Owner: Brian Whaley's Pixelated Views URL:http://btw73.blogspot.com Join Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2007 13:05:20 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: A blog covering the trials and tribulations of a web application development manager. Topics include hiring, interviewing, blogging, search engine optimization (SEO), web analytics, continuous integration, new technology, new software, and relevant books. Site statistics:Click here
Happy Thanksgiving 2007! 2007-11-22 08:54:00 Happy Thanksgiving
to you all! I can't believe I am blogging today. I guess I do fit into the addictive category of bloggers. I have read an article on Web Analytics World inquiring How Addicted Are you To Blogging. You can take the blog addiction quiz on the justsayhi.com web site. The author of the article is 77% addicted, and I was 70% addicted. At the end they give you a badge to display proudly. Here is mine:70%Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.
Read more:Happy
20 Bad Ideas - Black Hat SEO Practices 2007-11-19 23:02:00 I have spent a lot of time outlining the right things to do for SEO
- things that are typically called White Hat SEO. Some of the practices I have written about would even lean a bit towards the Gray Hat arena. I have even discussed the 3 different hats of a search engine optimizer. But I have never outlined Black
Hat SEO Practices. These are content practices, techniques, or methodologies that are sure to get your blog or web site banned from one, or all, of the major search engines. I list these here to help draw the line between what is acceptable, and what is not acceptable to the search engines. I do not list these techniques to advocate Black Hat
practices. Use These Techniques At Your Own Risk! 1. Astroturfing This is when a false public relations campaign or fake social media in the blogosphere generate increased attention to a site, blog, or wiki.* Livingston Buzz - Astroturfing on the Dark Side of the Moon 2. Buying Expired Domains Domains that have expired can carry a
50 Easy Tips to Keep your Blog Search Engine Optimized 2007-11-19 17:01:00 Blogging is one of the easiest ways to get content published to the Internet. Everyone, from the average Joe to the Corporate Communications Specialist wants to see their blog and their most recent posts on the Google results page. But, just like SEO for any other web site, it takes time, effort, and patience. Here is a collection of tips gathered from around the blogosphere on how to optimize your blog for search engines. Content Content is always king. Make sure your content is new, fresh, engaging, and relevant. Update your blog frequently. The more it is updated, the more your content will be indexed. Stick with your blog - don't get discouraged! Use an interesting title for your blog and each of your blog posts. Limit each of your posts to one topic, keeping your pages focused. Keep your posts not too short, and not too long. This keeps your readers interested and returning. Provide a list of your top 10 blog posts on your site. Make Read more:Search
, Engine
, Blog Search
5 Benefits of Internal Corporate Blogs 2007-11-19 10:19:00 Blogs are not new anymore. They have been around for a few years, and have proliferated fairly deep into the technology culture. If people are not writing one of their own, they are reading one, or a handful of them, or have an RSS aggregator where they are reading dozens or hundreds of blogs. Blogs have lots of uses. They are great for viral advertising, news publication, syndication, and collection of public opinion about a topic. You can have a personal blog to share photos of your vacations, a corporate blog for press releases, a news blog for niche news, and a host of other reasons to have a blog. Blogs are an easy way for anyone to produce and consume any information about anything from anywhere. But blogs have taken off within corporations as well. That is my interest here. We have deployed a blogging pilot in the workplace, and I have become a big proponent. At first it was part of my yearly objectives to h Read more:Benefits
, Internal
, Blogs
7 Sources to Help You Conduct a Peer Code Review 2007-11-15 09:28:00 The end of the year is swiftly approaching, and as the budget cycle is coming to a close, the work piles up quickly. I have had a staff of three from January through August, and with the piling work, we have had to triple in size. A staff of nine is very different to manage compared to a staff of three. There are many things to wrangle during ramp-up: a new corporate culture, new policies, new development environment, new standards, new team members. One of the tools in the technology manager's arsenal is the peer review. The CodingHorror web site outlines why they think software development departments should perform code reviews in their article called "Code Reviews: Just Do It." Jared Richardson also describes the value of peer code reviews on his blog. The basic reasons for implementing code reviews are obvious: reduced bugs, reduced rework, cross training, quicker ramp-up time, sharing of ideas, developer growth, mentorship opportunities Read more:Conduct
htmlSQL - Query your Page Elements like a Pro! 2007-11-13 13:56:00 While stumbling across the InterWeb, I came across this really neat page. The page, by Jonas John, describes htmlSQL, a PHP class to query the web by an SQL like language. I know, I know, this is PHP, not C#. But the idea really interested me. I have spent a lot of time focusing on WatiN, which does a similar thing. It allows you to take control of objects on the page and fill in forms, click buttons, etc. Getting an element in WatiN requires you to search the page using the Find methods. One of the troubles I have had is making sure that your find returns one, and only one, page element. Being able to query the page with htmlSQL would be a great way to verify that. A class like this would make it very easy to leverage the page DOM on the fly. Do you see any other uses for a class like this? Are there other products like this? What are your thoughts about htmlSQL?
