Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for February, 2005
Can ICANN Steal Your Domain?
Larry Seltzer has penned a column on eWeek that raises some serious security hackles about the ICANN policy for domain transfers. I commented on this when the policy went into effect.
What is frightening about the panix.com story he reviews is that the rightful owners of panix.com had the registrar lock ON and the domain still transferred. So the policy becomes more dangerous if your domain registrar does not have a tight scheme of check and balances for reviewing domain requests.
This is not always easily done as domain registration in many cases passes through various parties to the ultimate registrar. The terms of service should absolutely be read for the registrar and also how they handle domain locking.
How to write an effective press release
On request, from a reader of previous blog, here are some ideas about press releases. First, the title “how to write an effective press release” is a bit misleading. The idea is to create an effective media campaign. One press release rarely gets you where you want to go.
You need to think about publicity as a stream of water over the landscape. In the short term, the water doesn’t do much. In the long term, it can carve a beautiful canyon. That’s because it takes time for the media to recognize your releases, and more time for the public.
With that said, here are some tips:
1. See what the competition and other companies aredoing and start reading press releases to see which releases are effective and which aren’t. Go to http://www.businesswire.com and watch the press releases flow.
2. Set a goal for your publicity campaign. I’m assuming most readers here are not owners of publicly traded companies looking to support/grow the stock price. Therefore, your primary goal is to generate awareness in your target market.
3. Get a list of media and media contacts for your releases. If you’ve read anything by me, you know I am a big advocate for a …
Eval is dead! Long live Eval!
I’m Lachlan Donald, the new guy here at SitePoint. I’ll be helping out with PHP blog content along with the other guys here.
Eval seems to be a hot topic of discussion lately, especially in light of the recent vBulletin exploits and past exploits in common applications such as phpMyAdmin. Eval is one of the functions in PHP which can execute arbitrary code. Generally eval is used either by inexperienced programmers for a variety of misguided reasons, or by people attempting to push the boundries of PHP. What inspired me to post this article was this quote from Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP:
If eval() is the answer, you’re almost certainly asking the wrong question.
Perhaps it’s just my argumentative nature, but when people use that quote I always wonder whether there are any common problems that are only solvable by using eval. Before I get into the nitty-gritty details, a brief recap of what eval actually does from the PHP manual:
mixed eval ( string code_str )
eval() evaluates the string given in code_str as PHP code.
Among other things, this can be useful for storing code in a database
text field for later execution.
To an inexperienced programmer this might sound like a fantastic …
Ajax
Jesse James Garrett and the team at Adaptive Path have coined the shorthand term “Ajax” to mean the combination of all this cool DOM and CSS and XMLHTTPRequest stuff that everyone’s going on about. Garrett’s article, “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications”, defines Ajax as follows:
- standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
- dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
- data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
- asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
- and JavaScript binding everything together.
While I doubt that these concepts are new to Stylish Scripting readers, it is surely handy to have a nice short name to refer to them by. The article runs into some detail about how he concepts tie together, and flags examples of Ajax-enabled applications, like most of Google’s latest innovations. The Year of the DOM is the year of Ajax.
Running Apache on Windows
The Apache web server is gaining new momentum in 2005 after Netcraft reported them relatively flat in market share last year. The February web server survey shows them gaining a bit more than a percentage point year to date. While that may seem low - this is a survey in which more than 59
million servers were queried.
While many users come to Apache on a Unix-flavored operating system, the number of newcomers exploring Apache first on Windows is rising. No clear hard stats exist for this - but forum questions would suggest it.
I was introduced to Apache in 1997 when I built my first Red Hat system. It was not until 2002 that I built Apache on anything other than a Linux/Unix platform. As a February wrap-up - I have assembled several of the Apache on Windows links that have been sent along to me over time. I must admit the numerous servers I manage are exclusively either running Apache on Linux or OS X at this point - however I do count a Windows 2000 Advanced Server among my development machines running Apache 2.x.
I would welcome additional links to this list!
Apache, MySQL and others on Windows:
From the Source
The place …
Simple Clearing of Floats
Without wanting to stray too deeply in Simon and Stuart’s technical CSS territory, I thought this was worth noting.
For all it’s many advantages, sometimes it’s the little things that CSS layout makes difficult that really get to you. Clearing floated elements is a good example.
The Problem:
One of the simplest and most common layout structures involves the placing of a small, set-width DIV — perhaps navigation, a quote or a bio — within a larger wrapping DIV that contains the remaining content. In a markup this might be something like:
<div id=”outer”>
<div id=”inner”> <h2>A Column</h2> </div>
<h1>Main Content</h1>
<p>Lorem ipsum</p>
</div>
We can set the width of ‘#inner’ (let’s say ‘width:20%’), but, being a block level element, the main content will always wrap beneath, unless we float it (either left or right). Here our classic problem begins.
