HERE appears to have been a recent growth in PageRank and SEO analysis tools. Such tools have an on-line front-end (interface) so they are easily and readily accessible. Here is a short survey of tools that not only have I used, but I can also confirm are valuable:

• Simple PageRank prediction tool (RustyBrick)
• Tippy PageRank comparisons (temporary location)
• Multi-URL PageRank prediction
• Search engines saturation check
• Google cache lookup
• Google datacentres and IBL‘s
• Netcraft uptime statistics – risk factor, server, and host lookup
• Page analysis and optimisation

ODAY marks a milestone as I submitted my 2^nd Year Progress Report (PDF, HTML). My 1^st year report was enormous in comparison, totalling at 202 pages which went under the heading Continuation Report (PDF, HTML). Last month I started to work on my thesis and distributed my L_yX (front-end to L^AT_EX) template among the L_yX users community. This template appears to have become quite popular, which entails a rewarding feeling.

I am expecting to complete my Ph.D. next year, at the age of 24. As for future paths: academia is appealing, industry is appalling and otherwise all is confusing. The next stage remains undecided. I will have to ponder and come up with a decision within the next couple of months. I would like to sincerely thank all my readers, who have unknowingly motivated me to carry on with some heavy burdens. I have recently come under great pressure due to involvement in many (technical) support-related groups, as well as my jobs and the degree program at the University. I am glad to say that I have regained full control and can now cope with all my commitments and obligations.

Photo taken in 1984 or thereabouts

Here is a little riddle. Can you spot the special meaning of the number below? (hint)

I think the above can be considered a case of lateral thinking, which is one way of educating CS students and sharpening up their programming/testing skills. As strange as it may seem, I spent hours with tutors solving problems like the classic below:

A hunter aimed his gun carefully, and pulled the trigger. Seconds later he realised his mistake. Minutes later he was dead. What happened?

Clues: No living creature killed him. It was a cold winter’s day. He had a VERY loud gun…

Solution: The hunter was near a snowy cliff. When he fired the gun, he “triggered” an avalanche which buried him…

Hint: Try to see which English word the numbers form.

Blackhat SEO’s: under the illusion that they are talented gunslingers, shooting from the hip

have recently become aware of highly dirty practices, which sometimes get used by malovalent SEO‘s. ‘Googleating’ is one of the most vile SEO methods, perhaps only second to spam. I have been told about someone who developed a habit of conquering deleted blogs immediately once they had been freed. Then, it was promptly possible to ‘fuel’ his own adverts-filled public content sites, making use of merit (mainly in the form of Google PageRank), which got transferred owing to links in these recently-acquired blogs.

Further on the issue of dodgy practices, in order to compensate for banishment from search engines, that same person bought multiple domains; thus, he avoided putting all eggs in one basket.

How did I come to find this out? There is an exceptional user in a benevolent SEO forum that I participate in. He uses blackhat techniques and gives the group a bad reputation that may sooner or later draw attention from search engines, which in turn can inflict collective punishments on group participants. If justice pervails, bad practices will be choked and genuine sites will receive more referral traffic from search engines. The Internet is no place for mirrored public content, neither it is for link spam.

Longhorn (Vista) alpha: looks promising, but how much computer power will it devour?

have just come across an interesting speculation according to which the release of Windows Vista might give a boost to Linux on the desktop. The oxymoron did not surprise me much as I tend to agree that it Vista will be indictor of staticity. As I have argued before, Vista (formerly knows as Longhorn) excludes many of the lucrative features it was set to implement. Once it hits the market, people may conclude that Vista is uninnovative when compared against Windows XP, which in itself is similar to Windows 2000 ‘under the hood’. Moreover, Vista has some high requirements from hardware — an issue that Linux distributions do not suffer from.

As the time gets closer and closer to the public debut of Vista the operating system seems to be constantly losing the luster which was associated with Longhorn.

…

If this was not enough to turn people off from Vista, there are the hardware requirements.

…

Noting the problems with the arrival of Vista, an effort should be made to get people on desktop Linux distributions.

Speaking of desktop Linux, I purchased a new computer this morning. It should arrive my home within a day or two. The machine will have Mandriva pre-installed, but I might wipe everything off to put Ubuntu or SuSE on it. It is yet undecided.

Related items:

• XP + New Colours = Longhorn (Vista)
• Longhorn: A Trainwreck?

RANT STARTS HERE

CSS-Discuss is probably the most prolific mailing list when it comes to Web design and cascading style sheets (CSS) in particular. It is a broad group with high traffic of messages circulation. I subscribed to it earlier this year due to admiration for Eric Meyer — possibly the man behind this mailing list and the man to provide us with a Web-based presentation tool better known as S5.

[CSSD] avoids off -topic discussions like general (X)HTML, accessibility and particular Web-related applications. However, I am put back by the dull, useless, non-reusable discussions in that group. Much of the conversation traffic gets ‘wasted’ on cross-platform site checks and dealing with known browser bugs (rather than CSS as a standard). Almost every single day one would see entire threads about rendering of pages in different browsers — something along the lines of this fictitious paragraph:

In IE, the border is drawn one pixel above that which I see in FF so if I look closely enough I can see some small speckles in my menu. Having said that, it only becomes visible if I use this particular arcane browser.

To sum up, my final advice is to avoid this mailing list unless it resides on a separate E-mail account. It might be relevant if you wish to discuss bugs attributed to browser developers or if you want to wind up opening various Web sites in different computers and occasionally giving a nod to the OP, which acknowledges acceptable page rendering.

RANT ENDS HERE

uto-responders, also referred to as “vacation messages”, are a valuable feature of E-mail accounts. These are not only helpful when an account gets checked irregularly, but also when it becomes deprecated.

Auto-responders can be invoked by the E-mail client (e.g. recent versions of Outlook), but they require the computer to remain switched on. This, in fact, is the big con: the method unnecessarily consumes electricity in cases of an actual vacation. The computer needs to stay on for days or weeks at a time. Messages can be checked upon return, assuming the computer has not crash beforehand.

Alternatively, autoresponders can be handled at server level. It is worth noting that this will not always be a supported feature, especially when you do not have ownership of your E-mail address’ domain. The exception are Web-based mailing systems that support the feature fully, e.g. Yahoo Mail and CommuniGate Pro.

There is an ad-hoc alternative to autoresponders, which I adopted since I was able to set up a mail forwarder, but not an autoresponder.

• Set up a forwarder to a meaningful but non-existent E-mail address, e.g. I_am_away_at_the_moment@no.domain or This_account_has_been_intentionally_terminated@no.domain.
• Since the account you forward mail to resides on an address that does not exist, the message will bounce, though often not immediately.
• Subsequently, a delivery error will reach the original sender. Budging by the odd E-mail address that triggered an error, the message sender will receive information regarding the situation rather than assume that the recipient stayed silent.

To sum things up, forwarders to made-up addresses can guarantee that in the absence of auto-responders, all correspondents will receive meaningful feedback.