At some point they published a great document stating that cool URI’s don’t change. The general trust of the document, is that once a document is published on the internet – that URI should be permanently available as you never know who might link to it or consume it. As every user of the internet can attest to, there is nothing more frustrating than following a link from one web site to another and being greeted with the infamous 404 Page Not Found error.

While randomly clicking some links on my blog today, I noticed that I had two links in the footer to the HTML and CSS validation services. I haven’t clicked on those links for a long time, but for some reason today I did and was greeted with a 404 error. It would appear that over the course of time, W3 have very subtly updated the URI that the CSS validation service exists at:

• Old: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/referer
• New: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer

I figure maybe someone at W3C will see this pop up and see that one of their older, heavily referenced URI’s no longer works properly and they’ll put in the appropriate redirect.

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1. Google Webmaster Tools Displaying PDF & Word Document Links Google Webmaster Tools has the ability to explore the internal...

Case in point, the following two articles:

• Strike Keyword Gold By Writing A Simple Story
  The entire article is duplicated, as if someone has accidentally pasted it twice
• Overlooked But Beneficial On-Page SEO Elements
  Half of the article is set out in a monospace font, due to the a malformed closing </code> element

I would have expected that the original authors of those two respective articles would have previewed their work before pushing the publish button. Of course, it is quite possible that the people that wrote the articles don’t have accounts to login to Search Engine Land, in which case I would have expected them to check their work once one of the editors had published it and provide feedback if necessary.

It appears that hasn’t happened and the work flow that Search Engine Land have implemented isn’t solid enough to catch even the most glaring of oversights. It is a shame really because they produce a fantastic web site with valuable content throughout but the simplest of things like the above tarnishes their work in my eyes – it kind of suggests that they don’t care about it as much as I would have hoped that they do.

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The latest extensions available from within Google Maps Labs are:

• Drag ‘n’ Zoom
• Aerial Imagery
• Back to Beta
• Where in the World Game
• Rotatable Maps
• What’s Around Here?
• LatLng Tooltip
• LatLng Marker
• Smart Zoom

I really like the implementation of the Drag ‘n’ Zoom experimental feature and it is something that I think I’ll definitely leave enabled. The two LatLng lab experiments are going to be very useful to people who use Google Maps a lot and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Smart Zoom make its way into Google Maps as a default feature going forward either.

To enabled any of the currently available Google Maps Labs experimental features, look for a link in the top right hand corner of Google Maps beside  your user links such as My Profile, My Account, Help & Sign Out.

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The announcement for Google Fusion Tables notes that it is releasing the API for it, which integrates with a number of existing Google products such as Maps, App Engine, Base Data and the Visualisation APIs to allow for motion charts, timelines, maps with all the data running on Google’s infrastructure.

The Google Fusion Tables example video provided showcases an incredibly easy to use interface, which interleaves numerous existing data sources with custom data from the user on the fly. While that might be fine for static data sets, Google Fusion Tables also allows for dynamic data sets as well – where data can be synchronised into Fusion Tables in real time as the data is changing.

Recently Microsoft Live Labs released a similar product named Pivot, which provides similar functionality with a completely different user experience. The upfront effort for implementing Microsoft Pivot appears to much greater than Google Fusion Tables, as at least at this stage there doesn’t appear to be a way to simply upload, merge or link data together without providing that data through the Pivot architecture.

Watch this space, I suspect there are going to be some incredibly innovative uses for both products.

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For a long time, Google has been indexing numerous non-web specific file formats such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Adobe PDF and Macromedia now Adobe Flash file formats. While they were indexing and ranking those documents to show up in search, I have never seen anything to suggest that Google was counting either links or plain text URLs within those documents as a ranking indicator specifically. However, while viewing backlink data for a domain recently I noticed that Google Webmaster Tools was reporting backlinks from Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word documents.

If you’re in the business of generating a lot of documents to provide to third parties, a certain number of your clients will put the document on their web site for their users. If that happens, you’ve just gained additional inbound links to your site using the link text of your choice. If it turns out that Google is counting PDF, Word and other file format links as a ranking indicator – a savvy marketer might even recommend to third parties that they upload the document to their site – for any number of reasons, least of which is search engine optimisation.

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The Google Local Business Center is unavailable for the next hour

We appreciate your patience as we perform some routine system maintenance.

More specifically, we’re updating ‘the backend’ (to employ that catchy, catchall moniker coined and lent to us by engineering folks who work on all of the technical fiddly bits behind the scenes but know we communications folks can’t very well say ‘We’re updating all of the technical fiddly bits behind the scenes’ and expect you, an enlightened Google user, to take us seriously or at least not wonder aloud ‘ Wait, what sort of bits were those again?’).

So please check back in sixty minutes. Maybe less, considering the time you’ve invested in deciphering this message.

[Screenshot]

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Today the search options have been enhanced further to allow a user to remove shopping sites such as Amazon from the search results or to see more shopping sites in the search results. By choosing to add additional shopping sites, the layout of the search results changes slightly to be more price focused for comparison.

I came across new category filters that I haven’t previously seen, such as restaurants, retail, apartments, for sale, parking and so on. In this particular example, the additional category filters are contextually relevant to the search – in this case Circle on Cavill.

Circle on Cavill Gold Coast is a residential high rise located in the heart of Surfers Paradise and is of comprised of two towers and complemented by a retail precinct located at the base. As a by product of the type of facility, it offers restaurants, retail shopping, apartments for holiday letting, apartments to purchase to live in, secure under ground car parking and an enormous outdoor big screen hanging between the two towers which plays sport, movies, news and life style shows and much more.

The additional categorisation filters available within the search options are fantastic, allowing a user to see the different types of information that Google knows about a particular search term.

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Initially I didn’t change the theme because I thought that it was sufficient and after not chaning it for so long – I had unfortunately become used to it. I have nothing against the default WordPress theme, but it is used on thousands of different blogs around the world and as a by product – gives the impression that the owner of the site doesn’t care a whole lot for their site.

Today I am changing that for good and I vow never to go back to the default WordPress theme again.

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Curiously, I checked to see what version I was currently running and it was 3.0.10 and I assumed that it was going to update Firefox to the latest 3.5 series but I was mistaken. Instead, it upgraded to 3.0.11 which I thought was odd. As soon as it had completed, I checked for updates again and it said that another was available – surely this time it’ll get to Firefox 3.5, no it upgraded to 3.0.12. Checked again and another update was available and finally, it managed to upgrade Firefox to the latest and greatest version.

I’m sure there is a reason for doing an inline upgrade, however you’d think if you were going from 3.0 series into 3.5 series of an upgrade that it’d just make the jump and be done with it.

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Likes

• The texture applied to the main circular logo, it makes it feel like a heavy weight cardboard
• Fixed sidebar navigation, not unique but uncommon enough to make it interesting
• Hickensian is on debut
• That the little tree has still made its way into the design, even if it is in a less lavish nature

Dislikes

• Compared to previous versions, the footer of the site now feels bare and unloved.

Overall I really like the new design, it is really different in style compared to previous versions of the site however still unmistakably Hicksdesign.

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