Tha Author (Jason Brock) probably never tried using Inkscape for anything else other that "test" it for his article. Buggy software that it's even worse that CorelDraw for Windows.
Btw, I'm using CorelDraw since 1994 (Corel 3). Even now (Corel 2019) it crashes when you try to Import some EPS files or just randomly crashes...
My 2cents: If you want to start as a Graphic Designer, Adobe is the only way to go. Windows or Mac, doesn't matter. Start with a PC with any crappy Monitor (they are all crappy) and then when you have the money, buy a Macbook Pro or an iMac.
Finally, the state of Linux graphic design tools, it's exactly the same as it was 10 years ago. They just don't work properly for professional work and there is a perfectly good reason NOBODY is using them and will probably never will in the future.
For me, no GPU acceleration. This makes it extremely laggy and choppy (e.g., line tearing when scrolling... but not like brief; the tear is persistent until you move the screen and it re-renders that bit of the canvas). And it's at the utopian extreme end of their roadmap last I checked.
Nice article! As a web developer though, I did a quick "View Page Source" on my browser and I saw a complete mess... I'm sorry Quanta Magazine, this is not good for your business.
They really need to rethink their website. Very low Pagespeed Insights score, very slow website and HTML/CSS is just a mess.
I understand that Cloudflare or their Minimize/Cache system is doing a lot of this mess, but this will definitely effect your Google results. For example:
Inside the Source code, search for the phrase "Programmers are human, but mathematics is immortal". Do you see that it appears two times? JS is doing some crazy things and this affects their actual HTML script.
The blog seems to be build with React. I don't understand why they need to reinvent the wheel and build Blogs from scratch. Just use WordPress.
JS errors, page size, HTML errors, bad web design, CSS problems, SSL and broken layout has nothing to do with organic results or SEO and it is not proved that it affects your organic result position.
Even if it does, in-page problems doesn't affect your result not even by 1%. 99% is backlinks and their quality (or course).
Example: check techcrunch.com and debug/inspect their homepage. 15 JS errors, 6mb in size, no Description/Keywords, awful <title>, bad HTML elements. Can you even remotely beat them in the keyword "startup news"? No way. No matter how hard you will try to "SEO" your website.
I will tell it again. "SEO" was always a gimmick marketing thing. It's crazy that even now ppl don't understand that the only thing that matters are quality backlinks, as a result of quality content.
Exactly! And I think the problem with an SEO guide to engineers in particular, is that it ends up being a list of technical things. Things that are easy to quantify and that are black or white. Those are marginal. Yet an engineer can increase the score in some tool from X to 1.257X so they’re happy.
It’s much harder to write a guide on how to engage and delight your audience, and how to get the attention of other sites and the authority and trust to get linked to.
I'm writing a little more about that because it's sad to read an article like that that makes no sense.
SEO doesn't exist because the ONLY way to optimize your website is to write good content and get quality backlinks. To be precise, 99% of "SEO" is backlinks and 1% is your HTML quality (in-page SEO).
To give you an example, you can have the worst HTML, no internal linking, to Sitemap, no nothing, but have 10-20 quality backlinks and still be #1 in Google.
I'm doing internet marketing for more than 15 years now and the proof is out there. Quoting something else from the article:
"Google will try to follow relative paths inside of Javascript, even when they don't exist. This can result in polluted crawl error reports."
So he author claims that a relative path to a URL (inside a JS call) will effect your organic results. I wonder if anyone understands that this makes no sense and especially SEO-wise.
Polluted crawl error reports won't effect organic rankings, but they will make it harder to discover a legitimate page that is broken, but shouldn't be.
A few days ago I tried "Linux from Scratch" (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/) and I was learning about Binutils and the linux Toolchain. It's awesome to learn how important those core tools are for GNU/Linux.
Btw, I'm using CorelDraw since 1994 (Corel 3). Even now (Corel 2019) it crashes when you try to Import some EPS files or just randomly crashes...
My 2cents: If you want to start as a Graphic Designer, Adobe is the only way to go. Windows or Mac, doesn't matter. Start with a PC with any crappy Monitor (they are all crappy) and then when you have the money, buy a Macbook Pro or an iMac.
Finally, the state of Linux graphic design tools, it's exactly the same as it was 10 years ago. They just don't work properly for professional work and there is a perfectly good reason NOBODY is using them and will probably never will in the future.
cheers .-