This site generates a link to a random page of the Mozilla Javascript reference, with various keywords added in title and alt attributes. It would be better if they used text instead of an image as the link anchor.
Here's how this should be done instead:
* Register a new domain, say javascriptdocs.com or javascriptreference.org
* The new domain should be used for hosting the JS reference as well as the link generator. Using an unrelated domain means you are wasting a lot of links from people that want to support the cause.
* The documentation should get a SEO treatment by someone who knows what he's doing. You need good titles, sensible site structure, a small excerpt to be used on top of each page and in the meta descriptions.
* Contact people and websites that link to bad docs, make them aware of the better docs you are offering and get them to switch.
* A reward program for people that put up links, refer visitors from their website, etc. Give them a Mozilla t-shirt or a hat or something.
If there is going to be an effort to improve the actual docs, not just their Google ranking, I would be happy to provide some free consulting on SEO, site structure, usability, promotion, etc. You can find contact information in my profile.
I don't really buy all this big campaign to promote MDC.
First of all, I do it anyway. I constantly promote the MDC resources when ever I write a blog or forum post about some JavaScript thingie.
Secondly, the MDC site itself is not a perfect guide to JavaScript. Just look at the main page - https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript - it's overwhelming. Even though I use it frequently, it still makes me feel lost. Plus it has the same academic feel as W3C pages, and you know what... HTML spec is not the first result in google for "html" either.
Compare all this to the w3schools page on JavaScript: http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp It might not be teaching the best practices, but it sure as hell is a lot clearer than the MDC page.
Therefore I would suggest that MDC guys follow the first rule of SEO: just make a better site.
1) It's essentially spam, which Google works to prevent. It seems likely this will actually hurt Mozilla's rank in searches.
2) It's unnecessary. Google's results are usually fine. If you really want a page on Mozilla Dev Center you just add the letters "mdc" to your search, and it's the top result every time.
the point is you need to add mdc, people searching for javascript that do not know about mdc get sent to barely related sites at best, but more often misleading and wrong documentation
Call me stupid - but I am one of those persons who was unaware of MDC - and to be honest Mozilla sites hierarchy can be hard/impossible to traverse for the un-initiated.
I was wishing so much to find something like that JavaScript Guide. I love JS - but the little intricacies that are common knowledge to greybeards were so hard to find about - now I got it all here.
Agreed on 1). It's not unnecessary though. If you don't know what mdc is, you can't search for it. JavaScript is often said to be the most misunderstood programming language. I think this is because there is no definitive, easily findable resource on it.
lars: can you explain #1 a bit more? how is a simple widget/affiliate button spam?
just trying to understand this a bit better, because we are planning on doing an official mozilla mdn affiliate campaign to promote other parts of our documentation.
As I understand it, the point of this is to manipulate how MDC ranks in google searches. A lot of people try to do this, and google works to prevent it. What I'm saying is that google's algorithms might see this sudden rise in links coming from sites with potentially widely different content, consider it unnatural, and classify it as spam. They also might not, I certainly don't know the details of their spam prevention algorithm.
I'm not saying that I personally am offended by this widget, I don't give a damn. But google might.
Googling for 'javascript' brings up some sites about javascript, such as Wikipedia and Crockford's, along with some not so good tutorial-ish sites. The only really bad thing I see is the java.com reference at number three. Searching for 'javascript documentation' or 'javascript docs' pulls up the MDC doc site. Not sure why this is that big of a deal. I don't see a need for enlisting "the community" to drive SEO here.
It gives you a random part of the guide with the appropriate keywords in the title attribute of the link, so that each part of the guide gets boosted in the search rankings appropriately.
You can refresh if you want to promote a different part of the guide (Arrays, RegExp, etc).
I don't think w3schools has any affiliation with the W3C. But I agree with you, their documentation is terrible: bad examples, idiosyncratic code conventions, confusing layout, (no syntax highlighting,) lots of distracting ads, and very little of the "what are the corner cases", "how does this work in every browser", &c. details that are essential in this type of resource.
It would go much further for the mozilla development center to do a little basic, white-hat, on-page SEO. For example, this URL:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...
has a title of "Array - MDC". Even when it does come up in search results, most users wouldn't have context from the title what it's about. "MDC" adds nothing to the title. Words like "JavaScript" or "documentation" might help. Similarly, "documentation" isn't even on the page, and "Javascript" is first found halfway down the page and mostly in extra small text.
That said, the search results seem fine for this. [javascript array] turns up this page, albeit at position 9. It also shows w3cschools.com's page on the javascript array at the top, as well as several other great references. The only less than ideal results that I see are the two from javascript-array.com which tends to smell a little over-seo'ed from the fact that the hyphenated domain matches the query.
We are going to be doing some basic SEO very soon, but some of the current issues are due to the wiki platform we are using. We'll be investigating way to improve the overall markup for all docs.
Keeping this on the frontpage will help as well :)
This is a great idea. One of the reasons why JavaScript is frequently misunderstood is because if you search for anything JS related you will find posts explaining how to do some DHTML thing in IE5/6 and Netscape.
It's great that Mozilla considers themselves to be the patron saints of JS, but much of the recent growth in the JS community is due to projects like V8 and node. Why doesn't Joyent or Google get to host the docs on their servers?
Perhaps it's a better idea to establish a Javascript Foundation that runs javascript.org or something. This approach will probably not last and then it'll be a wasted SEO effort.
