I’m not obsessing too much about SEO for the new site. I’m just doing all the basic blocking and tackling, and focusing on the customer experience for now.

That said, Aaron Wall’s new SEO toolbar is pretty damn useful. I really like the integrations with all the other services. It seems to do a really good job pulling all this disparate information together.

Plus, it doesn’t phone home. That would have been a deal-breaker.

Jeff Atwood and team have built a new product called Stack Overflow, a question and answer site for programmers. It’s very early, but I think it will be successful. It’s certainly been useful for me.

For Serendeputy, I’m building an index of articles relevant to me, and I need to be able to generate a unique id based on the url. I experimented with (what appeared to be) the obvious solution, but it wasn’t working. So, I asked the question: “What’s the best way to hash a url in Ruby?” Within three minutes, I got a useful answer. By morning, I received three answers, with the best answer sorted to the top.

This is incredibly useful. I have a stack of Ruby books at my desk, and I’m often flipping through them trying to find a specific answer. I generally know *what* I’m trying to accomplish; I’m just lost on the syntax and the proper Ruby idiom to use. If my experience is typical, then Stack Overflow is a very useful supplement to these references.

Stack Overflow has a ton of Google juice already. My question is number one for the relevant search query: hash a url ruby. Most of the time when I do a Google search for specific questions, I get links to the Ruby documentation (which I already have) and a decent amount of off-topic spam. If Stack Overflow gets a critical mass of specific questions with canonical answers, then Google will become much more useful for everyone.

I’m very impressed with how they’ve focused on the customer experience. I’m trying to keep the same ideals with my project. Unlike those folks at that annoying site, they have everything open and clean. They have advertising, but it’s inobtrusive. And, the value of the product was so high that I actually made a point of looking at the advertising, seeing that an advertiser who’s associating with this useful an application is probably worth checking out. It’s amazing what optimizing for the customer experience will do for you.

It reminds me of how I felt in 1999 when I switched from Alta Vista to Google.

One quibble: Requiring people to get an OpenId is a mistake. Everyone in their target market has a simple throwaway handle/password combination that they use on all these sites. Unless it’s a pragmatic choice — they don’t have to program the authentication module — I think it’s a mistake to go against the grain of what people expect for these sites. Requiring an OpenId dissuaded me from registering; I just posted as a guest.

Alan is continuing to do a great job with The Big Picture. I really like the way that he’s handling sensitive pictures in this gallery covering the Georgian crisis.

Editor’s note: I’m trying to give back a little to community by sharing things I find exceptional. I hope to be able to share a couple of these a week.

I love listening to Leo Laporte‘s TWIT podcast (netcast?) network. I’ve been listening to these podcasts for a couple of years now and they continue to deliver each week.

These are my favorites:

This Week in Tech

This is the flagship podcast, the weekly roundup of tech news and gossip. It’s quality varies widely based on the guests, but it’s still worth a listen every week.

MacBreak Weekly

This is a really fun podcast in which the team, usually including Alex Lindsay, Scott Bourne, Andy Ihnatko and Merlin Mann, talk about the Mac, along with many many many other topics. MacBreak Weekly is like hanging out with some of my geekier friends for a couple of hours. That’s probably the highest compliment I can pay.

The weekly picks are very useful, too. Scrivener, which I’m using to write this post and which will likely be the subject of future fan mail, came to my attention via a recommendation from Andy Ihnatko.

Security Now

This is Steve Gibson‘s podcast, in which they talk quite geekily about security topics. A lot of the topics fly over my head, but I’ve learned a decent amount on web security topics by listening to this one. The bi-weekly listener question shows always contain a tasty nugget or two.

Since I’ve stopped communiting into Boston each day, my podcasting time is way down. I still make sure to listen to these three each week, though.