Nev n Dave

Search engines have become essential when browsing the web. There’s no doubt about it. With the wealth of information on the internet these days, we need good tools to help us find what we’re looking for. Take Google for example. It is for most users the central source of information on the internet and it is incredibly successful because of its ability to match relevant information against our search queries.

The crux of Google’s search engine is an algorithm called PageRank. Essentially, PageRank is a number which represents how important a page is on the web. One of the factors which contribute to the importance of a page is the number of other pages linked to it and the relative rankings of these pages. The more important a page, the more important the links present on that page. For the mathematically inclined amongst us, check out the PageRank description on WebWorkshop.

There are other factors that determine the importance of a page. The process of modifying a page to obtain the best ranking is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you are a webmaster, the first step is to Add your URL to Google. Following that, the following tips could be handy to improve your ranking:

• Keywords in the title
• Keywords in a H1, H2 or H3 heading
• Keywords without style as first usage
• Keywords in bold not as first usage
• Keywords in italic not as first usage
• Keywords in subscript/superscript
• Keywords in an image filename, ALT tag and/or title
• Keywords in a URL link or associated title tag
• Keywords in a link to a site with PageRank 8 or higher
• Keywords in a link from the homepage or external site
• Use META keywords. Though not necessary for Google, it is useful for other search engines

Here are some useful resources to read up on Search Engine Optimization:

• Google’s tips for webmasters
• PageRank calculations
• Search Engine Optimization articles
• More good Search Engine Optimization articles
• High accessibility is good for SEO
• Google Hacks (ISBN 0596004478)

Woo hoo! Finally, the Googlebot has come to our site and crawled our pages. If you do a search for “Nev n Dave”, you’ll find we are #1 on Google of 569,000 other links.

Incidentally, we’re also #1 on Yahoo, MSN, A9, Alexa, Vivisimo and AskJeeves
…

That’s pretty amazing!

These days it is pretty safe to say that Java developers are generally divided into two main camps when talking about their IDEs. There’s IntelliJ IDEA which is a commercial product from Jetbrains and there’s Eclipse which is a free open source product.

Personally, I think both products are good for the Java community. They both offer amazing features that improve developer productivity, are easy to work with and provide plugins to extend the base product offering. What other programming language can even say they have a comparable IDE? If interested, check out this link about the recent Visual Studio 2005 concerns.

I generally agree with what Tim says, that because IntelliJ IDEA relies on sales to make money, that “quality, ease of use and completeness of the product” are key considerations. Yeah, the latest 5.x releases have had their share of issues but if you look at the product as a whole, it rocks! Develop with pleasure!

Can you recall the last time you were imprisoned in a meeting during which you lost all sense of time, could not stop yourself yawning and wished you could get back to your desk and actually do some real work?

Well, I’m sure you’ve all experienced it. Don’t deny it, I know you have - we all have. Every work place I’ve ever been to and every project I’ve worked on, I’ve found them to be unavoidable. For some unknown reason, I’m convinced they exist only to torment us!

On that note, let me introduce Nev n Dave’s guide to a good meeting:

1. Have a clear purpose - What is the meeting about? What are you trying to achieve?
2. Keep things relevant and on topic - Do not over deviate from the agenda. Are the right participants invited?
3. Encourage participation and discussion - Don’t talk too much. Let someone else contribute to the meeting.
4. Keep it short - Get the message across succinctly. End the meeting once the objectives are accomplished.

Do you have a boring meeting experience to share with us?

The office farewell is a ritual in any workplace. It is a time to celebrate someone leaving the “family” and going on to bigger and better things. Often the manager would stand up, make a speech about how so and so have contributed to the organisation and illustrate some of the embarrassing things they might have done during a company function several years ago.

Being a software contractor, and moving from one company or another, you don’t often establish the bond the permie’s have. So the best thing about it, for me, is definitely the free food and drinks.

We’re adding ourselves to a couple of comic directories. So vote for us if you want to help us because you’ll get good karma! Honest.

Just click on the image below!

Ah the GoogleBot. Googlebot is Google’s web-crawling robot. Its job is to go out into the great Internet unknown and collect documents to build a searchable index for the Google search engine. In order for a site to be listed on Google’s homepage and be available for searching, that site must first be indexed by the GoogleBot.

I don’t know what other site operators do, but we tend to putty into the server and tail the access logs quite a bit. Yeah, yeah… it’s pretty sad but can’t help but get a kick whenever we see a “real” user access our sites…

Where is that GoogleBot?

Searching for domain names is such a drag. For anyone who’s had the opportunity to look for and register a domain name, this process I’m sure would have had been a major source of frustration. Good names are generally taken. Most of the time they are used for a lame site - adding virtually zero value for the internet community. The rest of the time, they are simply parked - unused and wasted.

Just how many blogs are there out there? Whilst there are many which are interesting, there are also a whole bunch which are not. We know we don’t want yet another blog amongst a forest of blogs. The question then is “How could we stand out from the crowd?”.

After some brainstorming, we’ve decided to try our hand at doing a web comic! Yup, Nev N Dave is going to be a web comic blog about software engineering, running startups as solopreneurs (solo-entrepreneurs), the internet movement and any insights we have as we go.

Neither of us have really maintained a blog before. And we’re not trained as artists. So this is going to be an interesting experiment! Armed with only our enthusiasm, let’s see where this leads us.

Nev will be the one doing the storyboarding and Dave will do the drawing honours. Both of us, hopefully, will contribute to the textual content.

Hi, welcome to the adventures of Nev n Dave! We’re a couple of software engineers located downunder in Sydney, Australia! We’ve been friends for a few years and have worked on various contracts together and thought it would be fun to start a blog together.

So what are we going to do with our new blog? That’s a good question. We’re not too sure, but we want to be different. Since we’re a couple of propellor heads, our blog is most likely going to be centered around the things we’re interested in such as pushing the boundaries of web enterprises, exploring crazy ideas and embarking on interesting quests and thought analysis.

Failing that, we’re hoping to have some fun and make a few friends along the way. So watch this space!