(no subject)

[julesjones]

The cover art for my new novella Mindscan (currently in editing, probable release in Spring) is now up on the Loose Id website, although there's no blurb yet.


The page layout for my website is changing. There were a lot of internal page navigation links and section labels that were normally hidden in a CSS browser but displayed in a text-only browser, something which allowed me to provide useful extra navigation options for people using certain accessibility browsers without cluttering up the display for the majority of browsers that didn't need those links and labels. Google is now penalising sites that use invisible text, which probably explains why my site now appears at the bottom rather than the top of certain search results. So I'm taking those links and labels out. Able-bodied text browser users will probably thank me for a better-looking page. My apologies to anyone who actually found them useful. They'll be gradually disappearing as I update pages.

Comments

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

The cover art for my new novella Mindscan (currently in editing, probable release in Spring) is now up on the Loose Id website, although there's no blurb yet.

I like the price!

[julesjones]

You will note that it's not actually available for purchase yet. :-)

I haven't asked, but I suspect it's because they don't finalise the price until editing's finished. Only the shop software insists on displaying *something*.

[hypatia.livejournal.com]

Google is now penalising sites that use invisible text, which probably explains why my site now appears at the bottom rather than the top of certain search results.

Have they said why considering the way it can penalises uses with specific accessibility needs? Bearing in mind that at last accessibility is becoming an issue companies in many countries are now required to address?

And 'ello there, should have realised you would be here somewhere :-) Having resisted LJ for eons a combination of friends with journals ('friends only' posts) and increasing numbers of blogs and work related sites setting up RSS feeds drove me use one also. I have found that if I use the custom groups I can scan the trade rags, secondary interest rags and friends journals seperately and with less actual effort than I was expending trying to follow them individually. For me at least there has been a net saving in effort. I've coded macros to do this on voice command now but I have to say that LJ itself has a way to go for accessibility.

Incidentally now that scansoft also distribute ViaVoice, it has as predicted meant VV is dying on the vine and as a consequence I've had to start transitioning to dragon. (there is at least one rant in few entries I've ever made to my own journal about this!). Its been a bit tortuous, I'm only slowly developing alternate macros to my VV sets (sub optimal year conributed). I suppose eventually I'll be bilingual :-)

[julesjones]

Google have it on their list of dos and don'ts for webmasters. They don't explicitly say why, but it's generally assumed that it's because a lot of the "search optimization" spammers are littering otherwise innocuous webpages with invisible text designed to improve the rankings of the pages they're peddling. Humans don't (usually) see it, but the search spiders do. So once again the scammer scum have perverted a a useful feature and made it impossible for the rest of us to use.

Apart from the accessibility issue, there's also the problem that invisible text is used by the anti-spammers - lots of webpages out there wth CSS-invisible links to tarpits and spamtrap addresses. They're typically set up with robot exclusion rules to keep out well-mannered spiders, but some of the spamtrap addresses rely on being on indexed pages.

First pass at the new layout is up, so if you have any comments I'd be pleased to hear them.


Yes, I got myself an LJ in order to post in/read other people's LJs. The original account has been around for a year, and has a grand total of two posts in it, although it's been used to make quite a few posts elsewhere. This one is a mirror of the blog page on the website. That's hand-coded html, and I decided that the easiest way to provide an RSS feed and a comments facility was to manually copy entries over to an LJ, rather than get involved with something like MT. It's not really intended to be anything other than notes for me and a few friends on how the writing's going, but it looked as if RSS and commenting might be useful for a couple of them.

I've been away from home for the last three months and had fairly poor net access, but when I get back to my main computer and my DSL, I'm going to sit down and Do Something about adding more people to the watch list and setting up filters. At the moment there's a core group of feeds I read daily when I've got adequate access, plus another group that I read regularly when I'm physically up to it. That latter group is currently done by bookmark rather than friends list, so that I don't have to scroll through screeds of stuff when my wrists are bad. I really, really wish that the LJ people hadn't called their feed aggregator "Friends". It doesn't matter what they say about it doesn't really mean friends, it carries that connotation and brings all sorts of interesting problems. There's at least one person who *is* a friend, but who I haven't "Friended" because she'd probably prefer not to have a diary about writing gay romance in her "Friend of" list.