Digitally Refreshing

Just came across this blog post from Facebook - looks like they’re going to ‘Free your Facebook page’ after all!

It’s called Facebook Connect and it will let you take your Facebook page with you, where ever you go. Security comes to mind almost immediately, does this move just weaken the wall between your personal data and the rest of the world? I’d be interested to see how corporates block Facebook connect, if it can exist on any other web page will blocking techniques become futile?

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave the web away to the masses. If it were to be commercialised by the likes of large corporates it’s growth would have been slower but I imagine just as vast. It would have been like the Web, but within a giant bubble with corporate branding which you had to pay (in one way or another) to enter and interact with.

Kind of like Facebook. Of course, the types of information found within Facebook is limited (for now) but there is still plenty to read, watch and learn from.

Facebook is growing into a concealed Web (behind a walled garden some say) wrapped in a brand. You even pay to enter. You hand over your personal details, photos, videos, news and gossip. Facebook can use this as they see fit - forever.

I would like to free my Facebook page and allow it to live independently on the web - keep the permissions so only your friends could see the page in it’s entirety, but allow it to link and be linked to by ‘outside’ pages.

Allow it to exist as other pages do ‘in the wild of the world wide web’.

You can kind of see this happening ever since Facebhook allowed Google to trawl through its members, here’s my Facebook page for example. However, to access the full version you still have to hand over your info as payment.

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Titles like that just don’t make sense, but from an Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) point of view, it works just fine. There is a compromise between hitting the number one spot on Google and creating a site that’s readable and usable.

Through good SEO techniques I managed to get www.petereed.co.uk on the first page of Google, then it completely disappeared from Google and now I’m scaling the rankings once again - trying to get to the illusive number one spot. This is what I’ve learnt …

(please note: I’m refering to the .co.uk version of each search engine unless specified otherwise)

Everyone wants their site to be number one on GYM (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search). But the first question you should ask is ‘For which search terms?‘ - this is massively important. For example, if you search on ‘orange‘ (without the quotes) in Google you’ll never find Digitally Refreshing, however if you search on ‘orange broadband‘ (without the quotes) then Digitally Refreshing appears on page 12. If you search on ‘orange broadband sucks‘ (without the quotes) Digitally Refreshing rises to number one.

I wanted petereed.co.uk to hold the number one position in Google when the term ‘pete reed‘ was searched on, so I made sure that I covered the basics by placing the term ‘Pete Reed‘ into:

Home page content
Home page title
HTML title tag
HTML description tag
HTML Keywords (Google stopped using Keywords for search years ago)

I also blogged about petereed.co.uk, linked to his site from mine and correctly key-worded my article. I also made sure that every other rowing site in the UK and abroad knew about his site and also linked to it. This is of course a slower process as you’re inevitably relying on others to promote you. I also made sure that Pete Reed’s Wikipedia entry contained a link to his site.

Pete Reed’s site shot straight to number 1 in Google for about a day. I’ve noticed this behaviour many times with sites I’ve built but they soon drop down the rankings again. Pete Reed’s site settled at around 12th place and worked it’s way up to around 7th and that’s where it stayed for about a week.

Barriers blocking a number one spot were ironically Pete himself. Pete had written many articles on many different websites, he was also written about regularly. So straight away I was dealing with a mass of high trafficked, well linked, established sites. How could Google know that Pete’s own site should appear at the top of the results page? Google ranks on relevance and this is why the likes of his own Wikipedia page and other Rowing sites were outstripping my efforts. For a while even my own post was ranked above his site.

Not content with this position I started to tweak the content, insert more keywords, create another well worded heading and edited the HTML title of the site. I would have used more keywords but the owner of the site wasn’t happy with the aesthetic of the content - which is fair, you have to appreciate the balance between SEO and usability as illustrated in the first paragraph of this article.

I also submitted a sitemap to Google using a free tool supplied by 1&1.

To my great disappointment Pete Reed’s site then dropped to around page 4 of Google and then suddenly disappeared from Google altogether. I knew it had been removed from Google because I made use of the webmaster tools provided by Google themselves.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Peter Reed’s site was still holding number one spot on Yahoo! so what was going on with Google?

Now, as I don’t know how Google really works (no-one does despite what people may tell you) I can only begin to guess at what may have happened and I’m pretty sure I screwed things up when I submitted the site map.

Google doesn’t do duplicate content. If you were to duplicate the content of someone elses site Google will simply ingore you (or the original site - which is a disaster). Pete Reed has two domains, petereed.co.uk and the domain he registered first - petereed.org. So, Google naturally crawled the .org version and then I submitted a site map for the .co.uk version creating a problem.

Or so I thought. As it turns out this wasn’t the problem as after a few days of Pete’s dissappearance it reappeared in Google’s index. So, Google has quite happily indexed both domain versions of the site:

Go to Google.co.uk and search on the following terms:

site:petereed.co.uk
site:petereed.org

You’ll see that Google now contains many pages from each ‘version’ of the site (with the number of pages growing steadily).

So, was this dissappearance just a glitch in the matrix? Did Google make a mistake which it then rectified a few days later? Or perhaps submitting a site map for a Joomla installed site using a different domain to the domain which the site was installed into is simply a bad idea?

What ever happened as of the date of this article www.petereed.co.uk is ranked number one in Google.co.uk and 4th in the .com version. But, remember it won’t stay that way forever - as soon as a site becomes more relevant Google will demote you.