I am one who doesn't really understand javascript hype (and have used it in advanced ways), there are few types, objects are automatically converted to strings, few functions support even for the web (urlparse). I am in favor of a VM to the web, supporting more programming languages.
I'd be interested to know by what standards you asses programing languages.
JavaScript has an admittedly clumsy and unnecessarily Java-like syntax and few built-in functions, I agree. But underneath there is a very elegant functional programming language. Who needs more built-in functions? Most scripting languages' built-in functions are just libraries written in that very language anyway. There's tons of such libraries for JavaScript.
A lot of the recent hype is due to node.js, too. Node.js is (somewhat simplified) a set of evented IO bindings for the V8 JavaScript engine. Those bindings enable us to build webservers using JavaScript. JavaScript was designed to be run in an event loop without any concurrency or blocking, which makes it incredibly easy to build software the scales reasonably well.
That said, I do agree that you should be able to use more languages in the browser. IIRC somebody has already ported Mono to Firefox which allows you to run tons of scripting languages in the browser. The next thing we need is standardization.
Calling Javascript a functional language is quite a stretch. All native data structures are mutable, the function literal syntax is extremely clumsy, and there is no algebraic datatypes, pattern matching or TCO.
Having JavaScript on the server side makes me a bit weary, because of the difficulties of developing with it on the user side well mainly the no compilation/type checking and lack of concurrency. With the push to multi-processor systems concurrency is becoming much more important to take advantage of which makes me curious how does a non concurrent loop scale well (I don't know much about this node.js library).
On the user side however I have learned to like it. The lack of type checking does bug me since I tend to make cludgy spelling errors which compilers pick up, but its tolerable. I do wish js had a built in type checker for development.
Another driver of hype, more negative hype is GWT. But it is a bit disappointment and is a wrong approach to the whole browser independence issues. My brother and I have been working on a project for over 4 months, which initially started with using GWT and after two month of struggling with it, we threw it out, and switched to JQuerry. Our productivity instantly shot up.
More language support would certainly interesting, but I agree JS standardization across browsers is a more important issue to have resolved.
Concurrency is not much of an issue, you write concurrent JS apps like you write them in other languages.
There are three types of applications, and two are easy in JavaScript.
The first is something that is well within the capabilities of one modern CPU core. This class of applications includes every program that's currently running on your machine. Servers that only do IO (message queues? memcache? SMTP?) can also be included, in many cases.
This is easy to handle because there is no concurrency. For IO, you use an event loop, of course.
The second class of application is something like Facebook. One machine will never be enough to handle it, so you design for it to be as distributed as possible. Each app is "shared nothing" and passes messages to communicate with other components.
Obviously, JavaScript will do fine here. Each tiny component runs on one CPU core, and then you run a million copies of the app on 250,000 4-core servers. Easy. Need to double capacity? Just buy more servers. Wonderful.
The third case is the Enterprise Application. This is something like your company's HR portal or your online bank. It's an application that's the swiss-army-knife of applications. It slices, dices, and reads email too. Just compiling it is a week-long process involving 10 engineers and 4 consultants. For maximum SPEEEEED, everything happens in its own threads, which share 100% of everything with the other threads. (How could you read email and RSS feeds and check your paycheck if there weren't threads!?)
This type of app can only ever run on a single machine; if it's too slow, IBM and Oracle would be happy to help you out with a marginally-faster box for a few million more dollars. Since everything is shared, once you hit the most expensive hardware, that's the best you can ever do. If you wonder why it takes 120 seconds to load your bank account balance... this kind of app is why.
And no, you can't write one of these in JavaScript. Shared-state threads are not implemented. What a loss...
Taking advantage of multi-core platforms is easy. Just start multiple node processes and have the kernel take care of the rest. If you want the processes to communicate, there's a host of tried and tested IPC methods available.
The advantage of this approach is that when you write a function in Javascript, it is guaranteed that no other program other than the very function you are writing will modify your data in any way.
I've used GWT on a big project for about half a year. It's not over-hyped. It definitely has it's space. If you're working on a project with two people, you're just not in the market for it. GWT is all about stability, optimization and structured development. I don't want to get into too much detail here, but some optimizations that GWT gives you are impossible to achieve by writing JS code manually.
They must think their sizing/font choices are good enough for everyone, so they've essentially stopped zooming.
Used properly, the META viewport should help pages adapt to smaller screens. For example, I think an iPhone-specific viewport setting would make the HN front-page more legible on iPhones by wrapping submission titles.
Unfortunately, lots of sites seem to pick settings that either don't work well on all mobile devices (like assuming iOS dimensions even for non-iOS devices) or prevent native zooming (Google mobile sites and the default WordPress mobile theme are offenders here).
Here's how this should be done instead:
* Register a new domain, say javascriptdocs.com or javascriptreference.org
* The new domain should be used for hosting the JS reference as well as the link generator. Using an unrelated domain means you are wasting a lot of links from people that want to support the cause.
* The documentation should get a SEO treatment by someone who knows what he's doing. You need good titles, sensible site structure, a small excerpt to be used on top of each page and in the meta descriptions.
* Contact people and websites that link to bad docs, make them aware of the better docs you are offering and get them to switch.
* A reward program for people that put up links, refer visitors from their website, etc. Give them a Mozilla t-shirt or a hat or something.