Ross sez : http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/ for a list of good web app software

Got through the majority of Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.net, though it did have some snippets that were interesting, couldn’t help but feel a lot of this has already been widely covered. Some of the chapters were very brief – black hat SEO in 30 pages? and some seemed very light on useful information. Still as a round up it wasn’t too bad, and got through it in a morning … I do wonder how much more I should really have read that is not covered in the book though. The technical areas that were the most interesting, it introduced but tend to say the detail was beyond the scope of the book.

Areas that may have been overlooked by developers were outlined in the chapters on duplicate content through multiple urls referencing the same material through parameters/canonicalization, and presenting HTTP status codes correctly to SE.

Content relocation is an area of difficulty where 301 redirects are not available to the developer/SEO person. URL rewriting has probably been discussed/implemented by many developers these days.

A couple of chapters while interesting didn’t seem like core issues or have been covered widely before: link bait, sitemaps and cloaking … the chapter on building an ecommerce site was poor.

Added new photographs from the Bradford Carnival or “Lord Mayor’s Parade” in July 2009. Once again this was brilliant with some fantastic costumes and street dancing …

Also added a page to show some the web design/development I’ve done over the past few years. Hopefully will keep this up to date.

Have started planning a stock photography site, first attempts with oscommerce and then zencart total failures. These carts not appropriate to selling stock. It’s gonna have to be bespoke, hooked into paypal/Google payments I think. Of the big three: Corbis, Alamy & Getty, the Corbis site looks the nicest, but I reckon with some Ajax it wouldn’t be too hard to get close to it.

Celeris Engineering’s site goes live this month – a sprint to get the site online in good time. An interesting project, with liquid css layouts.

Cat Empire – a fun night – strange band, mix of very different characters making quite different styles of song. Some brill moments though, followed by some groupy behaviour to get an autograph at least.

Trish Morrissey ‘Front’ – an exhibition where Morrissey replaces a female member of a beach party – the fact/fiction idea again, but somehow while the pictures were ok, it wasn’t really that interesting enough for a full exhibition. Lost in Transit was a diverse exhibition of 13 new photographers, very varied styles and presentations, some very good; most memorable Murray Ballard’s cryonics set for me.