SEVERE ACUTE RESPIRATORY PARANOIA
According to journalist, writer and awful web-site designer Michael Fumento the media may be taking us for a war-distracting hay-ride when it comes to the relatively unmysterious mystery disease known as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). In 'Super-Pneumonia' or Super Scare? Fumento makes the case that SARS is being hyped far out of proportion with its risks, and represents little more than a footnote in the history of minor pandemics. Is he right? He argues that SARS deaths have "virtually all" occured in countries with piss-poor health systems, which is at best a very cavalier interpretation of the numbers -- Canada and Australia, which by most measures enjoy health systems superior or equal to the United States, have experienced deaths, and the incidence of death compared against the estimated infected populations is hardly statistically insignificant. Moreover, the vectors by which the disease spreads have not yet been firmly established. These uncertainties aside, Fumento's reminder to keep things in perspective is timely: the sky is not yet falling, and we can rest relatively assured that SARS does not represent the second horseman of the coming apocalypse.
3/30/2003
3/29/2003
BITES FROM NETWORKED GNATS
Decentralised, cell-based resistance seems to be proving a more worthy adversary than American military strategists had anticipated, according to this war update from the Washington Post (free registration). According to V Corps commander General William S. Wallace "the enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed against." From the article:
Decentralised, cell-based resistance seems to be proving a more worthy adversary than American military strategists had anticipated, according to this war update from the Washington Post (free registration). According to V Corps commander General William S. Wallace "the enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed against." From the article:
Enemy gunners on rooftops and balconies had apparently been alerted to the approaching helicopters by dozens of cell phone calls made by a network of observers, the sources said. "We're dealing with a country in which everybody has a weapon, and when they fire them all in the air at the same time, it's tough," Wallace said.
3/26/2003
DEATH BY CHEESEBURGER
(Posted with additional discussion on Kuro5hin.)
Living as we do in times dominated by endless talk of feuding kings, rampaging rhetoric, radar-resistant homicidal robots, GPS-guided death rays and other dollar-intensive ordnance delivery vectors, it is sometimes nice to take a moment out to consider something a little more simple, savoury and sensual.
Consider this oft-quoted ode by tightwad songster and restauranteur Jimmy Buffet:
Nineteenth century German emigrants brought a taste for the dish to the New World in a variation known as Hamburg Steak which was often served lightly broiled and topped with a raw egg. By this time sweaty Mongolian ass had been replaced with more conventional forms of pounding the meat tender, leading to a wider adoption than would previously have been possible.
Who it was that first began encasing the patties in bread is a matter of some contention. The people of Seymour, Wisconsin, USA (home of the Hamburger Hall of Fame) staunchly maintain that the first genuine hamburgers were sold by their very own "Hamburger Charlie" Nagreen, starting at the Outagamie County Fair in 1885 when his customers complained that his meatballs were too messy to eat while wandering the fairgrounds. Otto Kusaw claims to have solved the same problem on the wharves of Hamburg in 1891, by folding steak inside of a bun for the dock workers. Louis Lassen of New Haven, Connecticut claims to have invented the modern hamburger in 1895 when a customer at his concession stand needed meat but had to dash, so he ended up using bread as a sort of edible glove for handling beef. Not to be outdone the Texans stand by Fletcher Davis who began frying Hamburg steak and serving it as a "hamburger sandwich" at the World's Fair in 1904 (the same World's Fair that brought us the red-hot frankfurter, the first French fries and French's American mustard, to boot). The standard bun thickness may have been augmented by a short-order cook named J. Walter Anderson of Wichita, Kansas, who went on to establish the first chain of franchised hamburger restaurants, White Castle, in the 1920s, which was followed in the 1930s by the Wimpy chain named in honour of the classic Popeye character. With the advent of drive-in restaurant culture in the 1940s hamburgers found a secure place on the North American menu.
Even more contentious than the issue of who originated the hamburger is the question of who perfected it with an application of melted cheese.
In the same the way that several forwarding-thinking nineteenth century working-class gastronomists had come upon the idea of housing loose beef in a sandwich shell for enhanced portability, there are dozens of nearly simultaneous claims to being the prime mover of the subsequent popularisation of the cheese-coated hamburger.
The inventor may be Louis E. Ballast, proprietor of the Humpty Dumpty Barrel Drive-In in Denver, Colorado who remembers having his curdy insight in 1935, after experimenting unsuccessfully with peanut butter beef patties and fried chocolate and meat confections best left undescribed. Carl and Margaret Kaelin of Kaelin's Restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky think they beat Ballast by a year, happening accidentally upon the cheeseburger in 1934 in a "hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter!"-type incident. But such talk may be causing poor old Lionel Sternberger to roll in his grave, knowing full-well that he came up with the "cheese hamburger" first back in 1926 while working the grill at the Rite Spot in Pasadena, California. Either way, the cheese topping and the term "cheeseburger" quickly became ubiquitous.
Recipes for and variations on the basic cheeseburger abound, ranging from familiar pairings like bacon to create a "banquet-burger" (another victim of simultaneous invention, but the credit for the name seems to trace back to Fran's Diner in Toronto, Canada), to more creative concoctions including but not limited to cheeseburger chowder, cheeseburger soup, cheeseburger rice, inside-out cheeseburger meatloaf, cheeseburger casserole, chocolate cheeseburgers, cheeseburger sandwiches, cheeseburger noodles, cheeseburger loaf, cheeseburger macaroni, cheeseburger pizza, cheeseburger pie, inverted loaded cheeseburgers, cheeseburger cookies, cheeseburger stew, giant cheeseburgers, cheeseburger rounds, cheeseburger brown betty, Gummi cheeseburgers, cheeseburger-on-a-roll; gourmet preparations such as gorgonzola cheeseburgers with pancetta, Swiss cheeseburger bisque, cheeseburger quiche; oddities like artificial cheeseburger substitutes, veggie burgers, "untraditional" cheeseburgers, home-made imitation McDonald's cheeseburgers, home-made imitation White Castle cheeseburgers; and national variations like cheeseburger tacos, Danish cheeseburgers, Greek cheeseburgers, and, of course, Chinese-style.
