Clicknetworks invests in fibre optic & high performance virtual machine cluster

Clicknetworks has announced its plan to build an ultra high-speed fibre optic broadband network.

The investment in the new technology infrastructure comes just shortly after the company announced they were to move all of their client’s data to a high performance virtual machine cluster.

The virtual machine cluster is reported to run on a 2 terabyte iSCSI SAN custom built by the Clicknetworks Computer Engineering team.

“The high performance virtual machine cluster will enable higher availability and greater density for our managed data. This means our hosted websites will be faster and our client’s data will be faster to access as well as providing a faster and more reliable backup”, said Craig Smith Systems Architect for Clicknetworks.

Clicknetworks software development team are currently developing a number of cloud based applications where high loads and high demand are anticipated. It is hoped that the new investment in information technology will enable Clicknetworks to support that future demand as well as enable their business clients to capitalise and use a technology framework usually reserved for large corporations and scientific / educational institutions.

“If we take a look at the big players like Microsoft and Google as well as look at current industry trends and the popularity of many cutting edge online applications that are based on subscription services, it is clear to us that the future of IT exists in the cloud. Software as a service is something we are going to see become common place in the not too distant future”, said Andrew Beattie, Digital Strategist at Clicknetworks Ltd.

Enhance your website through Microformats & Google Rich Snippets

Microformats and rich snippets allow you to enhance your website in the SERP's (search engine result pages) and indirectly increase your clickthru rates and visitor traffic. Over the past year, search engines such as Google have started using Microformats to enhance their search results for users. Let’s look at how this can work with reviews, people and events.

Reviews




You may have noticed in Google's search results product reviews appearing before the rest of the search result listings. Sometimes these reviews feature star ratings. Google calls such listings ‘rich snippets’, which are most often based on the hReview microformat standard. If you have product reviews on your website, hReview gives you the opportunity to mark up single user-generated reviews and an overall score of multiple reviews. In the image above, reviewer name and date of review can also be included in the search result.

More information on how Google uses the hReview microformat

People



If you have searched for a collegue or friend in Google before you may have noticed that sometimes their name, location and job title is in the SERP's. These results are rich snippets that Google uses based on the hCard microformat standard.

hCard is dedicated to marking up data that describes contact and social networking information. hCard can describe names, job titles, locations and the name a person is associated with.

More information on using the hCard microformat from Google


Events



Some website's like The List, have event information displayed in Google's SERP's. This is because they have marked up their events data using the hEvent microformat standard. hEvent describes information such as event location, start date and time, and event name.

More information on using the hEvent microformat from Google


Benefits of Microformats

Microformats benefit the search engines in that it enables them to understand the data they collect more semantically and to easilly extract this data and incorporate and syndicate it across other contexts and mediums. This means they are able to deliver more relevant and timely results faster and easier to the end user.

Microformats also enable website's to distribute their content more effectively and thus indirectly gather more visitors through increased click-thrus to that data. If you are a website with lots of information on reviews, people or events then you should consider investing the time to convert your existing data to a microformat that will have a real effect on the bottom line of your business and give you a major advantage over you competitors in the SERP's.

Google do not accept all website's that have rich snippet microformat data, but are instead reviewing sites on a case by case basis. To be included in Google's rich snippet SERP, they recommend webmaster's submit their website's for review through this form.

If you would like to find out how Clicknetworks can help your company or organisation enchance its online presence and gain more traffic through microformats and rich snippets then simply contact us.

Google Caffeine and its impact on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

There has been a lot of buzz recently in the blogosphere about Google's new planned search architecture update codenamed "Caffeine". This new architecture has been designed to return results faster and to better deal with rapidly updated information from social media services including Facebook and Twitter. Google claims that the new search tool will improve the speed, accuracy, size, and comprehensiveness of Google search.

In the latter half of last year developers were given a preview opportunity to test out the new search architecture in the Google Caffeine Sandbox. Our initial testing showed that the new search update was very quick returning results in around half the time of the current setup. Other differences we noted was the impact upon search engine optimisation which seems to focus more on heavier keyword weighting and the importance of the domain's age.

