Vanessa Fox. Nude.

I realize writing spam email is difficult. You’ve got to set up scripts and buy mailing lists and harvest addresses and set up proxies. I know. It’s hard work. But if you’re going to go through all that trouble, you may as well go that extra step to really pull me in until I’m so compelled I can’t help but order your cheap viagra online because I would just be crazy not to. Even though I’m a girl.

After years of extensive research and experience of receiving and not reading spam mail, I pass my wisdom on to you.

1. Typos make your email seem more real. Computers spell everything correctly. Humans, not so much. We’re not great at typing and we forget our elementary school spelling lessons because we’ve had all those years since then of drinking vodka, I mean learning other things that crowd our brains. But if you’re going to go the typo route, really go all out. For instance, I have an email in my inbox right now with the subject line “P C PC н ³ê Ä£ ʽ90650″. Clearly, a computer couldn’t have written that. That is likely from some friend of mine drunk emailing me. I would be foolish not to click on it.
2. Include the word “Google” in the subject. Everything’s free at Google, so obviously, Google probably gives a lot of stuff away over email. For instance, I have an email right now that says I just won a Google lottery! It has batch numbers and reference numbers so it must be legit. Plus, it’s from Google, who would not lie about me winning the lottery, right? All I have to do is send them my bank information, plus a few other small details, so they can deposit the money into my account. That Google, so high tech. They don’t even need to mail me a check. Of course, the email tells me to keep the news of my winning private, to prevent any mixups, so I hope blogging about it won’t keep me from getting my winnings.
3. Write the email in a language other than the one I speak. I will find that exotic and sexy. I won’t know what I’m ordering, but I won’t be able to resist giving you my credit card number.
4. Call me your friend. Everyone can use more friends. And the best kind of friend is one who you’ve never heard of, who sends emails completely unsolicited. If the person is willing to do that without being asked, just think of how much help he’ll be when you need to move that heavy couch down two flights of stairs and into your new apartment.
5. Include profound stanzas of poetry. If you know poetry, you must be sincere. To really get me though, make obscure Chaucer references and quote Sylvia Plath. You might have to get an English degree to make these emails really authentic, but I think it’s a fair price to pay to make me really feel the pain you felt when your rich father/husband/uncle, who was the king/president/prime minister of an African and/or Eastern European country died and left you all of his money, but in such a way that you can only get to it if I take some of it as well.
6. Forget to replace your variables with actual, well, values. Sure, you could say, “Hello Vanessa. I love your blog at www.vanessafoxnude.com. It really speaks to me in a way that no other nude blog does.” But if instead you say “Hello Name. I love your blog at URL. It really speaks to me in a way that no other TOPIC blog does,” then I can see that you like me so much, you’ve given me a special nickname. And my blog is so definitive that you think of the domain as just URL. When you type something into that browser address bar, you don’t think of a URL beyond mine. There simply is no other URL. And my blog’s topic is the only topic you care to know. To you, my blog is the topic of life. There’s no need to classify it and give it some category name that fences it in and limits it. Oh value-free variables, you warm my heart and make me feel like this crazy old world makes sense after all.
7. Be creative with the free stuff. Look, anyone can offer an iPod, vacation to Mexico or prepaid phone card. You’re not actually going to send that out to anyone, so think outside of the box! If you want people to open your mail, tell them you’re giving away fields of unicorns! Smurfs! One of the smaller oceans! Which would you rather have the thrill of almost but not quite winning? A Home Depot gift card or a spa vacation on fluffy white clouds where angels fan you with their wings and share their cream cheese? That’s what I thought.

I really hoped you’ve stocked enough of that cheap viagra, because once you implement these tips, that stuff will just be flying off the shelves. Maybe you should get some back up cialis, just in case you run out.

Sites that want to do well in search look to rank well and get traffic from search queries other than those specifically involving their site names. Sure, you want to be found for your company name or your blog name, but you figure anyone who already knows that is seeking out your site specifically. And you also want traffic from people searching for other topics that your site provides information about. People who maybe don’t know about your company or your site but once you’ve answered their burning search question, they won’t soon forget!

So far, I’m mostly ranking for people looking for me. Or for nude pictures (surely not of me, although I’m not sure exactly what the person searching for vanessa does dallas was looking for). I’m sure I don’t need to recount the various nude-related searches. We’ve all done them, I mean seen them. But searchers are also looking for a few other things that I feel I’m just not adequately providing. And I just don’t want to let them down.

So, to the person looking for oh i’m thinking about our younger years I say, it was only you and me. We were young and wild and free.

(By the way, when I do lyric searches, which I end up doing quite a bit, I find they often work better if I enclose the lyric in quotes and add the word lyric to the end of the query. Just a tip from me to you. Next time you need to know money, money, money, what kind of weather it’s like in a rich man’s world.)

make some effort (and related searches such as an effort). I don’t know how to answer this. I will indeed make some effort. If I get a little more coffee. I’m pretty lazy without coffee.

Someone wanted to know about working out when it hurts. Here’s the thing. Working out hurts. It just sucks. I find that NSync helps. Not with pushups, of course. And the person said working out sometimes makes me tired after, I think you might not understand the purpose of working out. Which is to make you so tired that you can barely walk to your car. And when people mock you and say, haha, you drove to go work out, you can visualize them being stuck on a treadmill for three hours. Although you won’t actually plot to make this happen because you’re just too tired.