Read more:Query
The Truth About High Content to Markup Ratio and SEO 2007-11-10 16:35:00 A common SEO
tip for web developers is to keep your content to markup ratio high. This is supposed to make the crawling of your site easier, more efficient, and faster. It is possible, however, that more modern site crawlers like Google ignore code already, since they behave like a text based browser anyway. However, implementing this as a SEO strategy cannot hurt. In fact, it has benefits for not only SEO reasons, but for general web development practices as well: Keeping the amount of code on the page low helps overall site maintenance and usability, focusing on your content. Including CSS and JavaScript in external files increase content-to-code ratio as well as making your site easier to maintain. Having validated HTML code will help the crawlers understand your site , as well as make your code compliant for maximum browser readability and performance. For more information: Phoenix Realm - Why Clean Markup
Matters To Your SEO All Your Read more:Truth
, Content
, Ratio
Generating sitemap.xml files in C# 2007-11-02 16:22:00 One of the things that I would like to tackle before the end of the year is including sitemap.xml files
with all of the new sites that my team develops. We could generate these files manually, but this would be tedious at best. There are a number of tools that will generate these files for you. Some of them are stand-alone desktop applications (Sitemap XML). Some web-based tools are built in PHP (AutoSitemap), Perl (TM Google Sitemap Generator), Python (Google WebMaster Tools), etc., and you can use in your own local environments. There is even a web site that you can submit your URL and it will generate the sitemap.xml file for you (XML Sitemaps). My requirements for this feature are pretty simple: Something built in C# Something we can include in our projects Something that can be run as part of our build process Something that can be completely hands-free So far, the only thing that I have found is the GoogleSiteMapProvide
10 Firefox Extensions That I Can't Live Without 2007-10-15 16:31:00 Firefox is the best browser available. It is easy to use, pretty fast response time, has tabbed browsing, rarely crashes, and the extensions capability is fantastic. I thought that my list of favorite extensions would make for a good topic. Firebug - A great way to debug JavaScript, view the HTML source of the page, examine the page's CSS, step through the page's scripts, navigate through the DOM, and view all the HTTP requests the page has made. Invaluable for any web developer. HTML Validator - "A Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing." Great to easily see if there are any HTML validation errors, and what they are. Page Validator - "Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Adds an option to the right-click context menu and to the Tools menu to allow for easy validation of the current page. Opens the re Read more:Firefox
3 Indispensable Tools for Candidate Review 2007-10-09 16:01:00 Tools are a great way to shorten time to complete tasks and improve quality in a process. Hiring, Candidate
Review, and Performance Review are no different. Here are three tools that I have founds myself using while reviewing candidates. SkillSurvey So I got an automated email last week. Big surprise, eh? If you are like me, you get dozens of these a day. This one was a little bit different. It was from a company asking me to provide a reference for one of my old consultants. That piqued my interest. I opened it up, followed the link to SkillSurvey, and filled out the questions. The simple instructions walked me through the process, and reassured me that my comments were anonymous and would be aggregated. There were less than 10 questions, and were simple radio button scales. I had the ability to put in freeform comments, and send it off. 360Metrics Every other year, I have been encouraged by Read more:Tools
Windows Live Search Gets an Upgrade 2007-10-06 12:42:00 On the Live Search
Blog this week, Microsoft's Search Team announced that it has released an upgrade to its Live Search engine. The enhancements to the search engine include: Improved Core Relevance - Improved search results for the searches you do day in and day out Reduced Spam - Constantly improving to stay ahead of the curve to filter out sites that use illegitimate or malicious SEO techniques Dramatically Improved "Snippets" - The site summaries have been improved and expanded in the search results page Much Bigger Index - The index has grown to 20 billion pages - 4 times larger than before Smart Logic to interpret some keywords - for example NW and Northwest are the same Take a look and see if you notice the difference. Leave feedback about your Live Search experiences here.
