Category: Work Status

Welcome to the June 2011 18INT newsletter! Google, Microsoft and Yahoo present schema.org A couple months ago, I wrote about how Facebook's Open Graph tags improve links to your content in the news stream. Schema.org, a collaboration between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, to does much the same thing--elaborate on the meaning of your HTML to improve user experience. Professional programmers know standards and best practices provide the best long-term strategy. Like design patterns and test-driven development, we know it makes life easier even if it's more work up front. This month, the major search engines agreed to a standard for adding more detail to HTML to aid search indexing. The technique annotates the information on the page without disturbing the display. This new tool is more detailed than Open Graph…

Welcome to the May 2011 edition of the 18INT newsletter! Facebook and SSL Facebook has been battling some bad press in the past month. They were caught hiring a PR agency to smear Google over privacy issues, perhaps to distract everyone from their ongoing security issues. Facebook app developers are a wild herd of cats, and facebook is finding they don't all follow along. The protocol used by Facebook and applications can make it easy to "leak" a session identifier, which is an opportunity for bad guy to take over your account. Part of Facebook's solution is to push all the apps into SSL. Another is to push all the apps into using OAuth 2.0 for authentication. Translated, this means if you're running an app on Facebook, you'll be upgrading your code…

Welcome to the April 2011 edition of the 18INT newsletter! Add Open Graph Tags Have you added Open Graph tags to all of your content? I haven't either, but it feels like it's time because Facebook is beginning to leverage the tags to enhance how the links appear in users' news streams. Despite a recent report from Forrester that content on Facebook is not not driving eCommerce sales, being present on Facebook remains imperative. We just haven't figured out the formula yet. I know this because I've seen Google ads drive people to a microsite that accomplished increasing offline sales. [caption id="attachment_279" align="aligncenter" width="455" caption="How a link to Rand-o-Matic appears in the Facebook news stream."][/caption] I'm sure we can agree that controlling how links to our content appear in the Facebook stream supports…

Eighteen Intelligence is my new Internet consultancy. Thanks in advance if you can spare a minute to learn more about it. The Past I have been building Web apps for about 17 years, most of that time leading small teams of engineers at consultancies. I met many great friends, including you. Sometimes friends would nudge me to start my own company. Recently, the time felt right, so I took their advice. The Present The formalities of starting the business are wrapped up. I founded 18INT on four values (truth, independence, computer automation, joy) and the core mission to free you from unnecessary constraints through programming. Now I'm ready to live and breath these principles. Clients recently commented on my speed and expertise, using words like "most excellent" and "awesome". I…

Eighteen Intelligence begins its life as a California corporation today.