To the person who wants to know what to write as a status in Facebook, I have absolutely no answers. I have no idea what to set my status to. It needs to be something with longevity because otherwise, I set my status to something like “taking a nap” and then get distracted by my email and the gym and flying to another country and before you know it, everyone thinks I’ve been taking a nap for four days. Which sounds pretty good actually, so the next time you see that as my status, it may indeed be true.

when not to launch early? When you’re not ready.

And now for some sports advice. why can’t you call “mine” in soccer? Good question. Why can’t you call mine in more things in life? Just asking.

Several people were looking for my Buffy site. I’m working on it! Patience!

But mostly, people who weren’t searching for me or porn were looking for help with their blackberry problems. Now, I must admit, as much as you’d have to pry my blackberry from my cold dead fingers, sometimes it drives me insane. It does crash a lot and gives out random errors for no reason. One error that happens a lot when I’m using the browser is this http 400 error. Now possibly this has nothing to do with the blackberry, and the sites I’m browsing to aren’t configured for mobile browsing (don’t get me started on airline sites that don’t work on mobile browsers because that is just about the craziest thing I’ve ever seen), but I think there’s something in particular about the combination of the site and the blackberry. Apparently lots of other people have had this problem, if my logs are any indication. Mostly people are looking for help with this one particular error 400, but someone just wants to know why the internet failed.

This error happens mostly with the blackberry browser, although my Cingular browser isn’t working at all right now, so I can’t compare them. The exact error message is:

HTTP Error 400: Bad Request
The server could not understand the page request, or was unable to process it for some reason. Please try loading a different page.

Huh.

Well, I don’t think I made a bad request, since I can make the same request on my laptop browser just fine. And all I’m asking is for a web page to load. I’m not asking the server to make me coffee. Although wouldn’t it be cool if servers could do that?

If I click the details, I get something a little more helpful than “unable to process it for some reason”, which is so unhelpful, I say, why even include it. Just say the server couldn’t process the request. The “for some reason” is just mocking me. Details tell me that the the size of the request header field exceeded the server limit. Which tells me that my precious blackberry browser is sending something a little odd, since all I did was type in the URL. Like I do from any browser. The details also show the details of my cookie, which again, is just there for the mocking factor. That’s the blackberry saying, haha, I’ll show you some code that you can do absolutely nothing with. But it’ll make me look like I tried and you’re just too lame to do anything with this overflowing set of data I’m providing to you.

I did my own search and found that sometimes the firewall that the blackberry might have to pass requests through (like say, if you have your blackberry on a corporate network) can mangle the request, but in my case, this happens only for particular sites. For most sites, things work fine. Someone else said this error can sometimes show up for blocked sites, which is interesting. I don’t think my company blocks sites, but I’ve noticed that Cingular does. So, that’s possible, although generally I get a different error message for blocked sites (it’s always random sites that are blocked for seemingly no reason too).

Some other stuff I read implied that this can sometimes happen when the webserver isn’t configured to handle certain types of requests. And that sounds reasonable. Especially combined with another post I found where someone said that after doing some troubleshooting, they found that the blackberry gateway was sending huge amounts of data in the http headers. And so if some webservers are configured with limits on this data, this would match my details message.

If you have a blackberry and get this error, your answer may be to use your laptop for browsing to the site. (And I have found that with a broadband card, you can surf on your laptop while driving almost as well as on your blackberry — at lights, people!) However, if you run a site, particularly one that you think may be accessed by mobile devices (which at this point is really all sites, because you never know when I might want to stop by), you should check out how it loads not just on one mobile browser, but on a bunch of different mobile devices, including a blackberry and a smartphone. (I throw that last one in there since I might give up the blackberry for a smartphone and I am selfishly thinking of my own browsing needs.)

And if you’re searching for me nude at the gym, well sorry to disappoint. I generally wear clothes there. They’ve got this wacky policy about that.

Earlier I ranted about how there are all these social networking sites and they bring us together and are great and joyous and we are all on a mountain top, holding hands, singing songs, and buying each other cokes, except that we are all on different mountains and every three minutes, we have to switch mountains to leave a new status message and by the time we’re done climbing and running around and setting things up just right on every mountain top we can find, our coke is warm and who wants warm coke.

Both in the comments and on twitter, people suggested various solutions for more easily stalking and being stalked, so I started checking them out. Then, I dug around and found more solutions, but none that really did what I was looking for. There are services where you can have a consolidated place for all of your profiles, but I can do that myself. And in fact, these consolidation services let you enter profile details, pictures, and all kinds of other things, so they end up being another social networking service to keep track of! It’s like they act like they are this fantastical magical answer, but in fact, are secretly adding to my coke-drinking, song-teaching, hand-holding dilemma. It’s like being rewarded for peeling a pile of potatoes… with more potatoes. Not that I don’t love me some potatoes, but sometimes, I’d like to stop peeling and eat them already.

First, I should mention that I’m not exactly a social networking butterfly. I don’t have a MySpace account (I mean, actually, I might. I vaguely recalling getting one as to grab the username. But I don’t think I could log in now even if I tried.). I may have a Friendster account, possibly. Not sure. I do have a Facebook account, but I’m so lame there, I can’t even update my status message more than once every two weeks. I do upload pictures to Flickr, but I forget that people can comment and I can’t really figure out how to see if anyone has commented, so I tend to happen upon a question about one of my pictures like a month after someone posts it. Really slick social networking there, huh.

