Skip links

Performancing

Main navigation

Archives for February 2009

History And Purpose Of ALT And TITLE Attributes

by

Addicott Web has a great article which provides a bit of history and explanation into the ALT and TITLE HTML attributes. You might think these two attributes provide the same function but they are used for two different purposes.

The ALT attribute is an important element to the accessibility community. It began as a way for people who are blind and use screen readers (or people who use text-only web browsers) to know when there was an image on the page they were reading.

The TITLE attribute can be used with almost all HTML elements on your website. While the ALT attribute emerged from the accessibility world, the TITLE attribute emerged from the usability standpoint.

From a usability standpoint myself, I enjoy articles which have TITLES applied to images if they don’t already have captions so I can get a description as to what the image entails. As for ALT tags, WordPress makes it very easy to add these and I typically use one to three descriptive words. On the topic of SEO, I have at times received an influx of traffic because of the way I have described an image through the ALT tags.

Have you noticed a decent amount of search traffic coming to your blog by way of Google Image search?

Common Sense SEO

by

This Thursday, David Peralty and I will be continuing our series this time, focusing on content generation and SEO. So with that in mind, I wanted to take a moment to highlight some key aspects involved with SEO that you don’t need a rocket scientist to help you figure out.

Be Visible – Think about the journey users take to arrive on your site. Keywords, search queries, phrases, etc. Queries that include your domain name, business, or company name. Also think about generic phrases that people use such as ‘blogging with WordPress’. Last but not least, there is the search queries which contain three, four, or five word phrases that identify exactly what the user is looking for. The key to success is to ensure that you have visibility at each point in the user’s journey.

Get Indexed – Make sure your website is able to be crawled effectively by search engine spiders. You can accomplish this by using clean code in your sites design, lack of on page javascript, absence of inline CSS styles, and non dynamic URL paths. The bit about URLs can easily be taken cared of by using a publishing system which supports URL rewriting. This is also a good time to create a sitemap and submit that to the various search engines. Sitemaps tell search engine spiders exactly what to crawl, hence the name.

All About Relevancy – Search engines are based on algorithms, not human thought. So while you might be able to get away with publishing gobbly gook as content on the site that search engines love, it may not be useful for visitors to your site. This means there is a fine line between writing for humans, and writing for robots. My rule of thumb and something I’ve done since day one ands that is to write for humans. I write content that is relevant to my sites purpose, the subject at hand and I use relevant titles to describe content as well as keywords within the content. All of these things put together not only makes sense to humans, but also tells the search engines that my content is relevant towards a specific subject so that I’ll rank higher for when user’s look for information regarding the subject.

Authority Is A Good Thing – Authority is a good thing when it comes to search engines. Authority is generally measured by the number and quality of inbound links to your website. For example, the more inbound links to a site from similar sites known to the engine using keywords in the anchor text, the more authority is given to that receiving site. When talking about Google, they use something known as PageRank to determine a sites authority level. Due to changes in the Google algorithm, it is advised my many to stay away from certain types of link building techniques such as buying links, reciprocal linking and site wide links. If you concentrate on creating good, high quality linkbait, the links will come to you.

These are just a few of the topics we’ll be discussing on this weeks edition of Perfcast so tune in and don’t miss it!

Lifestreams of History – How Will Future Generations Look Back at Us?

by

The other day, my brother asked for help printing out a paper for his Physics class (ran out of ink, as usual). When I opened the documents he emailed, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at what I saw. Of course, the paper was all about Physics–sort of a brief overview of significant events in the field for the past few centuries. But he presented what was supposedly a timeline of historic events in an unusual fashion: as lifestreams. He used Plurk, to be more specific.

I had a blast reading about Archimedes taking a bath and then exclaiming Eureka! and how Einstein purportedly plurks that relativity is how spending an hour with a pretty girl seems like a minute (how time flies, huh?).

If I wasn’t such a Physics geek back in High School I probably won’t find any of these interesting. But then what I find intriguing is the possibility of future generations looking back our present time through our lifestreams. Face it: our blog posts, tweets, plurks, and social network testimonials are part of history.

One of my history professors taught me how history is recorded through a collective of streams of information from personal observations and other data. And so, indeed, tweets, plurks, microblogs and even other longer mediums, are part of history.

But how sticky are these tidbits of personal and social history? Web applications and online media are eletronic and can be considered ephemeral in nature. Blogs come and go. And even blogging, lifestreaming services and social bookmarkers can close shop. Can we, therefore, rely on these as a good way to preserve our lines of thought for future generations? Can we trust our history to web apps?

The British Library is concerned with preserving digital media as reliably as manuscripts and books, and they want to archive digital media (on various other mediums) for future reference. True enough, it’s not too difficult to archive paper. Take for instance notes and letters sent between historical figures or heads of state, perhaps like communication between America’s founding fathers stored in national or state archives. Or how about something personal like love letters exchanged between sweethearts kept precious inside tin boxes? But email correspondences might slip away if not saved and archived properly. Consider this: how sure are you that Gmail will still be around 50 years from now?

This notwithstanding, lifestreaming services do afford us a good overview of what’s happening around the world, right now. Live blogging has become popular at trade events and conventions. Lifestreaming services make it even easier and more convenient, particularly if users can access through mobile devices.

In fact, some major world events have been liveblogged and “lifestreamed” so to speak. Take for instance CERN’s tests of its Large Hadron Collider late last year. Updates were posted on Twitter. Yes, that and a handful of doomsday predictions! But when the dust has settled–and when we’re sure we’re still alive and not sucked by some black hole from Europe–would people still consider this relevant at all?

The civilizations of old left us their structures and artifacts as pieces of the puzzle that is their history. To some extent, I still wonder at awe at how people lived back then. Ages from now, would people look back at the 21st Century through our “structures” and “artifacts” that is what we call new media? Would lifestreams and blogs be part of history? Would there be a reliable archive of this electronic data that would last through the rigors of time?

Or is all this just a fleeting moment, bound to pass at the blink of an eye?

Another Google Burn Victim

by

Mark Ghosh who operates WeblogToolsCollection.com recently published an article that describes the terrible support experience he encountered with Google after he made the big mistake of falling for a phishing scam related to his Orkut account. After his Orkut account became compromised, he was unable to gain access to it as the flaw used by the hackers was an old, and well known bug in the way in which the Orkut application stored data in cookies.

The Orkut application stores cookies in such a way that if your cookie is ever recreated by someone else or transmitted to someone else, they can use that cookie to log in to Orkut as you. forever. No matter how you change your credentials, you have no recourse of regaining control. So if you ever get caught in a phishing scam that sends your password to someone else and they recreate your orkut_state cookie, they can login as you forever.

Mark then describes the various avenues he has tried in order to get support from anyone within the Google powerhouse and so far, he has been unsuccessful after two weeks of trying. While the initial blame can be given to Mark (which he admits) the way in which Google has handled the situation is completely unacceptable. After reading what happened to Mark, I’m feeling pretty good that I don’t rely on Google or any web based application to handle my sensitive information.

Have you had a similar experience with Google’s support system? Don’t you think issues like this really need to be addressed before we start leaving all sorts of information into the cloud?