Trying out Twitter
I recently signed up for Twitter after a long time of thinking it was a retarded idea. I have come to find it pretty interesting and a valuable resource of industry related information. Follow the adventures of joe @ http://twitter.com/joekonet
What is Twitter?
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.
Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the USA, Canada, and India, as well as a UK number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email.
Posted March 15, 2008
Blog redesign complete
The integration of my design and WordPress was a success as far as I can tell. It turned out being a little more tricky than I assumed working with the includes, so I decided to just integrate the php bits into one file (index). Comments and suggestions are very welcome. IE6, IE7, Firefox and Netscape (PC) are all displaying correctly.
I also took the time to validate @ XHTML Strict, but WordPress insists on inserting target_blank tags. I wouldn’t mind a feature that defaulted to onclick=”target=’_blank’”.
Posted December 10, 2007
XHTML/CSS & SEO
Tips taken from Brandon’s Weblog posted on A List Apart describing how to optimized your site using XHTML/CSS:
- Maintain a good content to code ratio
- Improving your structural organization will ensure that spiders know what you’re trying to show them
- Declare your main heading as H1
- Using H1 through H6 accordingly
- H1 tag placed directly after the body tag will be weighted heavily by many search engines
- CSS for rollover effects instead of separate images will give you an advantage in search engine positioning
Also - Why tables for layout is stupid !!
Posted November 27, 2007
blog etiquette
In the article “How to Write a Better Weblog“, Dennis A. Mohoney provides several interesting opinions regarding blog etiquette. Being that I am often reluctant to post blogs - and now have one, It felt like the right time to look into what constitutes a worthy blog.
- Grammar, spelling, punctuation, rythm, focus, syntax and structure play an important role in getting your message across to the reader. If your blog is not easily read, it is unlikely it will be frequently visited. Studying horrendous language can help prevent similar mistakes in your own writing.
- Avoid first person point of view. It is not against the rules, but should not be seen as the only choice. In many situations the second- or third-person may be more effective.
- Amusing your readers is also a way to gain momentum. Not taking yourself too seriously is important, and you should expect rational/irrational criticism.
- Find fresh content. Many bloggers link to the same sites over and over. Wired probably has a link leading to it from 90% of all blogs. Finding fresh resources will not only help your blog be more interesting, but it will expose more of the web in the process.
Posted November 24, 2007
robots.txt
It is easy to spot when a spider crawls your site simply by checking your access logs. Traces are left behind just as any IP address of a visitor that has requested a file from your server. Knowing what spiders crawl your site also helps determine if your web stats (pages visited) are accurate, or if all the ‘visitors’ you think you are getting are actually bots.
Spiders are often spotted by their names, for instance, HotBot’s spider is named slurp and Alta Vista’s spider is named scooter. Reviewing all requests of the robots.txt file is usually your best clue, as spiders request this file to check which pages are to be indexed (although some do not follow this convention).
Posted September 10, 2007
Wiki Search?
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced yesterday that he will be pursuing a wiki-developed search engine. His intentions are to pursue the search market through his for-profit spinoff company, Wikia Inc. - Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! being the direct competitors which are all very heavily funded.
Investors will not be hard to win over when imagining the dollar value of the non-profit site Wikipedia, the most often visited as a result of a Google search. The traffic to Wikipedia has grown by 680% in the past two years. Amazon has already made an investment in the idea (other investors have also sent $4 million his way). A unique approach will be critical if Wiki is going to try and make a dent in the market this late in the game.
Posted September 9, 2007
Criticisms of folksonomy
Some critics suggest that leaving the categorization of content up to the user may be unreliable and inconsistent, creating “meta noise” as a result of an uncontrolled vocabulary. Web sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us allow users to tag content, with the intention of making not only text, but rich media findable.
Some of the shortcomings of user-tagged content include:
- polysemy - words which have multiple related meanings.
- synonyms- multiple words with the same or similar meanings.
- word inflections - words with plural forms, ie “dog” versus “dogs”.
wiki - “The lack of a hierarchical or systematic structure for the tagging system makes the terms relevant to what they are describing, but they often fail to show their relevancy or relationship to other objects of the same or similar type.”
Posted March 9, 2007
Cost Per Click Services
An online presentation of Cost Per Click Services using Eric Meyers S5 tool compares the differences between Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter.
Summary:
- The biggest difference between the major players is the ranking system and how you pay per click.
- With Yahoo!, you know exactly what you are paying for. Google does not reveal the exact amount you are paying per click.
- Google yields more page views - increasing your chance of a click though.
- Yahoo! displays results incrementally according to bid. Google rewards advertisers with rank for better Click Though Rates(CTR).
- Ultimately, You will pay less per click with Yahoo, but have better results using Google.
Posted March 3, 2007
Drupal vs. Wordpress
When considering using Drupal or Wordpress to manage your site, several important differentiating factors are to be considered. Although the functionality of the two may seem similar at first sight, they are very different.
Drupal and Worpress both produce search engine friendly content. These two open-source management systems are widely used and are both known for their standards compliance. The similarities pretty much end there.
Drupal is not a blogging tool. It can be used for blogging, but has much more to it. In the case that you will simply need a blogging tool, Wordpress may be a better option seeing as it is much easier to install and get up and running. If you are looking for something with much more depth and focus on taxonomy, Drupal far exceeds the limitations of Wordpress.
Take a tour of Drupal
From Ethan Zukerman’s blog:
“WordPress is an open source weblogging platform. It’s the platform I use to manage this blog and the platform - with some modifications - that Global Voices runs on. It has a reputation for being very user friendly, but for having some underlying architectural problems that make it hard to scale. Drupal is an open source multi-purpose content management system designed for the support of complex websites with multiple authors. It has a reputation for being ludicriously flexible, ungodly powerful and far too complex for mere mortals to use.”
Posted March 3, 2007
Drupal Clean URLs
Drupal is an open source content management system written by Dries Buytaert originally as a bulletin board system. Many popular dynamic content driven web sites such as The Onion, Spread Firefox, Ourmedia, KernelTrap, and Defective by Design are all currently built using Drupal. The code produced by Drupal is search engine friendly, clean, and standards compliant. One of the larger quailities of Drupal is it’s effective use of search friendly URL’s. This is accomplished through the use of “clean_urls”.
Clean URLs:
Drupal passes path arguments to itself via its internally generated URLs. This results in URLs that look like the following: “http://www.example.com/?q=node/64.” This makes URLs difficult to read and also stops many search engines from indexing the pages. To avoid this, Drupal uses “clean URLs”, eliminating the “?q=” in internal URLs. Following is an example with Clean URLs enabled: “http://www.example.com/my-nice-url”.
Note* It is better to enable URL rewrites though the httpd.conf file as opposed to .htaccess when possible, as it provides better performance and security.
Posted March 3, 2007
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