I also have a Linkedin account that I’ve had forever. I never go there, but I was scrolling through it when looking into this social networking stuff. I am convinced that every single person in the world has a Linkedin account. Go ahead. Type in someone’s name. Anyone’s. Or try this. Fill out your profile with your previous jobs and where you went to school and then click on the tiniest, most obscure company you’ve ever worked for. Every single person you work with will be listed. It’s freaky, really. I was talking to someone the other day who said that they were on Linkedin all the time and I said, doing what? And I guess that’s why I’m so bad at these sites. I don’t know exactly what you do there, but apparently you network. Like you might at a cocktail party only you can do it from your couch with your laptop while you watch Buffy DVDs. And you have to mix your own drinks. So, as with everything, there are pros and cons.

As you can see by my sidebar, I have been trying Twitter, and I actually kind of like it because I have a mix of friends that I can keep up with and I can do short little microblogging. Except again, I don’t really update very often. And I don’t really do instant messaging, so I have to go to the website to see everyone’s updates. Which makes it less useful than it could be, I suppose, especially when the website mostly shows the cat with the screwdriver when I know for a fact that cats refuse to do even the easiest of hardware maintenance requests. They will type for you though.

I do have a Digg profile, but does that really count as social networking? I mean, I guess you can see what stories your friends think are interesting and you can check them out too, so it’s a bit like sharing and being social. I have tried to set up del.icio.us, but I’m just not quite that organized yet. It’s on the list though. Right after I read that Getting Things Done book.

As an experiment, I tried a few of these purported magical consolidation sites. How did it go? Well…

SocialURL
Connect all of your social networks with one URL. Sounds fantastic right? Well, it let me enter the URLs of my profiles on the various social networking sites. Although, as I mentioned before, I could set up a page of links myself. I entered my Flickr information, but it didn’t seem to do anything with that. Then came cause for alarm. It prompted me to create a photo album. But I already have a photo album on Flickr! I’m here to consolidate stuff, not create new stuff! I can also write post-it notes to myself, which is OK I guess. But somewhat random. I can see who’s viewed my (non-existent) profile, which is, well, kind of creepy I suppose. I can also leave messages for people, which means that in addition to my email, and other email, and oh right that other email, plus Facebook, those hard-to-find Flickr comments, twitters, and blog comments, I need to remember to come over here to see what people are saying. Also, even with a non-existent profile, I’ve started getting requests for friends.

It’s not bad, as far as consolidation goes. They gave me a badge I can put on my site, like this:

Get your own social badge

You can do things like browse the “popular” people, who look exactly as you might imagine.

Jaiku
This seems to be not unlike Twitter, except that you can also add a bunch of feeds to your profile. You can list as many feeds as you’ve got. And then you can get a badge like this, so someone can go see your list of feeds and our mini blogging entries. I think.

It is kind of cool how it (I think) shows a combined feed of everything, but of course, it requires that everything you do has feeds, and I’m not sure if that’s the case. Digg and Twitter both seem to have one though, so maybe it’s just a matter of doing a little investigation and experimentation. (It couldn’t find the feed of my blog until I gave it the Feedburner URL, for instance.)

claimID
This somehow uses OpenID. It also claims to help you rank more highly for your name in search engines, although I’m not sure how that works. It looks like this is another system of compiling all of your identities. But you just add links and descriptions and things manually. I didn’t have the energy to do this. I guess I can do other things like add a contact network and I’m supposed to mark up my contacts with XFN data. Now, I pride myself on being a geek, but XFN data? Apparently, on my blogroll, I can add a rel attribute to the links that specify how I know the blogger. Looking at the documentation, I see that an acquaintance is someone I’ve perhaps exchanged a short conversation or two. Anything more makes that person my friend. I must have a lot of friends. Although a friend is also described as a home (boy|girl) and I didn’t know I was hip enough to have any of those, so maybe I have no friends at all. I can describe someone as my muse, which is awesome. But apparently that has no inverse. And with someone you call a crush, no symmetric relationship is offered as a possibility. Which makes the whole XFN thing somewhat like a sad Shakespearean tragedy, with unrequited love and lonely muses.

“Wilt thou be gone home boy? it is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale and not the lark,
That pierced the fateful hollow of thine inspiring muse-like ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree, which is not yet a geographic location attribute but hopefully will be soon:
Believe me XFN crush, it was the nightingale.

It was the lark, oh you with the non-symmetrical crush, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale: look, acquaintance with whom I have exchanged only a short conversation or two, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder geographic location of which we do not share an adjacent doorway.

My point is just that claimID seems to be a hell of a lot of work. And I’m pretty lazy, which I describe when trying to make a good impression as “busy”.

Cluztr
Somewhat like del.icio.us except that it just keeps track of every web site you surf to so your friends can see your online path. Um, no thanks. I like to keep my porn surfing to myself.

