Everyone wants their web site to appear high up on the lists of the major search engines, and one of the challenges for designers is – well, not making sure that it does, because you can’t make sure: a high ranking can’t be guaranteed (as we explain in detail here). What we – and those companies who specialise in Search Engine Optimisation – can do is make sure your site is Google-friendly (for example, search engines index text, so we make sure that key search terms are not concealed in graphics).

Naturally, there are people who try to beat the system. To make it harder for them, Google is quite secretive about how it ranks sites, (which makes it harder for everyone) but here’s one example: We know that a site with plenty of incoming links is rated higher because of it (it makes sense that if people link to your site, it’s because they think the information on it is useful, and if they think so, other people are likely to think so too – so the site is given a higher ranking). One result of this is that unscrupulous people try to create as many links as possible, not because the information is relevant and useful, but just to improve their rankings. They create interdependent sites, all multiply linked to each other; they seek out guestbooks which are not being maintained, and write entries which are nothing but links to their sites… Naturally, the search engines retaliate by refining their criteria – where once the quantity of links was enough, now they look at the quality of the links as well.

An article in last week’s Technology Guardian reported that Google’s revision of its rules habitually takes place in December, and this makes life very hard for companies who want maximum exposure in the run-up to Christmas, and have to work out how they have displeased Google, and why their ranking has dropped. “Is Google a Grinch or a good guy?” it asks.

It’s certainly possible to do something in all innocence which is treated as suspect and loses your site credibility with the search engines. I’ve done it myself – once, long ago, I was transferring a site to a new home, revising and updating as I went, and thought it was a good idea to retain links to the old pages until I had time to replace them. This did not go down well, and it took a long time to get the new site the sort of rating it deserved. So I do have some sympathy with the feeling that Google is a Grinch, making people’s Christmas harder than it should be.

Nonetheless, the intention is not to be a Grinch. If anything, Google is more like Santa Claus, trying to reward the sites which have genuinely valuable or entertaining content and punish those who cheat to obtain credit they don’t deserve. They make a list, they check it twice, they try to find out who’s naughty or nice…

The Blinking Eye Publishing launch at Newcastle’s Lit & Phil on Wednesday was an emotional occasion. Every book launch is a celebration, and Blinking Eye were launching four books, so that’s quadruply the case; and the books were the work of competition winners (the winner’s collection and runners-up anthology for both poetry and short story competitions), so there was a real excitement, the sense of something special and festive. The tiny mince pies with stars on them helped, too!

But the event was also Jeanne Macdonald‘s farewell performance. Blinking Eye was Jeanne’s baby, and Cornwell Internet was there almost from the start. We saw the organisation grow from a project to a reality, from a single competition to two – and we were delighted to see a short story competition alongside the poetry competition, because why should poetry have all the fun? Of course we were sorry when Blinking Eye decided, as part of a business review, to move their web site to a new supplier, but it’s all part of the process of growing up and moving on.

So we were happy to be there to mark the end of an era, and to wish both Blinking Eye and Jeanne herself every success in whatever comes next. Here’s hoping that the Blinking Eye competitions will resume in all their glory in 2009 after their hiatus!

When we spotted this notice in Ottakar’s bookshop in Harrogate, back in 2004, we thought it was a good joke. But, like all the best jokes, it seems to contain a kernel of truth.

Friday’s session at Colpitts Poetry was the launch of Permanent Winter, a collection of poetry from Siberia published by Smokestack Books, and the readers were intended to be editors Yana Glembotskaya and Oleg Burkov, as well as publisher Andy Croft.

Yet despite traveling to Novosibirsk – and beyond, to Kemerovo, a four-hour journey on an unheated bus! – Andy Croft had to appear in Durham without his Siberian collaborators, since they had had problems obtaining visas, not from the Russian but from the British authorities.

Poetry is not only dangerous, it is also resourceful and well-connected: Michael Standen had used chess-playing contacts to reach a group of exchange students – from, by pure coincidence, Siberia – who kindly came and read poetry to us. So the evening was able to proceed, if not exactly as planned, with the traditional Colpitts candlelight readings, first from Andy Croft in English, then by a relay of guest readers, each representing one of the five poets collected in the book.

When I am preparing a page for the web, the last stage is to validate the HTML – use software to check that my coding is correct. This is a helpful way to spot small faults, tags opened but not closed, images with no alt text, and so on.

But – particularly if my starting point was a word-processed document, or has foreign words with accented letters – it also queries non-standard characters: not just the és and üs, the ampersands and double quotes (which have their own uses in coding, and can’t therefore be used in the text) but also non-standard punctuation, smart quotes and smart apostrophes.

Sometimes these are numerous, and it all seems like nit-picking: is it really worth the bother? And then I visit a web page (like this one, for a vineyard in France) which has skipped this detail, and where my browser stumbles over the unfamiliar characters, in this case rendering every o circumflex (ô) as ^TM – and realise again that yes, it is.

We went on Friday evening to Colpitts Poetry, where Valerie Laws was reading with Jenny Lewis.

The two poets are friends, and know each other’s work well, which made for a relaxed and sociable atmosphere, and also for some entertaining give and take between them. Jenny Lewis asked Valerie Laws to read one of her early poems, about the sex-lives of slugs, as a prelude to a piece of her own, a poem which she had written in her garden and left outside, so that when she returned to retrieve the sheet of paper, she discovered that it had been half-destroyed by slugs, and the poem slug-edited down to a haiku – an excavated haiku, rather than one of Valerie’s embedded haiku.

I don’t talk much about completing web sites: no web site is ever complete, they can always be improved, expanded, polished, updated. Nonetheless, there’s a sense of achievement when a web site is ready to be launched, to be opened to the public – and all the more so if that’s accompanied by some sort of celebration!

This has been a fruitful autumn for Cornwell Internet in that respect. First we completed the refurbishment of the Red Squirrel Press site, in time for the publication of their third book; then came the launch of Vine Visit Ltd, a specialist tour company offering holidays for wine lovers, visiting the vineyards and talking to the winemakers.

Although the people behind Vine Visit Ltd – Helen Savage and Jamie Harrison – have years of experience in running trips of this kind, the company itself is a new one, and there was a breathless dash to get the web site up and functional in time to start accepting bookings for holidays in 2008.

But when it was done, there was a party! Admittedly, the party was for the launch of the company, not just the web site, but a party at the Biscuit Factory, with interesting artwork to look at, and delicious wines from NH Wines and wine related music from a cappella singing group Scherzo – it was a fine evening.

And so home, and on with the next site!

Just before we went on holiday, we agreed to take over the web site of Red Squirrel Press: the timing was so tight that the night before we set off, I was busy re-making the front page to advertise the launch of their second publication, Kevin Cadwallender’s Colouring in Guernica!

We were very sorry not to be at that launch, which sounded great fun: Kevin is always an entertaining reader, and Sheila Wakefield, the driving force behind Red Squirrel, had created a special Red Squirrel award, just for Kevin, in recognition of all he has done to promote other poets in the north-east – and managed to present it, too, despite having fractured her elbow (ouch!) only a few days before.

So it was a particular pleasure to go last night to the launch of James Oates’ Wideyback, the third poetry collection from the squirrels’ drey. It took place in a smart bar in Newcastle, an interestingly shaped space, all alcoves, low lighting and plenty of sofas, which would have been perfect for the sort of party where you drift around and talk to different people – and I enjoyed the part of the evening where we did just that. It was a bit of a challenge to the reader, though, particularly since James Oates was losing his voice, and there was music seeping through from the main bar space next door.

The words more or less held their own, though, particularly performance pieces like the Bigg Market Tarantella, James Oates’ homage to Hilaire Belloc:

Do you remember the Blackie Boy, Amanda?
Do you remember the Blackie Boy?

or his consideration of the particular flavours of wet kisses on the metro, in which Valerie Laws joined him to read the lines attributed to Jilly Goolden.

Quieter pieces, like A Longing for Clear Blue Skies were harder to follow, and I was glad to be able to read them afterwards, on the page. But then, I’m lucky enough that reading poetry is part of my job: my task for this morning was to add two poems from Wideyback to the Red Squirrel web site – and two from Colouring in Guernica for good measure.

The small town of Houghton-le-Spring has been holding an annual autumn festival since the middle ages: Houghton Feast may have originated as a Michaelmas celebration, but it survives as an excuse for a fine mixture of community events, not to mention the ox roasting and all the fun of the fair (and of course, it always rains for some of the time at least!)

Sheila Quigley’s crime novels centre on the fictitious Seahills Estate in Houghton; so naturally Houghton Feast plays a large part in her books. She returns the favour by leading a walk, with the help of local historian Paul Lanagan, around some of the sites mentioned in her work. Cornwell Internet joined a group of enthusiastic fans on Saturday afternoon’s tour,

Someone had gone to great trouble to prepare the route beforehand. For example, the windows of the Library (the point of departure) were adorned with “Wanted” posters. And when Sheila paused at the footbridge, to read the opening of Bad Moon Rising in which a young woman’s body is found under that very bridge, she found herself standing next to a sad little bouquet of flowers commemorating the victim.

Although Sheila’s books are genuinely pacy crime thrillers, it was clear that the group of fans following her that afternoon also appreciated her creation of a whole community of characters, and were glad of the opportunity to picture those people going about their lives in a real place. And when would there be more news from the Seahills? Well, admitted Sheila, she should complete the next book, The Road to Hell, that night or the next…

No posts for the last month because Cornwell Internet has been on holiday: we were away for less than three weeks, but the few days before our departure and the few days after our return were filled with urgent tasks, meeting deadlines, picking up things that had arisen during our absence…

Nonetheless, we have definitely been on holiday, and here’s photographic evidence – Roger taking a breather during a walk around the French village of Minerve, in the heart of the Minervois wine region.

We couldn’t have done it all so seamlessly without Stephen Mellor minding the shop – and nipping crises in the bud – for us. Thank you, Stephen.

Last week’s Saturday poem in the Guardian is Lament by the wonderful Joanna Boulter. There is more about Joanna (and more of her poems) on the Arrowhead Press web site and the Vane Women web site; and her Still Life with Figs was Diamond Twig’s first ever Poem of the Month.

Lament is taken from Twenty Four Preludes & Fugues on Dmitri Shostakovich from Arc Publications, which has been shortlisted for the Forward prize for the best first collection (sponsored by Felix Dennis).