Saturday, January 18, 2003

Dean, Dean, Dean or Turnabout is Fair Play or I'm Really Asking for It Now I listed his name three times because I found three mistakes (read on below) during my reading on his site today. I can't resist any longer.  The language and spelling mistakes on so many sites are beginning to compound.  Spoken language is pricking my ears in painful ways.  So much misuse! Now I'm not a language expert.  I probably make my share of punctuation mistakes and complex grammar goofs.  Dangling participles and split infinitives and run-on sentences and so on and so on ;-).  You get the picture.  And sure, there is certainly some literary license on the part of the author/blogger to be tolerated. But I've seen so many mistakes, that I am now motivated to create something that has been burning in my mind for a long time: a language peeves gallery.  Commonly misspelled words, incorrect word substitutions (then for than, too for to), mangled clichés, and other annoyances (to me of course) will be posted to a blog channel.  Now, I probably won't bother including the posts on my blog homepage, but I must post them!  I can withhold the outcry no longer! Anyway, Dean is quite the site critic.  And because he has elevated himself into the ranks of experts, I think he can benefit from some constructive criticism.  So here are the items I noticed on his site today: 1.) "use the once sentence that page contains" - "once" should be "one" here. 2.) "It looks like I'm might to have to find a new reseller account." - "I'm" should be "I." 3.) "I like the aggregator because I don't have to check all the webpages that don't update nearly as often as I would like them too! and for that matter, I don't update nearly as often as I would like to." - "too!" is the incorrectly substituted for "to." Now, I will definitely disclaim any appearances of perfection that you may think I hold about myself.  Heck, I've probably made a few mistakes in this post alone.  If your well-trained eye catches it, please leave a comment.  As Dean notes at the end of this post, we can all learn something from a little constructive feedback.  Right? Update: I realized some time after I posted this entry that I had misattributed item #3 to Dean (of DeanPeters.com and HealYourChurchWebsite.com).  It was actually posted by Dean (Dean McKenzie of DeanMcKenzie.org).  My apologies. Dean Peters has asked me (via comments) to edit his weblog.  I might just take him up on that whim.  How about it Dean?  You provide the login, and I will correct the mistakes I find.

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Meta Keyword Tags are Dead and Syndirella is Alive and Well Thanks to Dean for including this tidbit from one of my favorite sources: Search Engine Watch. Apparently, nearly all significant search engines ignore the <META  NAME="keywords"> tag.  It's a "spam magnet" and has been largely dismissed since the 1997-1998 time frame with regard to its importance in search engine relevance.  I was once badgered by so-called expert when building a site (in mid 2001) because I didn't include the META keywords tag.  The site won't be promoted properly, blah, blah, blah.  Well, I think the most important factors are keyword usage in page titles and content, search engine submission, and external links leading to your site.  Except for Inktomi, the major search engines don't use the META keywords tag.  So it's virtually dead, unless you have some other purpose for your own Million Dollar Markup. If you're interested, here's a few other things you can do with a META tag.  The article taught me something new today.  Some META tags (the ones that use the HTTP-EQUIV attribute) correspond to headers found in HTTP messages (see IETF RFC 1945, section 4.2).  Some web servers translate the values stored in the META tags (the HTTP-EQUIV kind) into the HTTP headers when they deliver content to the browser. Dean also noted the arrival of an open source, Windows-based desktop news aggregator called Syndirella by Dmitry Jemerov.  Excellent!  I like the idea of the ability (more research required here) to scrape regular web pages for news.  This means that I might be able to digest the Search Day newsletter from Search Engine Watch without visiting the page directly.  Maybe. I was using email subscriptions to get most of my news in the past, and I possess many dedicated mail folders for particular sources that fill up with unread messages.  Pretty useless. So, as I move along in my blogging adventure, RSS collected by a news aggregator seems to be a much be better solution.  If I miss six months worth of news, I don't have six months worth of news staring me in the face during my next session--only recent, relevant stuff. Now, Syndirella goes one step better.  Instead of having an extremely long web page to read, Syndirella carves up the news into each feed and allows in-client reading without bouncing all over to other windows.  It still feels a little clumsy and basic, but my hat is off to Dmitry for creating such a useful tool and releasing it as a free, open source product. Not only that, but it's written in C# running on the .NET framework.  I was wondering what the most effective way to distribute a .NET desktop application over the web would be.  The Framework is a 20MB+ download for those that don't already have it.  That's a long wait for a lot of users.  But Dmitry is doing it.  He warns the user about the size of the download and gives instructions about where to acquire it.  This seems to be the best way I've seen so far, short of mailing out a CD.  No, I don't want to do that.

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