If..Else Log

Wiki reference of the day: Uncanny Valley

Think back to when you were a kid - remember he-man figures? Each one essentially the same piece of plastic with a different paint job? bran is a bit like that.

The history of Konfabulator in the Form of a Comic. I'm sure that there's no need for me to mention that Konfabulator, having been taken over by Yahoo, is now free.

A speculative list of Google ranking factors. Here's a quick summary for busy readers:

Good

• Keyword in URL, domain name and Title
• Keyword in H1, H2 and H3
• Quality (High PR) and quantity of inbound links
• Anchor text of inbound links
• Links from expert sites
• Site Age (i.e. older = stability = good)
• Listing in DMOZ (increasingly harder to achieve)
• Thematic similarity of sites producing incoming links
• Fresh pages (good for blogs)
• Efficiently structured navigation (i.e. number of clicks required to get to a given page)
• Keyword proximity (adjacent keywords are rewarded)

Bad

• Excessive cross-linking
• Keyword stuffing
• Links to bad neighborhoods (i.e. linkfarms etc)
• Site Age (new sites are sandboxed)
• Cloaking (If detected, then wave goodbye to SE references)
• Keyword dilution
• Short domain expiration durations (possible indicator to a throw-away domain)

Robin Joseph's blog showcases some wonderful illustrations.

Stu Nicholls has an experiment up which shows how to produce a standards compliant min-width. Great work as always.

BD4D have a couple of articles on building a successful Web Startup in the UK. [1] [2]

Dave Shea gives his writeup on the current CSS handling in the IE7 beta.

Zoe Gillenwater expands on Dan Cederholm's Faux Column article to show how to create liquid equal height columns that can grow and shrink as you resize your window. There's also Chris McLeod's article on Elastic Faux Columns.

An old interview with Jonathan Ive back when he won the Design Museum's inaugural Designer of the Year award.

As well as being the designer behind the iPod, iMac and perhaps the revival of Apple, he's british as well:-)