For some of my less busy web sites I was using a small host based in Florida, USA. These small hosts provide a great way to have a website (or multiple websites) up on a budget. The whole lot went down on the 25th of October, no email response from the hosts, and their own website was also down.
We had them go down a bit more often that we would have liked since we started using them, but never for more than half an hour, and after all, you get what you pay for, so I wasn't all that surprised. In these past instances, however, their site was still up. Since these web sites aren't critical, I decided to wait a couple of days. Changing hosts is a pain, and other than that I we quite happy with them.
About three days later, I finally realised what had happened and looked on CNN to find that power was still not back on in the area of Florida where my host was located. I feel a bit bad taking business away from them, but hey, I need my sites back up. I didn't know when or if they were going to come back on line at all. Their phones were down and they weren't responding to emails.
Today I found another host for my sites. They are www.skilledhost.com, and seem to offer a better package for less money than we were paying before. Unfortunately one of the sites was not backed up, but it was a bit dodgy anyway and I will revamp it and turn it into something that hopefully someone might want to see. The other website I had stored in the trash bin of my workstation. By coincidence I had just finished some work on that site which involved modifying all the files. Obviously I don't rely on these sites for income, so I didn't bother backing them up as such. That will change from now on.
Friday, October 28, 2005
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Blogger Toolbar is back from the hidden div.
You may have noticed that the Blogger toolbar has re-appeared at the top of this blog. (I'm actually sure you haven't noticed, as the only person who views this blog more than once in a lifetime is me, I'm pretty sure:)
Anyway, when I first created this site, I found a way of removing the toolbar at the top. In the template code, simply define the vertical position of the element to -500px, and it's not there anymore. This is all well and good, and I thought it was a cool way to be a bit original, even if it was a bit naughty. I did actually have a scan of Blogger's terms of service and I couldn't find removing the blogger toolbar anywhere, as I try to do the right thing by people. (Yeah, even big corporations. What goes around comes around, I always say.)
I was just thinking about putting the nav bar back, as a user suggested that it is annoying when browsing blogs through Blogger, as you have no "next" button to click on. This didn't occur to me, so in the interests of a better user experience, I have put it back.
The interesting thing I noticed as I was modifying the code, was the method of hiding the element. It is essentially a hidden div. That is, a <div> tag moved off the page to hide it's contents.
This technique is widely used by unscrupulous webmasters as a way to stuff a page with a lot of hidden keywords for the purpose of manipulating their search engine rankings. The user never sees the hidden text, but the search engines (before they got smarter) used to be unable to differentiate between hidden and visible text when it was done in certian ways.
Some methods do still seem to work, (ovbiously not hidden divs) but they are doomed to failure as the search engines become ever more efficient at detecting the various methods of hiding content.
If you do a search for this site in Google, you will find that it has a URL only listing for the home page, and no listings for any other pages on the site. As you can see from the counter, it does pull a *bit* of traffic, but mainly from Yahoo, MSN, and Blogger it's self. Actually I think the entire stats thingy is public so you can check out the referrers yourself if you want. It just occured to me that the hidden toolbar could have been a possible reason for this, so we will see if the listings improve in the next few months. It's interesting that we still seem to have Pagerank.
This site has not had hours of development put into it like a proper commercial project, and I'm not vigorously seeking links or adding content, so it's easy for these kind of oversights to creep in. Unfortunately, there would be a lot of "innocent" sites with unique and useful content (not necessarily like this one, I mean hobby sites etc.) that would not be getting many visitors becuase of little coding errors. I know the average "do it yourself" webmaster who does a Frontpage site of his stamp collection would know what a hidden div is, let alone how to find one. Even colouring some text the same colour as the background in Dreamweaver accidently will have this effect. I guess this is one of many challenges for the search engines, and one of the reasons that I have a job as a professional web developer.
Anyway, when I first created this site, I found a way of removing the toolbar at the top. In the template code, simply define the vertical position of the element to -500px, and it's not there anymore. This is all well and good, and I thought it was a cool way to be a bit original, even if it was a bit naughty. I did actually have a scan of Blogger's terms of service and I couldn't find removing the blogger toolbar anywhere, as I try to do the right thing by people. (Yeah, even big corporations. What goes around comes around, I always say.)
I was just thinking about putting the nav bar back, as a user suggested that it is annoying when browsing blogs through Blogger, as you have no "next" button to click on. This didn't occur to me, so in the interests of a better user experience, I have put it back.
