Web Dev Ireland

I came into work this morning and wanted to read something that I had spotted last night and had put into my del.icio.us page (as I have done on countless occasions before).
I tried to logon and got this message.

Delicious is down for planned maintenance. We’re doing some database rearranging so we can release new features next week. We expect to be down from Midnight till 4am (Pacific) and will be posting updates on our blog.

I miss del.icio.us

I find it hard to believe that such a huge service should ever have to close down to do some upgrades, but that is the way of things with a free service.

Does anyone else have an free online service they could not live without?

The Extend Firefox competition has being going on for a while now and today they announced the winners of the competition. I am an avid firefox extension junkie (15 extensions and counting!) and use quite a few of the awarded extensions.

Cool prizes such as the Alienware Aurora 7500 were on offer to budding entrants
My favourites which I always use are;

Sage by Peter Andrews, which is an RSS reader.
Web Developer by Chris Pedrick, an absolute gem if you are in web development.
Forecast Fox by Aaron Sarna, Keeps me upto date with live weather reports all day (while I sit indoors)

New ones that I have just discovered are ;

Separe by Massimo Mangoni, which won most useful (its a tab seperator).
Reveal by Michael Wu, which won “Best Extension Overall” creates thumbnails of your tabs so you can see which one you want really cool, but a bit of a memory hog

If you use firefox but have not tried any of the extensions I recommend that you head over to Firefox extensions page and browse around. Just a word of warning you may become an extension junkie like me!

Search engines do not release the list of criteria that they use to determine a pages ranking, so most of the information below has come from many people experimenting and seeing how high their ranking went while employing these tactics.

The main factors that will get you high rankings are as follows (in no particular order).

1) Your domain name: www.bigbluebanana.com will help you show up reasonably high on a search for “big blue banana”
2) Title tags: search engine robots rate the text in your titles pretty high (assuming you don’t abuse the tag and have 50 keywords in it)
3) H1 tags: again search engine robots rate the text in your h1 tags pretty high
4) The actual content of the page: the more unique your content the higher you will rate for the unique keywords (or combinations of keywords) e.g if you search for “big green polkadot boat” and you have these words in your content in that order you will rate highly for that term (depending of course on the number of instances of that phrase on the net)
5) Non-recriprocal, inbound links: this is probably the most important of them all, the more sites with links to your page (the higher their page rank the better) the better you will rank for the term in their A tag link to you e.g if you have 1000 links to you with the text “monkey man” as the text for the link you will rate highly for that term.
Note: apparently links from other higher ranking pages in the same “community” as your site can have more of an effect on you ranking. e.g. if your site is about football and other football sites link to you they help your ranking more then a link from a science website.
6) Meta tags: no where near as important as they used to be but still have some bearing.
7) Filenames of your pages: if your page is named photoshop_tutorial.php it will help your ranking for that search term.
8) A sitemap and a robot.txt file : search engines robots like to find these and as a result google and others up your ranking for being compliant (robot.txt only has a marginal effect).
9) Use X/HTML with CSS: if the robot/webcrawler doesn’t have to trawl through a load of style information it can give better results for your content.
10) The length of time your content has existed, the longer it exists the more times it will be crawled by spiders/robots. The Sandbox effect has a bearing if your site is only new.
There are a few more but they really only have very minor bearing on your ranking.

I hope the tips above are of some help to someone out there and if you have more of an interest in this topic google for “SEO techniques” the results near the top usually belong to the people who are best at SEO.

After 3 Release Candidates, a version number change (it was originally to be FF 1.1) Firefox 1.5 is finally with us. Released earlier in the week it is already being downloaded on a huge scale from all over the world.

The Release notes describe all the new features

* Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
* Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
* Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
* Improvements to popup blocking.
* Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
* Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
* Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience.
* Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
* Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
* Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
* New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
* Many security enhancements.

I have being using it since the day of release and I like it a lot. Already there is a feature I can’t live without the “Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs”. I have wanted this feature for a long time and already use it extensively.

If you haven’t already got it get it now! Firefox 1.5 download

Website functionality

Another reason I was so concerned about the release of Firefox 1.5 is that I wanted to see if it changed the apperance of functionality of any of the sites I have written. I looked at the sites with the beta versions and everything seemed ok but I wanted to double check with the released version to be on the safe side. I’m happy to report that none of my websites have suffered any ill effects from the release. Has anyone else come across any problems??

I have recently being getting a lot of comment spam in the blog.
WordPress luckily has some “minor” spam protection as default, but I still have to moderate the spam manually. What solutions do you all use out there in the blogging community?
I would love to know how people deal with it and maybe then I could post an article to help other bloggers like myself.

For anyone who is a big fan of Dilbert like myself you will love the fact that Scott Adams has started to write a new blog. What makes me even happier is that it is written with the same wit as the comic. Adams dark sense of humour comes across fantasticaly.

Visit it and subscribe to the RSS feed.
It will no doubt become an unmissable read .

To commemerate the 100,000,000th download of firefox a LUG has launced a weather balloon to 100,000 feet! Yes the Oregon State Linux Users Group has gone all out and launched the balloon satellite, while having a BBQ and a bit of a shindig.

Loading up the balloon

Launching Firefox one
(more…)

Congratulations to firefox on 100,000,000 downloads!
It’s a great day for firefox have officially released 1.0 less then a year ago. It’s also interesting to point out that the figure does not included updates downloaded through the update management system.
It also doesn’t take into account the single downloads that have been pushed out to thousands of clients through internal sysadmin systems!
Now only about 5 billion more downloads to go and we can say goodbye to IE.

There are some great(funny) photos of people celebrating the 100 million downloads of firefox.

Current download number

Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is

I was reading the always excellent “Joel on Software” and came across this reference to Life hacking scroll down to “Multitasking in the Workplace”. Joel is an advocate of private offices for all employees, simply by removing distractions you increase productivity.

[an employee] would take an average of 25 minutes to return to what they were doing [after being interupted].

Joels article points to this excellent piece in the New York Times Magazine[free subscription required] the article by Clive Thompson is about how we have so much information coming at us in a regular day that we are constantly interrupted, wether by Instant Message, E-Mail, Collegue, telephone, etc. So we spend our days looking at these distractions and very little time doing any work.

Fascinating stuff thoroughly worth a read.

The 43 folders website is all about Life hacking and has some amazing tips on how to clear your time for the things that matter.

Traditional methods to help you concentrate (still very valid and helpful) I particularly like the “be here now” approach. I’m going to try it over the next few days and see how that comes out.

mozillaZine announced that the long awaited Firefox 1.5 Release candidate will be available October 28th!
For those of you that do not know what a relsease candidate is I shall explain, A release candidate is simply the last pre-release version of a piece of software to go for testing (usually more common in the Open Source Community) and by testing that means just simply to make sure that all the bugs have been fixed an the software is stable. Before a Pre-release a beta (or 2) is released, these are usually largely stable(i.e don’t crash every minute) but need the bugs Ironed out.

The Release notes state that the biggest additions to the new version are

- Improvements to automated update system.
- Improvements to Web site rendering and performance.
- Several security fixes.
- Bug Fixes

The automated update system is a huge feature, which will allow patches to be much smaller so the entire firefox binary doesn’t have to be downloaded everytime.

I will try and get a full list of the new features and post it later.

edit:

additional features

- SVG
- Fastback - which is memory caching of previously visited pages i.e your back/forward button
- Ability to group tabs and drag tabs(which I always wanted )
- One click removal of cookies, history and temporary internet files

SVG graphics are cool. They will basically be an XML based W3C compliant version of macromedia flash.