Love of a good cheeseburger has been known to stir the passions of many, including those who would worship the cheeseburger experience and its convenience-packaged offspring, those who would perfect the tasting with a matching wine, those who would go to great lengths to acquire a cheeseburger, those who would pay outrageous sums, and those who would prefer it meatless and without cheese.
Apparently there is a market for people who want cheeseburger-themed dancing telegrams, cheeseburger-shaped installation art, dog-toys, hats, magnets, cooking timers and talking condiment dispensers. People have even been known to use cheeseburgers as weapons of opportunity. Educators use cheeseburgers as analogies for work expectations, and as themes for plays, while others make use of cheeseburger rating systems for evaluating new technologies, while still others warn us about the Cheeseburger Paradox. In the dead of the night astronomers delight in the gleam of the Cheeseburger Nebula.
Apparently both troubled, narcissistic queers and religiously observant Jews are largely alienated by the cheeseburger phenomenon. I think this is a darn shame, but there are those who would disagree...
While it has been said that calorie-loaded cheeseburgers can be a part of a healthy diet, in combination with a sedantry lifestyle they can be deadly. Listen, kids: Mayor McCheese didn't retire -- he died riddled with cancer, his corpse unnaturally preserved for eternity by McDonald's weird alchemy. While athletic types can be well-fueled by cheeseburgers, for most of us they are simply sources of clogged arteries and obesity.
But the trouble doesn't stop there. A little bird told me that excessive beef consumption can be detrimental to the overall health of human beings and the world at large. Issues include deforestation, pollution and the support of perverse local economies. According to Richard Robbins of Plattsburgh University:
Cheeseburgers are juicy and delicious, and they smell like summer. Cheeseburgers are beautiful (even if they do happen to ramp up aggression in some individuals now and again, or wang up the Earth's chakras). Cheeseburgers are the most valuable gift the cows of the world can offer us, a gem-like confluence of curd and flesh. Close yours eyes and savour it, with the hard snap of a crisp pickle as your companion. Little else is finer.
Now and forever, make my every burger cheesy.
(Posted with additional discussion on Kuro5hin.)
Living as we do in times dominated by endless talk of feuding kings, rampaging rhetoric, radar-resistant homicidal robots, GPS-guided death rays and other dollar-intensive ordnance delivery vectors, it is sometimes nice to take a moment out to consider something a little more simple, savoury and sensual.
Consider this oft-quoted ode by tightwad songster and restauranteur Jimmy Buffet:
I like mine with lettuce and tomato,As spring comes again to the northern hemisphere, wetting and ripening our muddy backyards and thawing the ice from our barbecues, we collectively re-awaken to the endless decadent possibilities offered by the meaty junk-food staple known throughout the world as the cheeseburger.
Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes,
Big kosher pickle and a cold draught beer;
Well, good god Almighty, which way do I steer?
If the melting pot exists, the cheeseburger may well be its most palpable product; to take a bite of it is to take a bite of history...The story of the cheeseburger begins under the chapped ass of some fierce thirteenth century Mongol warrior, riding hard across Eurasia on the back of his foaming steed. You see, the Tartars felt that the tough ribbons of gamey beef to which they had access on the Russian Steppe should best be tenderised by using them as saddles. This delicacy would, with some modification, eventually find its way to the West as le steak tartare.
- Elizabeth Rozin, Primal Cheeseburger (Penguin 1994)
Nineteenth century German emigrants brought a taste for the dish to the New World in a variation known as Hamburg Steak which was often served lightly broiled and topped with a raw egg. By this time sweaty Mongolian ass had been replaced with more conventional forms of pounding the meat tender, leading to a wider adoption than would previously have been possible.
Who it was that first began encasing the patties in bread is a matter of some contention. The people of Seymour, Wisconsin, USA (home of the Hamburger Hall of Fame) staunchly maintain that the first genuine hamburgers were sold by their very own "Hamburger Charlie" Nagreen, starting at the Outagamie County Fair in 1885 when his customers complained that his meatballs were too messy to eat while wandering the fairgrounds. Otto Kusaw claims to have solved the same problem on the wharves of Hamburg in 1891, by folding steak inside of a bun for the dock workers. Louis Lassen of New Haven, Connecticut claims to have invented the modern hamburger in 1895 when a customer at his concession stand needed meat but had to dash, so he ended up using bread as a sort of edible glove for handling beef. Not to be outdone the Texans stand by Fletcher Davis who began frying Hamburg steak and serving it as a "hamburger sandwich" at the World's Fair in 1904 (the same World's Fair that brought us the red-hot frankfurter, the first French fries and French's American mustard, to boot). The standard bun thickness may have been augmented by a short-order cook named J. Walter Anderson of Wichita, Kansas, who went on to establish the first chain of franchised hamburger restaurants, White Castle, in the 1920s, which was followed in the 1930s by the Wimpy chain named in honour of the classic Popeye character. With the advent of drive-in restaurant culture in the 1940s hamburgers found a secure place on the North American menu.
Even more contentious than the issue of who originated the hamburger is the question of who perfected it with an application of melted cheese.
