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Web Standards Curriculum is a free course that aims to teach proper web standards–based web design and development from scratch. The first 21 articles are already online, with 29 more to come.

By the look of them they really do approach web development at absolute ground level, from defining the HTML head and choosing the right doctype (very useful, especially as HTML 5 requires the doctype to be specified properly in order to make sure the browser renders the page in standards mode; currently also imperative in order to make sure IE displays the page in standards and not in quirks mode). The first few articles also cover information architecture, drafting a site wireframe, colour theory and web typography.

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On June 2008 Google cheerfully announced a new feature of Google Trends:

“Today, we add a new layer to Trends with Google Trends for Websites, a fun tool that gives you a view of how popular your favorite websites are, including your own! It also compares and ranks site visitation across geographies, and related websites and searches.”

Oi. Hitwise will go out of business – just exaggerating here, don’t take me seriously, but still, this tool gives one traffic information, search volume information and keyword information all in one go. It’s not numerical, just index-based, but one can infer the main keywords that drive traffic to a given site and get a pretty accurate picture of the search competitive landscape in a given industry (assuming the Google data represents some 80% of all search data and as such is statistically significant)

As such, I will go and disable the “Share my Google Analytics data with Google products only” option in my Analytics account, which I suggest you do as well if you don’t care for your traffic and ranking data to be accessible by the entire world.

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I rather have to write about this one, since: a) I have used it for a long time and seen it evolve and improve; b) it actually runs on Macs and c) it seems to have been developed by a Romanian company and any Romanian achievement still makes me proud.

What it is: Advanced Web Ranking is a search engine ranking software that monitors your ranking on your chosen search engines for your chosen keywords across as many of your websites you care to monitor.
Some of the features include:

• local search for Google and Yahoo (can limit the search to a country or even city)
• progress tracking over time, and very nice ranking charts per keyword per search engine
• update scheduling (it takes a while to update the ranking data, especially with many keywords, so it can be quite handy to run it overnight for example)
• PPC monitoring (can monitor your paid ads and their position in the paid results)
• Yahoo and Google API integration
• keyword generator
• page markers on charts (this is great for presenting, you can segment the data and emphasize a relevant segment)
• imports keywords and URLs from a variety of sources
• and my favourite: runs on Mac, Linux and what was the third one…oh yeah…Windows

AWR is probably used by a lot of SEO companies in Australia, from the formatting of the reports I’ve seen, as it’s quite easy to set up, covers some 800+ search engines (more than I would ever want to monitor) and is quite affordable: 99 US dollars for the standard version (102 AUD at the most recent conversion rate).

The cherry on the cake, which makes me feel good although I’m not sure will make anybody else ecstatic, is that it emulates manual search and can also be used in conjunction with ones Google API key, making AWR a really friendly app in as far as the search engines go.

Anyways, so here it is: Advanced Web Ranking

And some screenshots:

This is something I had lots of fun with – creating a Google spreadsheet that is easy to update without any coding experience (or understanding for that matter) and that spits a kml file ready to be uploaded to Google Maps/Earth at the other end.

The kml building template is live at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p6wx32Mjd8QpOa_ZezKFDJQ complete with usage instructions.

If you want to copy the template drop me a line with your email address so that I can grant you editing privileges.

I just came across an excellent article from the eMarketer regarding the online advertising spending trends; it seems that despite several economies slowing down in 2008 online ad spending will still reach $65.2 billion in 2008, and through to $106.6 billion by 2011.Online ads would account for nearly 10% of all ad spending across all media in 2008, rising to 13.6% by 2011. Nearly one-fifth of Western European ad spending will be online by that time.

A few interesting charts:

Very interesting, I wouldn’t have expected Japan to to be the runner-up in the online advertising race (albeit just as a percentage of advertising spending), somehow the US seemed a more likely candidate, or even Brazil, India, Russia etc.

Wonder of all wonders! It seems a lot of cats like computers, so I don’t have the only weirdo that loves to sleep on my laptop.

Even more interesting, there is a business out there that sells desktop accessories meant to ‘contain’ your cat, keeping her away from the keyboard but still close enough for her to be happy and for you to scratch her.

Here it goes, it’s called Kitt-In-Box, and this is what it does:

Now I have to go and buy one for my Queen of the Comp

But the question the “bakes my noodle” now is: what is with geeks and cats?! (and I can say that, because I am a geek and I own two cats)

After a very long time, to see what is to be done with this blog.