My Very Strange Webhost, SBI! -- Opinions, Please
Prisoner at War
Friends, your opinions and advice, please:
I have a very simple JavaScript image-swap which works on my end but
when uploaded to my host at http://buildit.sitesell.com/sunnyside.html
does not work.
To rule out all possible factors, I made up a dummy page for an
index.html to upload, along the lines of <html><head><title></title></
head><body></body></html>.; the image-swap itself is your basic <img
src="blah.png" onMouseOver="bleh.gif" onMouseOut="blah.png">.
All file paths are correct; all image files have been uploaded; the
JavaScript itself, such as it is, is also correct.
That is to say, all very simple.
And still it doesn't work.
Now I contacted their customer/tech support, and only after three days
with the third rep was it acknowledged that I had a problem which they
ought to look into (at first they did the usual tech support thing
and, upon seeing the keyword "JavaScript" immediately disavowed any
responsibility for my situation, as if I was calling about third-party
software or something like that).
After another three days of not receiving my files that they asked me
to send, which I did via Yahoo!, they took a whole week to investigate
the matter
This is what I was told, in relevant part:
The issue is with how the absolute and relative links are
used, and our programmers have said (and tested) that
if you...
1. Upload a dummy file with all the images referenced
separately, i.e. in separate <img src ="..."> tags
2. Make all the links absolute before uploading
...then what you want to achieve will be successful on
the live page.
Can someone parse that for me, please? I don't understand what's
being asked of me, exactly.
Am I really being asked to use absolute path-names? Couldn't that
prove very messy down the road should I decide to move files/pages
around??
And, moreover, how am I supposed to use separate <img> tags for the
two image files that are to be used for an image-swap?? How would the
browser know to link the two in the manner of an image-swap if
"distributed" over separate <img> tags??
And is it perhaps somehow too much for me to expect my webpages to
upload "as is" -- or is it not unusual for a webhost to have
particular requirements about how such things need to be?? SBI! is my
first webhost so I really don't know what industry standards would be.
Ben C
>
> Friends, your opinions and advice, please:
>
> I have a very simple JavaScript image-swap which works on my end but
> when uploaded to my host at http://buildit.sitesell.com/sunnyside.html
> does not work.
>
> To rule out all possible factors, I made up a dummy page for an
> index.html to upload, along the lines of <html><head><title></title></
> head><body></body></html>.; the image-swap itself is your basic <img
> src="blah.png" onMouseOver="bleh.gif" onMouseOut="blah.png">.
Doesn't onmouseover etc. have to be a script, not just the name of
another image?
I've never heard of this technique before and can't find it in the HTML
spec.
> All file paths are correct; all image files have been uploaded; the
> JavaScript itself, such as it is, is also correct.
>
> That is to say, all very simple.
>
> And still it doesn't work.
>
> Now I contacted their customer/tech support, and only after three days
> with the third rep was it acknowledged that I had a problem which they
> ought to look into (at first they did the usual tech support thing
> and, upon seeing the keyword "JavaScript" immediately disavowed any
> responsibility for my situation, as if I was calling about third-party
> software or something like that).
It's not like the JavaScript is running on their server, so it shouldn't
make any difference to them.
> After another three days of not receiving my files that they asked me
> to send, which I did via Yahoo!, they took a whole week to investigate
> the matter
>
> This is what I was told, in relevant part:
>
> The issue is with how the absolute and relative links are
> used, and our programmers have said (and tested) that
> if you...
>
> 1. Upload a dummy file with all the images referenced
> separately, i.e. in separate <img src ="..."> tags
>
> 2. Make all the links absolute before uploading
>
> ...then what you want to achieve will be successful on
> the live page.
>
>
> Can someone parse that for me, please? I don't understand what's
> being asked of me, exactly.
>
> Am I really being asked to use absolute path-names? Couldn't that
> prove very messy down the road should I decide to move files/pages
> around??
Yes. And if they're absolute, how are you supposed to know what the root
is?
> And, moreover, how am I supposed to use separate <img> tags for the
> two image files that are to be used for an image-swap?? How would the
> browser know to link the two in the manner of an image-swap if
> "distributed" over separate <img> tags??
>
> And is it perhaps somehow too much for me to expect my webpages to
> upload "as is" -- or is it not unusual for a webhost to have
> particular requirements about how such things need to be?? SBI! is my
> first webhost so I really don't know what industry standards would be.
I don't think things are supposed to be this difficult.
Kim André Akerø
The onmouseover and onmouseout parameters of the tag needs to refer to
a JavaScript function, or even a small JavaScript contained inside the
parameter text, not a reference to an image location.
How to achieve such an effect is described, among other places, here:
http://www.hypergurl.com/rolloverimage.html
--
Kim André Akerø
- kima...@NOSPAMbetadome.com
(remove NOSPAM to contact me directly)
mygarb...@hotmail.com
bleh.gif would never be parsed as a valid function. By any scripting
engine.
<img src="blah.png" onMouseOver="this.src='bleh.gif';"
onMouseOut="this.src='blah.png';"> will work.
Yet the support is plain clueless. Dump'em. Find yourself a real
hosting service - or host it yourself, all you need is static ip from
your 'net provider. Even plain XP can support up to 80 concurrent
connections - enough for an amateur site. Need more? Get
Linux/Apache for free, or eMule WinServer2003 - Bill Gates surely will
not go broke without your license fee.
NNN
Jerry Stuckle
The hosting company's job is to keep servers running, not troubleshoot
our code. I would never expect a hosting company to be knowledgeable
about javascript or any other language.
And hosting it yourself is the worst thing you can do. What happens if
your phone line goes down? Your power goes out? Your server hangs
while you are at work - or worse yet, on vacation. Additionally, it may
be a violation of your ISP's TOS (and they may even have port 80 blocked
for incoming requests).
Plus you wouldn't get support for your javascript.
Hosting is a commodity. But don't expect the hosting company to do what
you're not paying for.
--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstu...@attglobal.net
==================
SAZ
@k37g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>, prisone...@yahoo.com says...
wrote, as it really isn't their problem - especially Javascript, which
is client-side. By responding at all, they were actually going above
and beyond what could reasonably be expected.
Sherman Pendley
> On 2008-05-08, Prisoner at War <prisone...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Friends, your opinions and advice, please:
>>
>> I have a very simple JavaScript image-swap which works on my end but
>> when uploaded to my host at http://buildit.sitesell.com/sunnyside.html
>> does not work.
>>
>> To rule out all possible factors, I made up a dummy page for an
>> index.html to upload, along the lines of <html><head><title></title></
>> head><body></body></html>.; the image-swap itself is your basic <img
>> src="blah.png" onMouseOver="bleh.gif" onMouseOut="blah.png">.
>
> Doesn't onmouseover etc. have to be a script, not just the name of
> another image?
One could write a popup script that would scan the DOM in the domReady
event, and replace the image names with real event handler closures
that load the named images.
I'm doing a similar feature on a site I'm working on right now - I
include a script at the top of the page, and links that include a "rel"
attribute value are modified through the DOM to add an onClick event
that is handled by loading the target with AJAX and displaying it in a
popup div.
Since the pieces that make the page reliant on JavaScript are added by
a JavaScript event handler, on browsers that don't do JavaScript by
design or by user choice, the links will remain ordinary links. That
makes this technique a good way to build in a graceful fallback.
Perhaps Prisoner was using a script at one time that did this kind of
on the fly modification, and is now using one for which he needs to
insert a more traditional function call into the event attributes.
>> Now I contacted their customer/tech support, and only after three days
>> with the third rep was it acknowledged that I had a problem which they
>> ought to look into (at first they did the usual tech support thing
>> and, upon seeing the keyword "JavaScript" immediately disavowed any
>> responsibility for my situation, as if I was calling about third-party
>> software or something like that).
>
> It's not like the JavaScript is running on their server, so it shouldn't
> make any difference to them.
This is a free hosting service, right? They could be inserting content,
like banner ads or something, in return for free hosting. I can well
imagine a banner ad with a mouseover script. And I can well imagine a
mouseover script being packaged this way. It needs JavaScript to
function anyway, so using JS to connect the event handlers is no
additional burden. It's certainly valid HTML. And it's a bit less
error prone; end users can use it who don't know a bit of JavaScript.
sherm--
--
My blog: http://shermspace.blogspot.com
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net
Sherman Pendley
> The hosting company's job is to keep servers running, not troubleshoot
> our code. I would never expect a hosting company to be knowledgeable
> about javascript or any other language.
I couldn't agree more!
Of course, having worked the phones in a "full service" hosting provider
that *did* offer that kind of support, in the full swing of the boom of
the 90s, I'm kind of biased on the subject. :-)
> And hosting it yourself is the worst thing you can do. What happens
> if your phone line goes down? Your power goes out? Your server hangs
> while you are at work - or worse yet, on vacation.
That depends. If it's a hobby site, the answer to those questions may
well be, who cares. I can fix it when I get back, the line gets fixed,
or whatever. Baby pictures don't really need five nines uptime.
> Additionally, it
> may be a violation of your ISP's TOS (and they may even have port 80
> blocked for incoming requests).
I'd be far more concerned with that aspect of it that the reliability.
Also, many ISPs offer web space to their customers, many of them for
free.
Richard Cornford
> On Thu, 8 May 2008 13:54:01 -0700 (PDT), Prisoner at War wrote:
<snip>
><img src="blah.png" onMouseOver="bleh.gif"
> onMouseOut="blah.png">.
> bleh.gif would never be parsed as a valid function.
> By any scripting engine.
The values of intrinsic event attributes are not parsed as functions,
they are parsed as function bodies, and - bleh.gif - is a valid function
body. It is a single expression statement consisting of a dot notation
property accessor. Pointless, and unlikely to execute without error, but
still completely valid.
Richard.
Prisoner at War
>
>
> It's not uncommon for a Hosting Tech Dept to walk away from a script you
> wrote, as it really isn't their problem - especially Javascript, which
> is client-side. By responding at all, they were actually going above
> and beyond what could reasonably be expected.
It may sound like it, but it actually doesn't make sense.
If I upload valid HTML, and it comes out screwy on their servers, can
they just say that they "don't do coding" and leave it at that?
Likewise with JavaScript, by the same logic: it's valid, it works
perfectly on my end, all files necessary had been uploaded, the script
is good. Why wouldn't it work on their servers?
Now it turns out that this webhost does have a certain way of doing
things, owing to the SEO they (claim to) provide, which makes them
different and thus one can't just expect "as is" uploading sometimes.
That's my explanation, anyway: they don't really care to explain; they
just tell me this is what I have to do ("separate the images" --
which, this rep later explained upon further prompting from me, that
she'd meant, upload them separately via separate dummy html pages so
that their system "recognizes" the images -- apparently it didn't
before, when uploaded together...?!?!)....
Prisoner at War
>
>
>
> Doesn't onmouseover etc. have to be a script, not just the name of
> another image?
No, actually; it could simply be, like what I have,
<img name="image" id="image"
onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif;'"
onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif;'">
> I've never heard of this technique before and can't find it in the HTML
> spec.
Yes, well, it's not "HTML" though it does occur in an HTML tag....
> It's not like the JavaScript is running on their server, so it shouldn't
> make any difference to them.
The tech support rep said this morning that I should upload the two
images involved in the image-swap *separately* via *separate* webpages
*each*...apparently, their system isn't recognizing one of them right
now, even though they are both already on their servers!
SBI! has a proprietary way of doing things, related to the SEO
services they provide, and apparently a simple image-swap like what I
have is a consequence of their peculiar way of doing things...!
> Yes. And if they're absolute, how are you supposed to know what the root
> is?
I wonder if they mean that I should use something like
<img src="http://www.my-website.com/image-files/image.gif">
> I don't think things are supposed to be this difficult.
I don't think so either -- but I don't know enough SEO right now to
know whether I should stick around with SBI! due to their claims of
SEO success.
Prisoner at War
Erratum:
I had neglected the "src" attribute in my post above (though not on
the actual webpage at issue)"
<img name="image" id="image" src=pic1.gif"
onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif;'"
onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif;'" />
Prisoner at War
>
> One could write a popup script that would scan the DOM in the domReady
> event, and replace the image names with real event handler closures
> that load the named images.
>
> I'm doing a similar feature on a site I'm working on right now - I
> include a script at the top of the page, and links that include a "rel"
> attribute value are modified through the DOM to add an onClick event
> that is handled by loading the target with AJAX and displaying it in a
> popup div.
>
> Since the pieces that make the page reliant on JavaScript are added by
> a JavaScript event handler, on browsers that don't do JavaScript by
> design or by user choice, the links will remain ordinary links. That
> makes this technique a good way to build in a graceful fallback.
>
> Perhaps Prisoner was using a script at one time that did this kind of
> on the fly modification, and is now using one for which he needs to
> insert a more traditional function call into the event attributes.
Interesting project you're attempting there...but actually, here's the
complete webpage I'm talking about, right here, in under 10 lines of
ASCII:
<html>
<head>
<title>test page</title>
</head>
<body>
<img name="image" id="image" src=pic1.gif"
onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif;'"
onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif;'" />
</body>
</html>
> This is a free hosting service, right? They could be inserting content,
> like banner ads or something, in return for free hosting. I can well
> imagine a banner ad with a mouseover script. And I can well imagine a
> mouseover script being packaged this way. It needs JavaScript to
> function anyway, so using JS to connect the event handlers is no
> additional burden. It's certainly valid HTML. And it's a bit less
> error prone; end users can use it who don't know a bit of JavaScript.
They're $300 a year! No, no banner ads, etc.
Their claim to fame is that they have an online "module" that builds a
website for you -- you click, click, click deciding on what pre-
determined website features you want...kind of like an instant noodles
approach to site-building.
Needless to say, I don't need that and am building my own (HTML and
even intermediate CSS and basic JavaScript is easy).
However, their second claim to fame, proprietary SEO, is what I'm
interested in -- I don't know much SEO to feel confident on my own in
that regard, and I don't know enough SEO to determine whether their
SEO claims are just "common-sensical stuff" I could do on my own (like
with HTML and site-building).
Hence, my dilemma.
I was thinking of just sticking with them for the learning experience,
but this sucks if little weird things like this image-swap issue pop
up every now and then.
Prisoner at War
wrote:
>
>
> The onmouseover and onmouseout parameters of the tag needs to refer to
> a JavaScript function, or even a small JavaScript contained inside the
> parameter text, not a reference to an image location.
Okay, here's the actual <img> tag that was used:
<img name="image" id="image" src=pic1.gif"
onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif;'"
onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif;'" />
Remember, it works perfectly on *my* end. If it were an issue of a
JavaScript error, it would not have worked.
> How to achieve such an effect is described, among other places, here:http://www.hypergurl.com/rolloverimage.html
Well, sure, it's possible to do it that way, too, but it seems like an
extra step, calling up JavaScript from within the HTML tag for a
simple thing like an image-swap when using JavaScript in the HTML
right there would suffice also.
> --
> Kim André Akerø
> - kiman...@NOSPAMbetadome.com
Prisoner at War
wrote:
Sorry, I was dabbling in my own short-hand; the actual HTML/JavaScript
used is
<img name="image" id="image" src=pic1.gif"
onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif;'"
onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif;'" />
Now I've received word again from SBI! tech/customer support, and the
instructions yesterday about "separately referencing the image files"
was meant as "upload each image file in its own dummy webpage" so that
the system recognizes the files -- apparently, even though the files
are already on the SBI! servers, they're not been seen by the system!!
Now their system is peculiar in that it's set up in some secret way
for SEO purposes...but this is a very strange consequence of that
indeed! At least that's the best explanation I can come up with, for
why a simple image-swap occasions such weirdness on the SBI! servers
-- again, remember that it works perfectly on my end, so it's not a
matter of invalid JavaScript or something.
Prisoner at War
wrote:
>
>
> bleh.gif would never be parsed as a valid function. By any scripting
> engine.
Remember, I'd reported that it works on my end perfectly.
> <img src="blah.png" onMouseOver="this.src='bleh.gif';"
> onMouseOut="this.src='blah.png';"> will work.
Okay, sorry, I was dabbling in a bit of my own short-hand notation
there; the actual HTML/JavaScript used was
<img name="image" id="image" src=pic1.gif"
onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif;'"
onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif;'" />
> Yet the support is plain clueless. Dump'em. Find yourself a real
> hosting service - or host it yourself, all you need is static ip from
> your 'net provider. Even plain XP can support up to 80 concurrent
> connections - enough for an amateur site. Need more? Get
> Linux/Apache for free, or eMule WinServer2003 - Bill Gates surely will
> not go broke without your license fee.
Well, I do want to put a website before I delve into how to host one
myself -- if I'd ever even go that far, actually (it's interesting,
but I'd probably rather use the time to learn Photoshop or something,
you see).
Any webhosts you might recommend? For a newbie who's growing in
knowledge and ability, yet doesn't plan on progressing beyond some
"intermediate" level of expertise in general. I'm souring on SBI!
because of a number of reasons, this little image-swap weirdness being
one of them.
