I was asked to talk about search engine optimisation at this month’s SYWP. It went down fairly well, so I’ve included the talk below:

The following brief post is about web browsers. If that’s not your thing, maybe go look at this beautiful photograph instead of reading on.

Just geeks left? Cool. I reluctantly jumped the Firefox train a year or so back, because Google Chrome has a faster javascript engine. That’s all really, but it is a lot faster at almost everything, and that makes a difference if you use the internet for stuff other than waiting for pages to load.

Time moves on, and Mozilla react to this by getting “super-duper fast” (their words not mine). So I decided to give it another go and get downloading. I installed beta 6, quite excited about getting back to grips with my previous favourite browser. And then I stopped. Didn’t even get as far as whipping out some JS heavy sites or anything. I had to stop, because the text anti-aliasing in the address bar is just… bad. 1999 bad. So bad that it hurts to look at tab titles. Or website addresses. #Fail bad.

Is anyone else getting this? Because I’m not even going to try the browser until they sort this out: Google 2, Mozilla 0 – sorry guys!

Note: A helpful commentor has pointed out that this aliasing bug is actually down to a glitch in the 2D hardware acceleration built into DirectX 10. So that means we need to revise the score. It’s now at Google 1, Mozilla 0, Microsoft -1. Much better!

If, like me, you have Windows 7 (or Vista) 64 bit installed, you may have noticed an annoying glitch – whilst the file previews are much better than they ever were in XP, they can’t quite manage PDFs. You get a funky message in fact:

This file cannot be previewed because of an error with the following previewer:
PDF Preview Handler for Vista
To open this file in its own program, double-click it.

For the last 6 months, I’ve just kind of ignored this. But I finally got annoyed enough with it to try and find a solution. As with most of these things, 3 seconds on google found me the answer.

1. Go to this website.
2. Download the patch.
3. Run it.

Sorted. It will update your registry to make thumbnails and previews work, making your life at least 3% better.

Just a short one today, pointing out the beauty of humour from one of the world’s largest technology companies.

Google give you the option of putting your homepage into whatever language you want. On its own this isn’t very funny, since if you are French then having a homepage in French is just normal.

But what about Klingon? That’s pretty funny.

Or Pirate? Where “Search” because Searrrrch”, and “Logout” because “Catch th’ outgoing tide!”

Or Piglatin? Oogleinggay omethingsay ecomesbay aay otlay ongerlay.

Or Hacker? Funny, although understanding your PR3F3R3N(3Z is a lot harder.

Or, my personal favourite, Bork bork bork, a confusing and vaguely Englishesque language. I recommend checking out the languages list in the Bork preferences.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Check out the picture of my current homepage on the right (or bigger, at this link).