| LED Digest 2134: R.I.P. FrontPage |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. April 7, 2006 Issue #2134 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ==================== --== FrontPage is Gone! ==-- ~ Joseph Taylor "I am trying to find out more about this new software taking the place of FrontPage." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Google Spidering ==-- ~ Mike Banks Valentine "This is one reason that I counsel clients to consistently add new content..." --== HTML Structure Validation ==-- ~ Lee Roberts "The answer is really simple." --== Protecting Images ==-- ~ James Miller "I have an alternative view on this." ~ Scott Smith "This thread has been a lot of fun to read..." ~ Paul Harris "Not sure if this has been picked up already..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Googling Tom Foolery ==-- ~ Lee Roberts --== Stopping Spam - An Experiment ==-- ~ Lew Vividere ~ Tom Anson ========== NEW =================================== From: Joe Taylor Subject: Frontpage is GONE! Hi Everyone and Adam, Just got this in my email box: ----------------------- "News flash - The future of FrontPage 2003 "The FrontPage era is ending, but two great new tools are born. Explore the next generation of Web authoring tools from Microsoft and unleash your creativity to design professional sites." http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4762268 ----------------------- These two new tools are called "Office SharePoint Designer 2007" and "Microsoft Expression Web Designer". As someone who "cut their teeth" and started making web sites from Frontpage 97, this change worries me and I'm not so sure what the future holds for my two site, totally designed and published in FrontPage 2003. Does anyone have the "inside scoop" on how compatable this new technology is going to be with FP 2003, are server extensions going to change, etc. I run a dedicated Linux box for my sites and it could mean a lot of money to have someone "revamp" it to suit new web design software. Note: I know, I know, professionals only use Macromedia, etc. But, I have used Frontpage to make a good living off this thing called the Internet. So save the, "you should use this software" argument for later. I am sincerely trying to find out more about this new software taking the place of FrontPage. Very Truly Yours, Joseph Taylor Powder and Bulk Dot Com http://www.powderandbulk.com/ ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Mike Banks Valentine Subject: Spidering > I have noticed in my statistics... that Google does not > spider my site... [but] the site is searchable in Google. - Baruch Avraham, LED 2133 Baruch, a search for your site shows Google has indexed 156 pages and you turn up ranked relatively well for many of your important search phrases (#14 for "Titanium Jewelry"). Once those pages are indexed and ranked by the engines, there is very little reason for the spiders to return and re-index them unless you are routinely changing them or adding new products. > Has anyone else seen anything like this? > What should I do about it. This is entirely normal for a mature (domain reserved December 3, 2001 according to Whois records) and stable site without frequent updates. What would be the point? With billions of pages online, the search engines need to conserve resources. Repeatedly crawling millions of mature sites that rarely change would be a waste of crawler time when they could be discovering new and fresh content added daily. Take a look at your site record at the web archive project. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.aris-titanium.com The WayBack Machine at archive.org shows only 8 changes in the past two years (look for asterisks beside the dates on the list at the link above). This "last changed" number is not to be considered highly accurate as the web archive project doesn't crawl that often either. It does note any changes to your pages on its' infrequent visits. But the point is that unless you have new content which changes often, there is very little reason for search engine crawlers to visit your site more often than you make changes. This is one reason that I counsel clients to consistently add new content in the form of blogs about their products, articles discussing history, unique facts, and any interesting stuff about your industry, designs, materials, etc. I always suggest that they NEVER stop adding new material and NEVER consider their site finished. Do a search for "Blogging Chocolate Purses" and you'll find an article I wrote about a client site. If you are interested in seeing frequent crawler activity and want to know how to easily blog about your products or services, that article is very helpful. If you simply enjoy seeing the crawler and don't want to add content, try changing a sentence on your home page, watch for the crawler in your logs, then change another sentence and watch for the crawler to return, change another sentence, etc. If you want the crawlers to visit more pages, simply make that sentence you change a text link to one of your interior pages and you'll see the crawler visit that interior page soon after. Once you do that and build up the frequency of those changes, you'll see the crawlers return much more frequently. If your site changes as often as the crawler visits, it will return more often. Clearly though, it makes no sense to have frequent crawler visits unless you add textual content or new products. Frequent updates can lead to better ranking and varied, interesting background material on your industry leads to more keyword combinations ranking well for your site. I'm going to add this post to my blog and I'll bet you see the crawler visit when it sees my link to your site. If you have changed anything on the home page, you can bet that the crawler will return within a few days to see