At this point, you may be asking yourself: What does that have anything to do with web design?

The Internet is Smart!

Take a step back from my story for a moment and think about your business. How do your customers find you?

As someone who spends most of their day in front of a computer, I almost always do an internet search to find local businesses. Every time I want to go out to eat with my wife, we look online to find nearby restaurants.

The cool thing is that the search engines are actually pretty smart – they list businesses related to my search even if they don’t have a website. The results are even plotted on a map so I can see how close they are to my house. Address, phone number, etc – it’s all there.

Back to my Story…

So like I was saying, I needed to find a variety of contractors to give us quotes for our patio extension. I opened my laptop and quickly searched for concrete/landscaping/decking contractors in my area…

…and Google Maps neatly listed nearby businesses. Some had websites. Others did not.

After looking through the search results for a few minutes, I caught myself contacting only the companies that had websites. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that (after all, I build websites for a living) but it illustrates a very important lesson: If you don’t have a website, how much business are you losing?

Appearances Matter

As the contractors came and went, I started to notice something else: I liked the guys whose appearance was professional more than the other contractors – regardless of price. I understand contractors wear boots and blue jeans, but some of these guys could care less about their appearance. I’m not kidding when I say that I saw one guy’s ass crack because his jeans were hanging too low.

Ewwwww!

The point here is exactly the same with your website: Your visitors will form an immediate opinion of you when they see your website. The Young Entrepreneur agrees with me!

Thanks to Gmail’s ability to manage POP3 accounts I’m actually sending/receiving most of my email through one portal. Not only does this save me time (I only have to check one portal for my email) but Gmail also offers me (virtually) limitless storage (I’m currently using less than 1% of my storage space). That’s not too shabby!

The obvious downside to this plan is that Gmail appears to be less and less reliable these days. Yesterday was the third day this year in which some part of Gmail was down.

I’ve also noticed that Hotmail has been finicky over the past week. My Hotmail account is probably ten years old and I can honestly say that I’ve never really had problems with it. However, I’ve noticed two things this week which are bothering me:

1. I consistently have to type my password twice. This is annoying, as I’m 100% sure I type it correctly the first time.
2. The “Delete” button is either really slow, or there’s a bug which forces me to click the message first then click the delete button. The delete button used to simply delete the message currently loaded in the window.

Granted, Hotmail hasn’t had a huge service outage that I can remember – but it’s a trend that I’m uncomfortable with.

With all of the problems we’ve been seeing with our email lately, I have to wonder what we (i.e. the IT/Web industry) are doing wrong. I’m no expert in cloud computing, but we as a society are becoming so reliant on our service providers that consumers are powerless to prevent these kinds of catastrophes. This year we’re having problems with our email. . . what is going to happen next year? What happens if we’re involved in a DOS attack?

I find that I struggle to find the answer to that question. On the one hand, we’re trusting a small handful of large companies (e.g. Google, Microsoft) to manage our data because they’re (presumably) more reliable than a larger number of small companies. This saves us money and, in theory,  offers us peace of mind. On the other hand, we’re giving our most precious commodity (i.e. our data) to these large companies and hoping that they allow us to access it. There’s little we can do when we’re denied access, and we have no guarantee that our data is backed-up and secure.

I’m clearly taking a pessimistic view of cloud computing and the title of this post is deliberately controversial. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I get paid to develop web applications and that I heavily rely on other companies to store my data. In the grand scheme of things, being denied access to our email for a few hours isn’t the worst thing that could happen. But am I the only one worried?

I installed the new version of Google Chrome about 10 minutes ago, and I honestly don’t see any improvement in my JavaScript. In fact, I’ve noticed that JavaScript is much slower than before on my local host! I had similar problems with Firefox 3.5 when I first upgraded. . . and I later uninstalled Fx3.5.

What are people’s thoughts on the new version of Chrome?

Today I decided to check my blog’s analytic data to see how the new permalinks have affected traffic to the site. Not surprisingly, they helped. . . though I was a little shocked to see a 55% increase in organic search traffic!

To better explain the graph, the green line shows organic search traffic by day between 7/14/09 and 8/10/09. The blue line shows organic search traffic between 8/11/09 (the day I fixed the permalinks) to 9/7/09. In other words, I’m comparing a period of exactly 28 days before and after I fixed the Wordpress permalinks.

While my analysis of the data isn’t exactly scientific, it would appear that the changes took roughly 2 weeks to affect my search engine rankings. The analytic data shows an increase in traffic from Google, Bing and Yahoo, though my organic search traffic comes overwhelmingly from Google (about 98.8%).

