Tecnotertulia
Observations at the Humanities and Technology Crossroads
A Worthwhile Definition of Web 2.0
01600 days
The thing I’ve most disliked about the term “Web 2.0″ is that most people use it to define something old as if it were something new. For example, some people have used the term to define myspace.com as a Web 2.0 application. However, they should remember that Geocities offered many of the same capabilities as myspace.com, but has been around since long before the term Web 2.0 was coined (since late 1995, to be exact).
Finally Tom Scott has done a great job underlining the essence of Web 2.0 applications. He describes exactly that part of Web 2.0 applications that is actually new. He also underlines the importance of good URL design and points out that it is even more important than graphic design (and I fully agree), but even good URL design isn’t exactly new. In fact, it’s been the mantra of many since the very beginning of the web, and for exactly the same reasons.
In the end, perhaps the only thing that differentiates these new web applications from pre-Web 2.0 web applications is the effort they put into making their data accessible to other systems. And if this is the case, is it really worth coining a new term to describe it? If so, why aren’t we just calling them what they are: web applications based on open standards? And finally, I don’t think the fact that most emerging web applications are embracing open standards should come as a surprise to anyone since it is a great way to grow your user base.
Blogging Vacation
11610 days
I’ll be taking a break from blogging for the next few weeks. My son was born about a week ago and there’s no time for anything but making sure mom and baby are well-fed and taken care of. Expect more activity around the end of January. In the meantime, here’s a photo of the little guy:
PHP BBEdit Clipping Set
01626 days
I’ve finally updated my PHP BBEdit Clipping Set (formerly known as a glossary). The new clipping set:
- Continues to contain around 6,000 function definitions (whatever is in the official PHP documentation)
- Is based on a recent version of the official documentation
- Allows tabbing between function parameters (very handy…)
- Provides additional information when inserting a function (the return type, for example)
- Optionally includes predefined constants for each function
As always, there are links to instructions for creating your own set (be sure to download the Extras to get the source XSLT stylesheets) and donations are greatly appreciated.
PageRank domain migration follow-up
01636 days
Several months ago I moved tedmasterweb.com to a subdomain of clevernet.biz. I expected the PageRank of tedmasterweb.com (4) to flow upstream and increase the PageRank of clevernet.biz (3). For months I waited and waited but nothing seemed to happen. In fact, I appeared to have completely lost the PageRank I had for tedmasterweb.com.
About a month ago I did several things to try and regain my lost PageRank. Specifically, I planned on asking people linking to the old site to update their links to point to the new location (clevernet.biz/tedmasterweb), but in many cases I was unable to find the authors of those links, or the links came from USENET or forum lists and they couldn’t be changed.
Besides updating incoming links, I fixed several broken links on clevernet.biz, added the clevernet.biz Google Analytics code to the tedmasterweb.com templates, and added a robots.txt file disallowing indexing of “email to friend” and “print version” pages. And finally, in my last post, I sent a ping to Matt Cutts’ blog in which he asks about international search bugs (which this isn’t but it did seem odd that the PageRank completely disappeared).
I’m not sure which of all of those things was the culprit, but I seem to have regained my PageRank, or at least, I’ve regained a PageRank on clevernet.biz/tedmasterweb (it is now 4).
Over the weekend we moved clevernet.biz to a new hosting provider. I do not expect such a move to impact PageRank since all we are doing is changing the IP address. I do wonder, though, how it will affect searches originating from Spain since the new server is housed in Germany and previously we were hosting our web site ourselves right in the Canary Islands. As of this writing, a search for “salir primero en Google” has us at number 1. This holds true when searching from the Canary Islands or from Chicago. We’ll see how this changes over time…
What I find really interesting, though, is that my tedmasterweb subdirectory has a higher PageRank than my main web site (clevernet.biz). My theory that a higher ranked subdirectory will boost the main domain has been debunked. It will be interesting to see if that ever changes, especially when we publish the new version of my PHP BBEdit Clippings set (which gave me a PageRank of 5 on tedmasterweb.com some years ago).