Jitbit Blogs

Moving our site to HTTPS and the early SEO-effects of it

About a week ago we have moved our site to HTTPS. I always wanted to, and now that Google has made it a ranking signal - we finally ran out of excuses. Here's what we did:

Pages that can be instantly improved for more search traffic

There are tons of "on-site" tactics you can work with to improve your website's organic traffic and conversions. Like A/B tests or even using on-site search data. I'd like to share another handy tactic today:

Removing files from Mercurial history

Another post for developers reading this blog. If you think these posts do not belong here, please leave a comment, and I'll consider moving my development articles to a separate blog.

Sometimes you need to remove files from Mercurial completely, even from the history. For instance, if you have mistakenly stored a sensitive file in the repo (some password, or an access key, or a code-signing certificate etc. etc.) Here's how you do it:

JavaScript: injecting extra info to copy-pasted text

You've seen this many times - when you copy and paste text from a website - a reference link to the source appears at the bottom, sometimes along with a copyright notice. Something like "read more at www.site.com". Some SEOs say this can be good source of backlinks so I tried to figure out how these sites do it... Turns out most of the sites use a service called "Tynt". But Tynt also traces visitor actions on a website (mouse moves, clicks etc), which I personally don't like.

Skype spying on you in Russia, China and who knows where else?

Russian newspaper "Vedomosti" - a reputable Russian periodical co-founded by Dow Jones, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal - has reported that both the national security agency and the police are able to tap Skype conversations without even filing a court order.

Since I'm originally from Russia, I will translate the article for you:

Non-obvious time-management hacks

Have fun!

This is my favorite time management principle. Even though it's hardly about saving time per se, but still... Don't be afraid to have fun! It's OK to have fun. Don't feel guilty for having it. Having fun is not losing time. So go ahead, grab your snowboard and go to the mountains for a week. Have a dinner with your wife. Take your kids to the waterpark. Try skydiving. Have a motorcycle trip across a couple of states (I did this two months ago on a rented bike, and it was amazing). Play a video game. Heck, write some code, if that's fun to you!

Have fun. It's fine. Don't put it off for the "better days" - there's no such thing as "better days" when all the work is done and the goals are achieved. By that time your body might not be capable of having fun anymore. You're getting old, remember? Human intelligence peaks at age 26 and keeps declining afterwards. We all get dumber over time. So go out and have fun right now before it's too late.

"The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work."

is my favorite quote by Paul Graham.

Now, the actual hacks:

Google Search is only 18% Search

I was recently testing some of the keywords and positions for our hosted help-desk app and it suddenly occurred to me that 80% of the page were not actually the search results. Check this out:

My brain got used to filtering the ads out, so it never popped into my head before... We are used to this picture. I actually had to get up from my laptop, grab a coffee and then glance back at my monitor from across the room to notice this.

ADs vs Results: area size

Now, we're all technical people so let's do the math

Visual Studio & ReSharper performance tips

Another post for ASP.NET/C# developers reading this blog. If you think these posts do not belong here, please leave a comment, and I'll consider moving my development articles to a separate blog.

Everyone knows Visual Studio 2010 can be slow. Even on my laptop with 8 gigs of RAM and Intel Core i7 it gets sluggish. Especially when editing Razor MVC views - every keystroke takes 1-3 seconds to register.

Below are a few tips on how to make it a bit faster:

IT Designation Definitions

Continuing the "IT-humor" series of posts (previous: What If Drivers Were Hired Like Programmers) here goes:

Definitions of Designations

Project Manager is a Person who thinks nine women can deliver a baby in One month.

Once there was a search engine

This is a sad story of an Internet giant. Started by two guys in a garage it eventually grew to control over 80% of the Internet search market and practically owned the whole Internet.

It was innovative and agile. The stock market loved it - at times the company stock doubled in price within just a month. It was one of the very few surviving companies after the dot-com bubble burst.

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