Blog Just Got Better with Rich Results

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Over 2 years ago we developed our own Blog. We were quite happy with it. Easy to use, and looked pretty good. Had all the features we wanted without going to a bloated Wordpress or similar type of template. Made use of a flatfile database so can be edited easily without going into an actual database.

To end user, it looked good, and was functional.

But what about search engines?

I never received any complaints from any webmaster tools, so I figured it was doing great.

However, I came across an article which made reference to schema.org. In it, it talked about news articles, job posting articles and blog articles. That got me curious.

They made reference to Google's Rich Results page to see if one's pages were perceived Rich by search engines.

So I ran my blog through this test tool and to my surprise, it couldn't find any Rich Text.

Our home-grown blog template was missing some key tags which search engines just love, such as item scope and item properties. So effective today, all the necessary tags for blogging were added and the Google tool is now happy. We are now more happy.

An important note is it did not change the format of our blog at all...it looks exactly the way it did before. The only difference is that search engines are now more happy with the results.



Responsiveness Just Got Better

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We have made some changes to our site over the last couple of days. Using tools like https://varvy.com, formally "feedthebot.com", we checked where our website could be improved. One area was CSS.

After optimizing our CSS down to one file we began to look at what else can be improved. We were using a grid boilerplate for years. This allowed us to make our site responsive or mobile friendly for quite some time. In fact it was responsive right from the beginning. However, starting today, it is responsive first. What that mean is we redesigned our website to cater towards mobile devices first then fall back to the big screen. It makes navigating to other pages on our site so much easier on small screen devices like phones.

Enjoy.



Online or Browser Based Whois Utility

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We have added another utility to our swiss army knife of utilities. This one is the whois utility or function. It will return domain information for a specified domain. If the domain is registered, it will provide various bits of information such as registration date, expiry data, renewal date and so forth. If the domain is not registered, it will let you know that too.

The main reason for adding such a utility is the whois utility uses its own unique tcp port to communicate with the whois service. Many companies block this port (usually only allowing browsing). So in order to use whois within such a company, you need to find one which works through a browser. Well, look no further, you have found it.

What about IP addresses? Well, throw in an IP address and see what happens. All part of the whois database lookup.



Adding a blog

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We have added a blog to our site. It is home-grown, so no Wordpress here. We backfilled some activities we have done in the past so we have a good timeline of when we have added additional pages to our website.



QR Code Generator

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Our newest addition to the Web's Best Computer Apps. The QR Code Generator is an application which can generate QR codes. It is designed to deliver data to devices with cameras...ie. almost all smartphones nowadays. The data is typically a URL but it can be numbers or secret messages.

Sample QR Codes

Here are some QR Codes to play with.

wbca.ca QR Code Image 1 wbca.ca QR Code Image 2 wbca.ca QR Code Image 3

Rule of 80 Calculator

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Our second addition to the Web's Best Computer Apps. The Rule of 80 Calculator is a calculator that can assist you in determining a retirement age. Many companies have a Rule of X, where X can be anywhere between 70 and 110. The Rule of 80 is the age plus the years of credited service equaling 80.



Webs Best Computer Apps

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Our Second WBCA...Web's Best Computer Apps. Maybe not the best title, but this will be a collection of web tools. So far, we have put in What is my IP?. Basically it will let you know what your IP address is.



Winters Best Cool Activities

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Our First WBCA...Winter's Best Cool Activities. At Winter's Best Cool Activities, we have a collection of videos we have made in the past. We have plans on adding some additional videos shortly...just waiting for the right weather conditions, and you will find more videos.