> NNN
Jim
>
> Sorry, I was dabbling in my own short-hand; the actual HTML/JavaScript
> used is
>
> <img name="image" id="image" src=pic1.gif"
> onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif;'"
> onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif;'" />
>
Oh, my, Prisoner. You say this works on your computer? But..but..
all the TYPOS!!!
Can you tell the difference between what you have typed above and
this:
<img name="image" id="image" src="pic1.gif"
onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif';"
onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif';" />
All quotes (double and single) are properly opened and closed, and the
semi-colons go *between* the the single/doubles. Now THIS code works
fine on my system.
Hope it helps!
Jim
Prisoner at War
>
>
> The hosting company's job is to keep servers running, not troubleshoot
> our code. I would never expect a hosting company to be knowledgeable
> about javascript or any other language.
I'm not asking to "troubleshoot" my JavaScript -- I'm asking them why
perfectly valid JavaScript is getting screwed up when uploaded to
their servers.
And the thing about SBI! -- why they cost $300 a year -- is that
they're "more than just webhosting," as one of their mottos go.
They're about site-building (if you don't know HTML and CSS -- but I
do), SEO (which I really don't know much about), and general
entrepreneurship on the Net. To those ends, their stated policy is to
excel at customer and tech support, but I have to say that so far they
seem to be only slightly better than typical tech support experiences
I have (namely, they read from a script, scan for keywords, and
basically don't get into your mind and your situation so much as,
well, like I said, work from a flowchart-like script).
> And hosting it yourself is the worst thing you can do. What happens if
> your phone line goes down? Your power goes out? Your server hangs
> while you are at work - or worse yet, on vacation. Additionally, it may
> be a violation of your ISP's TOS (and they may even have port 80 blocked
> for incoming requests).
I don't know if it's the "worst" thing possible -- it's intrigued me
before -- but certainly at this point it's just not cost-effective for
me: I have enough to learn as it is without any more "esoterica
technica" to further assimilate/grok.
> Plus you wouldn't get support for your javascript.
They don't provide "JavaScript support," and neither was I asking that
of them (though they assumed that as soon as they saw the keyword
"JavaScript," a most unfortunate demonstration of the narrow keyword-
mindset prevalent among people in general [this is why politicians say
the things they do, for example]).
> Hosting is a commodity. But don't expect the hosting company to do what
> you're not paying for.
Please visit http://buildit.sitesell.com/sunnyside.html for their
terms of service. I honestly was not asking of them anything they
weren't obligated to provide for $300 a year.
> --
> ==================
> Remove the "x" from my email address
> Jerry Stuckle
> JDS Computer Training Corp.
> jstuck...@attglobal.net
> ==================
Jim
> used is
> <img name="image" id="image" src=pic1.gif"
> onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif;'"
> onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif;'" />
Oh, my, Prisoner. You say this works on your computer? But..but..
all the TYPOS!!!
Can you tell the difference between what you have typed above and
this:
<img name="image" id="image" src="pic1.gif"
onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif';"
onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif';" />
All quotes (double and single) are properly opened and closed, and
the
semi-colons go *between* the the single/doubles. Now THIS code works
fine on my system.
Hope it helps!
Oh, just *what* is SEO? I've never heard of it.
Jim
Prisoner at War
Jeez, I really don't understand how people can misunderstand me. I
mean, I wrote it there, in plain English, right from the get-go. I
even specifically said that I'm not requesting JavaScript help of
them, but inquiring why perfectly valid script that runs as intended
on my end does not when uploaded to them.
Now how's that asking them for JavaScript help??
This is one aspect of human nature I'm afraid I shall never
understand. I say "A" and even go on to specifically say that I'm not
saying "B" and still people will say that I'm saying "B"!! =(
> Of course, having worked the phones in a "full service" hosting provider
> that *did* offer that kind of support, in the full swing of the boom of
> the 90s, I'm kind of biased on the subject. :-)
SBI! was started in 1997, so they have a solid record as a business,
it seems. Still, in less than three months I'm growing disillusioned
enough to start thinking about another webhost. What's keeping me
around is their SEO claims and my own lack of knowledge about SEO.
> That depends. If it's a hobby site, the answer to those questions may
> well be, who cares. I can fix it when I get back, the line gets fixed,
> or whatever. Baby pictures don't really need five nines uptime.
Indeed, and I do hope to make money from my upcoming site, if not
achieve the full financial independence for which "structural
engineering" SBI! claims to offer.
> I'd be far more concerned with that aspect of it that the reliability.
>
> Also, many ISPs offer web space to their customers, many of them for
> free.
Despite my growing though still fairly slight disillusionment, I was
thinking about just sticking with SBI! for another year or even two to
keep learning (particularly about SEO) and see what happens -- but
silly stuff like this simple image-swap weirdness makes me really
question them....
Prisoner at War
>
>
> Oh, my, Prisoner. You say this works on your computer? But..but..
> all the TYPOS!!!
Sorry!! I'm actually working from memory here, 'cause I don't have
access to my actual webpages right now, and...agggrrhh, long
story...! But typos aside, please just for the sake of argument
believe me that yes it really does work perfectly on my laptop! When
I work on my site again this weekend I'll post the 100% exact code
(right now, typos aside, what I'd provided so far is 99.9% the
same)....
> Can you tell the difference between what you have typed above and
> this:
>
> <img name="image" id="image" src="pic1.gif"
> onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif';"
> onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif';" />
>
> All quotes (double and single) are properly opened and closed, and
> the
> semi-colons go *between* the the single/doubles. Now THIS code works
> fine on my system.
Well, yes, that's precisely my predicament -- it's valid code and
works, but not on their servers!
This morning I received further word that what I should do is upload
each image separately on their own webpages -- though the SBI! server
has these images already, apparently it's not able to recognize them
unless they're uploaded separately!
I should explain that SBI! has a weird convoluted way of doing many
simple things, owing to the proprietary "database-design" they use for
purposes of SEO, and so you don't just upload each necessary image,
you can only upload them as a part of a webpage that specifically
calls for them! IOW, I can't just decide to upload "pic1.gif" if no
webpage asks for a "pic1.gif"...weird, but that's how they say they
have to do things in order for their database, which is designed for
SEO, to "pick them up"....
Now what they're telling me is that even though my page had called for
the two images of an image-swap, and that those two images were
uploaded, their system just doesn't see those images and therefore I
now have to create two separate dummy webpages, each calling for only
one of the two images, so that they may be re-uploaded and, hopefully,
seen by the SBI! system!!
JFC...this nuttiness makes me wonder if they really can do any SEO
(their other claim to fame)....
> Hope it helps!
>
> Oh, just *what* is SEO? I've never heard of it.
Search Engine Optimization -- inducing, as much as possible, the
search engines, particular Big Brother Google, to actually know about
your webpage and list it and list it very (extremely) highly, no less
than first 30 results...otherwise, great as your site may be, very few
people know about it and hence you're not making money....
I am sorely tempted to quit SBI! right now, but three things are
keeping me around for a little bit longer: SEO, their private forums
which are full of business ideas and such, and the lack of a similar
webhost ("similar" being one that takes SEO as its mission -- "above
and beyond webhosting," as SBI! likes to say)....
> Jim
Joose Niemi
Prisoner at War wrote:
> Okay, here's the actual <img> tag that was used:
>
> <img name="image" id="image" src=pic1.gif"
> onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif;'"
> onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif;'" />
You have a syntax error there. You're setting src to 'pic2.gif;' and
back to 'pic1.gif;'. Notice the extra ";" - it doesn't belong there.
Perhaps you meant to write -
onmouseover="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif';" - but you
may as well omit the ";" all together.
Better yet, use - onmouseover="this.src='pic2.gif'".
> Remember, it works perfectly on *my* end. If it were an issue of a
> JavaScript error, it would not have worked.
I find it very hard to believe that your code above could have worked in
any browser.
--
Joose Niemi
Chaddy2222
Prisoner at War wrote:
They do not seam to have a clue of what they are doing. If you want a
good web host go with Server Grade.
http://www.servergrade.com.au/
I have been wih them for 6 months and have not had any major issues.
They have quite good tech support as well and if they don't support a
feature they tell you strate away.
--
Regards Chad. http://freewebdesignonline.org
Sherman Pendley
> They're $300 a year! No, no banner ads, etc.
>
> Their claim to fame is that they have an online "module" that builds a
> website for you -- you click, click, click deciding on what pre-
> determined website features you want...kind of like an instant noodles
> approach to site-building.
Run away. Don't walk - run. You said you can get a prorated refund? Get
it. For one thing, web hosting can be found for half what you're paying
or less.
> However, their second claim to fame, proprietary SEO, is what I'm
> interested in -- I don't know much SEO to feel confident on my own in
> that regard
SEO is pure, 100% snake oil. People write illegible content and publish
pages with 800 HTML errors each, and wonder why Google can't index their
mess. SEO hucksters then try to sell them on the idea of adding a bunch
of meta gibberish, hiding keywords in comments or absolutely positioned
way off to the right of the visible page, etc.
Correct HTML with relevant text doesn't need to be "optimized" for search
engines - they're optimized for it.
> I was thinking of just sticking with them for the learning experience
You've gotten overcharged and ripped off by a huckster. That's enough
learning experiences for now, I think. :-)
Sherman Pendley
> On May 8, 11:57 pm, Sherman Pendley <spamt...@dot-app.org> wrote:
>>
>> One could write a popup script that would scan the DOM in the domReady
>> event, and replace the image names with real event handler closures
>> that load the named images.
>>
>> I'm doing a similar feature on a site I'm working on right now
>
> Interesting project you're attempting there
I didn't say "attempting," I said "doing." :-)
I'm not trying to be snooty or anything, I understand that what I'm
talking about here would be hard for a newbie. I'm just saying, I'm not
a newbie, nor am I describing something I mean to attempt and hope will
work - I'm talking from experience about a working site.
Dave
> Now their system is peculiar in that it's set up in some secret way
> for SEO purposes...but this is a very strange consequence of that
> indeed! At least that's the best explanation I can come up with, for
> why a simple image-swap occasions such weirdness on the SBI! servers
> -- again, remember that it works perfectly on my end, so it's not a
> matter of invalid JavaScript or something.
Couple of things to check:
1. Make sure that the web page that you upload matches the one that's
served by your host. If their secret sauce changes the HTML or JavaScript
before serving the file, that could be what's breaking your example page.
2. Try doing what they say. It's entirely possible that their secret sauce
includes some weird web server that scans a directory, and refuses to serve
images that aren't referenced from an "<img src="blah.gif"> tag.
--
Dave
SAZ
1c6c9c...@c58g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>, prisone...@yahoo.com
says...
Prisoner at War
>
>
> Run away. Don't walk - run. You said you can get a prorated refund? Get
> it. For one thing, web hosting can be found for half what you're paying
> or less.
Indeed, I did know that -- but, like I said, the three benefits of
SBI! are "near-instant-noodle site-building," SEO, and private forums
concerning entrepreneurship (for example, I found through one of those
forums a company in NYC that makes copies of your DVDs [with keep-case
and cover and even a paper insert) *and* drop-ships them for US$2
each, with no minimum order -- you make a how-to DVD and sell it for
$15, $20, or $30).
> SEO is pure, 100% snake oil.
Eh? 100%?? I know it's got a bad rap -- the way DHTML and even
JavaScript had received -- but faulty implementation isn't the same as
a wholly ridiculous idea in the first place! Do you mean to say
something like, nobody does SEO well, or do you mean to say that
there's no such thing as SEO???
> People write illegible content and publish
> pages with 800 HTML errors each, and wonder why Google can't index their
> mess. SEO hucksters then try to sell them on the idea of adding a bunch
> of meta gibberish, hiding keywords in comments or absolutely positioned
> way off to the right of the visible page, etc.
Actually, SBI! is almost anti-SEO in that regard; they advise against
playing SEO games. I introduced that term "SEO" in describing one of
their services because that's how it would appear to an outsider, as a
kind of SEO, but SBI! actually speaks against SEOing.
> Correct HTML with relevant text doesn't need to be "optimized" for search
> engines - they're optimized for it.
Well, no one knows the algorithms used to determine relevancy for any
given set of keywords, so it's hard to say what works (and to what
degree)...part of my reluctance to leave SBI! is because they do seem
to know more than me when it comes to "SEO" -- that is, getting picked
up by the search engines.
For example, my natural inclination as a writer would be to use so-
called clever turns of phrase, etc. -- but the very ambiguous and
double-entendre nature of such rhetoric is precisely what confounds
search engines, since they do not parse so much as pick up on keywords
(and backlinks and so forth)...so, anyway, I need to keep that stuff
in mind, you see, which I didn't even realize had existed...SBI! has
been a learning experience for me in that regard.
> You've gotten overcharged and ripped off by a huckster. That's enough
> learning experiences for now, I think. :-)
Hehe, learn from the best, I say! ;-)
Seriously, I know they're "marketoids," but that doesn't mean I can't
learn from them. However, just getting a simple image-swap to work
has been a frustrating experience -- an image-swap that's perfectly
all right, mind you; it's their proprietary system that's choking up
on it for some reason.
UPDATE: SBI! tech just e-mailed me and it seems that being "live" on
the web is okay but previewing it on their server isn't -- ?!?! --
even though it should be okay either way!
Here, check out this test page I made for them to demonstrate my
problem: www.ego-management.org/test.html -- see the simple image-
swap? Well, it works now as intended -- live on the web -- but
***previewing*** that page on their server (not "live" on the web and
publicly accessible) screws it all up!
The problem's not necessarily solved, though...SBI! tech is advising
that I use absolute path names for all my <img src="">...WTF?!?!?!?!
Prisoner at War
>
>
> I'm not trying to be snooty or anything, I understand that what I'm
> talking about here would be hard for a newbie. I'm just saying, I'm not
> a newbie, nor am I describing something I mean to attempt and hope will
> work - I'm talking from experience about a working site.
Ah, um, didn't mean "attempting" in a literal sense.
So who's your webhost??
Prisoner at War
They seem to be good at what they do: several of the sites they host
are top-ranked (and that would reflect on them since these sites all
adopt an "SBI! Approach" to things), as seen on http://results.sitesell.com/sunnyside.html
-- now because I'm not up on SEO, I can't tell whether that's genuine
or what...I do know that what SBI! offers in terms of "site mechanics"
I can handle on my own with all the books I've been reading (not to
mention ***these fine newsgroups!!***), but I don't know whether their
SEO claim is equally something I could learn or whether it truly is,
as they claim, to be the result of their proprietary database way of
webhosting....
But this image-swap craziness, and some other less serious issues, has
me seriously bummed out for the time being....
> If you want a
> good web host go with Server Grade.http://www.servergrade.com.au/
> I have been wih them for 6 months and have not had any major issues.
> They have quite good tech support as well and if they don't support a
> feature they tell you strate away.
Hmmm, Australia?? I know this is the web, but I'd never considered a
company that celebrates Christmas in summer! ;-)
Thanks for the recommendation -- I'll check it out...but why should I
use them as opposed to the Big Boys like Yahoo! or 1&1 or Dreamhost or
Monster, etc.??
> --
> Regards Chad.http://freewebdesignonline.org
Prisoner at War
>
>
> It sounds like you need a new web hosting company.
Any you might recommend?
The thing with SBI! is that they're the only ones who even claim to
have some kind of "SEO secret" (not their phrase; I'm paraphrasing
them with that) which helps propel a site to top spots on SERPs. I
don't know enough about SEO and such matters to gauge whether their
claims are reliable or whether the sites they showcase on
http://results.sitesell.com/sunnyside.html would have succeeded anyway.
Mark Goodge
keyboard and typed:
>On May 9, 1:17 pm, SAZ <saz1...@nospamexcite.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> It sounds like you need a new web hosting company.
>
>
>Any you might recommend?
>
>The thing with SBI! is that they're the only ones who even claim to
>have some kind of "SEO secret" (not their phrase; I'm paraphrasing
>them with that) which helps propel a site to top spots on SERPs.
No, they're not. *All* the SEO snake oil salesmen claim to have "the
secret" that no-one else knows.
It's pretty much the surefire sign that they are selling snake-oil,
since, in reality, the only reliable methods of getting to the top of
the rankings are already very widely known
> I
>don't know enough about SEO and such matters to gauge whether their
>claims are reliable or whether the sites they showcase on
>http://results.sitesell.com/sunnyside.html would have succeeded anyway.
There's nothing special about those Alexa rankings. It may sound
impressive to say that they're in the "top 1%" of websites, but pretty
much any active site can acheive that. The web has a very long tail -
every semi-comatose or unmaintained site is still listed by Alexa,
despite only getting maybe one hit a month. You can get into the top
1% of Alexa rankings with only a handful of visitors (one of which
will obviously be yourself) using the site regularly.
Mark
--
Stuff, some of it good, at http://www.good-stuff.co.uk
"Take me or leave me, don't have to believe me"
SAZ
@j22g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>, prisone...@yahoo.com says...
The vast majority of these sites are over 500,000 in Alexa. Frankly,
I'm shocked they're even advertising these numbers and actimg like it's
something special.
