When I installed the Unreality TV Forum, the first thing I did was to make the layout fixed-width for better legibility. The liquid layout of most forum themes results in long lines that are difficult to read without getting cataracts or worse! But that’s a usability thing.

The first thing I’m tackling for SEO reasons is titling. The page title is correct – it follows the format of the topic title. But on-page, the title is repeated loads of times, but not once with any sort of semantic meaning. I’m talking about the H1 tag here.

How do we tell Google what the page is about? Kick it off with a title wrapped in <h1></h1>. The problem with SMF themes is that they’re badly commented and hard to navigate. So here’s how I do it.

Theme Inheritance

There is a default theme included with SMF that all other themes derive from. The template that handles topic display is called display.template.php. If you want to customise this template, never do it to the default version – always copy the file to your custom theme folder.

The way inheritance works is that SMF will look for a customised display template first. If it doesn’t find one, it’ll revert to the default. So, bearing that in mind, let’s begin.

Take a copy of the display.template.php from the default theme folder and copy it into your current theme folder. We’ll edit this file to override the default forum topic display.

Hacking The Topic Display Template

Round about line 208 on the display template, there’s a bit of code that displays the topic title and the number of views that topic has had.

<td valign="middle" width="85%" style="padding-left: 6px;" id="top_subject">        ', $txt[118], ': ', $context['subject'], ' &nbsp;(', $txt[641], ' ', $context['num_views'], ' ', $txt[642], ')</td>

What I did was to take out the number of views and put that piece of code elsewhere. Once that was done, I wrapped the resulting code in <h1> tags, giving some semantic richness to the topic title.

The modified code (minus the page views) is this:

<td valign="middle" width="85%" style="padding-left: 6px;" id="top_subject">        <h1 class="topictitle">', $context['subject'], '</h1></td>

Now, I made this change to our forum less than a week ago. I want to give Google a bit of time to reindex the site and take into account the new page structures. It’ll be interesting to see if this relatively simple change makes a long term difference to ranking on the forum.

Hacking The Forum Users

One of the biggest problems in running a forum is that you give up control over input to your members. And your members are probably not SEO aware.

I had a word with some of our power members and asked them to be more thorough with their titles – including full names and details where possible. I didn’t approach this as an SEO issue – I approached it as a usability issue. Because we republish our latest forum headlines on the Unreality blogs, it was important that those topics made sense to any readers browsing the website.

So, we approached this from a usability point of view, which is correct. But we also hopefully gain SEO benefits.

Other SMF Hacks

There are a couple of other things I’d like to hack in SMF if I could. One is the poor URLs the system generates. The other is a full semantic reworking of the topic display template so that it’s not completely dependent on table-based layouts. If anybody’s done any work on this kind of thing, I’d love to hear it.

Currently, I’m using Yahoo! for my everyday searches, supplemented by Microsoft’s Live.com.

One of the biggest benefits of using alternative search engines is seeing different results. I’d gotten tired of Google showing Wikipedia as the first result for virtually everything. Yahoo! and Live don’t give Wikipedia nearly as much weight as Google does, so that’s a major bonus – other sites manage to rise to the top of the results pages.

Anyway, since I’m using Yahoo! much more, I was pleased to come across this guide on the Yahoo! search blog which shows you how to get better results out of your search queries. Here’s an overview:

1. Advanced search queries: terms you can add to your search to filter for specific results. You can use square brackets to specifiy the order of words in the search. For example [gerard mcgarry] will find "Gerard McGarry", but not "McGarry Gerard".
2. Package tracking: Tracking UPS, FedEx and USPS deliveries directly from the search bar.
3. Definitions & Synonyms: Type define or definition along with your query to get a dictionary style definition of a word.
4. Exclude terms: This works in the standard way – if you want to exclude a term from your search type the word with a minus sign in front of it.
5. Travel information: You can get a host of travel information including a flight tracker, traffic status and maps.
6. Quick links to Yahoo! services: Type the name of the Yahoo service you require and an exclamation mark immediately after to visit that Yahoo! service. For example, a search for ‘news!‘ will take you directly to Yahoo News.
7. Open Shortcuts: Similar to the technique in point 6, you can automatically search a specific site using this. Search Wikipedia for information about The Wombles by using the search ‘!wiki The Wombles‘. To search for variations on this type of query, do a search for ‘!list‘

Not a bad set of tips for getting the most out of Yahoo!. The one thing I’ve noticed is missing (to my knowledge) is the calculator and currency converter functionality. If I find a way to do this, I’ll let you know!

Of course, too much RSS is a bad thing. I found myself getting more and more frustrated with all the feeds in my reader (Google Reader) and watching unread items stack up. How would I ever read it all?

Well, I realised that I don’t have to read it all. I noticed that I was reading RSS in two different ways:

1. Finger on the pulse type information. This is essential reading for me and includes a number of blogs by web designers, SEOs and ProBloggers that write top-notch content and indespensible advice. These are the blogs I gain the most from and that I’m most likely to comment and participate in.

