If you believe the Alexa graph, Digg is a significantly more popular site than Reddit, with the gap growing larger every day.

I find these results surprizing. I've had half-a-dozen entries on the front page of Reddit, with each yielding from 2500-5600 distinct referrals per day. In comparison, I've had a front page entry on Digg for a day, only bringing in ~750 referrals.

Of course, a single entry isn't a very good sample, and it's entirely possible that most people just weren't interested in the link -- that it was a fluke that it got on the front page in the first place -- but I've seen several other stat watchers mention very similar stats (that a front-page of Digg yielded them 800 or so visitors per day), so I'm not basing this comment simply on my own observation. I've looked for exceptions to this, and found one individual who had a broad-interest link atop Digg's front page for 24 hours straight, and they claim that for that day they received a total of 7200 distinct referrals, and then it rapidly tailed off, disappearing in two days. That case seems to be the exception.

One possibility is that Digg offers more link diversity and thus the much greater traffic is dispersed, significantly reducing the impact on any one link. Alternately, perhaps Digg users spend more of their time within the Digg community, rather than following the links (in the same way that many Slashdot readers just make assumptions about the linked article, responding accordingly, rather than RTFA).

Another possibility is that Digg caters to a crowd that is more likely to have the Alexa/A9 toolbars installed, both of which feed back the stats that are used to drive the Alexa popularity metrics. Given that they're somewhat infrequently used toolbars, and are much more likely among certain crowds (and seems to appear in clusters), the traffic rankings are a bit of a crapshoot outside of the top sites -- Here on yafla I've had days with 6000 visitors where my Alexa ranking doesn't budge, whereas other days 2000 visitors cause it to quintuple.

Summary: Fake job listings, or real jobs backed by a selection process that filters out everyone, can earn your firm adversaries and detractors. They need to be identified for what they are -- a cheap, transparent gimmick.

A Typical Model

Following a fairly typical business model in this niche, yafla is a small consulting and contract development shop in a mid-sized market, using that business income to support the development of derivative products and businesses (such as the soon-to-come www.360notes.com), along with licensed ISV technologies.

We love the consulting/development market. We're extremely good at it, we enjoy the diversity and challenge, and we have no plans of ever abandoning it (at least until the world's software and IT needs have been completely satisfied once and for all). Yet of course we'd also love to build the next great shrinkwrap or web app hit, and are working towards that goal as well.

One thing we haven't done, however, is to pretend that we're bigger, more important, or more exclusive than we really are through the cheap but common technique of bogus or never-ending job listings -- We haven't built a pompous careers section bulked up with imaginary roles. We haven't provided descriptions of how extraordinary yafla talent is that only walk-on-water technical magicians with PhDs should consider joining the ranks of Extraordinary Gentlepeople.

The Lofty Requirements and Imaginary Jobs

What I'm talking about, of course, is the sadly prevalent practice of many organizations, from tiny to huge, to endlessly list artificial positions that don't actually exist, or to advertise theoretical positions that no one short of a deity could actually fill. This is a technique utilized by a diverse range of companies, from the tiny start-up that immediately has a prominent "careers" section comprising one third of their web property, to the huge organization like Microsoft's Canada division that lists the same positions for a year on end.

In this case I was spurred to write after seeing yet another micro-web firm -- one which I know has less than half a dozen employees and hasn't grown in years -- with a comprehensive job listing section including endless exhortations for only the most extraordinarily gifted and rare to join this exclusive crew. I imagine the endless ranks of prospects wasting their time jockeying for positions that will never be filled and it saddens me a bit.

Advertising false or theoretical positions is a cheap way of conveying the illusion that the perpetrator is an elite company on the go, so in demand that human resources needs outweigh the need to acquire clients (sort of a social proof), providing lofty requirements in hopes that you'll believe that all of the existing staff achieves the same. It attempts to cow competitors into thinking that they're so successful that they're chomping at the bit for new employees, but are thwarted by a workforce that is incapable of meeting their amazing skill requirements.

In response to these ads, countless prospective applicants carefully craft cover letters and customized resumes. They eagerly apply, imagining their future with this fabulous organization.

Many times their application either times out and yield an automated rejection letter, or immediately gets rejected by a human resources department that is filtering applications by a wide range of criteria unstated in the job posting (the classic being the secret compensation cutoff -- ask for less and you'll get through and underpaid, but waste your time submitting for a job that doesn't fulfill your financial requirements and you'll get instantly rejected).

Not named Smith. Not named Singh. Too much corporate experience. Too little corporate experience. Too presumptuous in its use of the greeting "A very good day to you". The arbitrary and often ridiculous filtering criteria can effectively eliminate anyone.

