Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for October, 2005
Two simple ratios for you to track
Here are two simple ratios for you to track when you market and sell your services:
1. The You/I ratio. Be sure that you say “you” 2-3 X more than you say “I/we” in your marketing materials. That way, you are focusing on your prospects’ needs.
2. The question/statement ratio. When speaking with prospects, especially in the early stages, be sure that 75% of what comes out of your mouth is an open question (not yes/no but open) and 25% is a statement. That way, you are learning about what your prospect values and not trying to read his or her mind.
Branding with Lea
Seems like every day I seem to stumble across another talented designer with impecable CSS chops.
Today I came across and really nice article on ‘the art self-branding’ by Edmonton designer, Lea Alcantara.
Self branding is all about ‘boiling off’ all the peripheral information until you’re left with a simplified purer version of you, but the difficult part is usually choosing the right stuff to remove. The truth is, it’s often easier to understand the essentials of someone else’s company than the one you spend most of your waking hours in. Lea takes you through a set of processes and question designed to help you get to the essence of your company identity.
The nice bit is Lea has just gone through this process with her Lealea.net (killer logo too), so she’s writing with fresh eyes and a very practical mindset.
Part II is on the way, so I’m looking forward to more from her.
Danny Sullivan on Google Print
Danny Sullivan has posted an excellent analysis of the technical issues involved with Google Print, in Indexing Versus Caching & How Google Print Doesn’t Reprint.
The thrust of Danny’s argument, and I agree 100%, is that indexing the content of a book so that it becomes searchable is not the same thing as creating or publishing a copy of the book. He is correct about that, but his post perpetuates a misunderstanding about how search engines work. This misunderstanding is part of the reason why publishers think Google is “stealing” their intellectual property.
Danny describes the search engine index as resembling a big spreadsheet (emphasis added):
I’ve described the index… to being like a “big book of the web.” But it’s not, really. It’s more like a giant spreadsheet, where all the words of a page are in one row of the spreadsheet, each word to a different column, then the next page in the row below that, and so on.
Actually, the index is far less readable than a spreadsheet, because search engines are storing word occurences, not documents, when they create their index. It’s not a row for every document, it’s a table of occurences for every word.
If the word “defenestration” appears …
Google’s Hidden Protocol
Google’s URL removal page contains a little bit of handy information that’s not found on their webmaster info pages where it should be.
Google supports the use of “wildcards” in robots.txt files. This isn’t part of the original 1994 robots.txt protocol, and as far as I know, is not supported by other search engines. To make it work, you need to add a separate section for Googlebot in your robots.txt file. An example:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*sort=
This would stop Googlebot from reading any URL that included the string “sort=” no matter where that string occurs in the URL.
So if you have a shopping cart, and use a variable called “sort” in some URLs, you can stop Googlebot from reading the sorted (but basically duplicate) content that your site produces for users.
Every search engine should support this. It would make real life a lot easier for folks with dynamic sites, and artificial life a lot easier for spiders.
Store large data client-side with AMASS
The AJAX MAss Storage System (AMASS) is a clever blend of JavaScript and Flash that doesn’t actually have anything to do with AJAX — except that it will help decrease the amount of AJAX you have to use to produce Web applications with rich user interfaces that behave like desktop apps.
AMASS inserts an invisible Flash movie the page in order to borrow a feature from the Flash Plugin, expanding JavaScript’s local data storage capacity (data stored on the end user’s machine, rather than on the Web server) from the 4KB offered by cookies up to 100KB, or even to any arbitrary size if the user grants permission when prompted.
Just what is this useful for? Well, with the amount of data users are typing into Web pages these days, features like undo and auto-save are starting to become vital, and AMASS makes them much easier (and less costly) to implement.
Gmail recently added auto-save to its offering, saving a draft copy every few minutes as you work on an email, so that you don’t lose your work if your two-year-old runs in and jabs the reset button on your computer again. Gmail implements this by periodically sending a copy of your work-in-progress …
Set Us Up The Catfish - Part 2: SlideMe
In Part 1, Alex introduced our implementation of Catfish ads and demonstrated how we managed to have them appear at the bottom of the window, in all browsers, without jerky motion while scrolling.
If you missed it, go back and have a look through part 1. We found a handy way of working around Internet Explorer’s lack of support for fixed positioning of elements.
Now, we have a working Catfish ad. It’s attached to the bottom of the screen, and stays there when it is scrolled.
