Google Changes HTML Output for Results Pages…
In a minor but still ever annoying change, Google decided to switch the “p class=g” tag with a “div class=g”. Apparently someone at google decided that yesterday would be a good day to break everyone’s scraper tools. No tags for this post.
Alternatives to Regular Expressions
As a php programmer who has to deal daily with regular expressions, sometimes they are just overkill for a simple job. Other times, I just don’t feel like trying to figure out the regex when I am trying to extract content just once (and code optimization is just not important). Below,I have thrown together a handful of PHP functions that I regularly use to help accomplish these tasks. GetSingleMatch This code allows you to easily grab a single bit of text out of a document by describing what text or code occurs right before and right after the text you are targetting. This calls for the $start, $end, and $content. If I were trying to target the word “fox” in “the quick brown fox jumps”, i would use, getSingleMatch(“brown...
My Costume is a Real Digg Story
DIGG COSTUME WEB CAM So, for Halloween, I decided to be a Digg Story. Literally. My costume syncs up with my Digg Story at http://www.digg.com/mods/My_Costume_Is_This_Digg_Story and displays the correct number of diggs. It refreshes every 15 seconds! You can see by the picture below and instructions on how I did it as well… Note: Because I had to take the picture of the costume before I ran it on digg, this one was actually hooked up to yesterday’s story on Al Gore: http://www.digg.com/politics/UK_signs_Al_Gore_to_sell_climate_case_in_US Supplies: 1. Poster board 2. Duct Tape (of course) 3. Magic Markers (no substitutions) 4. Laptop which bends flat (Acer 4010) & WIFI 5. XAMPP 6. Basic PHP Skills 7. More Duct Tape After creating the digg button...
Building Your Site for Users is Not Enough.
I am not going to make many friends with this post, but I think it is about time someone said it. If your SEO firm (search engine optimization firm) is telling you to build websites “for the user” and not “for the bots”, fire them. Yes, that’s right. Politely tell them to stuff it, and move along to better things. There is nothing wrong with building websites for the user, but there is something wrong with doing it in lew of building websites for the bots – especially when the two are in no way mutually exclusive. Let’s take a look at a real world example of how a website “built for the user” fails because it wasn’t also “built for the bots”. We will look at OpenOffice.org, the popular...
EBay Keyword Stuffing
What would you do with a PR9? Keyword stuffing of course! The venerable auction super-power EBay has put it’s massive product data to great use, by throwing it all together into the worlds longest sentence.ÂÂ OfÂÂ course,ÂÂ withÂÂ aÂÂ simpleÂÂ mod-rewrite,ÂÂ feedÂÂ pulling,ÂÂ andÂÂ maybeÂÂ someÂÂ additionalÂÂ hand-editedÂÂ content,ÂÂ theyÂÂ couldÂÂ reallyÂÂ rankÂÂ forÂÂ allÂÂ theÂÂ keywordsÂÂ theyÂÂ stuffÂÂ atÂÂ theÂÂ bottomÂÂ ofÂÂ theÂÂ page. Reads: “Looking for the all time top selling albums? eBay has them new and used at the great prices: The Eagles Greatest Hits 1971-1975 (The Eagles), Thriller...
Pretend You’re From Canada
The good people from Holland.com have a tid-bit of advice for wouldbe American travelers abroad: “pretend you’re from canada”. Amazing. No tags for this post.
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