Original Article: A Texas judge has reportedly ruled that Microsoft cannot sell any version of Word in the US that can open .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML. Seattlepi’s Microsoft Blog points to an announcement by the plaintiff, i4i.

In May, i4i in Toronto got $200 million from Microsoft, when a federal jury found that Microsoft infringed on the company’s patent. That patent is 11 years old. The abstract reads:

A system and method for the separate manipulation of the architecture and content of a document, particularly for data representation and transformations. The system, for use by computer software developers, removes dependency on document encoding technology. A map of metacodes found in the document is produced and provided and stored separately from the document. The map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document. The system allows of multiple views of the same content, the ability to work solely on structure and solely on content, storage efficiency of multiple versions and efficiency of operation.

The entire thing can be read here.

"We are disappointed by the court’s ruling," a Microsoft spokesman is quoted as saying in a statement. "We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid. We will appeal the verdict."

Popular belief is that Microsoft will probably overcome this one. Microsoft not selling Word in the US? That will be the day.

After much petition and long after the House of Representatives had done so, a feed showing all votes from individual Senators is now available. Previously, only how the Senate voted as a group was easily accessible, and only through unanimous agreement could one easily decipher how his or her representative voted.

Jim DeMint

“I want to thank Senators Schumer and Bennett for helping us increase Senate transparency and accountability,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina).  Last week, a group of Senators on both sides of the aisle sent them a letter asking them to publish Senate votes in the XML format so the public can use computers to search, sort, and visualize voting records in new ways.

“This simple but important change will help give Americans real transparency on their Senator’s voting record.”

Many of government records are stored on databases not accessible to the public. Often, if the information is available, it’s only available in less user friendly formats. XML is a standard that makes it easy to publish and mash up data.

Making Senate votes available in XML was included on a list created by participants in a survey conducted at Show Us the Data, which created a list of the top eight types of government information people wanted more access to. They include:

1.    Congressional committee votes
2.    Earmarks
3.    Foreign Travel Reports
4.    Legal Defense Funds
5.    Senate Votes in XML
6.    Senior Executive Service
7.    High Level Diplomatic Visits
8.    The CIA World Factbook 

Though much of the above information is currently available, often it is located in hard to reach places, like cumbersome, difficult to search and manage PDF files on obscure government websites. 
 

So the latest security bug in Firefox as reported by PC World seems more urgent than most. We all understand that nothing is truly secure on the Internet but we also like to think that there are not glaring vulnerabilities in the tools we use on a daily basis. As the PC World article states:

The attack code, written by security researcher Guido Landi was published on several security sites Wednesday, sending Firefox developers scrambling to patch the issue. Until the flaw is patched, this code could be modified by attackers and used to sneak unauthorized software onto a Firefox user’s machine.

Mozilla’s Director of Security Engineering is calling this a critical issue and a fix is scheduled to be rolled out with a version update at the start of next week. These developers are calling this fix and the release of this update a “high priority firedrill security update”. Not sure about you but that kind of language sounds a little creepy.

No operating system that runs Firefox is spared on this one either including Mac OS and Linux users. Essentially the bug allows someone to plant a “drive-by download” of software by tricking a user into viewing an XML file that starts the process. This was also a public release of the hack so it makes it even more uncommon.

The PC World article doesn’t wrap up with any words to make us feel any more secure though.

While the public release of browser attack code doesn’t happen all that often, security researchers don’t seem to have much trouble finding bugs in browser software. Last week, two hackers at the CanSecWest security conference dug up four separate bugs in the Firefox, IE and Safari browsers.

Maybe these things seem bigger in light of the bad economy because these types of concerns are every day events on the Internet. When times get bad, however, crime goes up historically and now there are more avenues for a new breed of criminal using technology to carry out their plans. Something tells me this may get a lot worse before it gets better.

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"While most Sitemap generators either crawl websites or list the files on a server, we have created a different kind of Sitemap generator that uses several ways to find URLs on your website and then allows you to automatically create and maintain different kinds of Sitemap files," says Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller.

The new Sitemap Generator is open source, and finds new and modified URLs from server traffic, log files, or files on the server. Then it can create the following sitemap files:

– XML Sitemaps
– Mobile Sitemaps
– Code Search Sitemaps (for source code you make available to users)

The Generator will also ping Google Blog Search and other search engines that support the sitemaps.org standard for all new and modified URLs (you can optionally include the URLs of the Sitemap files in your robots.txt file).

