Category: Best Practices

  • Sample code for focused custom Google search

    The site search feature of Google’s free custom search offering works by default only for sites whose addresses are root-level URLs (so, for example, you can use it out-of-the-box to search jrobb.userland.com or blogs.salon.com but not blogs.salon.com/0001111/). With the help of Ian Landsman and a few other readers over the weekend, I’ve come up with…

  • One solution to Google site search

    Have I mentioned lately that I love the Internet? Cast a question on the waters and the answer (or an answer) generally comes back within 24 hours. Ian Landsman sent me a solution in the comments to my previous post. I’d paste the code in here but even when escaped out it will cause problems…

  • XHTML 2.0 to drop backward compatability

    Catching up with Zeldman sent me off in six different directions, of course, but I especially enjoyed reading Web architecture | XML zone : The Web’s future: XHTML 2.0 at IBM’s developerWorks site. The proposed changes to HTML (I mean XHTML) sounds like steps in the right direction (ditching presentational tags, rationalizing noncontaining tags, dropping…

  • Make your URLs human-guessable

    Web addresses were never supposed to be human-readable. The fundamental hyperlinking concept of the Web is intended to mask the underlying Internet protocols and commands required to retrieve data. But the reality is that we see, store, type, copy, and paste URLs all the time (or else the “dotcom” meme would never have taken off),…

  • The dirty little secret of content management

    Dylan Tweney’s latest Business 2.0 column advises businesses to steer carefully between the six-figure CMS overkill solutions that thrived during the dotcom boom and the other end of the spectrum, reinventing the CMS wheel yourself in-house. I’ve been doing content management-related consulting for the last five years and there’s a big hole in the middle…

  • Blogs a half-baked KM solution?

    In Network Computing’s BuzzCut column, Mike DeMaria talks about blogs as an improvement over e-mail for project updating but as an imperfect solution, at best, for archiving and retrieving links: Until blog developers address the issues of archive classification and sorting, blogs can’t possibly live up to their potential.