Hartley Brody

It’s fairly common knowledge that website visitors hate pop-up windows. By definition, they interfere with what you’re doing and try to draw your attention to something else. In the early days of the internet, they were everywhere, but these days all major browsers block pop-up windows by default.

Now, site owners are switching to modal windows which usually don’t get caught by pop-up blockers since they use more complex javascript and CSS.

But if website visitors hate these intrusive windows so much, why do website owners still use them?

Because they work.

If you haven’t heard about it by now, Quora is a new social, question-and-answer site. It launched last year and was very popular amongst the Silicon Valley crowd for awhile, and it’s just started spreading to the masses.

Because of the elite early-adopters, the quality of the content is very high. There’s a ton of great information on everything from history to business to law. It might sound a little dorky at first, but if you consider yourself intellectually curious, you should definitely poke around.

Tomorrow morning, at 11:40am, I will begin the most athletically challenging event of my life: The New England Tough Mudder competition, up and down the side of Mt. Snow in Vermont. From Wikipedia:

Tough Mudder is a series of obstacle course competitions that bill themselves as “probably the toughest one day event on the planet.” According to the New York Times, the event is designed to be “more convivial than marathons and triathlons, but more grueling than shorter runs or novelty events.” For example, Warrior Dash courses are between three and four miles, while Tough Mudder courses are between seven and twelve miles. It is estimated that about 20% of participants do not finish the course.

Normally, something like that would sound exciting to me, but I’m a little nervous for this – I haven’t been training. At all.

As the proud owner of a website, you’ve probably spent a lot of time thinking about ways to make your site more valuable to your visitors. You’ve organized the navigation nicely, and put functionality like search and social media links in intuitive locations.

But none of that careful planning will matter if your website visitors don’t stick around long enough to see it. There’s a common adage among webmasters known as the “8-second rule”. If your website takes longer than 8 seconds to load, the average user will get frustrated and leave. And even if they stick around for that page, they’re more likely to grow frustrated with your site as they browse around.

Here’s the data to back it up.

Check out these 3 steps to find your slow points, speed up your site and keep visitors coming back.

What comes up if you search for your name on Google? Go ahead, try it.

For those of you that share a name with a famous celebrity, it will probably be a lot of press coverage and news articles. But for most people, the results can be somewhat chaotic and irrelevant. A few months ago, the first page of results for “Hartley Brody” had stats from my little league baseball team, some notes about my middle school swimming career, and links to random people-finder websites.

None of this was relevant to someone who might have been trying to search for me. As you start a job search and put yourself out there for the first time, there are many reasons it is important to “own” the search results for your name.

Here are five steps to help you get relevant content onto that all-important first page of results for your name.

I’ve always been interested in student government, especially the delicate task of campaigning among your peers. In most student government elections, the default assumption is that your friends will vote for you, which leads to the common complaint that student government elections are just a big popularity contest.

However, there is often a surprisingly large part of your constituency that isn’t socially affiliated with any of the candidates. Securing votes from these people is essential to winning. The purpose of any campaign is to scoop up as many of these non-affiliated voters as you can.

But how do you connect with these people? There are several major traps I’ve seen people fall into that diminish the effectiveness of their campaigns. Don’t make the same mistakes!

As the snow melts and the grass start to show again on college campuses across the country, a lot of students are sent scrambling to find plans for the fast-approaching summer break period. Suddenly coming to terms with the potential of yet another summer sitting at home can be both both terrifying and motivating.

But by now, it seems like most of the best opportunities have already been snatched up. It might seem like you have no options. How are you ever going to get your parents off your back or earn some spending money?

Fortunately, there are plenty of great opportunities to land an awesome summer gig, no matter how last minute it is – if you know where to look.

Web 2.0 was so revolutionary because of the fact that – for the first time in history – any individual could easily publish information that the entire world could see. Social media played a huge role in this movement. You could quickly share a picture, update a status or plan an event and have that content on display for everyone with a computer.

But then there was the privacy backlash. Sure, I might want to share some pictures with my college friends, but what about my coworkers? What if I want to publish something for my friends, but don’t want my parents to see it? What if I have a picture of me doing something awesome, but illegal?

This caused a lot of people to distrust the internet. They didn’t want their lives becoming an exposé that any random stranger could read about. To feed this privacy hysteria, there were a number of sensationalized stories about stalkers and robbers using information on the internet to ruin people’s lives.

As a young adult with a foot in “the real world” and one still in the fake life of college, I’ve struggled with the issues of what to share, and with who. And I definitely don’t always get it right.

As I’m sitting here in this comfy hotel chair waiting for my Papa John’s pizza to arrive, it’s hard for me to believe how helpless and alone I was feeling a few hours ago. The day started out fine enough. I slept until noon at Julian’s place and then showered and went through some emails to try and figure out which apartments I’d be looking at today.

It is now Sunday evening, which means I’ve been in Boston for 48 hours. I knew the first few days in a new city by myself would be an adventure, but I don’t think I was actually prepared for what was in store.