I’ve been thinking a bit about the history of the internet, and one important point I deduced was how important Google was to this all. Many-many people love Google, which usually means a lot hate it or dislike it too, but everyone should be thankful for what they have done.

You’re probably thinking that I’m a Gmail maniac, or I use Google Maps too much, but this isn’t the case. The reason Google should be thought of highly is that it made (and makes) everyone question the quality of everything, and taught everyone that even the strongest product can be beaten with the right attitude/tools. It first challenged Altavista and other search engines and won. It then built the best Email app ever, made it completely free and gave people masses of storage.

During this period it “Googleized” all its rivals, meaning Yahoo, Microsoft and smaller companies started to act the same way, thinking more community-oriented thoughts and developing their own stuff to the same standard.

I think most of the Twitter phenomenon is because of Google too. Not that they have anything in common, but the same thing is happening here. First there was Twitter, a great idea. Then others came and created Pownce, Plurk, and loads of other, basically identical services. This is great since it guves us variety, and they push each other to do better and better.

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Tags: gmail, Google, google hate, google love, google maps, search engine
Categories: The Web

Working as a web developer I get a lot of requests regarding SEO and getting to the top of Google as fast as possible. While code-wise a lot can be done, this is nowhere near enough. If you want to get anywhere near good rankings you will need solid content that keeps coming regularly. Once you have good posts on a blog for example people will come.

Apart from the reason that content is weighed most heavily by Google, all other so called “methods” are temporary. In the beginning there was the “fill your site with invisible keywords” method. The point of this was to create a huge chunk of text containing keywords, and setting its visibility to none. This means its still in the code, so Google sees it, but users don’t. Try that now and you’ll get a ban in seconds. Then came the meta tags period where people used to give huge-long descriptions and lengthy meta keyword lists. While not such a ’sin’, it won’t give you what you’re looking for.

My point is that everyone wants to cheat search engines and while it is of course a possibility, its only a matter of time before they get ahead of you. If you’re lucky you fall back a few hundred places, if not, you’re banned. As with every other business you have to work at it. I mean gHacks has 4,851 posts right now, over almost four years, that’s about 3.5 posts every day. Not all are written by Martin nowadays, but I bet he started the blog alone, and up until not too long ago he had a day job.

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Tags: blogging, content, seo
Categories: The Web

I don’t usually blog about games, but this one is so great, simple, yet unique and quite a challenge that I just have to show you. The premise in Tork (a play on the word “talk”) is that our antagonist crash lands on an alien planet where everyone speaks in sign language. The basic task is to learn the language, so you can fix your spaceship.

What I love about the game is that it is a true learning experience and gives you a bit more than small flash games nowadays. After you “hear” a symbol you can say it to someone else, based on the reaction you get you will eventually decypher it. You can write down what you think a symbol means and it will be displayed before you try to say it. Since a sentence can contain a maximum of four symbols, you eventually get to some complex stuff.

The game looks great, and although the controls are a bit cluncky, playability and UI wise it’s great. the language is loosely based on Esperanto and Mayan, take a look at the info on the site, so it is somewhat realistic, the bare bones of what linguists have to do for real languages. If you think you’re up to translating the language of an alien culture, give it a go!

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Tags: language
Categories: Games

I know I’ve been into rants and criticizms more nowadays, and I really sat down to do a proper tech news story today, but I really can’t let this one go. To kill the 5 minutes I had today I read a forum on “What’s so funny about Family Guy” and while going through it, i’m seriously getting the feeling that the population is devolving.

“i liek te show bc of stewie an brian, i think r the funnist 1s” A-What? I mean I’m in my 20’s, I’ve been using the internet for a while now so I should be specialist, but I mean the person who typed this either spent 20 minutes perfecting this, or fluently writes like this, which is actually quite a talent if he/she can also write properly. Another gem: “Srsly, i dun git it, wat’s the big deal about teh show? imea sure I used to liek it, but the jokes now all recycled, adn refercnes are completely non plot consistent?”

