Friday, August 25, 2006

Websites, search engines and all that Jazz

The business of putting up a website on the World Wide Web is not really for the faint-hearted. It is very easy to think that there is nothing to it. A naive newbie will always say, there are about 70 million websites in the Internet, surely I can make one just like the ugliest one there is. This, of course comes from a starry-eyed, optimistic, abject beginner who has high hopes of becoming a webmaster. Sure, there are free webhosts that take out the hard work and pain in making a website by giving the user a paint-by-numbers type of website creator. This is actually a good thing because making a website can be a darn pain in the neck especially if one is two of two things: ignorant and bull-headed. Being ignorant one goes ahead and gets ones hands dirty and very soon finds oneself in a lot of trouble. Being bull-headed, one refuses to be defeated and plows on with the work not caring for time or difficulty and pretty soon one has a working website for the world to see.

Havinig gone through the tutorials and after having read up on all materials related to website making, the webmaster-to-be starts thinking of webhosts and domain registration. I actually went through all the theoretical part of websites and I really thought, "how hard can it be?" Well, I was in for a big surprise. I had read up on HTML and CSS and I figured the best way was to get ready-made templates from a number of places in the Net which is basically a good plan. The idea was that, knowing the terminology would make it easier to read something made by an expert than to try and build one from scratch. There are countless of absolutely gorgeous templates just waiting to be fleshed out with terrific content. So, on I went with my, "how hard can it be?" approach.

If one has seriouisly explored the Internet one would surely find out about Search Engines and how they make the world wide web go round. There is no rocket science there. Think of the Web as a huge library which is growing continuously every second. How would one go about accessing the information from a huge physical library with rows and racks of books and periodicals? The simplest way is to look at the index cards which categorize and summarize every book in the shelves. Think of search engines as the index cards of a library. One can query a search engine for the contents of its databases based on a number of keywords that would bring one close to that which one is seeking. One could use Names or Authors or Subject Matter or Title in trying to locate a book. In a physical library with a buildiing and books this would be usual thing to do.

Search engines have taken this a step higher by providing a facility that further narrows down a search by indexing websites according to its contents using keywords to accumulate the various topics which a website may cover. A website may deal with a number of related topics and the search engine does its best to get a clear picture of what the website is all about so that it can offer that to the searcher on a silver platter of relevant pages. Whoah, what have we done? We have gone from being stymied by HTML and CSS to being knocked silly by the search engines and their appetite for content. This is a whole new ball game and I don't think I signed up for this type of aggravation.

Well, if one lives in the Net long enough one would surely have one's tidy, neat, well-ordered pre-conceived notions knocked over by a deluge of unstoppable variables that threaten to derail one's desire to have a website on the World Wide Web. What is one to do? Well, never fear for superman or someone who looks like him is near. Enter articles and writers for hire who give you finished articles that you can put on your website to make it worth reading as well as looking at. So ok, content can be addressed properly by writing it oneself or buying it from someone or gettinig it from some source which is willing to part with its stash of valuable articles.
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Sunday, August 13, 2006

Hard disk gave up

I had a bit of rest when my hard disk gave up the ghost. I did not really expect it to conk out for another three years but the things I was making it do finally did it in. Traffic exchanges were the primary reason why my hard disk gave up on me. It was not something which is ordinarily asked of a computer. But traffic exchanges were somehow intriguing and beguiling for someone who wants to drive traffic to his sites. Much like speed-dating, joining a traffic exchange gets your site seen by many people while you also see a lot of other sites you would otherwise not see at all all of this happening is a short span of time which increases its seductive appeal.

The natural progression from manual exchanges is automated exchanges for after all, computers were supposed to make our work lighter, right? I figured, I could view more websites without too much effort by joining autosurf exchangess. This was fine in theory at least. The major setback that I had was the wear and tear on my hardware which is kind of old. The other negative factor was that viewing so many sites in a short time causes eyestrain and I needed to rest my eyes for long periods of time.

Clearly, this was not a totally good idea for me. There had to be another way and my hard disk losing its magnetic glow forced me to consider other options. So, it's back to the drawing board, so to speak. I had seen the word SEO bandied about in the many discussions and forums and articles. SEO of course stands for Search Engine Optimization. Like something very esoteric and hidden from the masses, SEO is like the Holy Grail of SEO masters who make it their life's work to outwit or make search engines work for them. In simple terms, when somebody wants to find something from the Internet, he uses the search engines to bring to him a list of websites that deal with his keywords or the words that he wants the search engines to locate for him.

It is therefore imperative to know how the search engines conduct their searches and how they present their result which is aptly named SERP or, search engine result pages. Knowing how the search engines do their job allows technically-savvy individuals to make the search engine algorithm work for them. So, it is not uncommon for one expert to trumpet to the world his feat of landng in the number one spot for his keywords.

This was all very strange to me and somehow I did not feel that I should concern myself with their techniques. I belonged to a lower species of Internet denizens and SEO was certainly a concept which was too high above me. Be that as it may, one cannot remain untouched by SEO if one is concerned with bringing traffic to one's website. No man is an island, they say and a website floating in the vast void is lonelier than an island in the Pacific Ocean.
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Monday, August 07, 2006

An even longer interval

I cannot believe it. I had wanted to write something everyday to chronicle each twenty-four hours that passed in my life and maybe give a sense of what a life is all about. Nothing is ever simple or orderly or organized and lined up in a pretty row. Life is also wavelike and moves like a wave. It does not move in a straight line much as we would want it to. Life never stops and just keeps on going even when one phase has stopped and another started.

I guess one could say that there are many stages or phases in a man's life and that this could be termed episodes or chapters of some sort. We don't have to be artists with their periods and phases. We can just have what we have in bunches or groups. It is all the same, I think. Many days bunch together to form a phase even if one day just follows the next in endless succession. We might think that life happens day by day and week after week but there might be a color or a shape to these as in the "blue phase" or the "bent nose phase".

I had been excited and then depressed and I guess this was the reason why I stopped going to this journal to faithfully record each day. Depression does that to you. It makes any sort of activity pointless and you just want to sleep and sleep and sink deep into oblivion. This had been my problem all along and I thought that I had it licked. Life is like that, very treacherous while being very wonderful and I guess part of the thrill and wonder is in not knowing what it will do next. It always does the unexpected. It is as if it wants to keep us on our toes all the time.
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