AJAX blogs

I put a bit of jQuery on my site, animating the links in my art portfolio section. Check it out. I really like jQuery actually, it looks nice, and its a great way to liven up a site's visuals without using Flash and losing all that SEO. The problem is that jQuery, which is essentially JavaScript, is also not very SEO friendly. You can use it pretty much the same way as Flash, in limited quantities where you don't care about searchability. However, when you want to make it SEO friendly, it operates pretty similarly to AJAX. Basically, you don't want jQuery to be the only way you access any content. Any content ... (more...)

Here’s some free advice: don’t forget the cache-control tags on any server-side AJAX page. I was doing some Geodesic Solutions customization today. Anyone who has dealt with Geo will tell you it’s the biggest pain to customize, and that anyone who mentions Geo and best-practices in the same breath must be joking. Basically, the only way to customize it is through a series of patches, or by reworking the Geo class files (which will be overwritten in any upgrade). Geo doesn’t allow any mysql calls within the templates (I suppose it’s a good security measure), and since I didn’t need to do too much database work, I decided to do all the database stuff with AJAX. ... (more...)

AJAX isn't typically thought of as being very search engine friendly. This is because search engines don't process any JavaScript, which AJAX is built upon. I'm using a ton of AJAX on this one search engine site. In fact, the search engine itself is done in AJAX since it makes for quick page loads and overall a great user experience. This is a big problem because we also, of course, want all the pages that our search engine indexes to be spidered by Google and the other search engines. Besides the AJAX search, the only other way users reach the bottom level pages is through an advanced search form, which of course Google can't ... (more...)