Read more:Windows
, Windows Live
, Windows Live Search
TouchGraph Google Browser 2007-10-05 15:39:00 Pandia reviewed a new tool called TouchGraph Google
Browser. This tool allows you to visualize the connections between sites. You can read the initial review on the Pandia web site, and you can check out the TouchGraph Google Browser on the TouchGraph site. The TouchGraph team is a group of interface designers who are exploring better ways to visualize information. In addition to the TouchGraph Google Browser, they have also developed TouchGraph Amazon Browser and the TouchGraph Facebook Browser using the same visualization technology. This has some really interesting implications for Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics, and Web Site Development. Optimizing a site to have each of its pages appear in a graph like this could have its site map generated dynamically. Having a Web Analytics Dashboard where you could click on each of the pages, or series of pages, and view data relationships between them would be very powerful.
The Interview Killer - What Goes in the Head Tag? 2007-09-27 16:12:00 As a department that designs, develops, and constructs web sites and web applications, one of the skills necessary is HTML development. There are lots of other technical skills that are important - database development (i.e. Oracle or SQL Server), SQL and PL/SQL, C# .Net, ASP.Net, JavaScript, CSS, Java, Struts, and so on. But since this is web development, it is critical to be able to understand and develop HTML that is interpretable by modern browsers. To that end, it is important to ask technical questions about that technology. And it is always good to start at the top. So, one of the questions we typically ask in our interviews is, "in an HTML page, what goes in the Head Tag?" Now, you would think that technical professionals with over 10 years in the industry would be able to answer this basic question with ease. We have struggled to get an acceptable answer with this question. Here are some of the ones we have heard: "You put table Read more:Killer
Week(s) in Review - Test, Test, Test! 2007-09-26 12:16:00 It has been a bit of time since I have posted, and over that same period of time, I have been lax in reading the blogs I am subscribed to. The last 2 weeks the team has spent lots of time implementing Watin UI tests on one of our new sites. We have started to flush out a shared reusable library and leveraging that to develop site-specific unit tests. Roy Osherove has written three articles over these past two weeks that are very interesting, and directly relevant to the realm of Automated Unit Tests. One article is about A New Unit Test Platform called XUnit, which has many improvements over nUnit. The second article is about Code Reuse in Unit Tests. And, the third article is about Throw Away Test vs Tests That Last. Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman have also written two great articles in the Continuous Integration arena. ScottGu's article was regarding Automating Environment Specific
The 6 Test Styles of Google Website Optimizer 2007-09-13 14:35:00 So I attended the Google
Website Optimizer
webinar this Tuesday afternoon. I did not know too much about the feature set of this particular tool, so I thought the webinar would be a good way for me to find out more. The class was moderated by ROI Revolution. They are a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant and AdWords Qualified Company, and offer webinars and training classes for Google products. You can find more information about them on their web site. Essentially, Google Website Optimizer is a tool designed to track results of content changes to your web site before you commit to them. It works in a similar way to Google Analytics - you tag your pages, your content blocks, your action items, and your goal pages. Google Website Optimizer will then randomize your content or your page to test it how you choose. There are 6 different types of tests that you can use: A/B Testing - this is essentially a test to determine if Read more:Styles
The Truth About Plurals in Keywords 2007-09-10 07:38:00 So I was reading through some forum postings on SEO and came across a question on highrankings.com about plurals in keywords. Everyone agreed in the forum posts that including plurals in your keywords will give more accurate search results. They recommend testing it yourself. if you search for "search engine" and search for "search engines" you will get completely different results. I poked around some more, and found this great article on searchengineguide.com about plural vs. singular keywords. Sumantra Roy outlined how each search engine handles the difference between singular and plural keywords. And all twelve search engines reviewed have different results for singular and plural keyword searches. So there you have it. When building a list of keywords, include singular and plural versions of keywords.