In the same the way that several forwarding-thinking nineteenth century working-class gastronomists had come upon the idea of housing loose beef in a sandwich shell for enhanced portability, there are dozens of nearly simultaneous claims to being the prime mover of the subsequent popularisation of the cheese-coated hamburger.
The inventor may be Louis E. Ballast, proprietor of the Humpty Dumpty Barrel Drive-In in Denver, Colorado who remembers having his curdy insight in 1935, after experimenting unsuccessfully with peanut butter beef patties and fried chocolate and meat confections best left undescribed. Carl and Margaret Kaelin of Kaelin's Restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky think they beat Ballast by a year, happening accidentally upon the cheeseburger in 1934 in a "hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter!"-type incident. But such talk may be causing poor old Lionel Sternberger to roll in his grave, knowing full-well that he came up with the "cheese hamburger" first back in 1926 while working the grill at the Rite Spot in Pasadena, California. Either way, the cheese topping and the term "cheeseburger" quickly became ubiquitous.
Recipes for and variations on the basic cheeseburger abound, ranging from familiar pairings like bacon to create a "banquet-burger" (another victim of simultaneous invention, but the credit for the name seems to trace back to Fran's Diner in Toronto, Canada), to more creative concoctions including but not limited to cheeseburger chowder, cheeseburger soup, cheeseburger rice, inside-out cheeseburger meatloaf, cheeseburger casserole, chocolate cheeseburgers, cheeseburger sandwiches, cheeseburger noodles, cheeseburger loaf, cheeseburger macaroni, cheeseburger pizza, cheeseburger pie, inverted loaded cheeseburgers, cheeseburger cookies, cheeseburger stew, giant cheeseburgers, cheeseburger rounds, cheeseburger brown betty, Gummi cheeseburgers, cheeseburger-on-a-roll; gourmet preparations such as gorgonzola cheeseburgers with pancetta, Swiss cheeseburger bisque, cheeseburger quiche; oddities like artificial cheeseburger substitutes, veggie burgers, "untraditional" cheeseburgers, home-made imitation McDonald's cheeseburgers, home-made imitation White Castle cheeseburgers; and national variations like cheeseburger tacos, Danish cheeseburgers, Greek cheeseburgers, and, of course, Chinese-style.
Love of a good cheeseburger has been known to stir the passions of many, including those who would worship the cheeseburger experience and its convenience-packaged offspring, those who would perfect the tasting with a matching wine, those who would go to great lengths to acquire a cheeseburger, those who would pay outrageous sums, and those who would prefer it meatless and without cheese.
Apparently there is a market for people who want cheeseburger-themed dancing telegrams, cheeseburger-shaped installation art, dog-toys, hats, magnets, cooking timers and talking condiment dispensers. People have even been known to use cheeseburgers as weapons of opportunity. Educators use cheeseburgers as analogies for work expectations, and as themes for plays, while others make use of cheeseburger rating systems for evaluating new technologies, while still others warn us about the Cheeseburger Paradox. In the dead of the night astronomers delight in the gleam of the Cheeseburger Nebula.
Apparently both troubled, narcissistic queers and religiously observant Jews are largely alienated by the cheeseburger phenomenon. I think this is a darn shame, but there are those who would disagree...
While it has been said that calorie-loaded cheeseburgers can be a part of a healthy diet, in combination with a sedantry lifestyle they can be deadly. Listen, kids: Mayor McCheese didn't retire -- he died riddled with cancer, his corpse unnaturally preserved for eternity by McDonald's weird alchemy. While athletic types can be well-fueled by cheeseburgers, for most of us they are simply sources of clogged arteries and obesity.
But the trouble doesn't stop there. A little bird told me that excessive beef consumption can be detrimental to the overall health of human beings and the world at large. Issues include deforestation, pollution and the support of perverse local economies. According to Richard Robbins of Plattsburgh University:
The answers [as to why so much beef is consumed in spite of such environmental damage] involve understanding the relationships among Spanish cattle, British colonialism, the American government, the American bison, indigenous peoples, the automobile, the hamburger, and the fast-food restaurant.Beyond putting the ills of the world out of your mind while you wash your over-sized automobile with potable water and watch it run into the petroleum-rainbow gutter, the key to really enjoying your cheeseburger is partly predicated on a healthy serving of happy disinformation but mostly determined by the freshness of your ingredients: good meat lightly pressed, with crisp lettuce, tomato and red onion topped with real Dijon mustard. Europeans and European-wannabes may wish to add a glaze of mayonnaise. Relishes and chutneys are optional. Velveeta is seldom appropriate; rather, go for a mix of real cheeses like natural cheddar and havarti with smoked gouda to accompany bacon or mozzarella for fried mushrooms and white onions.
Cheeseburgers are juicy and delicious, and they smell like summer. Cheeseburgers are beautiful (even if they do happen to ramp up aggression in some individuals now and again, or wang up the Earth's chakras). Cheeseburgers are the most valuable gift the cows of the world can offer us, a gem-like confluence of curd and flesh. Close yours eyes and savour it, with the hard snap of a crisp pickle as your companion. Little else is finer.
Now and forever, make my every burger cheesy.
3/21/2003
O SALAM PAX, WHERE ART THOU?
Technology writer Paul Boutin asks the important, sceptical question "Is the Bagdad Blogger real?" in his blog, detailing his efforts to verify the location of the blogger who posts as Salam Pax on a Blog*Spot hole called Dear Raed. I have been following the young man's blog for a few days now, and the reports have a very humble, authentic feel in my opinion. Boutin seems to be weighing in on the side of Salam Pax's legitimacy, too.