if it changed again. If you don't want to start your own blog, try getting others to blog about you and you'll also see crawler activity increase. When it comes to crawler activity, change is good. But you may as well make the changes substantive and actually serve your visitors with valuable and informative information rather than change for the sake of change. Mike Banks Valentine http://realityseo.com -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Lee Roberts Subject: HTML validation > Can anyone share a *good* reason why I should care whether an HTML > validator likes my use of quotes around multi-word attributes only? - Mark Whitman, LED 2130 Seems Mark was asking a specific question here and is really curious as to the phenomenon he has encountered. The answer is really simple. Multiple word attributions are not clearly understood by user agents and have not been since the beginning of user agent development. Multiple word attributions will never be understood by all user agents. The reason is, they are not computing programs that process and evaluate data based upon algorithms that can be programmed to handle the diversity of human slang and jargon. Let's see if we can open this can a little wider and peer into it for a better visualization. You'll notice that you can have a width of 100 without quotation marks, but you can't have 100% without quotation marks. The reason is simple, the % is a programming character. Because of this, the values need to be delimited with the quotation marks. Single word attributes are followed by either a single greater than sign to close the HTML tag or a space. The delimiting of an attribute is performed by the equal sign and the space. Since the a space is a delimiting character, the next words in a multiple word attribute are stray words and the tag is considered broken. This will cause different behaviors in different user agents since not all user agents are created equal. Case in point, Internet Explorer 6's CSS support is 4 years or more behind other modern-day browsers. Therefore, it is suggested and regarded as not acceptable to have multiple word attributes without quotation marks. It's all about universality. Martha Retallick, in LED 2132, attempts to make some very good points about why one should validate HTML codes but some concerns arose. > Your site becomes accessible to blind > and low-vision users. Using HTML or XHTML standards does not guarantee the Web page or Web site will be accessible. That's why we have the Web Accessibility Initiative consisting of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, User Agent Accessibility Guidelines and the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines. Without the Web pages / site being developed under these guidelines, they are not accessible. Case in point, many HTML attributes are wrongly used in uneducated attempts to increase search engine positions. These consist of the table summary, HTML title attribute, image long desc and others. By improperly using these attributes a Web page quickly becomes inaccessible. > It's easier and faster to maintain a Web Standards-based > site. That's because these sites are built so that structure > and presentation are separated. Web standards does not require the separation of structure and presentation. HTML standards can be met without using CSS. Accessibility can be met without using CSS. HTML 4.x has existed longer than CSS has and therefore can be be met without CSS. The advantages highlighted are not valid reasons for a Web Standards-based site because the same advantage of changing segments of your Web pages across the entire site can be easily done in Dreamweaver, FrontPage, GoLive, SHTML, PHP, ASP, JSP, ColdFusion and more by modularizing your designs. > With a Web Standards-based site, every page > can be a printer-friendly page. No more hunting > for that little "printer-friendly" icon! Using HTML / XHTML standards does not guarantee success for this situation. CSS on the other hand does help with this, but does require the developer to understand the nuances of printed CSS layouts. Using HTML / XTHML standards aids in delivering usable Web sites. The reason to validate a Web page is to ensure compliance with the HTML / XHTML standards. Through compliance with the HTML / XHTML standards your Web pages will achieve universality and reduce the problems visitors may encounter due to poor coding and human error. Accessibility is achieved through a clear understanding of what user agents can do and the visitors to your Web sites. Without this understanding you're still trying to be the fastest gun in the West and something bad is bound to happen. Sincerely, Lee Roberts http://www.roserockdesign.com http://www.applepiecart.com -------- new post - new topic --------- From: James Miller Subject: Image theft I have an alternative view on this. I allow all of the images on my site, that I have taken myself to be used by others with impunity. They are only 600 pixels wide or so and more information than art. I do ask that people put a link to where the image came from. About a year ago I did a site for a mediation company at www.indepmed.com. I needed an image to sum up divorce and separation, but couldn't find a small image that was suitable. I thought about staging it, but then would you want a picture of yourself on a site about divorce. I wouldn't! So I found an image from David Starkey's book on Henry VIII and his wives. I asked his permission, he gave it and I used part of the image. I of course made a link to his book on Amazon. So I agree about image theft of high quality images, but small, informational ones, may well be worth more to you to give away free, provided that a reverse link is provided. As an aside to this, I'm trying to persuade a model friend to do a series of body part pictures, (not naughty