Towards a Mobile-Friendly, SEO-optimized Blog

A few months ago, Google announced that they'd be updating their mobile-friendly test, penalizing sites which present app install banners over the main mobile content. I didn't have any mobile apps to promote, so this change would only affect me as a user, not a site owner. I promptly forgot about it.

But if that's where the story ended, this would be a tiny blog post!

Shortly after the change went into effect, I received an email with the subject of "App install interstitials that hide content found on http://blog.ryanbraganza.com/" What was going on?

 

I opened up my blog on my phone and, as expected, I didn't see any app install interstitials. I did see something curious, however. When my blog loaded, my most recent post would slide in from the bottom - up and over the second-most recent post. It wasn't that I had an app install banner obscuring my content, it was my content that was doing the "obscuring!"

I chose a different theme, reran the "Mobile Friendly Test" and now all is well.

Why I use my real name online

Over the years, a handful of people have asked me why about why I use my real name online. I've been doing this for a few years now, so a decent explanation wouldn't fit in a tweet (Follow me on twitter!). I haven't published any blogs posts lately (though I have a surprising-to-me number of drafts) so the timing seems right to write. Please don't take this as me saying that everybody should use their real name online. This is my experience and your mileage may vary.

Let's go through some reasons to use an alias and why I don't heed the advice.

"I don't want future employers to know what I do online and hold it against me." For me, this is a positive. If a potential employer would otherwise hire me, but on the basis of my presence online, withhold an offer, I wouldn't want to work for that employer anyway. I am lucky enough to be in a position where finding employment is a non-issue for me. I recognize that others may not be so fortunate, and cannot be so picky in their choice of employer - "I'll work any job I can get." However, this is simply not the case for me.

"I don't want people in my real life to know what I do online." Why would I not want them to know? If I'm doing something online that I don't want people close to me to know about, then maybe I shouldn't be doing it in the first place (Please don't take this to mean that I don't believe people should have no privacy). I am one person, not two, so I should have one personality, not two. What you see is what you get, whether that be online or offline.

"I might be embarrassed by what people find online about me." I'm a human being. That means I make mistakes (If you don't believe me, read through some of my previous entries). I believe in forgiveness and in second chances. People change. People learn. People grow. "Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished." Judge me on who I am today, not who I was ten years ago. If you're going to hold something I said when I was younger against me, that says more about you than it does about me.

With these out of the way, let's go into some reasons why one might want to use their real name online.

Simplicity. Every time I need to make a new account, I don't need to spend a few seconds thinking of an alias to use. Instead, I simply take a few minutes to remember what my name is and how to spell it. When I'm talking to people, I don't have to think about "Do I know this person well enough to let them know who I am online?" before giving away my twitter handle to show them my pictures of food.

Serendipity. I believe that people, by and large, are fundamentally good. Maybe you're going through something in your life, that somebody else has been through. If you tell the world your experience, someone you know might be able to give you advice or help out, or simply relate to you how they got through a particular situation. The more secrecy you have, the less likely these moments of serendipity are to happen. It can be good for professional reasons, too. If I didn't have my linkedin profile, I wouldn't be living in the US today and working at a job I enjoy.

Authenticity & Accountability. Anonymity can give you some freedom. I've done it before. I've found that when I can say whatever I want, without worrying about the repercussions of having my real name attached, I said a lot of things I wasn't proud of. If I could take them back, I would. It's better to consider what you're about to say and if it is truly something you want to say. If not, then don't say it. Besides, it's hard enough having one personality, than to complicate things by having multiple.

Just be yourself.

Sincerely (well, mostly),

Ryan Martin Braganza

Functional Programming

I've really enjoyed the coursera courses that I've taken so far - game theory, compilers, algorithms (part 1). I've enjoyed them so much that I'm taking another one - functional programming principles in scala.

I've gone through the setup and my first impressions were simple: it uses a lot of my RAM and uses maven repositories (using sbt).

Here's hoping I finally grok functional programming.

https://class.coursera.org/progfun-2012-001/

I made a compiler?

Avid readers of my blog will recall that I enrolled in an online compilers course. Four assignments,countless quizzes/exams and many late nights later, I'm done! According to my calculations, I just barely made the pass mark, which I'd say is not as good as I'd hoped, better than it could've been and less than I'd expected. But gluing my 4 assignments (lexer, parser, semantic analyser and code generator) you end up with something that can compile some programs which run and give you the output you expect!

To be fair, the course description did warn that it would be tough, and not a great place to learn a new language (C++ for me). But apart from C++, I've gotten exposure to flex, bison, and MIPS. I recommend the course to anyone willing to devote the time into it.

Let's make a compiler

These past couple of weeks, I've been taking a game theory course https://class.coursera.org/gametheory/class/index

It's almost like taking a course at uni, except everything is multiple choice, styled with twitter bootstrap, and without the long commute. The course is winding up, so I thought I'd start another course.

As you may have guessed from the title, that course is about compilers https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers.

Compilers is one of the courses that post-Uni, I wish I had taken, so I'm pretty excited for the course. I am of the belief that understanding what goes on beneath the layer of abstraction you usually work at will make you write more effective code.

At the same time, I'm going to attempt the programming in C++. I've never written anything C++, and it's been a while since I last used a programming language without GC (C was my last one) so it'll be interesting to see how far I get!

If you're interested in taking an online course yourself, have a look here for something you might be interested in: https://plus.google.com/107809899089663019971/posts

Making unity useful

ccsm -> ubuntu unity plugin -> behaviour -> key to show the launcher = <alt><super>

Last One

This is the last post in my write a blogpost every day in January challenge. So I figure it's time to get meta. I started this challenge because I had previously tried to start this blog. Then I ended up with barely anything on this blog. Then I wanted to have something on this blog, because I told someone I would. Rather than one good post, it's a lot of small posts, though.

Starting this challenge gave me an excuse for the writing to not be great (actually, an excuse for it to be terrible). It's a lot easier to write something when you don't pressure yourself to make it too meaningful.

Writing these 30 posts has made me realise how contradictory I can be. In every post, I can poke holes in the things I've said.

New challenge starting tomorrow: 30+ minutes of cardio every day for as many days in a row as I can manage (first goal is getting through February).

http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_cutts_try_something_new_for_30_days.html