Technology writer Paul Boutin asks the important, sceptical question "Is the Bagdad Blogger real?" in his blog, detailing his efforts to verify the location of the blogger who posts as Salam Pax on a Blog*Spot hole called Dear Raed. I have been following the young man's blog for a few days now, and the reports have a very humble, authentic feel in my opinion. Boutin seems to be weighing in on the side of Salam Pax's legitimacy, too.
BEATING THE BUSH FOR RAVENS
The Atlantic has an insightful interview called What Makes W. Tick? in which Sage Stossel questions historian and journalist Richard Brookhiser about the current American president and commander-in-chief. This appears to be a relatively fair and informed analysis of Bush's character, from his enlightened and successful managerial style to his past struggles with alcohol, some of his inspirations to reform and their subsequent impact on his concept of morality. From the article:
The Atlantic has an insightful interview called What Makes W. Tick? in which Sage Stossel questions historian and journalist Richard Brookhiser about the current American president and commander-in-chief. This appears to be a relatively fair and informed analysis of Bush's character, from his enlightened and successful managerial style to his past struggles with alcohol, some of his inspirations to reform and their subsequent impact on his concept of morality. From the article:
Abstract, imaginative thinking, Brookhiser emphasizes, is not the President's strong suit. And though Bush does take care to draw upon the counsel of intelligent, informed advisors, each with a different point of view, those varying viewpoints tend to fall only within a range of perspectives that reflect his pre-existing inclinations.
3/20/2003
A MODEST WEBMASTER'S INTRODUCTION TO GOOGLE GROKKERY
At this point in history the collective brain of the Internet is at best a blithering fool, an idiot savante whose ramblings can be strung together sensibly only by the keenest of efforts and most dedicated panning. I have learned from first-hand experience that having some insight into the way the world's premier panning tool works helps websites get noticed by other search engines and directories, and surfed by visitors.
Before we start, let it be said that lots of things go into making a good website, and there are a lot of variables to consider beyond just specific search engines or directories when considering a web marketing strategy. This, however, is a narrow focus article. Don't write to me telling me there is a web beyond Google. I know. Shut up.
Secondly, I don't claim to have the fanciest website this side of San Francisco. I have a pretty basic collection of pages including a portfolio, description of professional services, and links to independent projects, built with non-cutting-edge HTML and minimal javascript, with QuickTime required for the multimedia components. I also have some kibbles of miscellania like this one, clustered around my homepage and my blog, which serve to feed some additional traffic to my main website. People surf my pages, some of those people contact me via e-mail or telephone, and some of those people end up giving me jobs. I get enough such jobs that I can pick and choose between them, so I judge my website to be a modest success.
In terms of traffic my site is also modest, in that the server tends to shell out between six and eight hundred pages per day at the time of this writing, which isn't a very strenuous load. (Note: counting pages is different than counting raw hits, which include calls for graphics, menu bar icons, robot restrictions files, error files and other crumbs.) Big commercial websites need over ten thousand page-views per day to start doing real e-business (they need millions to actually stay there), or so I have read, so in comparison my current page-view average isn't anything particularly remarkable.
But keep in mind: my average used to be five pages per day, when I first secured the domain (my old domain remains unused at the time of this writing). And on a typical day that meant two of those page-views were me checking to see if the domain name resolution was working, one of them was a type-o from somebody in Hong Kong and the resultant 404 error, and the other two were spambots looking for e-mail addresses to harvest. Welcome to the ground floor.
My site's pubescence came when I took the time to learn a little more about that sexy, secretive super-vedette of search enginery, Google [sic]. Though I had known about Google for some time, I had not really come to appreciate the fact that among surfers at large it was enjoying the fleeting privilege of being the pope of the world wide web -- a sort of Yahoo for the digitally-literate, in the sense of a symbolic portal.
My curiosity was first aroused when I noticed that my resume tended to turn up on Google's first page of results for my very specific queries, while my main sales pages languished far behind, on the tenth page or deeper. Like most amateur web spinners I had picked up on the old inertia that put a lot of emphasis on keywords listed in meta tags; I wondered why this technique wasn't yielding fruit. Though I was unfamiliar with the term "weblog" at the time, the answer turned out to be because of the blog-like character of my resume: a certain density of regular text and foreign links, updated regularly with dated entries. I have learned a lot since this initial curiosity, but it still does illustrate the most basic credo of the Googlebot: fresh, topical content and hyperlinks with text context are good.
The basic credo of Google itself is don't be evil. Glib as it sounds, this is a powerful message for a corporation to live by. And since Google has so far seemed to live by it so consistently, the only way to get along with Google is to emulate it. That is: the best to do well in Google listings is to feed Google what it wants: a good, non-spammy website that can be sensibly navigated and that features high-quality content along a theme. Featuring good content goes further with Google than trying to trick it with stuffed-crotch meta tags or link farms, because the latter approach is evil and Google is designed to sniff out and ignore evil (or sentence the site to be ignored, however you want to understand it). Shameless self-promotion will naturally cause some friction with Google, because Google has the capacity for shame.
Beyond that, here are some general guidelines I have gleaned from my armchair, attempting like so many others to divine the secret algorithms behind the curtains:
Google Likes Text
That may seem obvious, but some people get confused when their "Gallery Page" exclusively featuring photographs and navigation icons made from images without alt tags isn't well ranked. How does Google know your page is about leprechauns when you never actually use the word "leprechaun" in plain text on the page? This tip should be underlined and written in fluorescent lettering for people whose sites exist only through Flash or other multimedia schemes whose output is not parsed by the Googlebot at all.
