I often read or hear people talking about Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) and how to get their site at the top of a search engine list. I’m not going to repost the good ideas (see http://www.clearbreezedesign.com/searchable.htm for a good introduction) or go on about all the nonsense and superstition surrounding the subject but merely share my experience with two major search engines, MSN and Google.

After launching a site and sending the details to both MSN and Google the speed to getting an index was dramatically different. MSN showed the site after only a few weeks whereas Google took close onto 10 months to becoming fully indexed. At the start I used Google Alerts to register my interest in the words used by the site and got the odd alert about unrelated sites. During this time the web logs were showing that Google had indexed the site but no index and no alerts. Then after the 10 months the site was suddenly indexed and I started to get a steady stream of alerts for each of the pages of the site. I’d never claim to understand how Google works or how it will work tomorrow, but my observations are that Google does seem to index a site and at some point later the index becomes public knowledge. Now whether this is down to the well touted Sandboxing of sites or simply a queue of indexes I can only guess. But if you’ve designed your site correctly and are tearing your hair out wondering why you’re not getting a Google index, then don’t fret too much but be prepared for a wait. Maybe just everyone you meet to use MSN 😉

I’ve been getting a problem with my Virtual Server machines for some time. It looked like every now and again the VM would not be on the network. Examining the VM event log showed, "could not initialize the emulated Ethernet controller." However whenever I decided to look into the problem it would magically start working again. Well eventually I got fed up with it and decided to have quick web search. Finally I discovered that I’m not alone with this problem and there is a simple workaround for the problem too…

http://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=214204&SiteID=151
[Edit] It appears this link no longer works, I’m looking into getting the official answer, what this space.

The workaround also goes some way to explaining why I would "fix" it by simply rechecking the settings!

Today I was shown how to copy a file from your local machine and paste to a remote desktop session. The trick is to ensure you have "use local disk" enabled when you make the initial connection.

Had my first play with Dreamweaver for about five years today. I must confess that I’m not a great fan of "design mode" HTML editors and much prefer to hand code it, but it does a good job at auto-completing the tags so that’s all very good. No better than the free Visual Studio Express for Web Developers but there we go. The interested bit was using Dreamweaver with Adobe Contribute. The basic premise is you design a site with Dreaweaver, and allow authors to change the site via Contribute. The clever bit is that you can create templates in Dreamweaver with specific editable regions and specific sets of CSS styles. The in Contribute you can different rules to different roles thereby restricting users to what they can create and edit. It seems to work very well, the check-in system is a bit clumsy in comparison to modern source control servers but is effective. From the authors point of view they can an editor where they can clearly see the bits of the page that are available to them to change. In the drop down list of styles they (if configured correctly) only see the styles the web designer constructed for them to use. Although I couldn’t prevent the use of the horrible justification buttons in Contribute, very annoying. The templates themselves behave in a sort of "master page" principal. If you make a change to the template then it "automatically" (but it does require some help) updates any pages based upon that template. However, I did find the nested concept a little confusing and wasn’t nearly as flexible as ASP.NET Master Pages. Although to be fair the basic templates are much easier to use and I find ASP.NET Master a little nasty to use, certainly for a users stuck in design mode.

Overall I do like Dreamweaver, I think it’s horribly overpriced for what it delivers, at least for the bits I want to use. Contribute on the other hand is a fairly priced product and is a decent no thrills editor for the non-HTML savvy authors.

I read something a little surprising today. You know all that, "please agree to the…" you get when you install software? Well when you install Vista it says that you cannot install Vista on a Virtual Machine apart from the Business and Ultra (or whatever it’s called) editions. A rather strange thing to do, why should Microsoft care what hardware (or not) it is running on? I could understand if they said they don’t support VM software, after all who’s to say how they fake their hardware, but given the amount of rubbish physical hardware you can buy I don’t understand what they’re worried about. Still if you were not aware of this then now you are…sorry.

My incursion into the land of DOM scripting hit upon another difference between IE and Firefox, another simple example…

<Div id="test">
Hello there
</Div>

The task, use JavaScript to change the text in the Div, easy eh?

document.getElementById("test").firstChild.value = "new text"
or
document.getElementById("test").innerText = "new text"

Well, turns out I used both! IE seems to like the 2nd and Firefox the 1st, with neither complaining about the other. Now I can see why the AJAX libraries have their DOM abstraction functions!