One of the problems with SPAM is that you have to spend so much time downloading and deleting it. Another problem is that people you send email to do too. Your legitimate message may get lost in the deluge. How do you avoid the problem? One way is to offer people to whom you send...
[read more]

The SOS Band may not have been thinking about web design when they recorded "Take Your Time (Do It Right)", but that doesn't mean we can't apply their words to our craft. "Baby we can do it, take the time, do it right." If you build your website right the first time, you'll reap the...
[read more]

Sometimes participating in the AtomPub Working Group feels like being in an atom smasher. The latest topic to be rehashed, thrashed to bits, and perhaps soon to be slashed is the mighty link. We're not quite so dumb that we don't know what a link is, but we seem to be having an extraordinarily difficult...
[read more]

I've just posted an article titled SEO: Using RSS to increase relevance and maximize freshness, outlining how to display newsfeeds on a webpage, and optimize their display for SEO purposes. Details include: using free software to display newsfeeds, using semantic markup to emphasize keywords, and a technique for avoiding giving away PageRank.

When a search engine spider reads the text of your webpage, it sees a lot of words. How does it figure out whether the topic of your page is the word "the", the most common word on the page, or "Thneeds", the product you're selling? It's partly a matter of the search engine ignoring common...
[read more]

This morning at breakfast, I had a mental arc related to multitasking. I was shoveling food into my son's mouth with his little baby spoon and into mine with my man-sized tablespoon. Here's how I related it to multitasking:

Using a different spoon (pipeline) for each application (mouth) requires a context switch (putting one spoon...
[read more]

Support for the Atom format is growing, but it's certainly not as extensive as support for RSS. Because of this, it is sometimes useful to be able to convert Atom feeds to RSS. If, for example, you are using CaRP to display RSS feeds on your website, and you find an Atom feed you'd like...
[read more]

"Five Nines" of up-time for a system isn't so hard to achieve as long as you don't define it as 99.999% availability. Here's a little comic to illustrate:

While working on the predecessor site to The Professional Network, my brother with whom I was collaborating quoted some wise person saying that "perfect is the worst enemy of good enough." In other words, once something is good enough to do the job it's designed for, the worst thing you can do is to keep...
[read more]

The main purpose of SPF records is to determine whether an email was really sent by who it claims to come from in order to block or tag suspect emails. This can assist mail servers in handling both spam and worms. Another problem that can be reduced using SPF is the number of messages sent...
[read more]