September 22, 2011
Advantages of Using Corners Without Images
In a previous tutorial, we looked at rounding corners with images using CSS. Though, the page can be optimized for loading speed further by using no images. CSS allows us to use styles that can achieve this effect. Rounded corners work well on sites that need to highlight content on the home page such as ads, new products or news.
Here is the result produced by the code given here:
This is so easy to edit for any usage. Here, the use of a DIV tag with the content means that it can be used with content that is positioned anywhere on the page. Expanding or shrinking the size of the DIV box is straightforward. It will automatically adjust itself to fit the content in the box. Rounded corners give pages with text boxes a more attractive appearance.
Now for the code:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />
<title>Corner without images</title>
<style type=”text/css”>
body{padding: 20px;background-color: #FFF;
font: arial}
h1,h2,p{margin: 0 10px}
h1{font-size: 250%;color: #FFF}
h2{font-size: 200%;color: #f0f0f0}
p{padding-bottom:1em}
h2{padding-top: 0.2em}
div#background{ margin: 0 10%;background: #9BD1FA} /* Setting the background for content and color */
b.rtop, b.rbottom{display:block;background: #FFF} /* Setting the corner color, use different color for different layout */
b.rtop b, b.rbottom b{display:block;height: 1px; overflow: hidden; background: #9BD1FA}/* Setting the strip size and background
color */
b.r1{margin: 0 5px}
b.r2{margin: 0 3px}
b.r3{margin: 0 2px}
b.rtop b.r4, b.rbottom b.r4{margin: 0 1px;height: 1px}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id=”background”>
<b class=”rtop”><b class=”r1″></b><b class=“r2″></b><b class=”r3″></b><b class=”r4″></b></b>
<h1>Boxes Like This With Corners <br>Highlight Your Business Benefits</h1><br>
<p>There are many uses for these boxes. Rounded corners can add some spice to an otherwise dull page. </p>
<ul><li>Smooth Boxes</li><li>Easy To Set Up </li><li>Good for highlighting content</li></ul>
<h2>Have you tried rounded corners?</h2>
<p>Give it a whirl…and see if it can add some extra visual appeal to your web pages.</p>
<b class=”rbottom”><b class=”r4″></b><b class=”r3″></b><b class=”r2″></b><b class=”r1″></b></b>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Try placing the code into several types of pages such as tables and different designs. You will find it easy to use the code in various ways.
Go ahead, round those corners!
Filed under Blog, CSS, Design, Rounded Corners, Web Development, XHTML, XML by DeveloperFox
September 21, 2011
Dates and Times in MySQL, Part 1: Introduction
Storing dates and times in MySQL may appear to be as complicated as dates in real life to those who have never delved into the subject. Programmers often default time using an int datatype and storing the current timestamp using the time() function in PHP. Is there a best way to store dates and times or is it specific to the application I’m working on? This tutorial should answer that question and we’ll start by giving a general introduction to what MySQL has to offer in storing dates.
MySQL as three datatypes for storing date and time information: datetime, date, and timestamp. They all serve the purpose of storing date or time related information and all take the same syntax for input. However, each stores the information in a different way giving it advantages over others in certain situations.
- Datetime:
- Stores: date and time.
- Format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.
- Range: 1000-01-01 00:00:00 to 9999-12-31 23:59:59.
- Date:
- Stores: date.
- Format: YYYY-MM-DD.
- Range: 1000-01-01 to 9999-12-31.
- Timestamp:
- Stores: date and time.
- Format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.
- Range: 1970-01-01 00:00:00 to 2037-12-31 23:59:59.
Obviously, one would want to use datetime when needing to store the date and the time and just use date when you know you only need to store the date. For example, a published book would only need a date whereas a blog comment would need a date and a time. So, what’s the point of the timestamp type? Datetime has a wider range of values and stores the same information as timestamp.
