Sitemap’s

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Last update : June 16, 2013
Sitemap’s are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. Sitemaps also offer human visitors an overview of a website to easily navigate. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

The sitemap xml protocol 0.90, available on www.sitemaps.org,  is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

There are several tools available to generate sitemaps. My favorite is the online sitemap generator from xml-sitemap.com.

A quick guide for creating sitemaps is available on www.sitemapxml.co.uk. Detailled user guides are edited by the search engines providers, for example by Google.

On 13th august 2009, I installed the standalone sitemap generator from XML-Sitemaps.com succesfully.

Pagepeel, pageear and pageflip

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The first flash scripts to  show a flip book animation on a website appeared a few years ago. The most advanced script was programmed by IpariGrafika in Hungary. A dynamic version with an external xml file based on IpariGrafika’s script was published in 2005 by Steve Palmer on the Blogspace of 76design in Canada.

Today, IpariGrafika still offers the version 2.25 of the PageFlip script for free, but the new scalable versions 3.5 are associated with a paid licence ranging from 25 US$ for one website without source code to 395 US$ for unlimited commercial use with source code included. A special website www.pageflip.hu bas been created to promote and distribute the different versions. Several demonstrations of the pageflip script for artworks catalogs can be seen at the website of Leslie’s Artgallery in Luxembourg.

Two years ago, a script called pagepeel related to the pageflip animation appeared as a new interesting advertising form on websites. Pagepeel is a small animated pageear waving on the top right side of a website. It reveals a hint of something behind it. When a visitor moves the mouse over it, it pulls down like peeling the page down to reveal the eye catching ad design, while not effecting the website.

The pagepeel script is also named pagecurl, magiccorner, adpeel, peelad, eselsohr, flash peel, … There are a lot of more or less well designed pagepeel scripts available on the net, but only a single one is available for free. It’s the pagepeel flashscript developped by Christian Harz from Webpicasso Media in Germany. A scalable version 1.4 was released on june 29th, 2008. A tutorial about programming a pagepeel script is shown on www.pagepeel.info.

In the IE browser, animated GIF’s are stopped running when the pageear closes. Tip : The small image has an x-offset of 3 pixels and y-offset of 1 pixel.

Website visitor tracking

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There are several tools available to analyse and monitor visits to a website or blog in real-time. The common method for reliable tracking consist in inserting a simple piece of javascript code on every webpage and saving a first party cookie on the visitors computer. The cookie allows to distinguish between returning visitors and first time visitors. The sum of returning and first time visitors are called unique visitors.
IP + User Agent tracking typically reports higher numbers than cookie-based tracking because of dynamically assigned IP addresses and spider and robot visits. 3rd party cookies are set by a source other than the website being visited and are often blocked by browsers and security software, whereas 1st party cookies are considered as harmless by spyware protection software.

The most used free tracking and statistics packages are StatCounter, SiteMeter and Google Analytics. A comparison of StatCounter versus Google Analytics has been published by Andy Atkinson on his blog “Pain in the Tech“.

Google Analytics

I prefer Google Analytics, which is based on Urchin, and I use it for different websites since 2006. Google Analytics uses 1st partie cookies, counts a visit even if the page is pulled from a user’s or server’s cache, but it registers only one visit if a user comes to a site twice within thirty minutes without closing their browser. The Google Analytics reports include a dashboard with different site usage overviews and detailed informations about visitors, content, traffic sources and goals. All the data are anonymous and the privacy of the visitors is guaranteed.

Google provides a help page, an official blog and a conversion university for Google Analytics. An unofficial Google Analytics Blog is provided by ROI Revolution. A forum about Website Analytics – Tracking and Logging is available at WebmasterWorld.com. A solid tutorial “8 stupid things webmasters do to mess up their analytics” has been edited by Linda Bustos on Marketing Pilgrim. SiteScan offers a Google Analytics Diagnostic tool designed to provide you with a complete audit of your Google Analytics setup.

Nicolas Lierman is the author of the Google Analytics Reporting Suite developed in Adobe AIR. He published on his website AboutNico.be 5 tips for using Google Analytics.

Webalizer

A famous log file analysis programm for web servers is Webalizer. It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser. Written in C by Bradford L. Barrett who started the development in 1997, the program is open source and was designed for running on Linux systems. Version 2.20-01 was released on july 12th, 2008. “What is your webserver doing today ?” is the motto of the webalizer website.

Google Custom Search

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Google Search

Google offers a custom search engine (beta version) to webmasters to create a local search tool on a website or a blog. A quick and easy way consist in integrating a javascript code provided by Google on your webpage. The search engine can be customized to include more sites or to adapt the style of the results pages to the style of the website. Google provides tutorials, FAQ’s, developer documentation and featured examples to help webmasters to design the search tool.

Google’s “Terms of Use” state that you may not in any way frame, cache or modify the Results produced by the Google search engine. The results pages include advertisements placed by Google. For enterprises wanting ad-free results pages, Google offers various price plans for the Google site search.

