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Looking to hire some web talent? Need a designer or a developer who keeps track of what's going on in the web world? In case you haven't already, give Authentic Jobs a try.
Right now there is a promotion that lasts until October 31 (this year ;-)) and will give you 30% off on both full-time and freelance listings if you use the promotion code BEREA31 when you create your job listing.
Should you not find the talent you are looking for there is a money-back guarantee that applies even if you use the promo code. In other words you have nothing to lose.
Not hiring but looking for a job? Check out the listings or subscribe to an Authentic Jobs listing feed to make sure you don't miss any of the opportunities that are posted.Posted in Job openings.
Publication date: 2008-10-17more
Recently discovered web developer-related Firefox add-ons
I have recently discovered a few Firefox extensions that can be quite useful when building websites. They are likely old news to many, but I figure there are at least a few others who have not come across them.
ColorZilla is a handy extension that makes it easy to grab colours from the web page that is currently open in the browser. It sure beats having to open a screen shot in Photoshop just to find a colour code for something. ColorZilla does some other useful things as well, so it is not just a colour picker.
Firefox Accessibility Extension adds features that are useful to people with disabilities and helps developers evaluate accessibility.
Screengrab! among other things lets you take screen shots of what is inside the browser viewport, without the browser chrome. I could have used this recently when I was taking a whole bunch of screen shots of various websites for an upcoming course on web development. Unfortunately I didn't know about it then so I used the built in screen shot functionality in Mac OS X and cropped the images to get only the browser viewport. Oh well.
WAVE Toolbar lets you run the WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool inside Firefox, without sending any information to the WAVE server. Perfect if you're like me and spend a lot of time working on password-protected sites.
Posted in Accessibility, Browsers.
Publication date: 2008-10-15more
Free links to your site
I can’t believe a new feature from Google isn’t getting more notice, because it converts already-existing links to your site into much higher quality links, for free. The Google webmaster blog just announced that you can find the pages that link to 404 pages on your site.
Let me back up and give you a little [...] Publication date: 2008-10-14more
Stupid Digg + a kitten
Sorry that the blog was down for a few hours. Yesterday I did a throwaway post that somehow ended up getting 3800+ diggs or so. I didn’t have WP-Cache or Supercache turned on, so my blog melted to a little puddle of fail.
“Matt, you idiot! How you could run a modern WordPress blog [...] Publication date: 2008-10-11more
YouTube adds
A couple weeks ago, xkcd ran this funny comic:
Randall Monroe, the creator of xkcd, suggested that if YouTube commenters had to listen to their comments read back to them aloud, it might lead to better discussion on YouTube. Some Googlers thought that was a pretty fun suggestion, so they did it. YouTube now has an [...] Publication date: 2008-10-09more
Halloween costume for 2008?
I think I know what I’m doing for Halloween this year, but if anyone wants to throw out suggestions, I’d be delighted to hear them.
Publication date: 2008-10-08more
Google to webmasters: Write clean HTML and consider accessibility
I suspect that the recent release of Google Chrome, based on Webkit, has at least something to do with the Google Webmaster Central Blog post Workin' it on all browsers. In the post webmasters are encouraged to make sure their sites work regardless of what browser their visitors use, and Google is likely interested in websites working properly in their own browser.
The blog post points to an article in the Webmaster Help Center called Making sure your site appears properly in different browsers. That article contains four main tips:
Test your site in as many browsers as possible
Write good, clean HTML
Specify your character encoding
Consider accessibility
All good advice of course, though obviously there is a lot more to be said about good HTML and accessibility than what is brought up in the article. Nevertheless it's good to see this kind of information on Google where it may reach people who would not otherwise bother writing proper HTML and CSS or consider accessibility at all.Posted in Accessibility, Web Standards.
Publication date: 2008-10-08more
My Five Months With Google Chrome
Om Malik wrote an interesting post about Google Chrome one month after the public launch. While I was reading Om’s post, I realized that I wrote a post for the Google Chrome release that I never published. I’ll include it here, and then let’s meet at the bottom and compare notes.
