Posted on September 25, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Internet, Web development | Leave a Comment
It’s one of those facts that you learn once and then always remember: if you want your URL’s to be properly indexed: don’t stuff them with querystring-data. Make them nice, like they’re static URL’s. That’s what I always knew. Like riding a bike, you never forget it. But Google says this isn’t exactly true;
We’ve come across many webmasters who, like our friend, believed that static or static-looking URLs were an advantage for indexing and ranking their sites. This is based on the presumption that search engines have issues with crawling and analyzing URLs that include session IDs or source trackers. However, as a matter of fact, we at Google have made some progress in both areas. While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.
Google Webmaster Central Blog
Not only does Googlebot read dynamic URL’s just fine (and now I think of it: why wouldn’t one of the largest tech companies make any progress in this area over all these years?), they actually favor it if a dynamic URL is the ‘original’ of your URL scheme. Googlebot will figure out the parameters and do the indexing the right way.
Of course, static-looking URL’s are still nicer for a user to look at, and sometimes a URL that doesn’t have querystring-parameters can still be dynamic, but for Google’s sake: don’t rewrite it just for them. Good to know!
Posted on July 2, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Linux, Mac, MySQL, PHP, Tech, Web development | Leave a Comment
It’s always fun to compare tools. Who works with what and especially, why? Following the example of Flickr and some others, let me list my tools, see if you match:
Working:
Living and working:
I take my Mac everywhere. I work on it at work, even though it is a private machine. At home, I use VLC to watch video’s and DVD’s, NetNewsWire for the daily read, Celtx for screenwriting, Mail.app for.. well duh, RealPlayer to listen to BBC Radio 1 or iTunes for my music collection, Twitterific for Twitter and Unison to eh, browse newsgroups.
Well, that’s most of it. What about you?
Posted on September 22, 2007
Filed Under Blogging | 1 Comment
Holy smokes! I had about 30.000 comments waiting for approval on this blog. Most of them spam, according to a quick manual scan. I’m not going to look at 30.000 comments when I know more than 99% of it will be spam, so I logged into MySQL and marked them all as spam. I’m very sorry if this means your comment, which could have been so insightful and very useful to me or other readers, now is gone. Send me a message about it, I can easily restore it.
Oh, and before you mention it: yes, I am going to upgrade this blog and put in a proper spam filter. Not right now, though.
I’ll manually check comments more often from now on. So feel free to leave a comment.
Posted on February 22, 2007
Filed Under Blogging, Internet | Leave a Comment
I’m not very active on this blog, mostly becase I do most of my blogging in Dutch and even that actually isn’t much. But: I’m a Google Reader user now, and every so often I click on Share when I think an item is interesting.
So if you want to read what I think is nice, have a look at my shared feeds.
Posted on May 14, 2006
Filed Under Blogging, OPML, Tech | Leave a Comment
Dave Winer: “I’ve written code that allows you to set up NewsRiver to automatically ping SYO when your subscriptions change.”
That’s great. I’m developing an aggregator myself, and I was thinking about auto-exporting the subscription list to SYO in some way. I hope Dave’s feature will have an API, so aggregators can all connect and contribute.
Posted on April 24, 2006
Filed Under Blogging, Tech | 2 Comments
Does anyone know what happened to activeRenderer? Using Radio, I really liked what it could do. Would it work with OPML Editor?
Posted on April 19, 2006
Filed Under Blogging, Tech | Leave a Comment
Community Creators, Secure your code! – About Cross Site Scripting, a subject that’s been ignored to much by web developers.
Black Belt Productivity – Encouraging higher levels of productivity through the use of Getting Things Done.
The next Ubuntu (after Dapper Drake) will be called Edgy Eft.
There will be a BloggerCon IV.
Posted on January 13, 2006
Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment
Try this one, the best blonde joke ever!
Posted on November 30, 2005
Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment
Last weekend I wrote I’m looking for a new River of News style RSS aggregator. Today Dave Winer writes about Yahoo!:
They’re including a nice smallish RSS reader in their Mail app. I had seen it before, and it’s a River of News aggregator.
And that, of course, sounds very interesting. I can’t seem to find the RSS reader in Yahoo! Mail, so they still have to implement it, I guess. But I’m very curious!
Update: it seems there’s a separate private beta for Yahoo! Mail. I didn’t know that, but it explains why I didn’t see the RSS reader. SiliconBeat has info.
Posted on November 27, 2005
Filed Under Blogging | 1 Comment
I don’t know if you noticed, but I’ve switched weblog engines. I was using Radio UserLand for this blog, and I liked it very much. But: my ability to blog here depended on my laptop (which Radio runs on) being up and running, and of course being in a place where I can reach it, either physically or using a remote connection. That has been annoying me for a while, and this week Radio crashed while reading RSS feeds. It didn’t come back again. That was the limit.
I’m used to Radio being unstable. Every now and then, it crashes and I just have to start it again. Of coure that’s not good behaviour for any piece of software, but after using Radio for a few years I don’t mind anymore. This time though, it’s different. I don’t know why the thing crashed, but it does so a few moments after starting the application, over and over again. I can’t use it anymore.
Now, I am smart enough to fix Radio, that’s not the problem. The problem is that I have to go through a process of digging in the object database, reading and setting variables, tweaking here and there to find out what caused the crash and then disable it. All the data and scripts are stored in Radio’s object database and I know how to work with it.
But: I just don’t feel like going through all that. I have to get another application that can read the database (the open sourced Frontier will do), dig, tweak, retry, tweak a little more, etcetera. I don’t want to do that. I want to read my RSS feeds. I want to blog.
So, I decided to phase out Radio as my weblog engine of choice. I installed WordPress in between the Radio files on this server, and redirected both the home page and my RSS feed from Radio to WordPress. If everything went well, RSS subscribers didn’t notice anything. People who actually visit this site will notice the slight change in website design, but that’s very minimal.
I won’t say goodbye to Radio. I still have all the weblog data on my server, including the categories and OPML-generated pages. Someday I will fix it and I will use it to blog again, but it won’t be on the main location of this blog.
Until I fixed it, though, I will have to find a replacement RSS aggregator. I like the one-pane style Radio uses, and all the other aggregators seem to use the e-mail approach: three panes which requires a lot of clicking. I don’t like that.
So, if anyone knows of a good one-pane “river of news” style aggregator, I’d be happy to try it. If it runs on Linux, it’s twice as good. Any suggestions are very welcome.
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