Archive for posts tagged ‘web’
The Power of Labeling Images
Kevin Day, October 6th, 2008In my Google Analytics account, I noticed a few visitors arriving via Google Image searches. It turns out that this picture got a lot of Google juice and is the first image search result for the term “smiley pumpkin“.
What’s surprising is that that term doesn’t appear anywhere in the page or this site except for within the image tag:
<img src=“http://codeswimming.com/images/smiley_pumpkin.jpg”
title=“Smiley Pumpkin” alt=“Smiley Pumpkin” width=“500″ height=“375″/>
This blog only has a page rank of 1, yet by including the same search term in the file name, image title, and alt text, it got to the top of Google, albeit for a low-volume search term. There also don’t seem to be any links to that image from any other site that I can find.
This only has limited SEO use, however, because that post and my blog are not in the general web search results for the same term. Google seems to keep the two sets of results completely separate.
Thank God! Amazon persistent storage is here
Kevin Day, August 21st, 2008I just stayed up late last night working on backup scripts for my EC2 instances, so it was great to wake up this morning to see Amazon’s latest update. With Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS), ECS users can now mount persistent volumes directly to the file system. That should translate into more sleep for me.
I don’t know how many I/O requests I make in a month though, and that seems to be how they’re charging for this service. I’ll have to test it out first before I do anything serious with it.
Firefox Caching Bug
Kevin Day, August 17th, 2008For a while I thought I had a bug with my Ajax fantasy football mock draft program, but it turns out the bug was in Firefox 3 instead.
The bug is that Firefox 3 doesn’t handle caching properly. If you don’t want it to cache a page you have to specify your headers in a specific order, otherwise it will cache it even if the headers correctly specify not to. More info here and here.
This affected me because I use a periodic Ajax GET request to the same url in a live draft application. I reply with no-cache headers so that the GET request polls the server every time. When Firefox 3 pulled the request from the cache instead, it would miss a lot of updates and made the application appear to freeze up.
To work around the bug, I’m just appending a timestamp to the end of every request. I feel that’s better than using FF3’s specific ordering of header info because I don’t want to have to worry that they may change their magical ordering. It’s not much work to get around the bug, but it was difficult to pinpoint in the first place.
DIY Startup School Cleveland-style
Kevin Day, May 22nd, 2008Although the official Startup School was last month at Stanford, there was enough startup activity in Clevleand last week to constitute it’s own mini startup school.
Thursday was Cleveland Startup Drinks, which was a great chance to talk with other startup founders.
Saturday was the SCORE business workshop that was a half-day of informative talks by an accountant, a lawyer, and a bank president about how to develop a business plan, incorporate a business, and finance a business. This was the first time I had heard of SCORE, and it looks like a valuable resource for new businesses. They are a large group of retired business executives that offer free counseling. What could be better than that?
Lastly, on Sunday morning Craig Newmark spoke at the CWRU commencement ceremony. It wasn’t quite as inspriational as the real startup school talks, but it was a taste of Silicon Valley nonetheless.
Negligent web surfer
Kevin Day, March 1st, 2008When I was reading football news today, I discovered that the NFL has a Chinese website, nflchina.com. It’s mostly news articles that are translated into Chinese.
I used Google to translate the text to English, unsure of the results. I think it did a decent job. Here’s the Cleveland Browns page:
However, when I was browsing the site I got this error message at the top of a page:
You did not examine the competence of this website. Please sign.
I guess I’ll have to do a more thorough evaluation next time.
Also, I was disappointed that Google wouldn’t let me translate an already translated page. I wanted to see how the translations of translations would turn out.
Google apps and Microsoft’s file format
Kevin Day, February 21st, 2008Yet another post about a Google app and Joel on Software… anyways…
I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but Google Spreadsheets always seems to be a little bit faster and snappier each time I use it. Right now I’m working from a coffee shop with spotty internet connection, but it’s working as good as ever.
That made me think about how Google must know absolutely every tiny trick about optimizing Javascript in ways that no other company can even fathom. It seems like a good parallel to how Joel says Microsoft was light-years ahead of most other software companies for knowing how to write the fastest code possible on the hardware of the time.
Maybe in 10 years we’ll see Google release their specifications for how they store and update a spreadsheet and complain about how complex it is. However it’ll be that way because it includes hacks to work around IE6’s bugs.
Wanted: Smarter Gmail filtering
Kevin Day, February 20th, 2008A while ago when I first saw Gmail’s option for “Filter messages like these,” I thought that it would use Bayesian statistics to automatically determine which category an email falls into. I was disappointed that it just starts the filter menu with the “To” field pre-populated.
Joel Spolsky mentioned that his company’s software filters email that way and it works effectively.
It just seems like a lot more Google-like way of organizing things rather than filtering based on To/From addresses.
Great blogging quote
Kevin Day, January 12th, 2008From Jeff Atwood, Thirteen Blog Clichés:
It’s always been deeply disappointing to me that we have the whole of human history to talk about, and most people can’t get past what happened today.
Idea for a LinkedIn application
Kevin Day, December 11th, 2007Since LinkedIn will be allowing 3rd party applications as part of its involvement with OpenSocial, here’s one application I’d like to see:
A status bar showing how I compare to other people with my current job. Take my experience and education and compare those with everyone else with a job similar to mine. I am a design engineer with a master’s degree and 1.5 years of experience. My estimate is that my lack of experience would put me somewhere around the lower 25th percentile of all design engineers.
In addition to my current status, let me know how far I would move up with an extra year of experience, a certification, or another degree. Also, how would I stack up against Senior Design Engineers?
I think now that I’m out of college, I’m grasping for another metric for which to rate myself against others. Regardless, it would help people better set goals in their professional life.
I’m not sure if the Open Social API would allow access to all those other profiles, or if this would require a lot of messy screen scraping. Alternatively, if someone from LinkedIn gets wind of this idea, maybe they could add it themselves (and pay me for the idea too).