The moral of this story is simple but not surprising: permalinks dramatically help increase organic search traffic to your blog.

I recently started using Google Docs because a client wanted to share some project-speific documentation with me. I didn’t think much of the tool at first, and the bad press that Google received as a result of the Twitter hackers surely didn’t help my opinion. In all honesty, I just never thought much about how having my documents available online would really be advantageous to me.

About an hour ago, I discovered something that completely changed my mind: I can upload and display Power Point (and similar) presentations within my webpages. I’m amazed that I never knew about this. . . and I feel like my world has just changed completely.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m still hesitant to trust my sensitive documents to cloud computing. Google already knows far too much about me, and even though I’m not rich or famous I still worry about my acounts being hacked and my data deleted.

That being said, Power Point presentations are remarkably useful as an Internet marketing tool. This isn’t exactly breaking news; podcasts and “vlogs” have been around for years and accomplish the same basic idea. They’re great audio/visual tools, fantastic marketing devices and provide great opportunities for search engine optimization. I’ve given a handful of presentations over the past few months and I was wondering how I could more easily distribute my materials – I almost wet my pants when I found this solution.

So if you’re interested, check out my recently published presentations:

• ExtJS Unit Tests
• Building an n-Tier User Interface

To embed a presentation of your own, open your Google Doc and click “Share” in the upper-right-hand corner. Select “Publish / embed” from the drop-down menu, and then click the “Publish” button which appears on the next page. Google provides you with the necessary HTML code. Copy/Paste that code into your webpage and you’re done. Woo-hoo!

Recently I have noticed that my iGoogle weather widget has decided to display the wrong temperature at least once a day. I don’t know why. . . but I do know that if Fox Lake is at -10 degress in August then the next ice age must have started.

Ironically, the Doppler Radar widget directly above it says Fox Lake is mostly sunny and 78 degrees.

Google: your engineers have failed.

As the Internet becomes larger and as we spend more of our time online, our virtual reputations become more and more important to maintain.  While personal privacy is one of the biggest concerns to have, our online reputations are constantly being researched by our family, friends, employers and (probably) Big Brother.

All of those things you said on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, your blog or any message board have an enormous impact on what people think about you. It seems like I hear a new story every week about some John Doe who got fired because he had an inappropriate picture or comment posted online. Long story short, this isn’t something new. . . 

. . . but I’ve stumbled into something very interesting. I have not one, but several doppelgangers invading my search results.

Let me take a step backwards for a moment. Wikipedia defines a doppelganger as some one’s double. With a variety of historical and fictional doppelgangers to use as examples, my personal favorite is the character from the Spiderman comics. In case you couldn’t figure it out, he’s the evil clone of Spiderman and does nothing positive for Peter Parker’s secret identity.

Searching for my name (Arthur Kay) on any search engine is  likely to give you a pretty large set of results (I was surprised by that!). Google, for example, finds roughly 1.5 million results. Although these people may not look like me, we do share the same name – but (like Spiderman and his Doppelganger) we do not have much else in common.

For starters, there are several quasi-famous people who share my name. Kay Arthur (the inversion of my first/last names) is an internationally known Bible teacher who has written a ton of books. I chuckle a little bit at the thought of sharing a name with this lady, mainly because I’m not the most religious person. I’m also not a woman. Nevertheless, search results for her dominate any search remotely related to my name.

Next on the list is a composer named Arthur Kay. He died about 40 years ago, and I wish I had known more about him before today. This search result is a bit interesting, as I was a Music major in college and have composed a few songs myself (available here). I’d be curious to know if I have any blood relation to this guy – but that’s something I’ll figure out another day.

Then there’s a band called Arthur Kay and the Originals located in the United Kingdom. I’m not really into Ska music, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have any family in the UK. I would pretend I’m his son if it would get me a nice inheritance, but I’m willing to bet he isn’t worth enough money for that ruse to be worth while.

There’s some guy in Houston, Texas too. I know absolutely nothing about him, because no other search results appear about him either. I could ask him to be my friend on Facebook. . . but that might just be werid. Then again, it would be kinda funny.

The bottom line is that there’s next to nothing about me, the real Arthur Kay. The lesson I’ve learned today is that I need to optimize some of my online profiles, my website and this blog to get some more credit for my identity. Lucky for me none of the search results for my name return shady individuals!

I recently came across a situation that has me frustrated because ExtJS doesn’t seem to have a built-in utility to solve my problem. Obviously, I can code something custom. . . but I’m frustrated because it’s more work than necessary and far from elegant.