A solution used in the past by several developers was based on javascript code to open a small search window for doing a local search on a website. An example for searching the saraproft.lu website is given below:

=======================================

<p><a href=”javascript:(function()

{ p=prompt(‘Entrez un texte pour faire une recherche dans le site saraproft.lu via Google Luxembourg.’,”);

if(p)

{ document.location.href=’http://www.google.lu/search?

q=site:saraproft.lu ‘+escape(p)} })();” >

Search</a></p>

=======================================

This solution has some disadvantages with the security mecanisms of the new browser generation and is no longer recommended.

Google gadgets and Yahoo widgets

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In 2003, Konfabulator, a startup, released a paid software that consisted of cool standalone applets that did all sorts of stuff from telling the time, to monitoring stock market prices, to displaying your calendar. Mid-2005, Yahoo acquired the startup, and then offered Konfabulator as freeware, both for Mac OS X and Windows. They call it now widgets. In 2006, Google introduced Google gadgets, a precursor has been the side panels in the Google Desktop.

Google Gadgets are interactive mini-applications that can be placed anywhere on your desktop or on your iGoogle page to show you new email, weather, photos and personalized news. Other gadgets include the clock, calendar, scratch pad, todo list and many more. Google Gadgets are made by users that offer cool and dynamic content and can be placed also on any page on the web.

All Desktop gadgets use the Gadget API. They can also use core JavaScript features and the XMLHttpRequest class. Windows-only Desktop gadgets can include native Windows libraries and use selected Search APIs to take advantage of Google Desktop search features.

Google offers a Desktop SDK that has everything you need to write Google Gadgets and to integrate desktop searching into your applications. A development forum, a FAQ webpage and a hall of fame are available to provide valuable feedback on creating gadgets.

Google gadgets can also been used in Lively, a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs and that was released as beta on July 10th, 2008. Lively gadgets provide rich media and interaction capabilities to users.

A great site for gadgets, widgets and SEO is Seoish, run by Patrick Sexton alias Feedthebot.

Google Desktop et iGoogle

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Google Desktop

J’ai installé aujourd’hui Google Desktop sur mon portable. Google Desktop permet de faire des recherches locales aussi facilement que sur le Web et de trouver et de lancer des applications et des fichiers en quelques clics.  Google Desktop permet d’ajouter des plug-ins Google Gadgets pour personnaliser son bureau et pour consulter les actualités, la météo et bien d’autres informations. Pour aller un pas plus loin, on peut installer sa page d’accueil personnalisée avec iGoogle.

Il y a un blog officiel de Google Desktop qui constitue une source très riche d’informations concernant Google Desktop.

The number is the art is the limit is the price

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Last update : April 2, 2020

Bond PaintingOn the 17th of March 2008, I was the winner of the second collaborative bond painting (80cm x 60cm) that has been auctioned on ebay. The painting is a zero coupon bond created and signed by the swiss artist Marcel Salathé and the australian artist Anthony White. The artists guarantee to buy the painting back at a specific price, indicated on the painting, upon safe return during a specific month, also indicated on the painting. The summarized reasoning behind the Salathé & White bond paintings is that art is valued by the price someone is willing to pay, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the longevity of an artwork is crucially depending on the first price paid. The complete manifesto is presented on the Salathé & White website.

Marcel Salathé alias Sala is the creator of onethousandpaintings.com, an art project that has considerable success since its conception in 2006. More than 780 paintings have been sold and the project was presented in numerous blogs and in many high impact media publications.

Webgraph

Sala is not only a famous artists, but also a biologist (with an ETH Medal for outstanding PhD thesis awarded 2007), a writer, a musician and a talented programmer. He is the author of the html-graph applet. Give it a try and see the tags in your webpage popping up like confetti.

Marcel Salathé’s reflections about the art market resulted in the following actions concerning his paintings :

  • remove all content
  • add minimum of uniqueness/limit
  • led content become metacontent
  • build in supply and demand mechanism
  • create a price formula to stimulate the early market

price : y = f(x) = c(1000-x)

where

c-ceil(n + 1/100) * 0.1

and

n = number of paintings sold

On July 10th, 2008, Marcel Salathé was invited by  Google TechTalks to talk about the Onethousandpaintings artwork. The video published on the YouTube googletechtalks channel is shown herafter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIbyLlnKk9s

My daughter bought the Onethousandpainting Nr 658 mid 2006. It was the first painting sent to Luxembourg and one of the first work of conceptual art purchased by my daughter who owns a contemporary artgallery in Luxembourg. On August the 2nd, 2006, Luxembourg was welcomed as the24th country to the list of countries where paintings have been purchased on the blog of Marcel Salathé’s website.

Money Series

Anthony White is best known for his “Money Series”, a project that he started using the Australian Dollar. The series has now been expanded to British Pounds, US Dollars and Euros, and over five hundred paintings have been sold to over twenty different countries in the past three years. On november 12th, 2007, I received my 130€ painting from the money series of Anthony White. It was the first painting that has been sent to Luxembourg.

