Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for March, 2005
PHP 4.3.11 and 5.04 Released
The new releases include several security fixes relating to the exif and fbsql extensions, as well as the unserialize(), swf_definepoly() and getimagesize() functions. There are also over 70 non-critical bug fixes. The PHP Dev Team says that all PHP users are “strongly encouraged to upgrade”.
PHP download page.
PHP 4.3.11 ChangeLog.
PHP 5.0.4 ChangeLog.
Creative Commons Software for Licensing
I caught a blog entry on the Creative Commons site yesterday mentioning the latest release of ccPublisher for Windows and Mac OS X. Now I am a big Creative Commons licensing fan - yet I had never heard of this little app until almost missing it in my RSS feeds.
There is unfortunately little in the way of documentation - an overview for its use - though there is the skeleton beginning of a roadmap at the link above.
ccPublisher simply enables a user to drop an audio or video file (for which the program assumes you own the copyright or the right to authorize a license to) and allows you to select and apply a Creative Commons license to the file and upload to your own server or optionally upload it to archive.org (the Internet Archive - a destination worthy of some browsing time).
This in and of itself is not necessarily of front burner interest to web developers. However, having had to chase down royalty-free, right managed and other types of content (not too mention your own product - whether that be copy, images, software, etc.), the universe of content becoming available under CC licenses certainly is of interest.
From a second …
Is Cloaking Deceptive Advertising?
Alan Perkins of Silverdisk, a notorious “white hat” search engine marketer, has recently published a series of articles on ethics in SEO, culminating with Search Marketing Techniques, Deceptive Advertising Laws & Other Laws, in which he argues that some SEO techniques (mainly cloaking) might actually be illegal.
Although I am not completely in agreement with Alan on this, his thesis is well-argued and does make for interesting reading. The basic idea is that organic search results do not normally contain advertising, and that deception of a search engine to place a listing within those search results is equivalent to inserting an ad.
An interesting discussion, started by Alan, has taken place at the Search Engine Watch forums. SEM expert Danny Sullivan has commented on Alan’s article in the SEW blog.
Although I can’t go as far as Alan does in painting cloaking as deceptive advertising in all cases, I can see some cases where such laws might apply. If you can make the leap to consider search engine listings as advertisements, then use of deceptive titles (show one title to the search engine and another to human visitors) could be deceptive. For example, if I used cloaking to show the Yahoo spider a …
Multi-Line Strings and Text Editors
PHP conveniently allows two main methods of using multi-line strings, where a string constant is broken over many lines. However, it can be hard to find a syntax highlighting text editor that will correctly highlight multi-line strings in PHP.
When I was switched text editors recently, support for multi-line strings when syntax highlighting was high on my list of required features.
I find multi-line strings convenient for writing SQL, as writing a non-trivial SQL query on one line does not make for very readable code.
Here are two examples of multi-line strings in PHP. The first is simple a quoted string split over multiple lines.
$sql = “
SELECT
product.productid,
product.title
FROM
product
WHERE
product.type=’boardgame’
“;
This next example uses heredoc syntax, which allows you to specify a token to end the string with.
$sql =
The innovation balance
There’s lots of people out there really pushing the envelope of what can be done with the DOM and CSS. You all know this. But, at some point, there comes a time when you hit a wall, and that wall is named Internet Explorer.
This wasn’t always the case: to get to the Internet Explorer wall you now step over the crumbling ruins of the wall that was there before. If you pick up an aged, weathered brick from that wall you can just about see the words “Netscape 4″ painted on it. But that wall’s just an old pile of stones that everyone ignores, these days. Internet Explorer is the new Netscape 4.
The concern here is: do you let that hold you back? I mean, l00k, d00d! Firef0x haz these k-rAd new t00ls! IE is teh sux0r! Kill the M$!
Er, perhaps not. That’s a serious question, though; at what point should we abandon IE support in order to deliver better interfaces to Firefox users?
There’s a pretty reasonable argument that the answer to that question is: never. Don’t do FF-only things. Waving the banner of “standards compliance” and saying “well, it’s the IE development team’s fault for not bothering to …
Is certification relevant?
