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Blogs » Archive for July, 2006
Page Strength Analysis Tool
SEOMoz.org has developed a fantastic tool that calculates something they call “Page Strength” which can be used in to gauge the importance and visibility of any Website or Webpage.
I think it’s a great tool for any budding entrepreneur or marketer to have, as the Page Strength score is probably a much more accurate reflection of a Websites importance than Alexa Rank or Google PageRank alone.
Page Strength is based on a number of factors:
- Links pointing to the URL & domain
- Position in Google for the first four words of the title tag
- Age of the Domain
- Links from .edu and .gov domains
- Age of the Domain Name
- Links from Wikipedia, del.icio.us, DMOZ.org
- Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, and more
Give Page Strength a try on your own Website, or the next time you’re looking to acquire through the SitePoint MarketPlace.
Give it a try.
MS Virtual PC Now Free
This just in: Microsoft Virtual PC is now free! Now, you might ask, how does this help me as a developer? Well, let me count the ways:
- It lets one much more easily replicate the production environment without investing in hardware.
- It lets one test out beta software (such as IE 7 or Windows Vista) without breaking their current, working installation.
- Because the VPC image is stored as a file, it allows one to do some serious test runs on violate resources, such as databases, then restore to status quo ante-bellum without complex scripts.
Enjoy.
Jul 12, 2006 News Wire
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Oops! AdSense fails to track conversions for Google Pack referrals
Google pledges to reimburse affected publishers.
(tags: google advertising) -
Turbo-charging xmlrpc
Nice tutorial showing how to expose a PHP XML-RPC service with HTML documentation and support for JSON requests and responses.
(tags: php javascript ajax) -
Analysts see Java EE dying in an SOA world
Pundits predict that Java EE 5 (or, for the purposes of this article, Enterprise JavaBeans 3) will have no place in the enterprise world five years from now. Though some points are interesting, the analysis is tenuous, and rests on unproven SOA ideals.
(tags: java soa) -
Grand Strategy - Ajax-enabled Risk Clone
A Risk-inspired, AJAX-laden strategy game built with Dojo and DWR. This will eat your whole day right up.
(tags: java javascript ajax) -
A DOM Ready Extension for Prototype
A robust solution to the problem of executing JavaScript as soon as the page is ready (but before images are fully loaded) when using the Protoype library for JavaScript. Inspired by a similar solution developed for the jQuery library.
(tags: javascript rubyonrails) -
W AJAX design pattern
An interesting pattern that uses an AJAX request to load data that will take a while to retrieve/generate, while a standard page refresh loads what is immediately available, thereby increasing perceived responsiveness.
(tags: ajax) - Google Maps makes …
Securing your production.log
By default Rails logs all your POST parameters in both development and production. If you are accepting credit card numbers, passwords or other sensitive information then all this data will end up in plain text in your production.log file. Not very cool.
Changing your log level to :warn prevents the logging of requests and their parameterse. To make this change add the following line to your application’s config/environments/production.rb file:
config.log_level = :warn
The only problem with the above method is that you lose lots of useful information. Ideally you just want to make sure specific actions or parameters don’t get logged. Luckily for you somebody’s already figured out how to do this: Kent Sibilev’s plugin code posted to the Rails mailing list back in February excludes params for entire actions, and the filter_logged_params plugin let’s you specify parameter keys to filter out across all actions.
Happy secure logging!
(credit for making me aware of this problem goes to Jeremy at segpub)
Jul 11, 2006 News Wire
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Memory Leak Patterns in Internet Explorer
An interesting MSDN article about how memory leaks come about in IE and its JavaScript engine.
(tags: ie javascript) -
JSON, Ajax, and UTF8
A nice summary of how to implement JSON data transfer from the client to the server in PHP AJAX web applciatons.
(tags: ajax php javascript) -
Flash Document Class
Until ActionScript 3.0 in Flash 9 becomes widely available, this is a useful technique for customizing the class used to represent the root of a Flash movie while requiring a minimum of code (only one line, in fact) in the FLA.
(tags: flash) -
Bot Obedience: Herding Googlebot
A nice run-down of the tools that are at your disposal for controlling how Googlebot indexes the pages on your site.