Cheap and easy for HR, so everyone wins. Right?

The Negative Repercussions

Of course they don't.

On the other end of the equation is a real person that wasted their time and effort creating a submission for jobs that often don't even exist, or which they don't meet due to hidden requirements -- people who often already have jobs and are sacrificing their limited free time -- only for their efforts to sit stagnating in an inbox or database for years. If they're lucky they might get rashly rejected despite fulfilling all of the requirements, and then some, when some arbitrary time-out mechanism fires off a form rejection letter, or a haphazard HR rep blanket rejects all pending resumes.

The resentment builds. The goodwill of the organization suffers.

These rejectees often have decision making authority in their organization, and over the years they grow into more powerful roles. For years they nurse the wound that their perfect application for the big XZZ corp position was rejected out of hand, without as much as a phone call or personal contact allowing them to demonstrate their worth. Often it subconsciously colours their choices, be it as simple as supporting and advocating open source products in defiance of the careless Microsoft rep that canned their submission, or second guessing whether the firm should automatically move to .NET, or whether there should be a competitive showdown between it and J2EE. Even a minor antagonism can substantially change internal advocacy.

Of course choices should be made based upon empirical facts and unbiased analysis, but as human beings we are consciously and subconsciously affected by emotions and biasSmaller firms of course have less ramifications for partaking in this abuse.

Smaller firms often have no downside to printing such fake ads -- apart from killing a bit of your soul abusing people like that -- given that spurned suitors often have no business relationship with them outside of vying for a job. These firms use such ads in the theory that "no publicity is bad publicity". Compare this to Microsoft that relies upon the decisions of millions of people, and suffers from a million tiny wounds when an HR department gets sloppy.

My Personal Experience

I can personally relate to this problem to a degree.

Many years back, when I first moved to the greater Toronto area, I applied to a Microsoft Canada position that was pretty much a perfect match for my skills -- the ad seemed like it was written specifically with me in mind: I had what seemed to be a perfect mix of skills, experience, education and certification.

I had watched this job listing sit on the job site for many months, and figured I'd finally give it a try, so I wasted an hour of my time putting together a perfect resume, and then reformatting it for their absolutely terrible, archaic online resume building tool. I looked forward to the inevitable telephone interview when I would wow them more with my incredible communication skills and demonstrated intelligence.

A week later I got a form rejection letter informing me that I wasn't suitable for the position.

No phone call. No email questions. No follow-ups at all. Just a blanket, uncontestable (from a no-return bogus email address, which is a classy touch) rejection by the machine of HR at Microsoft.

The job listing stayed up for as long as I bothered watching. Every day that it sat there unfilled I stewed over the fact that I wasn't given even the courtesy of a brief phone interview.

I've never been a Microsoft zealot, and nor did that organization represent my dream job, but it admittingly did burn getting rejected in such a fashion (I'd much rather have bombed an interview and had myself to blame). My choices of Microsoft technology have always been driven by facts and pragmatism, so it wasn't like I was going to stomp my feet and embrace Linux to spite the Microsoft machine, but it did make me give alternatives a second look.

In all honesty it's probably made me a little more antagonistic towards Microsoft Canada employees, making me question "so what's so special about this guy? I don't get a phone call yet this idiot works there?"

For someone more emotionally invested, though, it probably could have made them an enemy. I have to wonder how many avowed Microsoft enemies, spreading the anti-Microsoft word far and wide, were molded when the human resources machine rashly stomped on their dreams.

The same question could be raised for other organizations with the same hiring practices, and for startups that build a facade of size by listing numerous positions that don't actually exist.

Not Everyone Is Employee Material

Of course many applicants aren't appropriate or optimal for the position they're seeking, so job seekers have to accept the fact that even getting past the initial filter is a remote possibility (especially given the one-click applications possible at many of the job sites: A single listing can yield tens of thousands of mechanically submitted applications, so even the best prospect can get lost in the noise, not to mention that listed positions are often internally filled, and listed only as a matter of process), and as always getting considered is often best achieved by network contacts and organizational insiders rather than cold resume submissions.

Nonetheless, fake job listings are quickly transparent to all, and unfilled roles that waste the applicant's time can earn an organization lifetime enemies.

On top of that, the practice of keeping some requirements secret wastes everyone's time. Apart from often unstated diversity staffing requirements, organizations often fail to publish the compensation band for a job. For prospects with financial needs beyond the position, it is an enormous waste of time and effort, and it fills HR inboxes with prospects that will never accept the position.

