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gkoberger
What makes you think it's SEO related? I don't think any search index would do anything with HTML comments.
renownedmedia
I think he was joking :p
3825
Or that they made their website interesting enough for us to and link back to the website, talk about it here, and possibly increase traffic ;)
trevin
While the markup doesn't do anything for SEO, Easter eggs like this are often created to help generate links back to the particular page from sites like HN...which can boost SEO.

The original submission title was probably tongue-in-cheek, but I'd bet the creator of the page had SEO in mind. Getting a ton of pg lovers who probably also link programming to link to a programming page on the site would be killer for SEO.

This is similar to creating a unique 404 error page that can generate tons of backlinks.

akharris
Yeah...we scattered some ASCII easter eggs around the site. Favorite practitioners of various subjects. PG wins for programming (duh).

We'll send a tshirt to the first person to find them all :).

saraid216
> PG wins for programming (duh).

...why?

sharkweek
Brilliant -- I love source code easter eggs

One of my favorites is on Vimeo - if you crack open the JS console, it pitches you on applying for front in dev work with them.

kn0thing
Hah! That's pretty brilliant. Nicely done, Vimeo. OK, who else has awesome source-code easter eggs?
hcmeier
> OK, who else has awesome source-code easter eggs?

https://soundcloud.com

bherms
What is going on there?
jfren
Open up the Javascript console..
bherms
Ahh, I just viewed source and saw an ultra-compressed bit of html and js originally.
jdorfman
MaxCDN does, inspired by SoundCloud.
andygcook
Even the President is in on it:

view-source:http://www.barackobama.com/

skcin7
On a related note, I know the candidates have nothing to do with this, but I'm extremely impressed with Barack Obama's web presence. I was also very impressed with Mitt Romney's web presence during the election.
jiggy2011
Well it's not like they were short of money to spend.
infinita740
The tumblr website has the logo in comment, http://www.tumblr.com/ this was on HN a long time ago, someone complained about bandwidth and power wasted for only a few users who noticed it
revelation
Not exactly a source-code easter egg, but MySpace sends a random X-PoweredBy header with each request. A selection:

X-PoweredBy: Nerd Rage X-PoweredBy: The fire of 1,000 SUNS! X-PoweredBy: Interns

Of course it also runs on IIS, and this is MySpace we are talking about, so the geek cred is questionable here.

aquarion
It's been kicked up a notch, though. It used to be Cold Fusion.
davefp
http://shopify.com

Read the top comment, then scroll waaay down to the bottom.

Full disclosure: I work for Shopify

mmaia
Some companies do that with http headers (e.g. Zappos, SEOmoz, GigaOM)
timdorr
Reddit:

    $ curl -v www.reddit.com
    > GET / HTTP/1.1
    > User-Agent: curl/7.30.0
    > Host: www.reddit.com
    > Accept: */*
    > 
    < HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    < Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
    < Server: '; DROP TABLE servertypes; --
throwaway125
I assume the giant comment is what we're supposed to see, but I'm not sure how that's supposed to have any impact on SEO at all. Seems more like a tribute than a SEO hack.
jnevill
You obviously know nothing about SEO. Having a Giant face in a comment of your page increases clicks, on average, by 147%. Give or take.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
simonster
I'm pretty sure John McCarthy was the creator of Lisp, not pg...
akharris
Whoops - good point. Fixing now. I'll take the blame on that one. Meant to write ARC.
andygcook
Does anyone know who the person in the homepage source code is?

view-source:http://www.tutorspree.com/

kn0thing
I'm hoping it's Freddie Mercury.
andygcook
I'm thinking it's Al Pacino in Scar Face. Freddie Mercury just as solid a bet though.
cdrxndr
Looks like Jeff Bridges to me ...
misiti3780
That is really cool - but who the hell found this, and how?
[dead] aghast
[humongous ascii art deleted to preserve page formatting]
leeoniya
it adds 11.5k to the page (20% overhead) for an easter egg seems a bit excessive. it would be 10x smaller and more interesting to embed a js1k game or demo in the source.
mischanix
gzip makes it quite a bit less than 20%
leeoniya
i dont believe gzip typically applies to html, only to loaded text-based resources, js/css. i could be wrong.

either way that page's html does not come in compressed.

solutionyogi
gzip definitely applies to html in addition to js/css.
scott_karana
Gzip applies to whatever it's configured to apply to, and text\html is likely the most common mimetype gzipped.

tutorspree does indeed load with gzip:

  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Server: nginx/1.1.19
  Date: Fri, 10 May 2013 21:19:05 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  Transfer-Encoding: chunked
  Connection: keep-alive
  Vary: Cookie
  Content-Encoding: gzip
leeoniya
i'm not sure where you're getting those headers from, this is what i'm seeing:

  Connection	Keep-Alive
  Content-Length	59127
  Content-Type	text/html; charset=utf-8
  Date	Fri, 10 May 2013 21:24:38 GMT
  Server	nginx/1.1.19
  Set-Cookie	....
  Vary	Cookie
EDIT: i ran it through IE and got these headers too. Then ran it through some other online header-check sites and got your headers in one instance.

the majority of my tests resulted in these: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/check-server-headers/?go=1&...

chacham15
On Chrome Windows 7 x64:

    Content-Encoding:gzip
Maybe you're looking at the wrong resource?
leeoniya
i dont know what's going on. chrome here doesnt show gzip in the headers. various external header check tools also show no gzip. where else am i supposed to look?
scott_karana
My guess (based on your other posts as well) is that you might be running through a transparent proxy that's stripping gzip. :-)

I got my headers in Chrome on Windows 7.

scott_karana
To be fair, I suspect it still amounts for 20% of the gzipped size.
platz
Are there any sites that publish the majority of it's content (or alternate) in html comments (view-source), rather than in visible markup?
oakaz
I don't see anything interesting.
shellerik
You may need to maximize your browser to see the effect while viewing the page source.
tokenadult
Thank you. I have a two-screen configuration, and usually use the smaller screen for Web browsing, and the larger screen for writing. When I dragged the view source tab over to my larger screen, I saw immediately what the big deal was. Cool.
oakaz
I only see the ascii picture of Paul Graham and his profile text.
cjreyes
interesting. I can see more details when scrolling
jiggy2011
He only wears shorts? Is there any truth in this?