The interesting thing I noticed as I was modifying the code, was the method of hiding the element. It is essentially a hidden div. That is, a <div> tag moved off the page to hide it's contents.
This technique is widely used by unscrupulous webmasters as a way to stuff a page with a lot of hidden keywords for the purpose of manipulating their search engine rankings. The user never sees the hidden text, but the search engines (before they got smarter) used to be unable to differentiate between hidden and visible text when it was done in certian ways.
Some methods do still seem to work, (ovbiously not hidden divs) but they are doomed to failure as the search engines become ever more efficient at detecting the various methods of hiding content.
If you do a search for this site in Google, you will find that it has a URL only listing for the home page, and no listings for any other pages on the site. As you can see from the counter, it does pull a *bit* of traffic, but mainly from Yahoo, MSN, and Blogger it's self. Actually I think the entire stats thingy is public so you can check out the referrers yourself if you want. It just occured to me that the hidden toolbar could have been a possible reason for this, so we will see if the listings improve in the next few months. It's interesting that we still seem to have Pagerank.
This site has not had hours of development put into it like a proper commercial project, and I'm not vigorously seeking links or adding content, so it's easy for these kind of oversights to creep in. Unfortunately, there would be a lot of "innocent" sites with unique and useful content (not necessarily like this one, I mean hobby sites etc.) that would not be getting many visitors becuase of little coding errors. I know the average "do it yourself" webmaster who does a Frontpage site of his stamp collection would know what a hidden div is, let alone how to find one. Even colouring some text the same colour as the background in Dreamweaver accidently will have this effect. I guess this is one of many challenges for the search engines, and one of the reasons that I have a job as a professional web developer.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Saw the Aviator last night - Great movie
My housemate brought a movie home last night, The Aviator starring Leonardo DeCaprio. Although I'm not a massive fan of the actor, I have to say it would be hard to imagine anyone else playing such a convincing part. The Aviator is a movie set in the 30s based on the life of Howard Hughes, the famous millionaire, movie maker, and aircraft builder. It covers his undertaking to make the most expensive movie of all time, and the various projects and events that took place during his life, such as his various record breaking achievements, and the design and construction of some of the most revolutionary aircraft. Namely the Hercules flying boat which was the largest aircraft of the time, and led the way for the massive aircraft that are in widespread use now.
This is a fascinating movie, especially for myself, as Howard Hughes was someone I used to read about as a kid as one of the greatest innovators of the aircraft industry. I've always loved planes. If I had more coin I'd be playing with planes instead of cars.
This is a fascinating movie, especially for myself, as Howard Hughes was someone I used to read about as a kid as one of the greatest innovators of the aircraft industry. I've always loved planes. If I had more coin I'd be playing with planes instead of cars.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Carl Scully will not apologise for the Cross City Tunnel
The minister responsible for signing the rediculous contract to the Cross City Tunnel, which allows it's foreign operators to close Sydney roads to funnel traffic through this stupid road. Carl Scully should be remembered for selling out Sydney's motorists, and allowing us all to be conned.
I don't care how many roads they close, and I don't care how hard they try to make it for me. They will not rip me off this way. I will NEVER pay a cent to use any toll road in Sydney, and hopefully the company running the cross city "funnel" will eventually go bankrupt. In the words of the Cross City CEO, "People will say bugger it". No, I won't say "bugger it". I will not use your tunnel, no matter how difficult you make it for me to get around the city with your callous road closures.
Carl Scully should be forced to resign in shame, as the man responsible for Sydney's roads for the last few years, he should be utterly ashamed to the shambles he has presided over. It has just turned out that the Lane Cove tunnel is the same deal. Road closures if the consortium cannot make it pay.
What a mess.
I don't care how many roads they close, and I don't care how hard they try to make it for me. They will not rip me off this way. I will NEVER pay a cent to use any toll road in Sydney, and hopefully the company running the cross city "funnel" will eventually go bankrupt. In the words of the Cross City CEO, "People will say bugger it". No, I won't say "bugger it". I will not use your tunnel, no matter how difficult you make it for me to get around the city with your callous road closures.
Carl Scully should be forced to resign in shame, as the man responsible for Sydney's roads for the last few years, he should be utterly ashamed to the shambles he has presided over. It has just turned out that the Lane Cove tunnel is the same deal. Road closures if the consortium cannot make it pay.
What a mess.
