"Oh yeah, and you don't get from the first picture to the last picture in 16 weeks, not gonna happen."
Someone who looked like the second picture when dehydrated, oiled, posing, and flatteringly lit could perfectly well make themself look like the first picture when bloated, unflatteringly lit, and letting it all hang out.
You can see where I am going with this. For some amounts of making himself look awful in the first picture, great in the second one, and 16 weeks of steroids and working out, those "before and after" pics are not implausible.
But I do realise that wasn't what you were saying. Your point was that if we take both pictures in good faith then it's "not gonna happen" and you would be right. I bother to point out what I did because it is reminiscent of those "get ripped" banner ads where - to me at least - it often looks like the same person on the same day 2 hours apart, first posing and tensing on the back of a fasting session and after, slouching, having stuffed themselves. And of course the advert reverses the "before and after", and pops 6 weeks with whatever they are selling into the timeline.
I do not have a corporate job, nor have I ever. The closest I have come is teaching in schools. However, I find your sentiment at odds with the experience of many I know in the corporate world. Most work long hours, but they find time for what is important to them and they find their work rewarding. The family time comes from what used to be Call of Duty or sport-watching time. When the kids grow up they get to do those things with them too. These people take care of their health, travel, and have rewarding family lives, they just have to be ruthlessly organised and priority-driven to focus on what is important to them (of which a respectable career is one aspect).
In the past I have thought the way you do and the way the original post outlines, but I concluded that I was actually a little jealous of people with more stable, better-paying jobs who were well enough organised that they could still do the things that they considered important and I was actually just looking for ways to frame the situation to my superiority. When I hung out with these people I almost wanted them to sneer and demonstrate values that "someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interest and activities is considered a flake", but they never did. I feel like most corporate folk I know totally "get" what people who haven't taken the same path as them are doing.
At the moment I live in Japan and have friends who work some insane hours. Their Facebook efficiency to set up band practice and baseball (and even now cricket!!) for the few hours they have to spare is a source of constant astonishment to me.
Right now, I'm looking at getting myself organised in that way and heading for a corporate job, not fleeing from one.
I love the short timers on blocks of text too large to read properly before it moves on. I kept clicking back and of course starting from the beginning of the quote to remind myself of the flow and then SWOOSH it moved onto the next one. I did that about half a dozen times and definitely felt my stress levels rise. It makes the point very well!
The point should be "don't use a bad carousel" then. It frustrated me that it didn't paused when my mouse was over the slide and that the timing was badly done (on purpose, I guess).
I've used them and my clients and the customers of those clients were happy with them. I did not through paragraphs of text on them, just pretty images and headlines (featured content).
> "It frustrated me that it didn't paused when my mouse was over the slide"
Even if you did this, your mobile users will still be mad, because they cannot hover.
The question isn't if you or your clients are happy with them. The question is if your users are happy with them, and if they generate better business results (conversion, clickthrough, whatever is relevant to you) than the simpler, less Javascripty, less timing-based, less gotcha-with-the-mouse-hover implementation.
Though some have a habit of stubbornly ignoring any professional advice against a feature they have an emotional attachment to, raw data can sometimes snap them out of it.
I am a mobile user, and I can hover. In Chrome on Android, when I tap on an element that doesn’t have an action of its own, that element always acts like the cursor is hovered there. I was able to use this to pause the carousel on http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/. And on other sites, if I tap and hold on a link, then close the dialog that pops up, the link still acts like it is hovered over.
Text in a carousel is a no-go; pausing when hovering is a neat idea, but not possible on touch screens, nor easily discoverable by the average user. Even if the timing is long enough, I still feel stressed out by the fact that I know the text could be dragged out of my sight any time, which stresses me out so much that I can't concentrate at all on the content.
The second terrible mistake is using page indicator dots (which do a good job of indicating the page) for navigation, let alone using them as the only means of navigation!
When you take into account these two things, a carousel can actually become comfortable to use and may no longer enrage its users. But that's still a far cry from being better than showing the content in a regular list:
> I've used them and my clients and the customers of those clients were happy with them.
What do you mean with "happy"? Did the customers actually understand how to use the carousel, did they discover its content, did they click on it? Not being annoying does not suffice to qualify as useful.
I use adblock to eliminate all elements on the page that animate. I can't read blocks of text with animation running in the corner of my eye - it's too distracting. I run flashblock for similar reasons.
Happens most often on newspaper and magazine websites. Some sites provide a pause button to kill the distraction, but many don't.
Another site fixed by noscript. I just read a vertically arranged set of scrollable statements. Although there was an orange bar stuck across one of them as the footer didn't move.
If you missed the slideshow your probably missing half the point. You should inspect the JavaScript, verify it safe and private, and turn on JavaScript. It's naughty, but a lot of people seem to like it.
I did the same, frustratingly (especially while reading the longer quotes) until I realised the carousel pauses if you hover your mouse over the slide you're currently reading.
[Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov] criticised what he termed US attempts to blame Russia for his disappearance, saying they were "groundless and unacceptable".
and
Meanwhile, China has also described US accusations that it facilitated the departure of fugitive Edward Snowden from Hong Kong as "groundless and unacceptable".
Does anyone else find it slightly odd that they used identical wording? Is this a case of the Chinese saying "well the Russians nailed it, let's use the exact same phrase", or what precisely?
