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September 24, 1999

j.ello | by the byte

• I loved your comments on the millennium article, especially the one from friend and fellow 3d animation junky James Zachary who wrote, "I think you are drinking to much night time cold syrup."  Thanks man... I feel the love.  Fellow j.ellofolk David Ockrassa send me a link to the Calendars FAQ part1, which goes into some excellent detail about the topic of when the millennium should be - and it's written very objectively.  You can check it out at http://www.pip.dknet.dk/~c-t/calendar.html. 

      Few websites are an overnight success, most private sites linger for an eternity before the masses get a hold of it.  Sometimes the only option afforded to us poor webfolk is the random chance of being seen in the search engines.  Maybe someone important will see it and let everyone else know... then of course, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and suddenly the site is "all that, and a bag of chips". If you're in the calm, but looking for the storm to come just a wee bit quicker, you might want to concentrate your efforts on the details of your website.
     I spent much of last night retro-fitting the Browse Old Issues page with the extended information that you can now find on the main j.ello | report page.  There are two really good reasons for doing so.  First, it makes it easier to find something in the old issues that might strike your fancy on a glance... but it also helps for placement in the search engines.  You see... having a web page doesn't quite cut it for the web engines... each one applies certain rules when deciding who to show first.  One of the most important factors in the search is the title of the web page.  In my case, the title of each report has simply been "j.ello | report for September 12, 1999" etc...  with no description of what the content is.  By entering a rough description of the content in the title of the page, you can improve your chances of being found in many more ways that just those keywords you THINK will lead people to you.  The more pages you have and the more varied the words in those pages are, the better your chances of being found when people are searching for parallel information.  I have lots of pages, each one containing lots of varied content, so I am hoping that adding descriptions in the titles will help bring my pages up with a wider range search keywords.  Now, keep in mind that the title is not all that matters.  There are many factors influencing your standing in the search engines like, frequency of the word in your page, closeness of the word to the top of your page, the so-called "meta-tags" which can indicate a page's description or the keywords that should be associated with a page (We'll talk more about those another time), even your URL matters.  Still, it is safe to say that if you want any kind of standing, then your title should be informative... and should be well-tuned to your content for that page.
     It is unfortunate, but sometimes some of the best pages don't show up on the search engines because they just don't set themselves up to be seen.  I have been in that boat - you almost have to specifically type "j.ello" into the search engines to get anything from my site to come up... and even then it's usually 10 or so down on the list.  UGH!  
     Hopefully these renovations will do us all a favor... and I hope everyone can learn by my mistakes. :)

     -j.ello

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