Wink
You can search for your name and find the profiles that are yours and claim them. It found my Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. Everything else was MySpace accounts for 15 year old girls. Who knew? You can also then add all the profiles Wink didn’t find. I admit, I’m getting a little tired at this point. Especially as most of these services aren’t accepting my profile pictures very easily. And Wink never sent my verification email. And I couldn’t figure out how to edit something if I entered the URL incorrectly. So, I would have to just delete it and start over. It’s also a little unsettling that you have to provide your username and password for each service to claim it and it’s unclear if it’s gathering the information or just passing it through to the service. In any case, Wink gave me a widget for my blog that looks like this:

ProfileLinker
This service links all your profiles. Are you beginning to sense a pattern? It also lets me upload a photo album and set status information, so as with several of the other services, it starts to compound my problem, rather than solve it. This site also lets you add password information for your various services, which will give you extra features from those services. This site has nice embedded help that shows up when you click into a field. You can also create a portable profile, and I’m not quite sure what that means except that it made me a freaky widget that rotates with pictures of people like Rand Fishkin (don’t worry Geraldine! It was this profilelinker service! I’m not keeping pictures of your fiance!) and Mike McDonald. My module looks like this:

There are surely lots of other social networking aggregation services out there. It seems that if what you want to do is have a widget that displays all your network links on your blog, many of these would do fine. If you want to use one of these services as a social networking service, well, you can, but you have more cokes to hand out and songs to sing than I do. And if you’re looking for the fulfillment of my impossible dream, and using one service to push and pull all status information, friends feeds, photo albums into a single gallery, and hope and joy and requited love for all, well, I haven’t found that yet. But I’ll let you know when I do.

I’m an occasional traveler. I have been known, every so often, to trudge along with a suitcase and an anti-terrorist ziploc bag. By which I mean that I’m on an airplane or in a hotel more often than I’m at home.

I love to travel; it’s fantastic in many ways. But this post is not about the wonderment and joy of travel, exactly. Because travel can also be stressful and irritating and suck your soul dry, so this post is about how I (sometimes) manage to turn the less-than-ideal parts into, well, not wonderment and joy, but perhaps less soul sucking moments.

These tips are likely not all that useful to the infrequent traveler. If you don’t travel all that much, then you just might want to book a cheap trip, because after all it’s only a few days, and it’ll get you there. Or you might want to go all out and splurge on an extravagant, relaxing vacation, with fruity drinks that feature umbrellas and a view of the ocean, and cabana boys fanning you with palm leaves, and… right. Business travel. Totally different. Rarely features cabana boys. Someone should work on that.

1. Join those annoying loyalty programs.
I was a complete hold out on this for a long time. I remembered Subway and the tiny stamps and how you were supposed to save this card and then paste these stamps on it and then at some point, after keeping track of teeny scraps of paper and licking unappetizing glue, you ended up with a free cookie. Thanks, I’ll buy my own cookie and clear some clutter from my life.

Fortunately, for the most part, loyalty programs have gotten easier to keep track of. And you get more than a cookie in the end. Although sometimes, you also get the cookie. And who doesn’t like cookies?

At some point, it even becomes useful to give in and do what these companies who offer these programs have been trying to get all of us to do all along — be loyal. I don’t think you should do it simply for the sake of the program, but if you find a company (airline, rental car agency, hotel, or whatever) that offers consistently good service, and provides some perks for returning, you’ve already saved yourself a ton of travel hassle. You don’t really have to think about it. If that company is available where you’re headed, just book it.

And by “consistently good”, I mean, of course, that they offer the Starbucks experience. It may not be the best latte in the world, but it probably won’t kill you and it should be fairly similar to what you got in Boston. And Philadelphia. And Washington DC. Sometimes happy traveling is all about avoiding the unexpected surprise of the hotel room of despair with its lack of a working heater and plastic folding desk chair.

Hotel loyalty programs sometimes start offering you perks just because you’ve signed up — free internet, bottles of water and snacks, free gym. The good rental car programs have a fee to join, but sometimes your company or one of your credit cards offers membership for free. I am Hertz gold for free through my American Express card, and whatever Budget’s program is through my work. Sometimes you just have to dig a little. But that extra five minutes of checking into it will be totally worth it the next time you don’t have to stand in line for an hour at the counter. Because then you might kill everyone around you and end up in prison which would totally make you late for that important meeting.

2. Speaking of annoying loyalty programs, be a frequent flyer on Alaska Airlines if you can.
If you fly a lot, you may as well stick to the same airline when you can, just because it really is worthwhile to gain elite status. However, as someone who is MVP Gold on Alaska and Platinum on American, I can tell you that not all elite statuses are the same. Generally, there’s not much you can do about this. You have to fly with whatever airline calls your home its hub. But I began to appreciate Alaska more and more the last time I called American.

Me: I need to change my flight.

Them: OK, that will be several hundred dollars!

Me: Er, do you waive the change fee or anything since I’m platinum? Alaska doesn’t charge me any fees.

Them: No, we don’t waive the fee, but we’re better than Alaska! We will upgrade you to first class!

Me: Right. Can you do that on this flight then?

Them: Sure, 72 hours before the flight, we’ll let you know if your upgrade went through. And then you’ll need to pay the upgrade fee.

Me: OK. You know Alaska upgrades me when I buy my ticket. For free. I’m just saying.

3. Book your own flights.
I could save some time by having someone else book my travel. But I’m sort of a control freak. And if you consider the number of hours of my life are spent traveling, well letting someone else book my travel would be like having someone else pick out my apartment. It’s worth a little extra time to explore your options sometimes too. Case in point: a few days ago, I was booking a flight from San Jose to Orange County, then from Orange County to Seattle. Alaska doesn’t fly direct from SJC to SNA, so I went to the American Airlines web site. They had lots of flights, so I picked some reasonable times and went to pay. Where I found neither flight was upgradeable. What’s up with that? Does American Airlines suddenly hate me? So I called them.

