Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.

Reputation and external links

One new insight I got while reading Google’s SEO Docs was how external links on your website could affect how Google perceives your website since it could cause Google to associate the linked website with your website. It could affect it in a good way when you are e.g. citing trustworthy sources like I just did, however it could also negatively affect it if those linked websites are a bit shady.

For example, when I was recently writing a blog post on creating a Black Friday banner in Shopify, I considered putting an external link to an online countdown timer that I used to check whether my countdown implementation across timezones worked properly. However, I realised that this random online countdown timer may not be the most trustworthy site to include with its large number of ads on the page. So I decided to exclude this link from the blog post and instead just included a screenshot of me comparing my countdown to that online countdown, which still conveyed the message just fine.

But what about when you still want to include a link to an external website because a user might find it helpful? For example in the previous scenario, I might still had wanted to include a link to that particular online countdown timer to save my readers some time from having to look one up. Or perhaps …

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SEO is one of the topics that I’ve always procrastinated on delayed learning in favour of other topics because I personally find it to be quite a dry topic. But just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean it isn’t important. In fact, it is one of the most important things contributing to a website’s success, since search engines are one of the most common ways potential users find a website, and poor performance and accessibility (which is part of SEO) can significantly degrade the user experience. And when you’re working on client websites and not just your hobby websites, well, that’s quite important.

Besides being forced assigned to read the Google SEO docs, one thing that helped me looked past the dryness of SEO is when Dom, one of the co-founders of Sanico Software, told me how learning SEO is “actually learning how to make the internet world a better place” since it helps me contribute to “an online world that is more optimised, performant[,] and accessible to all users online” (gotta add the Oxford comma lol). I personally have a pet-peeve with having everything properly labelled and organised in a semantic way, e.g. with having proper headings in websites and documents instead of having large text, and so this reasoning appeals to a part of me a lot. Indeed this is much more complicated than e.g. semantic …

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You know those times when you’re on this rollercoaster of emotions when debugging something, thinking that you’ve solved it but then another problem comes up? Yeah, this was one of those times.

Context was, I was working on a Phoenix LiveView app called BESTguestbookEVER for one of our clients. It’s an upcoming custom web app for a new startup based in Adelaide, where wedding guests record a video message instead of writing in a traditional guestbook. If you’ve read my previous blog post you would know the story, but a summarised version is that I was working on the video recording feature which required obtaining video and audio permissions. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as simple as just asking for the permissions and the user granting it through browser prompts. There were some additional things I had to do to get it working.

The big part of it was getting HTTPS working locally, since browsers would not let you grant video and audio permissions to websites accessed through insecure connections. If you want more details on that, check out my previous blog post “My journey in getting HTTPS working locally for a Phoenix LiveView app”. But today I’ll be covering the other smaller, but arguably equally important part of getting this to work.

I thought it worked everywhere…

See after getting HTTPS working, I thought it was finally …

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