2. Non time-sensitive blogs. These will usually be blogs that are outside my key interest areas. They might be blogs about music, parenting or the odd personal blog that I like to read from time to time.

Sorting RSS Feeds By Reading Habits

I decided that Google Reader was the best choice for reading the critical RSS feeds. I could browse full feeds quickly and easily, and navigate between posts with Reader’s handy keyboard shortcuts.

I moved all my less essential feeds over to various tabs in Netvibes. I was able to create a tab for each category of feed and create a ‘wall of news’ where I could see the latest headlines at a glance.

By moving out the less essential feeds, my Google Reader has less clutter and I can browse through my feeds much more quickly. The feeds I have moved to Netvibes can be checked on an ad-hoc basis as I’m really only interested in current news from them.

How Do You Manage Your RSS Subscriptions?

If you’re an RSS addict, why not share your tips on managing your RSS feed?

Since I use WordPress for a lot of my sites, I use the Sitemap Generator plugin to automatically create a sitemap. If you’re using any other content management system or – God forbid – manually managing your content, you may have to manually create a sitemap file or find a way to automate the process. I wrote a tutorial on creating a sitemap for ASP.NET applications a while back.

Anyway, once you’ve got a sitemap configured and working, all you need to do now is modify your robots.txt file and add the line:

SITEMAP: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Save the robots.txt file back to your web server and the search engines will take care of the rest.

Benefits Of Using A Sitemap

• Autodiscovery means you don’t have to manage submission to the major search engines and any others that may adopt the sitemaps standard.
• Providing a sitemap may prevent spiders unnecessarily crawling your website, reducing load on the server and bandwidth usage.
• The sitemaps protocol allows you to identify important pages in your site and specify which ones are updated more frequently. This allows the spiders to crawl your site more intelligently.

I should just add the standard disclaimer that publishing a sitemap to the search engines does not guarantee that your site will be indexed. Nor is it a way to achieve higher rankings. It simply provides an inventory of all the pages on your website to the search engines.

When I meet new clients, they’ll often ask me to explain what each component is and why they need it. I’ve even come across people who believe their ISP has something to do with the process too!

So, this guide will be dedicated to explaining the basics of web hosting so that you can be clearer on web hosting. Hopefully you’ll walk away with a better idea of how web hosting and domain registration work and how they relate to each other.

Web Hosting

Your website is made up of a number of different components: web pages, pictures and possibly a database if your site has any type of content management system. In order for these to be available on the Internet, they need to be ‘hosted’, or stored on a computer known as a server.

Different types of web hosting service exist for virtually any technical requirement or price point. Which one you choose depends on your website project.

Web hosts can provide additional services such as email accounts, website statistics and more. The number and types of service will very much depend on the company you choose to host with.

In essence though, your web host provides the storage for your website, whether that’s HTML files, images or databases.

Domain Registration

A website without a domain can only be identified by a series of numbers known as an IP Address. IP addresses are how computers talk to one another, but they’re not very easy to remember for humans. That’s why we have domain names – to give an easy-to-remember name to each website.

The domain for this website, for example, is scribbledesigns.co.uk. The corresponding IP Address is 208.97.143.6. Which would you rather have on your business stationery?

So, in summary, your domain name is the easy-to-remember address for your website.

There are two ways to approach domain names: stick close to your brand or company name (which you should probably do by defaut), or attempt a clever industry tie-in. For example, B&Q use diy.com and Boots use wellbeing.com

Your ISP

As I said earlier, this can be a source of confusion. The simple fact is, your ISP provides you with a connection to the Internet and usually has nothing to do with your website.

Summary

This guide has been a simple introduction to web hosting and domains. As you can imagine, there is much more to the topic than what I’ve covered here. Hopefully, you now have a clearer understanding of the basics of website hosting.

RSS (short for Really Simple Syndication) has two parts:

1. A website publishes an RSS file which contains a list of current articles. This is known as an RSS feed.
2. People with RSS Reader software then ‘subscribe’ to this feed and the RSS Reader will monitor it for new articles.

Basically, RSS is a great way for people to keep up to date with a website without having to constantly check for new information.

Now, why is RSS about to hit the mainstream?

Well, Microsoft will shortly release the latest version of the Internet Explorer web browser, the most used (I won’t say popular) web browser on the planet. Early adopters are likely to download this straight away, but I hear on the grapevine that it’s also going to be released as an urgent security fix, so ultimately a lot of people are going to get this update!

One of the biggest new features the Internet Explorer will have is the ability to detect and read RSS, so if a website you’re visiting has an RSS feed available, you’ll see a little icon in the address bar. With one click, you’ll be able to subscribe to the feed.

That’s not all. Microsoft are set to release a new version of Windows which will also have RSS integration.

RSS has been around for a few years now. Techies and early adopters have been actively using RSS on their websites and subscribing to RSS feeds using browsers like FireFox and Opera or web-based RSS Readers like Bloglines or Rojo.

With the integration of RSS into Microsoft’s core products, we will shortly see mass market adoption of RSS feeds. More sites will start to offer RSS (does yours?) and subscriber numbers are likely to expand too.