For the first flight, they told me that it was a regional jet, operated by American Eagle. So not only does the plane have no first class, but it’s a tiny plane. A plane that bounces around in the wind a lot. I’m not really a fan of bouncing around when high in the air. I asked if any of the other flights were on real jets — perhaps a jet that would more smoothly fly through the sky in a less-roller coaster type fashion. Turns out, a flight just an hour earlier fit this criteria. Excellent! Put me on that one! For the second flight, they told me they were codesharing with Alaska. And they can’t upgrade their elite members on Alaska. Great! I’ll book that separately with Alaska. So, in five minutes, I went from a scary tiny plane, squeezed in, eating peanuts, to drinking wine, playing with puppies, and being served peeled grapes by those cabana boys.

4. Consider your hotel room carefully and make it your home.
If you’re staying in a hotel room for only a couple of days, you might think the room doesn’t really matter. But when you realize that cumulatively, you’re spending more time in hotel rooms than in your house, maybe it does matter after all. I have a set of things I look for in a room and then a set of things I do once I get there.

• Please God, let the room have a coffeemaker. I mean, really. What the hell is wrong with this world.
• The hotel really needs room service. Otherwise, I have days like I did a few weeks ago, holed up in my room with my laptop, conference call, followed by email, followed by more conference calls, followed by… well, certainly no food all day. And the mini bar mostly had wax lips. OK, hotel, very whimsical. But when I’m STARVING, I’m not merrily amused by your nostalgic non-edible mini bar food.
• A comfortable desk chair would be too much to ask, I understand this. After what feels like thousands of painful chairs, designed for torture and cruelty, I have succumbed to the hotel chair directive. I will take the pain, and I will like it.
• I know I already asked for room service, but can I have a mini bar too? Sometimes I just really need a bottle of water. Yes, I know they are $10 in the mini bar, but you see, I don’t check luggage and I can no longer bring bottles of water with me because, you know, they might blow up the plane. But I pay the price for the the safety of all of you. And our country.
• Again, due to my great patriotism, I can’t carry on things like shampoo. Hotels should step up the patriotism too and provide me with something that will actually wash my hair and not leave it looking like I’ve been living under a bridge for a week. After all, people take a lot of pictures of the back of my head. My hotel-washed hair gets a lot of exposure!
• A warm bed. You think this should go without saying. But no. It’s late, you’re tired. You just want to sleep. You get into bed and you’ve got one teeny little comforter that generates no heat whatsoever. And since the heating system in the room is an impossible system of knobs that have absolutely no markings on them and seem to be hooked up to nothing anyway, you need some heat. So, you dig through the room for an extra blanket. You check the closet, the dresser, the mini bar. Nothing. For all you hotel rooms that have blankets stashed away, thank you. Really. Otherwise, it’s good to know you need a blanket long before you are so tired you can barely stand up, much less find the phone and explain about this blanket and wait the 40 minutes it will take to bring it up.
• Speaking of calling up and waiting for things, I have learned that it’s best to assess the state of the room right away, rather than let the drama unfold like a made-for-Lifetime movie. Too many times, I have been horrified and traumatized by surprise events. For instance, one does not want to discover that the room is stocked with only decaf coffee at 5am, when the email looms menacingly. Or when hungover. Um, not that the latter has happened to me.
• I know someone who calls and asks for different furniture and then rearranges the room, and while I realize this is a bit extreme, I also completely understand why she would do it. I generally don’t go that far, although there is no reason not to rearrange things a bit if they make the room more comfortable. Sometimes, a well-placed light makes all the difference. Hotels do often have things available if you ask (tea kettle, foam pillows, reading chair). Or are nice to the people who clean the room. The other day, someone brought me a soap dish, unsolicited. She said, “I just thought you might like this soap dish for the bathroom.” Well, thanks!
• The room does have a hair dryer. Really. Somewhere. Places to check: the shelf in the closet, the desk drawer, under the bed. Be warned they often hide it in a bag to make it even more difficult to find. Someone wants you walking around with wet hair and I’m not sure why.
• There’s nothing to be done about this, but I’ll whine about it anyway. Why do rooms provide you with an iron and ironing board if they don’t provide an electrical outlet anywhere in the room where you could actually place the ironing board? Why? If I want to iron, I almost always have to rearrange to the room, just to get at an outlet. And speaking of irons, you would think you could just turn it on and get to ironing. Don’t ever do that. Half the time, the iron will leave horrid black spots or otherwise scorch your clothes and make you look like a street urchin. Test the iron first, perhaps on a hotel towel. On anything, really, other than the absolutely only thing you have to wear to an event that starts in 10 minutes. Just a helpful tip from me to you.
• Power outlets are good. Rooms should have more of them. I stayed at a hotel a few days ago that had a power strip on the desk. I could actually leave the desk lamp plugged in and still charge my laptop, phone, blackberry, and camera. All at the same time! It was a magical moment.
• A gym, any gym at all, even one I have to pay $15 a visit for, is great. A gym that stays open past 10 is even better. One with both cardio and weights? Almost too good to be true.
• Do I even have to mention the internet access? Why does it always suck? Fortunately, I now have a Cingular broadband card, so I scoff at the hotel’s attempts to make me cry with its slow connections that drop every 5 minutes and refuse to let me on VPN. But you may not have a broadband card, so just be prepared for the sobbing. And while I’m at it, couldn’t hotels provide phones that actually work and have connections through which you can actually hear the person you are talking to? I’m just wondering. You know, dreaming the impossible dream.

