May 2005 Archives

If you operate a public web site, there is little doubt that you'd like an occasional visit from search engine minions, known as robots. Robot are little agents that search engines dispatch to your site to scan your page contents and sent them back to the mother ship for cataloguing and finally including in search engine results pages (SERP).

� If you have ever scanned your web logs, you would undoubtedly noticed these agents. They come with different names like googlebot, msnbot, and yahoo slurp.

As a frequent reader of MSNBC's Web site, I started noticing this past weekend that their left-side navigation menu items no longer expanded. As of this writing, the menu has yet to regain its dynamic trait.

The expanding menu has been part of MSNBC's navigational feature for many years. As the user hovered over the different item, a submenu would branch off displaying links to the top news for that section and other relevant sub-sections within.

By the time I got home tonight, my 9-year old was nearly finished with her homework. The only question remaining on her assignment sheet was "What is Olympus Mons?"

Now I knew I had heard of this term before, but I just couldn't come up with a definitive answer. Was it a crater on the Moon?