My last holdout, a Sony KV-36XBR800.

It was a wonderful TV, manufactured at a time when HDTV was still a developing technology (it’s HDTV interface was a DVI plug instead of HDMI). During the six years of service, it was not only the centerpiece of my living room, but a source of comfort for several children during my foster parenting years.

CRT television technology had reached it’s pinnacle, representing a choice of large and extremely heavy televisions. It was the last year Crutchfield offered them as an option, going completely to flat-panel displays the following season. The unit was so heavy that we had planned to just leave it behind if we ever sold the house.

During it’s lifetime, we saw the proliferation of LCD technology. Circumvented at times by ingenious projection-based approaches, early plasma attempts, and the amazing new LED options.

For me, Crutchfield is shipping us a new Plasma-based unit. I’m sensitive to refresh rate and even the best LEDs don’t come close to the performance of Plasma in this area. The tradeoff will be an awareness to burn-in and reflection, which are both addressed on the new TV using recent solutions and technologies. Plasma also doesn’t have the power-consumption advantage of the latest LED options, but in a few years I would think that LEDs will catch up.

Search Engines have been indexing and cataloging all types of websites, and have improved over the years. I didn’t rewrite URLs on TriumphRat.Net for several years and it was indexed in search engines just fine. In fact, I didn’t have to submit the site to search engines or generate any sort of sitemap either. Near the end of my tenure on Rat.Net, URL rewrites and Sitemaps were implemented with positive results that were frequently described as expotential.

So if rewritten URLs aren’t “technically” necessary why go through the trouble?

The bottom line is that while some search engines can index pages regardless of format, many search engines cannot. Also, if you depend on link popularity with other sites and search engines it doesn’t hurt to remove ampersands, question-marks, and other characters common with dynamic URLs.

From a useability standpoint, discussion forum owners frequently debate the value that users place on “friendly” URLs. For this site, a rewritten URL doesn’t offer much. I do it, but probably not in a format that is easily understandable. On Motorcycles International, user-friendly examples are:

http://www.motorcyclesintl.net/triumph
http://www.motorcyclesintl.net/ducati

From a content cataloging and advertising standpoint, it is much easier for marketers to create channels that associate to keywords in URLs. This is a commonly overlooked issue represents a technology/opportunity that frankly many webmasters don’t take time to learn about or implement. It also works well for grouping content.

Benefits improve with feature-rich products like vbSEO and other similar plugins for dicussion forums. One can tune a variety of options and preferences, governed on what the webmaster believes in.