Fun with robots.txt

July 28, 2010

The robots.txt file is a file you can include in your site directory to help prevent most spiders or bots (automated programs) from ‘crawling’ or indexing certain directories. Here someone (on the Lastfm crew http://www.last.fm/robots.txt) decided to have a bit of fun with it, note the last set of rules.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /music?
Disallow: /widgets/radio?
Disallow: /show_ads.php

Disallow: /affiliate/
Disallow: /affiliate_redirect.php
Disallow: /affiliate_sendto.php
Disallow: /affiliatelink.php
Disallow: /campaignlink.php
Disallow: /delivery.php

Disallow: /music/+noredirect/

Disallow: /harming/humans
Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders
Disallow: /harm/to/self

Allow: /

Filed under: Design,Web Development — Eric Baldoni
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Beware of the Kraken!

July 8, 2010

I’m a sucker for a good liquor bottle label, I love The Prisoner wine and most of the Orin Swift collection (how cool is the Papillon label?). So it was no surprise that this awesome bottle caught my eye. I confess I have not tried this rum, but I’ll have to report back to you as soon as I locate a bottle. The Kraken is our of my favorite sea monsters, and one you don’t want to meet on your oceanic travels!

The Kraken Website

Filed under: Art,Design — Eric Baldoni
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2 Billion searches for the word Facebook!

July 6, 2010

I stumbled upon an interesting fact while reading up on a post about how Google is creating a competitor for Facebook. Every month Google records over 2 billion searches for the word Facebook. Here is a screenshot of the AdWords Keyword Tool results.

Adwords Keyords

Screenshot of the search for the word Facebook using the Adwords Keyword tool.

So it stands to reason obviously that a good number of these searches stem from people not knowing the difference between the search bar and the address bar in most of the popular browsers these days. Here is a screenshot in case you don’t actually know! The one on the right is for searches, and you can actually choose your own search engine (you don’t HAVE to use the Googles you know).

There is a difference between these two fields!

One other interesting thing to note…Google has their own browser (you might have heard) called Chrome. In a twist to the usual address and search field set up Google just has one field for both.

Google Chrome, one search to rule them all.

If you enter just the website title in the address bar most modern browsers will take you to the correct site if it is available (filling in the http:// and the .com etc). Google Chrome however will take you to the search results page since you are using their address/search field, thus adding more hits to their results pages…A bit crafty I say.

Filed under: Design,SEO — Tags: , , , , — Eric Baldoni
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