Saturday, October 01, 2005
To cloak or not to cloak
Cloaking is a technique that has generated much discussion in the webmaster community. The possible benefits are unquestionable, the risks are out there, and the impact on the quality of the internet as an information resource is debatable.
Clokaing is basically a technique of displaying different page content based on the user that is viewing the page. There are many ways of determining the user, and displaying the different content. Some use javascript redirect where the redirect routine is in an external file, while others user server side scripting to serve up different code based on the IP address of the client. There are, of course hundreds of different variations, with varying levels of ethics in their intent.
The benefits of cloaking are mainly search engine related, although some webmasters use it for such things as redirecting users to certain sections of a site based on their DNS suffix, as a way of redirecting users based on country. Strictly speaking, if the address in the address bar changes, it is not true cloaking, but rather a redirect. In some of the javascript techniques I have come across, there is an html page with rich keyword content, and a javascript routine that will redirect only IE and Netscape browsers to another page. This leaves any search engine crawler or text-only viewer (or anyone with javascript disabled) looking at the content rich page, whilst everyone else is redirected to a graphics rich page with frames which is good for selling, but which would never rank in the search engines.
The problem I have with this is that just about every non IT professional computer user that I know complains about seeing results in the SERPs with a certain title and description, under a certain search. They click on it, and are then directed to a page which contains none of the text from the search engine listing. This is annoying, especially on a slow connection. This is the kind of thing that makes people not want to use the internet and visit new websites, which is bad for all of us who run websites.
I'm sure there are people who say "how else can one get a website that uses frames in the serps?" and my answer to that is "I wouldn't have a clue." Frames were back in the early 90's and although it is a good concept and it was a shame that the resource addressing structure of the internet didn't support it well in the long term. Unless the cloaked page represents the exact text that is on the framed page, how can it not be misleading? If the search engines are going to allow cloaked pages for sites that use frames, what is there to stop this from being abused? There is already a constant game of cat and mouse being played where "black hat" webmasters use doorway and cloaked pages to spam the indexes.
As search engine technology improves, their ability to detect cloaking will also improve. For this reason, I do not engage in any cloaking practices, even as a competitive measure, as I believe the sites that currently use it (many large established sites, some in sectors in which I compete) will get pinged in a big way at some stage. Crawlers that can read JavaScript properly can't be far off.
Clokaing is basically a technique of displaying different page content based on the user that is viewing the page. There are many ways of determining the user, and displaying the different content. Some use javascript redirect where the redirect routine is in an external file, while others user server side scripting to serve up different code based on the IP address of the client. There are, of course hundreds of different variations, with varying levels of ethics in their intent.
The benefits of cloaking are mainly search engine related, although some webmasters use it for such things as redirecting users to certain sections of a site based on their DNS suffix, as a way of redirecting users based on country. Strictly speaking, if the address in the address bar changes, it is not true cloaking, but rather a redirect. In some of the javascript techniques I have come across, there is an html page with rich keyword content, and a javascript routine that will redirect only IE and Netscape browsers to another page. This leaves any search engine crawler or text-only viewer (or anyone with javascript disabled) looking at the content rich page, whilst everyone else is redirected to a graphics rich page with frames which is good for selling, but which would never rank in the search engines.
The problem I have with this is that just about every non IT professional computer user that I know complains about seeing results in the SERPs with a certain title and description, under a certain search. They click on it, and are then directed to a page which contains none of the text from the search engine listing. This is annoying, especially on a slow connection. This is the kind of thing that makes people not want to use the internet and visit new websites, which is bad for all of us who run websites.
I'm sure there are people who say "how else can one get a website that uses frames in the serps?" and my answer to that is "I wouldn't have a clue." Frames were back in the early 90's and although it is a good concept and it was a shame that the resource addressing structure of the internet didn't support it well in the long term. Unless the cloaked page represents the exact text that is on the framed page, how can it not be misleading? If the search engines are going to allow cloaked pages for sites that use frames, what is there to stop this from being abused? There is already a constant game of cat and mouse being played where "black hat" webmasters use doorway and cloaked pages to spam the indexes.
As search engine technology improves, their ability to detect cloaking will also improve. For this reason, I do not engage in any cloaking practices, even as a competitive measure, as I believe the sites that currently use it (many large established sites, some in sectors in which I compete) will get pinged in a big way at some stage. Crawlers that can read JavaScript properly can't be far off.
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