admin's blog

We haven't had the time to create a great range of Nutch logos but Matt has done this one so I thought I'd put it up to see what the feedback is.

We'll get round to doing the others eventually - this one's ok, it brings the logo up to date a bit but with it being a badge type logo it's perhaps not as easy to use as one on a transparent background.

We recently re-created the Nutch logos and thought we'd keep an eye on the search results in both web and image results.

It's not something that is searched on much and there aren't many competing pages so you'd expect this site to rank ok for that term on all search engines.

Google

For one reason or another I've decided to take a quick look at IE8. This isn't a technical or in-depth review - it's just a quick test drive from an end user point of view.

I must admit, I spent so much time and effort as an early adopter in the late 90's that it takes a lot for me to get excited about with regard to software or hardware so it's not surprise to find that I'm not remotely excited by IE. IE7 did it's very best to kill my computer and anything associated with it so I installed IE8 with trepedation and genuine fear.

When we were updating our site and blogging about Nutch we couldn't find a decent quality logo so we've re-done them as EPS, PNG and GIF with the largest being 1200 x 449.

We're also going to have a go at re-inventing it and bringing it up to date - hopefully we'll have some done today and I'll post them up here.

Nutch logo (large GIF - 1220 x 449)

I don't usually cross-promote sites but I thought this had some relevance to those interested in Drupal.

Optimising Drupal sites for SEO is a little case study about how we tidied up a few issues on Crawl Score.

Part two should be finished tomorrow and that's much more about caching, improving page load speeds and generally improving your site for both users and search engine crawlers.

We've just put together a few search engines (indexes really) of various niches and the more we delve into it, the better it it.

The problems we had getting Java, Tomcat and Apache to work together were.... challenging. They really do seem to make it hard work - the Tomcat support site is utterly useless so it's down to creative web searching to find solutions.

We seem to have quite a few user visiting this site now that Crawl Score is live and I guess it's not that clear what we do.

I think perhaps the easiest way to put it is "a lot"!

There's no doubt about it, we do have fingers in a lot of pies but that's one of the reasons we're doing this (IE not working for a corporate) - we like looking at different ideas, trying new technology and putting a new spin on existing technology.

We were very excited when we learned about Elgg and quickly got a demo site up and running.

I think it's a bit early to have a very strong opinion about it but first impressions are that it's a bit light on features and perhaps there's some bias here as we're quite Drupal savvy but most of what it does can be done in Drupal pretty easily.

That's not to say that it can't improve and be a much more focused platform than Drupal but the current version (0.9) is quite basic in my very humble opinion.

We've just about finished on a vacuum cleaners site. It's a very simple showcase of our Go2Shops platform. If it generates a bit of revenue as well then that'd be nice. I'll explain a bit more about it in the Go2Shops section when I have more time.