Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Google knows I exist!!! (My hand-coded, gibberish-filled, free-hosted website with frames)

I read someplace recently that there was a problem with frames and search engine optimization. Supposedly, if google sees that your website uses frames, it lowers it in the search results... but I don't know the details, and I don't know whether I really understood it or not. (And I am having a brain fog day, and no matter how hard I struggle to think, it just doesn't happen.) It's not that simple, and I'm not explaining it properly... There's something about frames that can mislead google to think that there are lots and lots of results from your page, when actually it should be viewed as only one result... or something. So they changed the algorithm to take away points and make it more fair. That's a vague, general, poorly understood explanation of what they did.

My foggy brain interpreted this as, 'Oh no! Framed pages are handicapped now! They'll show up buried hundreds of miles deep at the very end of Google's 100,000 results!'

That might not be true. As I said, I'm trying to grasp these complex ideas using a chronic-fatigued brain that hasn't been working very well in the past few weeks. (Can you tell I'm not feeling too well today?)

I searched for 'kaniata' on google. It turns out that Kaniata is the name of a real town in Mali. But when I created that word, I created it as gibberish, as glossolalia. It was meant to be a unique word like Retmeishka. But instead, there are many other search results for the word Kaniata, since it is an actual town.

It turns out that my tiny little gibberish-filled hand-coded website is actually relatively high up in the google results for the word kaniata.

The website is http://kaniata.atwebpages.com/. I made it at batcave.net/. It's just a test page. Since I mentioned it in my blog, google knows it exists, because google looks for pages that people are linking to. If anyone clicks that link from my blog, it tells google that page is important to someone. That is how google found out that I exist.

I have my google set up to display 100 results per page, so you won't see it if you search for it and you are showing only 10 results per page. But for me, it's on the first page, a little way down. That might be on the second page of the results if you are showing 10 results per page. I don't want to go test that and mess with it right now. It's a hassle and I'm mentally not up for it.

Google knows I exist! Even though I used frames. Frames are not as badly cursed as I imagined they were! This makes me feel hopeful and excited.

I have this excitement about fighting a hopeless, losing, impossible battle. My battle: to make a really good website that uses frames. I'd like to make a social network, or a forum - something that other people will use to interact with each other - and a requirement of this project is that it must use frames. This isn't some requirement that you can get around. It is the heart and soul, the very center, of what this project is about. Frames are the whole point. Frames are everything. They are non-negotiable.

I want to learn about every possible hack that was ever invented to get around the problems that browsers have with frames. I also want a browser designed in a special way to display frames without any problems. Those problems don't have to happen. They aren't necessary and inevitable. They are not a law of nature. They happen because, for some reason, nobody ever bothered to fix them, and people moved on, and they forgot about frames.

Frames are the best way to design a web page. I have never seen anything that ever came close to functioning as well as a frame, period. All of the imitation frames are a poor substitute, and I can see this because I am on dialup and using an old computer and a browser that doesn't like all these new, heavy, bulky, slow-loading web pages.

Slow loading web pages are still bad even when I use them on my brand new netbook on a wi-fi connection! They are still slow! So that means everybody everywhere must feel that they are slow. It isn't just because I'm on dialup. Even cable users are experiencing slow, bulky web pages filled with unnecessary garbage when plain text will do.

So I want another website in the spirit of Craigslist.org and PlentyOfFish.com - pure function, pure high-quality content, plain text, nothing more. And I insist: it will use frames. I don't care about anything - it WILL use frames. Period. I don't care what I have to hack, I don't care what roundabout methods I have to use.

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