The story begins about a year ago. My company (GFX International) has been working on an enterprise software solution for some time, and the developers wrote a method using jQuery (v1.2.6) to parse an XHTML server response returned during 500 errors. The idea is to create a popup window with the error message (one line of code), which is parsed from a rather long XHTML document (the default 500 error page returned by .NET).

The jQuery method is actually quite elegant and works perfectly.

getErrorText: function (response) {
    var errorCode = response.status;

    if (errorCode == 401 || errorCode == 403) {
        return 'You are not permitted to perform this action.';
    }

    //the custom error page has a DIV tag with this ID
    var errorMessage = $(response.responseText).find("div#errortext").html();

    if (!errorMessage) {
        //in DEBUG mode, we don't use custom error page.
        errorMessage = $(response.responseText).find("h2").html();
    }

    return errorMessage;
}

Over the past 9 months since I was hired as our Web Developer, I’ve redesigned the UI of this application so that it is built almost entirely on ExtJS widgets and extensions. The problem with the above method is that this now is the only place in the application where we use jQuery – meaning we have to include the jQuery library for only 2 lines of code.

My initial thought was: “I’ll just re-write this method using ExtJS and remove our dependency on jQuery!” Sounds easy enough, but in reality it’s actually a pain in the ass for several reasons.

First, the response variable returned during the 500 error is not a valid XML document. . . it’s not even valid HTML. The .NET framework generates a detailed error message contained within HTML tags, but after closing the final HTML tag is appends a stack of executed code lines leading up to the error. This section of appended data breaks the XML/HTML validity, essentially making it impossible for me to just throw the response variable into an DOMparser() object.

Second, ExtJS has no built-in utility for parsing a generic XML string for a specified value. In jQuery, every variable called by $(someVariable) is checked (1) to see if it’s a string, and if so (2) to see if it is HTML code (using a regular expression match). If jQuery believes your variable to be an HTML chunk, it runs it through a clean() method to convert the HTML string into DOM nodes (getting rid of any junk. . . *cough* .NET stack trace).

ExtJS does have a similar utility: Ext.query(selector, root). Unfortunately for me, this means that I can only parse an exisiting DOM node. Since my response variable isn’t part of the DOM (or even formatted as a proper DOM element) this method doesn’t really help me until I solve the first problem.

After posting this problem on the ExtJS message board, a member of their support team suggested that I simply build a regular expression to parse my response object. Obviously, this would solve my problem. However, it’s not an elegant solution; regular expressions are ugly at best (they are in fact my nemesis), and this solution fails to solve similar problems faced by other ExtJS users (I assume others have encountered this problem). The bottom line is that this type of utility would make a reasonable and very useful addition to the ExtJS library. . . so why isn’t one available?

A company named BooneOakley (BooneOakley.com) has done something very cool, using the YouTube annotations feature to present each “page” of their site as a YouTube video. It’s a very cool idea, though one I don’t really agree with entirely.

First of all, BooneOakley is a full-service ad agency. They have redirected their web domain to their YouTube channel, effectively piggybacking on YouTube’s bandwidth and syndication.

They’ve obviously done something right here, creating a viral web campaign to spread their name. I had never heard of them before (not that I know anything about ad agencies), but if YouTube is willing to blog about them then this viral campaign is a wild success. If I’m blogging about how YouTube blogged about them, it’s an even more startling success.

On the other hand, YouTube doesn’t give you the ability to build a broad SEO campaign. Sure you can optimize your videos within YouTube and Google video search, but that doesn’t mean customers are going to find you in MSN, Yahoo, YellowPages, etc. Maybe that’s a consideration BooneOakely decided wasn’t important for them (they’re targeting a specific market I know nothing about… very possible).

Nevertheless, I don’t understand why they didn’t simply build their flash videos and embed them within their own hosted domain – thereby allowing for organic SEO, landing page construction, and more control over every aspect of their web presence. They could still have their videos on YouTube (a great idea!), but I honestly think that redirecting their domain to YouTube was a missed opportunity for broad SEO growth.

My friends at Fathom SEO might very well disagree with me. . . but I guess I’m entitled to my opinion. Kudos needs to be given to BooneOakley for their viral campaign, but I’ll be curious to know how long it takes them to rethink the need for a static website.

I had read in GA documentation about Event Tracking, and I really wanted to set it up on my sites. Unless I’m completely blind, I don’t think the documentation says anywhere that this feature is in beta testing and not fully available to the public.

Doing a quick Google search, I found a blog post details how to hack GA and see this data (assuming you’ve set it up). GA has been tracking the data – they just haven’t given you direct access to it.

I don’t know when Google plans on giving everyone access to this feature, but I’m hoping it’s sometime soon.