Like many Google [...] Publication date: 2008-10-06more
Quick comment for pixelrn
I tried to leave a comment on pixelrn.com but the problem with talking about hacked sites is that you often end up using language that gets flagged as spammy. Here’s what I tried to say but the WordPress installation over on pixelrn wouldn’t let me:
Hi Beth, I checked and it doesn’t look like you have [...] Publication date: 2008-10-04more
Google Blogsearch and Techmeme
More and more people are spending free time (and work time) online and lots of those people want to discover interesting things on the web. Google Blogsearch’s new home page applies that insight with a browsable version of what’s going on in the blogosphere. The UI design is a little reminiscent of Google News, but [...] Publication date: 2008-10-03more
New meme: Tag five friends to register to vote
Okay, I’ll help on this. A Google blog post and the corresponding video ask people to register to vote (find out how at http://maps.google.com/vote ) and/or send this video to five of their friends. I’m game for that, mainly because Jonah Hill is the funniest man in the world and he says to do it. [...] Publication date: 2008-10-03more
Multiple form labels and screen readers
Just about every website needs some forms. Sometimes there are many of them, sometimes just a single contact form. Regardless of their number, they need to be usable and accessible, which can sometimes be a little more work than it would be if theory and practice aligned a little better.
Say you have a simple form with an input field whose value needs to be validated, either by a JavaScript running in the browser or by a script on the server (preferably both). When the data entered by the user does not match what is expected, you need to notify the user somehow.
For sighted users this is generally not a problem. If you output some text stating what the problem is and highlight it visually, most people will notice it. For screen reader users it's a little more tricky though.
To make sure that the screen reader associates the message with the correct input field, the text should be in a label element that is explicitly connected to the field. No problem so far actually, but then the designer tells you that it has to look differently. The validation message should be below the input field instead of next to the label text. Or it should be next to the input field, or some other location not directly adjacent to the label text.
You start fiddling with extra markup, absolute positioning, negative margins, and end up with something that seems to work reasonably well. Until you resize the text, at which point things get misaligned.
You may be able to find a half-good solution that works within certain constraints, but if you've been down this road you probably get the point. Positioning error messages this way is fragile. It would be so much easier if you could just put the error message in a second label element associated with the input field.
Well, it turns out you can do that. From The LABEL element in the HTML 4.01 specification:
The LABEL element may be used to attach information to controls. Each LABEL element is associated with exactly one form control.
The for attribute associates a label with another control explicitly: the value of the for attribute must be the same as the value of the id attribute of the associated control element. More than one LABEL may be associated with the same control by creating multiple references via the for attribute.
Sounds great, doesn't it? A quick check in graphical web browsers shows that they associate multiple labels with the input field (as evidenced by the input field gaining focus when either label is clicked). But what about screen readers? It would be so useful if this would work...
Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it looks like it doesn't quite work as well as you'd hope. I mentioned this briefly in Use the label element to make your HTML forms accessible, but I think it's worth bringing up again since full support for multiple labels would help us make forms more accessible to screen reader users while keeping visual designers happy.
I am far from an expert user when it comes to screen readers, but I've done some limited testing with mostly disappointing results.
Apple VoiceOver does not recognise more than one label element associated with a form control and reads only the label that comes first in the document's source order.
JAWS and Window-Eyes both do the opposite and read only the last label when an input field gains focus.
The only screen reader of those that I tested that does handle multiple labels is Fire Vox.
The exact results may obviously depend on user configuration and reading modes, and there may be other screen readers that get it right, but these results indicate that screen reader behaviour is too inconsistent for multiple labels to be a reliable technique.
A couple of years ago, Bob Easton set up a multiple label test case that reveals similar results, discussed in Speaking form labels - Summary.
Sorry to write at such length about something that appears to have no practical use. I just wanted to highlight a case where I think screen readers following the HTML specification more closely would help web developers to increase the accessibility of HTML forms they don't have full visual control of.Posted in (X)HTML, Accessibility.
