you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

If you’re a webdeveloper, you’re no stranger to browser incompatibilities and CSS hackery. In an ideal world, standards really are standard, and your pages look the same on Firefox as they do on IE. Fortunately, IE7 is more standards-compliant than the horrendous IE6. The bad news? Updating to IE7 means you lose IE6.

Luckily, you can get IE6 as a standalone application. Just download it from here, unzip to a directory and run.

I got some junkmail today, from a scheister company called Domain Listing Service Corp. For $69, you can have your site submitted to 25 popular search engines w/ 8 keywords phrases. 25 search engines?! I use one.. Google. It’s the only one that matters to me.

In web prehistory (circa 1995-1996), you might’ve had to use a search engine submission service or go to the search company’s website directly and fill out a form to tell their spiders to crawl your site. That’s what I had to do with Altavista or one of these other sites. But not anymore.

here’s their letter
for some laughs

Today, all that is gone. Spiders crawl the web autonomously and don’t require human intervention. In fact, they are designed to circumvent ranking boosts. SEO (search engine optimization) companies will tell you they have a secret to raising your ranking through keywords, metatags and other pseudo-jargon, but that’s all hocus-pocus. Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google pin their fortunes on the efficiency of their indexing algorithms and on providing people with results that are relevant to them, not artificially boosted results.

Googling “Domain Listing Service Corp” turns up nothing from the actual company. What did turn up is someone’s blog entry: “Domain Listing Service Corp. Scam!” And the first result too! How ironic.

DLS, go sell your snake oil elsewhere, you crooks.

Here I am, sitting outside on a warm May evening, tapping away on my MacBook Pro. Today was very warm and a little humid — portending a hot and nasty New York City summer.

The Mac wireless antennae is much stronger than the 2 Windows laptops I own (one is dead). I can practically go anywhere around the house and the Mac will still pick up a signal. The PCs are more finicky and don’t have a very good antennae, almost requiring line of sight.

I really enjoy the greater mobility offered by my Mac. It is just a much better thought-out machine, but at $2000, it ought to be.