone!

We are hopeful that future indexes run as smoothly as October, and if they don’t, we'll remember our own advice and take a step back before moving forward.

How to Help the Survivors of Hurricane Sandy

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, October 31, 2012

How to Help the Survivors of Hurricane Sandy

As recovery and clean up begins along much of the East Coast, we know that people across the country are asking what they can do to offer to aid their fellow Americans.

FEMA offered a list of suggestions, including the most efficient ways to donate, best practices for volunteering, and a special reminder that the Red Cross has a need for blood donations right now.

If you’re a survivor of Sandy or know someone in need of shelter, see this list of Red Cross shelters: http://www.redcross.org/find-help/shelter

If you're interested in helping the survivors of Hurricane Sandy, please read this list of suggestions.

President Barack Obama delivers remarks during his visit to the Disaster Operation Center at the Red Cross national headquarters in Washington, D.C., Oct. 30, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Seth's Blog : Getting over ourselves

Getting over ourselves

In the face of billions of dollars of destruction, of the loss of life, of families distrupted, it's easy to wonder what we were so hung up on just a few days ago. Many just went face to face with an epic natural disaster, and millions are still recovering. Writer's block or a delayed shipment or an unreturned phone call seem sort of trivial now.

We're good at creating drama, at avoiding emotional labor and most of all, at thinking small. Maybe we don't need another meeting, a longer coffee break or another hour whittling away at our stuckness.

There's never been a better opportunity to step up and make an impact, while we've got the chance. This generation, this decade, right now, there are more opportunities to connect and do art than ever before. Maybe even today.

It's pretty easy to decide to roll with the punches, to look at the enormity of natural disaster and choose to hunker down and do less. It's more important than ever, I think, to persist and make a dent in the universe instead.

We've all been offered access to so many tools, so many valuable connections, so many committed people. What an opportunity.