Pure espresso - life’s too short for bad coffee. And so, in search of the perfect espresso, I’m trying out a bunch of different beans. The current one is Gipfelstürmer Kenya, Kagongo AA (archive.org) from kaffeezentrale.ch (who has a terribly broken website – seriously, fix yo shit). The 250 gram bag currently goes for CHF 15.50 (0.50 per 8g shot). They’re 100% arabica beans from Kirinyaga, Kenya (archive.org), southern slopes of Mount Kenya, produced by the Kagongo washing station (archive.
Tre Forze! Espresso Beans
A name with an exclamation mark? Most likely over-promising & under-delivering, right? Nope this was some good coffee. It was either the best of this batch, or just the last bag I opened & great out of necessity :P. Really liked it. Balanced flavor, not too bitter, not too strong, not too bright, not too weak, lightly nutty, appropriately crazy. Easy to dose, produced nice crema. Good beans. Like. I’m sure there’s better espresso out there, considering this is likely produced in quite massive quantities, but so far - so good.
Schwarzenbach Italian Roast espresso beans
Who can’t resist freshly-roasted coffee beans? Probably most people, since they tend not to be sold as much, haha. This round was for Schwarzenbach’s (archive.org) “Italienische Röstung” beans. The 100% arabica beans were slightly hard & glossy, like a dark roast. The espresso somewhat strong & bitter, with a light cacao aroma. Source: premium-coffee (archive.org) Cost: CHF 13.00 / 500 grams (0.20/8gr shot) Espresso: 7/10 (would buy again, good fallback :))
Amici Espresso ground coffee cans
Gotta start somewhere. Filling the machine with Amici ground coffee was a start. It was the only ground mix that was drinkable. They use a kind of pressurized can to keep the ground coffee fresh. It works fairly well – the first shots from each can are pretty reasonable. The next day’s shots get mediocre quickly, nothing to write home about (but enough to blog, haha). Cost: 12 cans at 250 grams each for CHF 150.
HTTP/2 & You
HTTP/2 & You? I occasionally hear webmasters ask about HTTP/2 and their site + web-search. The good news is that HTTP/2 doesn’t change the core concepts of HTTP, it doesn’t change the URLs, and is transparently supported for users & crawlers if they ask for it. Its primary differences focus on improved performance. Your hoster could add support for HTTP/2 and you might not even notice – who knows, maybe they support it already :).
crawl budget & 404s
I have a large site and removed lots of irrelevant pages for good. Should I return 404 or 410? What’s better for my “crawl budget”? (more from the depths of my inbox) The 410 (“Gone”) HTTP result code is a clearer sign that these pages are gone for good, and generally Google will drop those pages from the index a tiny bit faster. However, 404 vs 410 doesn’t affect the recrawl rate: we’ll still occasionally check to see if these pages are still gone, especially when we spot a new link to them.
307s
HTTPS & HSTS: 301, 302, or 307? If the combination of these letters & numbers mean anything to you, you might be curious to know why Chrome shows you a 307 redirect for HSTS pages. In the end, it’s pretty easy. After seeing the HTTPS URL with the HSTS header (for example, with any redirect from the HTTP version), Chrome will act like it’s seeing a 307 redirect the next time you try to access the HTTP page.
Mobile sites suck
I was using my phone more on the weekend, and your mobile-friendly sites blew me away. Way too many of these are just horrible. Subscription interstitials, app interstitials, browser popups asking for my location, impossible to fill out search forms, login interstitials, tiny UI elements, cookie & age interstitials, “you’re in the wrong country, idiot” interstitials, full-screen ads, “add to homescreen” overlays, etc. One - popular & well-known - site had four levels of popups/overlays on a page.
A search-engine guide to 301, 302, 307, & other redirects
It’s useful to understand the differences between the common kinds of redirects, so that you know where to use them (and can recognize when they’re used incorrectly). Luckily, when it comes to Google, we’re pretty tolerant of mistakes, so don’t worry too much :). In general, a redirect is between two pages, here called R & S (it also works for pages called https://example.com/filename.asp , or pretty much any URL). Very simplified, when you call up page R, it tells you that the content is at S, and when it comes to browsers, they show the content of S right away.
JS SEO in 2016
An update (March 2016) on the current state & recommendations for JavaScript sites / Progressive Web Apps [1] in Google Search. We occasionally see questions about what JS-based sites can do and still be visible in search, so here’s a brief summary for today’s state: # Don’t cloak to Googlebot. Use “feature detection” & “progressive enhancement” [2] techniques to make your content available to all users. Avoid redirecting to an “unsupported browser” page.