A few weeks ago, I first heard about the Nest thermostat a few weeks ago.  It is slick to say the least.  Nest has brought sex appeal to the thermostat.  Wifi, web programmable, updatable firmware, intelligence to learn how to best heat and cool your house – it’s sweet.

Being a security guy, I started wondering how hackable they are…  Can I go driving around and penetrate the Nest devices and have a giant bot net of spamming, DDOSing thermostats?  While interesting, that’s passe.  I’m sure we’ll get into the habit of rebooting our thermostats on patch Tuesday.  Maybe there will be a new industry of A/V for such things as well.

What intrigues me more is that the thermostat is not just a thermostat any more.  Previously just a box on the wall that would likely serve reliably for decades, the unassuming thermostat is being replaced with a miniature computer, who’s software, hardware and protocols will become obsolete with time.  We are signing up to add another device to the growing mountain of disposable devices – our phones, our PC’s, our TV’s, DVD players, ipods, ipads all desire to be replaced on short intervals, but those are entertainment devices.  We’re now adding a key infrastructure element of our house to that list.

Don’t misunderstand – I am going to be forking out some serious money when they are available to order again, but it’s depressing to know that I’ll be eagerly looking to replace them in 3 years with the latest model that has some new killer application.

 

There are several simple but effective SEO tricks to optimizing a Simple Machines forum.

URLs

First, is the URL structure. Search engines value the descriptiveness of a URL. By default, SMF uses URL’s that are worthless for SEO. An SMF mod, called Pretty URLs, will rewrite your URLs to be far more useful for a search engine. Pretty URLs is very simple to install, but a common problem is to ensure that .htaccess is writable, and that the root directory is writable.

Notice the difference (these links all go to the same post):

  • Default SMF URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/index.php?topic=2969.0
  • Search Engine Friendly URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/index.php/topic,2969.0.html
  • Pretty URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/offtopic/unleaded-gas/

Pretty URLs use the title of the post topic as part of the URL.  This will help search engines to properly classify the page and build a stronger connection between the the page and the title of the post in search results.

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