Is it cool to write like that nowadays? I love the internet, but it’s true, it is changing a culture a lot. I hesitate to deduce anything from this, but people not being able to write properly is happening more and more, and this is leaking into more and more places. I have gotten orders for websites from some people who can dish some serious money and talk like that (not that bad though), and, worst of all, they’re in their 30’s.

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Tags: behavior, rant
Categories: The Web

I’ve only been using 2.7 for a but, since I’m more building sites than blogging nowadays, but I have to say I love it. It looks much, much better, navigation is a bit unusual but overall easier, the whole structure is more logical than ever. However, as a coder working with Wordpress on a day to day basis, I see a lot fo things that could’ve been improved.

My biggest criticism is that basically Wordpress didn’t get better underneath, they just changed the packaging. While the change is welcome, there are a lot of areas, especially media management which could use some work. Many time I get asked to build in some sort fo featured image capability, or a different post view in different circumstances. It would be awesome if you could select two different types of post views, one for the main page, and one for the archive page, adding featured images only shown in one place, perhaps as a background to the text. This can be done by editing templates, but not everyone knows how to do this, so flexibility in this area would’ve been better I thnk.

Media management has been improved a lot in the last bigger release, but is still miles away from something which could be used flexibly. Adding Flickr integration, easy few click gallery creation, gallery views and so on would be wonderful, this can really only be done by plugins at the moment.

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Tags: wordpress
Categories: Open Source, Tools

As a blogger and general designer person, I often have the need for some cool pics. I could in theory take photos of stuff, but I don’t have the time or the expertise to come up with something good. My companion throughout my blogging days has been sxc.hu.

I was quite surprised about the domain, since it’s Hungarian (wohoo!), but the quality is absolutely spot on. Searching for any term will yield pages of relevant stuff. The top line of photos is from their stock photos site for cash, but all the others are free and of the same quality. The most you will have to do is five acknowledgement or notify the author, which is the least I can do for a godo image.

You can also use Flickr and DeviantArt, but in this case you will have to ask for permission in advance and I’m an impatient guy, so I only do this if I really love an image. It isn’t nice, but in theory you can use any image you find on the web. Where do you get your free images, I’d love to get some more sources!

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Tags: images, pics
Categories: The Web

I have been an active Paypaler for a while now, and I was surprised when Paypal sent me a letter asking me to verify that indeed I am not laundering money. Do I need to send photos of my apartment so it is apparent I do not have a printing press at home?

Nope, I needed to send some ID and utility bills. The process was fairly simple, I took a photo of my phone bill, my AmEx report and both sides of my National ID. In the Paypal documentation they say a phone bill is not ok, but since my apartment is not on my name I don’t pay bills per se. Nevertheless, I sent these all off.

After some mucking about (the form was not the best), Paypal accepted these documents and this, as a lot of government and verification processes puzzles me a bit. I mean I could’ve Photoshopped all that right? Unless they actually checked with my government and bank and carrier service, which I’m sure they didn’t, they replied in like 2 days, they can’t be really sure.

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Tags: paypal, Security
Categories: Online Services

Sometimes I find a free resource wich is just so much higher quality than most paid sources it’s astounding. I mean if someone can design 9 free fonts that look this good, how does his commercial work look like? Judging from the webpage and the fonts, this person truly loves typography, and the free fonts are his children, which are truly amazing.

You don’t only get one font weight with only a few extra characters. You get the full deal, with different font weights, characters, and in some cases all characters have a unique shape (Delicious font). There are also some nice descriptions, which make me realize how hard font design must be. Apparently “The Delicious italic is not a slanted roman, but a true italic.”… No comment from me, I have no idea what he’s talking about, but the font looks awesome!

My favorite one is Museo and Diavolo. I love the elegance that the narrow Museo offers, especially in its thinner variants. Diavolo is probably one of the coolest fonts I’ve ever seen. Put a bold heading on any page in Diavolo and the font itself makes a statement instantly. My only problem is now that I can’t use these fonts in my web pages because few people have them, let’s hope css3 changes this and enables embedding of fonts properly. Anyway, these fonts are awesome, check them out and download them right now!

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Tags: design, fonts
Categories: The Web, Tools