I have a VPS with ServInt, been very happy for the past 18 months. You
may not need a VPS, but it's nice to have complete control over
everything.
Sherman Pendley
> On May 9, 12:36 pm, Sherman Pendley <spamt...@dot-app.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I'm not trying to be snooty or anything, I understand that what I'm
>> talking about here would be hard for a newbie. I'm just saying, I'm not
>> a newbie, nor am I describing something I mean to attempt and hope will
>> work - I'm talking from experience about a working site.
>
> Ah, um, didn't mean "attempting" in a literal sense.
Sorry, I misunderstood.
> So who's your webhost??
I use DreamHost - $120/year, more space and transfer than any ten sites of
mine will need, and FastCGI support. The latter is a very nice feature if
your vocabulary includes the words Rails or Catalyst, and it's unusual to
find at that price.
mygarb...@hotmail.com
Dunno... The sites I worked on are mostly hosted on corporate
intranets. The only one open to Internet was also hosted by a big
corp - that was their online ordering system. And I still have not
found time to put together my own private site.
NNN
Prisoner at War
>
>
> The vast majority of these sites are over 500,000 in Alexa. Frankly,
> I'm shocked they're even advertising these numbers and actimg like it's
> something special.
Huh? I'm talking about http://results.sitesell.com/sunnyside.html --
like half are *under* 500K Alexa...now my sense is that you can't make
much money until you're 100K Alexa (and no "financial independence"
without ranking below ~45K)...correct me if I'm wrong...but at least
showing up on Alexa, low-res metric though they are, is a good
start....
> I have a VPS with ServInt, been very happy for the past 18 months. You
> may not need a VPS, but it's nice to have complete control over
> everything.
Whoa, I don't even have any idea what you mean. What kind of control?
Is there a good place where I can learn about webhosting matters? I
don't mean a technical manual or "white paper" reference; I mean, as a
would-be webmaster, where can I start to get my bearings in this
world?? I really did learn a lot with SBI! in these three months, but
I'm not sure how much more there is to learn...I may just stick it out
for the year just to leave no stone unturned over there, I dunno, but
I still see it as a case of me "outgrowing" them than them selling
junk. It's not a matter of personal pride; I really feel like I've
learned a lot. SBI! has given me a sort of conceptual framework to
tie things together...imagine buying a car and getting driving lessons
along with it, instead just buying a car and that's it...SBI! has been
holding this newbie's hand, and that's something I may yet need when
it comes to SEO....
What do *you* do for SEO, may I ask? Just curious. After all, a tree
falling in the forest empty of humans to hear it....
Prisoner at War
wrote:
>
>
> No, they're not. *All* the SEO snake oil salesmen claim to have "the
> secret" that no-one else knows.
Indeed -- and let me be fair to them: "SEO" is actually not something
they claim to deal in; not as such...I use the term "SEO" because they
do claim to help with SERP matters, but they are actually anti-SEO and
decry the SEO mindset. They actively advise against keyword games and
basically anything that pisses off a search engine (link farms, etc.).
I'd used the term "SEO" to describe their claim to fame because it's a
familiar term but they themselves describe it much more mystically as
"The Tao of SBI!" -- I kid you not. Though meant with a tongue-in-
cheek affection, they claim to out-SEO the SEOers by "keeping it
real"...what they emphasize is honest-to-goodness content generation
in conjunction with the proprietary set-up they have...again, I simply
don't know enough about SEO to gauge whether what SBI! does is
something I could actually do on my own (without gross
inefficiencies)...I find it hard to believe that all SEO is junk, as
you seem to suggest...after all, search engines do have their
mysterious ways, and certain SEO principles seem valid enough in a
common sense way....
> It's pretty much the surefire sign that they are selling snake-oil,
> since, in reality, the only reliable methods of getting to the top of
> the rankings are already very widely known
What are they, please?
They can't be that widely known since Google is supposed to be
changing their algorithms every so often to throw off SEOers. I'm
curious where you get your anti-SEO attitude from. SBI! is actually
very anti-SEO themselves, and they actually advise against SEO -- I
use the SEO term to describe one of their claims to fame because
insofar as they help with SERP matters, they're doing SEO in effect if
not in intent...but they claim to out-SEO the professional SEOers by
"keeping it real" with quality relevant content, in conjunction with
their proprietary database system that tracks SEO matters (who's
visiting, from where, how many, how often, etc.)....
> There's nothing special about those Alexa rankings. It may sound
> impressive to say that they're in the "top 1%" of websites, but pretty
> much any active site can acheive that.
Top 1% out of ~56 million sites means ranking, what, within a half
million of Alexa, which sounds impressive indeed proportionally but in
terms of making real money I have the suspicion that one needs to be
under 100K of Alexa -- and as for "financial independence" (which is
what SBI! sells) probably less than top 50K, likely even as low as
15K....
So, yeah, in a sense it's not really impressive if you know what the
numbers mean (and, low-res metric that Alexa is, it still gives an
useful idea)...but I don't know how you claim that "pretty much any
active site can achieve that"....
> The web has a very long tail -
> every semi-comatose or unmaintained site is still listed by Alexa,
> despite only getting maybe one hit a month.
Yeah, but we're talking about the ranking on their list, not simply
being listed at all.
> You can get into the top
> 1% of Alexa rankings with only a handful of visitors (one of which
> will obviously be yourself) using the site regularly.
I find that hard to believe, even while agreeing that "Top 1% Alexa"
covers a lot of territory, so much so that it could almost be
meaningless, depending on what one's trying to evaluate, exactly...in
terms of monetization potential, one would need much more than a
handful of visitors a month -- they say the Google Adsense click-
through rates are only like 3%, or $1 per hundred visitors....
So what would be the "secrets to website success," then?
> Mark
> --
> Stuff, some of it good, athttp://www.good-stuff.co.uk
Mark Goodge
keyboard and typed:
>On May 9, 5:19 pm, Mark Goodge <use...@listmail.good-stuff.co.uk>
>wrote:
>
>> It's pretty much the surefire sign that they are selling snake-oil,
>> since, in reality, the only reliable methods of getting to the top of
>> the rankings are already very widely known
>
>What are they, please?
Good, well structured original content that search engines find easy
to index and users find attractive to use.
>They can't be that widely known since Google is supposed to be
>changing their algorithms every so often to throw off SEOers.
That's why none of the "secret" methods are reliable.
> I'm
>curious where you get your anti-SEO attitude from.
I'm not anti-SEO in the sense that I don't think it's worth
structuring your site to make it easy for Google et al to index. There
are a lot of sites out there with otherwise good content that don't
get well indexed because they are badly designed and structured. If
you've got a site which has good, original content but is badly
structured, then you may well benefit from hiring someone to sort out
the mess and put it into a more search engine friendly structure.
I'm anti-SEO in the sense often used by so-called "SEO Consultancies"
which give the impression that you can get a site to the top of the
listings by means which are not fundamentally based on having good,
well structured original content. If you don't have good, original
content, then there are no legitimate or reliable ways to get to the
top of the listings.
>> There's nothing special about those Alexa rankings. It may sound
>> impressive to say that they're in the "top 1%" of websites, but pretty
>> much any active site can acheive that.
>
>Top 1% out of ~56 million sites means ranking, what, within a half
>million of Alexa, which sounds impressive indeed proportionally but in
>terms of making real money I have the suspicion that one needs to be
>under 100K of Alexa -- and as for "financial independence" (which is
>what SBI! sells) probably less than top 50K, likely even as low as
>15K....
>
>So, yeah, in a sense it's not really impressive if you know what the
>numbers mean (and, low-res metric that Alexa is, it still gives an
>useful idea)...but I don't know how you claim that "pretty much any
>active site can achieve that"....
From checking my own logs, I know how many visitors have the Alexa
toolbar installed, and I know where those sites feature in the
rankings. Typically, regular visits from just a handful of users with
the toolbar will put a site into the top 500,000.
>> You can get into the top
>> 1% of Alexa rankings with only a handful of visitors (one of which
>> will obviously be yourself) using the site regularly.
>
>I find that hard to believe, even while agreeing that "Top 1% Alexa"
>covers a lot of territory, so much so that it could almost be
>meaningless, depending on what one's trying to evaluate, exactly.
Even your own usage, if you have the toolbar installed, will affect
it. I can see that very clearly on my own sites. Take, for example,
these three:
http://www.britishsurnames.co.uk
http://www.motorwayservices.info
http://www.good-stuff.co.uk
Of those three, the top two get an order of magnitude more visitors
than the last one - that's easy to see both from my own logs, Google
Analytics and from Adsense pageviews. And yet the last one has the
higher Alexa ranking. Why? The reason is simple - that domain also
contains my own private pages which hold my bookmarks, admin control
panel, etc and therefore I use it repeatedly every day. I only visit
the other sites every now and then to check that they're working OK.
It's my *own* visits to my own site, with an Alexa-enable browser,
that is making it appear to Alexa to be more popular than two other
sites which, in reality, get ten times the number of visitors.
>..in
>terms of monetization potential, one would need much more than a
>handful of visitors a month -- they say the Google Adsense click-
>through rates are only like 3%, or $1 per hundred visitors....
>
>So what would be the "secrets to website success," then?
That depends on your definition of "success". To me, as an individual
creating the sites I mentioned above, it means creating websites that
I find enjoyable to create, that other people find enjoyable to use,
and that generate enough Adsense income to cover their hosting costs
so I can pursue my hobby at no cost to me. In these cases, success is
measured in how much I enjoy creating and maintaining the sites. When
I was employed as a web author, "success" meant, in one case, creating
an ecommerce site that was easy to use and turned visitors into paying
customers, thus generating income from product sales. In that case,
success was measured in terms of turnover and profit. In another case,
it meant improving an existing dating site in order to convert more
trial memberships into paying subscriptions. There, success was
measured in conversion rates. And in another situation, it meant
creating a website for a radio station which enabled listeners to
interact with the station and its presenters as well as giving
information about the organisation and its activities. Here, success
was measured in how useable and informative the site was. I've never
won awards for any of my sites, but for other people awards can be a
measure of success.
All of these sites are, I hope, successful, but success is measured in
different ways. It can be personal pleasure, it can be income and
profit, it can be usability and content. But the one thing that
success is almost never measured in is traffic. Traffic can be a means
to success (particularly for sites with derive a significant
proportion of their income from advertising), but hits alone don't do
anything other than eat up cpu cycles. Equally, Google page rank and
Alexa rankings are not a measure of success - they may reflect (albeit
imperfectly) what people are doing, but it's the people who will make
your site successful or not, not the rankings. The big mistake made by
most SEO companies, and their customers, is to make increased traffic
levels, page rank, Alexa rank, etc a goal in themselves. In reality,
they are a either a side-effect of a site that is acheiving its true
goals or a means to achieving those goals.
Mark
--
Pointless waffle (again) at http://mark.x.tc
"I scare myself to death, that's why I keep on running"
Mark Goodge
keyboard and typed:
>On May 9, 5:41 pm, SAZ <saz1...@nospamexcite.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> The vast majority of these sites are over 500,000 in Alexa. Frankly,
>> I'm shocked they're even advertising these numbers and actimg like it's
>> something special.
>
>Huh? I'm talking about http://results.sitesell.com/sunnyside.html --
>like half are *under* 500K Alexa...now my sense is that you can't make
>much money until you're 100K Alexa (and no "financial independence"
>without ranking below ~45K).
That may be true if your only income is from advertising, although it
depends on what you mean by "much money" - I've helped create an
ad-supported website which is currently ranked around 500,000 by Alexa
and generates around $250 a month in Google Adsense earnings. That's
not a huge amount, but it covers the costs of hosting it with plenty
to spare and it's a useful second income for the owner (who isn't me,
by the way; this isn't one of my sites that I've mentioned in other
posts to this group).
It's certainly not true if you're selling an actual product or
service. I've worked on a site which has an Alexa ranking in the
300,000 range that earns enough to support several full-time employees
and a bunch of contractors.
Mark
--
Miscellaneous remarks at http://Mark.Goodge.co.uk
"Look at the stars; look how they shine for you"
Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn
> Prisoner at War <prisone...@yahoo.com> writes:
>> On May 9, 12:36 pm, Sherman Pendley <spamt...@dot-app.org> wrote:
>>> I'm not trying to be snooty or anything, I understand that what I'm
>>> talking about here would be hard for a newbie. I'm just saying, I'm not
>>> a newbie, nor am I describing something I mean to attempt and hope will
>>> work - I'm talking from experience about a working site.
>> Ah, um, didn't mean "attempting" in a literal sense.
>
> Sorry, I misunderstood.
>
>> So who's your webhost??
>
> I use DreamHost - $120/year, more space and transfer than any ten sites of
> mine will need, and FastCGI support. The latter is a very nice feature if
> your vocabulary includes the words Rails or Catalyst, and it's unusual to
> find at that price.
You are *off-topic* in comp.lang.javascript and
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html. Will you please
stop this mindless crossposting without Followup-To.
F'up2 misc.consumers
PointedEars
--
realism: HTML 4.01 Strict
evangelism: XHTML 1.0 Strict
madness: XHTML 1.1 as application/xhtml+xml
-- Bjoern Hoehrmann
Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn
This has nothing to do with ECMAScript implementations or HTML. Go away.
F'up2 misc.consumers
PointedEars
--
var bugRiddenCrashPronePieceOfJunk = (
navigator.userAgent.indexOf('MSIE 5') != -1
&& navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Mac') != -1
) // Plone, register_function.js:16
Sherman Pendley
> On May 9, 5:41 pm, SAZ <saz1...@nospamexcite.com> wrote:
>>
>> I have a VPS with ServInt, been very happy for the past 18 months. You
>> may not need a VPS, but it's nice to have complete control over
>> everything.
>
> Whoa, I don't even have any idea what you mean. What kind of control?
The kind where you have to screw your pages up yourself, instead of your
hosting provider doing it for you. :-)
> What do *you* do for SEO, may I ask? Just curious. After all, a tree
> falling in the forest empty of humans to hear it....
Nothing. Seriously. No meta tags, no rearranging divs, no hidden content,
none of the usual voodoo. Just valid, symantically-correct HTML and
correctly-spelled content. My CamelBones site has a Google page rank of 6
out of 10 - for a highly-specialized site with a small audience, that's
not bad - and it's top ranked in any relevant search I've tried.
The thing about SEO is this: It's a band-aid. People use WYSIWYG tools to
create pages that output a horrible mess of invalid HTML. Then along come
the search engines. They look, think "I can't grok that mess" and move on.
The "solution" for this problem, as promoted by the SEO crowd, is to jump
through a bunch of additional hoops to compensate, adding meta element,
hidden text, and all kinds of other nonsense to the page.
And let's talk about his term "optimize" for a moment. To optimize is to
take something that works, and improve it. When a page's HTML is so bad
that a search engine isn't able to index it, I don't call that something
that's working. So we're not talking about optimizing, we're actually
talking about fixing something that's broken. SEO doesn't actually fix
anything; it's just clumsy workarounds.
Sherman Pendley
> Sherman Pendley wrote:
>> Prisoner at War <prisone...@yahoo.com> writes:
>>> On May 9, 12:36 pm, Sherman Pendley <spamt...@dot-app.org> wrote:
>>>> I'm not trying to be snooty or anything, I understand that what I'm
>>>> talking about here would be hard for a newbie. I'm just saying, I'm not
>>>> a newbie, nor am I describing something I mean to attempt and hope will
>>>> work - I'm talking from experience about a working site.
>>> Ah, um, didn't mean "attempting" in a literal sense.
>>
>> Sorry, I misunderstood.
>>
>>> So who's your webhost??
>>
>> I use DreamHost - $120/year, more space and transfer than any ten sites of
>> mine will need, and FastCGI support. The latter is a very nice feature if
>> your vocabulary includes the words Rails or Catalyst, and it's unusual to
>> find at that price.
>
> You are *off-topic* in comp.lang.javascript and
> comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html. Will you please
> stop this mindless crossposting without Followup-To.
If you'd asked nicely, I might have.
> F'up2 misc.consumers
Stuff it. I know how to operate my news reader.
Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn
> Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <Point...@web.de> writes:
>> Sherman Pendley wrote:
>>> Prisoner at War <prisone...@yahoo.com> writes:
>>>> On May 9, 12:36 pm, Sherman Pendley <spamt...@dot-app.org> wrote:
>>>>> I'm not trying to be snooty or anything, I understand that what I'm
>>>>> talking about here would be hard for a newbie. I'm just saying, I'm not
>>>>> a newbie, nor am I describing something I mean to attempt and hope will
>>>>> work - I'm talking from experience about a working site.
>>>> Ah, um, didn't mean "attempting" in a literal sense.
>>> Sorry, I misunderstood.
>>>
>>>> So who's your webhost??
>>> I use DreamHost - $120/year, more space and transfer than any ten sites of
>>> mine will need, and FastCGI support. The latter is a very nice feature if
>>> your vocabulary includes the words Rails or Catalyst, and it's unusual to
>>> find at that price.
>> You are *off-topic* in comp.lang.javascript and
>> comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html. Will you please
>> stop this mindless crossposting without Followup-To.
