We're on the Map

Dayton Diode has a Place Page, so we show up on Google Maps in local searches now. Our first mail at the space was a couple of postcards (I messed up and had to get them to resend) from Google confirming that we are who and where we claim to be. Ah, the intersection of the virtual and the physical, clicking a link caused the postcards to be sent. That's what hackerspaces are all about right?

Dayton Diode Place Page QR Code

Our discussion quickly turned geeky since, along with our place page, we get a QR code that people can scan with their phone's camera (and appropriate app). Embedded in the code is a link to the place page. The question that came up is about QR codes on business cards; I suggested that it sounded like a good idea, but was worried about things looking cluttered or gimicky. My networking and job interviewing experience is pretty limited though, so I might be missing something important on this topic.

QR code best practices:

• Mobilize the landing page
  
• Keep the url short
  
• Make the content valuable
  

Really easy to generate QR codes with zint. If you have a sane OS you can probably just do something like

[roothax0r@boxen]$ yum -y install zint

And then a little one-liner like

[hax0r@boxen]$ zint -b 58 --scale=2 -d http://daytondiode.org

will give you a QR code in 'out.png'. Here's the one for daytondiode.org: