I read this news story today and found it slightly humorous. I heard the morning radio DJ I listen to say that apparently all American Apparel stores carry this magazine and sell it. I’m still trying to figure out what the marketing strategy must be behind it or why on earth a popular clothing store would be selling these magazines.

I still get a kick out of the name of the magazine, BUTT. Could you imagine having to tell someone where you worked or interned? “Yes, I had an internship at BUTT.”

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In the past, several search engine optimizers have heavily discouraged fancy navigation menu systems; rather recommending using search engine friendly menus based on HTML and styled with CSS. Up until now the primary language understood by search engines has been HTML; however Google has unleashed the ability for its spiders to crawl and read JavaScript.

This means that the navigation on your website can now have dropdowns and flashy effects without sacrificing SEO. A good example of this is the Monitronics website. About a month ago they launched a new site built with DotNetNuke and the Solpart version 1.7.2 menu system. DotNetNuke’s Solpart menu system relies on JavaScript to run. In the past, this would have been strongly discouraged as with scripting disabled no menu items are visible, which equals bad for SEO. However, now that Google has spidered the new JavaScript menus they will appear in the Google cache and count toward SEO value for the site.

Yahoo’s cache is a little different in this case though. The main menu text is visible however without the drop downs. Yahoo has successfully cached the text rendered by the JavaScript but failed to read the JavaScript code itself therefore failing to spider the drop down menus and the menu links.

Even though Google spiders can now index JavaScript, this level of accomplishment is yet to be seen for Yahoo. Considering Google is Yahoo’s closest competitor I don’t see this being the case for long. In July 2006 a study showed that 43.7% of web users search with Google versus Yahoo at 28.8% of web users. This means we aren’t home free with JavaScript and SEO quite yet but it does mean a very large step in the right direction and good start to 2009.

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So I’m in the process of redesigning this website and was on the search of some good web 2.0 social networking icons. Truth be told there are a lot of different places to get them and a lot of different shapes and sizes that they come in now. This is great however I failed to find one in a format that I could play with and make my own without starting from scratch. So here I provide you with 12 icons to use yourself and edit them how you like.

Now those of you who may not be familiar with Adobe Illustrator, have no fear my friends, for if you like these icons just the way they are then here you go, in png format.

Note: I’ve provided them in 128×128 and 32×32, including the drop shadow.

Download AI file
Download images

Enjoy!

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