>
> If you'd asked nicely, I might have.
No, you wouldn't. For I asked nicely already, and you did not.
>> F'up2 misc.consumers
>
> Stuff it. I know how to operate my news reader.
So much for your capabilities regarding courtesy towards other people.
Score adjusted, F'up2 poster
PointedEars
--
Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on
a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web,
when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another
computer, another word processor, or another network. -- Tim Berners-Lee
Jim Moe
>
> Okay, here's the actual <img> tag that was used:
>
> onMouseOver="document.getElementById('image').src='pic2.gif;'"
> onMouseOut="document.getElementById('image').src='pic1.gif;'" />
>
--
jmm (hyphen) list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com
(Remove .AXSPAMGN for email)
Prisoner at War
>
>
> You have images named <pic2.gif;> and <pic1.gif;>? (Note the semicolon.)
Sorry, typo -- was working from memory there.
Here's the test page set up for SBI! to diagnose my problem:
http://www.ego-management.org/test.html
This weekend, they tell me that image-swaps require absolute path
names in order to preview right....
You know, at this point I'm just sick of them. I've almost just about
decided to cancel my subscription with them. I'm just going to hang
around for another few days to see if there's anything about them
that's redeeming. I'm not saying they suck or anything -- but I just
don't like one little weird thing after another. I'm about three
months with them now and it's just been one small thing after another,
really inconsequential by themselves but altogether give me a feeling
of awkwardness...yes, that's it: using them feels awkward. I mean,
WTF, they don't support .ani and .cur files, and no reason why not?!
Now this, requiring an absolute path name for an image-swap to work
(either in preview mode on their server or live on the web -- not even
sure if they're aware of the distinction yet).
That's all on top of some other matters unrelated to actual
webhosting....
Jerry Stuckle
Well, that's what you get when you ask something outside of the hosting
area. They are there to keep the servers up, not troubleshoot your
javascript.
At least they're trying to help - even though it isn't their job. The
fact they even gave you their best guess answer is more than most
hosting companies will do.
And BTW - they aren't *completely* wrong.
--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstu...@attglobal.net
==================
Prisoner at War
>
>
> The kind where you have to screw your pages up yourself, instead of your
> hosting provider doing it for you. :-)
LOL -- get this, SBI! tech support wrote again (and it's the fourth
rep in two weeks now!), and finally informs me that the images of an
image-swap need absolute path names..."just how SBI! works"...I'm
pretty much fed-up with this lot...nothing major, but silly little
things which precisely because they're so petty you wonder why a multi-
million-dollar webhosting company would work that way -- and they
don't explain it any further.
> Nothing. Seriously. No meta tags, no rearranging divs, no hidden content,
> none of the usual voodoo. Just valid, symantically-correct HTML and
> correctly-spelled content. My CamelBones site has a Google page rank of 6
> out of 10 - for a highly-specialized site with a small audience, that's
> not bad - and it's top ranked in any relevant search I've tried.
Ah, well, yeah, so-called "long tail" stuff will be easier to
rank...but how to compete for the more popular keywords? It's too bad
SEO has gotten such a bad reputation -- same as with DHTML and
JavaScript -- but I do think that many general principles apply...I
mean, search engines are human, they're not directories but search
engines and their spiders only churn text strings through various
algorithms...I mean, if your site is full of wordplay like double-
entendres you would need to know how search engines operate in order
to make sure that they're not blind to the true meaning of your
site....
> The thing about SEO is this: It's a band-aid. People use WYSIWYG tools to
> create pages that output a horrible mess of invalid HTML. Then along come
> the search engines. They look, think "I can't grok that mess" and move on.
> The "solution" for this problem, as promoted by the SEO crowd, is to jump
> through a bunch of additional hoops to compensate, adding meta element,
> hidden text, and all kinds of other nonsense to the page.
I think that was in the bad old days, wasn't it? Tricks like hidden
text are recognized by search engines now and delisted, for example.
Moreover, we may have differing definitions of SEO -- I certainly
don't think of SEO as a fix, and I don't think it could serve as one.
The point of SEO is to get the search engine's notice -- but with poor
or irrelevant content, as measured by visitors quickly clicking away
back to the search engine, well, site ranking goes down and no amount
of SEO will salvage such a situation (again, SEO is not meant to be a
fix, but a "calling card" for search engines).
> And let's talk about his term "optimize" for a moment. To optimize is to
> take something that works, and improve it. When a page's HTML is so bad
> that a search engine isn't able to index it, I don't call that something
> that's working. So we're not talking about optimizing, we're actually
> talking about fixing something that's broken. SEO doesn't actually fix
> anything; it's just clumsy workarounds.
Again, "SEO" is my term for what SBI! purports to do on behalf of
their subscribers -- they themselves are adamantly anti-SEO and would
not want the association. But I use the term because it does describe
the effect of their mission: to get the search engines to notice and
rank highly.
To that end they have various proprietary online widgets which track
traffic, analyze keyword density, keyword popularity (they use Word
Tracker for that), etc. Now I could go subscribe to Word Tracker
myself and scrounge around for various substitutes for their widgets,
but it could be more expensive (an annual Word Tracker subscription
could be as much as SBI! itself for a year) and just not as convenient
as having one place for all such needs.
However, I've been getting more and more annoyed by them this past
month, nothing mission critical to be sure but giving me a feeling of
*awkwardness*...it's *really* strange but SBI! has been like meeting
an interesting person at a cocktail party who, half-way through an
interesting conversation starts picking his nose...I'm getting that
weird awkward feeling with these people and yet it's not for anything
mission critical -- yet...but for $300 a year I don't want to feel
like there may be a string of little weird issues like this image-swap
matter and their not supporting certain common file formats...I'm
about to cancel and cash-out on their pro-rated refund guarantee, but
I'm going to think it over for a few days before I make a final
decision....
Prisoner at War
wrote:
>
>
> That may be true if your only income is from advertising,
Yeah, my monetization will be Adsense and affiliate programs for some
time to come, until I can produce my own hard-product like a self-
published book or self-produced DVD, which I don't expect to have time
for until after a year of content creation to make sure that the site
is as "complete" as it could be.
> although it
> depends on what you mean by "much money" - I've helped create an
> ad-supported website which is currently ranked around 500,000 by Alexa
> and generates around $250 a month in Google Adsense earnings. That's
> not a huge amount, but it covers the costs of hosting it with plenty
> to spare and it's a useful second income for the owner (who isn't me,
> by the way; this isn't one of my sites that I've mentioned in other
> posts to this group).
Well, paying for itself is the least of it for me; it's got to be of
value to a great many people...which means traffic, which means ad-
clicks....
> It's certainly not true if you're selling an actual product or
> service. I've worked on a site which has an Alexa ranking in the
> 300,000 range that earns enough to support several full-time employees
> and a bunch of contractors.
Indeed. I'm sorry; I should have noted that my site will be a sort of
"lifestyle resource"...it's niche content is what it is. My concerns
right now are content, and -- for lack of a better term -- SEO.
That's why SBI! is driving me batty with one little weirdness after
another! And they won't say why, except that that's just how they
work...presumably meaning that their proprietary database of a server
needs just this current set-up in order to do its SEO magic....
I'm pretty annoyed with them, though -- it's two weeks to the day
today between four different reps for them to finally tell me that
images used in an image-swap need to bear absolute path names for
their server to see them...?!?! Sounds like a friggin' server bug to
me, but they claim it's "just how SBI! works"...yeah, right; how come
you didn't tell me so right away?
I'm so annoyed with them but I fear that I would be annoyed with any
other webhost, as I really don't know what's industry standard in
terms of service and maybe there exist other webhosts out there with
weird stipulations like images-in-an-image-swap-must-bear-absolute-
path-names....
> Mark
> --
> Miscellaneous remarks athttp://Mark.Goodge.co.uk
Prisoner at War
wrote:
>
>
> Good, well structured original content that search engines find easy
> to index and users find attractive to use.
Ah, but that just begs the question -- what makes it easy for search
engines to index a website?? That's SEO -- so-called "white hat" SEO,
anyway....
> That's why none of the "secret" methods are reliable.
Again, SBI! itself states most emphatically that it is against
SEOing...I'm only using that term because it seems descriptive enough
to me of the **effects** of what they say their unique proprietary
business model provides their subscribers...they themselves decry SEO
and the SEO mindset.
What they claim to do is offer tools like traffic tracking, etc.,
which help a webmaster determine various site metrics (for purposes
of, as **I** say, SEO)...my fear is that they could actually be useful
to me on that score; all the tools I'd need in one place, as opposed
to scrounging around myself for them.
For example, if I didn't know HTML and the bit of CSS and JavaScript I
do, SBI! actually has a widget thinggy that does my website for me, in
terms of its structure...just click, click, click...nothing too fancy
but for a newbie certainly useful, you see...that's why I'm still a
bit hesitant to quit them immediately, since their other claim to fame
is "SEO" (again, not their word for what they do) and there are "SEO
tools" which I don't know how to substitute for on my own with another
webhost (though I'm sure most if not all webhosts offer basic traffic
tracking abilities, SBI! claims to be most comprehensive, and I just
haven't any way of gauging these matters)....
> I'm not anti-SEO in the sense that I don't think it's worth
> structuring your site to make it easy for Google et al to index.
Ah, well, we're on the same page, then -- and SBI! is given to the
same philosophy as well. Again, I don't want to misrepresent them,
for all my annoyance with them right now: "SEO" is not their term for
what they do; I use it as a kind of short-hand for "proprietary-
database-centric-webhosting-so-that-Google-notices-your-site-and-ranks-
it-highly"...now whether SBI! actually does this, and to what degree,
that's what I have no way of knowing....
> There
> are a lot of sites out there with otherwise good content that don't
> get well indexed because they are badly designed and structured.
Ah, my greatest fear!!!!
What makes for bad design and structure?
I don't mean one of these tripod.com vanity sites with broken code and
blinking and scrolling text, of course -- nothing so obvious...but
just why do some get picked up and others do not??
One thing SBI! stresses is to stay on-message; don't do a bodybuilding
site, for example, that's also about picking up girls on a Friday
night...apparently, search engines get confused by that kind of a
"diluted message" -- ?! Now to my mind, and IME, many who get into
bodybuilding do so in great part because of girls (i.e., what they
*think* girls want, to be precise), so the two seem most complementary
subjects.
> If
> you've got a site which has good, original content but is badly
> structured, then you may well benefit from hiring someone to sort out
> the mess and put it into a more search engine friendly structure.
If you could be me examples of (or links to!) what is bad structure
vis-a-vis otherwise good original content, I'd be much obliged!
> I'm anti-SEO in the sense often used by so-called "SEO Consultancies"
> which give the impression that you can get a site to the top of the
> listings by means which are not fundamentally based on having good,
> well structured original content. If you don't have good, original
> content, then there are no legitimate or reliable ways to get to the
> top of the listings.
SBI! agrees with you 100% there. Again, my apologies for having
helped to create the misimpression otherwise.
> From checking my own logs, I know how many visitors have the Alexa
> toolbar installed, and I know where those sites feature in the
> rankings. Typically, regular visits from just a handful of users with
> the toolbar will put a site into the top 500,000.
Hmm, interesting. I know Alexa is much maligned, but I figured a
fuzzy or jagged "100 dpi image" was still marginally useful...if you
are right, it's practically worthless -- and SBI's marketing hype
misleading at best!
> Even your own usage, if you have the toolbar installed, will affect
> it. I can see that very clearly on my own sites. Take, for example,
> these three:
>
> http://www.britishsurnames.co.ukhttp://www.motorwayservices.infohttp://www.good-stuff.co.uk
>
> Of those three, the top two get an order of magnitude more visitors
> than the last one - that's easy to see both from my own logs, Google
> Analytics and from Adsense pageviews. And yet the last one has the
> higher Alexa ranking. Why? The reason is simple - that domain also
> contains my own private pages which hold my bookmarks, admin control
> panel, etc and therefore I use it repeatedly every day. I only visit
> the other sites every now and then to check that they're working OK.
> It's my *own* visits to my own site, with an Alexa-enable browser,
> that is making it appear to Alexa to be more popular than two other
> sites which, in reality, get ten times the number of visitors.
Good grief, SBI! is intentionally misleading! I mean, I had thought
that Alexa rankings were at worst still somewhat useful, but it sounds
like they're worthless, as they could very easily be puffed up by
webmasters themselves!!
> That depends on your definition of "success". To me, as an individual
> creating the sites I mentioned above, it means creating websites that
> I find enjoyable to create, that other people find enjoyable to use,
> and that generate enough Adsense income to cover their hosting costs
> so I can pursue my hobby at no cost to me.
Well, as with all other things in life it seems, there is a
continuum...for me, what you just described would be the minimum
definition of website success -- one that pays its own way...I mean,
heck, *I* pay my own way in this world, don't take no government hand-
outs, ain't living off some girlfriend or parent...but I'm afraid
that's not quite "success," is it! (Oddly enough, I do enjoy my life
right now, yes, thank you!)
> In these cases, success is
> measured in how much I enjoy creating and maintaining the sites.
I certainly enjoy learning, and this fellowship of learning on these
newsgroups. Yes, I should say that *this* is the "minimum level" of
success...which, if I may wax philosophical again, is also the maximum
level, too, if success is conceived as a circle, a cycle, a process
than a result, a being rather than a state....
> When
> I was employed as a web author, "success" meant, in one case, creating
> an ecommerce site that was easy to use and turned visitors into paying
> customers, thus generating income from product sales. In that case,
> success was measured in terms of turnover and profit. In another case,
> it meant improving an existing dating site in order to convert more
> trial memberships into paying subscriptions. There, success was
> measured in conversion rates. And in another situation, it meant
> creating a website for a radio station which enabled listeners to
> interact with the station and its presenters as well as giving
> information about the organisation and its activities. Here, success
> was measured in how useable and informative the site was. I've never
> won awards for any of my sites, but for other people awards can be a
> measure of success.
To me, all that would be separate requirements for success, but not
success itself. Of course, obviously I have a different goal in
mind....
> All of these sites are, I hope, successful, but success is measured in
> different ways. It can be personal pleasure, it can be income and
> profit, it can be usability and content. But the one thing that
> success is almost never measured in is traffic. Traffic can be a means
> to success (particularly for sites with derive a significant
> proportion of their income from advertising),
My monetization model for the first year or two....
> but hits alone don't do
> anything other than eat up cpu cycles. Equally, Google page rank and
> Alexa rankings are not a measure of success - they may reflect (albeit
> imperfectly) what people are doing, but it's the people who will make
> your site successful or not, not the rankings. The big mistake made by
> most SEO companies, and their customers, is to make increased traffic
> levels, page rank, Alexa rank, etc a goal in themselves.
I think it was Lenin himself who said, remarking on Russian
capabilities in WWI (they turned out to be quite the paper tiger),
that at a certain level of critical mass, quantity becomes a quality
all its own.
I do believe I understand your skepticism of "popular SEO"...but I'm
afraid that numbers don't lie: high-traffic sites will make more money
than low-traffic sites (where "traffic" is defined in terms of "unique
IP addy" -- not a perfect metric there either but likely the closest
there can be on the web).
Consistently high SERP rank means, all else being equal, high traffic.
> In reality,
> they are a either a side-effect of a site that is acheiving its true
> goals or a means to achieving those goals.
That's certainly the SBI! philosophy -- they even call it "The Tao of
SBI!" -- and it's certainly my Number One Priority, too; valuable
(meaning also "original") content.
But, again, a tree falling in the forest....
Hence, my SEO concerns. And my dilemma over whether to quit SBI! over
some minor but annoying little issues that's been cropping up...SBI!
feels more and more awkward, like finding out over a series of dates
that your beloved has unusual habits like communing with crystals or
feeding off sunlight (no joke, there are people who really believe
that sunlight is literally food itself)...I mean, their Tech Support
just told me, after two weeks and four reps, that images used in an
image-swap need to bear absolute file paths -- ?!
Weird as that is (they do have a proprietary database-centric way of
doing things, allegedly for SEO [again, not their term but the same
promise]), what's even more weird is that they couldn't have told me
that right from the beginning!
Then if I should ever want to host a forum, it's an extra $100 for
SBI! -- and another ~$100 for another webhost to host that forum,
since the way SBI! is set up no subdomain would be allowed...?!?!
(Again, that proprietary database for SEO purposes....)
Just little things like that, you know, keep popping up...nothing
mission-critical in itself, but it feels more and more like instead of
them revolving around me, the customer, it's me revolving around them
-- and I'm paying them for the privilege of working around them!!
But -- sigh! -- the issue, again, is the claim of SEO...which I just
cannot gauge...they are the way they are because of SEO...and it had
seemed they had the sites to back up that claim -- until you informed
me that Alexa is basically worthless!
> Mark
> --
> Pointless waffle (again) athttp://mark.x.tc
Jim Moe
>
> Here's the test page set up for SBI! to diagnose my problem:
>
> http://www.ego-management.org/test.html
>
> This weekend, they tell me that image-swaps require absolute path
>
It works fine here. Seamonkey v1.1.9. (After I turned JS on.)
