just so no-one thinks I wasnt busy with the loops...

heres another entry to the developers blog :)

wikiloops has calmed down a bit, many members spending their holidays far from their recorders :) As for my search engine otpimizing attempts, some of the changes dont seem to be of googles taste - its always a tuff decision wich guides to follow, theres lots of information out there, and by now I come to the conclusion that its a mix of diffrent schemes and standards that seems to work best. So (for all who programm), the current version combines open-graph, schema.org, and data-vocabulary.org markups. None of this results in visible changes, but you may notice the diffrent layout of what facebook displays when you like a track. If you have been wondering how facebook knows to choose the right pic of the uploader, thats what this is about.
So I have been reading and learning all along, all the time with an eye on speed issues and browser compatibility. Looks like I am becoming better in weighing issues in priorities... I do hope thats so, monitoring the google hit rate every day to get an estimate how well I'm doing.
Now something funny and worth tellin ya... now, I have been struggling for about 1,5 years. And I always felt it to be most important not to interrupt the music played back by other actions a user might take while listening (such as writing a comment, giving a thumb, shouting etc etc). To be able to do that, theese actions are not allowed to reload the whole page, wich would cause the darned player restart.
So far, so easy, that works fine you are going to say.
Well, it does, but it only works fine, because theese actions are built into so called "frames" wich are reloaded instead of reloading the whole page (reload is necessary, otherwise, you wont see the comment you hjust wrote or the thumb you just gave).
The big problem has always been that search engines do not read what is displayed in a frame, so googlebot would only get to "see" the musicians pix, the player and the headline section, while ratings, comments and alternative jams are hidden from it.
OK, long explanation for a short laugh :) : I took me one and a half year to realize, that this "big problem" had a very simple solution to it:
since googlebot and all not registerred user simply cant comment, shout or thumb, it is completely unnecessary to offer them the content in frames! thats only relevant for logged in wikiloops members! Duh! how simple is that! So I quickly changed the design, so bots and guest visitors see the jampages without frames. That way, all comment texts are becoming visible to the bot and helping him determine what this webpage might be about. I hope, search results will show some love for that soon :)

I have not been around to changing any usability features lately, most things seem to work fine right now, so I wont go at it.

On my project-schedule:

- the mobile page needs an upgrade implementing all the newly gained wisdom...
- one day, I'm going to do the stage update...
- the help section needs a redo pretty badly by now
- og-markup needs to be finished (did a big cleanup of the whole headsection... dynamic programming of invisible content is a task to itself, I'm tellin ya...)
- need to stay in touch with the mod-team, everyone seems a little busy theese days, but I'm absolutely positive things will pick up pace again once summer is over. Got some upgrades and features in discussion there, we'll see about that in fall.

be good, and have fun around

Dick