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Why a well-designed/well-built website matters more than ever

Have you heard?
Google now personalizes all its search results based on your last 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. You can read about it on Google's blog if you want to learn more about this important change to how Google operates.

What does it mean?
Say you search a particular topic like "computers" on a regular basis. In the past Google would deliver similar results to you as it would to everyone else searching on the same phrase.

With personalized search Google will consider your past search activity, the phrases you search on and the pages you click through in order to generate a user profile that will deliver more relevant results when searching for "computer hard drives" or some other component. If you click on ZDNET more often in search results then that site will be weighted in your personalized results...

It seems like there's a ton of information coming out this week regarding developments in web development. Here I have assembled some links to blogs, websites and pages that discuss interesting new technologies, work arounds and generally cool stuff that web developers might find interesting. Some of these innovations will apply to Smallbox, but most apply to anyone working in web development.

First off, Smallbox has released an upgrade to our core content management engine. The latest release offers improvements in page load time (on average pages now render twice as fast as the previous version), new functionality such as the ability to manage navigation using Smallbox Config™, and hundreds of other small improvements that contribute to the ongoing evolution of our content management system. 

IE Workaround - Google developers have come up with a clever work around for the ongoing and painful experience of optimizing websites to work for Internet Explorer. The Google Chrome Frame is essentially a plug-in for IE 6/7/8 that renders pages with Google Chrome's webkit engine. How sweet is that?!

Google has also released a new set of tools called Google Web Elements. Web Elements lets developers and content managers insert code snippets that integrate Google Calendar, Maps, News, YouTube Video and more into your website. Users can specify specific sources and render this information on their website as an interactive page plug-in.

Have you heard of Kaltura? If not you should definitely know more about it...

I really love pet projects. I like doing small things to improve Smallbox that I can pick at inbetween client work. I inherited the task of reskinning the Rich Text Editor a few weeks back and I had no idea what was ahead of me. We are using this Fckeditor as our RTE for a reason, it's a good little plugin that works well and our clients find it intuitive to use. That's about where the intuition stops though as I discovered when I dove in to skin this thing, the entire skinning process is riddled with what we like to call "secret buttons". I found no information on the web and felt very frustrated and alone in the universe. I finally figured it out and now I think it's my duty to share my steps with the rest of the web.

So I, in association with Smallbox Software present : How to Fcking Skin the Fckeditor.