Being a part of the web industry means that you have to keep up to date with all the current trends and make use of new features. With the release of Internet Explorer 8 came a new way of following website updates – Web Slices.

Though currently only supported by Internet Explorer 8, hopefully this will feed through into others such as Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Web Slices take a specified snippet of a web page and displays it within a 320px x 240px iframe within the browser (see example below). Much like an RSS feed, the web slice will be updated regularly to check for updates. If an update has occurred since you last checked, the item in your ‘Favourites’ bar will glow orange.

If a web page that you are currently viewing features a web slice, a green icon will appear in your toolbar on the top right. To subscribe to the web slice, and therefore add it to your ‘Favourites’ toolbar, click this green icon and you will be asked to confirm you wish to continue.

As a test, Creative Jar have added a web slice to the ‘News’ section on the home page (found in the left-hand column). So if you are with the times and have Internet Explorer 8, then check it out. If not, then why haven’t you updated?! But just in case you cannot, below is a screenshot of what we are talking about:

A very interesting feature for keeping up with certain areas of websites you frequently visit. Other examples include weather forecasts and lottery numbers.

And do not worry – a blog post will be following shortly with instructions on how you can add a web slice to your own page! :)

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Theres nothing new about a robots.txt file, but I have started using robots.txt validators that will not validate unless an XML sitemap is specified.

This is very good practice as the XML sitemap will get picked up by all crawlers that support the tag 'Sitemap' within your robots.txt file (Google and MSNBot do for starters).

So using http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php#submit_robots as a reference my example robots.txt file will look like this:

The blank link between the Sitemap tag and the User-agent tag is essential as this can cause problems for some crawlers.

Happy SEO!

So how many of you have Google set as your homepage? If not then surely you are familiar with searching the internet and therefore you probably use Google.

With the recent rebrand of Live Search to Bing in the news a bit (apparently Bing is only fully available in the US at the moment), heres an interesting site for you to test which Search Engine results you prefer http://blindsearch.fejus.com/. Sometimes it's easy to forget that Google is only one of several Search Engines, all of which predominantly offer not only 'search' but also an awful lot more.

So go ahead, test yourself. You never know - you might find yourself surprised that your Search Engine of choice is not really the one you use.

As for my 'preference' - for the record I was evenly split between Bing and Google. I didn't once choose Yahoo! which is no surprise as I stopped using Yahoo in 2000 when I first heard of Google. So I won't be changing from 'Bing'.

If you like them all then use http://www.webfetch.co.uk it searches Search Engines - always useful!!

This weekend is the street fighter tournament! Grab your favourite controllers, your favourite sticks and get button bashing!!
I'll be taking my camera to document the days events, who know's I might even compete! I'll definately be giving the casual gamers a run for their money!

Click here to read more about it!

No, this isn't a post about Server Security!

I recently commissioned Greg in our Creative Team to come up with a Pirate themed picture for my sons 5th birthday. The below photo doesn't do the painting a great deal of justice as it's over 1m by 1m. But what Greg did create is awesome and will be cherished by me (and my family) for a long long time to come. So a big thank you to Greg!