About Scribble Designs

We help companies in Northern Ireland to establish their products and services on the Internet, to sell to the local or international market.

Scribble Designs specialise in standards-based web design and the creation of attractive websites that are easy to use. We believe that a well-designed site will provide the best return on investment by making it easier for your customers to buy your product or get in touch with you.

We have proven expertise in marketing websites through strong search engine optimisation and link-building techniques that will increase the number of visitors that come to your site.

In addition, we are one of the first web design firms in Northern Ireland to offer consulting on blogging based on solid, practical experience!

Find out more about our Web Design and Consulting Services or get in touch to find out more.

From The Blog...

SEO - Automating Meta Description For Dynamic ASP.NET Pages

If you have dynamic content in an ASP.NET web application, it’s relatively easy to create Meta description tags from the content stored in your database.

I got the idea to do this after installing the Head META Description plugin for WordPress and realising that I wasn’t automatically doing this in my ASP.NET applications.

Why META Description Is Important

Although Search Engines don’t place as much weight on META tags these days, the Description tag in particular is useful, because it helps to control what a search engine displays in its results.

If you don’t specify text to use, the search engine will create the description line itself. It may come out as unreadable garbage. However, if you do specify a description tag, you’ll get a coherent sentence that can act as teaser content in the search engines.

How To Generate META Description In ASP.NET

OK, let’s roll up our sleeves and get started. The first assumption I’m making is that you’re storing your content in a database of some description and that you have a large text field that stores the content of each page.

Processing The String

Below I’ve shown the function which we’ll use. Firstly it strips any HTML from the string using another function, then we split the string into an array which allows us to easily select the first 20 words with the For i = 0 To intLimit loop.

If the string ends with an incomplete sentence, we add an elipsis “…” to the end of the string to signify that there’s more to read. Finally, we return the formatted Description text.


Public Shared Function extractMeta(ByVal docToParse As String) As String
	docToParse = vbStripTags(docToParse)
	Dim oArray As Array = Split(docToParse, " ")
	Dim strOutput As String = ""
	Dim intLimit As Integer = 20, i As Integer
	For i = 0 To intLimit
		strOutput &= oArray(i) & " "
	Next
	If UBound(oArray) - 1 > intLimit Then
		strOutput &= "..."
	End If
	Return strOutput
End Function

Using HTMLMETA to Insert META Description

I set the META Description at the point where I’m building the page from the database. In a nutshell though, the following code will add the Description to your page (I’m using a SqlDataReader object to read the various database fields):


Dim metaDescription As New HtmlMeta
metaDescription.Name = "description"
metaDescription.Content = extractMeta(oReader("news_text"))
Page.Header.Controls.Add(metaDescription)

You’ll probably need to do a little bit of jiggery-pokery with this to get it right, but in general it works well.

Optimising Your Descriptions

When you’re writing for the web, you need to create compelling content for your readers. Now that your descriptions are optimised, you should try to make the lead sentence of each article more compelling.

The two areas to focus on are using relevant keywords within those first 20 or so words, and writing a sentence that will make people want to read more.

Basically, you’re catering to the search engines with the keywords and your human audience with an interesting introduction. The keywords will hopefully improve your ranking, while a leading sentence will hopefully attract more searchers to click through to your site.

That’s the goal anyway! Good luck with your new META tags!

Ma.gnolia Social Bookmarking

I’m a big fan of social bookmarking services.

Some, like del.icio.us are no-frills, serious bookmarking tools. Others, like Digg are places where links get submitted and community discussions form around the pages that are submitted.

But for over a year now, there’s been a social bookmarking site that beats the spartan design of del.icio.us and has a raft of community features to beat the likes of Digg. The site I’m referring to is ma.gnolia.

Better Design

Where del.icio.us sports a utilitarian design, ma.gnolia is built for comfort. Instead of being harsh and high-contrast, the design employs pastel colours and is strikingly people-centred. Virtually everything has an avatar associated with it.

Less Focus On Populists

I wouldn’t say ma.gnolia is impervious to spammers. However, it places a lot less emphasis on popularity of links which makes it less attractive than Digg or Reddit as a place to drop potential linkbait.

More Focus On Community And Discussion

There’s a little feature ma.gnolia has that I’ve never seen anywhere else - Give Thanks. No, it’s not a cue to start praying! If you see a useful link in someone else’s bookmarks, you can click a Give Thanks button and they get a little message. It’s a great social feature, and a nice way to foster community. I’ve been thanked about three times now, and I’ve thanked quite a few users myself.

The community revolves around people and groups. Needless to say, you can establish connections with individuals in the usual friend/contact list manner. You can also create or join special interest groups. That’s where all the conversation happens.

The groups basically act as forums for specific topics. You can also submit links to a group. This can be useful, because if you come across an excellent web design resource (for example), you can recommend it to the group.

RSS Features and Blog Integration

There’s a full range of RSS feeds available in ma.gnolia. You can subscribe to the bookmarks of other users, and you can also subscribe to bookmarks by tag or by group.

