The race to the front page.

I woke up this morning after a late session working on the SEO stuff for the RSA online project to find I had managed to get the wordpress blog onto page one! Yep in less than 24 hours. Needless to say I was stoked. But rather than sit on my hands, I have been up late again working on getting it right up the rankings.

So I created a Squidoo. This is quite a cool tool, maybe a little fiddly in parts but cool nonetheless. Hopefully I will atract some "juice" to my wordpress blog by doing this. Anyway, I'll let you know how I get on in the next few days.(if you're interested)

BJ RSA Online

I have spent the last few days getting the finishing touches on the BJ moodle course for Responsible service of alcohol (RSA) and I am just about to tell the world about it.

RSA is a tricky bit of e-learning to put together and it is one of the units of competence of the Hospitality Training Package that a lot of RTO's are providing, many of them online. Competition is pretty fierce and getting a hit on google for the course is going to prove difficult. So I thought I might conduct a little experiment to see if I can get our site up the google page rankings. That's right I'm going to through my hat into the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) ring.

SEO is something I know nothing about so I am happy to hear your suggestions. In the mean time, I have taken some screen shots of google searches with the appropriate key words, I have done a little work on grading the appropriate sites as they stand now, and I have created a new blog.

So here are some links to what I have done so far. (I am told back linking is the way to)

New RSA Blog
BJ's Moodle RSA Page (this should take you to a create a login page)
The BJ's Australia Hospitality page

My next post will be an update on how the experiment is going.

There are truffles, and then, there are truffles.

This week, on a flight back from Port Lincoln, I was reading an article in an in-flight magazine. I know, I should’ve been listening to an important podcast, reading the latest Moodle for Dummies release or just about anything else but it had been a long day. So there I was reading this magazine, and I came across an article on truffles. You know the ones, fungus, use a pig to find them, great in French cooking, cost a fortune. OK, so here’s the thing, when you read truffles, how many thought about the chocolate type? You know the ones, petit fours, champagne truffles, chocolatey goodness.

Whether writing an article, writing a blog post, or putting together a learning object, the use of images is a vital part which helps to convey the information to the reader. The right image in the right place can change the whole feel and even the meaning of the article or learning object. The wrong image can lead to confusion, or worse.

So what do truffles have to do with the use of images? The in-flight magazine article had a picture of the wrong type of truffle. Now I imagine, to a lot of folks, this error was not noticed and made little difference to them. I found it quite amusing and had to share it with the guy sitting next to me. He told someone else, and who knows how many others have done the same.

I’d love to hear any other stories or examples of this sort of slip up and what the repercussions were…