One of the many reasons I hate the holidays is that invariably I’ll be sitting around doing nothing, except for maybe my conscience asking me “Why the hell aren’t you writing now?”, and probably end up eating. As I look forward to this inevitable event that made me think of some of the things that I have found over the years that I thought are worth sharing.

Garrett’s Cheese Popcorn - is astoundingly good, better than any other cheese popcorn I have ever had, by a long shot. You might want to eat it with chopsticks though because the cheese will stain your fingers. Once, while in Chicago on business my friend Tom had some and then went to the Sony story and played the PS2 demo units, leaving the controller covered in orange goo.

Stam Chocolates - Jim from Podcasting News brought us a box of these a couple of years ago and they are better than anything else I’ve tried, even stuff from Germany and Austria. These chocolates are so good that our dog when berserk when we bought a box as a Christmas gift this year and he ate the whole 27 piece box.  There’s a lot fewer gross ingredients, it’s kind of like the difference between fresh squeezed OJ and all other OJ, except for….

Orchid Island Juice Company - I am an OJ snob, but Orchid Island is very good and available at Trader Joe’s and my local supermarket, Roche Brothers.

Strawberry Hill Povitica - Fantastic bread, make french toast with this and you’ll never go back to regular bread.

Blues Hog BBQ Sauce - I used to work with Chris, who is a BBQ Jedi Master with the trophies to prove it. My nephew has said he can no longer use other sauces because everything tastes like a sad excuse after Blues Hog.

Enjoy!

If you haven’t noticed from previous posts, I have been a guest on The Beancast a number of times. If you are into podcasting it’s kind of like TwiT for marketing people. If you’re not into podcasting it’s like the morning zoo with marketing and advertising people. If you still don’t get it it’s like me and the host Bob along with people like Steve Hall and Scott Monty talking about the stuff we usually talk about - and it’s on iTunes.

For the year end special being recorded tonight I’m giving away a copy of The Seth Godin Boxed Set - 4 DVD’s of video with him Live in Denver, with Charlie Rose, and 3 DVDs of Q+A. These DVDs are $800 a set and the winner will still be bound by the terms of sale (you have the right to resell, but not to post or to show to groups of more than 30).

I got this for paying for VIP level access to his Tribes event (and I forgot to get my book signed, which was also part of my ticket). I’ve watched them and they are great, but I rarely watch anything more than once on DVD and I’m pretty sure that nobody else in my family will watch them (don’t worry Seth, it’s not you, they don’t like my SEO videos either)… so why not use them for a promotional stunt rather than have them gather dust for eternity in my DVD bookcase?

“How to win?” you ask? I’ll give out the secret code during the cast, comment back here and the first one in wins.

When I first started this blog it was an experiment. Much like The M Show, I had no idea where it would go or if I would have more than a few weeks of things to write about. Fast forward a few years, and yes, I guess I do have some content.

Thanks to this lack of initial commitment I cut some corners. Rather than pay for two hosting accounts I decided to point RoninMarketeer.com to the same account that was hosting The M Show. Since Libsyn serves up 99% of the bits for that podcast the server had capacity to give.

The problem is that many tools that watch the web don’t really like this. Even with proper redirects any tactic that only a spammer or cheap bastard would use is not going to give you that extra glass of fresh Google juice. My domain started strong with a page rank of 6 (PR6 if you want to sound like a social media douche bag SEO consultant), but then dipped to 5 as the blog gained momentum.

I also noticed that technorati (hint - become a fan!) and lists like the Power 150 had me stranded out in Nowhereville. The final straw was when I hit PR4, not the web equivalent of hell, but definitely the neighborhood where the washer and dryer are out on the front porch and there are vehicles on cinder blocks in the front yard so you don’t have to mow the lawn.

So I had two options - flush it all and start new, which would have been the easy route, or try rehabilitation. Again, seeing this more as an experiment, it seemed like it would be a good case study to fix as much as I could and see what would happen. After all, it’s probable that I will run into people and companies whose online reputation has been screwed up, yet they will be unwilling to give up the current domain name in my future.

