Pittsburgh Code Camp 2: Confirmed Topics

Fresh from my inbox:

The 2nd Annual Pittsburgh Code Camp is taking the place of our
regularly-scheduled Pittsburgh .NET User Group meeting in April. Details
below:

This free, day-long event is put on by the local .NET
community to help promote software development, expose attendees to best
practices and provide access to content experts. Code Camp is designed as a
series of intensive code-related demos and technical sessions to guide the
developer to the next skill level. Code Camps have been taking place all over
the country with the goal of providing a developer to developer learning
experience that is fun and technically stimulating.

All attendees will
receive the presentation materials and sample code.

Date: Saturday,
April 14
Time: 9:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m.
Location:
University of
Pittsburgh, Department of Computer Science, Sennott
Square

RSVP: Events

View the full
agenda
Here

Pittsburgh Area SharePoint User Group

A SharePoint User Group is coming to the Pittsburgh area:

The Pittsburgh Area SharePoint User Group  is dedicated to
providing educational  and informational resources for Microsoft
SharePoint technologies and related products.  Its purpose is to bring
the local SharePoint community together to network, and to share tips, tricks,
and ideas on SharePoint technologies, as well as to provide a forum for people
involved with SharePoint.  The target audience for this users group
includes developers, designers, administrators, and power users. 

The first meeting of the SharePoint User Group will be held at the end
of April or early May.  To help us define the format, content, and timing
of this meeting, and to be notified of upcoming meetings, please help us by
filling out a brief survey, at
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=495253496362 
This survey, which is being administered by the Pittsburgh Technology Council,
will only take a few minutes to complete, and we hope to have all responses by
March 31st. Your responses will be collected by the Council and kept
completely confidential and, without your permission, no material that
identifies your response will be distributed.

The Pittsburgh area User Groups have proved to be a great source of
information and knowledge for users over the years–and we anticipate that the
SharePoint Users Group will be as equally successful.

Additional comments and concerns are always
welcome.

What’s Important to Search Engines and What’s Not

This is an outstanding article, full of great advice.  The author (Jill Whelan) is a long time search engine optimizer whose advice I’ve followed for years with success.  I trust her advice over that of many, many other people.

One example:

* The majority of the site will be static, as static pages are easier for search engines to crawl and rank properly.

‘Fraid not. Dynamic pages are just as easy to crawl and rank as static pages. Most websites today are dynamic because they’re simply easier to maintain. The search engines have figured out how to crawl and rank them just fine for many, many years now. It’s true that there are specific things you need to watch out for when creating a dynamic site, but most developers are aware of the worst of the issues. You certainly should consult with an SEO if you’re changing content management systems, or if you’re having problems getting your dynamic URLs spidered and indexed. But there’s no reason to have only static pages on your site because you’re worried about the search engines being able to index dynamic pages.

Full story at http://www.highrankings.com/advisor/not-important-to-seo/

Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages

Splogs suck.  We all know that.  And we all know where they are, and why they’re there.  And we know Google has been slow to do anything about the problem, since Adwords are a gravy train for them.  Recently, Microsoft researchers have gotten to the bottom of the scum, and may have a way to filter splogs from legit blogs:



The researchers’ specific findings included evidence that some blog-hosting services have permitted an explosion of phony doorway pages. For example, the researchers noted that such pages were far more prevalent in Google’s blogspot.com service than in other hosting domains. The Microsoft Research team has worked extensively with the managers of Microsoft’s Spaces blog-hosting service to detect and identify search-engine spam, Mr. Wang said. Google would not comment for the record on its own efforts to combat such practices.


Full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/technology/19spam.html?ex=1332043200&en=63a9e5286915f3bb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.


(Hat tip: Stephanie’s FlowerHaus)


Add to this the findings that blogger.com is riddled with malware, and it seems to be only a matter of time before corporate filters blog blogger.com (if they don’t already).