Sunday, July 27, 2008

Dashes or Underscores in URL - Google no longer care

After months of re-optimising URLs on various blogs and websites, I discovered today via this announcement that is was all for nothing ...

Once upon a time people thought that search engines like Google recognised underscores. Apparently Google at least now recognises both dashes or hyphens (-) as keywword separators ...

I guess you can't win them all.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Personal Start Pages - iGoogle vs Netvibes vs Protopage

Those who know me well would know that I've always been a big fan of Web 2.0, RSS, the mash-up and its potential and I've been getting into personal start pages recently which are starting to see that potential realised. I've tried iGoogle, Netvibes and Protopage. Some of these things have been around since about 2005, but they were very clunky in the early days. With the widespread adoption of AJAX, they are becoming much faster, more usable and practical. As for my personal preferences, well While Protopage is probably easiest in terms of user interface and adding RSS feeds, I find that Netvibes to be a lot faster and more fully featured. Forgive me, but I just haven't managed to persevere with Google's offering. I think it is still in beta and it looks it. So full of bugs, I couldn't even get the basic weather widget to work. Plainly put, at least at the moment, iGoogle sucks ...

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Royalty Free Stock Images - iStockPhoto vs stock.xchng vs Dreamstime

For royalty free stock images, I personally prefer Dreamstime. The prices are great (although not as low as they might appear). I used to use iStockPhoto exclusively, and even contribute photos, until their payments and criteria got too ridiculous and their prices for photos went through the roof after beinb bought out by Getty.

While stock.xchng is also good, it still doesn't offer the range or quality of Dreamstime.