Jeroen Dekker (photography) on-line

Rowan Rodrik — Tue, 29 May 2007 23:02:19 +0000

Jeroen Dekker, a friend and photographer, has recently, on May the 5th, put his website on concert photography on-line. (Go check it out! He has some great pictures there.)

I was very flattered when I was asked by Jeroen to give some SEO advice in the test stage of his website. I was even happier when I saw how well he had implemented my suggestions. In his concert photography section, he now has links consisting of the event name and the band name and the number of the photo. An example URL: http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/noordschok-2007/prey-band/1/. Also his page titles follow the same structure. As is often the case with SEO, the best results are acquired by remembering that good URLs are URLs which are cool enough that you won’t want to change the in the future and that good titles are titles which look good anywhere, be it in a bookmark or a search result.

I also noticed that, following some evangelizing on semantics and CSS from me, he had greatly cleaned up the HTML markup. Some pages could still profit from some ~~better~~more pedantic markup though. An example from the news section (cleaned up for readability):

The following bands played:
- "http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/fear-dark-festival-hedon-12-mei-2007/eluveitie-band/">Eluveitie
- "http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/fear-dark-festival-hedon-12-mei-2007/thy-majestie-band/">Thy Majestie
- "http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/fear-dark-festival-hedon-12-mei-2007/drottnar-band/">Drottnar
- "http://jeroen-dekker.com/concerts/fear-dark-festival-hedon-12-mei-2007/whispering-gallery-band/">Whispering Gallery

In my opinion, the above is a very awkward way to define what is really an unordered list:

The following bands played:

Finally, a nice touch that I noticed on his site is that he doesn’t have explicit pagination. By this I mean that clicking on the page 2 link simply takes you to the first photo on that page, so that he needs only an URL for each photo and not an URL for each page or even photoset.

Wiebe Hedde Cazemier

Rowan Rodrik — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:07:34 +0000

If you’re into Open Source software, 3D modeling or Do It Yourself audio, you may already know Wiebe under his on-line alias, Halfgaar. Personally, I’ve known him since I was 10 and he was 9. These days he’s still a very good friend, and even a colleague.

His Ferrari F50, not your usual lawn decoration.

Strongly straight-forward

As a very analytical, factual thinker, Wiebe is the kind of person who doesn’t run with the newest buzzwords. He simply says what he thinks and his thoughts usually follow from very sound and steady logic. As a programmer, this makes him invaluable. At times, as a human, this may make him hard to stomach if, as is usual, he is right and you are not. But, don’t worry: he will usually be kind enough to explain to you exactly—very exactly—why it is that you are wrong.

So, he may not be the type for marketing, but for anything that needs to be done robustly and thoroughly, he is irreplaceable.

Solid knowledge

System administration: As every Geek with family and friends, Wiebe has the obligatory knowledge of how to keep a network of Windows systems somewhat stable, but this knowledge is irrelevant compared to his experience and skill in Unix system administration. His favourite Linux distribution is Gentoo Linux and, as follows from his many posts to the Gentoo Forums, he is a Linux Guru indeed.
Backups: even to most system administrators, they’re just an afterthought, but he really knows his dar backups from your tar’s. And, he’s published about it too.
Audio-engineering requires an enormous level of insight in the complex dynamics of audio waves and electronics. To me, it’s mostly Chinese, but he has built his own amps, speakers and subwoofer. If he notices even the slightest artifact in the sound, he goes back to the drawing board and just redoes the circuits another time.

Learn more

Wiebe can be contacted at wiebe@halfgaar.net, unless if you’re a spammer, because he happens to be an expert-level SpamAssassin administrator.

Web presence