The easiest way to integrate your ma.gnolia bookmarks with your (WordPress) blog is to use the RSS sidebar widget. Alternatively, you can use the Postalicious plugin to scrape up your recent bookmarks and post them as an entry on your blog, which is what I do here.

Give ma.gnolia a go…

All that remains is for you to give ma.gnolia a go. If you sign up for an account, don’t forget to add me as a contact! Remember, if you’re a del.icio.us user transferring across, you can always import your existing bookmarks and tags.

Why The Blogger’s Code of Ethics Won’t Work

The last 3 weeks or so have been uncomfortable for bloggers. It all started with Kathy Sierra’s claims on her blog that she was receiving death threats and being intimidated by anonymous bloggers. Kathy, by the way, writes a fantastic blog called Creating Passionate Users.

For whatever reason, some people took a dislike to Kathy and started singling her out for abusive comments on other blogs and forums. Some disturbing pictures appeared with Kathy’s head pasted on to them, and her personal details were leaked on the Internet.

Kathy is a high-profile example of how someone can be abused on the Internet. In a digital culture it’s easy to forget that there’s a real-life person on the other end of the screen. In the absence of human contact and direct accountability, some people think they can say or do anything online.

Recently, Tim O’Reilly published a draft Blogger’s Code of Conduct. It’s an attempt to lay down some basic principles for interaction on the web. I have a problem with it though. I don’t think it’ll work.

Why a blogger’s code of conduct won’t work:

No Enforcing Authority
In an opt-in system like this, the people who will adopt a code of conduct are probably fairly ethical already. What about the trolls? Well, they’ll just continue character assassination as before - why should they care about a code of conduct that has no authority to back it up?

Unclear Legal Jurisdiction
So, what if a blogger in Australia threatens a blogger in the UK? What if they make the threat in the comments section of an American blog? Supposing that sufficient evidence can be gathered, can it be brought to court, and if so in what country? It’s these gaping legal issues that make it so easy to post anonymous stuff online.

Limited To Bloggers - What’s That About?
I don’t understand why a code of conduct applies ONLY to bloggers. Bloggers only form a small part of the fabric of the Internet. What about forums, social networking sites and good old-fashioned email? I’m sure there are other methods of interaction that don’t necessarily involve bloggers.

Maybe I’m being too cynical about Tim’s intentions, but this looks like an ill-conceived bit of bandwagon-hopping. As Darren said, the principles resonate with me, but I can’t see myself signing up to principles that cannot be universally upheld.

I heard the phrase “like herding cats” for the first time last week - I think it’s particularly appropriate for this situation.

Matt Mullenweg Featured In Sydney Morning Herald

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m a massive fan of the WordPress blogging platform.

The person behind WordPress is Matt Mullenweg. He mentioned on his blog this evening that he’d recently done an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.

If you’re not familiar with Matt’s work, I suggest you give it a read. It’s easy to forget some of the amazing developments Matt’s had a hand in over the last few years:

He started up the WordPress project and turned it into possibly the most popular blogging platform on the planet. I would say that it’s the tool used by most serious bloggers out there today.
Along with Dougal Campbell, he developed “Ping-O-Matic, a tool that notifies search engines of blog updates.” This is a crucial component of what I cringingly call the blogosphere. It allows services like Technorati to know about new content on a website rather than having to crawl it periodically to discover it.
He’s been involved with the group that pioneered Microformats (I’ll write about these another time!).
As co-creator of Akismet, not only does he provide the best blogging software, but he helps prevent comment spam from making blogging a nightmare!

I’m writing this post for a couple of reasons. a) I was stunned at how much work this guy has done to advance blogging, b) I’m convinced he’s going to revolutionize blogging yet again, and c) I owe the guy a big thank you.

The thank you, Matt is for providing such a life-altering piece of software for free. Blogging provides people with a new means of connecting with a potentially limitless audience, allows them to clarify their thoughts and feelings in words and allows the professional bloggers among us to make a decent (some would say indecent) living! And having tried some of the alternatives, I honestly believe WordPress is synonymous with blogging.

So there you go.

Comment Relish Plugin For WordPress

A great way to build a loyal audience for your blog is to occassionally drop an email to a commenter thanking them for their comment. I’ve seen this done on parenting blogs, and it really does help build a relationship between the blog author and his or her readers.

Alister Cameron agrees, and he recently discovered a new plugin for WordPress that automatically thanks first time commenters by email. The plugin is called Comment Relish and was developed by Justin Shattuck.

The plugin allows you to send a configurable email to any new commenter on your blog, thanking them for their comment. It’s a small courtesy, but it makes people feel valued that you took the time to thank them.

Alister identified a few shortcomings with the original plugin, though and made a few changes that allow him to manually oversee the process:

I dont want the email going directly to the commenter. I want the email sent to me, so I can check the wording, any weirdnesses (like changing the greeting from Hi Darren Jones back to just Hi Darren), and so I can add my own words to the template if their comment warrants it. Sometimes people also make obvious email address typos and I can check for these, this way.

