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Blogs » Archive for May, 2006
Moving up the food chain
Hopefully all readers of this blog by now know the importance of writing educational and informational pieces to establish yourself as a credible expert in your marketplace. Maybe some of you are even taking it upon yourself to write a book. I’ve done that and it has made a huge difference in my status to clients and to my income.
And nowI’ve just been quoted in a book. The author, Brian Carroll, called me out of the blue (thanks to my writing) and interviewed me. And now I appear on page 163 of his book Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, as “Celebrated business-building consultant Andrew Neitlich.” The book is published by McGraw Hill and due out this month.
I like that. Now see how this kind of thing works for both parties:
- Brian’s writing job is easier because he quotes lots of people like me throughout the book.
- He also gets publicity from people like me, as we tell others that we are in the book.
- I gain a bit more exposure by being cited in his book, as it is not everyday that someone is quoted in a book.
- All I had to do was spend a few minutes with …
Reducing HTTP Requests: An idea for a plugin
Cal Henderson from Flickr recently posted Serving Javascript Fast, where he talks about the approach they use at Flickr to reduce the number of HTTP requests per page and efficiently propagating new changes to assets.
In Rails 1.1 we get the propagation of changed assets for free: all URLs to static assets (javascripts, stylsheets, images) get their last modified timestamp appended to their URL. When an asset gets updated, the URL changes and all clients download the latest version.
For example, the following code:
<%= stylesheet_link_tag ‘common’ %>
will generate something similar to:
<link href=”/stylesheets/common.css?1148952578″ media=”screen” rel=”Stylesheet” type=”text/css” />
Though not as efficient as Flickr’s approach, it’s simple and works for most people.
The other problem Cal addressed, reducing the number of HTTP requests, is not something we get for free in Rails. In fact, the default setup for a Rails application that uses script.aculo.us has 4 javascript files. These four files don’t often change (only when you upgrade Rails), they are often all needed together and are often updated at the same time. Sound like a good candidate for reducing HTTP requests? Wouldn’t it be great if when we deployed our application to a production server we could concatenate these together and have our views …
Stop MSN From Displaying your DMOZ Descriptions
Both Google & MSN have an annoying habit of grabbing your site description from the DMOZ directory, rather than using what you have in your Meta Description tag.
MSN has finally provided Webmasters with an option to override the default behaviour.
What we did was introduce a new option at the page level - a robots meta tag – that tells the MSN search bot not to use the DMOZ site snippet. This is something that only can be done at Web page level, by a webmaster, and is not done as part of the robot.txt file. Source: MSN Blog
The new META tag for your webpages, if you don’t want your sites DMOZ description showing up on MSN Search results pages is:
meta NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”
This is a great way to potentially enhance the clickthrough ratio of your search listings on the MSN Search engine, especially if your DMOZ site description is poorly written or not representative of what you offer.
Reason to like PHP?
Perl;
print { open my $out, “>”, “pidfile”; $out or die } $$, “\n”;
Ruby;
File.open(’pidfile’, ‘w+’){ |fh| fh.puts Process.pid }
I could have used ‘$$’ instead of Process.pid, but I prefer readability
PHP;
file_put_contents( ‘pidfile’, getmypid() );
Yeah I know, I know but anyway…
WCAG 2.0 is broken–leave your comments now!
Last night’s presentation by Gian Sampson-Wild at the Melbourne Web Standards Group meeting about version 2.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines brought home for me just how much of a step backwards for the Web this document is. If the current working draft were to replace WCAG 1.0 as a W3C-approved recommendation, then a lot of the hard work that every web designer or developer who has spent any time learning, promoting or building accessible sites will be undone.
Due to various politics, in-fighting and corporate pandering, key elements that the web community had hung their hopes on–like validity–have been simply omitted from WCAG 2.0; under the guise of being future-proofed, the document is non-technology specific and instead relies on jargon and ambiguous terminology that keeps getting redefined; it encourages the use of a baseline (meaning that a site could simply announce “sorry, this site is only accessible to Flash users” and still pass the WCAG checkpoints–sorry, success criteria); it treads carefully around the unavoidable overlap of usability (to its detriment); and it omits key aspects of accessibility issues encountered by users with cognitive learning disabilities.
