julienmarie

There is three levels in SEO. The foundation, the content and the authority. My experience is more e-commerce focused.

The foundation is the build, the technical aspects of your site. Few requirements when doing complex websites: - Core Web Vitals above 90 - well formatted sitemaps, - the simplest HTML possible, - right meta, - json-ld, - headers ratio, - really fast Time to first byte, - perfect mobîle usability score - alt tags on images, - lazy loaded pictures below the fold - http 103 preload on static assets and LCP assets - inline SVG for icons ( SVG sprites better ) - responsive images ( something like imgix or thumbor is basically mandatory) - the least amount of JS and CSS possible - critical css generated for each template A 100% lighthouse score on a simple text page is easy. A 90+on mobile for a complex e-commerce website is hard. But without a sane foundation you are diminishing the impact of everything else.

Then the content. Have better content than everybody. Hire writers. For each page, have real human content written. But there a some techniques : - for each page choose a focus keyword and a secondary keyword - this keyword should be in your title, H1, and url. - secondary keyword should be in your h2 and meta description. - don't forget modifiers ( like geographic or niche or vertical ). They should be in your title and meta description. - run a TF-IDF analysis on your competition for your focus keyword. - run a ask the public analysis on your focus keyword - write your outline and incorporate the keywords that make sense from the tf idf and answer the questions that make sense from answer the public

But in the end, what matters is that your content is great, informed, well written, and has a brand voice. You don't want your content to smell like SEO content. Always prioritize the content quality vs keyword optimization.

Biggest issue on large websites: content cannibalization. When topics are really close to each other and would be relevant for same keyword, you need to find a way to whether move the focus upward to a category page, on add more différenciation between the pages.

Trick: optimize your content on the html side: lists should be html lists, for FAQs use the ld-jso ln for it etc... That's why a block editor is amazing for SEO.

Then, authority. Meaning back links. Don't use backlink services ( i built one in a previous life ). Focus on PR if you can. Do real marketing. But backlinks are not necessary to rank. My website is the best ranking website in its niche and country without any backlink effort.

You know Google loves you when you get indexed the same day you publish.

Create a process of content creation, publish regularly. Have regular internal linking reviews. Invest in a tool or two ( ahrefs and screaming frog ) for three hings : technical audit, keyword research and competition analysis.

Last advice: most SEO agencies are crap. They only sell backlinks and tepid 500 words blog articles. And most of the time, their work is outsourced via cookie cutter white label companies. But it's normal: they can't touch the foundations. And they don't have the skills as soon as you don't run on WordPress.

I personally listen to Audiobooks, mostly adventure / tale or similar. I find that it needs to have a dream like quality. Jules Vernes is great for it, the Count of Monte Cristo was a delight. I don't really follow the story as I miss basically more than half of it. Steer away from books where there is too much "action" ( LOTR was a total failure ) or too realistic ( you don't want some Houellebecq in your dreams ).

We sell fine food (bowtieduck.com ). Saw you are from Cebu we just opened deliveries there ;) and yes web hosting is weird and super expensive here.

Optimize your images ( use imgix by example or thumbor ( open source version) . Lazy load the images below the fold. For the images above the fold, use 103 Pre Hints headers ( as well as for your css and js). Make sure to inline your critical css . Use http2. Your website won't be much lighter ( picture will be ), but it will be way faster.

It's true but not realistic as soon as the website is more than a blog or a static content website. The goal of good web building is to manage to deliver the most value to consumers and the business, and removing what's not needed, and if you add anything, you make it on a performance oriented way. Bloat will always infiltrates itself, so you must clean again and again. I operate e-commerce websites and we went through multiple iterations with two goals in minds : performance ( speed / core vitals / seo ), and developer productivity (I'm basically the only tech guy, and I'm also the CEO managing 10 people). Our current e-commerce stack runs 99% on Phoenix Live view. As our market is only in 1 country (Philippines) we optimize for round trip network with servers the closest possible ( no decent hosting company in the country so we host in HK at datapacket on a beefy dedicated ). Site loads in less than a second, navigation is nearly immediate thanks to live view. We removed most JS trackers as we built our own server side tracking pipeline in Elixir that sends unified data where it's needed ( it took us like 2 days to build ). Since that move Google loves us and we are the top ranking website for our niche in the country on all our key products. One key thing also is that our target market is wealthy so they enjoy fast data / connection, this helps in terms of determining our target. Performance is not absolute. It's relative to your product, your market and your location.

Weirdly a few years ago (7?) I made the most stupid app for a friend. The app was really bad and coded with my feet as I never did a mobile app. It was based on Ionic and just had one screen. It was a feeding calculator for horses for a brand of horse feeds. You input the weight of the animal, the age and it's level of activity and it calculated how much feed to give daily and what type of feed. The app was clunky, outright bad. It got approved on the first try. I was surprised.

Just when they announced it, their live statistics started to degrade noticeably on their dashboard. https://status.postmarkapp.com/ with a huge slow down of their emails.

Hence the focus on multi-AZ. This makes completely sense for transactional.

It seems they are doing the same thing they did with ClickHouse in the OLAP space but this time in the OLTP space.

What is the difference with LiveView?

Borax is used in most sturgeon french caviars to preserve it. I guess in small quantities.

Been using it since June with Haraka for the email sending of small newsletters (around 50k recipients a day). It's working great. Love the simplicity of it.