Timestamp has three key features that date and datetime do not have. First, timestamps can default to the current date and time. All other data types must have constant default values. So, for example, instead of specifying the current date and time in your application’s query, one can specify the default value to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as follows,
`timestamp` TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
Second, timestamps can be set to automatically update to the current date and time whenever an update statement is run on the row the field is in. So, instead of specifying the updated date and time in your application’s query, one can specify the value to automatically update to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as follows,
`timestamp` TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
And, these two can be combined,
`timestamp` TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
Third, timestamps convert input to the current UTC time and convert output to the current time zone. Matt Bianco’s comment on a Stackoverflow answer sums up why this is important. He asks, “How long ago was ’2010-09-01 16:31:00′?” If that datetime was recorded in Wellington, you are in Brussels, and I am in New York, then we have to do some computing here against UTC time to find the difference. New Zealand is +12 UTC, Brussels +1, and New York -6. So, the recorded time is 2010-09-01 05:31:00 in Brussels and 2010-08-31 10:31:00 in New York. The time difference is 7 hours! And what if we don’t know where the datetime was originally recorded? Then we only have guesses!
All that to say, if one wants to record the current date and time rows are inserted and/or updated and/or one wants to know the exact date and time something happened, timestamp is the route to go, though, at the expense of a shorter time frame. So, if one is recording birthdays they will run into errors if the birthday is before 1970.
So, that is what MySQL has to offer natively for storing dates and times. Next we will look at the acceptable inputs to these data types and later what the performance differences are and some alternatives.
Filed under Blog, Database by Joe Purcell
“ MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented JavaScript framework designed for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript developer. It allows you to write powerful, flexible, and cross-browser code with its elegant, well documented, and coherent API ”
In this post I’ve selected 8 Mootools navigation,dropdown and sliding menu tutorials. These tutorials will help you create better web 2.0 effects.
1- Nice animated menu using CSS and Mootools
This tutorial illustrates how to implement a nice animated menu using Mootools and some lines of CSS and HTML code ready to reuse in your project.
2- Creating a Sliding Menu Using the MooTools Framework
Tutorial here will show you how to create a sliding menu using the MooTools framework, you are required to have basic knowledge of HTML, you don’t need to know JavaScript to follow this tutorial, but JavaScript will help you understand what the code actually does.
3- Two CSS vertical menu with show/hide effects
This is the basic example with a simple show/hide effect which you can implement just with some lines of JavaScript code.
4- Creating Drop-Down Navigation with Movable Type
The goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to add category driven drop-down menus to your web site.
5- Sliding top panel using mootools
This tutorial explains how to realize a simple sliding top panel (top/down) using mootools, some line of css code and JavaScript.
6- Show-Hide login panel
Add a show/hide login panel to your WordPress theme using Mootools.
7- MenuMatic
MenuMatic is a MooTools 1.2 class that takes a sematic ordered or unordered list of links and turns it into a dynamic drop down menu system.
8- Drop down menu using Mootools 1.2
Filed under Blog, CSS, Design, Java, PHP, Site Navigation, Web Development, Wordpress by DeveloperFox
September 20, 2011
Can I run Windows 8 on my Mac with VMWare Fusion?
I want to start exploring the new Microsoft Windows 8 developer preview that was released but I don’t want to overwrite the OS on my Win7 laptop. Instead, I was wondering if I could successfully install Windows 8 DP on my MacBook Pro using the latest version of VMWare Fusion (v 4.0)? Possible?
Dave’s Answer:
It’s not only possible, it actually works surprisingly well and I have to say, wow, Windows 8 looks completely different to previous versions of Windows that I’m used to, and I’ve been running Windows since it was Windows 3.1, and on and on…
Now is Windows 8 ready for prime time, ready for people to install on their main production computers? Definitely not. In fact, that’s why it’s labeled a “developer’s preview”, along with the fact that we have no idea how stable and reliable the code base is at this point. For all you know, it could crash and corrupt the disk at the most random and unfortunate moment. If you’re not ready for the adventure, definitely stick with a production operating system like the quite stable Windows 7 from Microsoft.
