ID-ology

Everyone knows the cool kids don’t bother with the mouse. But how? And what about the most irritating of mouse-related tasks, the ones where you’re resizing and ordering several of the hundred windows you need to to go about your business? There’s no keyboard shortcut for that, how would it even know what placement/size you want to adjust to?

Or so I thought to myself before stumbling upon this little beauty.

… michael

Not for the faint of tech. This is one of IDev’s “Labs” posts and my answer to a question on Stack Overflow, you can see the thread here

…

The js framework is only half the equation. You’ll also need a server-side framework to render static content.

I’m sure you’ve run into this, but the two tools for accomplishing this are #! and pushState. Googlebots that find a hashbang such as mysite.com/#!/blog immediately request
mysite.com?_escaped_fragment_=blog and credit any content they find to the #! url. That’s where your server-side framework comes in.

Pushstate is cleaner but is only supported in newer browsers. With pushState you can generate clean urls – ( mysite.com/blog ) – without resorting to a #, which kept the page from refreshing and zeroing out your js in the previous technique. But google bots still wont execute your js so if they land on your homepage – ( mysite.com ) – and see a link – ( mysite.com/blog ) – you’ll need a server-side framework to sever a static version of that page. If a person requests that link you sever them the same static page but allow your js to take over from there.

All in all, I still haven’t found a system for seo-ing js apps that feels clean. Neither have my solutions been very DRY as they’ve typically required two sets of templates. Though node.js offers a possible solution to that problem and I’d imagine there are server-side templating-languages that could compile into something js understands.

Just ranting at this point, but it seems like the ‘best possible solution’ would be if google could just read the json straight out of your api. So if you had:

[{
  "title": "mysite",
  "content": "more of the same",
  "links": {
    "link1": "https://api.mysite.com/blog"
  }
}]

Where a googlebot would know that title is something like an <h1> and content something like a <p>Links could be followed to the next api request. But I dunno, I just made that last part up. Still google’s full of smart people working on this stuff. They will surely figure something out soonish.