Chaddy2222
> On May 9, 11:20 am, Chaddy2222 <spamlovermailbox-
>
> sicur...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> > They do not seam to have a clue of what they are doing.
>
> They seem to be good at what they do: several of the sites they host
> are top-ranked (and that would reflect on them since these sites all
> -- now because I'm not up on SEO, I can't tell whether that's genuine
> or what...I do know that what SBI! offers in terms of "site mechanics"
> I can handle on my own with all the books I've been reading (not to
> mention ***these fine newsgroups!!***), but I don't know whether their
> SEO claim is equally something I could learn or whether it truly is,
> as they claim, to be the result of their proprietary database way of
> webhosting....
>
> But this image-swap craziness, and some other less serious issues, has
> me seriously bummed out for the time being....
>
> > If you want a
> > good web host go with Server Grade.http://www.servergrade.com.au/
> > I have been wih them for 6 months and have not had any major issues.
> > They have quite good tech support as well and if they don't support a
> > feature they tell you strate away.
>
> Hmmm, Australia?? I know this is the web, but I'd never considered a
> company that celebrates Christmas in summer! ;-)
>
> Thanks for the recommendation -- I'll check it out...but why should I
> use them as opposed to the Big Boys like Yahoo! or 1&1 or Dreamhost or
> Monster, etc.??
>
NG's to get an idea of some of the larger hosts. Mind you ServerGrade
only do support by email so you may or may not like that. I don't mind
that as it is easier then getting support on the phone. I also have a
reasonable grounding on what I need to do to get a site set-up so I
like having my site always online.
Also ServerGrade linit the amount of sites on their servers, my server
has 34 sites on it. Other hosts such as Yahoo place up to 300 or more
sites on the one server.
--
Regards Chad. http://freewebdesignonline.org
>
>
Mark Goodge
to keyboard and typed:
>On May 10, 5:17 am, Mark Goodge <use...@listmail.good-stuff.co.uk>
>wrote:
>>
>>
>> Good, well structured original content that search engines find easy
>> to index and users find attractive to use.
>
>Ah, but that just begs the question -- what makes it easy for search
>engines to index a website?? That's SEO -- so-called "white hat" SEO,
>anyway....
Probably the best answer to that is the one provided by Google:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
Mark
--
Pointless waffle (again) at http://mark.x.tc
"Lose yourself in the music, the moment, you own it, you better never let it go"
Sherman Pendley
> No, you wouldn't. For I asked nicely already, and you did not.
Calling someone "mindless" is not nice.
> Score adjusted, F'up2 poster
Would you like some cheese with that whine?
Prisoner at War
>
>
> Well, that's what you get when you ask something outside of the hosting
> area. They are there to keep the servers up, not troubleshoot your
> javascript.
But it's not about the JavaScript! My JavaScript is perfectly fine!
If my perfectly fine HTML doesn't come out right on their servers,
would that be "my problem" too or would it be *their* problem insofar
as the point of webhosting would be to support HTML, the language of
webpages??
I'm not asking them for help with troubleshooting JavaScript that's
not working; I'm asking them why JavaScript that *does* work on my end
does not on theirs!
UPDATE: the issue is now resolved. For some (unspecified, of course,
even when prompted) reason, this webshot requires images of an image-
swap to bear absolute file path names. All other images -- that is,
not used for an image-swap -- may be in the standard relative file
path name format, but image-swap images must use absolute file path
names.
Nowhere was this documented in their upload instructions,
however...apparently, mine was a special case, and not once since
their founding in 1997 has someone else tried to upload images of an
image-swap using relative file path names -- ?!?!
This seems like a gross programming bug to me, and instead of fixing
their system to accommodate standard practices they're asking me to
accommodate them!
All in the name of SEO...which makes me seriously question whether
these people can actually do any SEO worthy of the name, if their SEO
causes their server to somehow not see image files of an image-swap if
they're not referred to with absolute path names!
> At least they're trying to help - even though it isn't their job.
I really find this very odd that many people have noted that "it's not
their job" to investigate why perfectly fine -- and brain-dead
simple! We're talking about <img src="pic1.gif"
onMouseOver="this.src='pic2.gif;'"> -- JavaScript doesn't work on
their server.
Seriously, if your car doesn't run, do you think it's not the
dealership's job to answer why not? Oh, they just sell cars, they
don't actually make them -- ?!?!
> The
> fact they even gave you their best guess answer is more than most
> hosting companies will do.
The fact that it wasn't until the third rep that they finally
acknowledged my case was something they had a responsibility to
investigate means that they were doing what "most hosting companies
will do."
We all have computers, obviously -- and tech support SOP is to deny
responsibility for anything outside of the script. It's really
unfortunate but many people seem to behave no more intelligently than
a simple keyword-focused search engine, and so it took until the third
rep that SBI! actually understood the problem.
So much for another of their claims to fame, friendly helpful customer/
tech support.
I can live without their site-building templates, since I know HTML
and enough CSS and JavaScript for my own purposes; I can even live
without their customer support since no one can care about your
problems as much as you do; I've even given up on their private
forums, which is probably the most useful thing about them on account
of all the interesting business talk that goes on there, but which are
patrolled by the "mindless positive thinking police" -- the only
reason I have now to stick with them is their SEO claims...which I'm
beginning to doubt....
> And BTW - they aren't *completely* wrong.
About what are they not completely wrong?? Where are they "right"???
You wouldn't happen to be one of their SBI! Rapid Response Group
volunteers, would you?? (I kid you not; they actually have a
volunteer "force" of subscribers who bring anti-SBI! posts to the
company's attention, and then these volunteers show up to rebut the
negative claims. This most recently happened on
associateprograms.com's forums.)
> --
> ==================
> Remove the "x" from my email address
> Jerry Stuckle
> JDS Computer Training Corp.
> jstuck...@attglobal.net
> ==================
Sherman Pendley
> Ah, well, yeah, so-called "long tail" stuff will be easier to
> rank...but how to compete for the more popular keywords?
Personally - I don't. :-) I'm no business major, but my thinking is this:
When one has a very limited marketing budget, it's pointless to waste it in
markets where so much is already being spent that one's own small effort will
be drowned out in the noise. So I look for opportunities in the long tail,
where a little effort might go a long way in an under-served market segment.
> algorithms...I mean, if your site is full of wordplay like double-
> entendres you would need to know how search engines operate in order
> to make sure that they're not blind to the true meaning of your
> site....
Trying to make your site rank high for common, generic words is just a waste
of time, and here's why: Search engine *users* know about common words too.
A parent researching child discipline methods would probably not search for
"spanking" - he or she tried that search once and got very mixed results. He
or she would search for "corporal punishment", probably even including the
quotes to search for the exact phrase.
So, if I'm developing a parenting site, I wouldn't suggest spending any time
trying to "optimize" for the word "spanking." It was hijacked as a useful
search term long ago, and your audience knows that and won't be using it to
find what your site's about anyway.
> I think that was in the bad old days, wasn't it? Tricks like hidden
> text are recognized by search engines now and delisted, for example.
It's an ongoing game of cat-and-mouse. The search engines start delisting a
given trick, the SEO con artists come up with new ones.
> Moreover, we may have differing definitions of SEO -- I certainly
> don't think of SEO as a fix, and I don't think it could serve as one.
> The point of SEO is to get the search engine's notice
No, that's not SEO at all. That's just a form on Google. In my experience,
it's not necessary to do more than register with the top two or three search
engines. The others will pick up on larger engines' listings anyway. I've also
found that search engines need about as much help noticing web page changes as
a cat needs noticing mice.
SEO is when the engines know about your site, and you're trying to make your
site appear earlier in the search results.
Prisoner at War
Yep, it works fine *now* -- now that an absolute file path was
specified in the first "src" attribute of the <img> tag (curiously,
the image-swap src attributes remain in relative file path format).
*That* was the problem.
A problem for which at first they denied any responsibility.
Which now seems to never have occurred to anyone else in all the years
since their founding in 1997, as there is no documentation on this
issue: indeed, their specific instructions about uploading webpages is
to use relative file path names!
SBI! is feeling extremely awkward at this point. It's just one weird
situation after another...nothing mission-critical, of course, but a
series of them has me wondering "what next??"
Prisoner at War
sicur...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
>
> You only need to read back through the older posts from this and other
> NG's to get an idea of some of the larger hosts.
Yeah, but nothing like timely information! Perhaps policies have
since changed, etc. -- I myself was all bullish on SBI! only last
month, but then a series of weird incidents like this little image-
swap mystery has given me an "awkward feeling" towards them....
> Mind you ServerGrade
> only do support by email so you may or may not like that. I don't mind
> that as it is easier then getting support on the phone.
I prefer e-mail since everything's in writing and I can't be accused
of miscommunication -- though, of course, communication is a two-way
street, and if someone just isn't paying attention then it doesn't
even matter much that I put things in writing; they will still
misinterpret it!
> I also have a
> reasonable grounding on what I need to do to get a site set-up so I
> like having my site always online.
> Also ServerGrade linit the amount of sites on their servers, my server
> has 34 sites on it. Other hosts such as Yahoo place up to 300 or more
> sites on the one server.
Yeah, looks like I'm going to have to google up some how-to-choose-a-
webhost guides...in the meantime, please continue to share any new
thoughts you may have on the matter. I was hoping to learn with SBI!
but it's turning out to be like having to drop a college course 'cause
the professor has a strange and possibly unhelpful pedagogy and
instead of learning I'm dealing with weird minutiae....
> --
> Regards Chad.http://freewebdesignonline.org
>
>
Prisoner at War
wrote:
>
>
> Probably the best answer to that is the one provided by Google:
>
Thanks for the link, but those general guidelines are known by
everyone, even me! Obviously, there would still be a ranking order
even if everyone followed their guidelines -- which returns us to the
question of just how Google chooses to rank websites...I mean, not
having broken links, and having quality backlinks to your site, etc.
-- is that truly all there is? Okay, well, I'll see....
Thanks again, Mark. Much appreciated!
> Mark
> --
> Pointless waffle (again) athttp://mark.x.tc
Prisoner at War
>
>
> Personally - I don't. :-) I'm no business major, but my thinking is this:
> When one has a very limited marketing budget, it's pointless to waste it in
> markets where so much is already being spent that one's own small effort will
> be drowned out in the noise. So I look for opportunities in the long tail,
> where a little effort might go a long way in an under-served market segment.
Indeed, that's the SBI! take on it, too: market to the long-tail
keywords, and through the viral magic of backlinks and such (since the
www is by definition interconnected) you may well wind up winning the
market for the popular ones!
> Trying to make your site rank high for common, generic words is just a waste
> of time, and here's why: Search engine *users* know about common words too.
>
> A parent researching child discipline methods would probably not search for
> "spanking" - he or she tried that search once and got very mixed results. He
> or she would search for "corporal punishment", probably even including the
> quotes to search for the exact phrase.
>
> So, if I'm developing a parenting site, I wouldn't suggest spending any time
> trying to "optimize" for the word "spanking." It was hijacked as a useful
> search term long ago, and your audience knows that and won't be using it to
> find what your site's about anyway.
Hmm, I guess your assumption is that the audience isn't a bunch of
newbies, whereas mine had been just that...since I am a newbie
myself! And so when I use search engines I type in newbie-like
general keywords...hmmm...I know that it's "better to be a king in
hell than a pauper in heaven" ("big fish in a small pond than a small
fish in a big one"), but then again, 5% of a million is better than
99% of a hundred...I guess I'm trying to figure out niche long-tail
keywords versus popular common ones....
> It's an ongoing game of cat-and-mouse. The search engines start delisting a
> given trick, the SEO con artists come up with new ones.
Yes, and SBI! was supposed to take care of that with their proprietary
way of hosting websites...but now that's in serious doubt because of
the awkward feeling I'm getting from all the little weird incidents
like this image-swap mystery.
> No, that's not SEO at all. That's just a form on Google. In my experience,
> it's not necessary to do more than register with the top two or three search
> engines. The others will pick up on larger engines' listings anyway. I've also
> found that search engines need about as much help noticing web page changes as
> a cat needs noticing mice.
>
> SEO is when the engines know about your site, and you're trying to make your
> site appear earlier in the search results.
Indeed, I didn't mean "notice" in the sense of simply being indexed
somewhere on SERP 397...just submitting your site to the engine lets
it know that it exists, okay, but no big deal.
SBI! was supposed to have some way of improving PR...providing the
good original content is there to begin with so that PR is not lost
over time due to users quickly clicking back to the SERP on account of
irrelevant or low-value material....
How is/are your site(s) doing in terms of traffic and keyword SERP?
Unless you really believe in a kind of "built it and they will come"
web-mysticism, it seems that SEO has to be a part of business
strategy...and yes I'm hoping to make money from my site, not just
enough so that it pays its own way, but that it pays for me to
continue devoting ever-increasing time and thought to it, since that
would be a good sign that what I'm providing is of real value to
many. But they've got to know it exists in the first place!
Sherman Pendley
> At least they're trying to help - even though it isn't their job. The
> fact they even gave you their best guess answer is more than most
> hosting companies will do.
I think you've missed a key difference here. They're not just bare hosting.
He publishes his pages through a CMS they've written, that "optimizes" his
pages for search engines. They're modifying his pages, and he's asking them
about the JS they're adding - do you still think they're not obliged to
answer him?
Jerry Stuckle
> On May 10, 10:47 pm, Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>>
>> Well, that's what you get when you ask something outside of the hosting
>> area. They are there to keep the servers up, not troubleshoot your
>> javascript.
>
> But it's not about the JavaScript! My JavaScript is perfectly fine!
> If my perfectly fine HTML doesn't come out right on their servers,
> would that be "my problem" too or would it be *their* problem insofar
> as the point of webhosting would be to support HTML, the language of
> webpages??
>
That's what you don't get. IT IS ALL ABOUT JAVASCRIPT! Your javascript
IS NOT FINE.
> I'm not asking them for help with troubleshooting JavaScript that's
> not working; I'm asking them why JavaScript that *does* work on my end
> does not on theirs!
>
You are asking them to do this.
> UPDATE: the issue is now resolved. For some (unspecified, of course,
> even when prompted) reason, this webshot requires images of an image-
> swap to bear absolute file path names. All other images -- that is,
> not used for an image-swap -- may be in the standard relative file
> path name format, but image-swap images must use absolute file path
> names.
>
Which is JAVASCRIPT.
> Nowhere was this documented in their upload instructions,
> however...apparently, mine was a special case, and not once since
> their founding in 1997 has someone else tried to upload images of an
> image-swap using relative file path names -- ?!?!
>
> This seems like a gross programming bug to me, and instead of fixing
> their system to accommodate standard practices they're asking me to
> accommodate them!
>
The only programming bug is between your hears.
> All in the name of SEO...which makes me seriously question whether
> these people can actually do any SEO worthy of the name, if their SEO
> causes their server to somehow not see image files of an image-swap if
> they're not referred to with absolute path names!
>
The problem is NOT with them.
>> At least they're trying to help - even though it isn't their job.
>
> I really find this very odd that many people have noted that "it's not
> their job" to investigate why perfectly fine -- and brain-dead
> simple! We're talking about <img src="pic1.gif"
> onMouseOver="this.src='pic2.gif;'"> -- JavaScript doesn't work on
> their server.
>
That's right. Troubleshooting your code IS NOT THEIR JOB.
> Seriously, if your car doesn't run, do you think it's not the
> dealership's job to answer why not? Oh, they just sell cars, they
> don't actually make them -- ?!?!
>
Not if it's out of gas, it isn't.
But a more accurate comparison. If your car doesn't run, it it the
responsibility of the lot where you parked your car to tell you why it
isn't running? No. It's their job to paint the lines, fill the
potholes and plow the snow in the winter - so you have a place to park.
That's a MUCH better comparison.
>> The
>> fact they even gave you their best guess answer is more than most
>> hosting companies will do.
>
> The fact that it wasn't until the third rep that they finally
> acknowledged my case was something they had a responsibility to
> investigate means that they were doing what "most hosting companies
> will do."
>
Which means you got someone sympathetic with you.
> We all have computers, obviously -- and tech support SOP is to deny
> responsibility for anything outside of the script. It's really
> unfortunate but many people seem to behave no more intelligently than
> a simple keyword-focused search engine, and so it took until the third
> rep that SBI! actually understood the problem.
>
Yea, it seems it's hard for you to behave intelligently.
> So much for another of their claims to fame, friendly helpful customer/
> tech support.
>
Not at all. I think they acted mostly appropriately - at least until
the third rep.
> I can live without their site-building templates, since I know HTML
> and enough CSS and JavaScript for my own purposes; I can even live
> without their customer support since no one can care about your
> problems as much as you do; I've even given up on their private
> forums, which is probably the most useful thing about them on account
> of all the interesting business talk that goes on there, but which are
> patrolled by the "mindless positive thinking police" -- the only
> reason I have now to stick with them is their SEO claims...which I'm
> beginning to doubt....
>
Fine. Just don't come back here whining about more problems. Quire
frankly, no one here gives a damn.
>> And BTW - they aren't *completely* wrong.
