I have been building a proposal for a client, and to get more familiar with the iGoogle Gadget API, I built a Gadget that pulls a list of URLs from a remote XML file asynchronously and displays them.

Fun lessons I learned about writing iGoogle Gadgets:

• Using the iGoogle editor allows you to quickly edit, preview and troubleshoot apps, BUT does not allow you to use anything but the legacy APIs
• You cannot develop with the new APIs by calling them from your server, as they are cached by Google every hour (along with any called XML files)
• iGoogle has a pretty intuitive setup for using Javascript and writing cross-browser apps, once you look past the (very) rough developer’s tools

Here’s the gadget as it exists currently:

My future plans are to put the links in a tab, and change the link loading scheme.  The images are just too big and take precious vertical space. I’ll use another tab to display an RSS feed.  iGoogle has an API to chew on feeds and convert them to JSON for you.

I think loading the App data from an external XML/JSON is a far superior solution to hard-coding it into an app.  It allows it to be edited much easier by an program/unskilled user. You can view the code by reading the XML file here.

SEOs love to complain about Google’s practices, but a recent blog post by Aaron Wallreally underscores the arguments against Google.  Google has publicly stated (it’s their corporate mission) that they wish to collect information and make it available to users.  However, this is outright false based upon their actions regarding their secrecy about search terms and algorithms.  They keep this secret to maintain a “competitive edge”, and to at least in theory, prevent spammers.  Google has effectively changed their mission to just collecting all the world’s data and presenting it in a walled garden, arranged how a small minority of engineers wish to present it.  If you attempt to game their results or go against their vision, you are penalized harshly or banished.

Google is trusted with an incredible amount of our data yet they continually wish to keep the data exchange one-sided.  They offer a multitude of “free” services, but their services are not exactly services per se, but rather interfaces between Google and the real world that suck in the world’s knowledge and keep it in proprietary data stores.  Your emails, web search history, site usage statistics, calendaring, etc are all kept and combed through by Google.  It’s an incredibly one-sided conversation, with Google taking in all information, and sharing only limited and sterilized morsels.

From the “bad precedent” department, lawfirm Jones Day in Chicago filed an abusive lawsuit against startup BlockShopper.  Jones Day filed the suit in an attempt to control the anchor text of links to the firm.  A settlement has been reached out of court that prohibits Blockshopper from linking to the litigious bastards using anything but URL text and “Jones Day” The story at Ars Technica is here.  

Anchor text is what shows up for a link.  For instance, my “abusive lawsuit” link above links to jonesday.com, but the “abusive lawsuit” text is referred to as the anchor text.  Anchor text is an important factor in what Google and other search engines use to calculate keywords you rank for.  For instance, if there were a ton of links with the anchor text “abusive lawsuit” pointing at jonesday.com, then jonesday.com would likely come up as the first result for “abusive lawsuit”.  This can be done in a coordinated fashion called Google-Bombing.  Famous examples include the “Miserable Failure” googlebomb aimed at the biography of George W. Bush and a similar campaign against Al Gore.  

Googlebombs can be “defused” by Google, as they have a custom algorithm that is periodically run (according to a post at Matt Cutt’s blog, it’s when they feel like it’s needed).  However, this is the first time someone has successfully sued to affect their anchor tags.  It’s a bad precedent for the web and might be a part and parcel of the SEO efforts of future large corporations trying to manage ranked keywords.  For instance, suppose someone working on Ford Motor company’s SEO team noticed that Ford Motor company had been linked to unfavorably by a website, perhaps using anchor text “broken down car” or something similarly derogatory.   With the precedent that has been set, that SEO guy/gal could fire off an email to Ford’s legal team to harass that site and convince them to change/remove their links to better reflect the trademarks and brand of Ford.  Alternatively, they could issue linking guidelines through their legal team that would aid in SEO, such as requirements to include the title of the page (containing targetted keywords, of course).

Jones Day’s lawsuit specifies exactly how BlockShopper is supposed to link to Jones Day, and actually requires that they use the name of the lawyer they are linking to (the lawsuit was over linking to attorney profiles) and Jones Day.  This would have the effect of “pairing” a lawyer’s name with Jones Day in SERPs, making it harder for the lawyer to establish a private practice.  Additionally, it prevents negative anchor text from seeding keywords to specific lawyers or Jones Day in general.  Google’s pagerank counts each link as a vote, so in essence, Jones Day is deciding how you are allowed to vote for them.  It will remain to be seen how Google reacts to this and how their algorithms change to accomodate this censorship of information.  The engineers pride themselves on being able to algorithmically filter out misleading, irrelevant, or commercial influences from their SERPs, so this should be a good test.