Google Likes Formatting
How does Google tell whether your page is about leprechauns versus just making a passing reference to leprechauns? Through formatting, the Googlebot attempts to rank the importance of a given keyword. For instance, a keyword echoed in H1 or H2 headline text or boldface type is taken to be a more primary subject than one merely mentioned in the body text (though the number of occurances in the body text is relevant as well).
Google Respects Exclusion Standards
Use them. You should have a ROBOTS.TXT file at the root level of your website which states your general rules, and then specify in the header of your pages any specific restrictions using the robot exclusion meta tag. This should be used to avoid embarrassing things like seeing your navigation frame ranked higher than your actual content pages, by indicating in the robot tag that the links are to be followed, but the content of the navbar.html file itself is not to be indexed.
Google Likes Outbound Hyperlinks
Linking to similarly themed sites that Google already respects adds a layer of sugar to your content. Google is happy that you have contributed your grey matter to culling the content of the Internet, and rewards you with a certain amount of good faith that you know what you're talking about, and are not linking random, stupid things.
Google Loves Inbound Hyperlinks
Being linked to by a respected site (in this context a site with a high PageRank) is the single best way to boost your listing. Being linked to from sites themed with related keywords amplifies this effect, especially when the anchoring link text itself contains relevant keywords (for example "cool leprechaun site" rather than "click here" being the actual underlined text on the foreign site). Of course, Google knows that you know that hyperlinks are important, so Google keeps a sharp eye out for a practice known as "link-farming", where websites attempt to simulate the appearance of popularity by either exchanging links with strangers shamelessly or by creating circles of forwarding-domains which all point to one (sometimes duplicated) resource. How do you know if your website's friendly reciprocal linking policy smells like link-farming? Simple. Ask yourself: is it your intention to deceive? In other words: are you being evil? If you're not being evil, you're probably in the clear (despite paranoid discussion threads to the contrary).
Google Likes Accessibility
Google has respect for all browsers, and thus feels more warmly about pages that can be parsed by any browser, no matter how humble, rather than cryptic pages that require the latest and greatest browser bristling with bleeding-edge plug-ins in order to work. Google looks for good old HTML tricks like internal anchor names related to sub-topics, subject headlines, text justification and paragraph size to help determine the kind of content a page contains. While Google understands cascading style-sheets and some other dynamic tricks, always keep in mind how these pages will be parsed by low-end browsers before you publish. Google gets mad if you snub the blind man using Lynx, because that's evil.
Googlebot Isn't Psychic
Other than coming in the front door (to your HTML root directory, usually http://www.domain.tld), the Googlebot can only follow links that you provide to it. If you have pages that aren't linked to from anywhere else on your site (called "orphan" pages) they won't get spidered by Google or by anyone else for that matter. So, always remember to connect your pages together -- it is a web, after all.
Location, Location, Location
Google likes you to tell it where you are. It thinks city names are delicious.
Direct Me To Your Keyword
You score points for having a relevant keyword in the name of your directory or your actual HTML file, like http://domain.tld/littlefolk/leprechauns.html. Some sources, like this informative discussion thread, suggest that this practice is only good for a few levels deep, after that becoming potentially harmful to one's PageRank. In other words, you may not be making Google happier by going with http://domain.tld/folk/legendary/little/western/irish/domestic/leprechaun-related/leprechauns.html -- it may be more specific, but it feels spammy.
Google Likes Long Pages
I have often read the opposite advice, but my personal experience has consistently been that pages with long text content do better than shorter ones. The frequently quoted pearl that only the first twenty-five words of the page's plain text really count is nonsense.
Google Likes Experts
If you know about something, write a personal or formal essay about it, humble or fancy as you like, and post it on your site. If other people find your knowledge useful in any way they will find their way to the rest of your site (assuming you have semi-decently designed pages). The more obscure the topic you cover, the better you'll do as an expert. At the time of this writing my own musings on the subject of greasy Quebecois junk-food is the number one result for the query poutine. (If my website was about selling poutine, that would be a real feather in my cap. As it is, it probably just sends me a surge of raw traffic, which is good too.)
Invisible Text Isn't Necessarily Evil
I do use so-called "invisible text" on some of my title pages. I do this because I used to see these title or intro pages listed in Google with no description or keywords beneath the the title-link. By inserting some text coloured the same as the background I have maintained my design integrity while making the pages provide readable descriptions in the listings. Some people say that this is a spammy, evil activity since it reeks of burying pages in invisible keywords, but I think that they are being too paranoid. Use complete sentences, and don't go overboard.
Don't Obsess
The search engine results pages archive is a constantly roiling soup, a dynamic and fleeting thing, subject to the throes of the monthly dance as the servers around the world synchronise the Google database and the day to day fartings of endless everflux. Listings move up and down all the time. Don't panic. Be patient.
Google Likes Freshness
The Freshbot has been described as a sort of bonus feature, which indexes select portions of the web on a daily or weekly rather than monthly basis. It is hard to say what exactly makes the Freshbot visit more or less frequently, but it is true that the Freshbot is attracted to blog-like and/or newsfeed-like features. So, update your site often with topical, contemporary information...
...Here I am following my own advice. Share and enjoy!
At this point in history the collective brain of the Internet is at best a blithering fool, an idiot savante whose ramblings can be strung together sensibly only by the keenest of efforts and most dedicated panning. I have learned from first-hand experience that having some insight into the way the world's premier panning tool works helps websites get noticed by other search engines and directories, and surfed by visitors.
Before we start, let it be said that lots of things go into making a good website, and there are a lot of variables to consider beyond just specific search engines or directories when considering a web marketing strategy. This, however, is a narrow focus article. Don't write to me telling me there is a web beyond Google. I know. Shut up.