I’ll also warn you that you really need to have VMWare Fusion 4.0 or later, an upgrade just released and tuned for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. I’m running Lion on my MacBook Pro, and as you’ll see, it worked just fine…
To get started, install the latest version of VMWare Fusion. Software well worth having on your Mac anyway, in my opinion. Then download the install image for Windows 8 developer preview. Got them both?
Let’s Go!
I first tried to install Win8 with the 64-bit version of the OS but failed, so here you’ll want to pick 32-bit (x86) for your own installation. Perhaps down the road the 64-bit version will work, but for now, stick with 32 and you’ll be able to proceed.
Once the Win8 “.iso” disk image has downloaded, launch your new version of VMWare Fusion. If you already have a virtual machine running an OS of some sort already installed, you’ll see it appear in the Virtual Machine Library, like I do:
If not, well, it’ll look mostly the same, just the middle part will be blank.
To proceed, click on “Create New” on the lower left corner, and…
Since there’s no actual install DVD for Win8, click on “Continue without disc”…
What you downloaded from Microsoft was a disc image, so select that and it’ll pop up a file selection window. Pick the image (it’ll be named “WindowsDeveloperPreview-32bit-English.iso” or similar) and you’ll be right back where you were, but now it shows the image name:
Looks good so far. Click on “Continue” and you’ll get to pick what set of default configuration settings you need:
As you can see, I picked “Windows 7“, plain and straightforward. Another click on “Continue” and here’s the summary of my settings:
Looks okay, but the problem is that there’s not enough RAM. To fix it, I’ll click on “Customize Settings”, which — rather surprisingly — produces a little window asking you to name the virtual machine:
It makes sense if you think about it, it’s just a bit surprising (to me, at least) where it shows up. Anyway, give it a good, mnemonic name. Or call it “Borg” or whatever. Click “Save” and you’ll be able to tweak the RAM allocated to the virtual machine:
See that icon on the top right, “Processors and Memory”? Click on it. Now you can move the slider to allocate as much memory as you’d like, up to the full RAM of your device:
I’m going to pick 2GB — 2048MB — but if you have a lot of memory, you can’t do wrong by giving it even more RAM to work with.
Set it as you desire, click “Save” on the top left, then click the play button on the top left of the virtual machine window:
Ready? Awaayyyyyy we go:
Very cool, eh? To proceed, just click on “Next”.
Take your time, read every line of the license terms in detail. Check with your attorney. Call your Dad. Or, um, do what the rest of us do and accept the terms without even reading the license 
Either way, once you proceed, you’ll be able to decide whether you want to upgrade or do a clean install:
We’re starting from scratch, so you definitely want “Custom (advanced)” so you can install a new copy of Win 8. Nice.
Next up, time to ensure that it’s going to install on the correct drive (which is pretty straightforward when there’s only one choice and it’s virtual):
Still, make sure it’s correct, then click on “Next” on the lower right (not shown) to proceed.
Now Windows 8 developer preview will start its real install and it’ll take a while:
Some time passes. Alright, a fair amount of time passes, but eventually you see this cool display:
Heck, even the typeface looks good!
A bit later you’ll get to a few screens where you’ll have to enter some info, starting with the most basic of personalization:
You can name the virtual PC anything you want, of course. I called mine “win8dp” in a burst of extraordinary creativity.
There’s a bit more to set up before you’re ready to run Win8:
Then you can connect with your Windows Live account…
I couldn’t get this step to work — it didn’t like my WinLive account — so I ended up clicking on the “skip this step” link that’s hidden near the bottom of the page. I can always reinstall or fix it later, right?
Finally, I’m really, really close:
Another minute or two and we’ve got Windows 8 developer preview running live and with good performance in VMWare Fusion:
As my son would say, this is sick!
And ya gotta admit, this is quite a bit different than any previous version of Microsoft Windows, isn’t it? Oh, see the bottom? It’s a scrollbar. Move it to the side and there’s more!
