MindStorm -- It's Been Framed! (Reviews Please)

Nuke Cadet Joined: Aug 03, 2003 Posts: 4

www.MindStorm.us

Hey, could you all give a look at this and tell me what you think? It's my own personal site, and I've done quite a bit of customizing with it. It is php-nuke (don't be fooled by the frames).

Please give reviews!

Elite Nuker Joined: Jan 31, 2003 Posts: 717

What I saw:
The page cannot be displayed

Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2003 1:18 am

Hrm... interesting concept! I can't remember ever seeing Nuke turned into a blogger before. Very unusual, to say the least. The inboard scroll bar sort of irritates me, but to each his own.

Nice job!

Elite Nuker Joined: Jan 31, 2003 Posts: 717

OK, I saw it.

I did, sort of, the same thing HERE

Using phpNuke in frames etc.

Lieutenant Joined: May 29, 2003 Posts: 231

Nice unique design. Like VinDSL I don't like the scroll bar in the middle or frames. Also, your site is very bot unfriendly. They cannot follow javascript or flash menus and have difficulty with frames.

Nuke Cadet Joined: Aug 03, 2003 Posts: 4

What does "bot unfriendly" mean? I'm unfamiliar with that.

Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2003 12:22 pm

jijob wrote:

What does "bot unfriendly" mean? I'm unfamiliar with that.

I don't mean to speak for him, but I've been doing this a while. Besides the JS and Flash menues he mentioned, search engine bots usually ignore sites with frames. It hasn't always been this way, and all bots don't ignore all sites with frames, but that's more or less the way it is these days. That's probably what he meant.

Long session id numbers can cause problems with bots too, but I'm not convinced this is necessarily the case. I've seen sites that have session id's in place and Google indexes them just fine. And, I've seen sites that strip the sids and they don't get indexed. So, it's probably more of a case of luck o' the draw...

Lieutenant Joined: May 29, 2003 Posts: 231

Yeah, what VinDSL said. Also, bots can't follow links in javascript and flash menus. You need to add some plain text links somewhere for them so they can easily find your other pages. This is a pretty good tool to give you an idea what a bot sees: http://gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go?q=www.mindstorm.us

Google doesn't really have a problem with session id's because in many cases it doesn't index those pages. Other bots do though and more often than not they get lost. When that happens, they end up calling the same pages over and over again thinking they are brand new ones when the id changes on them. They can eat up a ton of bandwidth if they get lost. I've seen it happen to a number of people. One guy here let a lost bot go for like 10 days and it ate up 12 gigs on him. They don't get lost all the time, but when they do you have to step in and take action to stop them.

Nuke Cadet Joined: Aug 03, 2003 Posts: 4

Okay, thanks for all the info guys.

Elite Nuker Joined: Jan 31, 2003 Posts: 717

Quote:

add some plain text links somewhere for them

There is already a parallel HTML route.

Most, if not all, folders carry an empty index.html file.

Inserting a menu in these (and title and meta tags), with links to all the other html files in all the other folders and having an extra top link going to an index.htm in each folder (as opposed to the index.html) with a redirect META tag to the opening php file of that folder, will overcome that very nicely I think.