After the launch of the new Lily O’Briens site, designed by Magico a bit of a discussion arose around the site’s design (overall good) and specifically the SEO aspects of the site.

Richard Hearne of the SEO blog RedCardinal in his blog post Blind People Can’t Eat Chocolate highlighted that the site will not display anything in browsers it does not recognise.

In a follow-up post Richard reveals that for a period of time after the site going online the Google Bot was also blocked from the site.

Previous to Richard’s post (but after the site had been edited to accept GoogleBot) I set off to do a bit of investigating on what User-Agents Lily O’Briens would accept.
I hacked together, and then tidied up Hide-my-UA which allows you to choose a User-Agent to “pretend” to be and then browse around a site. Comments and suggestions welcome.

It was only today as I was looking over my site that I realised it was nearly 30 days since I last updated my blog.
I was amazed how quickly the time has passed and how blogging really takes time.
If you are looking for bloggers who really deserve credit then looking over the Blog Awards nominees
and voting for your favourites is well worth the time.

Richard Hearne (RedCardinal) has kindly offered a free SEO consultation for all of the nominees, which if even some of the participants avail of will take a considerable amount of time.
Undoubtedly though (and cleverly) each person who accepts Richard’s offer will drive an amount of traffic towards him and hopefully increase readership.

Along similar lines Eoghan McCabe (designer of AllFreeCalls.ie) is offering €2000 worth of his design work to a person who subscribes to his blog feed.

It must be the season for competitions and give-aways because as many in the blogo-sphere will know the second leg of Blog feeds subscriber race is soon to come to an end. (Oh, and Free Drinks are up for grabs)

Personally, I have done quite a bit in the past 29 days. I’ve been working on quite a few projects such as a CMS, a Flash/XML banner system and some other small website projects. The other web-dev related thing I spend a bit of time on is testing and benchmarking different approaches to problems so that the end result (and for future projects) is the most highly optimised solution, and the one which is best future-proofed.
Sometime in the past week I got the idea that maybe it would be a good time to revisit C++ and see if the concepts and complex facets of the language were any easier to understand. What I found suprising and incouraging was that most of the language now made sense and “fitted” (possibly because of my work with PHP) and even very tricky concepts such as “pointers” and “references” now made alot more sense.

When I get a bit more free time on my hands I plan to get some sort of portfolio or project dump up because I have way too much stuff just sitting here on my PC which isn’t seeing the light of day.

**NOTE: It appears wordpress decided to include old posts that I had deleted back into my feed. Oh well.

“AJAX“, is it a buzzword, methodology, technology or Web2.0-crapology?

It all depends on who you ask but I do think that when used properly, not excessively that a little bit of AJAX magic can do wonders.

I began thinking a little while back that I’d like to make a little tool to crawl a web page, check links, images, scripts etc. The problem with these things is that it takes time - too much time for a normal page, it would stall and die.

So, I thought it the perfect project to split up the jobs to be done and update the client as each of them are completed - I.E. a loading bar. What it does is split the requests to be done into chunks and then when the client’s side (AJAX) calls the server it processes a chunk and then updates the client again - simple.

It is by FAR not a completed tool, merely a fraction of what could be done. In reality it should check for Description tags, Author, check image ALT tags, check syntax etc.

Have a try here: Mini Page Checker

Please leave comments, suggestions, thoughts etc. if you like.