So that’s it. You’re running Windows 8 within the virtual world of Fusion. Not too bad at all, and quite interesting to see what direction Microsoft’s going with its system.
Filed under Blog, Mac by Dave Taylor
A Flash Gallery is a free application that allows you to create a slideshow on your website easy and fast. You won’t need any programming skills to install or use it. Just embed it into your website and script will automatically form a slideshow from a specified folder or an XML files or from Flickr photostream.
I’ve seen a lot of flash galleries on the web and there are growing fast, in this post, I’ve put together 19 of the best and most beautiful free flash galleries that have been made ever.
1- Flash Photo Gallery
This gallery is easy to configure and update since you need to change only the XML file.
I’ve mentioned some of its features here:
- Flash Gallery is 100% FREE!
- Easy to implement in your site
- Intuitive navigation
- Cross platform – Windows/Macintosh/Linux
- Lightweight, only 11KB
- Image preloader and effects
2- Flash Gallery
This is a free flash gallery for you.You can download it from www.flash-gallery.org website.
Here are a few of its features:
- easy installation
- forms slideshow automatically
- supports Flickr photostream
- customizable design
- fully resizable
3- Free Flash & XML Slideshow Photo Gallery
You can easily add, edit or delete images and thumbnails by editing an xml file in Notepad.
Features:
- Flash Slideshow Photo Gallery
- Next and Previos Buttons
- Add unlimited number of images
- Add photos and captions easily in an XML file which can be easily edited in Notepad
- Preloader for loading images
- Images are loaded externally from a photos folder
- Neat fade-in and fade-out photo transition effect
4- Free Flash & XML Photo Album with Categories
You don’t need the Flash software for editing the gallery. You can easily add, edit or delete pictures and categories by editing a xml file in Notepad. Creating your own Flash photo gallery has never been easier! You can add unlimited number of categories and photos! You need Flash Player 8.0 to view this Flash Photo Gallery.
Features:
- Add unlimited number of categories
- Add unlimited number of images
- Next and Previous buttons to navigate
- Images are loaded externally from a photos folder
- Nice fade-in and fade-out photo transition effect
- Add categories, photos and captions easily in an XML file which can be easily edited in Notepad
5- SimpleViewer
SimpleViewer is a free, customizable Flash image viewing application.
Main Features:
- Intelligent image pre-loading.
- Intuitive image navigation
- Lightweight (17k).
- Customizable interface – Set text color, frame color and width, navigation position.
- Resizable interface – Interface scales to fit browser window.
- Cross platform – Windows/Macintosh/Linux (requires Flash 8 or higher).
- Flash 8 detection. Users without Flash 8 are messaged to upgrade Flash.
- International font support.
- Keyboard Navigation (Cursor keys, Home, End, Page Up/Down)
- Mousewheel navigation
- Optionally right-click to open image in a new window.
6- Agile Gallery
AgileGallery is a free Flash photo gallery that rips through the XML output from Picasa (a free download from google) and generates the paging and thumbnails and displays the full sized photos along with any description entered in Picasa. It also includes a slideshow feature.
7- XML Image Gallery With Source
Tony’s Photo Album is a open source image gallery, you can check its demo by clicking the link below or download it.
[DEMO]
[DOWNLOAD]
8- FREE Photo Gallery
Photo Album v.2 is a free image gallery, you can download it by clicking the link below.
[DOWNLOAD]
9- Flash Photo Album
It’s an easy to use flash gallery.
Main Features:
- Dynamic Picture loading
- Easy to install and easy to change content
- Show pictures automatically with slideshow
- Integrate to any web site
- No server side scripting or database requirement
- Adds great look and functionality to your web site
- Specify other configuration file like asp or php.
- Showing selected image on thumb and showing selected page of thumbs.
- Ability to show up to 1200 images.
10- dfGallery
dfGallery is a free flash gallery, Take a look to some of features.
Features:
- Flash Gallery to support both Flickr , