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Did the July PageRank update come early?

Wednesday, June 30, 2010, 10:50 AM
Business by John (Article #270)

It sure looks like Google started updating PageRank Toolbar numbers around midnight last night. The update appears to be ongoing at the present time (10:44 am US Eastern time).

UPDATE

It's increasingly looking like this was a partial flush oft he PageRank Toolbar numbers caused by a change in the index upstream. Something related to all the tinkering coming from the Google Caffeine project.

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Servers handling "Pending Delete" .COM domains failing

Sunday, June 27, 2010, 3:55 PM
Business by John (Article #269)

Something is up with the servers handling the "Pending Delete" .COM domain names today. Whatever the cause is, the pending deletes didn't become available for purchase at their normal time, bwtween 11pm and 1:15pm U.S. Pacific time.

Even now, approaching 2pm Pacific, responses on domains made available are sporadic at best.

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Photoshop CS5, first impressions

Saturday, May 15, 2010, 10:31 PM
Graphic Design by John (Article #268)

I'm not the king of the earlier adopters. But, I fell head over heels for Adobe's lavish tech demo of Photoshop CS5 and made the leap.

Was it worth it? Overall, yeah.

But, the first day I was really pissed. Let's just be clear upfront about the #1 thing that's making people adopt CS5 so quickly: it's the beneficiary of a very good tech demo.

CS5, simply put, isn't as magical as the tech demo makes it look.

Take the content-aware fill, the part that still pisses me off. The tech demos for CS5 make the content-aware fill look like you can completely remove anything. And that Photoshop will figure it out by pure voodoo. In effect, the content-aware fill is supposed to be a near 100% replacement for the clone tool.

Not even close. after using CS5 for a week, my verdict on the content-aware fill is that it's a nice tool that will amazingly . . . when CS7 hits the market in 2014.

The content-aware fill takes way too many tries to get it right. And often the results, even when decent, look more like a poorly done clone tool effort. It's simply should not have been included in a finished product.

The magic selection tool is another tech demo meant to inspire awe. The first day I dealt with it, it was a bit disappointing. Again, the Adobe tech demos make this function look like pure voodoo. Instead, it tends to go off selecting half the damned image when all you want is to select the subject's arm.

The second day with the magic select tool was a lot better. I learned quickly that it needs to be trained a bit. Frankly, Adobe would do themselves a favor to buy out a machine learning company so I'm not retraining the damned tool every time I make a selection.

What I found is that you use the additive selection tool first. If it overshoots your target, shrug it off. Come back through with the subtractive selection tool, and fix it quickly. Keep adjusting the hits and misses until your selection is right.

There's a tweak tool that was heavily demoed. In theory, it's supposed to handle things like backgrounds showing through semi-transparent thing like hair. In practice, it's a complete waste. I saw better results from third-party plug-ins for PS6! And embarrassingly bad addition to an otherwise worthwhile tool. Another part of CS5 that had no business being shipped with a commercial product.

The pseudo-HDR tool was less pimped. Too bad. It's the one that works 100% as advertised. While not a 100% replacement for doing HDR the right way, it's good. It's about a 95% replacement for real HDR. Which, if you only have one image you want to HDR, is pretty handy.

The ringing from the pseudo HDR is obnoxious, but in truth the ringing from real HDR is obnoxious, too. The different with CS5 is you can turn the ringing off.

The 3-D effects tools were also heavily touted. Here I have to hedge my response a bit. I'm used to using 3D Studio Max and Brazil render engine. Nothing CS5 was going to deliver was going to impress me.

That said, I've seen better results from pre-alpha releases of open source projects with little participation. The 3-D tools suck. Plain and simple. For real 3-D, they're worthless. They have some value insofar as they provide the means to quickly deploy 3-D into Photoshop and work it. So, if you're doing text effects, the 3-D tools are serviceable. Probably worth shipping, but not worth getting excited about unless you're trying to avoid using a serious 3-D rendering package.

For as hard as all that sounds, I think CS5 was worth acquiring. Not big time worth it, but worth it.

Mind you, for most trades Photoshop hasn't added anything of real value since Photoshop 6. If your version of PS is getting everything done for you, CS5 is hardly a must buy. But, if you're laying out the cash to buy PS anyhow, CS5 won't leave you in that downgrade from Vista-to-XP type of bad spot.

Overall, the tools have the potential. As I said: I suspect a lot of this will look mind-bendingly awesome when CS7 debuts in the middle of the decade.

Recommendation? A soft buy.

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Google PageRank toolbar updates coming today

Saturday, April 3, 2010, 10:58 AM
Website Design by John (Article #267)

I was scanning the PageRanks of sites I own or admin, and I noticed a lot of new PR improvements and a couple dips. Most of the surprises were upside one or two points. Real big pops across a lot of sites.

Not sure what all went into it, but it's a pleasant surprise for an already gorgeous day.

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To Microsoft's credit

Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 12:26 AM
Thoughts by John (Article #266)

I was discussing a problem in Windows with someone online, and the conversation turned to the fact that the type of problem -- though not this particular manifestation -- stretched all the way back to Windows 3.0, the first usable desktop computer with multitasking.

So, for grins I looked on MS's support website for the fix. And sure enough, right there was an EXE waiting to be downloaded for Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 for Workgroups.

Now, I understand that this is no longer an officially supported fix. But, it's still exceedingly hip of MS to have it out there. Especially for an OS that hasn't been since 1995. Last updates were issued in 2003.