ASP.NET has improved dramatically with v2.0, to the point of making ASP.NET v1.x look like a bit of a hack job. One of the great improvements covered in this entry is the addition of Master Pages.

Master Pages allows you to define a template layer (and coupled back-end code) to be used on content pages using that master page. For instance a master page might define all linked scripts, CSS, and script blocks, along with a navigation header and footer that exist on all pages on the site (or at least those pages using the master page). An ugly example sits a subdirectory away -- at the root pages for yafla, where the navigation header and footer exist in a master page.

ex. MasterPage.Master

<%@ Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="MasterPage.master.cs" Inherits="MasterPage" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
    <title>My Master Page - This Title Will Be Overridden
       By the Title Element In Content Pages</title>
    <link rel=stylesheet type="text/css" href="stylesheet_in_all_pages.css" />
</head>
<body>
    <h3>This is my universal header!</h3>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div>
        <asp:contentplaceholder id="ContentPlaceHolder1" runat="server">
        </asp:contentplaceholder>
    </div>
    </form>
    <h3>&copy; 2015 Robot Inc.</h3>
</body>
</html>

You can also define code for the various events in the master page, which will run on the pertinent content pages.

Content pages then define what will fill the content block (or multiple content blocks as the case may be), and of course implement their own back-end code.

<%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/MasterPage.master"
AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default2.aspx.cs" Inherits="Default2"
Title="This is my overridden title" %>
<asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolder1" Runat="Server">
This is my content for this content page
</asp:Content>

Very trivial.

Of course this isn't the only way that this result could be achieved -- I could derive from a page object that imperatively creates all of the common elements, or I could use multiple user controls that defined the basics, but neither of those solutions, or similar workarounds, seem as elegant as master pages to me. There are equal or superior solutions in other platforms, however I'm sticking to the topic of ASP.NET in this entry so they are irrelevant.

The one hiccup I faced in the use of master pages was my desire to have meta keywords (which exist in the header) vary by page, despite the fact that the meta keyword is basically dead. I want the keywords to vary, similar to the way I can declaratively override the title in content pages. Unfortunately this required some code workarounds, which in my case included adding a public property on the master page, MetaKeywords, with a default keyword list, which I then added to the header in the PreRender stage of the master page (the following example is simplified for demonstrations sake, however a real implementation would scan the headers to ensure that the pertinent header doesn't already exist before adding it).

    public string MetaKeywords = "default keywords";

    protected void Page_PreRender(object sender, EventArgs e)
    { 
      SetMetaValues(this.Page.Header, "keywords", MetaKeywords);
    }

    public static void SetMetaValues(System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlHead head, string name, string content)
    {
      HtmlMeta metaValue = null;

      metaValue = new HtmlMeta();
      metaValue.Attributes.Add("name", name);
      metaValue.Attributes.Add("content", content);
      head.Controls.Add(metaValue);

      return true;
    }

Any content page could access its Master property to set the property, and the meta keywords would be appropriately set when the page was rendered. By using the MasterType directive the Master property of the page automatically resolves to the proper type.

Unfortunate that a declarative mechanism wasn't added for arbitrary header elements in the content pages.

The goal of master pages, of course, is to avoid the scourge of copy/paste coding: Unnecessarily having a single line of code in multiple places is an evil in software development, yet it's often the easy, thoughtless solution, yielding volumes of redundant code that invariably diverges and causes maintenance problems for years to come, reducing the quality and agility of the codebase.

I despise copy/pasted code. It truly is a peeve of mine.

When analyzing the quality of code bases, one of the first checks I usually perform is to use one of the automated code duplication checkers (available for most languages). There is a remarkable correlation between code duplication rates and code quality.

The benefit of master pages isn't limited to a single master template, however, but instead you can actually layer multiple master pages. For instance on the yafla site the services category pages use the Services master page, adding additional service specific back-end code and layout, while it uses the web site wide master page. It mirrors the templated way in which many websites are developed.

The downside of layered master pages is that the GUI team apparently didn't have time to build multiple level parsing into the web designer -- wherever you're working on content pages that have more than one level of master pages above them, you are limited to the source view. To attempt otherwise yields a "Design view does not support creating or editing nested master pages. To create or edit nested master pages, use the Source view." Unfortunate, but not deadly.

As an aside, one of the big improvements with ASP.NET v2 is better support of per-page development, similar to classic ASP and competitors such as PHP. This solves one of the primary problems many had with ASP.NET, which is that they didn't prefer to work within the "web site as a monolithic application" model that ASP.NET v1 pretty much enforced. Strangely the improvements bringing these benefits has been met with little fanfare, and few are even aware of it. I do plan on doing a feature on it shortly.

