Posts In The 'Rants' Category
Thursday, July 24th, 2008
I received a well-written, but completely absurd, spam e-mail yesterday. It started out by saying:
“I was looking at websites under the keyword face lift cape coral and came across your site tropicalwebworks.com. I see that you’re ranked #1 on page 18 in google.
I am not sure if you are aware of why you’re ranked this low but more importantly how easily correctable this is.”
(more…) Tags: keywords, scams, SEO
Posted in Rants, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
WordPress version 2.6 just came out. I installed it from scratch on a new blog (
Fix My Knee, a chronicle of my many knee surgeries). The installation went beautifully, and I liked the new Admin interface.
(more…) Tags: WordPress
Posted in Rants, Software | No Comments »
Friday, March 14th, 2008
Apparently I’m part of a small minority of web developers who believe that the developer has a level of professional responsibility toward the client, regardless of whether the client knows, understands, or requests same.
(more…) Tags: design, ethics, frames, SEO
Posted in Rants, Search Engine Optimization, Web Site Design, Web Standards | 2 Comments »
Saturday, January 5th, 2008
I recently had 2 diametrically opposite experiences with phishing. In the world of the Internet, “phishing” is when some entity (a scammer) — typically, a website or e-mail sender — pretends to be some organization that a user has a relationship with, and attempts to entice the user into providing personal and confidential information (such as passwords, bank account numbers, PIN numbers, etc.) to the scammer. eBay, PayPal, banks, and other similar sites are popular phishing targets.
(more…) Tags: antivirus, PayPal, phishing, scams
Posted in Microsoft, Rants, Technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
Poor hosting companies waste time and cost money.
I needed to set up a MySQL database for a client recently. The client hosts their website with a large and well-known hosting company, which advertises MySQL available with all hosting packages. It should have taken just a few minutes to create the database and assign the db username and password, and then I could get on with the backend programming for the site. Several days and several billable hours later, I was just getting started.
(more…) Tags: Hosting, MySQL, phpMyAdmin
Posted in Hosting, MySQL, Rants | No Comments »
Monday, October 1st, 2007
The amount of misinformation out there on the web is almost enough to make a person crazy. I ran across a few statements today that were so baldly wrong that I have to correct them here.
(more…) Tags: doorway pages, experts, keywords, meta tags, search engines
Posted in Rants, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
The infamous Google spam czar Matt Cutts has fired another round at honest webmasters just trying to go about their daily work. In a recent blog post, He invited readers to report web sites buying or selling links that are not using the ridiculous nofollow tag on those links. Read: Google wants us to snitch on our colleagues. Turn them in. Rat them out. Become WWW stool pigeons for Google.
There is a host of issues surrounding this edict from Google’s pet spam fighter, all of them ugly.
(more…) Tags: Google, nofollow, PageRank, spam
Posted in Google, Rants | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007
Microsoft is the master, but many, many programmers and software development companies are guilty. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had the most meaningless error messages pop up on my computer screen.
What set me off this morning? A client sent me a Word file. A simple, one-page Word file. I double-clicked it.
When the file opened, it opened with an error message:
The dimensions after resizing are too small or too large.
(more…) Tags: error message, Microsoft Word
Posted in Microsoft, Rants | 1 Comment »
Sunday, January 14th, 2007
I just edited the files in my wordpress template to remove all traces of the rel=”nofollow” attribute from links in this blog. All links, including those in comments and signatures, are now your basic bog-standard “follow” links.
(more…) Tags: Google, nofollow, PageRank
Posted in Google, Rants | 2 Comments »
Sunday, January 14th, 2007
For about the umpteenth time, this morning I responded to a question on a newsgroup by some poor soul who didn’t understand why the images weren’t showing up on his web page. The links were correct. The images were uploaded to the correct directory. But when he viewed his page in his browser, the images were just …. not there. As if they had never existed.
(more…) Tags: ad blocking, antivirus, spam
Posted in Rants, Technology | No Comments »
Saturday, January 13th, 2007
What do web site development, search engine optimization and Hippocrates have in common? A line from the Hippocratic Oath comes to mind:
First, do no harm. In a previous post, I touched on how the
technological factors underlying a web site are important to the site’s search engine optimization.
These factors aren’t important so much for their ability to rank a site highly, as they are for avoiding problems that can harm a site’s ranking.
(more…) Tags: canonical URL, javascript, SEO
Posted in Rants, Search Engine Optimization, Technology, Web Standards | No Comments »