Technology

Everything we buy these days seem to have more and more add-on widgets. However, many perhaps do not have the thought put into them that perhaps they should. From a systems perspective many fail the basic logic that one would expect.

One such example would be the inclusion of time spent in 'Park' when it comes to determining true fuel consumption in the Mitsubishi Pajero. Too much time spend with the car idling away whilst you test the trailer lights, keep children and the fridge cool in the driveway as you prepare to go on holiday means you get figures like these:

Yesterday I found myself flying for the first time with Tiger Airways out of the pure stubborn opinion that I should not have to pay up to $800 for economy seats for a return trip to Melbourne for a funeral. I must say it was not as bad as I dreaded - it seemed that you acknowledge that they have cut-throat cut off times and plan for it then average Joe Citizen should survive the trip unscathed.

So, I have been having some speed issues with my web site and went to have a hunt to see if I could find the culprit. Whilst I was sniffing around I noticed that this is my first >1Gb month for bandwidth. So, which one of you is stealing it, eh?

Seriously though, my statistics are looking pretty crazy. My number of visitors has slowly settled down again but I have still had almost 59,000 visitors in the last year. That's a fair schwag of people when you work out that it is several hundred people per day.

Perhaps I am suffering from too much time in the business sector. I am amazed at the pressure exuded now on small business owners to 'blog their way to success' using their blog to demonstrate their prowess to potential customers and win them over as clients.

It is amazing though how hard core the people who take up their gauntlet are. They make bold claims about their success from this and many ply the pressure onto their clients and readership to take up and do the same. These past few months I have felt this pressure immensely.

Most of the time drupal.org has all the information you need to achieve something with their web content manager. However, there are a few things that simply are difficult to explain with just textual input.

I found a part-solution to this in the Drupal Therapy web site as put together by Sean Effel. With the use of web cam and screen recorder he has made the process of learning about modules such as views really easy.

We need more people like this in the grey zone between developers and users!

Geoff, my geeky brother-in-law, is again getting himself media attention. What is now over two years since the creation of 'meta', the open source segway, Geoff's work has rated a mention in New Scientist magazine's December issue and has now also been published in Gizmag also.

Hi all!

This is an apology to the Linux Australia feed administrators and readership (whether they be involved either directly or via an aggregation of the aggregator). The feed from Green & Nutty was only meant to contain my personal posts but for some reason it is pulling in, well, everything! It was not my intention for this to occur. So I am sorry - I buggered up!

I would have noticed if I had been on PlanetLA last night as I do most Fridays but yesterday/last night/this morning I was off line and not aware that it had occurred. Thank you to the persons in the chain involved who brought this to my attention so that I could rectify it as quickly as possible. I have killed the feed so it should auto-correct soon (I hope - or maybe some admin intervention may be required)!

For those on in the LA community, please, just like coding problems and typos (particularly names), if I screw up *anything*, like feeds, then please feel free to contact me directly. I don't bite heads off chickens or people and would rather have a random subscriber to the feed shoot me an email, sms or give me a quick call just to say, 'You screwed up - please fix ...!' than have to involve other people. I know that administrators have signed up to this responsibility but they too have their own lives and I would like to think we can leave them in peace in the first instance and sort things out directly where possible. So whomever you were - please throw the wet fish directly next time (it might kit harder that way)!!

Thanks to the list for your infinite understanding as always.

What to say - most friends have more time than me!

My friend Paul had enough time to create a shoe phone after being reminded of Get Smart. Past's fiction, today's reality. ;)

Search engine optimisation (SEO) and site rankings are really a kettle of fish unto themselves these days. Being a marketer who went on to study in Information Technology I am suprised at how many people out there boast to be specialists in SEO.

In order to take a closer look at what is going on behind the scenes I have spend the last 24 hours monitoring guru.com for SEO requests. I have been in touch with some of the businesses putting out SEO requests and have also used their 'project' to understand the skill set of the person offering the solution.