So when is Google Caffeine going live?

There is a lot of speculation on blogs that Google Caffeine is live on around 80% of data centres. Unfortunately, there has been no official confirmation from Google yet that the new service is live, however some users will note a different Google search and results interface and some website owners will notice a shuffle in their rankings.

Ensuring your website does not lose its current ranking

We suggest that website owners and SEO specialists should take notice of Google’s rules in Webmaster Central to ensure they do not lose their rankings in the search results for major keywords. More specifically we suggest the following:

1. Do not copy other website’s copy. Google now checks for duplicate content and will penalise site’s with similar text content. Obviously, the website that has been online the most will contain the original content and won’t be penalised.

2. Do not duplicate the same content over and over again through doorway pages on the same domain. Your website may be flagged for duplicate content and you might lose significant positions for all your major keywords.

3. Do not hide keyword text or provide different results for Google other than what a normal user would see. Google has made it algorithm more sophisticated recently to catch out people who abuse the system. Exceptions to this rule can include tabbed content. As long as the content can be opened and closed by a user script this should not be a problem.

4. Do not link to suspected link farms or site’s which seem to be setup only for the purpose of obtaining a better Page Rank.

5. Do not Spam the Open Directory or Yahoo Directory with multiple listings for the same URL. Google does take into consideration whether a site is indexed with ODP and Yahoo and awards a higher weight for sites that have been included. Yahoo informs us that they are currently in the process of weeding out and penalising sites that have attempted to bypass their one URL policy. Those websites that have multiple listings in Yahoo may very soon find out that there domain has been permanently banned.

We advise all our clients to play by the rules. Yes there are unscrupulous SEO companies out there that will perform black hat techniques to get their client’s website to the top of Google, but for how long will their shady techniques last? I suspect not long as the major search companies perform ever more sophisticated checks to ensure the quality of their indexes. Matt Cutt’s from Google tells us that the single most important thing for webmasters to ensure good future rankings for their website in Google, is to provide high quality original and engaging content for their key audience. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

Epilepsy Scotland's 2010 WAGS Dinner

Clicknetworks were proud to sponsor Epilepsy Scotlands 2010 WAGS Dinner at the marriot hotel Glasgow, Friday 29th april.

This years event was extremely well attended, Guests were entertained by Still Game Host – Sanjeev Kohli, along with Guest Speakers former Rangers Player Kevin Drinkell, Radio Clydes Lorraine Herbison, Well Known Ayrshire Speaker, Hugh Drennan and Slvia Kelly.

One of the main Prizes on the Night was the Chance to win a new Apple IPAD, by purchasing a key for the safe, over 120 keys were sold on the night and 1 lucky winner will soon be the proud owner of the new IPAD.

Mind Mapping - migrating your thoughts from mind to desktop

As a software development company, we will often get provided with very open-ended tasks that tend to require some good old common sense and organisation in order to develop the ideas from concept to .NET Application.

Whilst some people may be better organised through writing extensive documents and papers and others prefer an audible (sound of their own voice) approach; personally I am strongly of the visual type. I understand concepts and ideas best when I can see them laid out in front of me using short "to the point" language and with necessary connections drawn out and connected. One powerful way for someone like me to organise and connect ideas together is by developing personal mind maps.

If you've never created a mind map before, why not give it a try when planning your next project or meeting! It's much faster and easier than you may think and is certainly worth every highly organised minute!

While many other pieces of software exist to help you in migrating your floating thoughts from mind to desktop screen, if you're not ready to invest in power commercial products such as MindGenius (http://www.mindgenius.com) or Inspiration (http://www.inspiration.com) then my personal recommendation is to give FreeMind a go!

Available from http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ , FreeMind is a handy open-source mind mapping tool that allows you to develop mind maps from the smallest basic layout of your big ideas to the grandest designs of complex *interactive* maps. See their website for some fairly extensive examples!

