18 July 2006 in Google, Intergen, Search Technology | Comments (6)

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting about common challenges that people face with website search (both with public search engines like Google, and website search such as SharePoint search). If you have any questions about a topic or would like to see an entry about a specific challenge you have then please leave a comment

The challenge
It’s the usual story, somebody has spent a lot of money on a website and they want to start seeing a return on that investment as soon as possible. There is nothing wrong with that, I’d be concerned if I was building a website for somebody who doesn’t want to see a return. The challenges arise when a site goes live and it is expected that the site is indexed by the major search engines in a matter of minutes of that go-live. So how do we get a website indexed by search engines as quickly as possible?

A solution?
Back in the 1990′s it was common practice to need to submit your website to search engine for it to index you. Some started following links and automatically found sites however this was usually seen as not a priority compared to manually submitted sites. The view that this practice is still the best is strong with some and they see site submission as the best way of getting their site indexed fast.

These days it’s not uncommon to see sites offering to submit your site to more than 1000 search engines for a small fee of $500 or more. Some people would see that as value for money without realising it’s almost a complete waste of time.

The real solution
Modern search engines don’t prioritise on submitted sites. They don’t see them as valuable and for good reason – would you trust a website that was brand new or one that has been around for a significant period of time with many links to it? I’ve read many accounts (and see this in practice) where a site can be manually submitted to a search engine and not appear in search results for several weeks. Yet, when another website that is mildly popular links to that same site they’re in search results within days.

One way to get links to your site early is to allow a case study of the site development to be posted on the vendors website. I’ll go into more ways to help build your link collection legitimately in future search posts.

When considering the value of paying somebody to submit your website to hundreds of search engines, remember that 95% of your search result referrals will be coming from the big 3: Google, Yahoo, MSN Search. I would never advise on the use of such submission tools because, frankly, they’re a waste of time in terms of return on investment.

Always an exception to the rule
It is important to note that I’m not advocating never submitting yourself to an index manually. There are specific industry sites, directories and community sites that are related to your business and submitting to these sites is important for visibility within your industry sector. Automated tools won’t even know that these sites exist or that they’re more important to you than a mass spamming to various indexes around the world.

– JD

18 July 2006 in Blogging | Comments (0)

Vote for my blog as the best .net blog in New Zealand

I didn’t take part this last year and thought I should give it a whirl since I was automatically included
Cheers and thanks for the vote,

- JD

11 July 2006 in Tools | Comments (1)

This week saw the first beta of FireFox 2.0 is out. It has several enhancements over 1.5 including:

• Spell checking on form fields (my favourite feature!)
• Session restore (close the browser with tabs open and they’ll be restored when you open again)
• “Undo Tab Close” for the times when you accidentally close a tab
• New search (similar to Internet Explorer 7.0)

Overall I just like the spell checking – something I’m sure will come as an extension in IE 7.0 (perhaps as part of the Live Toolbar?)

I’m really looking forward to this second round of competition in the browser space – we’re going to see some cool stuff coming out. I’m not quite sure I’m sold enough to move off IE 7.0 though. The future is bright

Download the Windows installer for FireFox here.

- JD

8 July 2006 in .Net, Code | Comments (1)

From time to time I enjoy doing WinForms development and quite often I find myself frustrated with some of the controls that come “out of the box”. Normally I end up overriding controls or, worse yet, writing them from scratch. Because of this I often keep an eye out of control libraries. There are some fantastic libraries out there but I thought I’d share the Component Factory suite which is free for both personal and corporate use.

Check out the Component Factory homepage for more details.

– JD

5 July 2006 in Intergen | Comments (1)

Intergen, the company I work for, is looking for more people to join our team. It’s never easy deciding to make a move but to help sweeten the deal Intergen have a promotion that if you apply and we employ you before the 31st of August you’ll receive a free 19″ LCD monitor. That’s not the only reason you should look to apply to work with us, we also offer:

• Working with cutting edge technology (Office 2007 suite, .Net Framework 3.0 and more)
• Free fizzy drinks (seriously we order so many flavours and the volume is crazy)
• Opportunities to work with a variety of clients
• Free cell phone + $100 of credit per month
• Free international travel insurance
• Personal access to our supplier pricing for computer gear
• Chill-out zone with xbox, dart board, couches etc
• …and more

We also have some of the best people in the industry (MVPs, Microsoft Regional Director etc) so you’ll be working alongside some of the best minds in the industry.

For a complete list of positions check out our available positions page. Don’t forget, Intergen also operates out of Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch so location shouldn’t be a big problem

So, now that you’ve decided you would like to apply, what should you do? Email me at john-danielt@intergen.co.nz with your CV and cover letter and I’ll pass them on.

And if you’re not sold yet? Email me any questions you have if you want to know a bit more or, if you live in Wellington, I’m happy to come and have a coffee with you

– JD

3 July 2006 in Windows | Comments (0)

As a heads up to anyone else that uses Acronis Disk Director (ADD), it can cause issues with Vista Beta 2.

I created a new partition and formatted it using ADD only to find after using Vista for 20 minutes it was complaining that I needed to run chkdsk to fix file system errors. I ended up assuming the drive was busted and did another setup on another physical disk only to have the same problem.

After a bit of searching people have found that using ADD to do the filesystem manipulation causes the problem. Apparently you can still create the partition using ADD but make sure you do the format using the Vista Setup. I’ll validate this tonight or tomorrow (you never know, maybe all my drives are broken).

– JD

3 July 2006 in Events | Comments (0)

Not too many events that I’m aware of this week but one that I will be making sure I attend is the Unlimited Potential presentation about gadgets.

This event will have several speakers and also includes the chance to win an iPod Nano.

When: Wednesday 5th July, 2006
Time: 4.30pm for 5.30pm start
Where: Renouf Foyer, Wellington Convention Centre, 111 Wakefield Street, Wellington

Please RSVP on the unlimited potential website. I look forward to meeting some of you there

– JD

P.S. Apologies for the lack of posts lately

21 June 2006 in Code | Comments (2)

I’ve been a huge fan of Akismet for stopping spam on my blog ever since it came out. I’ve never had such a simple solution that was so fantastically effective. And now somebody has written a .net 2.0 wrapper (there is a 1.1 one was well) to use it. This presents a very easy way of integrating fantastic spam protection into your .Net web applications if required.

Check out the post about the Akisment .Net wrapper here.

Akismet is written by the same guys that developed WordPress which powers my blog.

- JD

P.S. Heaps of plugins for this service have been coming out recently. If you’re using VBulletin, PHPBB or a huge array of other web applications there may already be a plugin for you.