Read more:Truth
, Keywords
Google Reader Gets an Upgrade - Search! 2007-09-07 11:36:00 Google Reader
now has a fantastic new feature - the one I have been waiting for - Search
! It now is just as good as any desktop feed reader. The only drawback is that it can only search what is in the RSS feed. If the feed is a partial feed or title only feed, that is all the search feature sees. But that is better than nothing. Yay Google! Check out the post on the Official Google Reader
Blog.
Read more:Google
Free Google Website Optimizer Demo 2007-09-01 08:49:00 I read about this in an article on Kathy Scott's Unofficial Google
Analytics Blog. This webinar is hosted by ROI Revolution on September 11th at 2pm ET (1pm CT / 12pm MT / 11am PT). From their web site: This 60 Minute Free Webinar on Google Website Optimizer
Will Cover: How to overcome the odds -- continual website improvements you can do to slingshot past your competition. How to set up a test with Google Website Optimizer in 3 simple steps. 6 tests to run on your site with easy to follow example layouts. Key questions to ask yourself in order to use Google Website Optimizer for valuable improvements. Special Google Guest: Tom Leung Tom Leung is Google’s Business Product Manager for Google's Website Optimizer. He was also a Business Development Manager for Microsoft from 2002 to 2004, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Don’t miss out on this special opportunity to hear Tom Leung speak live about the Google Website Optimizer tool! Space is limit
Infragistics shows off their .Net Wares 2007-08-30 07:54:00 Infragistics came to the office yesterday to show us their shiny new products and to talk about their roadmap for development. We scheduled the meeting as part of the .Net Working Group series, and was the first working group meeting of 2007. Jack Schwinn, one of our Sales Reps, brought in Devin Rader and Andrew Flick, Product Managers for Web Client and Rich Content respectively. The demo was led by Tony Lombardo, their Infragistics Evangelist. They covered a wide variety of topics and did a great job answering our questions. Here is a run-down of my notes from the demo: ASP.Net Controls Tony walked us through the controls that we have not seen since our last volume release. He walked us through the Excel, XPS and PDF Exporters, with support for formulas and multiple tabs. There is also an Excel Importer control. I think we will have a lot of use for these controls in our internal projects. They explained the Calc M
7 Sources that Laugh at SEO and Web Analytics 2007-08-29 08:12:00 Everyone needs a little comic relief. So I have compiled a list of funny Search Engine and Analytics
sources here for your amusement. Take a break and laugh a little. Video - The Break-Up Dilbert Comic on Web Analytics Top 21 Signs You Need a Break from SEO
Web Analytics According to Captain Kirk SEO Comics SEO Refugee - Cartoons SEOs and Lawyers - It's a Joke Plus, here's a bonus one I found... not really SEO related, but it pokes fun at Google and its search results. Google Mistakes Do you have any sources of SEO / Search Engine / Web Analytics Humor that I missed? Post a comment and add it in!
