Mark's World » Web 2.0

SEO eBook

Mark Lise — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:35:01 +0000

SEO eBook

I’ve wanted to learn more about SEO and how it can help drive traffic. I’ve managed to get my hands on the following SEO eBook. I was expecting a lot of complicated details which were difficult to figure out, hard to implement, or otherwise take me more time than actually worth it. I was pleasantly surprised!

The book clearly defines the area to target, why you want to do it, and how. If you’ve made a website before, you’re certainly capable of understanding this and making a big difference to your page rank. Reccomending this to anyone who wants to enhance their SEO without investing a ton of time.

Don’t Click on Twitter Explained (sorta)

Mark Lise — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:46:37 +0000

So if you are on twitter and you’ve seen the “Don’t Click: http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6″ status message, seriously. Just don’t click it. @apeatling was first on my list to state that it was a bad thing to do and it got me into investigative mode. Besides viewing the source, I found a site explainin how all the so-called “magic” happens, and if you can read French check it out: http://www.korben.info/petit-cours-de-twitt-jacking.html

It’s quite simple actually, it relies on an embedded iframe that visits the url: http://twitter.com/home?status=”http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6″. Now everone that’s following you will see the same message you on on that friend and who konws who’ll click on it and propogate the badness.

Twitter needs to (and I’m sure by the time most people read this it should be fixed) check the referral on any API call, of course this is just *one* way to help fix the problem.

I then looked into the rest of the site and see how I could exploit DM messages and anything else (on the advice of @quaelin). I theorize that you can use XHR to grep the twitter ID of any user you’re following and then DM them message. The same idea applies, use “http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/xxxxx” (where xxxx is the twitterID of a particular twitter account) construct an http POST, pushing in the authentication_token value, and wham you got your script sending DM’s to everyone.

I’m deliberately leaving out a lot of details, but in short this sucks. The same methods could be applied to many other sites, it’s not just Twitter that has to worry about this.

Follow me on twitter here: http://twitter.com/marklise

Google Chrome

Mark Lise — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:00:02 +0000

So I tried out Google Chrome yesterday along with the rest of the 2-3% internet traffic of the day. My initial impressions were clean, snappy, and very beta as far as features go, but a solid experience regardless.

They basically re-architected the browser to provide what they claim is more modern way of how the web should be viewed. This includes better security, memory management, javascript performance (V8), and overall stability. They achieve this through numerous means so instead of re-writing all of that here, just check out their comic – and interesting and “fun” way to learn about technology.

Just like Google app engine, I’m interested in where this goes – along with the TOS and all the other standard privacy talk surrounding Google applications.

Whuffie Social Capital

Mark Lise — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:14:47 +0000

A local techie blogged about The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities. Whuffie is a term that attempts to describe one’s social capital with respect to the web as we see it today. For those wanting to build a community, make it better, or just pick up a few tips – check out the book by Tara Hunt.

After Jeff’s post, I Immediately thought “What about the flipside”. The anti-Whuffie! Yes, we all want to know who’s popular, but I wonder how much value there would be around the bottom of this index? Who’s in the dark, who just said the most ridiculous thing, who’s jumping the bandwagon the most, what 10 things NOT to do in the social space? Maybe it would provide some value to those wanting to get into the social networking space, to teach them not to repeat the mistakes of those that came before them.

Google App Engine Invite

Mark Lise — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:29:05 +0000

I was a little bummed when I was madly hitting refresh on the Google App Engine and couldn’t get through. Once I did get through the 10K limit was already hit, all within about 15 minutes of release. I was trying to be one of the 10,000 developers allowed access after I saw their announcement about it a couple hours ago. So here I am surfing around.. commenting on blogs.. and my inbox lights up. It’s an email from Google saying, “Invitation to try Google App Engine”. Woo! I get to play with this thing. Funny thing is that some of the most obvious names I would pick were already taken! Oh well, happy with what I got. We’ll see what I can make of this thing.

Google App Engine

Mark Lise — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:12:17 +0000

Update: The 10k limit has already been hit. Wow. < 15 mins.

I saw the live Scoble feed on the Google App Engine announcement, so here are the details:

500MB storage
Available to the first 10,000 developers as of 9PM PST
10GB Bandwidth/day
200 Million megacycle CPU/day
Python code only

For a well-written app, Google says this should equate to something around 5 million page views/month. As for the Python code restriction, Google says it’s only temporary. To focus on just this issue is to not capture the bigger picture of what Google’s broader intentions are.

The whole point of Google App Engine is to take on the web platform space, and the first company that comes to mind when you think competition is Amazon. Now, I’m not sure that it’ll “take off” immediately given that it’ll be in essentially private beta, but I think Google going into this space has the potential to disrupt or otherwise take a bite out of Amazon.

Some services shown were Jaiku (ported to App Engine), Vorby(blank page as of writing), and Barbound(sorry no linky). Some reported that one of the reasons Google bought Jaiku was to demo it. It’s left to be seen whether Jaiku becomes more stable as a result – it might just turn out to be a good example of what can be done by hosting with Google. That is left to be seen however.

One of the things I noticed in the announcement was the repeated calls for “help us improve App Engine”. I think that’s a wise move and it looks to me that they’re attempting to reach out to the developer community to help shape the service. Maybe they think by allowing 10k developers to hack at and feel like they can contribute to the development that they’ll strike a Twitter or Jaiku on the platform.

This is a wait-and-see for me, the announcement wasn’t as big as I thought it’d be – but it’s got me interested.

OpenWeb Vancouver

Mark Lise — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:24:38 +0000

Geeks Unite! As the title says on their page… I will be attending OpenWebVancouver this year. This event I’m especially looking forward to as it brings together web technology, culture, design, and the open source discussion all in one neat little place. If you want to learn about where the web is going today from some of the top leaders in the space, come to Openweb Vancouver! Talks include those from the Mozilla foundation, Google, Sun Microsystems, and Facebook.

The event is put on by the Vancouver PHP user’s association, a non-profit organization that advances php development and other open source initiatives. Sign up and register today to learn about or simply promote the use of open source technology! Hope to see you all there!

Featured Projects

Mark Lise — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:00:30 +0000

Featured Projects on Mozilla’s site now shows Flock under Featured Mozilla-Based Applications. Thank you Mozilla! If you’re a developer you’ll want to check out Open Komodo – the IDE is really good and has support for many different languages (using plugins). There was a recent extension added that allows you to interact with a Komodo application on the fly, using either Javascript or Python!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Mozilla, Development, Flock, Web 2.0, Firefox, Browser

Your MySpace Web Browser Is Coming

Mark Lise — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 23:50:44 +0000

Flock, the Mozilla-based social web browser has made the announcement that everyone has been waiting for: they will now integrate with MySpace. Building on the MySpace Developer Platform, Flock will allow users to surf the web with their MySpace friends in their sidebar. This integration will expose all of the . . .

OpenID

Mark Lise — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 07:27:45 +0000

For those of you who don’t know what openID is all about, check out Chris Messina’s post on the subject. The ultra short-form of it is openID is a way of creating a global identity online. No more 10 million different username/passwords (we all know how annoying that is). I ended up installing a Wordpress plugin to make my site openID enabled. Another good blog to check out is Sam Ruby’s page where he shows you how to claim your blog.

Update: Chris’s suggestion to use Will Norris’ wordpress openID plugin can be found here. I’ll have to check this one out as well