web2.0 blogs

There's nothing worse than those long, ugly URLs with twenty variables in the query string. In recent years there have been a number of websites offering a free service where users can create shorter links to these complex URLs. While a short URL is great, the links provided by most of these sites are computer generated and impossible to remember. This weekend I programmed a simple tool to allow users to create their own links and normalize ugly URLs called normalurl.com. Just like other URL rewriting services, this website is completely free and allows anonymous users to easily create new URL redirects. However this ... (more...)

Let it not be said that I never fall victim to a web fad: AJAX, jQuery, SEO—I was there with bells on. So when everyone started hating Flash and doing all web animation with HTML/Javascript, I jumped right on board. I thought it was just great! You didn't have to lose any SEO, and most importantly you never had to open that awful Flash GUI. But have you noticed? EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT! There's just too much Javascript on the internet these days, and it is bringing many browsers to a halt. My MacBook is less than a year old (2.1GHz, 1GB mem) and Safari has been crashing frequently. In Firefox I ... (more...)

There’s a new search engine being showcased on Apple.com’s widget download page, lumifi® , which, unlike other search engines, does not run through a web browser. With web search being so integral to our computer lives, is it preferable to search through a website or an application? Lumifi’s marketing department provides one answer : “lumifi is different than Google and other search engines in that it reads each search result for you to determine what is actually relevant to your research rather than what happens to be popular at the moment.” But obviously other search engines do relevance tests–determining relevance is their main purpose. Perhaps they mean that lumifi does some sort of post-processing of standard search results; ... (more...)

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...)