>
> About what are they not completely wrong?? Where are they "right"???
> You wouldn't happen to be one of their SBI! Rapid Response Group
> volunteers, would you?? (I kid you not; they actually have a
> volunteer "force" of subscribers who bring anti-SBI! posts to the
> company's attention, and then these volunteers show up to rebut the
> negative claims. This most recently happened on
> associateprograms.com's forums.)
>
Absolute paths are generally the best way to go when referencing images.
But you've already proven you're too thick-headed to understand that.
--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstu...@attglobal.net
==================
Jerry Stuckle
> Jerry Stuckle <jstu...@attglobal.net> writes:
>
>> At least they're trying to help - even though it isn't their job. The
>> fact they even gave you their best guess answer is more than most
>> hosting companies will do.
>
> I think you've missed a key difference here. They're not just bare hosting.
> He publishes his pages through a CMS they've written, that "optimizes" his
> pages for search engines. They're modifying his pages, and he's asking them
> about the JS they're adding - do you still think they're not obliged to
> answer him?
>
> sherm--
>
Nope. Nothing I've seen indicates they are changing the javascript.
And if they were, he could easily look at it in his browser source.
Rather, he's blowing smoke in a vain attempt to cover his incompetence.
Mark Goodge
to keyboard and typed:
>On May 11, 3:47 am, Mark Goodge <use...@listmail.good-stuff.co.uk>
>wrote:
>>
>>
>> Probably the best answer to that is the one provided by Google:
>>
>> http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=3...
>
>Thanks for the link, but those general guidelines are known by
>everyone, even me! Obviously, there would still be a ranking order
>even if everyone followed their guidelines -- which returns us to the
>question of just how Google chooses to rank websites...I mean, not
>having broken links, and having quality backlinks to your site, etc.
>-- is that truly all there is?
No, and the guidelines I've referred to explicitly say otherwise.
To summarise Google's guidelines, ranking is all about three things:
1. Content
2. Structure
3. Popularity
The first two are entirely under your own control. They're also the
two that can't be faked - if your structure looks good, then it is
good; if your content looks good, then it is good. "White hat" SEO is
all about getting these right; it's about making sure that your
content really is good and your structure really is good. But getting
these right isn't just about SEO, it's also about making your site
useful and accessible to your target users. So it's something you
should be doing anyway, as a fundamental part of your website design
and authoring.
The third is the hard one, because you can't directly control who else
links to your site. Manipulating apparent link popularity, therefore,
is the focus of most "black hat" SEO, because there is scope for this
aspect of ranking to be faked by means of things like link farms,
gateway pages, referer spam, etc. Some of these methods can be very
effective, at least in the short term (referer spam in particular was
hugely effective until people wised up to it), but they're not
reliable in the long run as the search engines develop algorithms to
weed them out.
Mark
--
Pointless waffle (again) at http://mark.x.tc
"Sing for the laughter, sing for the tears"
Sherman Pendley
> How is/are your site(s) doing in terms of traffic and keyword SERP?
I don't know, and actually don't much care. The thing is, my site isn't
intended to generate revenue from traffic, and hosting at sourceforge
is free for open-source projects.
Don't get me wrong - if ad-click revenue were paying my rent, I'd care
quite a lot about traffic. :-)
> Unless you really believe in a kind of "built it and they will come"
> web-mysticism, it seems that SEO has to be a part of business
> strategy...
Not SEO as such, just common sense. Search engines are not an advertising
medium. Their business model is based, in part, on a credible reputation
as an impartial resource. They can and do sell "premium listings," but
those are clearly marked as such. They work very hard to discourage any
kind of attempt by sites to bias their own standings. (By "bias," I mean
to try to affect the standings in a way that the ordinarily-indexible text
wouldn't warrant.)
None of this is especially mysterious - keywords found in HTML headings
rank higher than those found in body text, for instance. So do those found
in link text, on sites that link to yours - the idea being that link text
is often descriptive in nature.
Google tries to rank highly the sites that are considered authoritative
or are otherwise well-thought-of by their peers. In short, sites with more
links leading to them from other sites that also match a keyword, will rank
higher. That's why Wikipedia turns up at the top of damn near everything
from Google lately - everybody + uncle is linking to it.
Ensuring that you can be found with any relevant search is really quite
easy, and nothing to do with what sounds like your real goal:
> But they've got to know it exists in the first place!
Hate to say it, but - spend some money. What you need is just plain old
advertising, not search engine tweaks. The job of the search engines is
simply to ensure that someone who knows your brand (a unique keyword)
can easily find information about it (your site). Getting the word out
about your brand isn't a search engine's job.
I would advise talking to the other end of Google, and buying some Adwords.
That's where you'll want to use broad terms - Adwords uses the same key-
word database, and they'll put your ads on sites that match the keywords
you supply, so more generic terms will reach more people.
Prisoner at War
wrote:
>
>
> No, and the guidelines I've referred to explicitly say otherwise.
>
> To summarise Google's guidelines, ranking is all about three things:
>
> 1. Content
I'm curiously about this point: google doesn't actually explain how
their bots determine "good content"...now I can imagine them using
some kind of text string comparison algorithm to test for originality
of content, but unless "good" simply means "original," how would their
bots know anything about content??
> 2. Structure
Not entirely sure I understand this point; that google advisory talks
about their bots choking on certain things but other than flash
animation and such I'm not sure why a billion-dollar company like
google doesn't just develop better bots instead of forcing people who
have otherwise valid HTML to keep an eye out for how google programmed
their bots!
> 3. Popularity
>
> The first two are entirely under your own control. They're also the
> two that can't be faked - if your structure looks good, then it is
> good; if your content looks good, then it is good. "White hat" SEO is
> all about getting these right; it's about making sure that your
> content really is good and your structure really is good. But getting
> these right isn't just about SEO, it's also about making your site
> useful and accessible to your target users. So it's something you
> should be doing anyway, as a fundamental part of your website design
> and authoring.
Yes, certainly, but I fear we're getting into chicken-or-egg territory
here: my concern is that people won't find my site, whereas you seem
to be saying that search engines will somehow "automatically" wind up
listing me if my site is useful and accessible...my understanding is
that those factors, utility and accessibility, are what keeps them on
my site (and coming back for more), but my issue is how to get them to
know about my site in the first place, and that's about SERP and PR,
isn't it...I know I can't be bothered to look beyond the Top 5 results
oftentimes, much even the Top Ten or the next SERP....
> The third is the hard one, because you can't directly control who else
> links to your site. Manipulating apparent link popularity, therefore,
> is the focus of most "black hat" SEO, because there is scope for this
> aspect of ranking to be faked by means of things like link farms,
> gateway pages, referer spam, etc. Some of these methods can be very
> effective, at least in the short term (referer spam in particular was
> hugely effective until people wised up to it), but they're not
> reliable in the long run as the search engines develop algorithms to
> weed them out.
Yes, I certainly don't plan on using any such tactics. As a matter of
fact, aside from certain (outdated) principles like keyword density, I
haven't a clue about SEO.
Do you do anything to help your sites list highly on google?
> Mark
> --
> Pointless waffle (again) athttp://mark.x.tc
dorayme
Sherman Pendley <spam...@dot-app.org> wrote:
>
> Hate to say it, but - spend some money. What you need is just plain old
> advertising, not search engine tweaks. The job of the search engines is
> simply to ensure that someone who knows your brand (a unique keyword)
> can easily find information about it (your site). Getting the word out
> about your brand isn't a search engine's job.
>
> I would advise talking to the other end of Google, and buying some Adwords.
> That's where you'll want to use broad terms - Adwords uses the same key-
> word database, and they'll put your ads on sites that match the keywords
> you supply, so more generic terms will reach more people.
A friend of mine has told me that his website hits and sales go up in
direct proportion to the amount of he spends at Google.
--
dorayme
Prisoner at War
>
>
> I don't know, and actually don't much care. The thing is, my site isn't
> intended to generate revenue from traffic, and hosting at sourceforge
> is free for open-source projects.
>
> Don't get me wrong - if ad-click revenue were paying my rent, I'd care
> quite a lot about traffic. :-)
Well, it could be -- or that's the claim, anyway. The few sites I
know that are making money seem to be sites about making money! Like
johnchow.com, etc. But that's not what I'm looking to do, so I
wonder....
> Not SEO as such, just common sense. Search engines are not an advertising
> medium.
Eh??? My impression is that search engines make their money from
advertisers!!
> Their business model is based, in part, on a credible reputation
> as an impartial resource. They can and do sell "premium listings," but
> those are clearly marked as such. They work very hard to discourage any
> kind of attempt by sites to bias their own standings. (By "bias," I mean
> to try to affect the standings in a way that the ordinarily-indexible text
> wouldn't warrant.)
Ah, well, yes, true...but google gets its AdWords money by matching
advertisers with relevant websites, and that depends on know how to
measure "relevancy"...which turns to thoughts of SEO for those who
want to be "most" relevant in terms of SERPs and PRs....
> None of this is especially mysterious - keywords found in HTML headings
> rank higher than those found in body text, for instance. So do those found
> in link text, on sites that link to yours - the idea being that link text
> is often descriptive in nature.
Sure, the concept is simple, but obviously ranking will always exist
-- so the question is, why, exactly? It's more than just keywords in
the <meta> tag....
> Google tries to rank highly the sites that are considered authoritative
> or are otherwise well-thought-of by their peers. In short, sites with more
> links leading to them from other sites that also match a keyword, will rank
> higher. That's why Wikipedia turns up at the top of damn near everything
> from Google lately - everybody + uncle is linking to it.
Indeed. So it appears that backlinks carry the most weight with
google. Google's relying on backlinks to measure content quality, and
using keywords for after-the-fact confirmation...?
> Ensuring that you can be found with any relevant search is really quite
> easy, and nothing to do with what sounds like your real goal:
"Really quite easy"??? Let's not forget what "being found" means to
me: Top 5 listing, ideally, if not Top Ten or even first SERP...I'm
not talking about simply being indexed somewhere on SERP 94,006,331
now...even SERP 2 would be far from ideal....
And what do you mean by my "real goal"? Do you mean my ultimate
objective of making money? It seems that there's no way I even have a
shot at doing so without people finding my site first -- and finding
it means Top 5, 10, 20, or even 30 ranking, since almost nobody spends
much time sifting through different results....
> Hate to say it, but - spend some money. What you need is just plain old
> advertising, not search engine tweaks. The job of the search engines is
> simply to ensure that someone who knows your brand (a unique keyword)
> can easily find information about it (your site). Getting the word out
> about your brand isn't a search engine's job.
Oh, true, it's not their job -- but SEO is about making it their job,
isn't it; or, perhaps better put, "piggy-backing" on what *is* their
job (highly relevant results) to help yourself -- a symbiotic
relationship....
> I would advise talking to the other end of Google, and buying some Adwords.
> That's where you'll want to use broad terms - Adwords uses the same key-
> word database, and they'll put your ads on sites that match the keywords
> you supply, so more generic terms will reach more people.
Yes, but not practical for a "lifestyle resource" such as I plan to
create...the site needs to pay for itself first before I can take on
any more financial commitments! And really, it seems silly to pay for
AdWords when what I have is a niche content site and not some hard-
goods store. Yes, my revenue model, consisting solely of mainly
Adsense and affiliate programs like Amazon Associates in the
beginning, suggests that paying for advertising wouldn't be
productive. I plan on promoting my site through forum participation,
in a short and unobtrusive .sig line, but in terms of SEO I wonder if
there's anything I could do...which, it seems, I really can't...which,
in a way, does make sense...but I have to ask! =)
Prisoner at War
>
>
> That's what you don't get. IT IS ALL ABOUT JAVASCRIPT! Your javascript
> IS NOT FINE.
Huh??? What was wrong with my JavaScript??
Here, take a look at it: http://www.ego-management.org/test.html and
tell me what's wrong with
<img name="dog" id="dog" src="image-files/awww4.png"
onmouseover="document.getElementById('dog').src='image-files/
awww.gif';" onmouseout="document.getElementById('dog').src='image-
files/awww4.png';">
> You are asking them to do this.
I don't know how you say that. I'm not asking them about code that
doesn't work -- "gee, can you help me with this code, I'm trying to
get it to do 'x' and it keeps doing 'y'" -- I'm asking them why **code
that works** on my end **doesn't on theirs** even though **all
necessary files** have been uploaded.
I just don't understand how you keep insisting that I'm asking for
programming help when most emphatically I am not. It's like you buy a
car and when you get home it stops working and the dealership tells
you, "sorry, we don't give driving lessons"...total non sequitur....
> Which is JAVASCRIPT.
NO -- it's not about the JavaScript, it's about their servers not
seeing a relative file path when an image-swap is attempted. The
issue is how their server handles relative and absolute file paths.
It's got nothing to do with JavaScript.
Honestly, are you one of them SBI! Rapid Response Group cyber-
militiamen? They send those people around rebutting negative SBI!
reviews, and you're just insisting on "JavaScript" when **even SBI!**
now admits it's not about "JavaScript" but "just how SBI! works"....
> The only programming bug is between your hears.
That's "ears" -- or did your mother not upload the firmware update?
> The problem is NOT with them.
Ah, despite their stipulation that absolute path names must be used in
the case of an image-swap, but *only* in the case of an image-swap,
the problem is "not with them."
Wow, who's your webhost, BTW? Wouldn't happen to be SBI! would it?
I'm new to all this so maybe it's very common or at least not unusual
for webhosts to demand that perfectly valid code be tweaked a little
to work on their servers -- I don't know -- but that's the only case
where "the problem [would not be] with them"....
> That's right. Troubleshooting your code IS NOT THEIR JOB.
But I'm not asking them to troubleshoot my code. Why do you insist on
continuing to grossly misrepresent the situation?
> Not if it's out of gas, it isn't.
But it's not out of gas. The tires aren't flat. And it isn't upside
down at the bottom of a thousand-foot cliff.
> But a more accurate comparison. If your car doesn't run, it it the
> responsibility of the lot where you parked your car to tell you why it
> isn't running?
Yes, that's why they have lemon laws.
You know, I used to be amazed that this country, with its car culture,
could have gone through *decades* without any lemon laws...until now,
when I consider that people like you for some reason think consumers
have very limited rights.
> No. It's their job to paint the lines, fill the
> potholes and plow the snow in the winter - so you have a place to park.
>
> That's a MUCH better comparison.
Ah, yes, sarcasm...the response of the intellectually lazy.
> Which means you got someone sympathetic with you.
Ah, I see: when they tried to ignore me, they were well within their
rights. Now that they acknowledge my problem, they're doing me a
favor.
Reminds me a bit of people who like to say "all glory be to God" but
claim that war and famine and disease are not the responsibility of an
all-loving all-powerful all-knowing God.
Honestly, are you from the SBI! Rapid Response Group, sent by the
company to rebut me? 'Cause you're not doing a good job of it, man.
> Yea, it seems it's hard for you to behave intelligently.
Ah, you with your ad hominem attacks is the epitome of evolutionary
success, whereas my questions about a service I paid $300 for that
can't even handle a standard image-swap is my behaving
unintelligently....
Jerry Stuckle, I don't know why you feel so antagonistic towards me,
but you are totally wrong in your behavior and your logic.
> Not at all. I think they acted mostly appropriately - at least until
> the third rep.
Jerry, it doesn't matter what you think at this point -- you've
demonstrated that you're just not a reasonable person.
> Fine. Just don't come back here whining about more problems. Quire
> frankly, no one here gives a damn.
Which is why you've taken the time to make a fool out of yourself,
showing everyone how illogical and ill-behaved you are over something
that has nothing to do with you.
> Absolute paths are generally the best way to go when referencing images.
Their instructions specifically stated to use *relative* paths. But
of course you choose to ignore that, while blaming me for being
puzzled over their system.
> But you've already proven you're too thick-headed to understand that.
Too thick-headed?? I'm not the one angry over nothing like you,
Jerry.
> --
> ==================
> Remove the "x" from my email address
> Jerry Stuckle
> JDS Computer Training Corp.
> jstuck...@attglobal.net
> ==================
Prisoner at War
<img name="dog" id="dog" src="http://www.ego-management.org/image-
files/awww4.png" alt="moo" title="meow"
onmouseover="document.getElementById('dog').src='image-files/
awww.gif';" onmouseout="document.getElementById('dog').src='image-
files/awww4.png';">
They used an absolute file path in the first src attribute. Somehow
that got it to work (http://www.ego-management.org/test.html) --
though the other two src attributes remain relative, as I'd had them
originally.
Just what is your problem, Jerry Stuckle? Why do you insist on
proving yourself a liar??
Come on, come out with -- are you an SBI! affiliate? Work for them?
Or just another SBI! cult-member, with their Rapid Response Group of
cyber-militiamen?? I'm serious. You have a personal animus here
that's way beyond the facts at hand.
You have an ulterior motive in using personal attacks against me over
-- what, a customer service issue!
On May 11, 3:54 pm, Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>
>
> Nope. Nothing I've seen indicates they are changing the javascript.
> And if they were, he could easily look at it in his browser source.