5. Pack lightly. But well. In good luggage.
I have always been a terrible packer. But I’ve had to buck up and figure it out, because when you’re on the road half the time, you really need the right stuff. And I always need more socks. Some people have an extra toiletry bag, always packed and ready to throw into the luggage. I have that too, although it doesn’t consist of much — just the ziploc bag of peace and freedom with a little toothpaste and a few other tiny terror-free items. But what I do have always packed and at the ready is a bag of electronics. It became ridiculous for me to unplug all my random chargers and things and pack them up every time I needed to take another trip. I’d be unplugging all day! So, instead, I have a set of chargers just for traveling. My little electronics bag has a few other things I might need: usb storage, ethernet cable (courtesy of Yahoo), card reader, spare headphones. It’s hard to see, but it looks a little like this:

You should also bring a CD or two if you’re renting a car. It’s doubtful you’ll be driving around in an area with good radio stations. For one thing, good radio stations don’t really exist.

I used to have crappy luggage, with broken zippers and uneven wheels. I finally splurged on some better luggage. Can you be in love with your luggage? I think I am living proof that you can be. Every time I fit everything into it and wheel it around with no fear of anything breaking or falling apart, I love it just a little more. I don’t pack much in the way of clothes. I figure if I have jeans, I can always grab an extra t-shirt somewhere if I need one. And hotels have same-day laundry service that can be handy. You can always get clothes if you need to. It’s the electronics you really can’t forget to bring.

And so as you can see, I don’t need checked luggage, because my bags consist of the following:

• socks
• more socks
• jeans and a t-shirt or two
• CDs
• phone, blackberry, chargers for same, usb cable, ethernet cable, digital camera, reader for same, charger for same, usb storage, ipod, ipod charger, usb light, bluetooth headset, charger for same, headphones, laptop, charger for same (I would have a travel mouse, but sadly, it doesn’t seem to work), ninento ds lite (obviously, and charger), ds games (um, I’ll stop now to avoid looking like an insane person)

All that stuff totally fits in a carry on.

6. Don’t forget to take pictures.
It’s nice to have photographic proof of where you’ve been. Each city has a unique personality and charm. I’ve begun documenting my own travels this way, as seen by my flickr photo essay: views from hotel rooms.

7. Stay connected
I have the aforementioned Cingular broadband card that works pretty well. I also have a blackberry for those times when I just can’t have the laptop out (those are sad times indeed). A guy sitting next to me a few weeks ago saw my blackberry and jumped on the chance to share his fanatical love with a fellow blackberry addict. He showed me his super-special battery that makes the phone twice as thick but apparently actually lasts more than 5 minutes, unlike the normal battery of crappiness that I have. So, that might be good to get if you use your blackberry a lot. I told him that I just charge it from my laptop with a usb cable and he was shocked and amazed. (This is particularly useful when you need to charge it while on a plane, although that does run down the laptop battery, so you have to choose your powered device, which is sort of like in the Bible when Solomon had to cut that baby in half. Or something like that. I forget the story exactly).

I was using my laptop with my Cingular card on the plane earlier this week (before we took off! I was not in any way jeopardizing the plane’s sensitive electronics with my need for being online! Although to be honest, I would totally try to get online while in the air if I weren’t so terrified of the falling to the ground.). The guy next to me was barely getting a wireless signal from the terminal, but it was working OK. I told him about iPass (which I also have), which lets you get on most airport, hotel, and T-Mobile hotspot wireless spots at no charge. It looks like it’s about $30 a month, which is totally worth it since one day in a hotel can be like fifteen bucks. It even works at McDonald’s. Who knew McDonald’s had wireless?

I’m sure there’s lots more that can make all the difference in traveling, but I have to stop writing now because they’re calling my flight. What are your trips for making travel something other than a walk through the burning inferno of painfulness?

After my post about how I dumped all my email and started over before it could suck the life entirely out of me and drag me into the murky depths of insanity and despair, several people commented that I should check out Getting Things Done. I read those comments and thought to myself. Huh. That sounds really interesting. Maybe I should order that.

Not long after, I happened to glance over at my bookshelf. Where I noticed this book. Called Getting Things Done. And vaguely recalled that a colleague suggested I try it months ago. I don’t even think I was complaining about my inbox at the time. I think he just observed my general state of being.

So, apparently I am too busy to remember that I ordered a book about dealing with being busy. And obviously, I was too busy to read it. I mentioned this to said colleague.

He said, “I can’t sharpen my axe right now, I’m too busy chopping wood with this dull blade!”

Indeed.

Barry asked me what I wish I were more serious about. Or more devoted to. Or scheduled in more. Or possibly was more perfect about.

I thought about this for a long time.

I pondered.

I weighed the possibilities.

The pros and cons.

The potential outcomes of increased seriousness in the various facets of my life.

And after careful consideration, I ultimately concluded: what do I wish I were more serious about?

Absolutely nothing.

OK, maybe I should try more varieties of donuts. I only ever get the chocolate kind with the custard inside. Perhaps I should branch out into the cake donuts with the multicolored sprinkles. Those look pretty good.

My site is like any other site on the web. In the early days, it is alone and silent. The tumbleweeds are tossed in the wind and with nothing around to stop them, they just roll on by. But my site is a little different in that it’s also a little like one of those roadside stands beside interstate 40, with the Stuckey’s and the pay $5 to see the buffalo up close. The tourists drive by on their way to California, and sometimes stop in to check things out. Only instead of looking for an ice cream cone and a picture with the Buffalo, you can hear them mumbling, “she’s nude? Where?”