(tags: google search) -
Get started with Ruby on Rails in less than 5 minutes
Matt Griffith shows off InstantRails in a screencast. InstantRails lets you run Ruby on Rails (incl. Apache and MySQL) on Windows by unzipping a file and running the included program. Uninstalling is as simple as deleting the directory.
(tags: rubyonrails apache mysql) -
OmniPeek Personal
A very nice network analysis, monitoring, and troubleshooting tool for Windows, free for personal use.
(tags: network software) -
50 Redesigns from Scratch
Web Design from Scratch is redesigning 50 real web site home pages from …
The importance of non-judgment and non-attachment in sales and entrepreneurship
The last blog post talked about the importance of failure.
There are two mindsets that makes failure acceptable and bearable, and they are non-judgment and non-attachment.
Both of these mindsets mean that you can go all out to get your business going, or to make a sale — but you stay a bit detached. You don’t judge yourself. You don’t take things personally. You don’t wrap your ego up in how things go, and instead drive to the outcome.
If things work out, great! If they don’t, you observe what happened, learn, make adjustments, and try again.
Many people misinterpret non-attachment to mean that one is passive. That’s not the case. You still move forward powerfully and with full intent. You still give it your all. But you don’t add the junk that so many people add — like tying your sense of personal worth to your success or failure.
A friend and business partner and I recently invested lots of money in a business that didn’t quite work out. I mourned it for a while, and then moved on. He is still kicking himself about the result. What’s the point?
There is a Zen story about two monks crossing a river, when they meet …
Regulazy—Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us
Roy Osherove has created a handy tool, Regulazy, which allows one to create simple regular expressions using a point and click interface.
Installing and managing edge Rails
By request, I’ll give you a quick rundown on how to develop against the latest version of Rails. Why would you want to do this? You might be working on a brand new app that’ll be in development for a while, so stability is not a great concern. Maybe you wanna be the cool kid on the block playing with as-yet-unreleased features. Whatever the case, here’s how you do it.
By default, when you start a Rails app it attempts to use Rails from your project’s vendor/rails directory. If it can not be found it’ll fall back on the latest gem.
To use edge Rails on an existing project, just do an svn checkout of the rails trunk into your vendor/rails directory inside your project.
svn co http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/trunk vendor/rails
If you’re starting a new project, you can check out Rails from SVN and then use it to create your new project. All the following commands are for *nix-based platforms. If you’re a windows user you’ll have to adapt accordingly (and maybe leave a comment for others?)
mkdir -p cutting_edge_project/vendor
cd cutting_edge_project
svn co http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/trunk vendor/rails
ruby vendor/rails/railties/bin/rails .
./script/server
=> Booting Mongrel (use ’script/server webrick’ to force WEBrick)
…
If you want to sync your version of Rails with the latest version …
Jul 10, 2006 News Wire
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MySQL to JSON
A slick little PHP class that can take a MySQL database query result set and convert it to JSON format for transmission to a browser via AJAX.
(tags: ajax php mysql) -
PHP Top 5
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has just published a list of the top five most common security vulnerabilities in web applications, based on Bugtraq data from 2005.
(tags: php security) -
R-U-ON
A free server monitoring service with an open API and a variety of neat widgets.
(tags: network apis) -
Catalyst 5.7000 release announcement
The new release of this MVC framework for Perl rapid web application development brings improved documentation, extensible ActionClass templates, chained action URLs, and simpler distribution packaging.
(tags: perl opensource) -
PHP “raycaster” 3D renderer
A PHP coder with too much time on his hands implements a “Wolfenstein 3D”-era 3D graphics engine in PHP.
(tags: php) -
19 Rails Tricks Most Rails Coders Don’t Know
Nineteen obscure-but-useful features of Rails that even the pros sometimes forget.
(tags: rubyonrails) -
Safari and PHP, File Uploads Solved!
Having problems with form submissions, particularly file uploads in Safari? This obscure bug to do with hidden form fields might be the cause.
(tags: safari)
Generic Dictionaries vs. the XmlSerializer
.NET 2.0’s generics and generic collections are awesome tools. But the very handy generic Dictionary falls on its face when it comes to XmlSerialization. Here is how to work around that issue.
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