This is an example as to how a TinyURL works — for instance, I might want to copy a URL into a website, blog, Twitter, or even Facebook. For example, I recently wrote an article on setting up a Wordpress blog and linked it here:

http://www.mightyfunk.com/2009/08/article-on-setting-up-a-wordpress-blog/

While this reads nicely, it is a long URL and something you definitely wouldn’t imagine typing in by hand (although I’d imagine most people would copy and paste the link instead.) In sites such as Twitter of Facebook — this occupies a lot of space and character counts. However, it is perfect for a search engine.

So using TinyURL, I can quickly turn this long URL (above) into something much simpler something short such as:

http://tinyurl.com/ngabbx

…which takes me to the same exact page.

Now, I think this is a wonderful idea. However, the one major issue I have with these “TinyURLs” is that they are downgrading the way search engines operate and spider pages. Search engines largely operate through descriptive text links, such as:

How to setup a Wordpress Blog

…or the full URL.

By using TinyURL, the keywords and ranking of a website actually gets ignored by the search engines, thereby harming a website’s search engine visibility. In essence, they are causing a break in the logical flow for other users viewing or trying to find information on the web. The TinyURLs may pass some hits back to a website on a very small level (it depends on whether the current search engines such as Google can parse them properly) — but they definitely won’t have the same impact a more descriptive link has. This is why I generally do not use them. That’s not to say people shouldn’t (a short Twitter post would be a prime candidate), but for all intents and purposes, I feel that they should be avoided in general everyday practice.

If you have a moment, please check it out!

http://www.lunarlog.com/2009/08/setting-up-a-wordpress-blog/

I let it fall into neglect because I’ve been too busy with my business, and plus every time I posted an article on it, I would get hit with tons of comment spam for months to come. So excuses aside, it’s up and running now. I’ll be posting more industry specific news related to Lunarstudio, 3D illustration, and Architectural Renderings there and try to reserve this blog for more miscellaneous information and topics. Please check it out and let me know what you think when you have a chance.

You see, Comcast has now engaged in the practice of DNS Hijacking. DNS Hijacking means that if you type in an invalid website address (whether intentional or through a mistake), instead of serving up a “neutral” HTTP 404 “page not found” error page that’s been traditional since the advent of the Web, it automatically redirects you to a Comcast website with search results and ads. This only applies to Comcast customers — which happens to number in the millions in the New York city and Boston metro areas. Comcast also has a foothold in other areas throughout the United States. So we are talking that this effects a large swath of consumers throughout the country.

Comcast is also not the only Internet Service Provider that engages in DNS Hijacking — more and more ISPs are following this practice on an almost daily basis. To test whether or not your ISP engages in “Domain Hijacking”, point your website’s browser to a domain name that probably doesn’t exist. In this example, we can all try going to this fictional website’s URL:

http://www.comcraps.com

If the resulting page suddenly serves up Comcast, then you’ve been DNS Hijacked by them. If it serves up anything but a ‘404 page not found’ or an ‘internal server error’, than you’ve been hijacked — most likely by your own Internet Service Provider.

Now, you might ask yourself, “what’s the big deal here?!?”

Well, I’ll give you one example. I have another blog that accidentally went offline today. My email client kept on spitting out errors that it could not connect to my website. So when I went online to check to see if the website was still up, and I got automatically redirected to a Comcast search page. I was pretty ticked off. I wanted potential visitors to my website to see an error that the page was offline — and not another website serving up fried food in it’s place.

Now just imagine if you were a website or business owner and you had to take down the page for a day or two of routine maintenance. A customer or client goes to your website to buy something or look up information, and instead of spitting an error or saying that the page cannot be found, it sends you to Comcast or any other website of their choosing. Does that seem right? I wouldn’t think so. But let’s say that you’re “OKAY” with that — what would you think if instead of going to Comcast, this blog constantly showed up as the landing page instead? How about a website featuring a big photo of my buttocks in a thong? Forever and ever — even when you accidentally typed in a wrong website address. It would be really annoying (if not to say a little bit disturbing.)

Now Comcrap has “kindly” offered up an “opt-out” program. My speculation is that they will definitely receive a high number of confused and agitated customers in this “smooth move” of theirs. They “have to kindly” provide this “opt-out” in order to maintain some semblance of “good customer relations.” The one problem with the opt-out program is that it requires the Comcrap customer to locate and find their computer’s MAC Address — which for the average person is a technical feat of computer knowledge. By no means is finding the MAC address obvious to the average person. ***I could actually post “how” to find the MAC address here in a few steps, but for the sake of getting you upset with Comcrap — I’ll let you try to figure it out and take it up with their technical support.***

So hopefully you’re starting to get some of the picture as to what they are attempting to do here. In a nutshell, they are trying to make more money through your accidental typing or through non-existent websites. They’ll try to “spin it” with their public relations machine by saying that they’re providing you a “useful service.” They may even “claim” that this practice “saves the consumer money through advertisements.” The potential for abuse by this corporation and other DNS Hijakers is enormous. They are literally trying to shove themselves DOWN YOUR THROAT without your permission or knowledge. And if you find that sort of behavior completely acceptable, than you’re not the type of person that I would like to know.

