I’ve been looking at SEO topics since starting this blog and I’ve come to the conclusion that the ‘nofollow’ tag, when arbitrarily used, in a word, sucks.
In the interest of serving the community (not that I have any PageRank to give) I’m using a plugin called NoFollow Free to remove the nofollow tag from most links on this site. I will of course add it back in for spammers, etc.
Via: WordPress Plugin: NoFollow Free.
I know this is old news, but I’m going to blog about it anyway as I don’t want to forget it. I love the Gmail gradient buttons and the fact that they do not use images makes it about one thousand times better in my view.
When I say end, I mean the end of his involvement. If you view the source of Gmail or any other google app that used the technique, you will see a few changes from what Douglas created.
I certainly didn’t create the concept of custom buttons at Google. Nor did I write the final code that made it into production. I merely initiated a couple steps to improve the methods we use to render custom buttons. My portion of the iteration is what’s documented here. There were many other steps in making these buttons a reality.
Via Recreating the button | stopdesign
I’ve had quite a few “Color Scheme Generators” in my bookmarks for years, though most of them leave a lot to be desired. Color Scheme Designer is the newest one to catch my eye. The amount of options you have with this app is astounding.
Color Scheme Designer certainly goes to the top of that bookmark list.
Via makeuseof.com
A few days ago I mentioned how inadequate this site was for mobile browsing. It was slow, huge, locked up lower powered devices. In short, was a disaster for the purpose.
This morning I set out to fix that with a plugin for WordPress called WordPress Mobile Edition by Crowd Favorite. With this plugin if you visit this site with a mobile browser you should automatically get the mobile version.
Carrington Mobile is an elegant mobile theme with that supports advanced touch browsers (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry) and is also backward compatible with older mobile devices.
Carrington Mobile is built on the Carrington CMS theme framework for WordPress.
You can see the results above. I still need to theme the mobile version of the site as the default Mobile Carrington doesn’t fit with the look and feel of this site, but everything is faster and much easier to use on a mobile device.
Recently I got an unlimited data plan for my blackberry. So, first thing I did was browse around, wow, what an eye opener. Things took forever to load and display, often locking up the device.
This got me thinking about how adequate my existing sites are for mobile browsing. Searching around I found Mobiready to evaluate this without locking up your own device (assuming you have the capability to test on mobiles).
For example, this site in it’s current form has problems.
After that abysmal score you have a few options, using WordPress as I am, you can go on a plug-in hunt. Though if you’ve hand coded your site then Mobiready offers a list of things that contributed to your score and suggestions to fix it.
I have yet to fix any of my sites but I’ll update this post to see how well the suggestions help. I want to note though, any tools are just a tool, you still should test before you support any mobile access. (Yes this means getting a hold of a Blackberry, Android powered phone, Pre, and an Iphone).