Julien M. ( French )

Location: Manila, Philippines

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Maybe

Technologies: Elixir, Erlang, React, JS, PHP, SQL (Postgres/MySQL), Docker, Devops

Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julienmarie/

Email: jm [at] producture [dot] com

---

Been CTO, Head of Product and Head of Marketing in multiple companies ( Social Networks – Friendster! – Ecommerce, Dating, Saas ).

Builder. Problem Solver. Highly technological. 15 yrs of experience.

I discovered Erlang and Joe around 2008, and it made rethink everything I knew about programming. The BEAM has now become my favorite development environment. I always wanted to meet Joe. His brilliance, his jokes on stage, his way of mumbling and walk all around the stage and getting excited at things were amazing. Let it crash.

I made that mistake when launching my first dating website By trying to be more efficient. Unfortunately, this market is not about dating, it's a dopamine delivery market. You want to keep people long, increase your LTV, show them an ever better possible "match" so you never settle. You don't want them to actually meet someone. Hence the crappy chat features ( while the rest of the tech stack is usually pretty solid ).

Quantrix Modeler is a successor of Improv. I personally love it, but pricing is quite steep.

I agree with jakegarelick, a good therapist will not hospitalize you.

What matters is for you to talk.

Why would anybody not deserve to be alive? Life is fundamentally nonsensical, and our struggle / cross ( depending on how you see it ) is to put meaning into it. This is why life is at the same time a tragedy and a liberating experience.

We are ephemeral, and not this important at the individual level. Only thing that matters is not harming others, eventually doing good to others if we are lucky, and finding joy in little things ( intellectual endeavours, earthly pleasures, art, sunsets, you name it ).

If it can help, a reading that helped me when I was deep in depression in my 20's was the The Gay Science, by Nietzsche. Don't read it in one go. Keep it with you, and read a few aphorisms every day. Some three liners aphorisms from Nietzsche made more impact in my life than everything else I read combined. This book literally saved my life.

Something interesting is making a mental "disorder" a sickness. A mental trait becomes a disorder when this trait no more compatible with social norms ( it breaks the order of things, hence disorder ). Hence the pain. And we assume a pain is a sickness that can be cured, medicated.

Medication do not solve the root of the pain. Our brain is more than a chemical balance. It's a neural network, trained on the training set of our childhood. There is this fundamental age around 6-7 years old where the child creates its identity picture, its definition of self, which becomes the blueprint of its personality trait and evolution. This blueprint causes what psychoanalysts call "neurosis". When digging into it, there are so many things that makes sense in the field of psychoanalysis, and the parallels with neurosciences and even AI are staggering.

Little nuggets I found enlightening in my day to day perception of life :

- We learn language and the meaning of things from others ( our parents usually ). As a consequence, we naturally expect truth and meaning to come from outside. That's why we look for confirmation from others. That's why we expect the people we fall in love with to give our life meaning.

- We create our identities based on our environment. We define ourselves against the others as to define is to draw a boundary, a difference. That's why you'll often see the cliché in family where if the elder's dominant trait/definition is to be good at school, then the second child will take the opposite route.

- Our neurosis is mostly our limiting factor to approach life. This is what we fight against everyday, this is the wall between what we can be and what we are.

I understand this can be seen as a controversial view for many.

I'm no psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, but was raised in a psychiatrist / psychoanalyst family. A weird but enriching experience.

Expat here in the Phils too! Should create a community of HN Phils Expats

Using it since last month. It really helps our fulfillment teams. Still a young product, but it solves the need quite well.

Interesting, I'm looking into Camunda right now for our processes. How would you describe the experience in terms of adoption and results ?

What's interesting is that it's the first web server not focused on speed or performance but on the user experience. I love nginx, but I had huge headaches configuring it when migrating php apps with huge htaccess rules to nginx. The terms of the license do not seem super clear though.

I discovered Erlang in the late 2000s via its kinda weird and iconic video "Erlang the Movie" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrIjfIjssLE that prompted me to dig further. I was at the time an average developer. Erlang, and Joe Armstrong books and videos, made me understand things that other web-oriented languages ( Ruby, PHP... ) never really dug into at the time. Because the Erlang ecosystem is more than distribution. Distribution is a consequence of its design around concurrency and message passing and let-it-crash/auto-healing philosophy. Erlang, and after that Elixir, made me think differently about code and made me a better programmer.

Smoking per se has been a behaviour for thousands of years. As much as there will always be effects on health, vaping has been a god send for me. I have been smoking 1+ pack a day for nearly 20 years, until I switched to vaping 9 months ago. I feel incomparably better. My resting heart rate went down by 20%, I breathe better, am way less tired, and it doesn't stink . Plus, there is a geeky aspect with what we call RDAs ( rebuildable vapes ). Yes, we do not know the long terms effects, but the chances to be worse than cigarettes are close to 0. Also, this article is full of references to studies that have been flagged as partisan and not seriously conducted. Not smoking / vaping is better, but for an ex-smoker, this is a godsend.

Indeed, OVH UI is slow and bulky. I moved to Hetzner for a lot of things. Even cheaper, had one server issue, but quickly fixed by their support ( a bios to upgrade ), their UX is simple but efficient. Any other opinion on them?

no link ?

most impressive, builtwith.com, 2M / month

Direct link to the github : https://github.com/lasp-lang/partisan

Spacemacs :)

Friendster.com ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendster ) , without any hesitation ( inventing Social networking, becoming #6 biggest site in the world, to nothing ). – Disclaimer: I worked there.