Secondly, I don't claim to have the fanciest website this side of San Francisco. I have a pretty basic collection of pages including a portfolio, description of professional services, and links to independent projects, built with non-cutting-edge HTML and minimal javascript, with QuickTime required for the multimedia components. I also have some kibbles of miscellania like this one, clustered around my homepage and my blog, which serve to feed some additional traffic to my main website. People surf my pages, some of those people contact me via e-mail or telephone, and some of those people end up giving me jobs. I get enough such jobs that I can pick and choose between them, so I judge my website to be a modest success.
In terms of traffic my site is also modest, in that the server tends to shell out between six and eight hundred pages per day at the time of this writing, which isn't a very strenuous load. (Note: counting pages is different than counting raw hits, which include calls for graphics, menu bar icons, robot restrictions files, error files and other crumbs.) Big commercial websites need over ten thousand page-views per day to start doing real e-business (they need millions to actually stay there), or so I have read, so in comparison my current page-view average isn't anything particularly remarkable.
But keep in mind: my average used to be five pages per day, when I first secured the domain (my old domain remains unused at the time of this writing). And on a typical day that meant two of those page-views were me checking to see if the domain name resolution was working, one of them was a type-o from somebody in Hong Kong and the resultant 404 error, and the other two were spambots looking for e-mail addresses to harvest. Welcome to the ground floor.
My site's pubescence came when I took the time to learn a little more about that sexy, secretive super-vedette of search enginery, Google [sic]. Though I had known about Google for some time, I had not really come to appreciate the fact that among surfers at large it was enjoying the fleeting privilege of being the pope of the world wide web -- a sort of Yahoo for the digitally-literate, in the sense of a symbolic portal.
My curiosity was first aroused when I noticed that my resume tended to turn up on Google's first page of results for my very specific queries, while my main sales pages languished far behind, on the tenth page or deeper. Like most amateur web spinners I had picked up on the old inertia that put a lot of emphasis on keywords listed in meta tags; I wondered why this technique wasn't yielding fruit. Though I was unfamiliar with the term "weblog" at the time, the answer turned out to be because of the blog-like character of my resume: a certain density of regular text and foreign links, updated regularly with dated entries. I have learned a lot since this initial curiosity, but it still does illustrate the most basic credo of the Googlebot: fresh, topical content and hyperlinks with text context are good.
The basic credo of Google itself is don't be evil. Glib as it sounds, this is a powerful message for a corporation to live by. And since Google has so far seemed to live by it so consistently, the only way to get along with Google is to emulate it. That is: the best to do well in Google listings is to feed Google what it wants: a good, non-spammy website that can be sensibly navigated and that features high-quality content along a theme. Featuring good content goes further with Google than trying to trick it with stuffed-crotch meta tags or link farms, because the latter approach is evil and Google is designed to sniff out and ignore evil (or sentence the site to be ignored, however you want to understand it). Shameless self-promotion will naturally cause some friction with Google, because Google has the capacity for shame.
Beyond that, here are some general guidelines I have gleaned from my armchair, attempting like so many others to divine the secret algorithms behind the curtains:
Google Likes Text
That may seem obvious, but some people get confused when their "Gallery Page" exclusively featuring photographs and navigation icons made from images without alt tags isn't well ranked. How does Google know your page is about leprechauns when you never actually use the word "leprechaun" in plain text on the page? This tip should be underlined and written in fluorescent lettering for people whose sites exist only through Flash or other multimedia schemes whose output is not parsed by the Googlebot at all.
Google Likes Formatting
How does Google tell whether your page is about leprechauns versus just making a passing reference to leprechauns? Through formatting, the Googlebot attempts to rank the importance of a given keyword. For instance, a keyword echoed in H1 or H2 headline text or boldface type is taken to be a more primary subject than one merely mentioned in the body text (though the number of occurances in the body text is relevant as well).
Google Respects Exclusion Standards
Use them. You should have a ROBOTS.TXT file at the root level of your website which states your general rules, and then specify in the header of your pages any specific restrictions using the robot exclusion meta tag. This should be used to avoid embarrassing things like seeing your navigation frame ranked higher than your actual content pages, by indicating in the robot tag that the links are to be followed, but the content of the navbar.html file itself is not to be indexed.
Google Likes Outbound Hyperlinks
Linking to similarly themed sites that Google already respects adds a layer of sugar to your content. Google is happy that you have contributed your grey matter to culling the content of the Internet, and rewards you with a certain amount of good faith that you know what you're talking about, and are not linking random, stupid things.
Google Loves Inbound Hyperlinks
Being linked to by a respected site (in this context a site with a high PageRank) is the single best way to boost your listing. Being linked to from sites themed with related keywords amplifies this effect, especially when the anchoring link text itself contains relevant keywords (for example "cool leprechaun site" rather than "click here" being the actual underlined text on the foreign site). Of course, Google knows that you know that hyperlinks are important, so Google keeps a sharp eye out for a practice known as "link-farming", where websites attempt to simulate the appearance of popularity by either exchanging links with strangers shamelessly or by creating circles of forwarding-domains which all point to one (sometimes duplicated) resource. How do you know if your website's friendly reciprocal linking policy smells like link-farming? Simple. Ask yourself: is it your intention to deceive? In other words: are you being evil? If you're not being evil, you're probably in the clear (despite paranoid discussion threads to the contrary).