If you’re unsure how to get started, Mueller says, "Google Sitemap Generator is a server plug-in that can be installed on both Linux/Apache and Microsoft IIS Windows-based servers. As with other server-side plug-ins, you will need to have administrative access to the server to install it. You can find detailed information for the installation in the Google Sitemap Generator documentation."

Help and support for Google’s new Sitemaps Generator are available. There is a help group as well as a Webmaster Help Forum.

They have come with the launch of their On-Demand Indexing that could actually assist the webmasters in enhancing their experience with Google Webmaster services in a better way! With help of this tool, the users can inform Google about the newly updated pages of their websites, or the ones that are new!

How it will assist the webmasters?

As a result, Custom Search will immediately schedule these pages for crawl, index and even serve the pages in their CSEs with a short span of one day!

“How do you tell us about these URLs? You guessed it… provide a Sitemap to Webmaster Tools, like you always do, and tell Custom Search about it. Just go to the CSE control panel, click on the Indexing tab, select your On-Demand Sitemap, and hit the "Index Now" button. You can tell us which of these URLs are most important to you via the priority and lastmod attributes that you provide in your Sitemap. Each CSE has a number of pages allocated within the On-Demand Index, and with these attributes, you can us which are most important for indexing. If you need greater allocation in the On-Demand index, as well as more customization controls, Google Site Search provides a range of options.”

“Some important points to remember:

1. You only need to submit your Sitemaps once in Webmaster Tools. Custom Search will automatically list the Sitemaps submitted via Webmaster Tools and you can decide which Sitemap to select for On-Demand Indexing.
2. Your Sitemap needs to be for a website verified in Webmaster Tools , so that we can verify ownership of the right URLs.
3. In order for us to index these additional pages, our crawlers must be able to crawl them. You can use "Webmaster Tools > Crawl Errors > URLs restricted by robots.txt" or check yourrobots.txt file to ensure that you’re not blocking us from crawling these pages.
4. Submitting pages for On-Demand Indexing will not make them appear any faster in the main Google index, or impact ranking on Google.com.”-GOOGLE

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1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up

Overview

Website structure and SEO are a combination of topics that I’ve always had a particular interest in because of my background in software engineering. I have worked on, or maintained over 150 corporate websites having seen many of the things that can make a website go wrong, which can seriously impact a websites operation and search engine rankings.

Of the three pillars of SEO (Structure, Content, and Links) I find the structure of a website to be one of the most under rated things, even among search engine optimization companies. The structure of a website consists of several elements which all are interdependent on each other. These include the code behind your website, how your website interlinks, and the technologies used in your website.

At this point I’m going to strongly recommend that you’re using Firefox with the Web Developer Toolbar installed. The web developer toolbar gives you an easy way to validate your website, test your site on multiple screen resolutions, and around another 100 functions.

Valid Markup and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

I have made it practice to develop all my projects in XHTML 1.0 Transitional (my personal preference so I can use target="_blank" and rel="nofollow" attributes) or XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 1.0. XHTML is a reformulation of HTML 4 as an XML 1.0 application. It is a very clean and semantic markup language which will also force you to write cleaner code. Whether you choose XHTML or HTML 4 your code will be friendly to the search engines (stay away from 3rd party standards like IHTML).

As for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) it gives us the ability to abstract the design out of a webpage, or site into a secondary document. This gives us a lot of advantages, and very few disadvantages. By removing redundant design code from your website you place the content closer to the start of the document, while reducing your code to markup ratio. It also makes it easier, and more cost effective to maintain your website as you can implement simple design changes by only editing on file.

When converting a website from table based design, to pure CSS based design there is generally around a 40% decrease in code. The reason for this is when most people use tables they end up placing tables, within tables, within tables all with their own attributes (height, width, border, etc). Now multiple all that redundant, and unneeded markup by the numbers of pages of you site and you’ll quickly see how Google (or any other search engine) will be able to index you website more efficiently.

In my research, and experience I have concluded using these two technologies in conjunction with each other is a part of guaranteeing your websites success, especially with its compatibility with Google. You will also find if you do any research on this topic a recurring mantra of CSS fanatics tables are for tabular data not design.

You’ll find that most of the highly organically ranked SEO companies implement CSS based design on their own websites. For examples of CSS based design check out Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, SEOMoz, and Quenet Consulting.