Publication date: 2008-10-01more
Five fun smartphone tips
Tip #1: See what you’re ordering. You’re at a restaurant and looking over the menu. But you don’t know the difference between a turkey bolognese and a turkey piccata. What to do? Fire up your iPhone, Android, or other smartphone and go to images.google.com and do a search for turkey bolognese. In just a few [...] Publication date: 2008-09-29more
Where to submit Chrome feedback?
The best place to submit Chrome feedback is at
http://groups.google.com/group/google-chrome-help
Not here (I’m going to disable comments on this post) and not over at Search Engine Roundtable. I still see a comment a day or so trickling in over there, probably because the post ranks highly for “Chrome feedback.”
Just to repeat, if you want a Chrome [...] Publication date: 2008-09-28more
Traveling => Light posting
I’m not-in-California for a few days, so expect light posting. If you want to try to guess where I’m visiting, I may start posting “Where is Matt?” hints on my Twitter stream for people that want to play along.
While I’m gone, enjoy the Android coverage. Even though I love my iPhone, I think lots of [...] Publication date: 2008-09-25more
Google Moderator launches
Here’s a fun link for you. Google just released a free service called Google Moderator. This is a port to Google App Engine of an existing tool we use all the time at Google. Internally it was called Dory (after the fish who asked questions all the time in Finding Nemo).
What does Google Moderator do? [...] Publication date: 2008-09-25more
Turn Firefox into a screen reader with Fire Vox
I've sen Fire Vox mentioned plenty of times but have never had any luck getting it to work on my Mac. Until now, that is. Not sure what I've been doing wrong the other times I have tried it, but the other day I gave it another shot and it worked without any problems.
For anyone who hasn't heard of Fire Vox, it is a free, open source screen reader extension for Firefox that works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Among other things it has support for WAI-ARIA and the CSS3 Speech Module, and is a good alternative to VoiceOver if you're on a Mac and need a screen reader for web browsing (or testing).
One thing that had me a little bit confused at first is that, at least as far as I can tell, you need to tab into a freshly loaded page before the "Auto Read" option (Ctrl + Shift + a) will work. Read Next (Ctrl + Shift + f) and Read Previous (Ctrl + Shift + d) work even if the focus is still in the location bar. Not sure if that is intentional or not, but if you load up a site and nothing happens when you press Ctrl + Shift + a to have Fire Vox read the entire page, try using tab or (Ctrl + Shift + f) to move keyboard focus to the loaded page first.
For developers Fire Vox makes it easy to check how their sites work in a screen reader. Sure, it's just one of several available screen readers, but this one is free and cross-platform. In other words there is no reason for you not to have it installed, so grab a copy right now.Posted in Accessibility, Browsers.
Publication date: 2008-09-24more
Yo ho ho! Happy Pirate Day, mateys!
I hope everyone be havin’ a great Talk Like a Pirate Day! It looks like Google added support fer Pirate in our user interface. I ‘ave t’ admit that I didn’ see that one comin’.
Special thanks t’ th’ online pirate translator fer help wit’ this post, don’tcha know. May the “black spot” not darken your [...] Publication date: 2008-09-20more
Sergey starts a blog!
I’ve checked with folks at Google and they confirmed that http://too.blogspot.com/ is Sergey Brin’s blog. The name “too” reflects Sergey’s additional life outside work. One of his first posts is about the fact that he might be more likely to develop Parkinson’s Disease when he’s older. That’s based on data from 23andMe, the personal genetics [...] Publication date: 2008-09-19more
Opera Web Standards Curriculum: A "do things the right way" learning resource
In July the Opera Web Standards Curriculum (WSC) was launched. It is a great initiative that aims to provide a free course for anyone who needs a thorough introduction to the web and how to create standards-based and accessible websites.
The WSC consists of a large number of articles covering topics, including the history of the web, graphic design for the web, HTML, CSS, and accessibility. At the time of this writing 23 articles have been published, with many more to come.
