That Other Guys’ Blog

16. 11.

My day isn’t exactly over, but I thought it would be a good time to share my initial results with my Bing Experiment - switching to Bing as my primary search engine for a week.

First impressions: I have to say I really like the home page photographs and teasers. That’s a pretty cool little feature and I bet it gets a lot of people thinking about things they might not otherwise. It puts a nice face on the utility of search and so I give kudos to Microsoft for this little bit of fun. I suspect this is something that goes over well with the consumer computer crowd - the “buy a PC from Best Buy and surf with Internet Explorer” type. Although this in no way impacts search results, I expect it might keep some folks coming back for more. As for me? Not a deal clincher - it’s all about the search results.

Some while ago I ran into the need to style form buttons with CSS and had run a Google query for “CSS Submit Button”. Today I ran into the need again and realized this was a good time to check out what Bing offered side by side with Google. The results?

Interestingly both search engines gave the same result for #1 (which by the way was a fine choice - the page answers my question) and they agree on three out of the top ten, although they place them in different spots. What I noticed by going through the process of checking the top ten on each engine was that both Bing and Google seemed to give a mix of pages that were directly related to my search terms and pages that are of a slightly broader nature. Both engines delivered one page which had no answers or example code, but were heavy in the use of the keywords “css button”. Overall, neither engine outperformed the other. Given my initial skepticism about another Microsoft search engine, I have to call this a win for Bing.

Tomorrow I will be sure to test the engines against each other for something a bit more fun: video. If you have suggestions for how to kick the tires on video search please comment either on the blog or on Facebook if that’s where you read my blog from.

14. 11.

I’m a pretty big fan of Google and have been for some while. I was never one to search with MSN or Live and Yahoo was something I may have tried ages ago, but recently I’ve been giving some thought to letting the folks in Redmond have a chance with my searches by conducting them on Bing.

It’s not that I am unhappy with Google, but rather I want to know that I have a full understanding of what the “other side” has to offer. I’ve used it a handful of times just to kick the tires, but I don’t feel as though a handful of searches will really provide me with a deeper sense of knowing the Bing engine.

I’m not sure what it will feel like to use Bing instead of Google, but I am prepared to give it a shot for a week and see how it works out. As I Bing my way through my week I will come back here to share my findings.

Anyone else spending time with Bing? What are your impressions?

13. 11.

A few years ago groups of people set forth to let the then-president of the United States know exactly what they thought of him by using a technique that came to be known as “Google Bombing”. By using the text “miserable failure” in links leading to the White House biography for George W. Bush, it was possible to make that page rank #1 in search results for the term “miserable failure”.

Google set about to alter their algorithms to anticipate and dampen the effect of Google Bombing, supposedly removing the ability for this to happen again.

Well folks… I’m here to tell you that our new president isn’t fairing much better - this time with the phrase “who is failure”.

Try and see for yourself: http://www.google.com/search?q=who+is+failure

6. 11.

If you meet the following conditions:

1) You are a bit of a web geek
2) You understand CSS
and
3) You’re on Twitter

then check out the Twitter search for #csspickuplines - pretty funny!

3. 11.

I have been working for the past six months or so on a PHP site templating engine. For lack of a better name I have simply been referring to it as “Site Builder” although I think I will use a much more brandable name should I ever license the underlying code. For now I am using it as a rapid prototyping tool for my website clients and so far it is working out really well.

I am curious if others have rolled their own template engine and if so what was your experience like? Do you have recommendations for frameworks to check out?

24. 07.

Just a quick little funny - google “recursion” without the quotes and see if you can find the Easter Egg. =)

21. 06.

Social media sites and tools - most especially Twitter and YouTube have brought to the world and to the Iranian people the ability to share directly what the ruling powers of the nation most fear: the truth of the brutality of the regime and the illegitimate election results.

I’m no expert on Iranian or Middle Eastern affairs. I have no claim to expertise on the history of Iran or of the Iranian Revolution of 30 years ago. What I do have, however, is Twitter and YouTube and thankfully so do many of those risking their lives on the streets of Tehran in support of an end to the current regime.

The Iranian regime can cut television, own the radio waves and run the printing presses. This revolution - and others like it (Moldova just two months ago) - will be tweeted. I find this deeply hopeful.

I read a very interesting editorial by Thomas Friedman at the NY Times wherein he describes how Mr. Moussavi, a candidate approved to run by the regime, became the symbol for change in Iran even though he likely would espouse (as correctly pointed out by the White House) policies that are not much different from those of Ahmadineja.  I highly recommend it.

There are an increasing number of videos being made available on YouTube and elsewhere that show the chaos, bravery and tragedy in the streets of Iran. Mashable has a worthwhile collection. The video of the young woman shot  is deeply frightening and disturbing. It is the image of her last moments of life that is likely to fuel a continuation of the outrage on the streets.

I expect the right wing would have a talk-radio field day if Obama said it (and he didn’t) so I will instead: “Today we are all Iranians”.

Rest her soul.

12. 06.

I just today ran across this post on the Yahoo Developer Network and wanted to give this high marks. Combined with the YSlow Firebug extension for Firefox there is enormous opportunity to enhance the speed or perceived speed of wesbites. I ran tests on the Lebanon Opera House using a modified subselection of test criteria (skipping Content Delivery Network) and was pleased to discover that for the most part I was already ahead of the curve.

By doing a bit of image optimization and adding expires headers to non-image content (external javascript and css files) I expect to score an A.

What best practices do you use? What methodologies do you employ to ensure these practices make it through as part of your development cycle? What other tools do you use?

8. 04.

This is (so far) one of my favorite Daily Show clips. Enjoy!