Website Templating

Now I’m going to start this section with a rant about Dreamweaver templates, and how useless they are. As a SEO / Web Developer there is nothing I loathe more than seeing a Dreamweaver template. If you’re going to template a site use a technology like Server Side Includes, PHP Includes, or ASP includes. The disadvantages of Dreamweaver templates are:

1. Embedded comments in your code can reak havoc on Keyword Density Tools
2. If you need a non standard footer in an index file you will need to break it from the template, creating issues for future template updates.
3. If you have a disagreement with your web developer / designer and you part company if he doesn’t supply you with the template it’ll cost you.

When building websites I personally use PHP for implementing Server Side Includes. PHP is a relative easy language to learn for implement simple things like includes. It is also one of the most popular Apache modules, as of April 2007 there were 20,917,850 domains, and 1,224,183 IP addresses with it installed. PHP is also available for the Microsoft IIS (Windows Server) web server.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

One thing that I can’t stress enough is try to stay away from Dynamic URLs, these are URL addresses with variables, and values following the "?" character. Google used to state that it had troubles indexing sites with dynamic URLs, and to a degree this still holds true. If you are going to use Dynamic URLs always try to have less than 2 variables in your URL. I have seen sites with excessive products, and URLs where Google / Live / Yahoo all have a different number of pages cached.

A better approach is to URL Rewrite your URLs. For the Linux side Apache has Mod Rewrite, and for Windows you can use ISAPI Rewrite. When you implement a URL Rewriting system you are essentially creating a hash URL lookup table for your site, than when a server query comes in it checks the hash table to see if it finds a match then feeds it the corresponding entry.

To put it into simple terms what we strive to accomplish with URL Rewrites is to mask our dynamic content by having it appear as a static URL. A URL like Article?Id=52&Page=5 could be rewritten to /Article/ID/52/Page/5/, which to a search engine appears to be a directory with an index.htm (or whatever default / index page your particular web server uses). To see an implementation of Mod Rewrites check out Dr. Madcow’s Web Portal in the Article Section, and Link Archive.

Dynamic Websites and Duplicate Content

If there is one reoccurring theme I see in a lot of dynamic websites on the internet is that they can sometimes present the same content on multiple pages. An example of this is when you visit a website that allows you to "view a printer friendly version of this page", a better web solution implementation would be to develop a printer friendly Cascading Stylesheet.

Another goal is also to avoid having any additional URLs on you site such as Links for changing currency with a redirect script, links to "Email to a friend" pages, or anything related to this. Always use Forms to POST date like this so that the same page, or a static page to reduce page count. This issue seems to plague a lot of custom developed ecommerce / CMSes. I’ve actually see CMSes that will present up to 5 URL / Links for each page, in the long run the spiders got so confused in indexing the catalog that some of the main content pages were not cached.

Internal Site Navigation

If built properly most websites will never have a need for an XML Sitemap, other than to get their new pages indexed that much quicker (Ecommerce & Enterprise being exceptions). I will however recommend that every website have a user accessible Sitemap linked from every page to aide your users, and for internal linking.

Most sites with indexing problems have issues with their internal page linking structure. The biggest of all these issues are websites that implement pure javascript navigation based system, these systems depend on Javascript to insert HTML into pages as there rendered. Now Google can parse javascript menus to find URLs, however all of these pages will only be linked from the JS, and not the pages there located on (expect no internal pagerank passing). The best Javascript menus are menus that manipulate your code on your page to change which sections are being displayed via CSS. An example of a hybrid CSS / Javascript menu that I like is QuickMenu by OpenCube (these guys have a great support department).

Keep I mind the more internal links you have to a page, the more internal strength this page will be given. So when in doubt link it up.

Testing Your Site Structure

When it comes to reliable website deploying all I can say is "Test It, Test It, and then Test It Some More". When testing structure I rely on 3 different programs / firefox extensions. The first is Xenu Link Slueth, this is a great tool to run on your website to figure out how many pages can be spidered, and to find dead links. The second is the Web Developer Extension for Firefox, make sure you always validate your code when you make changes. And the last is consult Google and Yahoo to see how many pages are in your index compared to how many pages Xenu found, on Yahoo or Google type site:www.yourdomain.com (Don’t use Live’s site: function it is useless).

After you’ve finished testing your code if you need to debug it I strongly recommend the Firebug Firefox Extension, and the IE7 Developer Toolbar.

Conclusion

When trying to maximize your organic rankings your internal structure is paramount, consider your site structure to be equivalent to the foundation of your house. If your foundation is not built adequately your house may be livable, but may have long term issues. With websites your long term issues will be a failure to maximize your ROI of your website, so practice safe and smart structure.

