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Blogs » Archive for February, 2006
Spammers in a Cut-throat Industry.
It’s not that easy being a website publisher.
One of my newest sites is 4 Laser Hair Removal. I spent roughly $2000 launching this site. The content is 100% unique, I want to turn this site into the defacto resource for laser hair removal information on the Internet. What do I get out of this? Copycats, in fact I’m sure by blogging about it I’ll get even more.
Additionally, my site is having a problem getting listed in Google. The subpages, such as category pages and articles, are listed fine. With PageRank’s of 5 or 6 as reported in the Google toolbar. The homepage though has maintained a PageRank of 0 and is not listed. I’ve sent in a reinclusion request to Google, but so far no response. This site has certainly never broken any rules, so I didn’t understand what the problem was to begin with.
So today I’m doing some checking, and one way to see if your site is penalized or not is to search for the site’s actual name and see if it shows up. So I try that with this search. (If you don’t see the same thing I see, that means Google …
IE7 Team Chat Transcript
Microsoft has posted a chat transcript from February 9th, in which the IE7 team answered questions about the browser from developers and other members of the public.
Though the chat was largely dominated by questions that have been answered elsewhere, there are a few tidbits of information worth noting.
First, it looks like Microsoft is still working on a few rendering changes, and the final list of supported CSS features is still not known:
Chris Wilson [MS] (Expert):
Q: Will max/min-height/width will be implemented in final release of IE7?
A: We knew that min/max-width/height would be even more important with the overflow changes. We’re working hard to get it in to IE7, but we can’t promise support for it just yet.
It sounds like Microsoft is planning to implement a public bug tracking database, so that developers have a centralized place to report and document work-arounds for rendering issues in the browser:
Anurag [MSFT] (Expert):
Q: I’d like to see a public bug triage system similar to bugzilla… wouldn’t this help you weed out duplicate feedback?
A: We are working on implementing a similar system. Thanks for the great feedback.
We have confirmation that there will be no JavaScript fixes in IE7. It’s especially depressing that we still have to …
SES NYC: Does Barry Diller Get Search?
The Search Engine Strategies conference kicked off this morning with Danny Sullivan’s interview with Barry Diller of IAC/Interactive, about the rebranding and future direction of the Ask.com search portal.
First of all, let me say something nice about Barry Diller - he understands positioning. He gets branding. He understands that users will decide whether the search engine under his care survives, thrives, or remains just a little irrelevant. He’s persuasive. He got me fired up about trying the new Ask.com search - which I can report to you has the cleanest interface and best set of tools that I’ve seen on a search portal so far.
What I have to ask about Barry Diller, and indeed the entire organization at Ask and IAC, is do they understand search? The reason that I use Google as my search engine of choice is not a cool user interface, it’s the quality of the organic search results that Google delivers. The reason why I fall back on Yahoo and MSN if Google lets me down, is again, that they are likely to deliver good search results.
Ask’s organic search results are powered by Teoma. Teoma/Ask reps have been coming to SES for years, talking about their …
AJAX and Session “Race Conditions”
Via Keith - here’s a problem I’m kicking myself for not covering explicitly in AJAX@localhost - Troubles with Asynchronous Ajax Requests and PHP Sessions by Marc Wandschneider.
Normally, when you write web applications in PHP, this is really not an issue, as each page request gets their own execution environment, and a user is only visiting one page at a time. Each page request coming from a particular user arrives more or less sequentially and shares no data with other page requests.
Ajax changes all of this, however: suddenly, one page visit can result in a number of simultaneous requests to the server.
Now before I go any further - this is not a PHP problem despite the title (I hope the web ring is paying attention)- this is is a feature of HTTP - it’s stateless. The problem is really the blurring of lines AJAX introduces - this goes right to the line between the two kinds of AJAX - is the client or the server managing state?
As Keith points out;
In short, server-side technologies like PHP don’t let you lock access to your session across requests.
I’d broaden that a little - in short, using a stateless protocol like HTTP, any attempt …
PHP UTF-8 0.1
Been messing around with bits of this code for a long time, in fact since first really getting to grips with Dokuwiki, but finally got the first release out.
PHP UTF-8 is intended to make it possible to handle UTF-8 encoded strings in PHP, without requiring the mbstring extension (although it uses mbstring if it’s available). In short, it provides versions of PHP’s string functions (pretty much everything you’ll find on this list), prefixed with utf_ and aware of UTF-8 encoding (that 1character >= 1 byte). It also gives you some tools to help check UTF-8 strings for “well formedness”, strip bad sequences and some “ASCII helpers”.
Parts of the code are cannibalised from elsewhere - thanks to Andi Gohr (Dokuwiki UTF-8) and Henri Sivonen for his UTF-8 to Code Point Array Converter (which was ported to PHP from the Mozilla codebase).
