April has been a very busy month so this months digest is short-and-sweet. I’ve also got another PHP tutorial in progress which looks at truncating strings of text for improved aesthetics in the next couple of weeks.

SEO

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using Site Speed in Web Search Ranking
Google announced the use of page load time in their algorithm. We saw this one coming with the inclusion of page load time data in Webmaster Tools and Google’s Page Speed tool.

Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

Further reading:
Search Engine Roundtable: April 2010 Google Webmaster Report
Yoast: Site Speed Ranking Factors
Matt Cutt’s Blog: Site Speed

jQuery

Sitepoint: Earle Castledine highlighted some of his favourite new features in jQuery 1.4. This is worth a read if you don’t want to get bogged down with every single new feature in jQuery, but instead see some practical uses for the new features and changes in version 1.4.

Other News

Ajaxian: Firefox Account Manager
Mozilla have been working on an interesting project called Account Manager that will enable users to log into the browser and subsequently have access to their stored passwords and login details.

The specification proposes using a static JSON document, automatically discovered by the browser, which describes what login methods the site supports. In addition, The browser needs a way to check which user (if any) is currently signed in. To do this, an HTTP header directive is set in the same code where you would set a cookie with a session ID. Watch the video here.

As a sidenote, I recently launched my new personal site this month, Robin Parduez.

The following blog post is an amalgamation of March 2010 highlights in SEO, web design and web coding. If you missed any of these articles, you might find them useful.

SEO Highlights

Bing Webmaster Center Blog: Illuminating the path to SEO for Silverlight
Bing have been posting some great content on their Webmaster Center Blog, and early in March they released an article discussing optimisation of Silverlight video content for search. The article is well-worth a read for SEO’s and Webmasters (and a lot of the principles apply to Flash as well).
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A couple of tips to make Photoshop run faster on Windows or Mac OS.

There’s also some advanced optimisation instructions for Mac OS users on the Adobe website. Although power users would probably want to avoid disabling some of the features discussed in this article.