With great little built-in icons and handy "snap-to" movement, FreeMind lets you get the job done quickly with minimal fuss and learning curve! When your ready you can export your MindMaps to a variety of formats including PDF, XHTML (with Flash for interactivity!) as well as SVG, JPEG and many other commonly used formats.

If you do eventually feel like moving up to more powerful software the format of FreeMind's files is all in XML allowing you to import your existing FreeMind mind maps with minimal bother - so provides a perfect starting point for anyone who would like to give mind mapping a go.

Emergency 24hr IT Support Line for Adventi Customers

Clicknetworks has today launched an emergency support line for free advice to customers of Adventi IT, who has recently gone into administration.

Established in 2002, Adventi had been regarded as one of the fastest-growing technology firms in the UK but cash flow problems have forced their board to put the company into administration.

In an effort to help current Adventi customers today, Clicknetworks Ltd has setup a 24 hour support line whereby Adventi customers can call to receive advice on how to keep their vital business IT infrastructure running and their businesss moving forward.

"We were very sad to hear about what has happened to Adventi and their customers, especially with people losing their jobs. However, Clicknetworks is in a good position to help Adventi customers in this emergency situation, as 60% of our client base are former Adventi customers", said Clicknetworks Managing Director Mark Mahaffy.

If you are an Adventi customers and are unable to get support from them then please feel free to get in touch with us here at Clicknetworks Ltd. We can provide a wide range of support options for you whether they be just for the short term or in the long run.

Call the support line on: 0141 530 9116.

HTML5 for today right now - It's a DOM thing ok!

Last week I brought up the question of whether it was ok to start developing and authoring sites in the still being devised markup language of HTML5. Today I will talk about which tags you can start using now in your web apps to future proof them for the future.

The vision and aim of HTML5 as mentioned in my last post is an attempt to make structured data more semantic (carry more inherent meaning inside of it) which will allow more advanced processing of the data than is currently possible with other doc types such as HTML4 and XHTML.

Apparently, when developing the HTML 5 spec, the editor, Ian Hickson of Google, analyzed over a billion web pages to find out how authors were actually using these elements. He discovered that in the top 20 class names used in the markup for this huge set of data were classes for common requirements: footer, header, nav, menu, content, and main.











So the foundation of the HTML5 markup spec consists of the following new tags which allow us to markup our website or blog in more meaningful ways:

• header


• footer


• nav


• section


• aside


• article

Now even though not every browser supports these tags at the moment, there is no reason why you can't start using them now to future proof your documents for the next wave of development. Whilst Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera provide limited support, again Internet Explorer provides almost nothing (no surprises there from Microsoft).

So the way to get IE8, IE7 and possibly IE6 to start recognising and parsing these tags and therefore enable the ability to style them via CSS, is to introduce the tags into the DOM via the use of a tiny and non-intrusive linked javascript. Then we can add style rules—floating, background colors, margins. This one line piece of code introduces the following tags into the DOM: abbr, article, aside, audio, bb, canvas, datagrid, datalist, details, dialog, eventsource, figure, footer, header, hgroup, mark, menu, meter, nav, output, progress, section, time, video.. Once in IE's DOM the browser recognises them which allows you to style them even though actual functionality for that element and attribute may not work, which means that you can start developing for the other browsers and at the same time enable backwards compatibility for IE as well as forwards compatibility for IE9 which apparently is being shipped with some support for HTML5. For more information, discussion and comments about this HTML5 DOM script please see: http://remysharp.com/2009/01/07/html5-enabling-script/

Alternatively you can use a script in the head of your document which enables you to call only those tags you wish to use:









So start authoring your docs in HTML5 today and future proof your sites whilst getting ahead of the competition. Although there is no evidence as yet that Google is making any meaningful sense out of the new tags, there is ample evidence to suggest it is wise to be prepared for the change in the algorithim when it happens for SEO purposes.

Next week I will go into more detail about HTML5 and even introduce some new ideas about how you can use Microformats and rich snippets to enhance your website, synidcate its content and improve your ranking and overall brand in Google and Google Maps all at once and at the same time.