In the greater scheme of things, this issue harks back to what some consumer rights advocates call “Net Neutrality.” According to Wikipedia’s article on Net Neutrality, it is defined by: “A [neutral network] is one that is free of restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as one where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams.” Since Comcast meters and limits your bandwidth, it is my argument that they should not be serving pages which causes extended load times and running up extra (albeit miniscule) bandwidth passed on to their consumers. By hijacking, they are effectively going against the principles and advocacy of net neutrality.

The web itself is founded on government research and tax payer’s dollars. In order to form some standards that every website developer and designer adheres to, the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C was formed to implement common practices.  The W3C in essence has made rules which every designer and developer should follow if the Internet is to maintain some semblance of organization and ease of use. The statuse code, HTTP 404 was designated by the web’s founder Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. In summary, Comcast has overruled the traditional W3C practice and standards by inserting their own rules on how you should view the Internet.

A little article on the history of the HTTP 404 status can be found here:

http://www.plinko.net/404/history.asp

I find this practice extremely deplorable. I did not pay to have advertisements served to me without my permission. Perhaps, instead of having an “opt-out” feature, they should have provided sane people an “opt-in” feature instead. But we know that know sane person would ever sign up for ads. It’s just a matter of time before consumer advocates and the general public raises hell over such deceptive practices. I can forsee anti-trust lawsuits being levied against Comcast for essentially overriding our surfing and viewing behavior.

If you’re like me and take issue with this malpractice, I would suggest that you write your senator, write articles and blog about this, and educate or discuss with others the potential areas of abuse these providers are engaging in.

–Charles

As Comcast’s motto goes, “It’s Comcraptic!!!”

As a side note, a masked or parked domain retains the domain name but the actual content is from another page. In this case, my Lunarstudio architectural renderings website shows up underneath it.

Over the years, I’ve had parents, schools, and industry professionals call me with some of these important questions. Much of the time, I find that the majority of people are somewhat oblivious to the amount of work that is involved in our line of field. Since there doesn’t seem to be any specific resource that contains all of this information in one place, I decided to write my own article. So if you have a moment, please check out my article located here at:

http://knol.google.com/k/charles-leo/3d-architectural-renderings/1crjh0kvjvrgi/1#

Here’s 4 links that need the repair and I’ll see if this triggers a reindex:

http://www.lunarstudio.com/portfolio/architectural-renderings-commercial-interior.html

http://www.lunarstudio.com/portfolio/architectural-rendering-commercial-exterior.html

http://www.lunarstudio.com/portfolio/architectural-rendering-commercial-exterior-2.html

http://www.lunarstudio.com/portfolio/3d-animations.html

If you have a spare moment, please check out my architectural renderings website at:

Architectural Renderings by Lunarstudio.

The original Lunarstudio website was setup before blogs ever came into popularity, so keeping the content “fresh” was always a bit of a manual chore versus having a blogging system that makes posting new items easier. It often involved resizing several versions of the same image, painful image cropping (I prefer to present artwork as it’s intended to be presented), and creating several different HTML pages to accommodate each image as well as keywords for the search engines.

Now, gallery updates are pretty much a couple of minor steps instead. While it’s still not quite a blog per se, I can just copy code and pretty much plug in a new image rather quickly. The content is also easier to maintain and navigate — no more browsing multiple pages — it’s all conveniently there at your fingertips using Lightview (a lightbox Javascript code) that pops open unobtrusive windows.

As for the search engine optimization, the code and the images are more streamlined and easier to navigate by Google, Yahoo!, and Bing spiders. By streamlining, I mean code optimization or SEO. The images are clearly labeled with proper alt and title attributes now. I found some code errors and fixed those as well as revalidated the entire website. Over the past month, I’ve seen traffic increase about 50% and now place in the top 10 for over a hundred search engine keyword terms.

When I originally set out to create the Lunarstudio website, I designed it many years ago without search engine optimization in mind. The problem with the site was that the design sat perfectly centered within a confined rectangle. It was also severly limited because the website is mostly an image gallery and portfolio. Search engines have a tendency to really “like” text whereas my site didn’t have too many words but had many images instead.

After a couple of years, I finally took the time to study up on SEO. I wanted to redo the website but was forced to work within the rectangular, minimal text parameters of the overall site design. The code “under the hood” became really messy, and the text on the pages were formatted to read like a search term — completely inorganic and unnatural. I actually hated (I know it’s a strong word) how it read.

Now that I’ve added more space and built the website ground up knowing search engine optimization better, I’d expect an increase in traffic and overall ranking for my architectural illustrator and 3d illustration services — both of which I have seen for Google. It remains to be seen how the website performs in Yahoo! as well as Bing.

There’s a few more pages I’d like to mention in this post as they will help with the search engines and graphic-related terms. Please excuse my self-promotion but with the current economy, building and construction has slowed down over the past year and every bit of linking helps. Architects feel the pinch probably more so than anyone else and rendering companies are sometimes last on their priority lists.

Right now these pages are not getting indexed with PageRank and I’d like to see/test if a post here helps the search engines. These links are:

Lunarstudio Architectural Renderings Information

Architectural Rendering Services

Architectural Rendering Pricing and Prices

Architectural Renderings and Illustrations Clients

Architectural Rendering Job Opportunities