If ‘#inner’ is shorter than #outer, all is well.
However, if ‘#inner’ grows taller than it’s wrapping parent, it breaks through the bottom edge of ‘#outer’. It’s as if ‘#outer’ forgets it’s supposed to be keeping tabs on what ‘#inner’ is doing as soon as you float it.
As we can’t always control the amount of content in these DIVs, it certainly presents a problem. …
How to write an effective case study
Thanks to the reader who asked for this topic.
Case studies are a great way to tell your story to prospects and clients in a way that concretely shows your value and results. Here is what every case study should have:
1. Start with a compelling, results-driven headline. Avoid: “Website redesign for bowling alley.” Instead go for: “Bowling alley generates 50% increase in new bowlers with web site we designed”
2. Your first paragraph should focus on a summary of the case, focusing on a one-sentence description of the problem, and then how you solved the problem.
3. Define the problem in more detail.
4. Define your solution. Avoid technical jargon. For Web Designers, a before and after — along with your logic — works well.
5. Define the results. Here it is best to have the client provide a quote testifying to the results. That increases your credibility 100%.
6. Have a side bar that summarizes the case (the way magazines have boxes with large text and summaries for readers who just want to skim).
7. Provide facts and figures — especially about saving or making more money.
8. Speak in their language not yours. Unless your prospects are technical in nature, don’t get into Cold Fusion, …
Sender Policy Framework - Option to Battle Spam
The Sender Policy Framework (spf) was developed by Meng Weng Wong as a fork of Hadmut Danisch’s RMX and Gordon Fecyk’s DMP - both former efforts to battle email spam based for the most part on domain forging.
Wong is the founder and CTO of pobox.com and in 2004 pobox.com and Microsoft jointly submitted a draft for RFC status to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for spf and Sender ID (developed by Microsoft). There was controversy around Microsoft’s Sender ID as they filed for patents on part of the process - which would potentially hinder it from becoming a global open standard. The IETF abandoned consideration of the joint proposal for RFC status in late 2004. Microsoft has since re-submitted a new draft of Sender ID to the IETF.
SPF for the time being is back on its own - and it is believed to be in use by more than one million domains.
It seeks to battle spam by rejecting emails where the domain (namely a domain(s) under your management) is forged. It is done through DNS by specifying in DNS zones the only authorized hosts that can send mail from your domain and reconciling them to a …
The power of pure CSS
With all this cool JavaScript and DOM stuff going on, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that it’s possible to contort some pure CSS and HTML into acting like an interactive site without any scripting at all. I suspect that most readers here will have seen Eric Meyer’s css/edge, where he demonstrates some of the neat capabilities of CSS, but there’s a lot more you can do.
Enter Stu Nicholls and his CSS Playground. First example of something that will make you think “that’s just CSS??” is the amazing puzzle. Give it a try. And go “ooooh, that’s clever”.
The major way of implementing some form of interactivity through pure CSS is with the :hover directive, and the major thing standing in the way of this is that IE doesn’t support :hover on anything other than links. Nonetheless, some impressive things are possible: see Stu’s photo gallery for one example. It’s not that these techniques are revolutionary, it’s more that they do exist and can be exploited to add some neat things to your sites without any scripting at all.
Keyword Competition Metrics
It’s been a few days between posts, and I apologize to anyone who has been waiting for this one…
What I’d like to address today is how we can look at the level of competition for a search term. There are a lot of ways to look at this question, and how you see the competition can have a big impact on strategy and tactics for a search engine marketing campaign.
In my last post, I discussed the “weighted popularity” formula. I’ll get back to that in more detail soon, but for now let’s just assume that you’ve made some decisions about which search terms best reach your target audience. Now that you know this, you need some idea of how much effort it will take to get in front of that audience.
I like to look primarily at three types of competition data:
[list=1]
[*]How many sites/pages are competing?
[*]How well linked are the top ranked sites?
[*]How much are people paying for PPC traffic?
[/list]
Let me go ahead and knock those down in order…
The “traditional” way of measuring the number of competing pages is to do a search for the keyword or phrase you’re interested in, and see how many results are returned. Unfortunately, this is …
Sponsored Links
Logo Design, Web page Design and more!
- Custom logo designs created ‘just for you’.
- Pick the design you like best.
- Only pay if you’re satisfied with the result.
SitePoint Kits
Download sample chapters of any of our popular kits.
The Search Engine Marketing Kit, 2.0
The Web Design Business Kit 2.0
The Email Marketing Kit
The Usability Kit
SitePoint Books
Download sample chapters of any of our popular books.