Dan Clarke

Today I want to talk about how to optimise your website for mobile browsers.
With the ever increasing use of mobile devices for accessing the internet, it would be foolish to overlook how your website performs on mobile browsers. There are many things to take into account when considering how best to present the content of your website to mobile users, not least that the screen size is drastically smaller, and navigation is often touchscreen based.

Some of the main things that need to be taken into account are that any navigation must be large and well spaced, and text should be presented in a large, clear format.

The Subdomain Solution (Bad)

Ok, So the privacy trick is more of a trick/workaround than an exploit, and is by no means some kind of security hole/security exploit, but it none the less gives up some data that most people would assume to be private.
The basic premise is very simple.

If you set your Friends list as private, but your friends do not, your friends list is not (entirely) hidden, and there is nothing you can do about it

The “exploit”, if you can even really call it that, relates to the privacy settings of your “Friends List” on Facebook.

Update:

Seems the people at Twitter are “Player Haters” and have suspended the account

Was fun while it lasted!

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Good morning Internets.

Last night on the way to a party, I was walking down the icy cold Berlin streets and was was struck with a cool idea.

I’d never built a twitter bot before, but figured it couldn’t be too hard. I have worked with the twitter API a few times and its pretty straight forward.
So, this morning, with last nights Gin n Tonics fermenting nicely into a comfortable Gin headache, I put together the British English Bot.

It periodically checks twitter for American spelt words, and offers corrective suggestions to the tweeter..

My fellow internets,
The internet, we know and love, finds itself in grave jeopardy.

A new bill being proposed in the US seeks to make fundamental changes to the way the internet works.
The bill has received almost unanimous criticism from all of the major online corporations (See the list below).

The bill amounts to government censorship of the internet and uses exactly the same kind of filtering that is already in place in countries such as China, Iran, and Syria.

Online piracy is a problem, nobody would dispute this, but you don’t cure a headache by cutting your head off.

Perhaps the biggest, most common, On-Page SEO error that I see across the web, has to be Duplicate Content. The sad thing is this problem is common across all kinds of websites from small time bloggers, to large media websites, and (perhaps the most unforgivable of all) SEO agencies.

Duplicate Content is also probably the single topic of SEO that has the most confusion and, for lack of a better word, bullshit written about it.
The truth is that Duplicate Content is actually quite a simple concept. In fact there is pretty much one decisive rule that encompasses the whole idea of Duplicate Content:

One Piece of Content – One URL – No Exceptions

So, following on from the previous post “Can the Googlebot read JavaScript? Ajax? Cookies?“, the wait is over, the results are in…
Overall the results are quite confusing, but lead me to make some strange, possible conclusions..

• Googlebot CAN read JavaScript
• Googlebot CAN execute, and read the results of, AJAX requests
• Googlebot CAN NOT store/read Cookies

But the killer is:

• Googlebot DOES NOT use this information in search relevancy calculations

If we take a look at the cached version of the page it doesn’t actually tell us anything about the Googlebot. The only string that can be seen is the one that uses inline JavaScript which is pretty much expected as the Ajax requests are relative and not absolute meaning they fail on the cached version.
And, as we predicted, the cookie is not set, telling us that the Googlebot didn’t/can’t read cookies.

Having recently read the fascinating blog comment from iPullRank over at seomoz (Just How Smart Are Search Robots?) It really made me think about everything we think we know about the GoogleBot.
What made matters worse, I was set to teach a session on “Understanding the Googlebot” the very next day to my team of 40, or so, interns.

Bollocks, I thought.

Last week I attended probably the greatest conference ever.

Google Developer Day 2011 (or GDD2011 for short) made its final stop, here in Berlin.
Designed to allow budding developers meet and exchange ideas, it was also a chance for Google to show off some of the latest developments in HTML5 and to present them to developers to see what the feedback was.

Some of the stuff they presented in the “Bleeding Edge HTML5″ presentation was absolutely mind-blowing.

(It gave me the idea to make this Twitter Voice Recognition project “Twittalk“)

They really reminded me how right Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was when he said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

In SEO it sometimes feels like every day is an uphill struggle, a constant battle with Google to gain some movement in the search engine results, an all out war with your competitors for your targeted keywords.

With that in mind myself and my good work colleague Andres devised a cool plan to help teach our team of interns some great SEO skills with some real hands on experience.

I am a firm believer in learning by doing, getting hands on experience and testing out new techniques and tricks is the best way to learn what works and what doesn’t. It’s all well and good to learn the theory of what is best practice in terms of good SEO but it is no substitute for real experience.
Since we work for a large multi-million dollar website, messing around and experimenting with all kinds of on page adjustments obviously isn’t possible.

Continuing from my previous post on How to surf the internet anonymously in which I discussed a few of the basic ways that you can hide or mask your identity online.
There are many different reasons why you might wish to anonymise your internet activities, ranging from data privacy concerns to overcoming restrictive government internet filters. to today we will look at some more advanced and robust techniques that you can use to surf anonymously.