The editor, Chris Mills, asked me if I would be interested in writing a few articles. I said yes, but unfortunately I soon realised that I did not have enough spare time to write as many WSC articles as I would have liked to. My single contribution to the WSC is Choosing the right doctype for your HTML documents. Considering the quality of the articles written by the other authors I think my lack of time may have been for the best.
For a long time I've missed having something like the WSC to refer people to when they ask me where to start learning about modern web design and development, so it's great to finally have a place to send them to.
Even better, the entire course is Creative Commons licensed to allow universities, companies, and other organisations to use it freely.
Know someone who needs to catch up with Web Standards? Help make the web a better place by referring them to the Opera Web Standards Curriculum (WSC).Posted in Web Standards.
Publication date: 2008-09-17more
Shiny Chrome bits, plus a fresh tip
A few neat Chrome things that I’ve seen recently:
CrossOver ported the open-source Chromium browser over to Mac and Linux using Wine. Bear in mind that this is more of a proof-of-concept and not the official version, but you can still download the binaries and play with it.
If you like the look and feel of Chrome [...] Publication date: 2008-09-16more
Best Yogurt in Silicon Valley?
Hi, my name is Matt, and I have a yogurt problem. It started last month when I discovered the joys of Pinkberry yogurt on my trip down to Los Angeles for SIGGRAPH.
Pinkberry is different from “normal” yogurt like TCBY because it has a tart (or slightly sour) taste. If you’re living in middle America with [...] Publication date: 2008-09-15more
How to delete
Lazyweb, here’s a quick question for you. On a FreeBSD system, suppose I own a directory called “foo”. Inside that “foo” directory are some files (file1, file2, file3) owned by the “nobody” user. How do I delete those files? When I type the command “rm file1″ I get the response “rm: file1: Permission denied” even [...] Publication date: 2008-09-14more
How to delete files from a directory I own in FreeBSD?
Lazyweb, here’s a quick question for you. On a FreeBSD system, suppose I own a directory called “foo”. Inside that “foo” directory are some files (file1, file2, file3) owned by the “nobody” user. How do I delete those files? When I type the command “rm file1″ I get the response “rm: file1: Permission denied” even [...] Publication date: 2008-09-14more
Arrrrr you prepared for Talk Like a Pirate Day with pirate fonts?
Are you ready for Talk Like a Pirate Day? It’s September 19th (same date every year), so it’s coming up fast. I recently stumbled across some really nice pirate fonts online. This one is called Windlass, for example:
Hat-tip to KPAO! which is a fun blog.
Every time I start looking at fonts, I always surface 3-4 [...] Publication date: 2008-09-08more
Arrrrr you prepared for Talk Like a Pirate Day with fonts?
Are you ready for Talk Like a Pirate Day? It’s September 19th (same date every year), so it’s coming up fast. I recently stumbled across some really nice pirate fonts online. This one is called Windlass, for example:
Hat-tip to KPAO! which is a fun blog.
Every time I start looking at fonts, I always surface 3-4 [...] Publication date: 2008-09-08more
Twitter added nofollow to
Yesterday John Battelle emailed me to ask about Rae’s post. This will be a little inside baseball to some people who don’t live and breathe search and Twitter, but I figured I’d take what I emailed to John, add some pictures, and post it here. Here’s the email:
Sorry for the delay in replying; I’m really [...] Publication date: 2008-09-06more
Signs of life
As you may have noticed it's been over three months since I last posted anything here. Just in case you missed it, the reason is that I have been on parental leave. Well, as of this week I am now back at work, and hope to start posting reasonably regularly here again within the next few weeks.
There will be a few changes compared to how things have worked here in the past. Time is becoming more and more precious for me, especially with a one-year-old to take care of, and I need to find ways to remove as many time eaters as possible. One of those time eaters is - unfortunately - comments.
Yeah, I know. I have said in the past that comments are very important here and on other blogs, and I still think they are. But managing comments, whether they are positive or not, takes a lot of time and effort for me, so I am going to disable comments for the time being.