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There are 3522 comments in total, but when you group them into similar buckets it narrows down pretty quickly into a more manageable list… but still pretty impressive!

There are currently 662 responses, and the plan is to provide updates to this list every few weeks. We still have almost 2 months until the deadline, but given that we have a lot of issues to work though, we thought it would be best to provide the responses earlier than the Jan deadline to allow for more time to discuss the issues.

So far I think we’re doing a pretty good job of doing what the national body is asking for. Most of the comments were accompanied by a proposed resolution, and most of them are great suggestions, so our response back is often that we’ll do exactly what they are asking for.

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This thing has been coined "Gphone" in many of media’s (often misleading) reports on the product, though Google’s Steve Horowitz says it’s not a Gphone, but allows to create "thousands of Gphones."

The presented demo looks quite good, but Android’s capabilities depend on the hardware; in a relative large-screen, high-power phone environment it’s coming close to the iPhone, while on lower-end hardware it might be more comparable to the Symbian mobile OS. But even with Android, it might well be that usability-wise, nothing will play in the league of the iPhone for quite some time to come.

Developer Kit Released

Google’s SDK (software development kit) for Android is live now too. The tool is a 55-59 MB download for Windows XP/ Vista, Mac OS X and Linux. "Developers will also need Eclipse 3.2 or later, with Java Development Tools and the Android SDK’s plugin, or Java and Javac 1.5 or 1.6; Apache Ant; an integrated development environment; and Python 2.2 or later," Google adds in a press release.

"The dev environment (Eclipse) even has a nice emulator, so you can see how it’s going to work on an Android phone," Reto Meier comments in the forum.

A $10 Million Android Competition

Also, Google announced a 10 million dollar heavy developer competition for the best programs people create for Android. Individual prices range from $25,000 (as recognition for the 50 "most promising entries", as Google’s press release on the subject puts it) to $275,000. The first phase of the competition runs from January 2nd through March 3rd, 2008. The second phase will take place in the second half of 2008, Google says. Clearly, Google’s money is intended to push the platform by creating buzz, but also by generating potentially useful applications that pull end users.

You want to join the competiton? Here’s a bit of Java source code Google presents as "Hello World" introductory sample (I removed the comments) – if this looks like it might be something for you, I suppose $275,000 is *cough* not shabby (I usually prefer creating web apps, as they can – theoretically – work across devices, even on cellphones… but this API may give you the power to access the full phone and all its capabilities):

package com.google.android.samples.app;import com.google.android.samples.R;import android.app.Activity;import android.os.Bundle;

public class HelloWorld extends Activity {

    @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle icicle) {        super.onCreate(icicle);        setContentView(R.layout.hello_world);    }}

The actual contents of the Hello World aren’t in that source bit, but contained in XML files probably similar to this XML and this other XML. There’s also a video demo for creating your first Android application.

[Thanks Reto!]

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A trio of new and updated goodies from Truveo arrived online. Developers partnered with the video search site can utilize several APIs to add search functionality to existing and new websites.

Truveo, which AOL purchased in December 2005 only three months after its public debut, wowed tech industry observers with its performance. AOL’s bid came shortly after it inked a billion-dollar deal with Google for its continued search and advertising services.

Dr. Tim Tuttle, Truveo’s founder, touted the service’s capabilities in a statement. “With our powerful video search APIs and enterprise-class reporting tools, Truveo is the only solution for any website owner who’s serious about incorporating video search functionality on their site,” he said.

Some of the recent updates involve enhancing Truveo’s performance in the face of heavier demands by people for videos. Truveo’s partners should see better response time and relevance for video searches conducted by their site visitors.

Updated reporting dashboards will provide more insight into user traffic patterns, user engagement, popular search queries, popular video channels, as well as overall API performance.

Those open APIs offer XML, AJAX, or Flash sites the video search results, which can be incorporated into websites or applications as desired.

"The AOL Video Search XML API provides the functionality and defines the specification for submitting REST-style queries against the AOL video search index and retrieving XML-formatted response messages," said the XML API summary.

Developers will need to set up an API account to use the service. Once the account has been created, the developer will be assigned a unique Application ID key that will be needed for uses of the API.

Video’s continuing boom online has led to greater demand for that content. Effective search will be a key player here, and Truveo’s service has been very impressive ever since its launch.