As a consultant, in the past I often pursued certifications to demonstrate my capabilities with related technologies. This led to me obtaining IBM, Java, XML, and now .NET developer certifications. In addition to demonstrating some knowledge (I emphasize some), it also gave me a reason to dive in and become acclimated with the various aspects of a technology/platform. Now, I may not remember every aspect/detail but I’ll be aware of its existence.
It may be my current situation, but I don’t hear much about certification these days. Do companies emphasize it? Do developers pursue them or set certification as a goal?
Updated Web Page Analyzer
It’s great to see Andy King has announced an update to his excellent, free page analysis tool at WebsiteOptimization.com.
For anyone who hasn’t stumbled across it before, this is an online tool that takes a URL from you, and returns a nicely formatted report on the over-all efficiency of the page you gave it.
I’ve found it can come in quite handy with client work, particularly if their current site uses a chunky, older table-based structure. All you have to do is remember to generate a report on the current site before you start, and then another on your new construction.
While they know anyone can give lip service to ‘more efficiency’ and ‘faster downloads’ and ‘reduced bandwidth’, two reports detailing the clear improvements in fairly plain english usually help to leave a client feeling good about themselves. I tweaked my own, local, customized print stylesheet, designed specifically for client presentation. That might make a good GreaseMonkey script in future.
The new service adds:
- support for Frames
- support for iFrames
- support for CSS based images
- more realistic CSS and JS size thresholds
Of course, if you have the Web Developer Toolbar, you may already be quite familiar with the …
Java for Mobile Phones: The Next Generation
The Java Community Process (JCP) has approved initial plans to develop the Mobile Information Device Profile 3.0 (MIDP3), a new version of the standard that regulates Java applications and games on mobile phones.
Though the standard is still at the very earliest stages of development, the Java Specification Request that has been approved offers a glimpse of the new features that will be coming to the platform:
- running multiple MIDlets (mobile applications) at once
- running MIDlets in the background
- auto-launching MIDlets at device startup
- multi-screen and large display support
- more expressive and customizable user interfaces
- richer and higher performance games
A public review period of the finished spec is scheduled for January 2006, with the final spec to be approved in May 2006. I’d expect MIDP3 phones to hit the market en masse around Q1 2007.
In the meantime, MIDP2 is not a bad platform to play with. I’ve been doing some work with it myself in my spare time, porting an open source game written for Nokia S60 v1 handsets (7650/3650) to the MIDP2 standard supported by all major manufacturers.
Replacing rsync with unison
Thanks to Rui at the Tao of Mac - I was turned on to Unison to replace the volumes of rsync functions I use on various servers.
Unison synchronizes rather than mirroring as rsync does - making it valuable for workstations as well as development and production servers. To boot - it works on OS X!
The app, found here, can track two directories on two separate systems, or on two hard drives on the same system. It processes updates to both replicas in a bi-directional fashion rather than simply backing up or copying data from one side to the other. It can additionally work across platforms - so Windows can be synched with Unix and so on. Very nice.
It has config options for working with Subversion among others - which I finally have switched to from the crusty old CVS (I may have been one of the last according to some folks I have spoken with!). I also found its claim of carefully handling conflicts accurate. Like rsync - it of course can work over enrypted connections using ssh.
Assessing Keyword Relevance
If you’ve been following my (occasionally interrupted) thoughts on keyword strategy, you’ll hopefully recall a couple core concepts: relevance and weighted popularity. You can read my full post on keyword metrics here.
The basic idea of weighted popularity is that you don’t really want to know how many times a given search term is used, you want to know how many times it’s used by people who are actually looking for what you have to offer. Taking a percentage to represent relevance, we can do a little math to estimate the number of targeted searches are available.
If, for example, we believe that 50% of the searchers using a given search term are looking for what we have to offer, and that there are 1000 searches per day using that search term, we can multiply 1000 by 50% to reach a weighted popularity of 500, or 500 targeted searches per day.
I’ve already discussed different ways to estimate the popularity of a search term, and I’m sure we’ll hit that subject again soon. What I want to discuss today is how to estimate the relevance of a search term. The easy way is to just take your best guess, but like a lot …
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.