Tagged: [Software Development], [Programming], [Software-Development]

While I remain committed to SQL Server, after a lengthy evaluation and feature analysis process, we will start advocating MySQL 5 to some clients under a set number of conditions, both on the Windows and the Linux platforms. While MySQL was previously lacking some critical foundational features, v5 ups the ante considerably, filling a particular niche in the solution spectrum. This is a part of a wider trend at yafla of embracing some of the "alternative" platforms, outside of our normal Microsoft-enabled comfort zone, where it benefits our customers and the solution.

Due to licensing conditions we still won't be targeting our applications at MySQL.

We still advocate PostgreSQL, another excellent open source RDBMS, for some scenarios.

One of the continuing trends of the Web 2.0 revolution is tag-mania -- sticking tags on everything and anything, hoping that it somehow improves the flow, digestion, and utility of information. From adding tag clouds to your blog, to slashdot, to photos, to bookmarks, tags have continued to spread across the web landscape.

As with every tech "revolution", in corporations across the globe eager employees are embracing the trend, advocating adding tags to documents and directories and files, and embracing the concept of metadata.

As a bit of an explanation for those who haven't been following TechCrunch in morbid curiousity -- wondering what dubious business came out of super-secret stealth alpha invite-only mode today -- and thus aren't up on their Web 2.0 lingo, tags are, in essence, a set of words that one or more users apply to something to categorize it -- what we historically called keywords, albeit sometimes (thought not always) with a "democratic" process determining the rendered tag set.

For instance the tags of this post might be "Web 2.0, tags". Ten visitors might add "tripe", making it the dominant tag in the tag cloud.

Getting a variety of people adding tags to the same content, or building a common directory of information loosely categorized by tags, is what's commonly called a folksonomy. Consider, for comparison, a formal taxonomy of a system like Yahoo's classic categorization, where a submitter would choose exactly where in the hierarchy a link went, and the Yahoo overlords would validate it, and insert it if appropriate. Instead the loose addition of tags adapts to have multiple categorizations over time.

[Web 2.0 aware readers will probably shudder seeing an explanation of something so "basic", yet discussions in the field have led to me to believe that much of this great revolution has gone unnoticed by the bulk of society, including even the majority of technology workers. I regularly converse with people who've never seen del.icious, don't know who 37signals are, and haven't been to Reddit or Digg or Flickr or Furl. Much like bloggers have grossly overestimated the impact of blogs on the general population, there seems to be a presumption that the Web 2.0 lingo and dogma is more universal than it actually is]

While many of the Web 2.0 aficionados declare there to be a fundamental religious difference between the venerable keyword and tags, the difference is superficial at best (democratically selected keywords are still just keywords). The same keywords that have always existed as a data block in the JPEG file format, and exists in virtual every document format (Word, for instance), form the foundation of tags. Metadata has been around since we first started storing data, and tags are a continuation of that trend.

Many of the foundations of modern tagging, the evolution of the keyword, were first demonstrated widely by the superlative web photo organizing and sharing application Flickr.

Given the primitive state of image recognition, this was a perfect fit: Without tagging your photo with keywords such as "bridge, burlington skyway, qew", there was no way searches could find that photo if asked, for instance, for pictures of the Burlington Skyway bridge -- We aren't yet at a stage where software can reliable figure out what the subjects of a picture are, and mechanical metadata is still incomplete (although it's getting there), so keywords/tags/folksonomies fills a critical gap if the photography data process.

Outside of photos the use of tags is often much more dubious.

To go back in history a bit, when search engines first appeared they largely relied upon meta keywords. This was a compromise due to limits in the "comprehension" of content -- search engines got confused easily, and even when they could parse the content properly they couldn't truly figure out what the content was about. 

Keywords came along, offering a simple, condensed, human-created subset of the data, categorizing the important attributes of the content. Search engines embraced and utilized keywords as an important element of fulfilling search requests.

The honeymoon didn't last for long. It turned out that keywords were a prime stomping ground for search engine spammers, not to mention that it was a horribly limited method of searching through data: Not only were the choices of keywords entirely subjective -- often grossly incomplete and inconsistent -- but by design it was limited to a very, very small subset of the content. If you really wanted content about metal railings, you might have missed my extensive discussion on that topic in my Burlington Skyway Bridge article because I didn't feel that metal railings made the cut for the keywords.

Meta tags are largely dead now.

In its place search engines have become much better at determining what a given page is about (or at least simulating a reasonable promixity thereof). By analyzing content, having a directory of similar and derivative words, and by deriving information by context (such as links and related pages, and how they word links) and layout (noting that heading text, title, and early text holds more importance in classifying the page, though it still is used in concert with the rest of the content), search engines have come a long way it understanding content, and in correlating searches with appropriate results.