The  combined paintings Salathé & White Bond Nr 2, the Onethousand-painting Nr 658 and the Money Series painting 130€ are exhibited at Leslie’s Artgallery, 66-68 rue de Luxembourg, L-6140 Bridel, Luxembourg. The gallery closed definitely early 2014.

Vivaty Scenes : a personal virtual 3D web community

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Vivaty

Vivaty, a company in the San Francisco area, has developed during the last two years a platform designed for rich web content and 3D experiences called “Vivaty Scenes“. The application was launched as a public beta on tuesday 8th July 2008 in AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and in Facebook. Vivaty Scenes are realistic rooms that act as a virtual personal environment, a 3D version of your personal page. You can set the theme, decorate with furniture and other virtual goods, and chat with the avatars of friends who enter your room. You can bring in photos from Flickr and Facebook or videos from YouTube and display them on screens in your room. You can also play MP3 songs.

Vivaty Scenes is a platform which plugs straight and seamlessly into your already setup, defined and working social network. The program (a 4 MB player browser plug-in) currently only runs on Windows machines and in Internet Explorer, although Firefox and Mac versions of Vivaty Scenes are planned for release at a later date. 2 GB computer memory and 256 MB VRAM graphic card memory are recommended for using Vivaty Scenes.

Avatars

The avatar associated with one user can be changed at any time, a richer avatar customization will be available in the future. Avatars can be moved with the mouse or with the directional keys. The viewpoint (camera position) can be changed with a mouse right click and drag & drop, with the mouse wheel you can pan in and out. Avatars can be animated with gestures and express their moods in idle animations (sad, angry, happy, …).

3D objects

Scenes can be modified and customized at anytime, items can be changed and added. By double clicking on a media object (photo, photo gallery, video) the camera zooms in close but your avatar stays put. Some features of Vivaty Scenes are similar to Adobe Atmosphere discontinued on 19th december 2004.

BlinkM & ambient light’s

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BlinkM

ThingM Labs presents a smart LED (BlinkM) that makes prototyping, experimenting, and hacking with light easier than ever! An affordable drop-in replacement for a regular LED that can be any color, any brightness, and can blink and fade in virtually any pattern. Pick a color, fade between two colors, or make a crazy blinking sequence with our open source software, then just drop it into your project and go!

Designed by Tod E. Kurt, co-founder of ThingM who engineered hardware and software for robotic camera systems that went to Mars, BlinkM modules are distributed in Europe by Tinker in Milan and London and by Coolcomponents in South London.

MoodBeams

Another cool light device are Mood Beams, kaleidoscopic critters, a funky tribe of supremely portable, battery-operated characters that cycle through a spectrum of hypnotic colours. They’re sensitive to sound, so if you put them next to your radio or CD player they’ll change colour in time to the beat of the music. It’s like having a ravey light show emanating from within an amorphous Japanese cartoon character. Mood Beams can be set to perform at five different speeds: Heartbeat, Rainbow, Strobe, Colour Dance and Colour Hold – simply set the mode to suit the mood. Three series of four characters are available, they are called Curious, Surprised, Silly, Shy, Puzzled, Smiley, Chillin, Love Struck, Gloomy, Peppy, Dizzy, Chipper and are manufactured by Radica in Southern China for its customer Mattel GirlTech.

Ambient Orb

 

A glass lamp that uses color to show weather forecasts, trends in the stock market, or the traffic on your local homeway, called “Ambient Orb”, is offered as an online service by Ambient Devices.

The first emotional lamp, the Dal, a WiFi-connected device that can be programmed to respond to real-world events by emanating sequences of gentle color, was created in 2003 by Violet which created two years later the Nabaztag. The Dal lamp has been exhibited at some of the world’s most prestigious museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and The City of Science and Industry in Seoul, Korea. It received the “Star of the Observeur de design, 2004,” a design award from the French Agency for the Promotion of Industrial Creations.

Dal Lamp

Active Worlds

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ActiveWorlds

Activeworlds Inc., headquartered in Newburyport, Massachusetts, provides software products and online services that permit users to enter, move about and interact with others in a computer generated, 3D virtual environment using the Internet. A 3D virtual environment enables users to move in three dimensions and  to create objects and structures which other users can see and move in real time.

The “Active Worlds Browser” runs on Windows and Linux. Active Worlds has two ways of entering its universe: as a free tourist or as a paid citizen. Tourist mode is Active Worlds’ version of a free account with several limitations. You can pay for a citizen for the price of $6.95/month or $69.95/year.

On June 28, 1995 AlphaWorld was renamed Active Worlds and officially launched as version 1.0. On June 16, 2008, Activeworlds, Inc. released the first major update to the browser in two years, version 4.2. The update was considered smooth and painless, being completed in a matter of only fifteen minutes, compared to the several days of version 4.1’s initial upgrade in 2006. Version 4.2 includes an enhanced graphics engine, captured web pages on objects, and, most notably, customizable avatars on a scale more complex than that of Second Life.

In 2008, Alphaworld is 429,025 km2 large, has more than 360.000 paid citizens, more than 200 million objects, more than 100 shops selling a wide variety of products and more than 1000 unique worlds to explore