Hungerford Web Design Blog

I unfortunately had to turn down a customer last week and politely decline the work they were offering. It’s an interesting socio-economic situation (with some big words to boot).

Theoretically, it could be argued that I have just declined an opportunity for my business to be more successful and could have left a negative impression on a prospective customer which could affect the business longer term. We have had to provide timescales in the past due to heavy workload and they have had time-based requirements that we couldn’t fulfill. In each of those situations in the past, they have greatly appreciated the honesty and awareness of our planning which has led (in some cases) to them coming back to us for other work in the future. This is however, the first time we have had to turn someone down for other reasons.

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It’s probably no secret (although it was news to me).

http://www.googlr.com

Yep - owned and operated by Google. Googlr is a common typo as the QWERTY keyboard has E and R next to each other. The traffic it received prompted Google to run exactly the same search engine from it.

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Not heard of Browserank? You’re not alone, despite regularly trawling blogs, news sites and being a part of a number of focus groups it was news to me until a couple of weeks ago that Microsoft have invested heavily in improving both the exposure and code behind it’s Pagerank rival . In fact many people are unaware that Microsoft (who have introduced Browserank) have been offering a small suite of webmaster tools for Live for quite some time.

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Well, in our article “That is so not Cuil” we showed how a bunch of ex-Google employees got together to produce “Cuil” which they believe shows the way forward for search engines. Then along came Yahoo who have released BOSS (Build you Own Search Engine) which allows 3rd party developers to build apon a Yahoo api and produce their own search engines. The Cuil developers spent a great deal of time, effort and money producing Cuil, so what did Sam Pullara do? Well in short, the answer is in the name:

http:/www.4hoursearch.com

It took him 4 hours to write it, 4 hours to go from 0 to 20 hits/second and 4 hours to get the domain name.

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Technorati Tags: Applications, Blog, Boss, Caption, Cuil, Demo, Domain Name, Google, Money, Party Developers, Running, Search Engine, Search Engines, Source Code, Speedy, Time Effort, Web Design, Yahoo, Yahoo Api, Yahoo Search, Yuil

Knol is fairly under-subscribed in terms of the number of users aware of it’s existence. Knol (short for knowledge? not according to Google) is a Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia.

So what’s the difference? The biggest thing for me is the lack of anonymity. In Wikipedia you can edit an article and short of your IP address, there is no way of knowing who you are. Not in Knol you old pirate! Knol requires a valid login. You can also only edit your own articles (I’m not too sure what this means for Duplication).

It all starts getting a little messy now in SEO terms. Continue reading »

Technorati Tags: Anonymity, Conflict Of Interest, Content Writers, Copyright, Encyclopedia, Existence, Experiences, Google, Ip Address, Knol, Knowledge, Messy, Online Encyclopedia, Pirate, Sure What This Means, Trusts, Valid Login, What This Means, Wikipedia

In June this year, Adobe and Google announced that Google would be reading and indexing Flash content. For years, Flash was shunned by SEO’s as it just wasn’t indexable (is that a word?). I can imagine that accessibility officianados have a healthy problem with flash as well. Flash as a single element to a site is a nice visual representation of content. 100% flash sites tend to be large, have little-no accessibility and force you to view the site one way and one way only..

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Not heard of Cuil? (pronounced “cool” - apparently)…

A bunch of people who left google, decided that what Google can do, they can do better. When I first heard about this I thought it was a great idea and perhaps they could add some really long-awaited improvements.

Some of this functionality includes images and media to add context to search results (arguably useful). Unfortunately, cuil served up it’s users with a bunch of adult images (with absolutely no relevance to the search results). The following link (provided by theregister) is not safe for work - Cuil NSFW. It doesn’t strike me as the best way to launch a new search engine - or perhaps it is, as everyone is talking about it.

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PART 1

Nagios is (IMHO) the de-facto standard in website and server monitoring. It has been around for quite some time. Here I will talk through the functionality and how to install and configure Nagios.

We shall shortly be offering remote monitoring, configuration and alerting as a service, please contact us if this is something you would like to discuss.

For the purposes of this tutorial, I will be installing Nagios on a Fedora Core server and monitoring a remote CentOS server through linux firewalls and a router with NAT (though if you are not usng firewalls you can simply ignore those steps).

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As you may be aware, the Hungerford Web Design website was recently the first site to be awarded an iCare award for accessibility. We have been awarded the silver award based on our accessible design, content and standards development.

“A lot of hard work has gone into this site and it is indeed a deserving winner”

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It’s a potentially controversial question I know….

Our blog is definitely lacking in accessible content and it’s something I am hyper-aware of. Primarily this is because that as a web developer I view any restriction on user base as a bad thing, a mindset which has helped me to convince clients and users of the benefits. That said, rather than becoming easier, I am finding it harder to justify the extra work (and it is) to provide a really accessible site.

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