Better SEO leads to 21% Increase in Search Impressions
It’s been a little over a month since we rolled out the new scoobysworkshop.com website. A major aspect of the redesign was to formalize a strong search engine optimization (SEO) program. The process involved creating quality content, good old fashioned strategic descriptions and a more social friendly sharing environment. The results? Well, they speak for themselves. Google Webmaster Tools reports a 21% increase in search impressions over last month:
ScoobysWorkshop.com goes live!
I am very pleased to announce that as of last night, the newly designed Scooby’s Workshop website has gone live. This isn’t to say that the process has been a breeze, it certainly hasn’t! Scooby and I learned a huge lesson on scalability when dealing with several hundred http requests per hour. Everything seems to be going smoothly so far, which is a rarity, let’s hope it stays that way. Go ahead and check it out 
Here’s a cool testimonial snippet from the project:
Going from an old fashioned static HTML website to a dynamic one like WordPress takes far more work than meets the eye. I’m a software engineer and I hadnt even heard of these things till Jovanni educated me. Number one is security. As I found out 6 months ago when my old website was high-jacked and forwarded to a spammers website, security is a high stakes game now.
Jovanni is an expert at security (its his field) and he took a multi-layered approach to make sure the new website is safe. Cool new services and ways to protect digital assets that an old-school software engineer like myself had never heard of. I learned my lesson the hard way, you can learn from my mistake. If you have a popular website, even if its not a commercial website, you need to get a security expert involved to make sure your website is safe!
Find me on LinkedIn
I have no idea why I’m so slow with these things; people have been urging me to get on LinkedIn since its birth and I’ve just been like, “pfft no thanks!” I hopped on there about two weeks ago to scope it out and fell in love. As a guy who is in a very transitional phase of life, I’ve come to realize just how important networking is. With this in mind, I have come to see the great potential that this social service offers and jumped on board! If I’ve done business with you or you are just curious as to what area my career-related life is headed, add me. If I’m out of your network I used my school email address: [email protected]
Career Fair Shenanigans
Over the last day or two I have been preparing for the career fair over at Drexel on Oct. 12th. My old resume was terribly boring and did a poor job at highlighting my past experiences and current academic and professional goals so I did decided to redo it. I’m not exactly looking for work yet since I have plans on attending graduate school, but I’m certainly not against possible offers. My main reason for going is because I want to make connections and speak to recruiters/employers about internship opportunities for the coming summer. I heard that the NSA is going to be there speaking and doing some recruiting of there own; as some of you may know, getting a security job through the NSA is one of my main professional goals.
Anyways, this is my first career fair so I’m a little nervous, I don’t quite know what to expect. Hopefully I can avoid being awkward!
Summer Wrap up
It has been a very fun and enlightening experience working at the Stanford Security Lab this summer. I’ve learned tons of different things, and noted various topics in which I have to become better versed in with security and privacy as a whole. I can only hope that the drive I currently have sticks with me as I wrap up this last year of undergrad and prepare myself for grad school.
Just as a quick summary, here are various articles in which I either did research on, wrote, or was featured in along with project websites in which the work was related to (most notably, the Tracking the Trackers series):
- Tracking the Trackers: Early Results
- Tracking the Trackers: To Catch a History Thief
- Tracking the Trackers: The AdChoices Icon
- Tracking the Trackers: Microsoft Advertising
- FourthParty: A New Approach to Web Measurement (1, 2)
- Do Not Track Universal Web Tracking Opt Out
- Consumer Watchdog: Unfair and Deceptive online tracking
- Wall Street Journal: Latest in Web Tracking: Stealthy ‘Supercookies’
Just wanted to give a shout-out to Jonathan Mayer, Stanford C.S. PhD candidate, for being an awesome mentor this summer. Also shout-outs to John Mitchel for being my sponsoring faculty along with the NSF funded Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies (TRUST) in Cyber Security and Trustworthy Systems for granting me this wonderful opportunity.
Hopefully I will be able to update this blog with news of grad schools that I get into!
Stay Away From FatCow Hosting!
The title says it all! I picked up this hosting company after serious consideration of many online reviews I found, and boy what a mistake that was! All the reviews I read must have been contrived because the quality of service has been a disgrace.
In the last two weeks, all customers hosted on FatCow have experienced 3 sessions of downtime, one session lasting for almost 6 hours before being fixed. On top of the terrible up-time, the hosting is just plain out SLOWWWWWWWWWW. I’ve tried contacting FatCow support various times, only to get the same sorry excuse, “Everything looks fine on our end, you don’t know what your talking about.”
Save yourself the hassle and use hostgator. I have used their VPS and shared hosting for a rather large client of mine and have not been disappointed with their service. Think I’m making exaggerated claims about how lousy FatCow really is? Check out their Facebook page to see all of the disgruntled customers:
https://www.facebook.com/FatCow
I certainly can’t wait for my contract with them to be over so I can switch over to a more reliable service. In the meantime, please bare with me here 
Webalytics
Over the past few weeks of doing research here at the Security Lab at Stanford Univeristy, my mentor has been developing an analytic tool that we dubbed as “Webalytics.” This tool is actually just a firefox addon that dumps a great deal of information from your browsing session into a sqlite database that can be analyzed later. There is no interface, you simply install the plugin and surf the net and it will be working in the background. This plugin is currently experimental and we are running various tests with it as we speak. The website for the tool will be up shortly, and I will update this post then, giving the link.
