In the Mix

Well, it's just after 3pm on day one of Mix:UK 07. I'm taking a break with a coffee so I thought I'd post.

It's mixed bag down here (sorry - no pun intended). The technology is fantastic - the stuff that can be achieved with WPF and Silverlight is excellent. I'm still a little uncertain that usability has been sacrificed on the sacrificial alter of bling, however. To be fair, that's more telling about the rapid-development nature of conference demos, where the wow-factor is more important, but I think it's a very, very significant issue which should not be allowed to get lost in the excitement.

So, keynote was good, but a little patchy, with lots of people showing off their latest and greatest example of of WPF or Silverlight. The first session was really useful for me. I've done some XAML, but to watch a guy who really knows his way around Blend really helped gel things in my mind.

More interesting still, however, was the next session, where a gret guy called Nathan Buggia from Live Search talked about SEO. It was a good session, with a lot of straight talk from a guy who works at a search engine about SEO, nicely pointing out some of the less honorable practices of SEO sharks. Overall his message was what I've said all along - build good, semantic pages with informative content and you'll get good rankings. There's a bit more to it than that, obviously, but that's broadly it.

What I did discover during that session, which I really ought to have seen before (I may even have seen it but not have it register), was the XML sitemap format, detailed at sitemaps.org. This can be pushed to the search engines to give them prior information, if you like. It doesn't let you 'fix' your results, but it can be used to give helpful hints to the search engine, particularly on refresh rates for changing pages or even just giving them the nod that things have changed. I will research this more thoroughly now - I may even manage a post on what I find.

Anyway, I will sign off with an apology - sorry Nick, I'm in London and I haven't called. Next time, I promise!