>
> Rather, he's blowing smoke in a vain attempt to cover his incompetence.
>
> --
> ==================
> Remove the "x" from my email address
> Jerry Stuckle
> JDS Computer Training Corp.
> jstuck...@attglobal.net
> ==================
Prisoner at War
>
>
> A friend of mine has told me that his website hits and sales go up in
> direct proportion to the amount of he spends at Google.
Hmmm, you wouldn't suppose that "saintly" google somehow favors its
clients, would you?? Many on the SBI! private forums have reported
being indexed by google almost right away once they signed on with
google Adsense.
> --
> dorayme
Prisoner at War
>
>
> I think you've missed a key difference here. They're not just bare hosting.
> He publishes his pages through a CMS they've written, that "optimizes" his
> pages for search engines. They're modifying his pages, and he's asking them
> about the JS they're adding - do you still think they're not obliged to
> answer him?
More to the point: they didn't add to my JavaScript until I brought
the image-swap mystery to their attention.
Indeed, this almost certainly has nothing to do with JavaScript, it
now turns out! It's about how their servers "see" a file when that
file is used as part of an image-swap...apparently, when called as an
image-swap, image files must use absolute paths or else the server
doesn't see them. Sounds like a programming bug to me, but they don't
want to declare it one -- and thus assume responsibility for a minor
matter, so it's simply up to me to deal with how they are.
My only fear is that down the road there should be many more little
oddities like this...already they don't allow me to use .ani or .cur
files, which are the only formats which MSIE 7 would utilize for
custom cursor graphics...no idea why, but they don't and that's that.
Not only do they sound like any other company out there with that kind
of an attitude, but they are in fact somewhat less than other webhosts
in having bizarre little oddities like this image-swap business.
I'm very sad to leave them, as they had been such an interesting
resource for me -- yes, *resource* -- but I really don't want to deal
with any more weird little "surprises" down the road, so I'm going to
cancel my subscription...I hope there aren't any weird surprises with
that as well! Though I shouldn't be too surprised if there were...I
can't find any cancellation info on their website! I'm going to have
to ask customer/tech support again....
Sherman Pendley
> Oh, true, it's not their job -- but SEO is about making it their job,
> isn't it; or, perhaps better put, "piggy-backing" on what *is* their
> job (highly relevant results) to help yourself -- a symbiotic
> relationship....
No, SEO is about cheating. Gaming the system to rank higher than your
content would rate on its own. If you're talking about something else,
please stop calling it SEO - calling it that only serves to confuse the
issue.
> Yes, but not practical for a "lifestyle resource" such as I plan to
> create...the site needs to pay for itself first before I can take on
> any more financial commitments!
LOL! I haven't heard such grandiose plans since the crash. Lots of luck
with that - and don't quit your day job.
dorayme
<6f9fbe7c-18ae-45c0...@25g2000hsx.googlegroups.com>,
Know nothing about it, I just relay what I was told by a very successful
businessman who maintains his own website (Joomla based and boy o boy
does it break at larger font-sizes... sssshhhh! I know, it is not
Joomla's fault.)
Me, I just like to make client websites with good and truthful content,
clear words and leave it to the gods... but I suppose I should look to
this ranking business more...
One severe character here could not fathom it when I suggested once that
not all websites are in this race, that great bookmarking and search
engine findability are not everyone's priorities.
--
dorayme
Prisoner at War
>
>
> Know nothing about it, I just relay what I was told by a very successful
> businessman who maintains his own website (Joomla based and boy o boy
> does it break at larger font-sizes... sssshhhh! I know, it is not
> Joomla's fault.)
Well, it certainly stands to reason: benefits google, benefits
advertisers, benefits webmasters -- win-win-win situation all-around!
> Me, I just like to make client websites with good and truthful content,
> clear words and leave it to the gods... but I suppose I should look to
> this ranking business more...
There's a difference between content and SEO, in my estimation anyway,
even though SEO means nothing without the valuable original content to
back it up and keep it up high on the SERPs.
I'm not an SEO hobbyist, mind you; just wondering, trying to determine
what I should know about it. That's the thing about SBI! -- they are
the only webhost I know of who emphasize SEO, even though they don't
actually use that somewhat disreputable term to describe their
services.
> One severe character here could not fathom it when I suggested once that
> not all websites are in this race, that great bookmarking and search
> engine findability are not everyone's priorities.
True, those are so-called "hobby sites" and there's nothing wrong with
them.
I wouldn't pull the plug on my upcoming website even if it were a
money-loser, because I really believe in what I have to offer (it's a
"philosophy of mind" and "lifestyle resource" site).
But I really would like to make lots of money on it because that would
mean that lots of people find my site very valuable, which is my
intent all along: to put something out there that I don't think is
being covered by anyone else on the web -- certainly not in the way I
envision (again, "philosophy of mind" and "lifestyle
resource"...intrigued yet?? ;-))...and "SEO" or "getting-picked-up-
and-indexed-super-duper-highly-by-the-search-engines" is going to be a
key component.
> --
> dorayme
Prisoner at War
>
>
> No, SEO is about cheating. Gaming the system to rank higher than your
> content would rate on its own. If you're talking about something else,
> please stop calling it SEO - calling it that only serves to confuse the
> issue.
Well then, it is as I've said: we do have different definitions of
"SEO!" I'm taking the term literally, as in optimizing search engine
results vis-a-vis one's own website. You have in mind the admittedly
poor snake-oil history of that term. But hey just 'cause military
power is almost always used for great evil doesn't mean that having a
military is a bad idea, right? Likewise with SEO. I don't think it
has to be about "cheating" or even "gaming" the system.
To me, SEO is trying to "compensate" for the inherent stupidity of
current Artificial Intelligence efforts. It's not about somehow
masking my site about hamsters into something that turns up on keyword
searches for "true love" and "get rich quick" and "perfect body
now"...to me SEO is about helping those stupid but powerful spiders
realize that my site exists and that it's the best hamster site out
there....
> LOL! I haven't heard such grandiose plans since the crash. Lots of luck
> with that - and don't quit your day job.
Grandiose plans??? I say I want the site to pay for itself first
before I would consider spending more money on advertising and that's
somehow grandiose???
Mark Goodge
to keyboard and typed:
>On May 11, 4:19 pm, Mark Goodge <use...@listmail.good-stuff.co.uk>
>wrote:
>>
>>
>> No, and the guidelines I've referred to explicitly say otherwise.
>>
>> To summarise Google's guidelines, ranking is all about three things:
>>
>> 1. Content
>
>I'm curiously about this point: google doesn't actually explain how
>their bots determine "good content"...now I can imagine them using
>some kind of text string comparison algorithm to test for originality
>of content, but unless "good" simply means "original," how would their
>bots know anything about content??
Mostly, yes, it's about being original.
>> 2. Structure
>
>Not entirely sure I understand this point; that google advisory talks
>about their bots choking on certain things but other than flash
>animation and such I'm not sure why a billion-dollar company like
>google doesn't just develop better bots instead of forcing people who
>have otherwise valid HTML to keep an eye out for how google programmed
>their bots!
Two rasons: a) it's a lot harder than you seem to think to develop
bots capable of parsing content from images, client-side scripting,
etc, and b) Google's guidelines are nothing more than a restatement of
the W3C guidelines here and merely reflect what is good programming
practice. A website that meets Google's requirements will also be more
likely to have valid HTML/CSS and be more accessible to human users as
well as spiders. So there's no sensible reason to want to do things
differently to the way Google suggest, and therefore there's no reason
why Google should want to develop algorithms to index sites that don't
at least try to adhere to published standards.
Google won't punish you for simply having a few typos or a bit of bad
HTML syntax in your pages - even the best sites often fail validation
here and there - but the less valid and accessible your code becomes,
the harder it is for Google to index it.
>> 3. Popularity
>>
>> The first two are entirely under your own control. They're also the
>> two that can't be faked - if your structure looks good, then it is
>> good; if your content looks good, then it is good. "White hat" SEO is
>> all about getting these right; it's about making sure that your
>> content really is good and your structure really is good. But getting
>> these right isn't just about SEO, it's also about making your site
>> useful and accessible to your target users. So it's something you
>> should be doing anyway, as a fundamental part of your website design
>> and authoring.
>
>Yes, certainly, but I fear we're getting into chicken-or-egg territory
>here: my concern is that people won't find my site, whereas you seem
>to be saying that search engines will somehow "automatically" wind up
>listing me if my site is useful and accessible...my understanding is
>that those factors, utility and accessibility, are what keeps them on
>my site (and coming back for more), but my issue is how to get them to
>know about my site in the first place, and that's about SERP and PR,
>isn't it...I know I can't be bothered to look beyond the Top 5 results
>oftentimes, much even the Top Ten or the next SERP....
You can get your site spidered initally by telling Google about it.
That's what the "add my site" page is for:
Even if you don't do that, it only takes *one* link from an
already-indexed page to get your site listed. Additional inbound links
don't affect the speed at which your site is listed; they merely
affect the pagerank algorithm for ranking the site.
>> The third is the hard one, because you can't directly control who else
>> links to your site. Manipulating apparent link popularity, therefore,
>> is the focus of most "black hat" SEO, because there is scope for this
>> aspect of ranking to be faked by means of things like link farms,
>> gateway pages, referer spam, etc. Some of these methods can be very
>> effective, at least in the short term (referer spam in particular was
>> hugely effective until people wised up to it), but they're not
>> reliable in the long run as the search engines develop algorithms to
>> weed them out.
>
>Yes, I certainly don't plan on using any such tactics. As a matter of
>fact, aside from certain (outdated) principles like keyword density, I
>haven't a clue about SEO.
>
>Do you do anything to help your sites list highly on google?
I follow the first two guidelines. It seems to work. Google for
"motorway services" and "british surnames" and my sites are top, both
times.
Mark
--
Pointless waffle (again) at http://mark.x.tc
"Time is tickin' and we can't go back"
Sherman Pendley
> On May 11, 8:13 pm, Sherman Pendley <spamt...@dot-app.org> wrote:
>>
>> No, SEO is about cheating. Gaming the system to rank higher than your
>> content would rate on its own. If you're talking about something else,
>> please stop calling it SEO - calling it that only serves to confuse the
>> issue.
>
> Well then, it is as I've said: we do have different definitions of
> "SEO!" I'm taking the term literally, as in optimizing search engine
> results
Whether the literal sense of the term has that meaning or not, the term
"SEO" in popular usage is used to refer to the snake-oil variety.
>> LOL! I haven't heard such grandiose plans since the crash. Lots of luck
>> with that - and don't quit your day job.
>
> Grandiose plans??? I say I want the site to pay for itself first
> before I would consider spending more money on advertising and that's
> somehow grandiose?
Yes, in fact it is. Would you expect a non-web business to break even
without spending a dime on advertising? Why would you expect a web site
to be different? I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but the
notion that the internet is a license to print money died along with the
tech bubble.
Chaddy2222
Prisoner at War wrote:
Well as for ServerGrade. Just try them out. Have a look through the
site if you have not done so already though.
But as for learning you might not be able to learn much from the web
host because as Jerry said it is not the Job of the host to teach you
this stuff. You need to learn from sites such as http://www.htmldog.com
or even better buy a book.
But you can also read the large amount of stuff the is on sites such
as http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com
--
Regards Chad. http://freewebdesignonline.org
Andy Dingley
> This is one aspect of human nature I'm afraid I shall never
> understand. I say "A" and even go on to specifically say that I'm not
> saying "B" and still people will say that I'm saying "B"!! =(
It's because you're saying B, and you only _think_ that you're saying
A
Ditch this hosting company. Although do it gracefully, because they
even talked to you about an issue that no hosting company with any
sense would even answer the phone over - _YOUR_ script bugs.
Secondly, find a basic HTML tutorial ("Head First HTML with CSS &
XHTML", as a recommendation), or else contract out the development
work. I doubt you can afford to waste "three days" or whatever over
simple beginner's errors like this one.
Jerry Stuckle
I suggest you find another line of work. You are obviously too dense to
understand what it takes to be a web developer.
--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstu...@attglobal.net
==================
Jerry Stuckle
I have never even heard of SBI! until you came on board. But you are
obviously too dense to understand simple English. I'm not the only one
who has told you what you're expecting is not their job.
I suggest you find another line of work.
--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstu...@attglobal.net
==================
Jerry Stuckle
No, it's all about how you can't understand basic programming.
Andy Dingley
> http://www.ego-management.org/test.html
The rollover image file is 100k, which isn't small.
Now AFAICS, this works, but not well. It does roll-over, but it takes
a long time about doing so. So I think your problem could be as simple
as poor response from their server, coupled with a fairly large image.
First of all, rollovers look naff. If you want a site that looks like
1997, just go over the top with cutesy rollovers.
In terms of getting them to work, then do it with CSS (in general).
This works. It generally works better than JavaScript too. You'll have
to use <a> all over the place to keep IE happy, and you can't do it
for foreground images, so it won't print well either.
If you do it with JS, then pre-load the rollover images when the page
is loaded. That way the user doesn't have to wait when they first roll-
over.
Prisoner at War
sicur...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
>
> Well as for ServerGrade. Just try them out. Have a look through the
> site if you have not done so already though.
> But as for learning you might not be able to learn much from the web
> host because as Jerry said it is not the Job of the host to teach you
> this stuff.
Jerry has no idea what he's talking about. I wasn't asking for help
with JavaScript; I was asking why they didn't seem to support
JavaScript since the code worked on my end but not on theirs. Big
difference, but for some reason the distinction remains lost on him.
As for my "learning with SBI!" comment, learning indeed is what SBI!
purports to do; as a matter of fact, one of their sales pages lists
colleges and universities using them for e-commerce instruction,
fairly famous places like the University of Arizona and even The
Citadel!
> You need to learn from sites such ashttp://www.htmldog.com
> or even better buy a book.
> But you can also read the large amount of stuff the is on sites such
> ashttp://www.webpagesthatsuck.com
LOL, yeah, I came across that last one! But thanks for the refs; yes,
I was hoping that SBI! would be a "centralized place" where I could
learn this stuff (not necessarily "all" of it but a lot, certainly --
and I suppose I have, though I should have liked more), but it looks
like it's back to just googling the web and tickling the library
books!
> --
> Regards Chad.http://freewebdesignonline.org
Prisoner at War
>
>
>
> Whether the literal sense of the term has that meaning or not, the term
> "SEO" in popular usage is used to refer to the snake-oil variety.
Yes, I did realize that, which is why I kept stipulating that we had
different definitions and therefore were conducting different, though
related, conversations!
Hey, "DHTML" and even "JavaScript" has/had a bad rep, owing to mass
misuse of their power, but we shouldn't conflate the technology itself
with the application thereof -- and likewise, SEO. There's obviously
a place for SEO principles. Indeed, SEO helps search engines, dumb
bots that they are, recognize the reality they purport to seek out and
index.
> Yes, in fact it is. Would you expect a non-web business to break even
> without spending a dime on advertising? Why would you expect a web site
> to be different? I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but the
> notion that the internet is a license to print money died along with the
> tech bubble.
Hey, I've enjoyed "Dot Com" and "E-Dreams" and own the DVDs, too...but
that's not what I'm talking about here.
I'm talking niche content, even blogs...there's been many who at the
very least broke even on their sites without advertising **since** the
great Dot Bomb years. Some even make a living from it, and a very
good one at that.
But all I'd said there was that I want my site to be able to pay for
itself before thinking about purchasing AdWords advertising, etc. I
just can't agree that that's somehow "grandiose" at all...though I
concur with you regarding the power of advertising, I also think that
not every type of business needs it -- my local pizzeria certainly
doesn't: its market is the neighborhood around it, whose citizens
already know of it. While it would welcome visitors from afar, it
certainly needn't advertise to them.
And on the web -- this much I've learned from SBI! (and thus for such
reasons it does pain me to have to decide to leave them already) --
it's much better to try to leverage the search engines first before
spending even more money. You see, there's no offline analogue to
something like the web and its search engines and Craig's List and so
forth. That's all free advertising, in effect. And I intend to
maximize their potential before venturing into any more "capital
expenditure"...hardly grandiose -- if anything, most conservative!
Prisoner at War
Just admit that you were angry over nothing, Jerry. Just admit that
you're wrong. As a matter of fact, take an anger-management course
before you decide to make a fool out of yourself again.
Usenet is not a pissing contest. If you can't help, don't hinder,
either.
On May 12, 12:50 pm, Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>
>
> I suggest you find another line of work. You are obviously too dense to
> understand what it takes to be a web developer.
>
> --
> ==================
> Remove the "x" from my email address
> Jerry Stuckle
> JDS Computer Training Corp.
> jstuck...@attglobal.net
> ==================
Prisoner at War
Neither am I the only one to tell you that I'm not expecting
programming help from them. I'm asking why a script that runs on my
end doesn't on theirs, when all necessary files have been uploaded.
I'm sorry you can't comprehend the distinction, but then again you
seem to have no notion of "responsibility" either -- such as, your
responsibility to behave responsibly and not engage in silly ad
hominem diatribe.
I would wonder what you enjoy so much about insulting someone in the
midst of a customer service issue, but it's clear now that your
neurosis speaks for itself.
