Thursday, June 26, 2008

Facebook Status on Twitter

If you have many social networking profiles, you have many different places you can update your status message. Consolidation of status messages let's you put your status where you want to in the way you want to put it there, and then lets others access it how and where they want.

Having your Facebook status automatically update Twitter can mean updating one less site manually, and that means more time for other things. Read how to have your Facebook status automatically update your Twitter status on internetducttape.com. Basically you do this:

The only downside I can see is a delay in the update to Twitter.

The consolidation of any number of social networking account statuses should be possible if:

  • the primary account you want to update manually has a status feed (likely in RSS)
  • you can figure out how to change the contents of the primary feed (e.g., using a site like Yahoo Pipes)
  • the statuses you want to update automatically can be modified programatically, either on the site (like Facebook's ability to import a feed's posts as notes), or with a third party site (like TwitterFeed)

Google Webinar on Tools, Analytics and Optimizer July 8th

Google Webinar July 8, 2008 @ 9 am pt on Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer.

July 10 Update: It's now online and available for replay

Monday, June 23, 2008

Century City View

View from Century City looking North West.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

The Great Office War (flash)

War at the Office (rated PG-13).

Monday, June 16, 2008

Title Attributes and Search Engine Optimization

Title attributes in link tags improve user experience and make sites more accessible to screen readers and other browsers. It seems that search engines may consider the title attribute in determining the ranking of the site being linked to in the link tag, but to a very small degree. As with most SEO decisions, improving usability and user experience will likely improve rankings in the long term since search engines continue to hone their algorithms to reflect how usable sites are (among other things).

Aside from being a usability best practice, it's worth noting that Target was sued for not making their site accessible, and that even if web publishers are not required to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, it's a good idea that serves both visitors with disabilities and non-visual browsing situations in the future (e.g., various mobile applications).

Friday, June 13, 2008

Server Response Time Affects Ranking and User Experience

The faster your server responds, the better. Load time affects both user experience and how search engines evaluate your web site. Elements of a page's load time include many things, like:

  • server response time
  • file size of html, image, stylesheet, scripts and other external files
  • the user's network connection and location

Search engines factor load time into how they rank pages. Google includes load time into its rankings and server response time impacts load time. A page of any size can only be loaded after the server responds to the browser's request.

A faster server response will mean the page loads more quickly for the user, and that affects how comfortable and how much control a user feels while browsing the web. Visitors are more likely to stay on a site that loads quickly. Since 0.1 seconds is the limit for users feeling that they are directly manipulating objects in the UI Jakob Nielsen, Response Time Overview), every moment counts.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Farmhouse

Farmhouse on the Disney Ranch.

Monday, June 9, 2008

I'm a Marvel...and I'm a DC (flash)

Mac/PC parody about Batman and Ironman (rated PG-13).

Friday, June 6, 2008

Show Me Your Genitals (flash)

A song for the ladies by Jon Lajoie (rated R).