Michael Lugassy’s blog

"I'm easily impressed by the very best" 

Kehalim Elevator Pitch

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Estimating Amazon EBS/RDS I/O Requests

Unsure how many million I/O requests will Amazon charge you on EBS and RDS? Here's a simple way:

1.       Run iostats (debian users should apt-get install sysstat first)

2.       Summarize the tps out of all applicable drives

3.       Multiply by 2.6352 (60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 30.5 days / 1,000,000 requests)

4.       Multiply by $0.1 (which is the current pricing for 1M I/O requests)

Here's a quick sample:

So 12.95 * 2.6352 * $0.1 =~ $3.41 monthly :-)

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Advanced SEO at StartupSeeds

 

A while ago, I gave a long SEO lecture to the good guys at www.startupseeds.com. It was targeted to a more advance audience and points on how an "old" and "new" webmasters deal (or should deal) with SEO. Since it's in Hebrew, here are the highlights:

  1. Beyond links, content & structure, make sure you understand the 4th building block of SEO - user engagement (time spent, page views, bounce rate..) - very important factor that's gaining momentum and harder to manipulate
  2. Do SEO very early to the site launch and combine SEO efforts with other traffic sources (i.e. do not buy PPC until your structure is aligned, run affiliate promotions through the same organic pages, etc.)
  3. Do your own keyword research based on independently collected information (related websites, discussions, forums) and through data that is closer to your users (internal search phrases, user tags). Do your own statistics rather than relying on wordtracker, keyworddiscovery and other freely available sources
  4. Target long-tail rather than a specific set of competitive keywords and work bottom-up (starting with your item or product pages, moving to category or tag pages and eventually the generic phrases on the homepage)
  5. Rather than focusing purely on "Web" (page-based results), consider the less-competitive Google Images, News, Blogs, Videos and Products - using microformats can also boost you up to appear under "Universal Search"
  6. Enhance client-side experience by scoring high on yslow (gzip, caching, pages that send last-modified headersm etc.) - Better response times means more user page views and healthier crawling sessions
  7. Improve XML sitemap by including all possible attributes, submitting to other engines (not just google) and pinging on every change - back it up with RSS feeds for better crawling
  8. Replace manual and artificial "Link campaigns" with crowdsourcing - Having users embed signed/linked widgets, webmasters use and link through your API, etc.

The full video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MASS2Glfiw

Filed under  //   seo  

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Why you should use posterous

After years online, I've decided on http://posterous.com/ for blogging. From
sign up to finish they do everything right and appreciate your time. Post
through email, autopost externally to other socials, customize look & feel,
use custom domain, integrate Google Analytics & Feedburner yet requires
nothing to install. Since it's all email based, posts are also archived on
my "sent" folder. Extremely useful with great UX. Let the writing begin...

Filed under  //   blog  

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Who's flying to London?

Looking for someone who would be around London at October 10th to grab me Sprint's version of the HTC Hero. Running Android, this chin-less version seems very slick. Full review here: http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/htc-hero-sprint/4505-6452_7-33770450.html

Filed under  //   android   htc hero   mobile  

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