This article pointed me toward Squidoo, a tool that lets users build their own personal homepage. Ideal for first-timers looking for an easy way to create an online presence, but because it’s really well implemented it’s fun for other users as well. As the article at SEOking points out, you can RSS feeds to your homepage. I wonder if the posts from those feeds are included in your outgoing Squidoo feed. That would enable Yahoo Pipes-like feed mashups…

There are plenty of other so-called “modules” that let you place all sorts of content on your Squidoo page. Cool stuff.

We had another one of those infamous screen resolution debates at work today, which reminded me that I once made a little javascript that sets the browser window to specific sizes, and reports the current available content area. I copy-pasted this page together a few years back and was quite surprised to find it still works, even in IE7.

Javascript browser resize and size detection

Please keep in mind that setting your browser to a say 800*600 on a 1024*768 (or better) screen will not give an accurate indication of the available space if you’re designing for users with an actual 800*600 screen. Those users will probably have maximized their browser windows. At it’s maximized setting, the margins are slightly different and the windows taskbar comes into play.

My daughter has been playing with my old Olympus C100 (D370) digital camera. I couldn’t be any prouder…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rubytanck (captions and tags are in Dutch)

Ever since I (and everybody else it seems) read a guide on some blog about about how to write compelling blog post titles, I keep seeing posts like this. One of the tips was to compile a list of some sort. The top 10 reasons to use a PC over a Mac. Or the 20 most popular blogging topics. 5 pop singers who shaved their heads. And it works. People apparently like lists. Here’s one with 50 great website designs from last year. Enjoy!

This is one of the most interesting gadgets I’ve seen recently. An “internet tablet” that’s big enough to have a decent screen yet small enough to fit in your pocket. The Nokia N800 looks like it’s an ideal device for quickly looking up that actor who’s name you can’t remember on IMDB (this happens to me all the time) and checking your email without having to fire up your PC. It has an Opera browser that apparently handles Gmail quite well (a must for me) and it has a Google Talk (Jabber) client that supports video. Even the regular gtalk client doesn’t do that.

The interface looks pretty nifty as well, and I love the exterior design. There’s lots of software available that lets you use it for all sorts of other things as well, including VoIP software that will turn it into a phone. Apparently, there’s a version of Skype in the works as well…

In my daytime job I’m a Flash developer. But when it comes to creating websites I don’t think Flash is the way to go. Not just because Flash has some serious accessibility issues, but mainly because Flash-only websites are very search engine unfriendly. They usually consist of only one HTML page, and most of those contain no readable content. So Google, MSN and Yahoo will have no clue as to what your site’s about. I’ve been pondering things you could do to fix or at least improve this. I’ve played around with a few of these ideas and techniques, others are still on my to-try list. Please let me know if you’ve come up with other solutions or have anything else to add.
(more…)

I made a little flash movie a while ago that generates a random number and displays it in a fashion that puts slot machines to shame when it comes to pure excitement and drama. I’d almost forgotten about it when I checked my stats last week and noticed that it’s actually being used. I revisited the code last night and ironed out a few mistakes. It for instance no longer attempts to find numbers between 1 and say “monkey”. Nor does it accept negative numbers. It can draw numbers between 1 and any number you want up to a quadrillion. And of course it was in dire need of some easter eggs…

So, next time you need to decide who should take out the trash, who’s diaper-turn it is or who gets the last slice of pizza, go to my random number generator and let a complete unbiased Flash movie settle it.

It sometimes seems like there’s a new Google SomethingSomething service out there every day, but this post over on Joe Whyte’s blog is not about Google’s next step towards world domination. It lists all known filters and penalties that Google’s good old search engine applies to websites that for some reason appear suspicious.

One or two of these filter might very well be in effect for this blog. For one, this site has only very recently been moved to it’s own domain, and the domain has only been registered for about 9 months. Both of these facts might trigger the “sandbox filter”. And it has 28.000+ incoming links, all with the same anchor text, thanks to the tiny little credit link in my WordPress themes. Talk about a “Google bomb”. I didn’t even realize this when I added those links, nor did I imagine hundreds of people downloading and using my themes. An accidental bombing, which has made this silly little 20-post blog appear in the Technorati top 2000.

Currently, the Firefox extension I use to check pagerank shows this site’s homepage as being 0/10. It was 5/10 last week, and most web-based pagerank lookup tools still report 5/10.

When I occasionally browse themes.wordpress.net it strikes me not only how many themes there are, but also how many of them are rather poor. Many of them lack a coherent colour scheme and offer poor usability. Smashing Magazine has gathered 83 of the best WordPress themes available. If you’ve just set op WordPress and are looking for the creme de la creme in WordPress design, this is the place to look. My personal favorite is Suble, but you can’t go wrong with any of these.

Too bad none of my themes made it in there, I guess I’ll have to try harder with future themes…

It had been a while since I last visited Google’s sitemaps page. My movie weblog has a sitemap plugin installed that generates a feed that Google uses to index the site. It turns out Sitemaps has grown into “Webmaster tools”, and it’s great. Not only does it offer lots of details about how your is indexed, they’ve just added a tab that displays exactly who’s linking to what page on your site.

I’m very new to SEO techniques, but this seems like the perfect starting point for optimizing your site for Google. You can see what keywords are recognized in your site and how you rank for them.