Paintings & blog by Chris Gibbins

Sometimes, especially in quick turn-around campaign sites, images are used to such an extent that there is actually very little textual content on the web page. A quick and dirty solution for getting a magazine advert or flier onto the web.

“If all of the content is repeated as alt text for each image, then all is ok, isn’t it?”

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I have just stumbled across this very interesting interview with Venessa Fox, who works for Google.
Having recently started to include an xml sitemap in a couple of my sites, I never quite understood their significance. They are not sitemaps in the traditional sense; a page similar to a table of contents. Instead, the new standard for sitemaps are only for the benefit of those crawling webbots, so that they can find all of your web pages. I actually thought that the job of webbots was to follow links from the homepage, but perhaps they need better directions and a little help once in a while, especially with complicated sites.

Venessa also discusses a little about Duplicate content and the filtering process undertaken by Google.

One of my clients has two sites that run off the same database, sharing 60% of the content between them. The problem is this is a duplication of content and it looks as if Google has interpreted this as an offence of some kind. Why else wouldn’t the webots have re-indexed these certain pages in 6 months.
The best article on the subject is: “Deftly dealing with duplicate content“. But the advice doesn’t exactly cover this situation.

My first attempt at resolving the issue is to remove the site that wasn’t supposed to be indexed anyway, using a robots.txt file. Perhaps this will work and regain some favour with the webots. Otherwise we have to think again.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is such an interesting subject that attracts a huge amount of debate. Sifting through the various opinions of so many people can be confusing, but the task of keeping abreast of current SEO ideas remains crucial for any web manager or developer. One great resource on this subject and a place for many useful SEO tools is SEO Chat.

Including video clips on the web has always been an overly complicated task because of the many decisions that had to be made.

Which file format should I use?

How large shall I make the video clip?

What frame rate?

Video streaming?

Thankfully, now google video can make everything a whole lot easier, as you can upload any size video to the google servers in any format and then insert the given code onto your web site. Your video clip can then be shown on your page as a SWF file, with the Google servers doing all the work.

Recently came across Amy Hoy’s Blog about Ruby on Rails. Apart from the clear, fun writing style, she has such a talent for describing quite difficult concepts in an understandable way.

Check out her Cheat Sheets: What’s Ajax? Cheat Sheet, Form Helpers Cheat Sheet.

Whilst exploring several fascinating Ruby on Rails sites, wikis, and blogs, I have recently got into listening to podcasts. It is a nice change from reading all of the time, listening to the experts discuss all of the issues, whilst carrying on with some work myseslf. Take a look or should I say listen at Rails Podcasts.

Actually just stumbled on and excellent podcast interview by Joshua Porter on Web 2.0. Amongst many of the fascinating discussions about where the world of web sites is heading and where they came from, the survivors of the dotcom age and the lessons learnt, the subject of tagging came up. Apparently Amazon now includes the facility for adding personal tags. This service will also provide a really accurate indication of customer trends as well as providing benefits for the individuals.

I have heard a lot about ASP.net and how so many companies are now using it, and talked to many excited programmers raving on about how powerful it was. And now I am looking at Ruby on Rails. Another environment for building web applications that is supposed to save on production times.

Both these development platforms are pretty impressive, and I know that many have an instant dislike of Microsoft so would be in favour of RoR (Ruby on Rails) so I decided to look for some unbiased reviews. I found this review discussing comparison between ASP.net and Ruby on Rails.