School and Study Tips, LinkedIn Tips, Sony, SCU, SJSU, and Del Mar Posts Have Moved

Are you looking for content on this site and got the error "Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist."? If so, then these links may help:

• For school and study tips: The content that was on this site was updated and moved to a new Study and School Tips site.

• For LinkedIn tips: The content that was on this site was either deleted because it was obsolete or updated and moved to the LinkedIn Notes blog.

• For Santa Clara University MBA students and alumni: Information about online social networks was updated and moved to the Santa Clara University MBA Notes blog.

• For San Jose State University students and alumni: Information about online social networks was updated and moved to the San Jose State University Notes blog.

• For Del Mar High School students and alumni: Information about connecting with classmates was updated and moved to the Del Mar High School Connection blog.

• For downtown San Jose residents and visitors: The content that was on this site was deleted because it was obsolete.

• For former and current Sony employees and contractors: Information about online social networks was updated and moved to the Unofficial Sony Alumni Social Networking Sites blog.

For techies: Yes, I know I could have used 301 redirects to make the transition of content from one place to another as seamless as possible for machines doing search engine optimization (SEO) as well as humans. But there are a lot of reasons I didn't do that. To start, I saved some money by moving my web site content with low traffic to Blogger sites. I might further elaborate on the reasons I didn't use 301 redirects in a future post.

Updated Personal Blog, Added Picture in Title

I started this blog in 2005, so 10 years later it seemed like a good time to update it to take advantage of features that Blogger makes easy to add to a site. Most of the features were probably available in 2005 with WordPress plugins, but I wasn't that serious of blogger. I just wanted a decent looking place where I could occasionally share information that I think might be useful to others. The same holds true today, but I thought it might be fun to take advantage of features that are now easy to implement in Blogger.

So during this upgrade of this personal blog, I figured out one thing that might be useful to you if you're using Blogger: How to put a picture next to the title.

You can see in the upper left corner of this page that my picture is next to the title "Rick Upton". It took a little experimentation to figure out how to do this.

Idea for Blogger Writer's Block

I was thinking, what subjects could I cover in the future for blog posts?

I've been active on a number of Yahoo! Groups for years, so then it dawned on me: reuse the content I've already created. So here's my plan for finding material for posts when I don't have any new ideas or don't have time to write any new idea:

Multiple Blogs and Customizing Blogger Templates

[UPDATE April 27, 2015: Blogger now support labels which helps to categorize posts within a single blog, but it is still very useful for me to maintain multiple blogs so that I may target each one for very different audiences. Within each blog, I am using labels to help further categorize the posts.]

Blogger doesn't have a feature to set up categories within a blog, but does allow for multiple blogs under one profile.

So I created two new blogs: MBA Notes from a Santa Clara University Alumni and LinkedIn Notes. After setting up the blogs, I realized that I like having multiple blogs better than just one blog with categories. I used basically the same template for each blog, but made subtle customized differences.

StatCounter Nice, But Javascript Code Corrupts Hyperlinks in Word

Over the last few days, I've inserted StatCounter code into the template for this blog, my personal site, and the site for the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Association of Santa Clara Valley. While the code worked fine for this blog, I ran into a problem with the other two sites. My personal site and the MLK site have pages that are maintained using Microsoft Word.

Blog is now "Feed Enabled"

One of the purposes of my home page and this blog is to experiment with different ideas and technologies which may be useful for my job or my volunteer work. For example, I have been able to experiment with a number of ideas for search engine optimization on my personal home page, learning lessons which I applied to the web sites I manage for Sony and the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Association of Santa Clara County.

After reading a lot of hype about RSS feeds, I thought I should take a shot at implementing a feed for my blog, just so that I know how it works. I don't expect many, if any, people to utilize my feed. However, the lessons learned from this exercise might prove to be useful for work and volunteer projects.