AdvisorBits

Google Maps (beta) was launched pretty quietly today.

The service is quite fast to load in the browser and moving around on the map is fast. The mapping screen refreshes from the center out which is a nice little touch. I don't have to wait half way through the map loading to find out if I am centered correctly.

I was able to find quite a few things in Albany and in my local town. My own home which is quite rural was found, but another friend's home was not. Directions between known points were accurate, but interestingly they were slightly different for no apparent reason if you switch the to-from end points.

I am not really familiar with the other mapping services ability to pin point businesses by name, but Google Maps found a small local college by name only. I thought that was pretty good. Another search for restaurants in my town produced a fairly comprehensive list. More than I knew around here.

The business listings here do not seem related to Googles main search engine listings. I used keywords I am sure the main Google knows my site by and knows. I know Google has the address, among other reasons I know this, it appears on every page. Google Maps didn't find it.

Beta means not quite ready for production yet, so I don't mind a few odd results at this point. The results are snappy and accurate, even if I do wonder about some of the things it doesn't find. (Yet.)

What are your first impressions?

I am working on a redesign of my primary business website. I want to achieve at least 2 goals which I frequently help my clients with, goals that like the cobbler who's children have no shoes I have not achieved for myself.

1. I want to make the site more sematically correct. More than just stuff like menus should be lists, not just <span>s in <divs> information should be simple and easy to navigate. Heading tags should be nested in ways that would make sense to my highschool composition teacher, rest her soul.
2. I want to focus more on the RIGHT keywords, and make sure that search engines correctly interpret what my site has to offer searchers. Of course, I will have to figure out what those are.

The site I have now does OK in terms of page rank, and the keywords that most search engines calculate are acceptable, and the XHTML and CSS validates OK most of the time too. I wouldn't mind it if the site looked a bit cooler while I am at it.

Oh, and one other thing... it is going to be entirely MT powered.

I was doing a little search engine research on the word "blogging", and I was pretty suprised to notice that according to Overture there were 120 searches for "fired for blogging" in April of 2005.

Don't believe me? Check for yourself: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Once I thought about it a little I was amused. I am an independant contractor for a variety of reasons including my desire to be free from concerns like this.

People ask me about links to things all the time. In a sense, many of the posts in AdvisorBits are just annotated links. Lately, I have been writing on a less frequent basis about the things that have really caught my eye, and a little less of the quicky posts.

Part of my reason for that has been that I knew I was working on a web directory where I would be able to quickly post links to sites that interested me. A directory is a categorized list, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that MT is easily able to create such a directory. If the actual categories seem arbitrary to you, you should look in a US phone book some time.

Without further ado... here is the new all new less fattening AdvisorBits Web Directory.

The site search has been updated to search both AdvisorBits and the Web Directory, hopefully this will be useful. (At least its no longer broken nor using a template with the default style from MT 3.1x) There's a link on the AdvisorBits About page to submit suggestions for links, and you can ask general questions about the directory in the comments of this post.

I have watched with a certain amount of amusement the national debate [sic] over the correct words to label the passage of time when the Christians celebrate the birth of their lord, and the Jews celebrate the miracles of a small army rising up successfully against a larger army and the oil which should have lasted only one day but instead lasted eight, and when retailers all over America make it into the black.

I have always thought that we used "Happy Holidays" because it was more inclusive, AND ...

... because it is easier for me to spell. For some reason I always want to leave the "H" out of Christmas. And I have no idea how to spell Chanukah without some kind of help.

Which brings me to the first of two reasons this post is in the Search Engines category. I use Google to correct my spelling. If the application I am using doesn't support spell check, many times I will search for the term. If I spell it wrong, Google will generally provide a correct suggestion. It always knows what I am looking for, why shouldn't it know what I meant to spell?

At JSW4.NET Internet Hosting Services for Small Business we just finished another web site managed using MT for my friend and picture framing specialist Jeff Risley. Jeff owns Park Row Gallery, and he is having his twentieth year anniversary this year. I used this opportunity to employ MT both in the primary site, and with far less customization in a news site. This lets him manage the content on his site very easily, and gives him an easy way to post regular news items.