IBM to build brain-like computers

“IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains.”
more on the BBC

Reminds me of the TEDtalk by Kwabena Boahen

a bit of self-promo…

The last weeks, I spent a lot of time re-working my Shanti CMSes SEO-ability.

And the efforts are starting to bare fruit. Or so it seems anyways…
- I polished the function generating and submitting the sitemap.xml function (the webmaster-tools now fully approve it). The sitemap is submitted to Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, MSN (Live.com) and Moreover.com.
- added a robots.txt specifying the content we want indexed.
- the addresses are now SEO friendly, resulting in better ranking in search engines.
- Also modified some of the PHP generating the navigational structure allowing the site administrator more liberty as to the appearance of the content, as well as more SEO friendly code.

The results, 15% more visitors coming via search engines, a 15% drop in bounce rate, 4.8 page depth per visit (as opposed to 2.3 before).

And to top it all off, Olivier, the master acupuncturist called me today, he got two new clients because of his site today. The new features have been in place for a little more then one week.

SEO time well spent…

Shanti CMS by Valentin Backofen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.codeigniter.com.

Download Source Code

news from the valley…

I had my first suspicions when I saw that one of the major contributors to the the AMFPHP project had somewhat inexplicable political leanings. No that is not really true, what did raise them was the fact that AMFPHP has been stuck at its current version for one year, much like when ASDT died silently. It’s like a sign of a terminal disease. But I digress, this should not impede on ones good programming skills. Because indeed AMFPHP is a wonderful piece of work, especially when you throw AMFEXT into the mix. But I guess all things must come to an end, as it looks like amfphp is integrating into zend…and that it is time to check out alternate AMF solutions…

read more at sephiroth.it

I hate to say it…

but I told you so…

Sites like SurfTheChannel, Watch-Movies and Tv-Links and many Many MANY like them have been around and sprung up since a couple of years now. Then there’s NBC, FOX and (surely CBS offers this too) that stream their shows on their website via an on-demand service.Though highly annoying as it is for US surfers only, so you cannot access it unless you visit them via a proxy.

. All thanks to Flash video, as I am sure Macromedia (ahem, Adobe) would want you to believe. Putting the origins aside. Having settled their dispute with Viacom, YouTube (ahem Google) now signed a deal with MGM. Youtube will show full-length films from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s archives…

So who will the other portals follow with now? Surely Turner and Murdoch have some deals up theirs (he he - now I don’t), I mean their sleeves as well…

watch this story closely as it develops…

more on the BBC

Another Shanti

Before Frieda was born I was working ridicules amount of hours with Marc-Antoine over the last month. We missed our initial goal of the 21st of October by a hair. Several issues came in our way, but in the end it was for the better I believe, as it allowed us to clean out several hicks in both front- and back- end.

The Flash (9, AS3) front end draws its data of a database managed and maintained through my own Shanti CMS (the db Structure remains the same as well). The data is fed to Flash via AMFPHP.
We also added SWF address into the mix allowing deeplinking within the site. I also completed a script for SEO google friendly content so that deeplinks can be properly indexed. As of yet, this function remains on the DEV server as Frieda came in the way. But as such the function is tested ready and true, and it will be my first order of business when back in action.

Just felt like that the news needed spreading, as this site had been in the making for quite some time. I remember hearing talk of a new web site back when I first started @ Marketel for the first time back in 2006 there was already talk of a new website. Many-an Art Director tried his and her luck, but to no avail. Nothing ever materialized. Funny how that goes. It took a determined president and way to little time to push it through. We had, admittedly, been dabbling on the project since the beginning of the summer. But there was no serious production time allocated to the project until Jaques Duval made it clear that he needed a new site, and he needed it pronto. He had a big announcement to make, both internally and externally and for it, a new web site was needed. The two weeks running up to the launch, Marc-Antoine and I clocked in at well above one hundred hours, but to no avail. so instead of launching a half finished product the launch was postponed, the press release, was not.

But look at us now, a good looking site. Deeplinkable, downloaded lightning fast (the site totals at below 200 Kb) and running smooth as a kitten. A result of a couple of late nights, honest hard work, and wayyyyy too much StHubert. But looking at it now I was well worth. With google analytics telling me that many visitors like what they are clicking, and a row of up-coming extensions I think we can be quite happy with the out come. The outcome, which, from the start, we wanted to be a framework that both Front- and Back-end could be taken on and easily implemented in any up-coming productions…

we rock!

and others think so too…

Shanti CMS by Valentin Backofen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.codeigniter.com.

Download Source Code

Next entries »