I’m not sure when, but O’Reilly had a make over on their website recently. Not all of their sites are using the all of the new template, most notably the O’Reilly Network that seems to only being using the top navigation section of the new style. This is unfortunate because I think the O’Reilly Network would look better using all of the new layout.
I like it, the additional white space makes things easier on the eyes. The navigation is clear and easy to follow.
Now if I could just find a way to get up to the 2006 Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon this July :-)
Another in the line of folks who should know better, O’Reilly has web spam on some of their sites. This doesn’t appear to be quite as bad as the WordPress web spam because they aren’t using CSS to make the content invisible to visitors. The placement of these “ads” are rather out of the way though, on the bottom left hand column.
With a little bit of looking around I was able to find these ads on oreillynet.com (on the article pages also), windowsdevcenter.com (on the article pages also), macdevcenter.com (on the article pages also), ondotnet.comt (on the article pages also), onjava.com (on the article pages also), onlamp.com (on the article pages also), perl.com (on the article pages also) and xml.com (on the article pages also).
The numbers involved don’t appear to be quite as bad as the WordPress incident either, with Google finding less than 600 pages with these ads for oreillynet.com. If the other sites have a similar number of pages with ads then all told it would less than 5000 pages. A lot of these ads point to freehotelsearch.com, which seems to offer a legitimate service (I only looked up reservations, I didn’t actually place one).
I think one could argue that these ads aren’t completely wrong. The argument would come down to intent, are these links there in hopes that people will actually click on them, or are they more of an effort to trick search engines to increase their importance? They are links, so it is possible that someone might click on them, but they aren’t nearly as prominent as the rest of their ads. I’m leaning more towards the idea that these ads are there more to boost their search engine ranking than as traditional ads. Tim is going to have a tough time making this look legit.
UPDATE 8:30am 24 Aug 2005: Tim O’Reilly has a posted an initial response to the complaints about the ads. The short version: while not completely wrong (and not nearly as bad as the WordPress spam) these types of ads aren’t good for the long term.
Yesterday O’Reilly Connection was announced by Tim. I’m not sure why, but I received an early invite via email last week and started my profile. The initial work for this was done by Greenplum (business software using PostgreSQL) and continued by some O’Reilly folks. So presumably the back end database for the site is PostgreSQL. I couldn’t find any other official information about what runs the site, but the web server is Apache 2 with the PHP 4 module installed. As with basically everything else that comes out on the web lately, the site is still in “beta”.
I haven’t been real excited about the whole social networking idea for websites. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, O’Reilly Connection seems to be focused on helping you hook up with people who have the skills that you need for a project or job. In remains to be seen if this is something that people will be interested in enough for it to be sustained in the long haul.
Perhaps going through the entire process of filing out my skills and job history will inspire to me to update my resume. Hmmm, perhaps generating a resume from the data in your profile would be a useful service?