Subjects:
Antisocial Networking
Cory Doctorow points out in an Information Week article, why the idea of social networking is as short lived as many other non substantial ideas. Who wants to be constantly reminded about people one doesn't want to know about.
Weight Watch
Here's how to make something that's already bulky even more heavy weight. Sometimes you just need to bring the wrong people together.
Open Backdoor
Content Management Systems aren't really produced with security in mind. Their one and only aim is enabling those who don't know better to publish. Sometimes "modified content" does get noticed, however.
Slow Death
Have traditional media had their day? Almost, even if not all of them are aware of it.
DiggRank Guesswork
Digg has, like any other mechanism ordering things by some criteria, an algorithm, we're told by Muhammad Saleem in a Search Engine Land article. What is supposed to be a "deeper look at what the Digg algorithm is" doesn't look much like a description of an algorithm but more like assumptions on probably educated guesses.
Blackish Magic at its Best
Matt Cutts entertains today with an hilarious example of an "SEO company" promising their cloaking script cannot be detected by search engines and how to deconstruct such stupid claims.
Rumination
The Dmoz Blog explains [when it doesn't produce HTTP error 500], what has been explained before but obviously still isn't obvious: "Why hasn't my site been accepted into DMOZ?"
http://blog.dmoz.org/2007/10/08/why-hasnt-my-site-been-accepted-into-dmoz/
Thou shalst not sell links
Google's Webmaster pages now state that selling links [and being caught] doesn't just reduce your Pagerank, it may also "negatively impact a site's ranking in search results".
Size matters
It appears most web designers seem not to believe they're the only one using their browser at full screen size. Smashing magazine elaborates, why content should be flexible so it can adapt to window rather than screen size. Those posting comments agree - with something - and then state the pixel widths they design to.
Linkbait
Phantasy and creativity is all you need to accumulate the right sort of links. If the start page of Jan von Hollebens Site doesn't convince you, have a look at his series Dreams of Flying.
Public Exposure
Mark Pilgrim, according to this post, a Google employee, makes a scathing attack on Hivelogic's Dan Benjamin for his step by step instructions on how to install MySQL on an Apple server.
My dear boy, sometimes you cannot afford to wait for a prepackaged fix to appear, and sometimes the vendor supplied build of a packaged fix is not what you want, because it includes or assumes things not applicable in your situation. Understanding essential tools used professionally is part of being responsible. Even if the american legal system has its own quirks, and abusers, you don't want to be charged with negligence, or have negligence on your conscience. Ethics do matter. As does language.
Coin.ciden.tal
The german news site Heise reports that Yahoo, owner of del.icio.us, has asked the german operator of the bookmarking site icio.de - a sequence of letters not found in any german word - to please cease and desist. Remember: you can't just copy the internet.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/99299
Consistent Font Sizing
Richard Rutter explains in A List Apart how to use font-size and line-height consistently even when using multiple columns and font sizes across the major browsers.
Webkit Changes
With OS X 10.4.11 and 10.5 Apple introduced ten changes to Webkit Web Designers targeting the Safari and Konqueror Browsers should be aware of.
Linkpop for the Hard of Hearing
Now that openly sold links have been demoted Google goes after paid bloggers who write about paying firms or their products in order to link their sites if you believe PayPerPost's T. Murphy.
Links can be classed into two groups: real ones and fake ones, those where money or some other form of consideration changes hands. Strangely most commercial sites try to get fake ones and then to hide their fakeness in such a way that the search engines [software] quality control regards them as real links. And it's this mindset that makes these sources worthless. It's not how many people you can pay to say you're cool. It's how cool you are that matters.
Lights, Curtains ...
It appears to be fashionable at the moment to produce movies for near everything to be published irrespective of use or intended audience. Ignoring the fact that movie files don't contain HTML and thus are somewhat difficult to optimise for search engines, one should consider if a movie is the best media type for an application. I don't believe technical documentation should be wrapped in a video: users can't underline or highlight things they deem particularly important, and one can't jump from paragraph to paragraph like I'm used to in a book or printout of a FAQ or Howto.
Which allows me to announce a home movie filmed using a cheap wireless camera bought on an auction site and captured on an old linux box using motion, because I wanted to know where the damn cat comes into our garden to defecate.
Being in Control
Just because something is free and Open Source doesn't mean it's automatically good or safe. Unless you fully understand what you're doing you shouldn't really be surprised if reality doesn't match expectations. Many a CMS has not been designed with security in mind. If the installation instructions, FAQ or other documents suggest you chmod 777 some files or directories [I think younger people call these folders now], you're allowing anyone [!] to modify or replace files or directory contents at their leisure. Not necessarily a wise career move.
Split Personality
The register reports that Ebay seems to misplace things these days, especially accounts or payments.
