Okay not the far off future, but for this summer specifically. There are some new technologies that are emerging and I want to learn more, so here is my laundry list of things that I am actively and aggressively going after to learn, implement on my own website, and am testing to use for clients.
Rich Snippets
When Google speaks I listen. Recently it was announced that Google was embracing Rich Snippets. There is a special syntax to use that is XML based for creating your snippets and embedding them in your source code and I want to review, try them on my own website, and see how the search engines really use the information. Will it help in anyway with what is shown in the results, does it give a website a bump over the others? Whatever I find out, I’ll make sure to share with you here. Learn more about Rich Snippets at Search Engine Land.
Spry Features
I moved to Dreamweaver and am now introducing several new XML technologies into my own website. Right now I am working on creating and XML feed to show my online web design Portfolio. Dreamweaver makes it pretty easy to do this stuff, but the applications for other content and sites may be really cool, so I am chinking away at learning more about the use of accordion panels and data sets. I am already heavily using the Spry drop down and fly out menus. They are nice and very search engine friendly, but I would like to skin them better with background graphics for a more custom look. I’ll point to my projects when I am ready to show them off.
Web Slices
This is another brand new technology introduced with Internet Explorer 8. Web slices are little snippets that you can change and people can subscribe to to review in their browser favorites bar without visiting your site. Could be a very cool way to show discounts, feature products, or snippets of content that change regularly. I think that this will have really cool application for websites and want to understand them more. Here is some information from CoDe magazine on how to build a web slice. I’m not sure what search engines are doing with the information yet, but just like RSS feeds this could be a huge new technology that will bloom in the months to years to come.