I'm starting to lose trust and confidence in Firefox. What has happened over at Mozilla to turn what was once the "standard browser" of technology-savvy people everywhere, into the browser that's always letting me down?

It started with the ocassional crash. I remember feeling kind of shocked the first time I saw Firefox 2 crash. After a number of years of being reliable and stable, there it was - falling flat on its face. Over time, as the crashing happened again and again, I was less shocked.

Firefox has gone through a number of security and stability upgrades. From 2.0.0.0  to 2.0.0.1 and on and on. Firefox automatically updates for me whenever a new stable release is pushed out by the developers.

But how did 2.0.0.8 slip out?

I started Firefox today, and noticed for the first time on a particularly ad-filled web site that for some reason Adblock wasn't blocking any ads. I opened the extension tab and saw this:

All of my extensions are broken. Restarting Firefox didn't fix it.

According to the official bug report which was filed TWO MONTHS AGO, developers are still trying to figure out how to fix it. Downloading the latest browser (2.0.0.9) or even one of the development builds won't do it.

Open source is supposed to be better than closed source right? Bugs are found and fixed in 24 hours, or so the story goes. I consider this to be a serious problem - all of my extensions no longer work. And as far as I can tell, this bug has been known for 2 months now. All-in-all, it's a huge knock to the reputation of the supposedly "stable and less bugs" browser. That myth has just been shattered, although truth be told it's been in jeopardy for some time.

 

This isn't meant to be the politics blog, but there was an important report released in the Blackwater investigation today:

FBI Blames Blackwater in 14 of the 17 Deaths

Aye yai yai.

I've been following Jakob Neilsen for 10 years at least. Ever since a company I worked for invested in some professional usability equipment ($60,000 worth if I remember), and started video taping people using our web site.

Jakob is known as one of the top - and certainly most famous - usability experts in the world. His site is http://www.useit.com/

And Jakob Neilsen says I should stop blogging and actually write useful articles instead.

His advice actually makes sense. If you want to establish yourself as a top expert in some field, you actually need to contribute valuable content to the Internet. Simply a few paragraphs commenting on the controversey of the day (as this very post is doing), doesn't really contribute.

In actual fact, the goal I guess is to get people linking TO YOU and having them do the commenting on your work, instead of linking to other people. This has SEO benefits as well, because establishing yourself as a recognized expert in a field, which causes people to link to you, makes Google think you're a great destination to send people, and so they send more, and it's a "virtuous circle".

What I might do is turn some of my best blog posts, where I think I'm actually contributing new content and not just insights and commentary, into articles with their own organization and hierarchy. Put that on my to do list.

 

I have an ongoing theme over the history of this blog: how much does the United States owe, and what's the credit card limit up to now?

According to the U.S. Government, the current debt stands at $9.111 Trillion. It's odd typing such a large number. I'd rather prefer saying $9,111 Billion. A billion dollars is a heck of a lot of money, and we as normal humans can't even properly fathom a trillion. It's beyond comprehension.

And the last I heard the statutory debt limit was $8.97 Trillion. So they much have increased it without me noticing - and they did increase it early in October. How come this didn't make the news? A quick Google search tells me the current limit is $9.815 Trillion.

I guess in an election year, they want to give themselves a lot of room to spend so that they don't have to debate the level of debt on the nightly news.

 

Someone recently hired me for a very specific task: improve their site ranking in Google for some specific search terms.

I thought that was a fairly easy task. One look at their web site made me see that their site was quite search engine unfriendly - a lot of images with text in it. Obviously, as pretty as your site is, if Google sees page after page of blank space, its not going to think very much of your site.

So, I went through all their HTML, changed many of the text-images to just text, and added alt text to the others that I didn't want to change (like headers, and text with graphics behind them).

And now I wait. And wait. And wait.

The problem now is that Google isn't coming back to reindex their site. Google did make an appearance in October, but that was before I had uploaded the new pages. And since October, Google hasn't been back.

So, this is the SEO dillemma. In an ideal world, I could make a few changes to the site, watch for the reaction in Google. Make a few more changes, and check the reaction. Rinse and repeat. But if I have to wait a month or TWO each time, that kind of makes it difficult.

I understand Google has various spider priorities, where they visit CNN.com 100 times per day, visit my site once per day, and apparently visit my client's site once per month or less. I wonder how long it will take to get Google to visit my client's weekly at least. Is that even possible? I'll let you know, as only time will tell.

(And I wait. And wait. And still waiting.)

I've heard of Waxy Links here and there. But until I actually visited there today for the first time, I didn't "get it". Now I get it. A lot of really interesting stuff there. Check it out.

 

OK I admit I could muck this up.

But I'm going to try upgrading my blog software. Hold still, this could hurt.

Update: The upgrade went pretty much without a hitch. I love when that happens. I'm now running on the next version of dasBlog 1.9. And I found this new theme, which I love so far.

 

SEO Theorist Michael Martinez shares an interesting list of 20 hard core SEO tips.

My favorites?

2. Add 5 new pages of content to your site every week

It's true. The more original content you have, the better. And if your content is growing steadily over time, people will bookmark your site and come back. Content, content, content.

15. Create a 1-page listing of 20 unknown web sites you wish you had created, and post it to your site.

You grow reputation by not only having quality content, but by pointing to other people's quality content. If you link to the same old sites everyone else is linking to (YouTube), it's not that significant to Google. And if you link to bad neighborhoods (like link farms, made for adsense sites, and the like), you'll ruin your own reputation with Google. But if you link to quality content, not only will your visitors be happy, but the big ol' Googlebot will too.

20. Define a metric of three to five factors that does not include Alexa, PageRank, Compete, or any of the common backlink checkers.

This one's hard. Basically, in order to stand out in a crowd you have to be different. You shouldn't do what one million other web sites are doing (comparing themselves to Alexa), you should come up with your own definition of success.