[REBOL] Re: Please help me to promote REBOL
From: apwing:zonnet:nl at: 11-Nov-2003 18:37
Hi Sunanda,
thanks for the very good remarks concerning my site. In the near future I am going to
incorporate the advice into it! I hope that at some stage the site may help the "world"
to know more about REBOL than today.
Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards,
Arie van Wingerden
http://home.zonnet.nl/rebolution
----- Original Message -----
From: [SunandaDH--aol--com]
To: [rebol-list--rebol--com]
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2003 8:35 AM
Subject: [REBOL] Re: Please help me to promote REBOL
Hi Arie,
> In order to serve the REBOL community best, I ask you to check my site for
> correctness and completeness. If you think it's worthwile, please link to
my
> site. Do not hesitate to comment, I am just a newbie :-)
I think it'll be a great resource. Thanks for taking the time to do it.
I've got a few comments about the site itself rather than directly on its
contents. These are triggered by looking at your site, but some of them apply to
other REBOL sites too.
1. GET INTO DMOZ
To be visible in search engines (so people can find you) it is important to
have incoming links from other sites and directories.
An important directory to get into is DMOZ. The correct category is probably:
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/REBOL/FAQs,_Help,_and_Tutorial
s/
But I am not sure you have enough *unique* content yet to qualify for a DMOZ
listing -- simply listing other links isn't enough. Add some content along
the lines of other replies and you'll do fine.
Incidentally, thanks to AllenK for starting the REBOL categories at DMOZ and
Tgosbell for taking it over and expanding them.
2. BE SEARCH-ENGINE FRIENDLY
If you want the site to rank well, you've got to do things that
search-engines like.
The site uses frames. They are a great idea for an internal company intranet.
But they are a major impediment for search engines out in the wider world.
Although SEs will these days index beyond the frameset, their heart really
isn't into it, so you don't get good ranking without an enormous amount of other
work.
Frames also annoy us users out here -- it's impossible to bookmark an
individual page, or to provide a deeplink.
So think about replacing the frames with SSI or similar technology.
3. AIM FOR VALIDATED HTML
REBOL is a cross-platform miracle, so the chances are that people will be
using your site from all sorts of browsers you and I have never even heard of.
Cross-browser support is tricky to get 100% right, but it helps a lot if the
HTML validates to the !DOCTYPE standard it's aimed at.
The site has some improperly nested and unclosed HTML tags. You can check
the individual pages at:
http://validator.w3.org/
(So far no one has complained that they couldn't see the site, so the mark-up
issues may all be benign. But validation is still a useful discipline: you
can't know with 100% certainty which mark-up errors will cause problems with
search engines or new browsers, so it's best not to insert those errors).
Sunanda