All sites start out with the tumbleweeds, and it’s anyone’s guess as to whether they eventually become Disneyland or the field with the world’s largest ball of string. Although I suppose if you want your site to be in the Disneyland category, it helps to fill it with lots of E-ticket attractions.

This site came online the evening of March 31st, and in looking at my stats for the month of April, my very first, fledgling month, the first lessons I learned, which I pass on now to you at absolutely no charge is this: Make sure you set up your Analytics code correctly or your stats are going to be a little off. I thought I did everything right, but it turns out the code was only on the home page, and not on the permalink pages. That’s all set now, so I should be able to show accurate graphs and everything for May.

For April though, I do have basic AWStats, which my hosting company, Tiger Technologies, includes for free. I got the most traffic on April 2nd, which is a little sad when you think about it, because that means it’s all gone downhill since then. But it also makes sense, since as it turns out, “look! nude!” is fairly compelling anchor text.

First, to give some scale to those pretty bars:

And here’s the month:

Speaking of anchor text, most of my traffic is not from search, although I expect that should change over time as I create more content and more of it is indexed. Mostly, I’m getting visitors from links. It seems that people think of links as valuable for PageRank, but they forget that links also bring you traffic. If you have links from relevant sites, particularly if the links describe you in a compelling way, you’re going to get great visitor value from them. If the link isn’t relevant or descriptive, readers will have no reason to click over.

Of course, if the anchor text is misleading, you may got a lot of quick hits, but the visitors may not stick around or come back. Which leads me to one of the links that brought me the most traffic all month.

Yep, the meaning of my blog, the inspiration. Dave Naylor. You might assume that a site that brings you a large portion of your traffic must have a large, engaged audience with an interest in your site’s subject matter. But it could also be that the entire blog post is “Vanessa Fox nude. No really this time is. PS, I told you it was vanessa fox nude.”

Which is something to consider about link bait. You want to catch people’s attention and get them to visit your site, but you want to bait them in such a way that they want to stick around once they arrive, otherwise it was all sort of pointless. Well, I hope that some of Dave’s readers stuck around a little and weren’t too disappointed. Otherwise, that would be 933 sadly disappointed people.

(A short aside: some people have asked me about the domain name for this blog and look at me crazy when I answer, well, it was Dave’s idea. A while ago, Dave claimed to be getting referrers for the phrase, and managed to parlay that into ranking #1 for it. A few other people started talking about it, which of course meant they started ranking for it too, so I eventually grabbed the domain name, just to keep it out of nefarious hands. After all, I know how it goes, you’re in a bar hanging out, drinking, and as you’re chatting about stuff, you’ve got your blackberry out grabbing domain names as they occur to your vodka-influenced mind. Or maybe that’s just me. And then when I was thinking of starting the blog, I figured I already had a good domain name for it, especially as blogging is an honest look at your soul and all that. Unless mostly you lie. And while it is true that if anyone should rank #1 for vanessa fox nude it may as well be me, it has of course, backfired a little on me, because now lots of people are ranking for it.)

But 933 isn’t the most visitors another site sent me. Matt Cutts sent me 1114. Thanks Matt! Jeremy Zawodny sent me around 900 visitors, which just goes to show that getting involved with the blogging community (in this case, a meme) brings not only fun, but also links!

You can link bait, you can participate in community activities, you can do all kinds of things to get visitors. But the best way to get visitors is to have good content, because then you also keep visitors. (75% of my visitors stayed for less than 30 seconds, just long enough to realize pictures were likely not forthcoming.)

My most popular entry so far was when I ranted about not watching your damn video. It got linked from lots of places, all of which sent me some readers. Techmeme sent me several hundred visitors, as did Digg. Speaking of Digg, they would have sent me more, but my posts have a tendency to get buried over there. In fact, four posts of mine have been submitted, all buried. I have no idea why. Even my post on getting buried got buried.

What else brought me traffic? Blogrolls, blog mentions, forums, articles. Stumbleupon brought me around 150 visitors. And twitter brought me a hundred or so, both from the link in my profile and from the few times that I twittered about writing a new post. (I’m currently at 174 subscribers according to Feeburner. I need to get one of those fancy badges, if only I had the three seconds to figure out how to do it!)

What about search? Well, your site needs to be indexed and ranking well for popular queries to get much search traffic. And that can take some time. So, as you might imagine, I didn’t get much search traffic in my first month. However, I did get some!

Yes, mostly Google. As I mentioned earlier, Google started indexing pages pretty quickly, with Yahoo coming in soon after. But what phrases am I being found for? Well, 406 people have found me by searching for vanessa, where I’m at about position 15. I’m around 4 for vanessa fox and (woo) number 1 for vanessa fox nude, which I’m sure would make my mother quite proud. I even got some traffic from nude, which means searchers must have really been trying out lots and lots of results.

(Interestingly, Google, Yahoo, and Live all have this site number one for vanessa fox nude. However, Ask doesn’t seem to have the site indexed. But what is number one for vanessa fox nude? www.vanessafox.org/2007/04/25/my-social-networking-dream/. What’s that URL you might ask? And you might click on it and notice it redirects to this site. That was a domain that I set up briefly to see if my posts were getting buried on Digg because the diggers took the URL to mean that the site was porn. (Apparently not. That post, submitted under the non-porn like URL, was also quickly buried.) The URL is the only one from that short-lived domain with links to it (from Digg). And Ask has picked it up, but not any of the URLs from this domain. I don’t have any profound theories as to why. Just thought it was interesting.

