Luciana’s ITerating Blog

If you’re interested in cool technologies like XML and jQuery and you’re fluent in romanian, you should check out Cosmin’s blog. You’ll find there all the news and tutorials you might need

1. Sitemaps are mandatory

This is not necessarily true especially if your website is small and search engine friendly. A sitemap won’t hurt your rankings, but it won’t improve them either.

2. Meta keywords are good for rankings

False. Seems that none of the search engines take them into consideration anymore these days mainly because early SEO specialists used to abuse them.

3. Keyword stuffing brings more visitors

Nothing could be further from the true. Keyword stuffing is considered illegal SEO and most of the search engines will stop sending traffic to your website once they smell something rotten like hidden text or invisible links.

4. Flash is evil

Flash is not evil. Flash is pretty. It’s the absence of plain text that will hurt your rankings, not the presence of Flash animations.

5. You should submit your website to all the search engines

This used to be necessary a while ago, but not anymore. Spiders crawl the web so fast and so often that you don’t have to move a finger to get indexed.

I don’t use Vista (yet) but I did notice the cute screensavers they came up with for this release. My favorite is Bubbles

Today, while browsing ITerating I found a pack of Vista screensavers ported to XP. They are super cool and they work great, as you can notice in the attached snapshot!

• FireFox is free and open source. Anyone can contribute. It has support for W3C standards like DOM and CSS
• The simplified user interface leaves more space for the actual web pages (10% more space than Opera)
• The download manager shows both pending and completed downloads
• With the session restore feature you’ll be able to continue working where you left off even after a power loss or a Windows crash
• Switching to FireFox is a piece of cake. You can import all your data from your former browser easily
• It works with your favorite operating system
• Thanks to the smart “Find” feature, you’ll know if the keyword is not on the page before you finish typing it
• You can add your most frequently used links in the bookmarks toolbar. Having them one click away will save you a lot of time
• The URL field acts just like Google’s “Lucky Search”. By typing a keyword instead of an URL you’ll be automatically redirected to the most relevant result
• Firefox is highly customizable and extensible. Whether you want a new theme, a new toolbar or a new extension you’ll find thousands of free goodies on the Mozilla Add-Ons homepage

Get FireFox!

Still not convinced? Watch the video

Computers will never take the place of books. You can’t stand on a floppy disk to reach a high shelf.

- Sam Ewing

I’m sure you’re already using an online manager like Flickr or Photobucket to share your pictures with the world. But that’s not all you can do with your digital images.

Custom T-Shirts are yesterday’s news, print you favorite photos on a calendar, key chain, coffee cup, tie, hat, bumber sticker or even on your luggage tag! Zazzle will wrap them, print them and ship them in just two business days. My personal favorites are the stamps, but there are plenty products to please even the most picky customer.

Blurb offers another great service: custom high quality books. There are dozens of templates for you to choose from: portfolios, wedding books, recipes books, story books and many more. Just download BookSmart and take as much time as you like to create the absolute design. When you’re satisfied with the result, share it with the community. Who knows, maybe you’ll turn your volume into a bestseller!

 Image editing tools

ITerating Collaborates with Semantic Web Community to Create Framework for

Exchange of Software Product Information

NEW YORK – August 27, 2007 – ITerating, provider of the first free Wiki-based software guide for open source, commercial and hosted software, today announced the immediate availability of a free Semantic Web service providing up-to-date information about more than 17,000 software products at www.iterating.com. Other repositories of product information can now automatically synchronize their data with this ITerating web service. IT professionals and other consumers of software can use the service to keep up-to-date on information about new products, new versions and patch distributions for commercial, open source and hosted software.

It has become a daunting task for IT professionals and consumers of software information to keep up-to-date due to the vast number of new versions, drivers and patches that are now available, and the condensed timeframe in which all are developed. Now users can subscribe to specific products or product categories on ITerating.com and easily create an automated information feed. The ITerating web service can now be synchronized with many repositories of software product information such as Linux distribution archives and online guides.

ITerating worked with Tim Berners-Lee and others in the Semantic Web community to develop this unique web service. The service is built upon a Semantic ontology framework which consists of four ontologies, including DOAP (Description Of A Project), FOAF (Friend Of A Friend), Open BRR (Business Readiness Rating™) and Review. ITerating created a Semantic ontology for Open BRR, which is a standard model for rating open source software. In addition, ITerating worked with the creators of DOAP and Review to extend their existing ontologies. Finally, these three ontologies were combined with the FOAF ontology – resulting in a comprehensive vocabulary structure for discovering, sharing and comparing up-to-date information about open source, commercial and hosted software products.

“We applaud ITerating for the work they’ve done to extend the DOAP ontology,” said Edd Dumbill, creator of DOAP. “We view this vocabulary as an important addition to our overall objective of standardizing the description of software projects and resources.”

“The ability to exchange software product information in a free, standard format is a tremendously valuable asset for the software community,” said Larry Augustin, venture investor, open source evangelist and founder of sourceforge.net. “We look forward to seeing more companies endorse it.”

“Our goal is to offer the world’s first comprehensive software guide that is always up-to-date,” said Nicolas Vandenberghe, CEO of ITerating. “By combining a Wiki format with Semantic Web services, we are able to ensure that the information on the ITerating site is both comprehensive and up-to-date. Now everyone has the opportunity to use this powerful but simple tool to organize, share and combine information about software on the web.”

About ITerating

ITerating provides the first Wiki-based software guide for open source, commercial and hosted software. The site is a comprehensive and up-to-date resource for the IT industry. It is the only software site to offer product directories, descriptions, reviews, ratings, articles, and detailed product feature comparisons. All content on ITerating is covered by the Creative Commons and contributions (rating, reviews, text) remain the property of their creators. Founded in October 2005, ITerating is headquartered in New York. For more information, visit www.ITerating.com.

Virgil Griffith, an American programmer, published a few days ago a software piece called Wikiscanner. This cool tool scans the anonymous Wikipedia edits for the IP addresses and cross-references them with the IP directory. Nothing unusual so far, but check out below some of the edits he discovered:

• The Vatican edits Irish Catholic politician Gerry Adams page
• Microsoft tried to cover up the XBOX 360 failure rate
• Oil company ChevronTexaco removes informative biodiesel article and deletes a paragraph regarding fines against the company
• MySpace removes paragraph when their website was hacked
• EA Games deletes whole paragraphs of criticism about employment practices and business methods
• UN address calls journalist Oriana Fallaci a racist ‘prostitute’
• Someone at Reuters calls Bush “a mass murderer”
• US University adds the “prestigious” adjective to its page
• Boeing edits from “Boeing is a leading American aircraft and aerospace manufacturer” to “Boeing is the leading American aircraft and aerospace manufacturer”
• MSN Search is “a major competitor to Google”. That’s what MSN added to their page
• BBC changes Blair’s drink from coffee to vodka and his workout from the gym to the bedroom. Someone from the BBC also changes Bush’s page, changing the name from ”George Walker Bush” to “George Wan*** Bush”
• Someone from The Guardian edits the Wikipedia page of rival newspaper The Times. Originally in the article it is said that The Times sells more than The Guardian. After the edit, The Guardian sells more.

To see who’s editing the articles about your organization, go to http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/ . If you find anything interesting, let me know

As you probably noticed by now, Skype is not working. Seems there’s a software problem affecting the login system. According to the announcements on the official homepage, Skype Engineering Team is trying hard to solve the problems.

A bunch of rumors also started to spread over the internet: some say the downtime was caused by the latest Microsoft Windows Updates, others believe that Skype has been hacked by a group of Russian hackers. Is there any truth in these statements? Time will tell

A great commercial