A while back I wrote an explanation of Dijkstra's algorithm, this year I have noticed something rather amusing: an increase in people visiting that page and also asking for code and/or more detailed explanations on it - I am making the assumption this is college students who want me to write their assignments for them. The answer is no! I'm sure there is code out there for it, and I'm confident that if you follow my explanation step-by-step you will be able to put together some pseudo-code that you can then convert into the language of your choice.
We had our June Dublin GTUG on Tuesday last (28th June) and by all accounts it was a fantastic success.
We had Ilmari Heikkenen over from Google's London offices to talk about HTML5 and specifically the visual elements that are new to HTML5 and how you can use them to do some cool in-browser modifications to images.
We also had Neil Turner, a freelance web dev, talk about some of the tools he uses when developing for HTML5, I have a list of what I saw:
Some of these frameworks have built in tools to help mitigate cross-browser issues, particularly with regard to Internet Explorer, which was mentioned several times, not every time was in a bad way.
Groupon, love it or hate it, it's massive and you've heard of it. That's the first sign of their success, you know what they do and who they are. Much has been written about Groupon in the last few weeks, most of it bad, yes they don't get a lot of repeat business from either businesses or customers, yes they are spending huge amounts of money acquiring new customers, and yes they are spending huge sums of money on a giant staff acquiring new businesses for deals. All of this points to disaster for Groupon, but I can't help but wonder... something that I heard from Google a while back when talking about YouTube: "Google bets on the future".
Those who recall, when YouTube was purchased by Google there was a consensus it would never make money, it would only cost more as the business grew and it was going to end in disaster. Google made the purchase betting that technology would make the business costs decrease, that economies of scale would kick in also decreasing the costs, and they were right. By all accounts YouTube is profitable these days.
This leads me to wonder if Groupon isn't making a similar bet on the future. If they can become the main player in the daily deal space, and by 'main player' I mean practically the only player, they stand a chance. Instead of saying "I'm going to buy a daily deal" you say "I'm going to Groupon it", there is the possibility they will succeed. In that case the costs of acquiring new businesses goes down and the cost of acquiring new subscribers goes down, and suddenly they become profitable.
Personally I would rather they perish, in my experience they seem to suffer memory lapses about me unsubscribing which immediately makes them spam in my book.
I use Google Apps on a number of my sites, it is a very handy tool, for one thing it makes it ten times easier to move a domain between registrars and hosts since all email is stored somewhere else. Anyway, I have a new use for it - to identify what companies sell my email address on (or lose it). I used to add a + to my email, like this:
One of the most visited pages on my site is a very short post on hiding a node title in Drupal 6. With the release of Drupal 7, let me update this post.
My website is not a heavy traffic site, but I do have a few pages that attract a few hundred organic search engine hits a month, mostly simple tech solutions I have written up. These pages get between a few comments a month to a few comments a week added to them by 'SEO Professionals'. I find it pretty funny.
All the comments on this site are fully moderated, I have a spam filter that removes pretty much all the automatic spam for me (up to a few hundred comments a day) and the remainder I moderate by hand. These comments generally have links to sites with domains along the lines of seoprofessionalsonline dot com and nine times out of ten the comment that is posted is some cut and paste job that is entirely devoid of content but clearly meant to prey on my ego, often saying something about how amazing the content on my site is, with half a dozen links to different sites thrown in.
The day a search engine figures out how to rank content that is well written and generally content heavy not SEO-link-heavy is the day the internet becomes great! Google should really have an option to search based on the Flesch–Kincaid score of text, that would be a start.