What else? Mostly not much. I did get someone looking for daven nude, not that I would try to capitalize on that or anything. Nu uh. Someone wanted to know what it takes to get buried. Dude. It’s not hard! And someone was looking for an rss icon.

Only time will tell how things will progress from here. I have a fairly small set of visitors so far, but that might change if I start ranking for something other than my name (and nude!). And that might happen if I start writing substantial content about things people are searching for. Although since this blog has no real theme and I just randomly babble about whatever comes to mind, I may not have a large set of content about any one thing any time soon. Oh, and I suppose the content should be interesting. I’ll try to work on that. I can’t promise anything though. If I really wanted to get some traffic going, I’d probably add some pictures. But I think I’m OK without traffic. For now anyway.

Email. One of the world’s great inventions. You can dash off a quick note to someone and when they’ve got a few minutes to reply, they send a quick note back. Doesn’t matter where you are in the world, what email system you’re using, if you’ve got spare change for a phone call. All you need is an internet connection.

My first job after college was pre-web. Sure, email existed, but it wasn’t exactly mainstream. I wrote a lot of memos at work. I would type them up, print them out, make copies, initial the From: line, and bring them to the mailroom so they could be distributed to everyone’s inboxes. You know, the physical ones on top of people’s desks. Sometimes, I had a wide cc list that included people from multiple locations. In that case, I would print my memo, walk it down to the copy center in the basement, give it to the Xerox guy we had working there full-time, wait for him to make the hundred copies, and then bring it to the mailroom. And I’d have to do things like use a yellow highlighter to mark who each copy was for on the 100 line cc list. Or stuff the copies into those interoffice envelopes for hours.

Sometimes, I wish those days were back.

My email situation has gotten so bad that when I read about email bankruptcy on valleywag, I thought I may have found the answer to my unsolvable problem. I looked at my mountain of mail and thought, what can I do other than start over? The alternatives suggested by Valleywag (that they cautioned would be too extreme for most people) didn’t seem extreme enough to help. Nor did the other solutions I read.

I had too much mail and not enough time, but I knew I had too many important messages to just dump everything. So what to do? I asked around. What do other people do? Some people said they used their inbox like a to do list. Sounds great, but my inbox had 15,000 messages in it — some read, some unread, some that I needed to deal with, some I just needed to delete. It had become impossible to even find the to dos.

What didn’t work:

• Keeping everything in my inbox with no deleting or categorizing. I use gmail and I have filters set up that label things in mailing lists and keep them from the inbox and have a filter that labels everything addressed specifically to me, but that just wasn’t enough. My inbox was still overflowing and I had no ability to keep up with it. It was like trying to sort the ocean into three pails, each the size of a thimble, and wondering what to do with the extra water.
• Over categorizing. Once I realized the lack of categorization wasn’t working, I set up the most granular organization system imaginable. For instance, I had Sitemaps - to do, Sitemaps - mobile, Sitemaps - blog, Sitemaps.org… you get the idea. It was just too much. I even tried setting up “to do” and “done” labels for each category. That also didn’t work. That was just hiding everything I had to do so that in addition to getting the work done, I had to work at finding it in the first place.

Clearly, I had to do something. Deleting it all and starting over with a new system was tempting, but so many people were expecting me to get back to them. I imagined a rising email army, swords raised, and the mob saying to me in perfect harmony, you killed my important email, prepare to die!

Last week, I set aside an entire day to figure it out. I went through everything in my inbox, one by one. Delete, file, need to address. I went through an entire month. And then I asked (as you do, on twitter), how far back should I go? The overwhelming twitter response was a month. If someone needs something from you and they sent you mail over a month ago, they’ll send you new mail. Or more likely, they’ll fashion a voodoo doll in your likeness, stick pins in it and throw it into a fire of burning coals and lava, but sending another email is one possibility.

So I took the plunge and moved everything from before April 1st out of my inbox and into a folder. I figured if I managed to get through the “need to address” items from April, I could start working on March. And then (after an entire day of sorting) my inbox was empty. Instantly, new mail started coming in, but with a clean inbox, it was easy to sort the new stuff.

I started tackling the highest priority mail. I am still, as it happens, tackling that high priority mail. What I really needed was a full “address email day” to follow my “email triage day”, but I had to do laundry and pack and fly to Philadelphia and speak at WebSearch University and do a few other things like that, so sadly, that full email day has not yet materialized.

I have already gotten several emails that were pings on things from pre-April and I’ve addressed those right away (guilt, you see, over sending the email to the land of email limbo in the first place), so perhaps it’s true that anything you need to address that’s older than a month will come and find you.

I discovered that I needed a new folder called “waiting”. Lots of times, once I address something, I can’t just move it to a done folder or delete it, because I’m waiting to get more information back before I can close it out. But I don’t want to keep it in my “need to address” folder, because then that’s more difficult to use as a to do list. By having a waiting folder, I can clear it from the list, but still have it handy to follow up on later. Or so the theory goes. I have barely made a dent in the to do list, much less made it to the follow up pile.

So, if you sent me mail in April, I am working on it. If you sent me mail before April, please send it again. Or at least make my voodoo doll look pretty before you throw it onto the coals.

How do you stay on top of your email? Any tips on avoiding email bankruptcy?