My findings were that most SEO providers ability to understand the true scope of what they acronym means was very sadly lacking. To match, we have almost 36% of those 'employers' that I surveyed not understanding the full scope of SEO either meaning that they were really not qualified to make a good service purchase unless one of their bidders 'enlightened' them to the simple fact that SEO is a two-edged sword. You can have the most 'optimised' site internally but unless you spend time looking after the externals also then you may still fall on your sword.

Most of the bids that I have been given to review included only internals such as and is not just internals like 99% of bidders were bidding on implementation of meta tags and robots, robot tags, html clean ups, site map installation as well as being a loyal provider of optimisation updates and ranking reports.

Another odd project I found was of an 'SEO expert' that wanted to farm out the internal work of clients and not only did he desire the above things but he also wanted the selected supplier to provide 'integration/optimisation themed pages'. Now I am not sure what this person actually means as depending on where you put the emphasis it could mean several different things. My best guess is that he's looking for someone who can build content managers which are optimised for crawling that can have templates overlaid to meet the clients needs.

Other things that are missing internally has been the 'accessibility' approach also. I mean, how many of us who do web development actually take the time to put in our alternate text and descriptors. We all know that some search engines love them, right? Ah, but those extra three seconds of typing may mean I miss something too. Just check out my site closely enough and you will find that it is not up to strict XHTML standard let alone having the appropriate meta data in place.

Now, putting my marketing hat on I wonder what businesses actually understand SEO to be? Clearly a large percentage of businesses posting projects on Guru did not. In the most simplistic of terms it includes a marketing approach to getting your site noticed and linked to in a manner which brings in the keywords that you want you site to be high hitting with. But do marketers know how to achieve this? I'd hope so with the nature of marketing education being increasingly loaded with conferences on 'Search'. But time will tell and some clients will still not be able to see the trees for the weeds in that process.

In relation to this I was interested to find that only 8% of SEO jobs were posted in marketing and 92% were in technology. It would be interesting to see whether this becomes more balanced over time as marketers get their heads around what search is really about. So last night my little Alexa site ranking tool told me that my personal web site ranked in at #19 million and a bit, globally speaking, after my big web site reorganisation leading to a huge number for 404's. . Today, it is at #3, 201, 472. I did just one thing to make this happen, without spending a cent, and it wasn't anything on any of my web sites. If you are interested in doing this for your own business then it may be worth contacting me at the office to find out more.

Michael got home from Blackhat a few days ago now and he was discussing some of the issues raised there with Arjen Lentz and I. One issue raised was finding out information about people through the use of an email address and the humble 'lost password'.

Now, let me paint a scenario. You, unbeknownst to the public, are a member of alcoholics anonymous. Unfortunately for you, you upset someone so significantly that they go dirt digging on you. Since you have an email address and they know it, dirt digging can be easy to do, especially with a script.

How many web sites are there with membership or account forms? How many do you belong to? Most people have accounts and most sites have a 'lost password' option. Nine times out of ten, that I have found today, most have a process by which you are required to enter your password. If you are a member it emails your password to you and the screen usually displays as much and if you are not a registered member it returns that tid-bit of information to the screen.

By putting your email address into the form someone can very quickly tell if you are a member at that site or not based on the message that is returned. From that they can deduce whether you are a member or not. Oh no, your alcoholism is now exposed! Now think what can be achieved with a smart script which can hit thousands of web sites!?!

Hopefully, by now most technology people should have already seen the solution because I hope that someone will run with implementing it into content management and forum systems for user privacy reasons.

For those who can't see the solution all you need to do is change the displayed response. So how will they know if their request has been effective? Tell them that they have been sent an email either with their account details or details on how to set one up. Then email the account the relevant information or send them a how to register message.

I encourage people to take this proposal to their open source projects because I would like to be able to choose who knows about the online memberships I participate in and am sure that I am not the only one.