Just found this video of a guy doing free running around Sheffield. Parkour is pretty cool, even more so when you know where they’re doing it!

Design and in particular, web design are fields which require practitioners to keep constantly up to date on what’s going on within their chosen field. In the case of design, its important to keep up with the latest trends, themes and motifs, while trying to figure out where to go next. In the case of web design you also have to keep up with technology, APIs, frameworks and a whole host of other technobabble that occasionally fills me with dread.

Recently I’ve recently been learning the intricacies of x-cart. X Cart is a solution for building safe and robust e-commerce sites and supports all the sort of features that you’d expect to see in an online shop, by using it we can offer our clients a powerful shopping solution that should cover almost all their needs for a nominal charge. We’ll be adding a couple of shopfronts we’ve been building to our portfolio soon.

I’ve also been burying my head in the innards of WordPress to allow us to build ever more complex blogs and websites, I’ve also been working my first custom widget for the Sensora 2010 website.

I’ve also been busying myself with learning Action Script 3. To be fair, I’ve been learning bits of it since it was released, but I seriously knuckled down to it in 2009 and can now use it – together with away3d to deliver fully interactive 3d experiences straight to the user’s browser. Working with Flash and AS3 is a bit of a weird one for me personally, I used to hate it, then I had what I guess you could call an epiphany and everything seemed to fit together in my head. Now its an area I actually enjoy working with – go figure.

Ok… so I kinda revel in the technobabble, but when you can use it to actually come up with something it’s sort of seductive.

Search Engine Optimisation is something that people get hung up on too much and it’s mostly because there is so much misinformation, half-truths and outdated ideas floating around about the subject. The current state of affairs has been brought about as the result of spammers trying to ruin everything for the rest of us, and search providers – mainly Google – desperately trying to keep it all in check.

The problem with many SEO experts is that they engage in practices that have negligible effect on actual search rankings, and in some cases can actually get you punished by the big G.

From my run-ins with various self-proclaimed SEO experts (and they are all self-proclaimed) here is a (non-exhaustive) list of the methods they employ and why I think they’re bunk:

1. Meta keywords – this is worthy of a post in it’s own right.
   I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve talked to who are convinced that meta keywords mean a damn thing. Thankfully Google has finally put the idea to rest. Stuffing the meta with keywords will most likely drop your site down the rankings as Google will think you’re trying to trick it.
2. Stuff your content full of keywords you put in the meta tag
   While it does make sense to have some keywords in your text, many SEO companies will advise you to stuff it full, until there’s barely any words left in between to hold the sentence together. Remember, it’s your customers who buy your products, not the search engine, text that is jammed with jargon and keywords isn’t pleasant to read and will most likely make people go elsewhere.
3. Change your content regularly
   This is usually the kicker of the whole shebang. Now, it’s true that Google likes sites that are generating new content, because you’re contributing to keeping the web fresh, however unscrupulous SEO experts go so far as to change a few sentences a month on pages that already exist. Now this isn’t too bad from a technical point of view (it’s not breaking the way the web should work), but its not uncommon to hear of people paying a £200+ retainer on a monthly basis.
4. Traffic shaping
   The above methods range from pointless to reasonably harmless, this is where we start getting into the dark underbelly of SEO practices. Traffic shaping is done by adding ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ to links that they don’t want a search engine’s spider program to go down. This is an attempt to increase certain page’s rank within their own site and while the “nofollow” attribute does have some good uses, it’s generally frowned upon as you’re artificially increasing the apparent usefulness of the page in question.
5. Link Bombing
   Now we’re well and truly in the dark recesses of the SEO world. This is the practice of spreading links all over the web with specific keywords, the idea being that search engines will associate these keywords with that link eventually. These methods usually involve employing 3rd world labour and paying them pennies per link they create.
6. Spam bots
   Similar to link bombing, although usually they operate by posting comments on blogs and in online forums. These are the cases where the nofollow attribute is useful, as it effectively renders the link pointless.

So, that’s some of the nefarious practices employed by SEO agents, what about good SEO?

Powazek writes:

“The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious…”

Thing is, its not really. Good SEO practices are all wrapped up conversations about semantics, page order and code execution.

Here’s another non-exhaustive list of what I consider to be good practice.

1. Header tag order
   Headers should always flow down the page in order of importance, the website’s title should always use the <H1> tag, titles for posts (for example) should use <h2> and so on. If you need more than the 6 levels provided by HTML, you’re doing something wrong.
2. Content at the top
   It’s important to get the content of the document as close to the top of the HTML code as possible for two reasons.
   1) It makes life easier for the blind: if you have to listen to a screen reader walk you through a bunch of unrelated garbage before you get to the content, it’s just unfair.
   2) It ensures that when a search engine takes a cache of your page it actually captures the important bit first.
3. Menus at the bottom (of the code)
   This is related to point 2, the navigation bar should always get put to the bottom of the code. It saves blind people having to listen to the options over and over like an infernal telephone menu system stuck on repeat and also guarantees that Google doesn’t return your menu on its search results. So long as your web designer knows what they’re doing (and I do) the menu will still appear at the top (or where ever you want) of the actual page.
4. Use semantically correct tags
   This is a point that’s going to become increasingly important in a few years as the web moves towards a true relationship-based network of pages. This means using list elements for what they’re intended, rather than trying to make one using carriage returns.
5. Write good content
   Which is hopefully what I’ve been doing here. What’s the point of having a beautiful, semantic, optimised website, when there’s nothing worth looking at when you get there?

So there you have it, I don’t completely disagree with Powazek’s position, I just think that perhaps instead of bleating on about how ‘obvious’ it all is, he could have at least touched on why he though it was all so obvious.

Yooouuuutuuube is a simple idea, brilliantly executed, it basically copies a youtube video and tiles it endlessly over the background of the page. This would be pretty cool in its own right, but add in the ability to zoom out and pan the camera round and soon you realise you’ve watched the video twice over and you’re still not bored.

If you go to the site’s root you can enter the ID of any youtube video you find online, the video that I’ve set the link above up with is a music video made by the charmingly named “Fagottron“, a kind of meta art work in its own right, re-editing and reusing footage to create his own work.

So, how is this meta? When we talk about meta-*, we’re talking about something being about itself, metalanguage is language that is used to describe language, metaemotions are how a person feels about their own emotions in a certain situation. Well, yooouuutuuube is nothing on its own, it’s in fact a piece of art, that needs more art to complete it, it’s essentially art about art.

The idea of “Meta-something” has flourished on the web, where it has both practical uses, such as adding metadata to a webpage to help give it some context, to the more dubiously practical art of ‘metahumour’ – where an Internet in-joke (known by Richard Dawkin’s term “Meme”) is used as a basis for another joke, usually involving 1 or more other memes. Then there’s ‘recursive metahumour’, where the joke makes a joke about making a joke about itself within the confines of the original joke…
It all gets very complicated. I think it might be best to just watch the pretty colours.