In short, this document is supposed to replace the existing guidelines and move the …
Web Directions, Sydney 2006 - WIN an XBOX 360 from SitePoint
If you followed my coverage of Web Essentials last year, you already know it’s an annual gathering of heavy hitters, great thinkers and down-and-dirty practitioners in the web development community. If you were at WE05, you’re probably dying to do it all again!
Web Essentials is happening in Sydney again this year, only this time it’s called Web Directions. There will be two days of workshops (Sept. 26-27) followed by two conference days (Sept. 28-29). As the Platinum Sponsor for the event, SitePoint will be there in full force.
I’ll be presenting with JavaScript Anthology author Cameron Adams a talk entitled “JavaScript APIs & Mashups: work you don’t have to do”, showing off the amazing ways you can use JavaScript to profit from the hard work of others.
Cameron will also be spinning tunes at the final night party (hosted by SitePoint, of course) along with Lucas Chan, SitePoint’s resident DJ. Drink cards for use at this party will be handed out throughout the conference by SitePoint staff, so be sure to say hi!
Speaking of which, one way to get in our good books is to register for the conference through our super-secret (okay, not really) registration …
FireBug 0.4 includes JavaScript Debugger
Web developers need no longer deal with the flakiness of Venkman, Mozilla’s venerable but stagnant JavaScript debugger.
With the release of FireBug 0.4, an excellent extension for analyzing JavaScript and CSS errors and XMLHttpRequest operations (AJAX) that we have covered before, Firefox now has a powerful, up-to-date debugger that you don’t need to hack to get working.
In addition to standard debugging capabilities like setting breakpoints, stepping through code, and inspecting variables, FireBug adds support for checking assertions, automatic breaking on JavaScript errors, and more.
If you do any JavaScript work at all, grab FireBug now and consider making a donation to developer Joe Hewitt, who built the thing in his spare time.
First Look: Google Web Toolkit
Portions of this entry were first published in the SitePoint Tech Times #139.
Have you written your own AJAX framework yet? It seems all the big boys are doing it. Microsoft is bringing us Atlas for ASP.NET, Yahoo!’s User Interface Library is open source, server agnostic and beautifully documented and Adobe is working on Spry, which is off to a shaky start in the web standards department. Do we really need another?
Google’s late-but-inevitable entry into this arena is certainly no copycat. The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is nothing less than a completely original approach to web development that allows server-side Java developers to take their skills to the JavaScript domain… without having to write any JavaScript.
In short, you write, test and debug your client-side code in Java and then use a specialized compiler to convert it all into cross-browser JavaScript for use on your site.
How’s it work?
You can write you client-side code using the usual core Java classes in the java.lang and java.util packages, as well as a nice library of classes that come with GWT that let you access the same browser features that are available in JavaScript (the Docment Object Model, alert boxes, setTimeout, XMLHttpRequest, etc.).
Web Standards Group tonight
I’m speaking at the Melbourne Web Standards Group tonight about techniques for producing rounded corners on the Web. Come along if you’re in town–free pizza for all!
How your gut instincts can help you sell and market
Studies show that physicians generally start out in their career ordering too many tests. Then, as they get more experienced, they order fewer than average. Their gut instincts have developed, and they get pretty good at diagnosing patients without a bunch of unnecessary tests.
Hopefully you, too, have developed your instincts for your business. However, in this case, your instincts should tell you:
- When your pipeline is looking a bit weak and you need to market. Here, your instincts should send you signals of fear and insecurity when the time is right to get more active.
- When a prospect will buy and when they are just “kicking the tires.” That way, you know which opportunities to pursue and which aren’t worth the time.
- When you need to upgrade or broaden your offerings.
- When you need to upgrade your client list.
- When you need to improve your service.
- When you should or shouldn’t trust a client, vendor, or potential business partner.
- When you need to save or protect financial reserves for a while.
- When you can sit back and relax for a while. My gut instincts almost never tell me that I can. What about yours?
Develop and trust your instincts. They can …
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