You’ll have to forgive a little pride but, from initial benchmarks on the most critical native (non-mbstring) functions, performance is almost as good as the mbstring functions - within the acceptable range. The key was this inspired tip. Otherwise it’s bending that /u PCRE_UTF8 pattern modifier to good use.
Anyway - documentation is thin on the ground, apart from inline in the …
PHP Radio
Quick tip - if you haven’t already, check out the Pro::PHP Podcast. Some great shows there, published as mp3 - usually around 30-35 minuts in length but without visuals, it’s easy to multi-task.
Particularily recommend listening to the interview with Andi Gutmans - it’s officially unofficial - PHP6 by the end of this year ;).
Pro::PHP is thanks to host Marcus Whitey (blog), who’s voice has a remarkably calming effect on my 2 month old son (was getting desperate this evening - worked like a charm), and reporter Chris Cornutt (of phpdeveloper).
Profiting Without Frequently Updated Content
Someone asked me today if I thought it was possible to run a successful website that does not get updated frequently. My answer: absolutely!
There are many types of content sites out there, discounting blogs and forums the two most common types are what I call web magazines, or ezines, and reference or resource sites.
SitePoint is a web magazine, they have a large amount of repeat visitors that come expecting new content, like this blog post. On SitePoint’s homepage you’ll find recent content getting the most exposure, this is because that is what visitors want to see, the new content, because chances are they’ve read the old content before.
Now I tend to run reference sites, as I find them to be easier. Wilderness-Survival.net is one of my reference sites and it has been around for about 5 years. If you visit it you will see that there is no real featured content, no recent content to speak of. Instead the content is organized like an encyclopedia or other reference book (hence the term reference site). In fact this site hasn’t had a content update since it was originally launched 5 years ago.
So, what type of site is …
How to generate leads
In a recent blog entry, worchyld asks about how to generate leads. This has been covered extensively in this blog, in my articles on Sitepoint, and in my books, but it’s always good to have a primer:
1. Before you start generating leads, be sure that you have a great strategic foundation in place. This means:
- Choose a target market on which to focus your marketing. That way, you spend less to get more clients.
- Develop a marketing message that communicates the problems you solve, the benefits you provide, how you get results, what sets you apart, and proof of your success. All of these must be in terms that your market finds significant and meaningful to them (not to you).
2. Get visible:
- Start with some low-cost, high-impact ways to get visible: join associations where your target market hangs out; speak; write; do community service in a leadership role; get proactive at developing referral sources; do some research about your target market’s issues; issue newsworthy rpess releases; provide some information products about your area of expertise (i.e., audio, video, white papers).
- Target 25 - 100 prospects. Send each a series of informational letters. Follow up after each one to introduce yourself …
Screencast: Photoshop Starburst Effect
SitePoint is planning a series of premium video tutorials for web developers. To kick off this effort, and to get some valuable feedback from the community (that’s you), we thought we’d start by giving you all a free dose of Photoshop eye candy!
There are two versions of the video: one with additional text captions for the hearing or audio hardware impaired (or for those who just don’t like my voice).
Screencast: Photoshop Starburst Effect (10:09, no captions)
Screencast: Photoshop Starburst Effect (10:09, captioned)
These videos are optimized for low-grade broadband connections, but patient dial-up viewers can wait and view the video once it has loaded.
Depending on your feedback, we plan for future screencasts to cover all the same technical topics that we cover in other areas of sitepoint.com, from down-and-dirty coding tutorials to web design solutions.
Let me stress that your feedback is especially important, here. Screencasts like these take time to produce, and we’d like to see a clear vote of support from our community before we commit to producing them on a regular basis. You can either comment on this blog, make use of our feedback form (put it under Blog Feedback), or drop me a line personally at kevin …
Males, females, diversity, and marketing your services
A coaching client of mine is having some issues managing his staff. Apparently a few of his employees are starting to complain openly at meetings. It turns out that he is having issues with four of his staff members, and that all four are female in an organization that is about 50/50 split between men and women.
So this is an interesting finding. It is easy to jump on this individual as doing something wrong, or on me for highlighting this kind of issue in our politically correct world. But that’s not the point of this blog, so please don’t go there in your posts.
Here is the point:
I find that many of my clients have trouble relating to a variety of types of people different than they are. These include different: sex, age/generation, religion, ethnicity, urban vs. suburban, political views, children vs. childless, married vs. single, different ways of communicating (bottom-line, analytical, political, metaphorical, etc.), different focuses (financial, technological, aesthetic, status, revenues, costs), values, and education.
It is amazing the world is as peaceful a place as it is!
Here is what I think I know:
1. People buy from people they like.
2. The more you can tolerate, respect, and value different types …
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