yelyah - “earthquakes today 20111006” piano improv
Productivity tip #246:
name improv after new site so that you’re forced to launch that site that day or look like an idiot
Alright, so it’s a productivity tip that’s applicable to only like 0.01% of the population, but for me, it worked.
I can’t say that I built Earthquakes Today from scratch because the raw data was already taken care of due to work on Last Earthquake, but I did build the rest of the page from scratch today.
I won’t lie. This is a direct attempt to rank for the query “earthquakes today” which has about a gazillion more queries than the “last earthquake” set. I was kinda shocked to find that an exact match domain still existed especially given that the less popular singular version “earthquake today” has all of the com/net/org/infos taken. And if you happen to know what I’m talking about, I’m referring to the “exact” searches rather than the often misleading “broad” match (and in this case “earthquake today” actually outranks “earthquakes today” on a broad search).
As opposed to yesterday, there’s now a proper cron job running on a remote 24/7 box to powerupdates to the site. What a PITA that was though. RVM and cron hate me. And of course, I never did get any errors coming out of cron so I’m just basically crossing my fingers that the cron job continues to work.
So for me now the question is how do I differentiate the sites. I could just go the literal route. Last earthquake is only ever the one earthquake and then earthquakes today is only ever the 24 hours. Did I mention I also own two “brandable” domains (meaning no one is searching for them) related to earthquakes? And to give you an idea of the sort of procrastinator I am, I bought both of those in early April. So for me to launch sites the day that I buy the domain is actually quite the accomplishment.
Now to make my ugly baby… less so.