26 Definitions from the Web Analytics Association 2007-08-27 14:25:00 A Press Release from The Web Analytics
Association announces the delivery of 26 Standard Definitions
to Promote Consistency across the Rapidly Evolving Web Analytics Community. These were released at the much-hyped Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, California. This is a follow up to their release of their Web Analytics "Big Three" Definitions in 2006, where they standardize the definitions of Unique Visitors, Visits/Sessions, and Page Views. In their newest edition, the WAA Standards Committee has provided 26 definitions (including the original 3) in 4 different categories - Building Block Terms, Visit Characterization, Content Characterization, and Conversion Metrics. I recommend downloading the PDF, reading through it, and including this in your library of SEO and Web Analytics documentation.
Microsoft Has Entered the Building! 2007-08-26 09:41:00 Microsoft came to the office today to walk us through their Technology Roadmap. David Solivan, our Architect Evangelist, came in and spent 4 hours walking through the future vision of Microsoft and their products and services. His presentation was split into two sections - Enterprise Product Roadmap and Enterprise Developer Roadmap. Below are my notes from the meeting. Enterprise Product Roadmap Office Suite The focus in the mid nineties was on productivity. Now that vision has been achieved, the focus has shifted: Collaboration Content Management Search Business Intelligence Streamlined Processes Portals Windows Mobile The Windows Mobile team is working on delivering the following new features and functionality for the Tablet PC, Pocket PC, and Smartphone platforms: Maps - Pocket Streets, MapPoint Development Tools - Visual Studio, .Net CompactFramework Security - ISA Server Data Management - SQL Server CE, Notification Services Content - MS Read more:Microsoft
, Building
10 Steps to Conduct a Successful .Net Job Interview 2007-08-22 13:00:00 This is a follow-up post to my posts on .Net Hiring Manager Resources and on Preparing for a .Net Interview. I will be interviewing a number of candidates next week for open positions in our department. I thought it would be good to review the process that we have typically followed, and get feedback. 1. Introduction Someone should meet the candidate at the receptionist's desk. It is a good idea to have the hiring manager do this. Look them in they eye, introduce yourself, and shake their hands firmly. On the walk to the interview room, share some small talk about the weather and the drive. This gives you an idea if they will mind how far they will have to drive to work. It also gives you the opportunity to check out how they dress and how they carry themselves. Once you are in the interview room, let them know that the interview will be about an hour long. Ask them if they would like something to drink, and to get more comfortable. Introduce them to everyone that they ar Read more:Conduct
7 Steps to Prepare for a .Net Job Interview 2007-08-20 15:00:00 Our department has gone through some changes lately; some changes have affected the process we follow when interviewing. Since I know I will be doing lots of interviewing this month, I have been thinking a lot about what we have done right in our process, and what can be improved. Here is the process that we go through in our department to prepare for interviews. 1. Define a Process As an interviewer, one of my objectives throughout the interviewing process is to provide as much consistency as possible. Define a process that is consistent and repeatable. Then, when comparing one candidate to another, you will be comparing them win the same questions, with the same process. It will also mean that you are always prepared for the next interview cycle with little effort. 2. Write A Great Job Description The Job Description that you write is what will let your recruiters, consulting companies, and candidates know exactly what you are looking for. It is important to list everything t
Gatineau Beta is Open for Applicants 2007-08-18 10:46:00 Ian Thomas is a Microsoft employee in their Digital Advertising Solutions group. He is "responsible for bringing Gatineau to market," as his blog states. Gatineau is in essence a Microsoft Competitor to Google Analytics. Microsoft already has adCenter, just as Google has AdSense and AdWords. You can read all about his work and his perspectives on web analytics on his blog called Lies, Damn Lies. I am a frequent reader, and his articles are insightful and informative. His recent post announces "Gatineau beta access request form online." Now you can go to his online form and request access to Gatineau Beta. You will need to have an adCenter account. If you do not, don't worry - you will be able to register for one as part of the Gatineau Beta, but you will need to pay a $5 one-time fee. I have signed up for a beta account, and want to try it out on my blog Pixelated Views. It will give me lots of great insight as to how
