Jason Wong is an awesome entrepeneur. Back in 1997, I’d worked on his startup idea to take advantage of cheap storage (Zip drives) to do programatic recording of television (Tivo!). Or something like that. There were definitely zip drives. And at this late date we should probably pretend we were an early version of some other company that made it. Afterwards I lost touch with him, until today, when I ran into him on Connection.

He’s CEO of Ionami, an 8-person web consultancy. He’s still an entrepeneur and doing big things with Rails. I’m so happy to run into old friends who are doing well.

Web Genius, Justin Watt, had a great time at Webzine2005.

Rather than cooking up your own XML DTD/Schema, the microformats guys are advising using a combination of XHTML (which is XML afterall) and class attributes to create structured data for things like blogrolls (XFN), contact information (hCard), and calendaring (hCalendar).

One of the principles Tantek stressed (at FOO Camp) was that “invisible metadata deteriorates.” I wonder what my librarian friends would say about that? The benefit of XHTML is that browsers already exist on every platform to display whatever you markup. Using a combination of tags and CSS, create a format the benefits the user first, and the machine second.

I just finished upgrading my blog’s CSS stylesheet with help from MovableStyle.

Their styles are licensed under Creative Commons so you’re free to use them as is or as a starting point. I started with Tiny Green and then darkened the green, made entry titles stand out more, and increased the font size (from x-small to small!). You’re free to use my style as well.

Saw Craig Hordlow speak on Search Engine Optimization, (SEO). Normally this isn’t my bag, I always thought SEO was a polite way to say, “cheat the search engines.” It sounds sketchy.

Craig, however, is definitely not sketchy. He’s very pragmatic and I got a couple of neat nuggets.

The most pragmatic, and thus my favorite, was that search rank doesn’t matter if users don’t stick around on your site. So whatever you do to fool the search engines, don’t let it get in the way of creating a site that your lucky visitors will want to read.

He also talked a little bit about Page Rank. I’d heard of it, but I didn’t know it was something that the search engines shared with you. Here’s a tool to check your page rank.

He couldn’t help but share one cheat. Search engines add extra weight to terms at the top of the page. From the SEO perspective you’d do well by putting a lot of your search terms at the top of the page. That’s probably not going to do a lot of good for your visitors. However, you can use CSS to style your page so that the block of keywords at the top of your HTML file actually displays at the bottom. Tricky!

Craig runs an SEO consultancy, Red Bricks Media, and also teachs SEO at AcademyX.