Now the next challenge, to become number one ranked site for the search term “olympic rower“.

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Over the past few weeks I’ve been working closely with Great Britain rower Pete Reed to build him a website in advance of the Olympics in Beijing this summer. Pete will be competing at the Olympics as part of Great Britain’s flagship coxless four boat. As double World Champion, he’s one of Britain’s brightest medal hopes and needed a website to match.

I’ve designed a website to reflect Pete’s personality and the challenges of his sport, whilst trying to capture the feeling of patriotism and excitement that surrounds the Olympics. His website needed to fulfil a variety of functions including corporate promotion, blogs, galleries and feedback capability, but retain the flexibility to change with him (and to be easily updated) and he moves through the next 4-year training cycle to the 2012 Olympics in London.

I built the site on top of the popular Joomla CMS. It was my first attempt at getting to grips with Joomla (version 1.5) and I had to do a lot of learning! If anyone is interested in dabbling with the popular CMS then get stuck in. The help forums, help pages and general instruction manuals are excellent – much better than they were this time last year!

I think it’s just about there now – check it out at www.petereed.co.uk and let me know what you think!

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When I searched on “Dot Com Burst 2.0” (with the quotes) (in Google) there were two results, one of which led back to The Register – where I had seen the phrase coined by Chris Morrison.

This all stems from an article about Facebook and a few other social sites crashing any time soon. To quote The Register, here are a few facts:

Five per cent fewer people in the UK visited the site in January compared to the previous month. A total of 400,000 seem to have become bored with the social network and didn’t bother to return.

Similar drops in interest have hit Facebook’s competitors. Bebo has seen an eight per cent drop in UK users since October.

MySpace, meanwhile, has seen 14 per cent of UK users desert it in the last three months.

Google, the undisputed motherbrain of flogging ad space online, says it has yet to find a way of turning the News Corp site’s traffic into dollars.

The Register

Despite my lack of interest in Facebook recently, I just uploaded a whole gallery of images which felt oddly good – like I was reminiscing with friends. However, saying that I’m still trying to ignore the 56 invites calling for my attention …

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My Sony Ericsson W880i either freezes and/or switches off on a regular basis, I thought I had fixed this problem, but it’s back again.

Here’s what I did to (temporarily) stop my Sony Ericsson W880i from switching off.

Updated my software. Go to Sony Ericsson’s update site and download the Sony Ericsson W880i firmware upgrade. The download is an unreasonable 36MB, so this could take some time. Instructions are bizarre, but follow them.

Copied and cleaned my phone book data. After careful examination I found that one of my contacts or address book entries was corrupt. So, every time I scrolled through my address book the W880i instantly switched off and then switched on again. It was as if it had rebooted.

I fixed this by copying my address book from my phone to my SIM, deleting my phone address book and then copying it back again to my phone. I could then at least see the corrupted address book entry and delete it.

I may have to do this all again, as my Sony Ericsson W880i is switching off again!

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A look at what the Internet could become in the year 2015. Google merges with Amazon, forming Googlezon.

Googlezon takes on The New York Times and wins, eventually spawning a new type of media.

It’s a scary projection of the future, one which on one hand seems inevitable, but on the other impossible.

Watch Epic 2015

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Taken from Julian Harris’ blog:

67% of Facebook users had not even heard of Facebook Beacon and the evil that it is (summary: it shares your profile information with third party vendors even if you’re not logged in and even if you have opted out of everything).

I used to visit FB every day, every hour if I’m honest with myself, but I just seem to be tired of it now.

I think now that I’ve found all my friends - some of the appeal has gone. Now I just email those who I want to stay in touch with. Email - the greatest social networking tool of all time?

Maybe I should download the Flock browser and relight my social fire?

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This will be my 10th year working on the web. I was first employed by The House of Synergy in 1998 as a web designer. Since then I’ve worked for agencies and corporates in South Africa and England. I’m now working for PruHealth as a senior web designer.

I started on Photoshop 4, running on a Silicon Graphics machine, where there were no dynamic filters, no transform previews and if you wanted to edit text you had to delete the layer and retype!

I learnt and wrote HTML in note pad and tried to understand the intricacies of JavaScript, being the only tool I had access to which could bring a webpage to life. Other than an animated gif of course!

I’ve learnt a great deal in that time, not only about web design but also about what people (agencies, end users and management) expect and want from the web.

I think the biggest realisation for me is that the average website visitor to the average website isn’t actually all that interested in what the page looks like (above and beyond being readable and understandable), they are more interested in the information they can gather and the speed at which they can do it.

Through many one-sided-mirror usability testing sessions I have realised that I could have spent half the time I actually needed to on the subtle design tweaks. As long as the user journey is clear and the content well written the visitor is usually happy.

I would like to add that there are still many visitors who appreciate all the effort designers put into their work. In certain industries this high standard of design and detail is absolutely required by both visitors and owners alike.

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I’ve just downloaded and installed Open Office 2.3. The main reason I did this? So that I could use it to save my documents in Google Docs.

Using an extension called OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs, much the same way that Firefox uses extensions, I am now able to create a document locally on my PC and then easily save it to my Google Docs folder.

However, when I actually tried to save my document to Google Docs I ran into an error (I’m working on Windows XP):

Problem: no object DCH for MIME type application/atom+XML

I’ll do some research now and see what I can find out. Will keep you posted.

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