Others have argued for not allowing comments on blogs, and Jeremy Keith sums it up pretty well in Commentary. I used to partly disagree with what Jeremy and the others he is quoting are saying, but I have changed my position on this. Thank you to all readers who have taken the time to post constructive, thoughtful and encouraging comments through the years. I really appreciate it, but from now on there will be no comment form at the end of each post here.
Another thing I want to do is simplify. The design, the code, the publishing system, my writing process, everything that has to do with writing and posting content here. I really want to have a stable setup that lets me focus on writing instead of worrying about pixels or scripts or databases. I am also going to (try to) stop worrying about things being broken in inferior browsers. I get quite enough of solving IE CSS bugs at work, so I am going to minimise the time I waste on it here.
These simplifications will be a work in progress, so if you see anything that is broken or experience any other kind of hiccups around here, it's most likely caused by me changing things and will (hopefully) be temporary.
Or not.
Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites.Posted in Life.
Publication date: 2008-09-05more
Google does not want rights to things you do using Chrome
Alright, I’ve got another conspiracy theory misconception to dispel. After reading through the Chrome Terms of Service, some people are worried that Google is trying to assert rights on everything that you do on Chrome. From one example story by Marshall Kirkpatrick:
The terms include a section giving Google “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and [...] Publication date: 2008-09-04more
Google Chrome user agent
It’s easy to find out what Google Chrome’s user-agent is. Using the same trick as I did with the iPhone, I searched for phpinfo HTTP_USER_AGENT in Google Chrome. Click on one of the results and search for HTTP_USER_AGENT on the page. Here’s the image that I see:
My exact user-agent is
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; [...] Publication date: 2008-09-04more
Live-blogging the Google Chrome announcement
Update, 12:49 p.m.: You can try Google Chrome at http://www.google.com/chrome and I hope every Windows user takes it for a spin. It’s only a seven megabyte download, which means it’s really fast to download and try.
Update, 12:46 p.m.: Chromium, the site dedicated to open-sourcing Google Chrome is now open at http://www.chromium.org/
According to a press release [...] Publication date: 2008-09-03more
Preventing paranoia: when does Google Chrome talk to Google.com?
For better or worse, my blog is popular with the Google conspiracy-theorist demographic. I knew that as soon as Google Chrome launched, some readers would ask tough questions about privacy and how/when Google Chrome communicates with google.com.
So I decided to tackle this issue head-on. I talked to the Chrome team to find out if [...] Publication date: 2008-09-03more
Answers to common Google Chrome objections
I spend a fair amount of my time debunking misconceptions about Google. So when I found out that Google Chrome was going to be released, I put on my thinking cap about what objections people would throw out about Google Chrome. Here are the questions that I came up with, along with my personal answers. [...] Publication date: 2008-09-03more
Get Ready for Google Chrome: New Open-Source Web Browser
Google just officially confirmed that it will release a new open-source web browser, called Google Chrome (that link should go live sometime tomorrow).
I can’t wait to talk more about Google Chrome, but I’ll hold off until it officially launches. Once people can download Google Chrome, I plan to talk about my experiences using Google Chrome, [...] Publication date: 2008-09-03more
My favorite books of 2008 (so far)
Okay, so we’re more than halfway through 2008. I’m a voracious reader, and I wanted to share my favorite books that I read in the first half of 2008.
1. American Shaolin. Matthew Polly grew up in Kansas and decided to go study martial arts in China with Shaolin monks. I dare you to read the [...] Publication date: 2008-08-28more
Three tips for
This is my personal blog. I don’t run my draft posts by Google’s PR or legal team, other than maybe 2-3 times when I thought a post might have legal implications. But I have learned a few hard-won lessons. So, when someone recently asked me for tips about talking to the public, I couldn’t resist. [...] Publication date: 2008-08-25more
Digging out from SIGGRAPH and L.A.