If you’d like more advice or information on what RSS can do for you and your business, I’m available for consultation!

Because IE has been bundled with every version of Windows since Windows 98 (I think it was an add-on pack for Windows 95), IE has become synonymous with web browsing. Most people don’t even know that there are alternative browsers out there that they can download for free.

Which is a shame, because IE is actually a terrible web browser, and fails to support the web standards that make life easier for Web users and designers alike. Also, because of IE‘s dominance, many sites have been built around the bugs and issues in the software, which means that they often don’t work properly in other browsers.

Cue a fantastic article by John Dvorak of PC Mag, outlining how Internet Explorer has cost Microsoft in terms of security and reputation:

Microsoft’s entry into the browser business and its subsequent linking of the browser into the Windows operating system looks to be the worst decision???and perhaps the biggest, most costly gaffe???the company ever made

He goes on to suggest that most – if not all – of Microsoft’s public relations and legal problems have been largely down to Internet Explorer. He certainly has a point in that if IE hadn’t been bundled, Windows would have been a much more stable product.

I loved his proposal that they should drop support for IE permanently and start to bundle FireFox and Opera with every Windows installation. Maybe one day….

Do you remember a few years back, during the dot-com boom, British Telecom claimed that they held the patent for hyperlink technology? Well, there was a massive furore over how they planned to exploit the patent, with some pundits speculating that BT might levy a cost per link to website owners.

It sounds ludicrous in hindsight, but it amounted to little. However, had it been in any way enforcable, it would have potentially wiped out the Internet as we know it today.

The Latest Threat To The Internet

It was Brian Clark’s post, The Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse that reminded me of the latest threat to the development of the Web.

Essentially the claim is that some of the large telecoms companies in America could use their stranglehold of the market to begin charging for data-based services. It is being argued that this effective ‘taxing’ of websites will benefit the large corporations that can afford to pay for this type of service at the expense of smaller businesses who cannot.

In America, the very suggestion is causing outrage and rightly so. A move of this nature would put many small-time operators out of business, and would stifle the countless communities of Internet users across the globe. The concept of ‘net neutrality’ has been raised to describe the situation and what people stand to lose:

Net neutrality ensures that all users can access the content or run the applications and devices of their choice. With net neutrality, the network’s only job is to move data ??? not choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.

I’ve been working with the Internet for over 10 years now, and I have always regarded it as the ultimate democratic platform. People can choose exactly what they want to read, see or listen to. Websites flourish when they meet or exceed the expectations of their users and online communities have helped people and even saved lives.

Of course, all of this depends upon the ethical behaviour of those companies who control the infrastructure that the Internet runs on. The providers are the least visible part of the Internet experience, but arguably the most essential. Without them, the Internet becomes disconnected.

A Storm In A Teacup?

Like the BT cost-per-hyperlink controversy, I hope that the issue disappears quietly into Internet folklore. However, I’m not sure that this is likely. As Doc Searls wrote in his “Saving The Net” article, “The carriers have been lobbying Congress for control of the Net since Bush the Elder was in office.”

Are they likely to stop now? Your guess is as good as mine. One thing’s for sure, there’s a growing concern about the matter in the US and with groups like Save The Internet springing up to lobby in opposition, the beginnings of a resistance movement are brewing!

What these moves will mean for the rest of the world and we people in Northern Ireland is still unclear, so watch this space.

Paul’s post is an excellent introduction and carries instructions on how to use RSS feeds in the real world, including help on setting up Bloglines, My Yahoo, Google’s personalised homepages and many more free RSS reader applications.

Definitely worth a look.

On a related note, RSS technology must be starting to infiltrate the business world to some degree. I read a blog this morning that actually used the phrase “feed management”. Only in the corporate world…..

Update: If you’re still having trouble understanding the concept of RSS, Colin at Uber Geeks has posted a good entry-level description of RSS or, Web Feeds as they’re likely to become known.

In previous versions, Opera displayed small advertisements in the top of the browser as a means of funding development of the browser. The adverts could be removed by paying a small subscription fee.

According to the Opera web site:

Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera’s growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made today’s milestone an achievable goal. Premium support is available.

Fully Featured Opera

Before FireFox came along, I regularly used Opera for web browsing. It has an amazing set of features and is very useful for hardcore surfers. Some of my favourite features:

1. Extended Bookmarks functionality. If you have a folder full of bookmarks, you can elect to open all of the bookmarked pages at once.
2. Notepad facility. Excellent for doing research – you can copy selections of text into a note in the sidebar of the browser for later reference.
3. Tabbed browsing. Essential. Enough said.
4. Saved Sessions. When you exit Opera, it will remember all of the pages you had open at that point and will automatically reload them the next time you start Opera!
5. Recall closed tabs. If you accidentally close a tab during your Opera session, you can restore it through an option in the Window menu.

Now, FireFox has tempted me away, but with this latest news I might give Opera a second chance. If you’ve never experimented with alternative web browsers before, now is a good time!

Update: Some tips and tutorials for Opera users here.