Local listings, Git, and the awesome size of the internet – The Monday Nov 8th Roundup

After a crazy summer, an even crazier fall, it’s now winter and it’s sunny and warm. You know there’s some strange weather forces at play. Fortunately this also means less rain, which is always a plus in “The Grey Zone” of the North West Coast.

Also, is it just me or are people blogging less? My reader list has gone from 300 some odd posts a week to ~100, and my Twitter streams have been flooded with retweets instead of new content.

Anyhow, this week we’ve got a guide to local listings, getting started with git, and the awesome size of the internet. Hit up the [more] for… well… more.

• Milwaukee SEO gets to crown our week with his Guide to Google Places and Local Listings. This is a pretty detailed guide, talking about everything from your basic Google Places listings, to adding videos and images, optimizing on-Page content, and going off-site. Good stuff.
• Huo Mah really does create great content. Today’s is The Art of War – SEO style. While I question the metaphorical appropriateness of comparing SEO to war, his break down is pretty clever.

• Around our office a lot of our development projects go through subversion, but for the smaller projects I work on I’ve been taking a look at Git. As fate would have it, this week A List Apart has a post on Getting Started with Git, giving a lot of great information on this particular version control technology.
• From SmashingMag we’ve got a great little bit on creating equal height column layouts using borders and negative margins. It’s pretty clever, using a 200px border to create a unicolor column. Unfortunately it also prevents you from doing background graphics in your column. Of course, a gradient fading into your background color will still look great.

• Avinash has a great post on the Yahoo Web Analytics blog explaining how to get started with web analytics. If you’ve been following him then you know the basics: design business goals that you can measure, set goals, segment.
• The Google Analytics Blog has announced new Intelligence features, including “major contributors” for custom alerts, as well as SMS and email alerts.

• I always find these posts after I’m done doing what they advise on… this time it’s 6 important things to consider when doing a website redesign.
• Uxmag has a very information rich post on using social media technologies to drive UX design and product strategy. That’s all well and good, but my god can they redesign their front page? Go ahead, try to find that somewhere on their post grid. It’s almost as bad as The Register.

• You know how I complained earlier about posts coming out after I no longer have need of them? Well not this time. Mashable has a guide to Facebook likes and shares. Their advice? Don’t favour one over the other, rather think about each as serving a different engagement form.
• We’ll end it all with something fun: TheRoxor’s infographic on The Awesome Size of the Internet.