March Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup

Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup is back, with a great line up of speakers and an opportunity to share what you've been hacking on.

The format is changing just a bit, whereby free beer and plenty of time before the talks will give everyone a change to hang out, presentations will be a bit shorter, and there will be a hack-and-tell at the end. We'll still head to the bar after the event to continue to share ideas.

Planned talks:

Brent Bushnell - Founder and CEO of Two Bit Circus - Enjoy a dialog about the carnival of the future and how to inspire a generation of young inventors to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math.

Aaron Ross - VP Salesforce.com (retired) and Author of Amazon Bestseller "Predictable Revenue". We will have a scrum down on particulars of the book, steps for early stage entrepreneurs, and plenty of QA from the crowd. This is more of a discussion than a talk.

Paul Mestemaker - Case Study: HowACarWorks.com A HNer in the UK has a family friend who owned the rights to an out of print book about how cars works. With the family friend's permission, the HNer scanned in the pages of the book, ran some OCR, and launched HowACarWorks.com (http://howacarworks.com/). He built a custom Rails-based CMS and now gets thousands of visits/month. In a comment thread on HN, he had mentioned he knew nothing about SEO. Paul Mestemaker (http://paulmestemaker.com/), founder of Mythly Studios (http://mythly.com/), offered to help so long as he could publish the results. They're only a few weeks into the gig, but already have set new organic search traffic records for the site and decreased page load times by 20%-40%. Paul will share some of the lessons learned that would likely be valuable to any web developer/marketer such as:

How to more effectively measure your site speed in Google Analytics (custom javascript to increase site speed sample rate, custom reports in Google Analytics) Improving your site's speed (using Google Page Speed to assess your site, how to implement some of those recommendations, early results: 20-40%+ decrease in page load times) URL restructuring -- When should you consider it? Importance of 301 redirects on Google's ranking algorithm; What to expect when you do change your URLs How we used keyword research to figure out a way to collect email addresses Advanced profile techniques for identifying sources linking to you (e.g. finding exact forum posts linking to you) Have you been working on a project in your spider hole for months? Do you have a secret stealth idea that is ready for the world? Do just want some good old fashioned opinionated feedback from your peers?

This is the forum!! You'll have about 5 mins to take the stage and demo/show/share your project. Please let the organizers know prior to the event.