I’m up to my ears in email from last week, but I had a great time down in Los Angeles and at SIGGRAPH:
I’ll try to write up a little bit about the trip, but for now I’m gearing up for SES San Jose. Places to find me:
- I’ll be on a keynote panel on Tuesday. [...] Publication date: 2008-08-18more
What to do in Los Angeles?
I’m going to be down in Los Angeles for the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference next week, but I hope to have a little sightseeing free time. What would you recommend seeing or doing in Los Angeles?
Publication date: 2008-08-09more
A Quick Tutorial on JavaScript Bookmarklets
Bookmarklets are very handy pieces of JavaScript code that you can bookmark. In HTML, if you want a link to open in a new window, you’d write it like this:
<a href=”http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/” target=”_blank”>Matt Cutts</a>
Go on, try it on this link: Matt Cutts
If you wanted to create a bookmarklet to open a new window or tab, you’d [...] Publication date: 2008-08-05more
Ben Gomes on Google
This summer several people in Google’s quality group have pulled back the curtain on how people think about search quality at Google. We’ve had Udi Manber give an overview of search quality and the groups that work on it. Then my office-mate Amit Singhal discussed some of our principles of core ranking. Amit followed that [...] Publication date: 2008-08-02more
eBay's Paul Strong on Building the Data Center of the Future
Every few months I like to give people an update on where I expect to be over the next few months. I apologize in advance if I have to decline other speaking invitations, but I’m genuinely trying to travel less and speak less these days to get a better work/life balance. Here are my tentative [...] Publication date: 2008-07-29more
Twitter/Summize search flaky?
I’ve started to post more on my twitter account recently. Less than two weeks ago, Twitter bought Summize. Good for them; I like both companies. But http://search.twitter.com/search?q=wordpress+mattcutts should return this entry in Twitter’s search results. I don’t see it in Twitter’s search results:
What’s the story, Twitter/Summize folks? I can’t escape the feeling that I would [...] Publication date: 2008-07-28more
Best WordPress Plugin for Related Posts?
On my “Matt Cutts” twitter account a few days ago I asked other folks which WordPress “Related Posts” plug-in they would recommend. It seems like “Related Posts” extensions go in and out of vogue every few years, so I wanted to hear what smart folks were using lately. The plugins that got recommended the [...] Publication date: 2008-07-27more
Get your search fix with two videos
I was going to wait until part 2 was posted, but I’ll point people to part 1 now. The video from the SMX Advanced keynote is now live, so you can watch the first 25 minutes of questions and answers. Read the intro here, or just watch the video:
And Juliane Stiller from Google’s German Webmaster [...] Publication date: 2008-07-25more
New Toolbar PageRanks coming
Hey folks, I wanted to let you know that new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days. I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites.
Publication date: 2008-07-25more
I love my pedometer
I’ve written about my Omron pedometer once before, but I wanted to mention it again because I like it so much. Recent research suggests that using a pedometer can lead to more walking and better health.
I’ve been carrying a pedometer for a little over a year now, and I’ve done almost four million steps since [...] Publication date: 2008-07-25more
Sometimes people think that the Google Toolbar led to Google indexing a page. Here’s a recent such story, for example, which speculates how urls with the substring “mms2legacy” got indexed. Here’s where I started to disagree:
The reason for this [supposedly unlisted urls getting crawled --Matt], explained Ken Simpson, CEO of anti-spam company MailChannels, is that [...] Publication date: 2008-07-21more
What are the best iPhone applications?
Here are some of the applications that I’m trying out right now:
What applications do you like on the iPhone 3G?
Publication date: 2008-07-21more
Idea for an Android/iPhone app: Call Me a Cab
I still like my last start-up idea about converting MP3 music collections to be legal and cleaning up mangled/ugly filenames. As Amazon and others start to sell MP3s, a startup could easily offer some interesting services. For example, I just saw that a new product called TuneUp will clean up your filenames, metadata, and cover [...] Publication date: 2008-07-21more
Two Cats One Laptop
The new iPhone 3G camera seems to work pretty well. Here’s a test shot with me, two cats, and a laptop:
The iPhone 3G still doesn’t work great for close-ups on very small stuff, but it seems to work well in the four to six foot range.