The loss of the keyword has proven to be very beneficial for search. Now it's the actual data that classifies the content, rather than artificial metadata.

With improvements in language processors and context associative correlations (e.g. where the content parser understands that the paragraph on boxers is talking about the boxer breed of dog, determined by its correlation with other documents coupled with other details of the language, using language trees to classify probable meaning), things will only get better.

Content search has a very bright present, and a brighter future.

Yet tags continue to spread in woefully inappropriate domains, even where it's serving as nothing more than the modern day equivalent of the venerable META keyword. Instead of building reliable, feature-rich search tools into product, appropriately determining relationships and context to understant content, product vendors are just tossing in a hack-job tag infrastructure and calling their job complete.

Worse still, users are accepting it and calling it a feature.

Mozilla has announced the winners of the previously mentioned extend Firefox contest, with the three grand-prize victors carrying home a beefy PC, along with a considerable amount of developer credibility. Category winners earned some decent prizes as well.

Congratulations to the winners on a job well done.

Having said that, I've tried out the winning extensions, and I have to confess that I'm underwhelmed. Not to take away from their accomplishments, but for a challenge of such magnitude, for a core product with millions of software developer fans, I expected some awe-inspiring, revolutionary products to emerge.

Firefox has an enormously robust and feature rich extension model, where almost anything is possible, yet the roster of available extensions is dominated by trivial tools with simplistic, archaic interfaces, too many of which seem like hack jobs (the exception being the extensions by big corporations -- Corporations that spit and polish their offering to reap the benefits of tracking your habits and encouraging you to use of their search).

Of course I'm complaining about something that is generally free, so as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for...In fact you get far more than you pay for, but it demonstrates that there are limits to the sacrifice and resources someone will commit to a product that they find difficult to monetize.

Not only is it close to impossible to achieve revenue from an extension unless you're pushing a different product (such as search), but the skills and technologies that you learn building extensions is hard to leverage for professional gain (e.g. knowing XUL and the Mozilla extension API is of marginal value outside of building extensions, where the C skills gained doing kernel hacking has tremendous professional value).

Nonetheless, at least the winners weren't gadget clocks. Gadget clocks and basic arithmetic web service examples always strike me as a sign of a technology or platform that is being oversold.

I like Reddit.

On average the signal to noise ratio is great, and a scan through the hot list is usually a very worthwhile venture. The wide range of topics makes it more entertaining and informative than many tech-only sites, but it still has enough tech-related info to feel pertinent to the software development profession.

I've also received a substantial number of hits from Reddit over the past couple of months, with no less than 5 entries hitting the front page for periods of time, with each of them yielded 6000+ inbound visitors. Though these are of no profit to me, it is satisfying that many of these visitors left great comments and sent interesting emails, and found the entries informative or educational. After each onslaught the number of RSS subscribers jumps by a hefty amount.

Early on I admittingly submitted a couple of my longer, more thought-out posts to Reddit, thinking it would help exposure a bit, but became a bit discouraged by the whole exercise after seeing them instantly start descending into the negative range. Pure speculation, but my guess is that some rather unsportsmanlike submitters are automatically "voting down" everything in proximity of their addition, hoping to make their own submission stand out in relation (it's the only rational explanation for the almost instant vote downs). I would also guess that many users skip over low-ranked new items, so it basically becomes a race to get the first couple of up votes before it's voted into oblivion, and then a continued series of up votes to offset the continual downvotes.

This came to mind as I was just "testing out" the quicklinks that I just added on posts. I discovered a case of a single entry that had been submitted to Reddit three different times from different areas of the blog (which is a "benefit" of users who subscribe to and read the different areas). I've put these in order, determined by the obvious sequential ID that Reddit adds. I'm not sure of the specific times of each of them.

http://reddit.com/info?id=14ev - This was added from the home page version. It earned a forgettable score of 1.

http://reddit.com/info?id=14lu - This was apparently added referencing the static version located here. It earned a healthy -4 score. Perhaps because it was a duplicate of the prior one.

http://reddit.com/info?id=14sm - This was added from the Software Development version. It earned a very respectable score of 204, and I knew about this one because of a substantial impact on the visits over a two day period.

The exact same content, in different forms, yielded a 1, a -4, and a front-page for two days 204. Whether it was because of titles, time of day, or simply luck of the draw (that the last one got momentum before the haters started downvoting), it is a fascinating demonstration that these sorts of web democracies aren't always a meritocrasy.

Just thought that was a little fascinating.