The Accidental Developer

Keeping your inbox empty in gMail

So a friend of mine recently convinced me to try using gmail in a different way. His suggestion was that I try archiving all of the mail that I have that no longer requires direct attention, or has some action I must take hanging on it. I have to admit its a pretty appealing idea, since the mail will still show up in searches and whatnot. Shortly following this suggestion I got put on a very high volume mailing list that I also wanted to read many of the emails on. So I decided to give it a try.

I started by setting a group “instant unarchive” on the first two-hundred emails that I have. Then I did the select all action, and clicked the link that appears at the top of your email list when you select all to “select all 70 billion emails” and archived the bunch. I then clicked on the left the “instant unarchive” group, and moved them to my inbox. Ta-Da now I’m down to my latest 200 emails in my inbox. As some of these are still relevent & outstanding I’m going to have to archive them by hand.

The concept of having an empty inbox is pretty darned appealing to me. I’ll give you updates as I go. (oh by the way, the command key to archive an email is “e”)

SEO and title tag density

How does keyword density in the title tag affect search engine placement? On Facts about Title Keyword Density, it says that Live.com rewards high keyword density in a title tag, whereas Google.com punishes high keyword density in a title tag.

I don’t really care about search engines other than Google. I’ve heard SEO experts claim that Yahoo! and MSN/Live still contribute a fair number of clicks, but that’s not true according to my server stats. I’d like to find out if Google really does punish keyword density in a title tag.

I created 3 similar pages for a fictional person, whose name currently return zero results in Google. Using the name as the search term, there are 3 different keyword weights.

1. Test A (100%)
2. Test B (50%)
3. Test C (9%)

This may not be the best test methodology, but at least it’s a start. In a few days, I’ll see how Google ranks them. Any opinions on how the pages will rank?

Clever ways to save bandwidth

When I worked for MLive.com, one of our practices was to leave out quotes around attribute values (except for alt attributes). This was to save on bandwidth costs. In spite of the fact that the page was no longer valid HTML (technically), all target browsers rendered the pages properly.

That might seem like nitpicking, but with over a million pageviews a day, all that ASCII can add up. Personally, I would prefer valid HTML, but I bet the financial side of that decision was pretty interesting. › Continue reading

Tags: bandwidth, google