Considering, that in their server header they're not even sure which server software they're using, it doesn't really come as a surprise.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:14:32 GMT Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 Set-Cookie: dp1=bu1p/QEBfX0BAX19AQA**491aba99^; [snip ...] Set-Cookie: nonsession=BAQAAARY2TiKZAAaAAMsAAUc5j [snip ...] Set-Cookie: s=CgAD4ACBHOtiZMzhiN2JiNjMxMTYwYTBi [snip ...] Cache-Control: private Pragma: no-cache Content-Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Length: 36434
Labour of Hype
Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog details that Jimmy Wales' plans for his search engine based on a Wikipedia-like model [i.e. free labour from the public] are based on the acquisition of Grub from LookSmart for just $50,000. Looksmart shelled out $1.3 million for Grub. That makes the deal yet another not so very smart loss.
Bribing one's way
Throwing $400,000 at a supplier to get a government body to use Windows instead of Linux on about 17,000 PCs is called a bribe. Interestingly, it's illegal in the US although the dirty deed happened in Nigeria.
Bribing one's users
Market Watch reports renewed efforts by Microsoft to make their type of search more appealing to users.
Don't give up yet
I'm not normally interested in advertising but someone was kind enough to point this movie out to me. It's funny.
You can fool...
A lot of people will be wondering how on earth someone could possibly justify that kind of money. But then there's a lot of people in China.
What the 404...
When a site is finished seems to be governed by how cool it looks these days. Functionality or reliability are add-ons to be implemented at a later date, it appears. This is probably why I find more and more pages advertising the fact that a product is unavailable.
Returning these almost always very elaborate pages with a 404 status code wouldn't cost a penny more, but it'd save a lot of people a lot of time, as search engines would be prevented from indexing pages saying, for want of a better phrase, that you drew a blank.
The same applies to ajaxified or web 2.0 sites - that's sites requiring Javascript in the user's browser for you and me. For this very reason Google posted some common sense advice in their Webmaster Central Blog for those developers who never bothered to look at the HTTP protocol. Using the term "Ajax" in the body copy however the thing is almost promoted to inside knowledge.
Waste not, want not
How useless meta tags have become should be apparent when you search at Google for the term produltproben [it's a typo] and check the 50 or so results Google provides. You won't find the well known and well linked site [geizkragen.de] where I found the word in its Meta Keywords, although you will find pages that have what appears to be a generous copy of geizkragen.de's meta strings in their page body.
Yahoo, btw, still regards Meta Keywords as valid information.
Attention to Detail
When I tried to log into my laptop earlier I must have hit the caps lock key by accident. The password field immediately had a symbol on its right edge alerting me to the fact that caps lock was turned on. It's the many little things which never get in the way that make Apple's OS X so pleasant to use.
Yahoo Link Count fixed
If you head over to Yahoo's Site Explorer to check your links you will find the fine folk at Yahoo have kept their promise to repair the way they count your inlinks.
Know How Not To
There's a difference whether a teenager downloads an mp3 file from somewhere or a major label provides downloads without having the right to do so.
Time machine opens Black Hole
Pyile reports that the Time Machine introduced in Apple's OS X 10.5 runs applications which have been deleted but which have also been backed up. There is a workaround by removing the deleted app from the backups also, but I bet it's easily forgotten by those who start an application by double clicking a document.
http://pyile.com/2007/11/mac-os-x-runs-deleted-applications/
I never got used to that way of dealing with things, having grown up on Unix before windowing systems became workable and being used to open any document with whatever application was appropriate for the task at hand. That's not necessarily the default application associated with a document type. I therefore always open an application, then open the document I want to edit.
Google Aftershock
The one thing that's really surprising after last week's Pagerank update, which led to a lot of sites apparently engaged in link selling to lose big chunks of Pagerank, is the utter silence from Google.
Which says a lot, really, as in the past on similar widely reported occasions someone somewhere at Google in the end said something, even if it was termed a personal opinion and not "official" policy. This time there was nothing.
Phonetics
Reading about Apple's Iphone I came across the term "Jesus Phone". Not knowing why this was coined, I asked Google. I'm not surprised that Ebay has something to say about that.
Mobility
Might have looked brilliant on an Iphone, but was pretty hard to read in an ordinary browser. Has been fixed now, though.
Relations with the Public
What a lot of PR-Hacks forget is that those receiving their, ahem, creations are real people. People who don't take lightly to mindless stealing of their time.
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, retaliates now by firstly banning the names of those abusing his mailbox permanently, and secondly, and this is what makes it pure joy, he publishes the list of last month's offenders, so others can add these names to their own spam filters. He concludes: "If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it - turnabout is fair play."
© Copyright 1998 - 2008 Klaus Schallhorn.