Many web developers using IIS, having seen the widespread adoption of mod_rewrite in Apache, have been wondering about what tools are available to them.  IIS 7.0 in Vista and Server 2008 has a rewrite module provided by Microsoft, by popular demand.  However, users of older versions of IIS have been stuck in the cold with regard to a lack of rewrite options.  

Why is it so important?

Many people don’t notice the heavy usage of URL rewrites in popular websites.  It is used on this websites to produce the friendly URLs used for permalinks.  It is used to erase something unfriendly like an article id “article.php?=132&source?=20″ and change it to /articles/myarticle/source/.  This has major benefits for search engine optimization.  I used a rewrite rule to change an incredibly unfriendly DNN url to “www.exampledomain.com/blog/”.  Having these keywords available in the link drastically helps optimize your inbound links.  It can be used for untold other uses as well, since the Apache implementation is fantastically powerful.  Rewrite rules are created using regular expressions.

Your Options

Your main two options for IIS are Ionics ISAPI Rewrite and Helicon Tech’s ISAPI Rewrite.  Ionic’s is an open source implementation of a rewrite engine, and has been progressing along nicely since when I first used it (started with the 0.8 beta).  It works as an ISAPI .DLL that is applied in IIS.  The rules are put into an INI file.  There are regrettably no  way to make separate sites have separate rules barring loading multiple copies of the DLL with multiple INI files.  Helicon’s IIS rewrite solution is a lot more mature, and closely follows the Apache implementation.  You use .htaccess files to manage rewrites.  Furthermore, almost all apache mod_rewrite rules work in Helicon’s solution.  The free version only supports one set of rules, but the premium version ($80 at the time of writing) supports .htaccess files in every web directory, with different rules.  Overall, I would recommend Helicon’s software, although it would definitely be worth looking at the Ionics project to monitor how well they are doing.  The free version of Helicon’s software only has modest restrictions, and is not expensive if you’ve already paid for Windows Server and some SQL server.

Update:

Bill Staples made a note that I neglected to include a link to the IIS7 URL rewrite, so here it is:
http://www.iis.net/extensions/URLRewrite 

I just got IIS7 installed on my Vista Ultimate box, so I should have some future posts about leveraging IIS7’s new capabilities for SEO and user friendly web applications!

I had a problem with a user who couldn’t mount a network drive.  When I would attempt to add the drive manually, I got the error “The drive could not be mapped because no network was found“.

Sitrep:

• Network was working (symptoms occur on both wireless or wired)
• Fileshare mounting WAS working (it would  mount another network drive on the same server, also it mounted redirected folders on the same server just fine)
• Can not browse windows network
• Workstation service was running fine

I mention the last one because this knowledgebase article explains that it’s a problem with the windows Workstation Service.  I would buy this if I couldn’t mount ANY folders or network drives, but the service seems to be running and restarting it doesn’t affect anything.

My Solution:

1. Go to “Network Connections”
2. Right click a network connection, go to “Properties”
3. Highlight “Client for Microsoft Networks”
4. Click “Uninstall”
5. Restart computer
6. Go to “Network Connections”
7. Right click a network connection, go to “Properties”
8. Click “Install”
9. Select “Client for Microsoft Networks”
10. Click through dialogs
11. Restart

This worked perfectly for me.  The network drive mounted right up afterwards and my problem was solved.  Let me know in the comments if this worked for you or if you are stuck somewhere!

Click the link to go download SEO Toolbar

Aaron Wall, writer of SEOBook, is one of my favorite people to read.  His blog, SEOBook Blog, is filled with great information about search engine optimization.  He’s a leader in his field, and on top of that, a very good writer who makes the subject very interesting.  Today I have a new reason to rave about Mr. Wall.  He has released a new SEO Tool for Firefox, called SEO Toolbar.

SEO Toolbar takes many features from older SEO Book tools, and incorporates them into a brand new consolidated toolbar for Firefox.  I am a daily user of SEO for Firefox, which is included.  Also included is an updated version of Rankchecker for Firefox.  However, merely including already-powerful tools is not enough.  Aaron Wall has improved the core functionality of SEO for Firefox.  I will definitely use the ability to cross-compare sites in Firefox, and relish the ability to export it to Excel CSV.  These tools will allow my day-to-day SEO campaigns to be put under even closer scrutiny.  Stuff I don’t use as much (yet!) has been included, such as RSS feed of popular SEO blogs, an SEO dictionary, competitive research tools, Google SK Tool integration, and more.

Lastly, the software is completely free!  No hassle-ware or other widgets begging me to hand my credit card to the publisher.  It’s truly a great asset to the community, much like its creator.