Just so the Macophiles don't feel picked, you can find Apple updates on their site going back to to Mac OS 8. Last updates were issued in 1998.

I throw that out there as a weird observation, since I think folks don't take enough time to appreciate what a good job some of these companies do.

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Tracking expiring and dropping domain names

Monday, February 15, 2010, 1:29 PM
Website Design by John (Article #265)

This is my most recent big project: DropCatchSell.com, a site for tracking expired and dropped domain names with value.

This is the culmination of much of my recent research into PR, SERP and other ranking systems. The idea is pretty straight forward if you understand the domain name acquisition process.

The big problem with what is known in domaining as "drop catching" is the majority of expiring and dropping websites aren't worth the cost of registering them. The thing is, on any given day, between 250,000 and 400,000 domain names drop. And that's only counting the major US TLDs, such as .com, .net, .org, .info, etc.

The goal with DropCatchSell is to build a website that does a respectable of filtering out the garbage domains and leaving behind those with real value. Short domains (4 letters or less), two syllable medium domains, dictionary names, ones with established traffic, etc.

It's still very, very beta. I hope to keep it free, but a big part of the beta is deciding whether free is a workable business model.

Check it out. Use the contact form to let me know what you think.

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GoDaddy finally cleans up its checkout process

Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 5:20 PM
Business by John (Article #264)

GoDaddy has finally gone and done it. At long last, they've fixed a lot of what is wrong with their checkout process.

The #1 thing I now love is there is the option to permanently point all your future registrations toward your name servers -- long overdue, and good riddance to GoDaddy's fugly parking pages.

Overall, the process is quicker, with fewer nags. The last remaining nag, to renew your upcoming domains, can be seen as a feature. It doesn't bother me enough to be a black mark.

The only downside is that some checkouts with certain coupon codes seem to prohibit using PayPal. Sucks. But, again not bad enough to be a black mark.

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Back to basics: clean up your link names

Friday, January 22, 2010, 11:44 AM
Website Design by John (Article #263)

One of the biggest things search engine providers -- and thereby search engine users (your potential visitors and customers) -- rely up is the quality of the text in your links.

While you don't want to engage in skeevy techniques that amount to Googlebombing, you do want to do your level best to write your links cleanly for the actual thing that page you're linking to is about.

The classic bad link name is "click here". While it makes a great deal of sense within a sentence, for example, saying "for more information on ridding your property of unwanted widgets, click here", it doesn't make life easy for Google, Yahoo and Bing's bots that are indexing your page.

As a content creator, it is your social responsibility to ensure that the pages those bots index have good, meaningful links on them. The entire notion of a usable semantic internet hinges on good links.

So, if the page you're linking to is about "removing unwanted widgets from your notwidget pond", that entire string of text needs to be the main text inside the A tag of your link.

It represents one of the big shifts in editorial decision making in the age of the internet. And it is shocking how much of it goes to waste. Don't let your perfectly good links go to waste in the search engine simply by poor linking. Improve your links. Thing when you're righting about what part of the sentence is the semantically linkable part. Keep that in your head at all times when you are writing for the web. Not only will you improve your own website, you'll improve the general internet.

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What the internet will look like in hell

Thursday, January 21, 2010, 10:06 AM
Website Design by John (Article #262)

Check this out: this is what the internet will look like in hell.

So many things done wrong. The Flash intro (frustrates customers who might just want the phone number). The Flash navigation (makes it hard for Google to index). The skip intro link (loses juice for the front page).

As a design it's almost bad to the point of being cute.

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Early release of expired domains is rare

Monday, January 18, 2010, 1:06 PM
Business by John (Article #261)

The last weekend I started compiling data on how expired domain names are handled. Here are the highlights:

1. While a lot of registrars do hold onto higher quality domains, the percentage of total expired domains that scored well in my analysis (respectable in-bound links, domain uses real English words, etc) that the registrars actually held onto themselves was surprisingly low.

2. More domains made it out of the auction period than I would have expected. In fact, of those expired domains with a PageRank of three and at least one inbound link from a ranked website, about two-thirds coasted through auction without a big.

3. Very, very few domains were released early. Of the approximately 2000 expired domains included in the analysis, only three were released within two days of their expiration.

Now this is all very preliminary. So, don't get married to any of this not-really information. But, I thought it was interesting and worth sharing.

[NOTE: Added on January 19.]

Having tweak my analysis tool quite a bit, I've determined that the quick drop rate is somewhere below five percent.

The one thing I have to say is that the people at various stages of handling the death of a thousand cuts that is an expiring domain are good at what they do. The whole system has that slightly too mysterious quality that any good racket requires. It's hard to determine when a name will drop. Notification of a genuine delete -- the last stage where the name becomes immediately available to be registered anywhere -- held onto until as late as possible.

Based on the domains that are thrown overboard early, the domain registrars know exactly how well any domain performs while in expired status. If a domain drops early, you should take that as evidence that it has nothing -- no link juice, zero visitors, not enough value to even waste the electricity to keep a "this domain may be for sale" pitch up and running on the URL.

What I'm very interested in now is seeing how the better domains (any domain with a PR greater than 3, a single inbound link, or any real traffic besides domainers) move through the pipeline and become honestly deleted.

At some point the damned things do have to drop into the public pool of domains. And even hunting for domains manually, I've found some winners. So, its not so much a cut-throat business as it is a slightly dreadful business amid a tsunami of data.

We'll see.

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