Flash files will be indexed by search engines July 2nd, 2008
I’ll preface this post by saying I’m not a fan of flash. I think flash has a place but is often over used. I chose to label it as over used instead of abused. The abuse has yet to come, but I’ll get to that. Flash is good for displaying video’s, music and of course those browser based flash games that can suck an hour out of your life. Using flash for banners can be useful as well.
With the exception of websites devoted to TV shows, movies or other multimedia as soon as I see the “loading” screen for a website developed completely in flash I close the window. One of my biggest arguments against the use of a flash based website was the fact that search engines could not index the content and therefore suffer with lower rankings. This is no longer the case.
As of this week google announced that it now has the ability to crawl flash files and index the content. This new feature does not belong soley to google. Adobe released the technology to yahoo as well as google.
As per anything that occurs on the internet this opens new doors for abuse. Search engines will have to find a way to determine legitmate content from black hat SEO practices that include spamming hidden content in an attempt to gain higher search engine positions. You can bet right now there are people that are developing sites using this practice. I think at first they will benefit from these practices and change search engine rankings. Sooner or later the search engines will catch up with them and blacklist those websites (remove them from the index all together).
Posted in Search Engines | No Comments »
How much information should you store online? May 30th, 2008
Putting all of your online information in one place may not be a good idea. A golden rule for financial investment is to make sure your portfolio is diversified. Diversification will protect you if one area of your portfolio does not perform as it should. What does this have to do with storing information online? I will focus on three services that aggregate data for a one stop source of information.
Tags: Security
Posted in Industry News, Security | No Comments »
Charter is going to spy on you for “enhanced online expierence” May 15th, 2008
I have never been a big fan of charter communications deplorable service but until now they had been just one of more than a handful of large companies that take my money and waste my time. This latest move is far beyond poor service and lack of customer support. It seems charter is making a move to spy on their costumers in order to increase revenues through targeted advertisements. I stumbled across this slashdot article. You can find more information here.
Tags: ISP, privacy, Security
Posted in Industry News | No Comments »
Protect your forms from hijackers May 1st, 2008
The topic of protecting your forms from spammers looking to hijack your form mail is old and has been kicked around extensively . As a relatively new developer (2 years at the time of writing) I remember looking for a quick easy solution to protect form mails, so here it is.
Tags: php, Security
Posted in Security, php | No Comments »
PHP to upload, resize and store multiple images. April 14th, 2008
Here is a PHP script sample that uploads multiple images, resizes the images, creates a thumbnail and stores the image pathname with descriptions in a MySQL database. The original code is modified from this example here. The major differences are the quality of images stored and the ability to store multiple images as well as a thumbnail.
Tags: image upload, php
Posted in php | 8 Comments »
What do the search engines say about you? February 11th, 2008
Recently I went looking for a new dentist. I pulled up my handy tool google maps, searched for a business near my house. There were about 4 different results within a few miles of my house. Google maps will show you pictures of the business (yes even if you never submitted one) website listings and reviews. The website listings often contain links to other reviewing websites. None of the dentists office has a website so I couldn’t learn much from that. However, a few had reviews.
Tags: SEO
Posted in Search Engines | No Comments »
New trend in domain registration January 18th, 2008
There is sub culture of the internet that deals strictly with buying and selling domain names. These individuals are often called “tasters”. They may pick up on a buzz word or use a program that they wrote to buy domains in massive numbers. The more popular the domain name the higher the resell price. I’m not privy to how lucrative this market is but the fact that it occurs on a large scale means somebody is making money from.
Tags: industry, registrar
Posted in Industry News | No Comments »