ones), that can be used on web sites for free. Hands pointing, feet, eyes etc. to be used with just a link back to her site. James Miller Daisy Analysis www.daisy.co.uk -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Scott Smith Subject: Image theft This thread has been a lot of fun to read, especially the creative ways to grab the images. I've always been in the "if you can see it you can copy it" camp, and have suggested to my clients that worrying about it isn't worth the time or stress trying to prevent it. That said, one way to prevent any right-click "Save Image As..." workarounds is to use a style sheet with a class for each photo as a background image. On the displaying HTML page, apply each class to a separate <.div> with a transparent spacer image that has the same dimensions as the photo. If a person uses "Save Image As..." they will only pick up a 1px .gif which lies over top the image, rather than the desired photo. Checking the source won't immediately help, since only classes are listed in the HTML, not the URLs of the images. Of course, any competent developer can download the stylesheet by following the path in the source, check their cache, screen capture etc. but it does slow down the casual image grabber. Scott Smith Globi Web Solutions www.globi.ca -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Paul Harris Subject: Image theft Not sure if this has been picked up already but view site in Firefox, Tools, Page info - all images are available for saving - another way of capturing the image would be to use screen capture using Snagit - www.snagit.com Paul Harris www.designaweb.biz ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Lee Roberts Subject: Tom foolery John Smart, in LED 2132, poses the question many people have about delivering content to the search engines and different content for the same page to people. If you wish your site to remain in the good graces of the search engines, then please do not attempt to fool the search engines. This is considered spam and can get your site penalized. Google says (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html), under Quality Guidelines - Basic Principles, -------------------- "Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as 'cloaking.'" -------------------- The other search engines have a similar rule. > Suppose you have two pages, one which is Google-friendly > and the other user-friendly. You make the top part of the Google > -friendly page, the same as the user-friendly. So if the pages > swapped after say a second, the user wouldn't see any difference. - James Miller, LED 2133 Search engines cannot parse or actuate JS, so their spiders would see only what you show them prior to the refresh. However, not everyone supports JS and they would see the Google page. Then, Google's team of spam hunters look for these things. When they find a page that does not visually match the cached version, you got immediate troubles. Whether the other search engines go this far to keep their indexes clean of spam is questionable. Sincerely, Lee Roberts http://www.roserockdesign.com http://www.applepiecart.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Lew Vividere Subject: Spam experiment > I would *really* like to explore this unsubscribe > matter further... - Tom Aman, LED 2133 Most of my spam doesn't even have a unubscribe link so I couldn't even try unsuscribing. Unsubscribing works when you are getting spam from places that are somewhat legit, but the bulk of the spam I get doesn't let you unsubscribe and even if some of it did, I suspect it would be to harvest yet another "real" address for them to spam further. I get over 3,000 spams a day. I can't fully trust it to not identify something as spam that isn't, but I use Mailwasher Pro to screen my mail on the server before I download it. It can catch spam identified by SpamCop as well as their own FirstAlert system. Just yesterday I got a new update to Mailwasher that uses a new service call Blue Frog from Blue Security. They are the first organization that contacts the affiliate program the spammer is promoting as well as contacting the spammer's ISP to block spam. I would suggest all the LED Digest users to go to bluesecurity.com and sign up for Blue Frog and use it reporting the spam they receive. Lew Vividere -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Tom Anson Subject: Spam experiment Well Tom, I just took myself out of this study this past weekend. Following your advice (and being in something of a stupor in the wee hours of the morning), I spent a few hours unsubscribing to spam email. Around the first of the year, the amount of spam I was receiving nearly doubled. Most of it was identical Viagra ads -- only the affiliate numbers were different. Then, about a month ago, the amount of spam nearly doubled again. I still wasn't up to Tom's 295 per day, but considering the trend, it was enough to make me consider my options. So I unsubscribed again and again, until I couldn't see straight anymore. The result? An immediate near doubling of spam. However, over the last day or two, the level seems to have dropped off somewhat -- to the level it was a month ago. Last night, instead of the 145 or so spam to delete from my Delete folder, I was down to about 95. I'm hoping that, in time, there may be more of a drop. I think Tom's idea of a study sounds great. I would be interested in seeing the results. Also, I tried looking around for a place to report the most aggregious offenders, and I really couldn't find anything. Doesn't the FTC have a place to report spam? I looked but couldn't find the right page. Any help would be appreciated. Tom Anson Anson Aromatic Essentials http://www.therapeutic-grade.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. "Persistence is a strong will. Obstinance is a strong won't." - Anon. |
