It was interesting to see some action on the Google Toolbar taking over the standard 404 error page on a website. I guess some web developers out there are a little up in arms, but hasn’t Internet Explorer been doing this for years? Any 404 page under 512 bytes is taken over by the browser, and now the Google Toolbar will have a thing to say about it too.
For me as a webmaster this is a major intrusion into my own intellectual property.
When a visitor tries to reach your content with an invalid URL and your server returns a short, default error message (less than 512 bytes), the Toolbar will suggest an alternate URL to the visitor.
This isn’t worth sweating over. If you use custom error pages then you already know (or should) to combat IE hijacking you need to make them larger than 512 bytes. If you’ve already done this, then the Google Toolbar will respect that too.
This is purely a self-congratulatory post that signifies my very first ever database now has a single table surpassing the 10,000 record mark.
It’s a sales tracking table that has only increased at a rate of about 10 records per day, but after a few years that really adds up! Thanks to a nifty caching system that I wrote it’s also extremely fast even when pulling up records from several years ago. 20,000 page views per month doesn’t slow it down one bit.
I’ve seen many discussions about whether abiding by W3C standards or not shows a better return on search engine placement and targeted keywords. There’s obviously going to be varied responses across the Internet on this, but my short answer is: Yes.
While search engines will pick you up regardless of content, by following standards and semantic HTML styles, your pages are going to be regarded as they are intended, not by a search engines best guess. Many websites don’t take full advantage of the power of the <title> and <h1> tags to explicitly tell engines what to expect within the page. The layout can certainly be pretty, but it should also follow a clean logic under the hood. A great way to test your site is to view it in a text only browser such as Lynx. See how well it degrades and you can quickly determine if a search engine will be able to make sense of your code.
There’s no silver bullet. No right answer. But, you’ll certainly set yourself up for success if you can at least validate on some level of HTML or XHTML (not to mention make changing styles a heck of a lot easier!).
As I gear up for new feature requests at work and begin digging into more obscure code on my screen, I often get asked by co-workers if what I’m doing is any different than when a software company writes applications for Windows. My short answer is typically: No, it’s not.
An even better answer can be found by reading A Great Web Developer is a Great Application Developer. Both styles of development have their benefits and drawbacks, but having a well-rounded background is what’s best when designing new projects. I’d highly recommend reading through that entire post if you’re interested in development of any kind. In the least, it will move you to asking the right questions.