Yesterday I read in the Wall Street Journal weekend addition that Google may be purchasing Yelp. A web application that contains over 8 million reviews by people like myself. It also contains a community of people who want their voice to be heard and a large volunteer base that has promoted the site. That’s a lot of crowd sourcing to build quite the asset. $500 million’s worth to Google and possibly $750+ million to other potential buyers. Now that others have outbid Google.
Read more

If you are running with the latest version of PHP & SQL Server on Windows. Make sure you control how dates are formatted especially for smalldatetime. If you let PHP use its built in function you could get strange results ranging from Chinese to French. Jui isn’t the same as Jul and that confuses strtotime().
Read more

Persistent Uniform Resource Locators or PURLs can take many forms. Typically software that I use like Wordpress has this functionality built in, but they call it by a different name Permalinks like the one for this article http://www.365webapplications.com/2009/12/15/what-is-a-purl, which you can see in your browser above. It is much more friendly than the database link http://www.365webapplications.com/?p=724. In SEO you want to sure you efforts don’t get lost over time, by using these in conjunction with search engine and human friendly names. Like http://www.365webapplications.com/category/review/, which regardless of the year would always show the latest reviews. Also archives would have similar forms like http://365webapplications.com/2009/10, meaning show all articles from October 2009.
Read more