Links, statistics, and the value of visitors…

Tue Oct 4

Just a couple of links today. Great article from SEOMoz.org about how search engines rank sites. Very easy to understand explanation of website statistics from Digital Web.

Getting rid of the browser…

Mon Oct 3

Following on from Andys chance meeting with Aral Balkan, a prominant Flash developer, he wonders whether the “new Flash” is coming from the same angle as the usable web application community.

Like Andy, I used to do Flash. Like a lot of web designers, I was lured into the … flashiness of it all, and spent months on end making animated menus and, like, rilly, rilly, sooooo coooooool loading screens. I have since learned my lesson and repented of my sin. However, it has to be said that Flash has its uses, and some of the new Flash things I occasionally see are amazing visually, and seem to have got rid of that “look at me! look at me!” attitude of the early days.

However, Aral raises an interesting point about the browser being, effectively, a plugin to the operatring system. And I see his point. In an ideal world we’d not have to load anything to use an application, let alone run an operating system AND browser. Useful applications would just Be There, much like a mobile phone is Just There.

However I don’t think we can get away from usung operating systems (they are pretty integral to the whole computer thing), but maybe we can get away from having separate browsers. And I’ll explain how.

Some clever people are developing a portable version of Firefox, that king among browsers. Portable as it you don’t have to install it, can run it direct from a CD or USB memory stick. Portable as it you could (eventually) just release a single executable, which is preconfigured to display only the chrome (status bar, menus etc) you want, and to connect to a web application. Without an address bar it would cease to be a standard browser, and instead just be a wrapper for a web app.

This isn’t a new idea, my good friend M@ and I have been talking about building a “web app wrapper” application, a light .exe that could save configuration information and other data in XML files on the client, for a long time now. However using a stable, web standards-compliant, and very powerful browser such as Firefox as this wrapper would solve a lot of the problems that we could have encountered using the IE capabilities of .net.

Anyway, if the aim is to get people using web apps as easily as possible, this is one way to do it.

And I haven’t even mentioned Flash projectors yet…

Procrastination…

Sat Oct 1

If you want to miss project deadlines, procrastination’s what you need. Even a tiny amount of it can set you back by days, or even weeks if you’re a dab hand at spinning things out. A little procrastination goes a long way, remember, and with worldwide prices at such a low level, anyone can get in on the act!

It’s all to do with supply and demand, you see. Sure, there’s more demand for quality procrastination than there has ever been at any time in the human races’ history, but we’re also producing such huge quantities of procrastination that prices have plummeted. Now you can see why procrastination suppliers are springing up everywhere - even your mobile phone has procrastination facilities built right into it!

technology has made procrastination so much easier. Now we don’t need to waste time doing nothing, we can waste time by pretending that we’re doing something really important! For example “I really need to catch up on these blogs”, or what about “Finishing this level will make me a better person”. We’ve all been there, I know I have.

So, the next time you want to spend hours in worthless and fruitless employment, look no further than the nearest piece of electrical wizardry. It’ll have you procrastinating for hours!