The Lost Art of Debugging - 10 Resources 2007-11-29 17:40:00 Debugging is as much of an art as it is a science. There are lots of great tools to help developers debug their code. I believe developers, including myself, have learned to depend too much on these tools instead of thinking through the problem. There is a common thread across all programming languages and development platforms. That thread is the way that you approach, identify, and tackle a bug. To help develop an environment of good debugging practices, I have decided to write a series of blogs on technology agnostic debugging techniques. My first post about The Lost Art of Debugging is a blogroll of resources, both electronic and print, that developers should read to help develop good debugging techniques. Here are ten great resources on the methodology of debugging. Web Sites & Blogs HackNot - Debugging 101 Reading Tea Leaves - The Fine Art of Debugging Simply Breath Teching - Debugging Solutions - A Framework VETTY OFFICER'S WEBLOG - Debugging tips for New softwa Read more:Resources
Mix08 - Session 4 - Integrating your site with Internet Explorer 8 2008-03-06 06:37:00 There are two new features that Microsoft is announcing the Beta1 version of InternetExplorer
8. These two new features are Activities and WebSlices, as mentioned in the keynote. Activities XML installed to the browser using the OpenService Format There are a few simple components that make up an activity - Category, Context, Execute, and Preview Category - This is a way to group the different Activities you add - in this example, it is Maps Context - text that shows up in the context menu, context is typically "selection", which will use the text that you have highlighted Execute - the actual URL that will be launched, with {selection} in curly brackets to dynamically pass the selection Preview - setting this will allow for a mouseover preview - action is a URL, requi Read more:Integrating
, Internet Explorer
Mix08 Session 3 - Silverlight and Advertising 2008-03-05 20:28:00 This session is to be geared to how Silverlight is used in advertising and media delivery. Following the last few acquisitions of Microsoft's, and listening to the keynote, they are going to be focusing on advertising a lot more now and in the future. With my current focus on Brand sites at BMS, this is a topic of great interest. Polite Advertising
Polite advertising is a way of delivering a small banner advertisement, and provide lots more information to the user inline, on demand, when requested. Polite ads should have a fast initial load time and render very quickly They should also not block the rest of the page from downloading. Incremental elements should download later, and do so asynchronously There are two techniques to polite advertising with Silverligh
Mix08 - Session 2 - Advanced Search Engine Optimization 2008-03-05 19:21:00 For session 2 I had selected a session on Advanced SearchEngineOptimization
. It sounded like the session was right up my alley. My hopes were high. Search Engine - Crawling, Ranking, Finding Search Engines do three basic things - crawl, rank, and find. Crawling - search engines start with sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, and follow links from there Ranking - Each page is ranked according to certain criteria - inbound links (basically an endorsement of other sites - either high quality, low quality, or links with penalty); outbound links; note that subdomains are treated very differently than subdirectories. Searching - simple process - check spelling, determine intent, fulfillment of search request with results, determine results order Building Pages Use HT
Mix08 - Session 1 - From Flash to Silverlight - A Rosetta Stone 2008-03-05 18:04:00 There are lots of similarities and lots of differences in the way Silverlight operates as compared to Flash
. This session covers some of those, as well as some of the improvements to Silverlight 2 Beta 1. Basics In Silverlight 2, all objects now inherit from the userControls base class. In Flash, X and Y are properties, you could create a "ball" object, and get and set X and Y as properties to make it more like Flash The Point object is similar to the mouse object in Flash. Create a Point and call it mouse, and the C# starts to look a lot like ActionScript in Flash. The Helvetica of Easing Algorithms This is a cool and very simple effect that is used regularly in Flash. Using storyboards and the X and Y properties you just created, you can calculate the di Read more:Rosetta
, Stone
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