Debunking SEO Myths And Old Webmaster’s Tales

Posted on August 6, 2010
Filed Under Neat Things | Leave a Comment

Would you wear a tin foil hat if it thought it would help your page rank? I wouldn’t either, but you would be surprised what some people do in an effort to get more visitors to their web site.  One of the most useful tags on Pro Webmasters is the SEO tag, we’re already working collaboratively to debunk or prove myths about search engine optimization. There are even several Google employees helping out by cautioning people to not try any crazy tricks to improve their ranking.

Who would have thought that the best way to attract visitors is to provide standards compliant semantically correct HTML documents that also offered interesting and useful content? I’ve known this for years, but it feels good to see my thoughts validated and endorsed by my peers.

If you have not already done so, check out Pro Webmasters. The questions are interesting, the community is friendly and the turn around to get an answer is often less than an hour. If your question has anything at all to do with maintaining or operating a web site, it is welcome there. Just try to ask questions that can be answered with facts and data vs opinion.

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On Q&A And Broken Windows

Posted on July 13, 2010
Filed Under Future Presents | Leave a Comment

Have you ever driven through a bad neighborhood with lots of rubbish blowing about and felt less guilty than you would otherwise by throwing a banana peel out of your car window? Perhaps an empty soda can? If you have, you’ve demonstrated what we call the broken window theory. Not surprisingly, the theory also applies to digital real estate, if you can accept that term long enough to finish this brief essay.

When most people get in their cars, they have every intention of arriving at a specific place in a certain amount of time. Some people just get bored and go for a drive. The Internet works this way as well, you might boot up your computer and go straight to e-mail, or wander around a bit. In either metaphor, both people have equal chances of driving through the same ‘digital’ neighborhoods.

I’m digressing into metaphors, so lets get to the point. One of the broadest reasons people use the Internet is to gain some kind of knowledge, though some may not realize that hidden intention when they start. If you want knowledge, its most conveniently obtained by asking a question. Q&A sites help ensure that your natural “how do I ...” question works in search engines, by providing results that they can index. Read more

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No More Favors To Internet Explorer

Posted on July 2, 2010
Filed Under Programming | Leave a Comment

This is a short rant. I am not going to continue to work around a browser that does not adhere to standards, no matter how many people use what I wrote. If this site looks awkward for you, get a standards compliant browser. I am also officially ignoring any bug reports pertaining to stuff that I wrote not working correctly in various versions of Internet Explorer. I’d rather just issue you a refund than add kludges that will break in the future, only to add more kludges.

Try:

We have standards, the company that wrote Internet Explorer choses to ignore them, hence I won’t support it. Note, I’m not demeaning Lynx, I use it avidly.

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Rare Knowledge Is Often Unrewarded

Posted on July 1, 2010
Filed Under Humor | Leave a Comment

I was reflecting today on a joke koan that I read, somewhere, I can’t remember where (and I’ve added to it):

A locomotive breaks down and an engineer is called in to fix it. The engineer listens to the sounds of the locomotive, reaches in his tool box and pulls out a hammer. He crawls under the train, bangs four times on something and then crawls out from under the train. He looks at the manager, hands him an invoice and says “All fixed, boss.”

The manager looks at the invoice that says $1500.00 then says  ”All you did was whack it with a hammer four times!”

The engineer smiled and said “Whacking that piece with a hammer four times: $100. Knowing where and how to whack it: $1400. You got a break, I usually charge per hit.”

The manager was then enlightened.

I thought those who read this blog might enjoy that :)

I’m almost positive that I saw the original version of this on Stack Overflow, but I can’t seem to find it now. It could be that the post has since been deleted. If you know where it is, please leave a comment.

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Duplicating The Guts Of Giants

Posted on July 1, 2010
Filed Under Programming | Leave a Comment

We’re all impressed and fascinated with the inner workings of Stack Overflow. Its one of the few web based services that has actually impressed me. Every single button, link, label or sprite belongs exactly where it is. The tools provided are exactly adequate for users to accomplish what they want to do, no more – no less. That’s not surprising, the people who built the site have turned software usability into its own religion.

Its one of the few sites that I’ve ever seen that did not go overboard or too stringent with the use of AJAX. How do you know a great user interface? It doesn’t get in your way.

Breaking SO down into its basic useful and novel elements we have:

Read more

Shared Web Hosting Is Not Dead

Posted on June 29, 2010
Filed Under The Web Hosting Industry | Leave a Comment

An old colleague of mine was telling me of his plans to finally, after almost fifteen years of working for someone else, start his own hosting venture. My first instinct was of course to offer this poor soul some Lithium, seeing that his existing salary as CTO is more than triple the amount of profit he could expect from a start up web hosting venture in the first few years. I listened patiently as he unveiled his plan to take over the universe one domain at a time when all of a sudden he completely shocked me:

“I’m not doing shared, too much hassle and nobody wants it. Cloud, baby! CLOUD!”

Interestingly, I was just in the process of setting up a re-seller account for another friend when he dropped in. I didn’t say much, I just let him finish. He was looking for a sympathetic ear and he found one, I am well known for being rather prolific in my development of tools to make Xen easier for web hosts. I don’t think he was expecting my reply, which was:

“All these years, and you still don’t get it.”

Read more

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Security And The Starving Kitten Problem

Posted on June 18, 2010
Filed Under Rants | Leave a Comment

I am known to be extremely pedantic when it comes to security. Why? I help to safe guard personally identifiable information. I’ve often said that proper security can almost never be convenient. In some instances, not following proper practices is effectively breaking the law (HIPAA). Yet, some users – in particular non technical managers, can not seem to grasp the fact that I can’t allow them access to certain things on their iPhone from a beach in Tahiti over open WiFi. More often than not, people only consider what they are trying to accomplish, not what any given system sees them as doing.

I’ve come up with a great analogy that some of you might find helpful in explaining why we can’t ‘change the system’ to allow certain things:

It is midnight. Inside of a locked bank is a locked bank vault. The vault contains two things, a giant stack of money and a starving kitten that is crying out for help. Two people are attempting to enter the bank – one of them a bank robber, the other one an animal lover. One wants the cash, the other wants to save the kitten.

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Google Jumping Out Of Windows?

Posted on June 2, 2010
Filed Under Rants | 2 Comments

The thing is, you never really know with Google. From the outside looking in, guessing at the internals of Google technology is just that, guessing. However, reports of some Google employees claiming that the giant is ditching Windows completely over security concerns following the incident in China are surfacing. I think that reporting is once again coming out way too early, and too much emphasis is being placed on the security aspect of what may or may not be an actual decision of the Google higher ups.

Lets take a look at what we know about Google, mostly from the code that they give us and what they’ve said in talks: Read more

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