Google Likes Accessibility
Google has respect for all browsers, and thus feels more warmly about pages that can be parsed by any browser, no matter how humble, rather than cryptic pages that require the latest and greatest browser bristling with bleeding-edge plug-ins in order to work. Google looks for good old HTML tricks like internal anchor names related to sub-topics, subject headlines, text justification and paragraph size to help determine the kind of content a page contains. While Google understands cascading style-sheets and some other dynamic tricks, always keep in mind how these pages will be parsed by low-end browsers before you publish. Google gets mad if you snub the blind man using Lynx, because that's evil.
Googlebot Isn't Psychic
Other than coming in the front door (to your HTML root directory, usually http://www.domain.tld), the Googlebot can only follow links that you provide to it. If you have pages that aren't linked to from anywhere else on your site (called "orphan" pages) they won't get spidered by Google or by anyone else for that matter. So, always remember to connect your pages together -- it is a web, after all.
Location, Location, Location
Google likes you to tell it where you are. It thinks city names are delicious.
Direct Me To Your Keyword
You score points for having a relevant keyword in the name of your directory or your actual HTML file, like http://domain.tld/littlefolk/leprechauns.html. Some sources, like this informative discussion thread, suggest that this practice is only good for a few levels deep, after that becoming potentially harmful to one's PageRank. In other words, you may not be making Google happier by going with http://domain.tld/folk/legendary/little/western/irish/domestic/leprechaun-related/leprechauns.html -- it may be more specific, but it feels spammy.
Google Likes Long Pages
I have often read the opposite advice, but my personal experience has consistently been that pages with long text content do better than shorter ones. The frequently quoted pearl that only the first twenty-five words of the page's plain text really count is nonsense.
Google Likes Experts
If you know about something, write a personal or formal essay about it, humble or fancy as you like, and post it on your site. If other people find your knowledge useful in any way they will find their way to the rest of your site (assuming you have semi-decently designed pages). The more obscure the topic you cover, the better you'll do as an expert. At the time of this writing my own musings on the subject of greasy Quebecois junk-food is the number one result for the query poutine. (If my website was about selling poutine, that would be a real feather in my cap. As it is, it probably just sends me a surge of raw traffic, which is good too.)
Invisible Text Isn't Necessarily Evil
I do use so-called "invisible text" on some of my title pages. I do this because I used to see these title or intro pages listed in Google with no description or keywords beneath the the title-link. By inserting some text coloured the same as the background I have maintained my design integrity while making the pages provide readable descriptions in the listings. Some people say that this is a spammy, evil activity since it reeks of burying pages in invisible keywords, but I think that they are being too paranoid. Use complete sentences, and don't go overboard.
Don't Obsess
The search engine results pages archive is a constantly roiling soup, a dynamic and fleeting thing, subject to the throes of the monthly dance as the servers around the world synchronise the Google database and the day to day fartings of endless everflux. Listings move up and down all the time. Don't panic. Be patient.
Google Likes Freshness
The Freshbot has been described as a sort of bonus feature, which indexes select portions of the web on a daily or weekly rather than monthly basis. It is hard to say what exactly makes the Freshbot visit more or less frequently, but it is true that the Freshbot is attracted to blog-like and/or newsfeed-like features. So, update your site often with topical, contemporary information...
...Here I am following my own advice. Share and enjoy!
3/18/2003
GRACEFUL DINOSAURS OF THE DAWN OF THE AIR AGE
Fabulous airships have seized the popular imagination since DaVinci, with modern fantastic visions ranging from Miyazaki's improbable fixed-wing pirates to the dense lines of humming, glowing traffic weaving through Lucas' Coruscant. In the realm of the real, however, nothing is more fabulous than the world of zeppelins -- silver whales in stately flight among the white clouds of a slower age, brainchild of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. You can read a detailed account of a 1933 flight aboard the Graf Zeppelin from the point of view of a little girl here, or you can read about the life of US Navy man Larry Rodrigues aboard sub-hunting military dirigibles here. Galleries of fairly small, grainy images abound on the net, including this one, this one and this one, which all claim to have "original" photographs though they seem to feature much material in common. And of course even the briefest jaunt through the annals of dirigible history would be incomplete without mention of the famous Goodyear Blimp or the infamous Stealth Blimp.
Also: I'm sick.
Fabulous airships have seized the popular imagination since DaVinci, with modern fantastic visions ranging from Miyazaki's improbable fixed-wing pirates to the dense lines of humming, glowing traffic weaving through Lucas' Coruscant. In the realm of the real, however, nothing is more fabulous than the world of zeppelins -- silver whales in stately flight among the white clouds of a slower age, brainchild of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. You can read a detailed account of a 1933 flight aboard the Graf Zeppelin from the point of view of a little girl here, or you can read about the life of US Navy man Larry Rodrigues aboard sub-hunting military dirigibles here. Galleries of fairly small, grainy images abound on the net, including this one, this one and this one, which all claim to have "original" photographs though they seem to feature much material in common. And of course even the briefest jaunt through the annals of dirigible history would be incomplete without mention of the famous Goodyear Blimp or the infamous Stealth Blimp.
Also: I'm sick.
3/11/2003
WORTH A SECOND LOOK
This press release from The Planetary Society describes how a batch of signal sources identified by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence as possibly alien in origin are slated to be reobserved in greater detail by the Arecibo radio-telescope observatory. The signals were uncovered by the massive distributed computing project Seti@Home, in which "4 million astronomy buffs in 226 countries...act as a supercomputer, collectivelty sifting through the 35 terabytes of raw data collected by the 305-meter Arecibo dish" (MS-NBC). To date, my team has processed some 2 361 data units for the project. Further geek discussion and results boasting can be sampled here.
