Aug
12
Filed under: Usability, Web Design, Web Tech, WordPress
It seems the search engine market is becoming competitive again. In response to the recent release of Microsoft’s ‘decision engine’ Bing, Google is stepping up their game.
Competition breeds innovation, proof that capitalism works.
This week, Google released their new sandbox search engine, nicknamed ‘Caffeine’. In my initial tests, it seems Caffeine results are focused more on articles and web pages, not video or news results. Youtube and news items are typically still on the first page, but they are further down instead of always sticking to the top.
It seems you can’t saturate your Youtube video description with keywords anymore. Content is king.
Mar
25
Filed under: Mesmer Lab, Tutorials, Web Design, WordPress
You may have noticed the spiffy new calendar icon here at Mesmer Lab. Well I created the graphic purely in Photoshop and have made it available at Graphic River. A future article will explain how I made it, but this article is about how to implement it into your WordPress blog.
The goal is to get rid of the generic-looking display of each article’s date. The visitor to most sites would want to know when the article is written to see how relevant the ideas, data or techniques are. A bold display of the date lets the user quickly scan and find the publish date.
Feb
02
Filed under: WordPress
I recently added Tweet This to my site, a plugin for WordPress that enables your visitors to easily post a link to your article in their Twitter stream. The key point here, easier is better. One-click goodness will surely get your articles into the Twitterverse.
The plugin was updated yesterday with many more admin features along with options for Digg This, Plunk This and Ping This links. You can see all four at the bottom of this article.
A very welcome addition is customization of how the text is sent to Twitter. The default is ‘[URL] [TITLE]‘ but I followed John Chow’s lead and modified mine to ‘Reading @mesmerlab [TITLE] [URL]‘. I had to modify the plugin code itself when I first installed it.
Thanks go out to Richard X. Thripp for this great upgrade!
