Search marketing is a huge industry, generating billions of dollars of income every year and growing exponentially. In the past I have created software to streamline your SEO and PPC driven business tasks and I have realized there is a huge opportunity that most of us miss on a daily basis: effectively marketing to blind people who use Google. Most of us simply stop at making our sites work well with screen-readers, but the untapped riches lie in areas which have yet to be explored. Behold, the ultimate keyword list for internet marketers who target blind people:

Godspeed in your marketing efforts.

(click to embiggen)

1) Quit smoking. (Smoked in high-school, then quit until I was 23-ish)
2) Work out, build muscle.
3) Get laid.

Laziness has never been an issue; I just don’t have time. Perhaps I just don’t have time skills, but regardless I’ve spent the past two years wanting to get into shape but nothing happened. So this year I decided to try it out, and took a shot at all three.

So far I’m still smoking and unlaid, but the initial workout strategy has been successful. Every day when I step into the room, I pick up the weights and move them somewhere else, and since it takes me forty-five minutes to move them ten feet I am regularly getting the recommend amount of exercise.

Thank you.

Suppose you’re next in line at a bank, waiting to make a deposit. You hand the teller your check and ID card, which in this scenario, only displays your full name and phone number, which will be used as a password. Now which situation would provide more security for both you and the bank?

• After verifying that the computed sum of your name and phone number matched the secret ‘key’, the teller executes your transaction and discards your old debit card, issuing you a new one. This happens after every single transaction, even on the same day. Also it can slow transactions down.
• The teller will only acknowledge you once a trusted staff member vouches for you. This process only needs to happen when you enter the bank, but you have unlimited transactions available without the need for verification until you leave.
• You walk into the bank, decide the pressure is too much and cancel your account, vowing to live in a cave until Jesus appears.

I want to expand a bit more on this post later on, but for now I’m throwing it out there.

That needs to be on the Daily Show.

1: I’ve been busy.

2: I forgot the administrator password to this blog, and couldn’t reset it because the MX records on the server are set up weird to accommodate for Google stuff – so I manually changed the password in the database (which turned out to be using a new algorithm in WP 2.5) which messed everything up to the point I had to completly delete my user account on this blog and start over.

Only I couldn’t start over. So in other words, I locked myself outside of the house and figured that killing the people inside would somehow get the door open. I’m clearly Mensa material.

In other news, I found a picture of me floating around the web from 2003.

I have no idea.

Apparently, I.R.S. stands for “I Really Suck (at doing my job)” because for the past two years they’ve misspelled my name as ‘Jeffert Hood’ despite my repeated attempts to ignore it. You might blame my handwriting, or my neglecting to have it corrected – but I blame the government.

Posts are going to be short for the next few weeks. I’m building a startup company.

Now you might have noticed that this wonderful computer I’m bragging about lasted less than three months. In computer years, that’s about twelve minutes, thirty seconds. Five of those minutes were used while waiting for it to turn on, and I haven’t calculated wasted time during random crashes and reboots.

I suspect the eBayer bought it in 2006 and sold it to me in 2007 for a newer computer. It only lasted three months after that before finally falling apart while I was using it. And I didn’t even know Ford made computers!

Anyway..

I’ve put some parts of the broken computer into a new one that I now use for web design stuff, and that required me to reinstall Windows XP because all the new hardware configuration invalidated my XP license. In doing so, I was forced to use Internet Explorer 6 before updating to IE 8 and FireFox. I was surprised that most of my site looked normal in the older, unsupported browser, however certain elements were rendering so incorrectly that I actually felt stupid for even creating the design in the first place.

For instance, look at that ‘paging’ bar at the bottom..

This is how it’s supposed to look:

However, in Internet Explorer 6 (or every default XP computer) it looks like this:

It wasn’t designed to look that way, but I’m going to keep it because it looks like a staircase – and every click lowers you deeper into the basement of my brain until you reach a single post where I cry and blame all of my problems on other people. Also, I figure that even though a hundred-million people still use IE 6, exactly none of them will ever view my website.

So yes, I took you through three months of nonsense just to say a really old software program doesn’t work anymore.

You’re welcome.