I dont want a comment sent the moment they submit the comment. Thats not natural. By sending me an email, a more organic and natural exchange occurs. It may be hours before I see that email to adjust it and pass it on, but thats more real to me.

That’s a sweet touch. With a bit more work, Justin (or Alister) could customise the plugin to have it’s own moderation panel in WordPress so that emails could be queued there for review and modification before being sent directly from the panel. That would reduce the need for Alister to route the emails to himself, and would also provide for a more natural delay in sending.

How To Configure Sitemap Autodiscovery For Your Website

I read over on ProNet today that all the major search engines have now announced support for autodiscovery of sitemaps via the robots.txt file.

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.

Power Browsing: Turn The del.icio.us Bookmarks Extension Into An Essential Web Toolkit

Since del.icio.us launched their Bookmarks extension for FireFox, a number of new features have made it easier to harness the power of your bookmarks.

Possibly the greatest of these is the Bookmarks Toolbar which gets added to the browser. You can use the toolbar to display bookmarks three ways:

Imported toolbar items: When you install the plugin originally, del.icio.us bookmarks any items you had on the toolbar and tags them firefox:toolbar.
Bookmarks by tag: My personal favourite - this allows you to select favourite tags and creates a menu out of each tag.
Bookmarks by bundle: del.icio.us allows you to create groups of tags - this view lists each bundle as a top-level menu and individual tag names as submenus.

Creating Your Toolkit From Tags

The key to displaying your most used websites is to group them into useful sets of tags. For example, I might visit my Gmail account, my RSS reader, stats packages, Google calendar on a daily basis. So, I’ll bookmark all of these pages and tag them quicklinks.

Now, to get that tag to appear as a drop-down menu, click the del.icio.us log on the toolbar and select Manage favourite tags. Type the name of the tag into the box and click add. It will appear in your list of favourite tags, where you can choose to have the bookmarks appear in alphabetical or chronological order.

Manage favourite tags dialog

Other Power Tag Ideas

I’ve got a couple of ideas for tag groups that could really work (including some I use myself).

Bookmarklets
Advertising and affiliate tracking: Store all your advertising and affiliate sites under one handy tag.
Web stats/analytics packages
Your favourite social networking sites.
Your favourite news/blog resources. RSS readers, aggregators, news websites. All in one place.

You’ve probably got other ideas for how this could be used. If so, share them in the links below.

Using Your Tag Toolbar

Opening groups of bookmarks The beauty of the toolbar is that with one click you can open all bookmarks under a given tag across multiple tabs in FireFox. So, if you’ve grouped your bookmarks correctly, you can save a whole lot of time just opening up various websites!

Simply right-click on the tag name and choose the option “Open In Tabs”.

Bookmarklets and Privacy in del.icio.us Toolbar

When I first installed the Bookmarks extension, all my social networking bookmarklets disappeared. I was a bit disherartened about this, but the good news is del.icio.us Bookmarks has support for Bookmarklets.

Where you would normally drag a bookmarklet to the toolbar, just right-click the link in your browser window and select “Bookmark this page in del.icio.us”. I use a “bookmarklets” tag to organise these and have it appear on my toolbar for easy access.

When you’re bookmarking blocks of JavaScript like bookmarklets, you’ll notice that these are not shared with other del.icio.us users. This is for security. Similarly, when you bookmark something you want to keep private, make sure you opt to NOT share it!

Del.icio.us Bookmarks Extension For FireFox

I’m an avid user of various social bookmarking services, and I mostly use del.icio.us for my everyday bookmarking requirements. I also use ma.gnolia for bookmarking because it provides a far better social experience than del.icio.us.

Anyway, for the past couple of months, I’ve been using the del.icio.us Bookmarks extension for FireFox. It’s an add-on that completely replaces the FireFox bookmarks system with your del.icio.us bookmarks, creating seamless integration between del.icio.us and FireFox.

Previous plugins have allowed you to easily bookmark and capture new pages. The Bookmarks extension allows you to quickly and easily search your bookmarks without having to visit the del.icio.us website.

The del.icio.us toolbar

The del.icio.us toolbar is a useful addition. You can use it to show recently bookmarked items, but you can also use it to display collections of bookmarks by tag or by bundle. This can be really useful as a toolkit of frequently used websites.

Sidebar Functionality

You can view your bookmarks in a sidebar. Even better, you can edit any bookmark by right-clicking on it and choosing properties. By right-clicking on a tag name, you have the option to open all the bookmarks under that tag in multiple FireFox tabs.

Extended Properties

Because of the deeper integration with FireFox, you can also assign keyword shortcuts for particular pages. For example, give the Gmail homepage a shortcut name of gmail and from now on, simply type gmail into the location bar and press return. The shortcut gmail gets automatically translated into https://mail.google.com/.

I’ve written about FireFox shortcuts in the past - check out this short tutorial.

Scribble Designs: Web Design in Northern Ireland.