Webmaster News

Rails Deployment

Digital Media Minute (Free subscription) | yesterday

Vinsol has a nice eleven-item checklist of rails deployment best practices to follow when you are deploying your rails app to a production server.

Javascript Scroll Clock

Digital Media Minute (Free subscription) | yesterday

Interesting scroll clock created Toki Woki, with Javascript /Mootools. Hey it’s Friday geeks, have some fun. Via DaringFireball.

Google Patent - Artificial Anchor for a Document in the SERPs

Webmaster World (Free subscription) | yesterday

"How would you feel about Google adding an artificial page fragment anchor, so that they could send users to the specific part of a page that was chosen in the snippet, for instance?"

Bing SERPs Update

Webmaster World (Free subscription) | yesterday

"WebmasterWorld Members are noticing updates to Bing SERPs."

eBay Completes Skype Sale

WebPro News (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009

It looks like the eBay-Skype spectacle has finally come to a close. Despite all of the arguments (legal and otherwise) that cropped up at one point or another, representatives of both companies announced last night that the sale of Skype to an investor group is complete. Josh Silverman, the president of Skype, adopted a rather enthusiastic approach when breaking the news. He wrote on the Share Skype...

Twitter Makes Geotagging Tweets Possible

WebPro News (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009

Back in the summer, Twitter announced that it was working on an API to give developers the ability to geotag tweets. The company has now made that available. There is no geotagging on Twitter.com yet, but Twitter apps will now be able to support it. So potentially, you will be able to geotag tweets and show the location from where you tweeted. "The added information provides valuable context...

Twitter Adds Geotagging API

Webmaster World (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009

"Today, the Geotagging API is officially available."

• Twitter Turns On Geolocation API. Not For Twitter.com Just Yet. - TechCrunch
• Think Globally, Tweet Locally - Twitter Blog
• See the 5 articles on the same subject

Did Microsoft Bing Just Learn How to Handle 301s Correctly?

Webmaster World (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009

Featured Home Page Discussion Did Bing just learn how to handle 301s'Major, and very positive improvements if so#:4016152 7:23 am on Oct. 30, 2009 (utc 0)MSN/Bing appears to have finally figured out how to follow 301 redirects, discarding the old URL and indexing/not-penalizing the destination URLs. This has lead to a lot more URLs from older authority domains coming into the index, and a pretty huge...

Google Disabling Accounts Due to FF Tamper Data Plug-In?

Webmaster World (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009

I am guessing that Google (somewhere) fill in your current country using IP geolocation or previous indication and then stupidly place it in a hidden field or cookie, trusting that it remains unchanged later. Men, women and fellow developers: anything stored client side is changeable... don't do it! As for your account being disabled, it sounds like there was a mixup. I suggest you contact Google about...

Report Details Ongoing Twitter Downtime Problems

WebPro News (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009

Most companies try to improve themselves over time. Twitter, unfortunately, hasn't managed to do so. A downtime report from CheckMySite indicates that Twitter's still suffering problems on a regular basis, and that it hasn't done well at all in comparison to Facebook and MySpace. Here's the golden standard (or the norm, depending on how you look at it): Facebook and MySpace both achieved an uptime...

The FDA Targets Websites Over Drug Sales

WebPro News (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009

The Food and Drug Administration is cracking down on 136 websites it says were selling illegal or misbranded drugs to U.S. consumers. The FDA says none of the websites are for pharmacies in the United States or Canada. The agency has sent 22 warning letters to the operators of these websites and notified Internet service providers and domain name registrars that the websites were selling products...

Google Improves Google News on More Mobile Devices

WebPro News (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009

Google has announced a new Google News for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users. The company already offers one for other devices like Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and S60, although they say more improvements to those versions will be coming soon, as well. Today's new version includes a new Google News homepage, which shows more stories, sources, and images, but keeps the same basic look and feel. "Also,...

(Private) Facebook Shares Up 42% In Four Months

WebPro News (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009

Some time ago, Mark Zuckerberg began allowing Facebook employees to make a quick buck by selling their shares through private channels (as opposed to waiting for Facebook to hit the Nasdaq or Dow). Since then, many have done exactly that. The interesting thing is that the price of Facebook's stock has risen a whole lot in recent months. Brian Womack talked to Adam Oliveri, a managing director at SecondMarket,...

Google Testing a Revamp of the Search Results Page

WebPro News (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009

Google is testing a new user interface for its search options feature. If you are unfamiliar with the search options feature, it is the link on your search results page that says "show options" and brings up a menu on the left-hand side of the screen providing a number of ways to filter your results. According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, a "small number" of Google...

"What's Happening" with Twitter?

WebPro News (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009

There's a lot of change going on with Twitter these days. Recently we got the highly-anticipated Lists feature , which helped us to organize our streams and discover new, interesting people to follow. Then Twitter began rolling out its retweet button feature , which seemed like something that had been strangely missing from the service for a long time, but has ultimately caused something of an uproar...