May 20th, 2006
Anthony
Or: A trait I have not yet mastered
So I was reading about this interview that Aaron Wall conducted with Kim Krause Berg, titled ‘Blog Usability Interview‘. Aaron is this really clever guy who wrote the ‘SEO Book‘. (Its a great read, check this review out.)
Kim Grause Berg (never heard of her) is apparently this girl who does reviews on blog usability. Its kind of a first I suppose, and has sparked my interest given that I studied Information Environments. IE was a toilet-paper degree with a lot of focus on Interaction Design, Usability Design, and lots of other two-letter acronyms. (But only those ending with ‘design’.) Read the rest of this entry »
May 19th, 2006
Anthony
This is a new issue, and one that appears to be especially important to Google. What makes google trust your domain?
Well, it seems like there are a few factors contributing:
- Age of domain
- Incoming links (quality, not quantity)
- Historical information (have you been spamming, do you have a history?)
The most important factor, by far, is the age of the domain.
Read the rest of this entry »
May 18th, 2006
Anthony
On Page Factors - what does that even mean?
Well, its everything on your page. Lets look at the basics first…
- Title tag
- Meta tags
- Heading tags
- Keyword density
- Meaning HTML markup
Thats the short list, now lets look closely… Read the rest of this entry »
May 17th, 2006
Anthony
Incoming links are very important to your site’s SEO strategy. The basic theory behind search engines is that the engine will pretend to be a user on a website. The ‘user’ starts clicking links - any links. Eventually, they’ll cover all the sites that have links to them. So the more links to your site, the quicker you’ll be found.
Once search engines started getting huge amounts of pages indexed, they needed to figure out a way to rank the page - to determine how important it is, and what search phrases the page would be relevant for. Engines use a bunch of factors for this, but links are an important one. Read the rest of this entry »
May 17th, 2006
Anthony
Had a little discussion in the office today, regarding SEO. We came up with this shortlist:
- Frequency of content updates
- Incoming Links
- On-page factors
- Trusted domain
There’s more, obviously. But these are the major factors affecting search engine placement. Lets discuss in more detail. This is post number one of a four-part series, in which I’ll go over these four tips.
Frequency of content updates
Read the rest of this entry »
May 4th, 2006
Anthony
So today at work, just as its time to go home, I hear Tina swear under her breath. “Why is this font so tiny?”
She was publishing a post for Tailored.com.au, which uses blogger. Blogger is kinda nice in a lot of ways. Its free, its easy, any dummy can do it. And you can set up your own templates to keep the blog in theme with the rest of your site. Blogger allows you a blogspot account - so your blog is visible at http://you.blogspot.com, but also allows ‘publishing’ - that is, you write your posts in blogger and then blogger creates pages on your server via an FTP connection. It creates an index page that lists all the recent posts, and summaries each month for archives, as well as an individual page for each post. (See example, Tailored post about gold coast accommodation)
So whats so bad about that?
Well sure, you say that now. After all, you’re not the one who looked closely at today’s blog post, trying to figure out why the font was funny. It looked fine in blogger’s preview function, but once it was published, it was just all kinds of messed up.
So I hit the ‘view source’ button. Read the rest of this entry »
May 4th, 2006
Anthony
Its always a hassle, isn’t it. You code up your webapp and store timestamps from events - then later you have to do the conversion in your head because the server your site sits on is on the other side of the world.
Michael Phipps touches on the subject, mentioning an issue with attempting local timezones in multi-user systems.
Last week Pete was trying to solve a problem, and ran into the issue of not being able to change the timezone on his server, even though he needed all times stored in Australian Eastern Standard. As one does, he didn’t find a decent solution until he’d already implemented a hack.
echo date('r');
// Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:38:30 +0000
?>
If you do not have access to editing the server time, here's a quick fix:
// For example, to output Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5:00)
putenv("TZ=EST");
echo date('r');
// Fri, 17 Mar 2006 07:38:30 -0500
?>
How easy is that!