Dirty Mouse // Food For Designers’ Dirty Little Mice

Ooh, this is a pearl of a screensaver from Simon Heys. I’ve had it running for a few days now and it looks the muts nuts on my big screen iMac. Best of all, it’s free!

Link via FormFiftyFive

CSS Globe is worth bookmarking if you are a techie or web designer.Its got some nice articles on web standards and lots of links to relevant content. Also got a nice clean design. Go and have a look »

Typetester is a handy little application for web people, which allows users to preview different CSS text styles live on the screen.

It’ll also generate the correcct CSS for the styles you select. Hardcore CSS users won’t find it useful, but when deciding what weight/colour of font to use, we find it a cracking utility.

CSS Type is a similar app but it lacks the same ease-of-use, or clear layout.

Voyage is a Flash-based, 3D RSS Feed aggregator that sorts the feeds based on date of each item posted. Users can add and delete feeds. It’s a bit awkward and slow, but it looks fantastic.

RSS Voyage was built by Andy Biggs | Thanks to Big Steve for the link

Painfully true.

Thanks to Andrew G for the link | Image copyright Poisoned Minds

So, there are certain things that you can do yourself in order to get a better SEO rank, but as with everything, there are ways of cheating your way success. Beware though, try any of these methods and subsequently get caught, you run the risk of being booted off Google. BMW Germany is possibly the most famous example for this, as it was caught using ‘black hat’ methods.

So what techniques shouldn’t you do?

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In order to gain maximum exposure on a search engine, a website has to be optimized properly. Search engines look for a number of different things in establishing how well it sees a site ranking. In order for a website to successfully function, it requires stringent attention to detail on these areas

Which search engine should I optimize for?

Well, at a rough estimate Google accounts for 1 out of every 2 searches on the internet. Yahoo is next at 25% with MSN (now Live) accounting for 10%. The remainder of the market is fought out by the thousands of other search engines on the internet. So, it makes good sense to aim your site primarily at ranking higly in Google’s organic listings.

‘Well it’s all about your page rank, isn’t it?”

Anyone involved in web circles will no doubt have heard this when talking about search engine optimization. The Google Page Rank is a great indicator of the strength of a page, but it shouldn’t be relied upon as the sole judge of page health. For those that don’t know, Page Rank is defined as the degree of importance or value that Google has for a specific web page. A site assigned a page rank of 0 is generally an unimportant or new page, wheras a page rank of 9 (there is no page ranked 10) is a page of great value or importance. A site that’s well maintained and spidered regularly will gain a better page rank over time, but by applying a few tips and tweaks you can rapidly gain an increase in your page rank.

View your current page rank with this tool from Live PageRank »

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Now, lets set something straight from the beginning of this article. We love Apple. However, we can also acknowledge when they are wrong. For instance, Apple can’t make a mouse to save their lives. Look at the mighty mouse - utter crap. As soon as a shiny new iMac turned up at Dirty Mansions, mighty mouse got the boot and a Microsoft (no less) mouse got installed.

Apple’s decision to release a PC version of iTunes was shrewd. Its decision to release Safari on Windows is a gamble. It is going to attempt to build on its brand loyalty, but has it exposed its carefully contrived brand to criticism? Pompous Mac users love to trot out the ‘we don’t get viruses’ line, but now Safari is on a PC, this shield of invincibility is about to be tarnished. Granted, the difference in OS plus the fact that Safari can’t ‘get a virus’ but any doubt over security could have the ability to transcend platforms and cast shadows over Apple’s previously untarnished OS. but in less than 24 hours the windows version of Safari had bugs and security flaws “popping up like hotcakes”. A hasty 3.01 update was posted for download within days, and now we’re on 3.0.2!

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