That seems the most likely, doesn't it? I'd love it if somewhere there were an official diplomatic language glossary with translations for what these terms really mean, e.g. groundless and unacceptable: "justified and permissible".
In so far as I have had "success" with speed reading it has been to force myself to run over the words more quickly and so interpret the commonly seen structures as single units. This means that if a piece is written in a very formulaic style then I can get through it fast because most of the stock sentences read like single words with only the unique modifiers jumping out of the page.
Think about when you look at code and automatically chunk the bits you have seen a million times before but are somehow magically able pick out the needle in the haystack which tells you what is special in this instance. The layout of code helps enormously for us, but I find the effect is the same with reading if I go quickly and with specific purpose to reformulate the information as it is scanned. And the more you do it the better you get because you have more data to draw from when identifying structures. It gets to the point where often I want an author to be formulaic rather than stylish and idiosyncratic because it makes it much quicker to reorganise and internalise.
> Think about when you look at code and automatically chunk the bits you have seen a million times before but are somehow magically able pick out the needle in the haystack which tells you what is special in this instance.
I guess the real solution is to use a denser language?
> It gets to the point where often I want an author to be formulaic rather than stylish and idiosyncratic because it makes it much quicker to reorganise and internalise.
Hence legalese, and bureaucratese, and any number of other things that get laughed at and railed against in equal measure.
Excellent point. I rarely think of those as standardised structural conventions for clearly and efficiently conveying meaning to those acquainted with the terms and, to my shame, usually write them off as obfuscating functions to mislead or confuse. Not so!
What others have said about commenters/lurkers and not being able to downvote, but also I think the "sentiment" is more that SEO sucks than that this piece is garbage per se. I upvoted it because it's entertaining and it did, along with the discussion here, broaden my perspective on SEO.
I read it as a joke by the end but, worryingly, didn't automatically recontextualise it as racist in light of that. Which, I think I agree with you, it is, if it's a joke and all the East Africa stuff is made up for "comedy value".
Nowhere. It was speculation on my part extrapolated from the premise that the piece was written as a joke and nothing in it could be taken at face value. A little research on the guy suggests I was reading too much into it. Here he is http://www.linkedin.com/in/rishilakhani and his languages are listed as "Hindi, Swahili, Gujarati, Punjabi" - we don't need much more than that to connect the dots.
Totally with you. I was enjoying the amusing tone of the piece but he lost my sympathy at:
"Before, SEO was the game of really skilled people, you know like professional poker players. You had to know the game, know when to raise, and when to bluff."
Then with the "Maybe I should find another job?" I thought this has got to be satire. Well played, sir.
The way the piece is framed, the writing style, surely a work of humour?
I agree; that last comment gives it away. I've been doing enterprise-level SEO for several years now as a day job and it's not as if algo updates are so frequent and far reaching as to make it difficult to keep up with. Most major updates from Google and the other engines are predicated on two major themes:
-Rewarding relevant, informative, keyword-rich content focused on specific topics and punishing sites that construct thinly constructed (UGC or otherwise) pages, particularly those who do it in huge numbers.
-Rewarding sites who links from similarly relevant, authoritative sources gained organically and punishing those who acquire links through artificial means (either through direct purchases, purchasing domain portfolios with thousands of backlinks etc.)
There are nuances that are market-specific that require slightly different approaches and concentrations (e.g. health care) but those are the main things folks should concern themselves with. There's no black magic behind it unless you're doing something shady to begin with.
It was meant as humour, for other SEOs in reality. Kind of an in joke that took the hard part of our job and made it funny. Frankly, as in any industry, you have to adapt. (I am the Author of that site)
As a Mathematics graduate I was going to call you out on your comment, because I feel the subject does not lend itself to the kind of wiggle room necessary for maneuvering such as you describe. Then I remembered this: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2013/01/23/the-indiana-pi-bill..., and thought better of it.
Indeed. Reading the Wikipedia entry on Cassagnes I wonder: 'idea' or 'discovery'?
"Cassagnes, an electrician at the Lincrusta Company, was performing a routine installation of a factory light switch plate wrapped in a translucent decal covering. During the installation, he removed the decal and wrote on it with a pencil, noticing that image transferred to the opposite face. Cassagnes tinkered with his discovery, which led to the world's first prototype of the Etch A Sketch."
I love these stories of something chanced upon by accident being turned into a product. It wouldn't surprise me if most successful ideas come about this way, rather than from a 'visionary' entrepreneur brainstorming the 'next big thing'.
Someone who looked like the second picture when dehydrated, oiled, posing, and flatteringly lit could perfectly well make themself look like the first picture when bloated, unflatteringly lit, and letting it all hang out.
You can see where I am going with this. For some amounts of making himself look awful in the first picture, great in the second one, and 16 weeks of steroids and working out, those "before and after" pics are not implausible.
But I do realise that wasn't what you were saying. Your point was that if we take both pictures in good faith then it's "not gonna happen" and you would be right. I bother to point out what I did because it is reminiscent of those "get ripped" banner ads where - to me at least - it often looks like the same person on the same day 2 hours apart, first posing and tensing on the back of a fasting session and after, slouching, having stuffed themselves. And of course the advert reverses the "before and after", and pops 6 weeks with whatever they are selling into the timeline.