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Learn why Facebook, Twitter, and other sites have #! in their URLs.

News and Follow/Ups – 00:37

• Jade got a new job!
• Mark shot skeet!
• Spellr.us is now Checkdog.com
• Blue lights make you more alert, it’s true!

Geek Tools – 07:55

• iPad 2

Webapps – 16:34

• uFollow – Follow your favorite bloggers
• Loads.in – See how fast your page loads in various locations

Project Estimation – 23:14

• What?
  • Some of you may have noticed a lot of URLs on the web with #! in them.
  • The name shebang comes from an inexact contraction of SHArp bang or haSH bang
• Why?
  • Make the Ajax pages of your site more crawlable to Google and other search engines
    • A browser can execute javascript well, a crawler cannot
    • to make the crawler see what the user sees the server needs to give the crawler an HTML snapshot
    • The current practice
      • Developers make parallel universes, pages for users without javascript and pages with often using progressive enhancement
    • The new way
      • The site adopts the AJAX crawling scheme
      • For each URL that has dynamically produced content, your server provides an HTML snapshot, which is the content a user (with a browser) sees.
      • These will be AJAX urls or urps containing a hash fragment
        • http://faceoffshow.com/index.html#key=value
      • The search engine indexes the HTML snapshot and serves your original Ajax URLs in the results.
      • How do I make these snapshots?
        • Run a headless browser and obtain an html snapshot
          • HtmlUnit
          • Crawljax
          • Watij.com
        • If much of your content is produced with a server-side technology such as PHP or Ruby, you can use your existing code and only replace the JavaScript portions of your web page with static or server-side created HTML.
        • You can create a static version of your pages offline, as is the current practice.
      • What if I want to do snapshots to my home page that doesnt have #!?
        • <meta name=”fragment” content=”!”>
  • The bang part of it was added by Google and now other search engines are now following suit.
• Test it out
  • Make sure you test out your sites crawlability with Fetch as Googlebot
• Who is doing this?
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
• Criticism