Results so far: The problem was deeper than I thought, my feed had been hacked with some hidden links that I imagine where what banished me to the ghetto. Having finally straightened out the domain name issues and cleaned up all the feeds (sorry to the M Show fans that had Ronin posts show up for a couple of days!), today Google shows me with a PR5! So rehabilitation is possible at least to get back to zero, the next question is can you go above the zero line?

What you can do to help: If you want to accelerate this case study (LOL) you could re-subscribe to the feeds over there on the left side of the page above my Lijit widget (I would tell Tara that I’ve finally got it in the template, but she would roast me since it’s taken me like 7 years to finally add it to my blog, but since she didn’t enter the 23rd Annual Marketing Over Coffee Awards, hell, we’re even). Anyway, for the price of less than a few clicks a day you can help feed this hungry blog.

Ok, I can no longer avoid shovelling snow… see you later.

This week I have become hooked on Mahalo Answers. It’s the crack of websites…

The business week is over, and snow is coming down fast and furious here.

Speaking of other addictions - my 64GB SSD arrived today. I’m making an image of my old school hard drive right now and on Monday the brain transplant for the fastest Laptop in the fleet will begin. Geeks rejoice!

Choose the standard definition so you don’t have to sit through a pre-roll ad.

Nominations close in 1 hour for the 23rd Annual Marketing Over Coffee Awards! This is the last chance to show the world your greatest marketing accomplishments for 2008. Finalists will be announced on the podcast tomorrow, and winners announced next week - only 5 will be honored!

Just comment here, or over at Marketing Over Coffee, all it takes is a link.

One other thing - now that I have cleaned up all of the infrastructure problems I’d really appreciate it if you would be willing to favorite me on Technorati. If you have any link scams that you want help with, I’m willing to barter! (Just kidding… no evil scams here.)

You are now looking at a 2.7 Wordpress blog (codename Coltrane). With this forced update it appears that I have vanquished the spammers that had taken up residence down in my footer, sending my Google juice to hell. Why didn’t I upgrade before switching domains you ask? Only so many hours in a day unfortunately.

Last week was WebInno 20, the new tech showcase that is a great way to find out what’s happening in tech in Boston. The sad part is that I still have paperwork on my desk from WebInno 19 that I had yet to write up. Sadder yet, I signed up for 20 and for some reason thought that it was on Wednesday, so when I checked my calendar that morning, it was too late, it had happened the night before.

Regardless, there are two things to take away from this  - one for David (as he usually keeps a good eye on who’s writing about the event) - if EventBrite could send a reminder email the day before that would help idiots like the man at this keyboard right now. We’ve had a lot of success doing this for webinars, I go so far as to send the reminder at the same time the event will be the next day so that it has context.

The other is that even though my feedback is late, that doesn’t take anything away from the fact that I was impressed by RunKeeper, an iPhone app that uses GPS to track your time and course. As a diehard Nike+ user (actually off the wagon now with the cold weather), this is very impressive. Since I don’t have an iPhone though, I’ll stay +.

I’m going to 2.7 to fix some spam problems, who knows what I’ll break.

The best part is one Doug Haslam has pointed out before - if I really break things, you won’t even see this!

UPDATE: Things are moving nicely, Technorati is giving me a shot at probation!

Technorati Profile

I had a Google alert trip this morning, Neville Hobson interviewed Scott Monty and Scott’s bio mentioned that he has been a co-host on Marketing Over Coffee (although I thought it went great, Chris Brogan referred to that episode as adding not only a 5th Beatle, but one with a Tuba).

Regardless of your opinion on past content, the reason I’m posting is that Neville has implemented Google’s Friend Connect. As opposed to joining a Ning group or any other closed network where you have to fill out a bunch of stuff, if you are already signed into your Google account you can join in two clicks. It’s very cool, check it out.