A Net-at-hand user asked what they could do to help get their website listed high in search engine results, so I decided to write an article for the help site that gives some principles for SEO (search engine optimization).
You can find it here. Enjoy!
Adding compatibility for Net-at-hand with Internet Explorer has been on our to-do list for a long time (to be completely honest, we didn’t really have a problem “encouraging” our customers to use a better browser), but the rendering bugs that Internet Explorer has always had were beyond quick fixes so it kept getting put off.
Well, it seems that Microsoft decided to finally build a better browser and correctly render pages that conform to published standards when they released “Internet Explorer 8”http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Internet-explorer/default.aspx.
We are pleased to let you know that Net-at-hand works perfectly fine with the new Internet Explorer 8, so feel free to give it a try.
We made a change to the page titles (normally displayed in the menu bar when viewed in a browser) when a Net-at-hand web page is displayed in order to better optimize those pages for search engines.
Previously, the name of the site was placed there, followed by a dash, followed by the title of whatever content was being rendered.
What we have done is switch the order of that so the content title is displayed first. Search engines place more importance on the first area than they do on the second area. This will allow you to better use the titles of your site’s content to target certain terms with search engines.
We recently added a new field to the admin area in your Net-at-hand website which is called “title search”. Basically, this gives you an easy way to find content in your site.
As the size of your website grows, it might get harder to navigate to the content you want to edit. The title search will let you look for items based on their title name. Anything that is not in the garbage will show up in the search results.
It may not be very fancy, but I hope it helps you get the job done more easily.
We are coming up on two years that Net-at-hand has been in production and we are very pleased with how everything has progressed so far. Net-at-hand has proven to be a stable and robust platform for building websites, and it is only going to get better.
One thing about running a successful web application like Net-at-hand is that we must always be prepared to grow. As more people start to use the service, more strain is placed on the resources that run that service.
So the time has come to take the next step which is to upgrade the server that Net-at-hand runs on. To this end, we will be taking Net-at-hand down tonight (4/3) at 12:00 am EDT. We are expecting the time that the server will be down to be about 10 minutes, but it could take upward to 60 minutes.
Basically what we are going to be doing is setting Net-at-hand up on a new server instance that will double the size of the server. This will let us handle the increased traffic (and file uploads) better.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about anything.
UPDATE—The server upgrade went very smoothly, though it ended up taking over an hour and a half before we got everything back up and running. But the system is seems to be performing well. Let us know if you notice any issues.
Last month, when we upgraded some of the system components used for Net-at-hand, the upgrade changed the way that dates and times are handled within the programming code of Net-at-hand. This change caused some events to not show up in the calendar as they should have.
Upon discovering the problem, we decided to make some basic changes to how Net-at-hand handles dates in the background. These changes aren’t going to bring anything noticeably different right now (other than your calendars displaying properly :), but it is going to open the door for some additional features for the calendar.
This evening at around 6:30 pm we became aware of an issue some people were having when trying to attach new images to a page.
Because of some changes that we have been making to Net-at-hand recently, images that were attached to pages were not properly saved and were over-writing each other.
We were able to find the bug pretty quickly and have fixed it. It should not cause you any more problems.
Beginning Sunday, 3/1/09, the url (web address) for items in Net-at-hand websites have changed.
Previously, the url for a page was made up of the title of the page with all the including folders as well. For example, if you had a page called “My history” in a folder called “About me”, then the url for that page would have been ”/about-me/my-history”.
The new url format is a bit simpler (and faster for the system to generate). Now, the url for that same page in the previous paragraph would be ”/my-history:[id#]” where [id#] would be a the specific id number for that page in the system.
Now, we will be the first to admit that this new format is not as clean-looking as the old. We actually like the old format better in that regard. However, the new one is much simpler for the system to generate and will help keep system performance better overall.
Don’t worry if you have hard-coded any of the old style urls into your website. Your content is still available at the old address. But any url’s that are automatically generated by the system will using the new style.
Side note Those of you who are wise in the way of SEO best practices might be wondering why we are letting content be available at two different urls. It will be a fairly simple matter to set up Net-at-hand to redirect all old-style urls to the new format, but we are waiting to make sure the are no unforeseen consequences to doing so. One example is if you need to include a webpage at a specific url for some system (such as Google’s webmaster tools). The new style urls will not work in that scenario. We will figure out the best way to handle this and address it when the time comes.