Publication date: 2008-07-18more
5 Steps to Upgrade From a Hacked iPhone to an iPhone 3G
I know what you’re thinking: “Matt, I hacked my original iPhone. Now I want to share in the iPhone 3G fun, but I’m worried that something horrible will happen if I upgrade to the iPhone 3G.”
Buck up, fellow iPhone hacker. I’ll tell you how to upgrade from your hacked Apple phone and keep all the [...] Publication date: 2008-07-17more
Yup, I’m about to do another blog post where someone says that a website is clean but it doesn’t look like it to us. I did a very similar post in January 2007, and in that post I said
I Publication date: 2008-07-15more
If you read all the press on Friday, it sounded like a full-out iPocalypse as Apple’s in-store activation of the iPhone failed, which left a bunch of people steamed. I left a Summize search for [iphone] up in my browser; there were probably 10K+ twitters on Friday that mentioned the iPhone.
By afternoon I noticed that [...] Publication date: 2008-07-14more
Cool: Google Releases Protocol Buffers Into the Wild
I love that Google just open-sourced Protocol Buffers. Think of Protocol Buffers as a very compact way of encoding data in a binary format. A programmer can write a simple description of a protocol or structured data and Google’s code will autogenerate a class in C++, Java, or Python to read, write, and parse the [...] Publication date: 2008-07-09more
Carolyn Y. Johnson has a great article about companies that listen online today in the Boston Globe. She mentions that Comcast and Southwest monitor Twitter for frustrated users and Dell for improving its customer service as well as providing a site called IdeaStorm where people can provide feedback. Dell has implemented over 50 of the [...] Publication date: 2008-07-07more
Today is July 1st, which is a special day because it marks the beginning of the second half of the year. Just in the last day or so there have been a couple pieces of good news: better indexing of Flash, and we re-wrote our “What is an SEO?” guide to improve the [...] Publication date: 2008-07-03more
Protect yourself: get a free credit report
I wanted to write down 3-4 easy steps to protect yourself from identity theft and help you check your free annual credit reports.
Credit check options
- If you haven’t checked your credit in the last year, visit the official site that lets you get a free credit report from each of the three major credit bureaus. [...] Publication date: 2008-07-03more
How to stop junk mail
I’ve been learning how to stop receiving junk mail, and I thought I’d share what I’ve learned.
Reducing Junk Mail
There are several services that will help you reduce your junk mail:
- GreenDimes offers a free basic service, but I decided to do their $20 one-time fee because it offered a few extra things I wanted. GreenDimes [...] Publication date: 2008-07-03more
If you haven’t seen the official posts, Adobe has been working to make Flash more index-able by search engines. Google has recently rolled out better code for Flash, e.g. you’re now more likely to see useful snippets on Flash pages in Google’s search results.
I’m a fan of this change, and I’m a fan of Adobe [...] Publication date: 2008-07-01more
Free search engine optimization tips for beginners
Jefferson Graham didn’t just write an article of free SEO tips — he also brought his video camera along. The result is a five minute video interview with more easy, free search engine optimization tips. Again, this is targeted at beginner SEO and small business SEO instead of advanced marketers. You can watch the video [...] Publication date: 2008-06-30more
This sucks. On some very rare occasions, when I connect an SD card reader to my Ubuntu machine, it freezes. Normally I just reboot and everything is fine. But this time my Ubuntu machine won’t boot, and it shows a message like
Starting up …
Loading, please wait…
kinit: name_to_dev_t(/dev/disk/by-uuid/bd656dcd-04b4-412f-a880-62a6553bd8b) = sda5(8,5)
kinit: trying to resume from /dev/disk/by-uuid/bd656dcd-04b4-412f-a880-62a6553bd8b
kinit: No [...] Publication date: 2008-06-27more
(In the webmaster chat last week, someone asked about my cats, so I thought I’d throw out a cat post.)
