Mr Coles Peter Coles’ blog

This is a technical followup to a post on SEOmoz.org with a specific example on how to setup an automated link building tool that monitors a google alerts RSS feed using YQL and then checks those pages to see if they linked to the site you are monitoring. This post explains the python code in more detail and gives specifics on how to set it up with the google apps engine. read full post…

An overview of my thoughts and reactions from the Twitter Chirp conference in San Francisco. Topics include Will.i.am and “code writers”, more business and less hacking, @anywhere clientside Twitter apps, and finally “filling holes” and Twitter/developer tensions. read full post…

I made a few performance enhancements to my site after hearing the Google announcement that they’re using site speed in search rankings. The changes include using the Google analytics asynchronous tracking script, minifying my CSS into one file, and changing my home page to show excerpts of blog posts after the two most recent ones. read full post…

Google officially announced that they use page load speed as one of their signals for ranking page. I wonder if they were experimenting with this back in Fall 2009. I noticed at this time that my rankings in Google dropped drastically and then returned to normal, coinciding directly with slow loads on my site due to a database misconfiguration. read full post…

A simple tool to unminify CSS. It’s useful if you want to look at a site’s CSS, but you can only get your hands on the minified version. It is very simple and also lets you specify tab with. The idea is partly inspired by existing javascript beautifiers and unminifiers. read full post…