On May 12, 12:51 pm, Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>
>
> I have never even heard of SBI! until you came on board. But you are
> obviously too dense to understand simple English. I'm not the only one
> who has told you what you're expecting is not their job.
>
> I suggest you find another line of work.
>
> --
> ==================
> Remove the "x" from my email address
> Jerry Stuckle
> JDS Computer Training Corp.
> jstuck...@attglobal.net
> ==================
Prisoner at War
For all your accusations of an error in my simple image-swap code,
you've yet to point out exactly what the problem was, despite repeated
challenges to do so.
On May 12, 12:52 pm, Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>
>
> No, it's all about how you can't understand basic programming.
>
> --
> ==================
> Remove the "x" from my email address
> Jerry Stuckle
> JDS Computer Training Corp.
> jstuck...@attglobal.net
> ==================
Jonathan N. Little
> On May 12, 4:23 am, Chaddy2222 <spamlovermailbox-
> sicur...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>>
>> Well as for ServerGrade. Just try them out. Have a look through the
>> site if you have not done so already though.
>> But as for learning you might not be able to learn much from the web
>> host because as Jerry said it is not the Job of the host to teach you
>> this stuff.
>
> Jerry has no idea what he's talking about. I wasn't asking for help
> with JavaScript; I was asking why they didn't seem to support
> JavaScript since the code worked on my end but not on theirs. Big
> difference, but for some reason the distinction remains lost on him.
If it is client-side JavaScript the webserver has nothing to do with it,
other than properly server the content type for external JS files.
Client-side JavaScript is processed within the browser. Your JavaScript
problems have nothing to do with your hosting company.
--
Take care,
Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com
Prisoner at War
>
>
> It's because you're saying B, and you only _think_ that you're saying
> A
Well, how was I saying "A," then?
From the get-go I've said that my code works perfectly on my end. Yet
it doesn't on theirs. Is it asking them for "programming help" if
perfect programming doesn't work with them? Or is it not, as I keep
saying, simply asking them why they don't support standard code?
And as it turns out, they say the issue is having to use an absolute
path name when attempting an image-swap. That's got nothing to do
with "programming" at all. For some reason, their CMS just won't
accept relative file paths when an image-swap is involved.
Now that's a figgin' **B*U*G** but human nature loves to blame the
victim and so there's the tendency to blame my "programming" -- even
though it's got nothing to do with programming, but simply how their
CMS sees files!
> Ditch this hosting company. Although do it gracefully, because they
> even talked to you about an issue that no hosting company with any
> sense would even answer the phone over - _YOUR_ script bugs.
Repeating a lie doesn't make it true -- though, yes, it's worked for
Goebbels and Stalin and Madison Avenue.
Now where's my script bugs, please? No one's pointed it out in all
this time. It's another curious property of human nature that people
should be so eager to cast blame but cannot be bothered to point out
what the alleged error is supposed to be.
> Secondly, find a basic HTML tutorial ("Head First HTML with CSS &
> XHTML", as a recommendation),
Already got it! Very nice book, I really dig it -- though curiously
it's in color whereas the later-issued "Head First JavaScript"
isn't....
> or else contract out the development
> work. I doubt you can afford to waste "three days" or whatever over
> simple beginner's errors like this one.
Yeah, and what was that "simple beginner's error," exactly?
Why do you people keep saying there's an error and yet can't be
bothered to point it out??
Prisoner at War
>
>
> If it is client-side JavaScript the webserver has nothing to do with it,
> other than properly server the content type for external JS files.
> Client-side JavaScript is processed within the browser. Your JavaScript
> problems have nothing to do with your hosting company.
The image-swap **works** when loading the page from my hard drive into
my web browser.
The **same exact** page, when uploaded to their servers, does not work
when viewed on my web browser.
Explain how that's "client-side JavaScript."
Explain how that's "my JavaScript problems."
Please explain. I hear a lot of accusations, but no one's yet to
explain the charges.
It's easy to only *say* that someone's wrong.
Prove it.
Tell me where in HTML/JavaScript it's stipulated that the first src
attribute of an image-swap needs to bear an absolute file path name in
order for the image-swap to work.
That's what was preventing the image-swap from working. The webhost
needed the first src attribute involved in an image-swap to be in
absolute path format.
Now tell me how that's "my JavaScript" or "client-side."
Prisoner at War
>
>
> The rollover image file is 100k, which isn't small.
You know, I was wondering about that...with DSL and whatnot these
days, what's the general consensus on file sizes? How much ought a
single webpage to weigh? (Say, in terms of text-to-kilobyte
proportions or some-such.) How big should "minor" graphics be? How
small should "main" pictures be? Etc.
> Now AFAICS, this works, but not well. It does roll-over, but it takes
> a long time about doing so.
Well, I could preload the image -- but test.html was created
specifically to eliminate all other possible factors (you see it's a
very simple <html><head><title></title></head><body><img /></body></
html> of a page).
> So I think your problem could be as simple
> as poor response from their server, coupled with a fairly large image.
Hmmm, their server choking over a 100K image??
Actually, I don't know if you've been following the other posts in
this thread, but I've announced several times now that their tech
support has finally resolved the problem: they need the first scr
attribute in the <img> of an image-swap to be in *absolute* file path
format!!
Strange as that is, they themselves did not know this (it took 'em two
weeks to diagnose, after all) -- as if I'm the only one since the
company's founding in 1997 to have ever attempted an image-swap?!?!?
> First of all, rollovers look naff. If you want a site that looks like
> 1997, just go over the top with cutesy rollovers.
I know, I know...but it's not over-the-top, really it's not. I know
they have a bad rep worse than plaid suits, but hey...the thing about
fashion is that it's always changing -- and coming around again.
Visit that domain again next year and you won't mind it too much on
that account!
> In terms of getting them to work, then do it with CSS (in general).
Yeah, I just saw that on like page 200-something of Simon Collison's
book. Cool! But his particular technique requires a bit of work in
an image editor first, to make sure the image is set up right to
effect a purely CSS image-swap....
> This works. It generally works better than JavaScript too. You'll have
> to use <a> all over the place to keep IE happy, and you can't do it
> for foreground images, so it won't print well either.
Hmm, sounds like you have another CSS image-swap technique in mind
than what Simon Collison's book details??
> If you do it with JS, then pre-load the rollover images when the page
> is loaded. That way the user doesn't have to wait when they first roll-
> over.
Yes, I'll be preloading it for sure. Again, just wanted to simplify
things for tech support to diagnose.
Prisoner at War
wrote:
>
>
> Mostly, yes, it's about being original.
Right, and the definition of "originality" is determined by text
string comparison metrics, then? If that's all it is, then I wonder
how they would rank a site against another for "originality"...best
use of synonyms?? Heretofore unencountered sentence length?? Most
ASCII kilobytes required for the whole site??
> Two rasons: a) it's a lot harder than you seem to think to develop
> bots capable of parsing content from images, client-side scripting,
> etc,
Well, yeah, that's why I'd said "other than Flash animation and
such"...or perhaps I misunderstood and that's all that they have a
problem with.
> and b) Google's guidelines are nothing more than a restatement of
> the W3C guidelines here and merely reflect what is good programming
> practice. A website that meets Google's requirements will also be more
> likely to have valid HTML/CSS and be more accessible to human users as
> well as spiders. So there's no sensible reason to want to do things
> differently to the way Google suggest, and therefore there's no reason
> why Google should want to develop algorithms to index sites that don't
> at least try to adhere to published standards.
>
> Google won't punish you for simply having a few typos or a bit of bad
> HTML syntax in your pages - even the best sites often fail validation
> here and there - but the less valid and accessible your code becomes,
> the harder it is for Google to index it.
Oh, okay. That's great news, then -- my site has been failing W3C
validation for little XHTML issues here and there (often "typos" sort
of mistakes like a missing closing slash for a self-contained tag like
<img>, etc.).
> You can get your site spidered initally by telling Google about it.
> That's what the "add my site" page is for:
>
> http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yeah, but I'm not talking about simply being indexed...you need a very
high rank, and that's why I keep thinking in terms of SEO (so-called
white-hat, if you will)...I'm not worried at all about simply being
listed on SERP 98,470,115 -- I'm puzzled over how to get on SERP 1 --
and within the Top 10 at most!
> Even if you don't do that, it only takes *one* link from an
> already-indexed page to get your site listed. Additional inbound links
> don't affect the speed at which your site is listed; they merely
> affect the pagerank algorithm for ranking the site.
Yes, that's the other thing, getting linked ("peer-reviewed")...wow,
how much there is to consider!
> I follow the first two guidelines. It seems to work. Google for
> "motorway services" and "british surnames" and my sites are top, both
> times.
Many thanks for your time and good advice! I know it sounds like I'm
SEO-crazy here, but that's simply the illusory nature of stream-of-
consciousness wondering-aloud (which, if you haven't noticed, is how I
approach usenet posting!)...I don't think I'd have too much time for
SEO anyway, so it's a relief to hear that it's hardly works!
> Mark
> --
> Pointless waffle (again) athttp://mark.x.tc
Steve Pugh
> On May 12, 4:14 pm, "Jonathan N. Little" <lws4...@central.net> wrote:
> > If it is client-side JavaScript the webserver has nothing to do with it,
> > other than properly server the content type for external JS files.
> > Client-side JavaScript is processed within the browser. Your JavaScript
> > problems have nothing to do with your hosting company.
>
> The image-swap **works** when loading the page from my hard drive into
> my web browser.
>
> The **same exact** page, when uploaded to their servers, does not work
> when viewed on my web browser.
>
> Explain how that's "client-side JavaScript."
JavaScript is always client side. 100%.
So either, your host is changing your JavaScript code after you upload
it, or their peculiar hosting environment is moving images around and
fixing paths in HTML but not in JavaScript.
Question, how do you upload images to your server?
> Tell me where in HTML/JavaScript it's stipulated that the first src
> attribute of an image-swap needs to bear an absolute file path name in
> order for the image-swap to work.
It isn't.
> That's what was preventing the image-swap from working. The webhost
> needed the first src attribute involved in an image-swap to be in
> absolute path format.
But no other host does. Your host is doing something to your code.
Your host shouldn't need to know anything about your JavaScript. Web
servers do nothing at all with JavaScript. The fact that your script
needed to be rewritten in a certain way means that your host is
mucking about with your code behind the scenes. This is very, very
odd.
> Now tell me how that's "my JavaScript" or "client-side."
All JavaScript is client side. The fact that your host is rewriting
your JavaScript, or moving your images, in such a way that when sent
to the browser it no longer works is not at all normal. But this is
the host creating a client side problem, not a server side problem.
Steve
Andy Dingley
<prisone...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I've announced several times now that their tech
>support has finally resolved the problem: they need the first scr
>attribute in the <img> of an image-swap to be in *absolute* file path
>format!!
Announce it again, it'll still be wrong.
That is _not_ the problem, The amount of perverse mis-configuration
they'd have to do to achieve this is beyond a host dumb enough to get
involved in fixing users' content for them.
Andy Dingley
<prisone...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Yeah, and what was that "simple beginner's error," exactly?
<img src="blah.png" onMouseOver="bleh.gif" onMouseOut="blah.png">.
You're confusing URI resources like src with JavaScript(sic) event
handlers like onmouseover & onmouseout
Prisoner at War
>
>
> JavaScript is always client side. 100%.
Indeed -- but my antecedent there, "that," was not referring to
JavaScript but to the fact that something which displays right in my
browser when on my hard drive *doesn't* when on their server. Same
code, same browser, same everything, except in one case it's on my
hard drive and in another it's on their server.
One would naturally consult *them*, then.
> So either, your host is changing your JavaScript code after you upload
> it, or their peculiar hosting environment is moving images around and
> fixing paths in HTML but not in JavaScript.
>
> Question, how do you upload images to your server?
Great question!
I'd not wanted to speak of it earlier, for fear of making my post seem
even more convoluted, but to upload to SBI! requires going through a
certain webpage of theirs...it has to do, again, with their
"proprietary way" of doing things...they have a "database-centric"
structure for purposes of SEO (which, incidentally, means no CGI
stuff, either -- but then again, they're not exactly marketing
themselves to power users and DIYers either) and so files can't simply
be FTPed up (at least not the first time -- that much I do know for
sure) and must be uploaded as part of an .html document that
specifically calls for them.
Okay, whatever, right? I mean, however it's uploaded, HTML is still
HTML, right? Ditto JavaScript and CSS. A src attribute is a src
attribute, right?
Well, not with them it isn't!
And they didn't even know of it until I raised the matter.
Which is doubly-odd due to the implication that since their founding
in 1997, nobody's ever attempted an image-swap, such that this problem
was unknown until now???
Just too many weird little curiosities like this, and it makes me want
to cancel my subscription -- which, speaking of canceling and
oddities, there's no information on their website about how to
cancel!!!
Absolutely none whatsoever!!!
So I ask the rep (the latest one, anyway; I've been passed back and
forth between four reps in slightly over two weeks now) about their
cancellation policies and, get this, he tells me to contact support!!!
I suppose he meant, "start a new support request," but it's just funny
how they word things (this isn't the first time)....
I'm telling you, SBI! is friggin' weird. Ever step into a New York
neighborhood pizzeria where the owner has a shrug and a take-it-or-
leave-it attitude when you tell him there's a fly in your cheese??
> It isn't.
Thank you!!! I'm calling it a bug in their CMS and they say "it's
just how SBI! works"...well, if that's "just" how it works, why didn't
you know about it until now??
They're one weird webhost. Not evil, I don't think, and it was an
interesting learning experience which I don't regret -- like a weird
girlfriend you will laugh over for years to come -- but I'm certainly
disappointed that they just shrug these things off as if I'm making
extraordinary demands of them.
> But no other host does. Your host is doing something to your code.
The thing is, they don't even pretend to give an explanation. It just
makes me feel like things "just happen," you know what I mean? That
"oh well shit happens" kind of attitude. Not for $300 a year am I
gonna put up with that! I mean, what next??
> Your host shouldn't need to know anything about your JavaScript. Web
> servers do nothing at all with JavaScript. The fact that your script
> needed to be rewritten in a certain way means that your host is
> mucking about with your code behind the scenes. This is very, very
> odd.
Okay, that's what I was thinking! But since I'm a newbie to all this
(I only learned about "CMS" through this thread, actually!), I had to
ask on usenet...it would have been better if SBI! had tried to give me
a sense of why things are how they are with them instead of making me
feel like I'm supposed to work around *them.*
> All JavaScript is client side. The fact that your host is rewriting
> your JavaScript, or moving your images, in such a way that when sent
> to the browser it no longer works is not at all normal. But this is
> the host creating a client side problem, not a server side problem.
Okay, to be super exact about it, yes -- not literally server-side as
in something to do with their server hardware or software...thanks for
clarifying that point, which I'd overlooked even though I now
understand it to be something due to their CMS.
> Steve
Prisoner at War
> On Mon, 12 May 2008 13:23:27 -0700 (PDT), Prisoner at War
>
> >Yeah, and what was that "simple beginner's error," exactly?
>
> <img src="blah.png" onMouseOver="bleh.gif" onMouseOut="blah.png">.
>
> You're confusing URI resources like src with JavaScript(sic) event
> handlers like onmouseover & onmouseout
Yes, I'm sorry I'm not more articulate with the technical terms
involved...but that's not what caused the image-swap to not work when
their server served it to my web browser, even though the same exact
code does work when my hard drive serves it to the same web browser.
It turns out that they needed an absolute file path for the first src
attribute for some reason ("it's just how SBI! works" -- even though
it took them two weeks to find that out for themselves!)...oddly
enough, the other src attributes can remain in relative format.
Looking forward, I guess this is a good lesson in itself, too; to ask
of my next webhost very detailed questions about what they can do and
how they would do it...all along I'm just assuming that what works on
my end should seamless work on theirs (that is, no distinction between
being sent up by my hard drive or by their server, save for speed due
to internet connections)....
Prisoner at War
> On Mon, 12 May 2008 13:53:24 -0700 (PDT), Prisoner at War
>
> > I've announced several times now that their tech
> >support has finally resolved the problem: they need the first scr
> >attribute in the <img> of an image-swap to be in *absolute* file path
> >format!!
>
> Announce it again, it'll still be wrong.
*What* is "wrong"??? *What*, exactly???
The image-swap now works when served through the web from their
servers to my browser -- *after* they set the first src attribute to
absolute path format (while curiously leaving the other two
relative!).
> That is _not_ the problem, The amount of perverse mis-configuration
> they'd have to do to achieve this is beyond a host dumb enough to get
> involved in fixing users' content for them.
What "perverse misconfiguration" are you talking about???
All they did was set the first src attribute to absolute path format!
The issue is why any webhost would need to do that.
What is there to "fix"??
Tell me where the code is wrong.
You keep making these groundless accusations like Jerry Stuckle, and
yet just like him you have yet to point out exactly what was "wrong"
with my "code" -- when it's clearly not even a coding issue!
Good God, is there a semanticist in the house?? Talk about three men
in a dark room with an elephant....