This press release from The Planetary Society describes how a batch of signal sources identified by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence as possibly alien in origin are slated to be reobserved in greater detail by the Arecibo radio-telescope observatory. The signals were uncovered by the massive distributed computing project Seti@Home, in which "4 million astronomy buffs in 226 countries...act as a supercomputer, collectivelty sifting through the 35 terabytes of raw data collected by the 305-meter Arecibo dish" (MS-NBC). To date, my team has processed some 2 361 data units for the project. Further geek discussion and results boasting can be sampled here.
3/09/2003
THE GAP AND THE CORE
Why invade Iraq if not for oil? Ask Thomas P.M. Barnett of the U.S. Naval War College: his concise, unvarnished article for Esquire is called The Pentagon's New Map and is sub-headed "It explains why we're going to war, and why we'll keep going to war." From the article:
Why invade Iraq if not for oil? Ask Thomas P.M. Barnett of the U.S. Naval War College: his concise, unvarnished article for Esquire is called The Pentagon's New Map and is sub-headed "It explains why we're going to war, and why we'll keep going to war." From the article:
"Think about it: Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are pure products of the Gap—in effect, its most violent feedback to the Core. They tell us how we are doing in exporting security to these lawless areas (not very well) and which states they would like to take “off line” from globalization and return to some seventh-century definition of the good life (any Gap state with a sizable Muslim population, especially Saudi Arabia).
"If you take this message from Osama and combine it with our military-intervention record of the last decade, a simple security rule set emerges: A country’s potential to warrant a U.S. military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity. There is a good reason why Al Qaeda was based first in Sudan and then later in Afghanistan: These are two of the most disconnected countries in the world. Look at the other places U.S. Special Operations Forces have recently zeroed in on: northwestern Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen. We are talking about the ends of the earth as far as globalization is concerned."
3/06/2003
COOLER TO BE CANADIAN
While I agree that grilling citizens abroad for the policies of their government at home is at the very least obnoxious behaviour, I cannot help but be a little bit gratified at the humble pie apparently being served up to traveling Americans as detailed in this article from USA Today, chipping away at the previously untarnished mantle of proud ethnocentricity that has rubbed Europeans and European wannabes the wrong way for decades. My favourite quotation from a stung Yank is this one, which demonstrates beautifully how confused about differing perceptions of various nationalities the average American is: "One girl turns and says, 'We were hoping you were Canadian.' Canadian? Since when was it cooler to be Canadian?" As any remotely cosmopolitan traveller knows, being Canadian has been cooler than being American as far as Europeans are concerned for quite some time. Sneaky American tourists have been known to try to pass themselves off as loud, linguistically-impaired Canadians in order to get a warmer reception in Europe. The Washington Times weighs in here. Again, I do not support persecuting people on the basis of their nationality, but I do support Americans having a bit of a reality check. It's time.
While I agree that grilling citizens abroad for the policies of their government at home is at the very least obnoxious behaviour, I cannot help but be a little bit gratified at the humble pie apparently being served up to traveling Americans as detailed in this article from USA Today, chipping away at the previously untarnished mantle of proud ethnocentricity that has rubbed Europeans and European wannabes the wrong way for decades. My favourite quotation from a stung Yank is this one, which demonstrates beautifully how confused about differing perceptions of various nationalities the average American is: "One girl turns and says, 'We were hoping you were Canadian.' Canadian? Since when was it cooler to be Canadian?" As any remotely cosmopolitan traveller knows, being Canadian has been cooler than being American as far as Europeans are concerned for quite some time. Sneaky American tourists have been known to try to pass themselves off as loud, linguistically-impaired Canadians in order to get a warmer reception in Europe. The Washington Times weighs in here. Again, I do not support persecuting people on the basis of their nationality, but I do support Americans having a bit of a reality check. It's time.
3/05/2003
FEYNMAN FROM BELOW
I am currently reading The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a collection of the "best short works" of acclaimed physicist Richard P. Feynman (1918 - 1988), perhaps best known popularly for his Feynman Diagrams for schematising sub-atomic interactions. The book features interviews, speeches, short essays and semi-formal question and answer sessions with the quirky and renouned Nobel winner, including a short, personal introduction by student and colleague Freeman Dyson which compares his relationship with the elder physicist to that of Jonson and Shakespeare. Editor Jeffrey Robbins has chosen to largely preserve Feynman's ungrammatical, off-the-cuff style, which is as often charming as it is frustrating to read, depending on the context, OK? Here is an excerpt from a talk Feynman gave about his involvement in the Manhatten Project, and how he was the only person to see the first atomic blast:
I am currently reading The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a collection of the "best short works" of acclaimed physicist Richard P. Feynman (1918 - 1988), perhaps best known popularly for his Feynman Diagrams for schematising sub-atomic interactions. The book features interviews, speeches, short essays and semi-formal question and answer sessions with the quirky and renouned Nobel winner, including a short, personal introduction by student and colleague Freeman Dyson which compares his relationship with the elder physicist to that of Jonson and Shakespeare. Editor Jeffrey Robbins has chosen to largely preserve Feynman's ungrammatical, off-the-cuff style, which is as often charming as it is frustrating to read, depending on the context, OK? Here is an excerpt from a talk Feynman gave about his involvement in the Manhatten Project, and how he was the only person to see the first atomic blast:
"So then I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes -- bright light can never hurt your eyes -- it's ultraviolet light that does. So I got behind a truck windshield, so the ultraviolet can't go through the glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing...OK. Time comes...I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange...it's a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside...I am the only guy that actually looked at the damn thing, the first Trinity Test. The guys up where I was all had dark glasses...You couldn't see a thing with dark glasses."
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