The problem is, it’s always there. The Catfish would be much more eye-catching if it ’slid’ into view, rather than appearing immediately. Catch your Website visitors by surprise!
Sliding The Catfish Into View
With a bit of DHTML jiggery-pokery, we can position the Catfish so that it’s just out of sight, with the top of it just below the bottom of our browser window. This is an ideal point from which to ’slide it in to view’ later.
Hint: it also gives us a chance to start pre-loading the images in the Catfish, so that when it bobs up, the images should be ready to go.
A negative bottom margin nicely tucks it away.
margin-bottom: -79px;
If using …
Google Update Update
Yes, Google is updating, changing, shifting, call it anything you like but don’t call it dancing. So what’s happening? Search results are shifting around like mad, that’s what’s happening. What does it mean? I can’t tell you until it stops moving, which may take another couple weeks.
We’ve been watching this since about last Friday, and my phone has been ringing off the hook. Everyone who thinks I called the November 2003 update correctly is waiting for me to pull another rabbit out of my hat… I can’t promise a rabbit, but I will have an opinion once this thing settles down and we can look at what’s changed.
Right now, it’s not over, and we can’t do anything but watch, or more appropriately, do something productive. Unfortunately, it’s my job to watch these things, so I press on….
As does Matt Cutts, director of search quality at Google and the man who must:
- pretend that he isn’t GoogleGuy
- direct this kind of thing to happen in the first place
- deal with all the positive and negative feedback
- direct the inevitable adjustments
- make an effort to explain all this to the webmaster community without actually explaining it.
Matt is posting “weather reports” on his blog, and that’s a …
PHP Collaboration Project official home
At the risk of turning this into a PHP Collaboration Project linkblog, it looks like the official home of the project for now will be here: PHP Collaboration Project.
A video introduction, public forums and an overview of the project goals are up, along with PCP-related headlines from around the Web. No feeds yet, though.
SimpleXML and namespaces
There’s a lot about SimpleXML, PHP5’s new API for accessing the contents of XML documents, in SitePoint’s recently-published book No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP, but one thing it doesn’t cover is how to use SimpleXML with a document that makes use of XML Namespaces.
Take this document, for example–a simplified RSS 1.0 feed:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf=”http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#”
xmlns=”http://purl.org/rss/1.0/” xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”>
<channel rdf:about=”http://www.sitepoint.com/”>
<title>SitePoint.com</title>
<link>http://www.sitepoint.com/</link>
<description>SitePoint is the natural place to go to grow your online business.</description>
<items>
<rdf:Seq>
<rdf:li rdf:resource=”http://www.sitepoint.com/article/take-command-ajax” />
</rdf:Seq>
</items>
</channel>
<item rdf:about=”http://www.sitepoint.com/article/take-command-ajax”>
<title>Take Command with AJAX</title>
<link>http://www.sitepoint.com/article/take-command-ajax</link>
<description>Want to get a bang out of your AJAX artillery?</description>
<dc:date>2005-10-14T04:00:00Z</dc:date>
</item>
</rdf:RDF>
In PHP5, here’s how you might think to use SimpleXML’s API to get at the date of every item in the feed:
$feed = simplexml_load_file(’http://www.sitepoint.com/recent.rdf’);
foreach ($feed->item as $item) {
echo $item->date;
}
But this won’t work, because the date element has a namespace prefix (<dc:date>), so it can’t be accessed …
JavaOne 2004 and 2005 presentations free online
Last year at this time, I was considering just when to buy a one-year subscription to JavaOne online. If I timed it right, I figured, I could pay for one year and watch two years’ worth of JavaOne conference presentations. Well, I guess I wasn’t the only one paralyzed by indecision, because this year Sun has just plonked the presentations online for all to see–no charge!
Every presentation at JavaOne 2004 and 2005 can be viewed in full-motion video, complete with live transcription and synchronized presentation slides, or downloaded in PDF form. The Web tier presentations alone could keep you busy all day!
Whether motivated by a lack of developer interest in the paid subscriptions, or by a desire to promote next year’s conference, this is a great resource for those of us who are either too cash-strapped (like me) or too far away (also me) to attend the conference in person.
So why not take your phone off the hook, uncork a nice bottle of wine, and curl up with some cutting-edge Java presentations tonight? If anyone asks, I’ll say you had a hot date.
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