Subjects:
Webdesigner's Little Helper
If you're often asked to make the logo a little bigger, to remove some white space, to add more fluorescence or more emotion - you know the type of client - then you'll find the right product mix right here.
Pagerank updated
After a lot
of sites were left out in the cold in the wake of last week's Pagerank fix the same
changes have now affected link selling sites in many countries. There are, however,
some sites whose PR has been increased although they have been selling links
ads for years.
People who have avoided dodgy links will be smirking gleefully. But I fear that some shady characters might be rubbing their hands: time to hyperpromote forum posts and blog comments with entries such as "I couldn't understand some parts of this story, have to check elsewhere". The signal to noise ratio probably takes another hit.
Yahoo Numbers
Don't faint if you check your links using Yahoo's Site Explorer. Yahoo just announced that the inlink numbers are somewhat off until "next week".
Pagerank Update
Quite a few people believe the way Google's Pagerank algorithm juggles value has been changed. A number of sites selling text ads appear to have lost quite a bit of PR. Downgrades are between 2.0 and 3.0 on the one to ten Pagerank scale for popular sites including autoblog.com, forbes.com and the washingtonpost.com.
Others appear to have stable PR values even if they've been selling ads through one of Google's mini competitors or on their own for ages. Could this be another high profile demonstration like the [very temporary] banning of BMW last February to signal that links aren't a commodity?
Google Promotion
The Google Logo has two new O's.
In other News
For once a step in the right direction has been taken despite the European Commission: the American DRM will be restricted to the USA, as Microsoft has been forced to publish an irrevocable pledge not to assert any patents it may have. Non-commercial European Open Source developers don't even need to listen to unsubstantiated patent claims anymore.
Patently obvious
Amazon has been awarded yet another "non-obvious" patent. I wish I knew what these guys are smoking.
Degree For Sale - one previous owner
So we read again that links should not be sold, and that the powers that be may or may not devalue or punish sites which sell links like others sell merchandise. Nothing wrong with that, and nothing new really, since Google started to be concerned with this very problem some years back. I didn't hear any alarm bells ringing at the time when Google announced their interest in programming solutions to "Detecting common templates in pages, and separating out the common structure from the individual content, where all the sins take place.
To me, and probably some others, it was obvious, they were going to try to differentiate between "real" page content and all the bits we humans routinely ignore because of their irrelevance.
Links aren't - and not just in theory - that different from degrees. One you bought at a degree mill isn't really that prestigious. Applies to web as well: if lots of people really praise your site, it not only will be recognised as what it is [an opinion expressed through linking], it will also be as close to eternal as it can be on the web.
Unhinged
Here he claims yet again to have as many or more rights than SCO, and here he demonstrates his eloquence in full.
Too shallow
After some email exchanges several years back I always regarded Urs Hölzle as someone whose manners showed an enormous amount of potential.
AP now confirms that my first impression was probably right.
MSN's going to be like Google - was
You must've read it several times this morning, as lots of media repeat MSFT's PR saying "Microsoft rolls out search improvements". What they do is adding stemming to their search engine, plus a few other tricks in discovering and discounting stop words.
Stemming was an advanced technology when first published in 1968. Because it wasn't finished then, Martin Porter published his improved and elegant algorithm for english language words in 1980, which was used, rewritten and cloned umpteen times, but never improved. More like slightly broken, as none of the implementations were error free when compared to Porter's publication or an english dictionary. For this reason he released a library of code for english and other [stemmable] languages about 20 years later.
Google started using a form of stemming around 2003. And now Microsoft regards itself on a par with Google as it will introduce stemming as well. It seems to ignore the fact that others may have moved on.
Hasta la Vista
I had a notebook on order from Dell for delivery around the 25th of this month when I read this morning that Microsoft no longer insists on their WGA-thingy during the MSIE 7 installation.
I immediately made a copy of the virtual disk used by qemu, started XP as a guest OS under Linux, and downloaded and installed MSIE 7. Bingo, worked.
I later phoned Dell to cancel my order, and lo and behold, they obliged without batting an eyelid [they've also been quite good with some hardware problems I had last year, btw].
Reason I ordered a notebook in the first place was that WGA had prevented me from installing MSIE 7 when running XP under qemu emulation. For some reason it regarded the version of XP taken off the Dell media [the Dells I use all run Linux] as "non-genuine".
First MSIE 7-impressions: far fewer bugs than previous models for common CSS usage. And the pretty "Back" and "Forward" buttons reminds me of a Scooter.
Your taxes at work
Just in case you didn't know what "Value Added Tax" was good for, here's a screenshot explaining it all:
Adobe web server wide open
I thought it strange when I noticed that lots of Photoshop files were installed with mode 0777 on my Powerbook [for non geeks that means everyone on your system has permission to mess with those files]. That was fixed easily enough with a recursive chmod go-w.
When Photoshop CS3 was published, there were warnings that the installer actually turns off the firewall on the system, something unheard of. Now Heise Security reports that Adobe's web server is abusable. They don't really understand a lot about security, do they?
http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/96605
© Copyright 1998 - 2008 Klaus Schallhorn.