Inspired by
this article at Read/Write Web, I decided to make a search engine out of one of my bookmark collections.
Discover Semantic searches about 70 sites dealing with the semantic web (aka "web 3.0"). It covers W3 recommendations, specifications, tools, tutorials, and dozens of blogs about semweb.
If nothing else, it was interesting to see what can be done with the CSEs. I also used
Microsoft Expression Web 2 Beta for the coding. Unlike the first version of Expression Web, this one's got PHP intellisense (language library and code completion) and the built-in web server can run PHP. It's a lot faster than Eclipse, which really doesn't like the size of my Symfony projects these days.
Like every year since spinning off
W3Counter from
Website Goodies in 2004, it's exceeded its hardware capacity once again in December. Initially the service shared a Celeron 2.4/512MB server with all of my websites. It then grew into its own Pentium 4 3.0GHz/1GB server, then into a 2-processor 4-core Opteron/4GB setup. This time it's outgrown the hard drive IO capacity of a single server, evidenced by maxing the IO wait stat on `top` and the daily afternoon site slow downs.
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The SEO community's buzzing over official word from Google that
selling text links can hurt your PR and rankings. It's truly sad that $600-a-share Google is willing to ruin its own search results because they can't figure out how to differentiate paid ads from useful links. They're not always different things, either, one of many reasons why penalizing a site for carrying a text link is just wrong.
The search giant's argument is that too many people are buying links on websites in order to artificially boost their PageRank, a factor in determining search result ranking.
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I spend more time writing on forums than on this blog, so I'm going to start sharing the more interesting threads I participate in here as well.
WebDesignofMaine: Google is number 1. I think Google is going to take over the world. Think about where we are as a civilization, the information age, and who ever can controls that information will have a lot of power. Wikipedia is a major contender since it's more of any organized database of information than Google. But Google is striving for domination by developing so many tools that you won't need to use any other service, and how much does it cost again? Oh it's free right now. Microsoft will put up a struggle with it's massive amount of assets, but seriously, who likes them anymore?
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Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application
37Signals' book on web application development is now free to read online. No more $19 to download. It's written without much fluff and with a lot of whitespace — a quick read.
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Agile processes, are they killing our children?
A cynically comical look at how software life cycles are really done.. among other things. Thanks to
dagfinn at SitePoint for that link.
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It began with Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's founders, decided to build a search engine which didn't rank pages primarily by keyword density like their competition. Early search engines were easy to fool — fill your page with the same phrase over and over and you'd appear near the top of search results for that phrase. Google was different. It let the web itself tell their search engine what pages were about and which were most important. This process is what they called PageRank, and works by analyzing the incoming links to each page.
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