A little while ago someone mentioned the Kitt-In Box. It’s like an inbox for your desk, except that it holds cats. My cat Emmy likes to hang out in box-like objects, e.g.
So I decided to [...] Publication date: 2008-06-25more
Jefferson Graham of USA Today stopped by the Googleplex a little while ago and we talked about SEO tips for business owners that want to run their business, not live and breathe search 24 hours a day. The result is an article of search engine optimization (SEO) advice that you could hand to any friend [...] Publication date: 2008-06-23more
An eBay Live! 2008 Message from Dinesh Lathi ? More Updates for Sellers
If you’re a site owner, webmaster, SEO, or otherwise have an interest in website metrics, I think you’re going to like Google Trends for Websites. It’s almost as addictive to me as Google Maps is for, you know, normal people. You’re probably familiar with regular Google Trends, which lets you see trends in how [...] Publication date: 2008-06-21more
Google webmaster chat: tons of fun!
By the way, we had our second webmaster live chat yesterday. I think almost everyone had a good time. It was free for anyone to dial in, and hundreds of people showed up. Thanks to the Google presenters and everyone that asked questions or talked in the chat. I got a chance to answer lots [...] Publication date: 2008-06-21more
eBay.ca - A Message from Jeff King: The Finding Playground is Back
At SMX a couple weeks ago Eric Enge and I did a 20-25 minute interview. The interview transcript is now out in case you want to read through it. We discuss some of the ways to get links that are likely to stand the test of time:
Those links are typically given voluntarily. It is an [...] Publication date: 2008-06-19more
Happy
Most people that read my blog know that I really, really like Firefox. I put on a temporary Firefox tattoo a few months ago:
Firefox 3 just came out today, and they’re trying to set a world record for most software downloads in 24 hours. So now is the time to get it! Tell your friends, [...] Publication date: 2008-06-19more
Review: Furminator Cat Brush
I really like the Furminator cat brush. My cat Emmy loves it, and it pulls a ton of hair off of her. How much hair? Well, not to be gross, but a lot:
Good stuff, at least with my cat.
Publication date: 2008-06-19more
Sign up for our webmaster chat
We’ll be doing a webmaster chat tomorrow at 2 p.m. Pacific time. You need to register in advance for the chat, which you can do with this link.
Last quarter we did a webmaster chat and it was a ton of fun. I spent the entire time responding to people in the live chat. This time [...] Publication date: 2008-06-19more
eBay Star Developer Award Winners Recognized for Innovation
Just a quick reminder that websites should check for XSS holes on their site, especially freeform text input such as search boxes. Even big sites can have these issues with XSS and escaping user input. (Note: don’t click on these search results.)
If you’ve noticed that your rankings in Google seem to be affected, you might [...] Publication date: 2008-06-17more
Sometimes at a conference people will ask me “Does it matter what extension I use for my pages? Does Google prefer .php over .asp, or .html over .htm?” And my answer is “We’re happy to crawl all of these file extensions. It doesn’t matter what you choose between any of those.”
Usually I also try to [...] Publication date: 2008-06-14more
Review: Stud-4-Sure stud finder
I wanted to do a few short blog posts about products that I really like and that work well. First up is a stud finder that I found. It’s called the Stud4Sure stud finder (not an affiliate link). It’s more accurate than fancy electronic studfinders and much more accurate than knocking on the wall.
This little [...] Publication date: 2008-06-13more
Jeremy leaves Yahoo!
Jeremy Zawodny is leaving Yahoo!. That’s pretty huge news.
Wihle Jeremy and I have playfully jousted in the past, I have nothing but respect for Jeremy — to the point where we joked for April Fool’s Day a couple years ago about switching blogs. I’ve enjoyed being on search panels with him before, and he’s been [...] Publication date: 2008-06-13more
EBay to postpone plans for PayPal-only plan in Australia