I added a new permanent link to my SEO cateogory in the sidebar today. It is SEOmoz.org. All sorts of search engine optimization tools and articles are provided. Be sure to check out the article Search Engine Ranking Factors, as it is a masterpiece of clear organization and informative writing. The article surprised me by giving h1 tags on the page “Inconsequential Importance.” I’d always heard that they were important. You have to register to use some of the tools.
Readabiity tool online
The article Methods for measuring text readability – Standards-schmandards gives some background about what readability is, although if you’re an education majors you’re already familiar with the notion of reading levels. The article ties it in with web accessibility, so it’s an intro worth reading. You’ll find the link to the online readability index calculator in the article.
I tried it out with the previous paragraph, and it gave the paragraph a grade level of 15 and a reading ease score of 21, saying a typical comic scores 90 and legalese can score under 10.
The previous blog entry about Paul Graham’s speech scored a reading level of grade 7 and a reading ease score of 65.
What Business Can Learn from Open Source
Paul Graham gave this talk, What Business Can Learn from Open Source, at Oscon 2005. It is long, but worth the time. His points relate to the passions of the unruly and unpaid who create open source or innovative weblogs. It ties right into the point I was making in my previous post about the woman who sleeps with babies.
Here’s an excerpt of what he said, “So these, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging
have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they
like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive,
and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down. . . . When I say business can
learn from open source, I don’t mean any specific business can. I
mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene
pool does. . . . I think the big obstacle preventing
us from seeing the future of business is the assumption that people
working for you have to be employees. But think about what’s going
on underneath: the company has some money, and they pay it to the
employee in the hope that he’ll make something worth more than they
paid him. Well, there are other ways to arrange that relationship. . . . “
Benefits of growing older
Yep, that’s me–all wrinkled up like a Shar-pei. Ah, to have the life of a dog, a flappy-skinned little Shar-pei. But when you’re a wrinkled old biddy like me, people don’t run up to you, scratch behind your ears, and exclaim, "Aren’t you just the cutest thing!"
All those wrinkles are no doubt increased because you just can’t sleep as much as you used to when you get older. So much less beauty sleep is bound to have an effect, right?
I’m currently working on a project with some folks two time zones to the West of me. Today I got up at 4 a.m. and sat down at the computer to work. By 8 a.m. I had half a day’s work done, and my co-workers weren’t even out of bed yet. I thought that opening your eyes, wide awake and ready to rock, at 4 a.m. was a drawback, a handicap.
Yesterday, however, I heard a story about a woman who turned the peculiar sleep needs of the aging into a boon. She gets along fine on a couple of hours sleep now and then, so she hires herself out to sleep with newborns. She spends the night in the baby’s room and crawls out of bed to feed and change the little darling as needed. Mom and dad wake refreshed in the morning to take over. During the day she is busy living her normal life. She sleeps with the baby until it is sleeping through the night, then moves on to a different newborn.
From the perspective of a teacher, I’ve seen some interesting people in my classroom. Some of them are pliable and do things exactly the way you instruct. Some of them maintain their own peculiarities in spite of everything that happens around them. They have their own ideas about what makes sense as web navigation, what looks good on a web page, what uses the web can be put to. It doesn’t hurt teachers to get the occasional reminder that what seems to be a handicap or a problem can often turn into a good thing. Success comes in many forms. Sometimes it’s good to trust that even the average student may find a way to make life sing using the skills learned in your classroom; unless, of course, they’re sleeping in class.
Free at Last!
Opera Web Browser is free and without banner ads to all at long last. Download it, use it! One more way to eliminate IE from your life.
Review: PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites
PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites : Visual QuickPro Guide
The explanations for beginning users of both PHP and MySQL are clear and easy to follow. As you might imagine, the beginning chapters of the book are introductory in terms of both PHP and MySQL. By Chapter 7, the reader is using PHP with MySQL to execute queries and perform other functions. The Web Application Development chapter explains hidden form inputs, editing records and understanding HTTP headers. There is a chapter on cookies and sessions and a security chapter. Three example chapters give the reader an example of a content management system, a user registration system, and an e-commerce system.
The book is clear, well-written and easy to follow. I would recommend it for classroom use.
Having said that, I should mention a book that one of my friends who teaches PHP and MySQL says is her favorite book. I haven’t seen this one myself, but she likes it because each concept has a two page layout: one concept, two pages, you’re done. The book she likes is PHP 5 : Your visual blueprint for creating open source, server-side content (Visual Read Less, Learn More)
Vendors and valid HTML
Am I the only person who gets horribly irritated by companies like Amazon, Google, Flickr, and other outfits that generate invalid HTML for you to use on your website to promote or sell for them? Come on, people, it isn’t that hard. You can match up a product, an ID number, all sorts of random data. Why can’t you do it with valid HTML? At the very least you could let users indicate whether they want HTML or XHTML before you spit out a bunch of HTML for them to copy. Grrrr.