Panda in bar….
A panda walks into a bar and orders some food, after he's done eating he shoots the bartender and starts leaving. "Hey, you can't do that!" said someone else in…
Search Engine Ranking via Title Tags
”How do I get my website page to rank well in search engines for a certain search term?”. While there are many techniques and tactics that can contribute to how your website ranks, one of the most fundamental is through the use of title tags. Title tags let search engines know what the main thrust of each web page is, and which categories or search terms to file the site under. By the way a title tag is what falls between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags in your html code for each page.
Read and parse text files with PHP
Read and parse text files with PHP
Quite often, the need pops up to read and parse text files, typically these are plain text or CSV (exports from Excel, MS Access or some other source).
This guide will show you the pest practice for doing so.
Forum is here…
I have recently added a forum to my site. If you have any specific requests for some development (PHP,.NET ... anything), project management, search engine optimisation... or just want to…
PHP – Generate/Create strong passwords, uuid, random string
Very often the need to create passwords or some other ‘unique’ string be it a captcha or for use as unique identifier (UUID).
Here are a few functions I’ve used and refined over the years, 2 types, for password/random string generation and UUID generation.
Generating random strings is pretty simple as it’ll be a password.
However for a UUID there is always the slim chance it’s not unique.
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Signs of poor PHP ‘products’
If you are a professional developer (or aspiring) you will inevitably get asked to customise or even better “extend” existing wares.
If it’s a product you are familiar with great! If not I heartilly reccomend spending a little time investigating prior to accepting a job ( ultimatley if they are happy to give
access to their code, if not atleast tell you what’s been used so you cam repliocate it to play with briefly). I know this sounds like a lot of work wich ultimatley – if you
don’t accept the job – you have done for free, but it will save you masses of grief, tears and late nights if you do.
So, I have a few pointers to ‘be aware of’ while evaluating the job and to (generally) identify crappy PHP products/solutions quickly…
PHP Form Action Self submit
A question I am always asked is about ‘self-submitting’ forms.
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Firefox horizontal jump between pages!
For a very long time I have always been annoyed by Firefox... Have you ever witnessed the 'horizontal jump' cause by your content being taller then the browser size? And…
Dinner in Rick Stein’s – The Seafood Restaurant
Laura and I recently had a weekend break in Cornwall, and since we were there we decided to visit Rick Stein's The Seafood Restaurant. It had recently undergone a refurbishment…
Capitalization for us Mc’s and Mac’s!
Needed to capltalize Mc’s and Mac’s? Here’s a quick function for it…
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Principles of Web Design
When I undertake developing a website I always try to keep 3 key principles in mind;
1. Simplicity
2. Modularity
3. Balance
Follow my basic guide and you’ll become a better developer/designer…
ColdFusion – replace nl to br
Just a quickie if you need to replace NL (New Line or Carriage Return) in CFMX; <cfset text = replace(text,'#Chr(10)##Chr(13)#','<br>',"All")> You could also wrap it up in a CFC or…
SEO/SEM and the quality of your web traffic…
The people we (web designers/developers) create work for are always really interested in web traffic – LOTS of web traffic. But there is one thing that many web designers/developers and even our clients don’t consider, is the quality of traffic.
We (developers & clients alike) love counting page-views and unique visits but from my point of view, if the traffic you are attracting is poor, who cares if you get thousands of visits a day!
How can we determine the ‘quality’ of web traffic?
- Length of their visit…
- If you sell a service/product what your ‘conversion rate’ is…
- How many bookmark/’add-to-favorite’ your website.
- How many people visit your website by directly typing in your web address.
Choosing a SEO/SEM friendly domain name…
NOTE: SEO is the acronym for: ’search engine optimisation. Which is the process of making your web pages more search engine ‘friendly’ by optimising the code and content.
Choosing the correct domain name for your site generally has a big impact in terms of how it affects your positions in the search engines and your overall traffic.
THERE ARE 3 CRITICAL FACTORS, YOUR DOMAIN NAME…
- … should contain key words.
- … should be as short as possible – easy to remember & easy to type in.
- … can be better off as a .com over say a .net, org etc …
- … consider localisation of the domain… i.e. if you want it to do well in the UK .co.uk etc etc…
Creating good passwords…
Recently I was reviewing the security practices for my users... I like to get them to change their windows login regularly as it's used via LDAP etc etc in some…