If you are a brave soul, the current release can be tested here: Webalytics
Update:
Since this post was written, the project name was changed and the actual v1.0 release went live. Head on over to FourthParty.info to pick up a copy and try it out!
Most random post ever.
This post will be structured in no particular way and will incude me jumping from several topics with no transitions!
I am currently on the application phase for several universities, which is a much bigger pain in the butt than it was for undergrad studies. Nonetheless, I am almost done my first application which is for Northeastern University and have started my second application for Johns Hopkins University. These two have been picked mainly because:
- Good Information Assurance programs
- They are part of the Federal Cyber Security:Scholarship for Service, a scholarship program that pays full tuition, requiring you to work a couple of years doing security-related work for one of the govt agencies (which I want to do anyways, so big win there)
I have a few back up schools that I will be applying to, but hopefully I don’t need to rely on them
Anyways, the work that I have been a part of here at Stanford University’s Security Lab is actually picking up quite a bit of unexpected publicity. My mentor has been excited since day one, but I had my doubts! It is nice to know that our hard work is being accepted and taken seriously. For more info on Do Not Track, head on over to donottrack.us
- Our initial findings: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6694
- New history sniffing findings: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/669
- ConsumerWatchDog’s call to the FTC: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/ltrleibowitz071411.pdf
On other news, I have been testing a few new technologies lately in preparation for rolling out the new Scoobysworkshop.com design. This is the biggest webdesign project I have ever worked on, and there is a still a little bit of work left to do. So far, I have redesigned over 100 pages of old content that was mainly written really bad or used very old HTML and JavaScript techniques like Spry. I also had to optimize over 150 images that are used on the site to save bandwidth and reduce load times. As for the initial roll out, I am trying to convince my client to use a CDN, specifically Amazon’s Cloudfront. Testing this out on my personal website and I have seen a pretty big improvement. In addition, since this is a big website with lots of traffic, including a lot of malicious traffic, I decided to use a caching addon (w3c Total Cache) along with a website proxy. Cloudfront is what I am banking, and it hasn’t disappointing me yet! After only two days of implementing it on my website, it stopped traffic from 84 known bad requests, most likely spam bots. Also, their free plan is actually really good and has no bandwidth caps. I will report back with how things went after the website is rolled out!
Lastly, I updated my resume a few days to reflect my current goals. I am transitioning from looking for work to getting into grad school! That means my current resume will look very different from the previous, including a cleaner layout and exluding technical skills and all that blah blah blah. This doesn’t mean I’m not looking for new and exciting projects!
- Jovanni Hernandez
One Project Down – Many More to Go
Today I finally finished the website for my clients, Maid in Heaven Cleaning Services. It took a bit longer than I had wanted, but it’s done now! Before I was even able to finish that project, I got tacked onto a volunteer assignment for a long time idol of mine “Scooby” Werkstatt. Scooby operates and maintains a free fitness website targeted to people working out at home. I learned about Scooby after I finished a cycle of P90X and was looking for new direction. Little did I know that through using Scooby’s materials I would learn to think on my own and create workouts that were accesible and affordable to my needs.
Anyways, onto the nitty gritty: Scooby has been fighting a war against fitness scam artists who trick hundreds and hundreds of people into buying their products using absurd claims. These scam artists have large budgets that allow them to make their products very marketable and reach out to others. Since Scooby is running his gig alone, there is no budget, and marketing yourself becomes a lot harder! Scooby reached out to his community asking for help in which I wrote him a volunteer proposal as a way to give back for helping out me and many others.
The plan is very extensive including:
- Redesigning the website
- Using a clean backend
- WordPress CMS with Catalyst Framework
- Search engine optimizing the website
- Streamlining platforms
- Integrating Blogger blog into main page
- Migrating hundreds of pages of content
- Cleaning up code, removing deprecated usage of tables and other code
- Using HTML5 standards and CSS3
As you may be able to tell, there is a lot of work to be done! This is going to be an ongoing project which may very well take several months in order to be fully implemented, but the end result will be well worth it. It will also make Scooby’s life much easier once he grows accustomed to the WordPress WYSIWYG which is miles ahead of using DreamWeaver templates.
On other news, I am a week into my internship here at Stanford University’s Computer Science Security Lab. It is much different than I had been imagining. I’ve been learning lots of new programming languages (note: I am not going to school for computer science) such as Python, jQuery, and JavaScript (creating Firefox plugins using the JetPack SDK). So far it has been VERY challenging, but I’m learning a ton of unexpected information. Talk about a humbling experience when you are thrown into an unknown situation!
Maid in Heaven Cleaning Services: http://www.maidheaven.com
Scooby’s Current Website: http://www.scoobysworkshop.com
Beta version of the redesign: http://ph34rnet.fatcow.com/scooby
New Client
I always forget to give updates on the latest things I am working on, my bad! My latest project is a website for a local cleaning service “Maid in Heaven”. As a part of my research, I didn’t find any cleaning services with attractive and professional websites, so this should be an interesting project! On a side note, I have also been free lancing with the web design experts at Baker Media. I am a long time follower of their work and their online shows so it has been a pleasure working with them. Stay tuned for more additions to the portfolio!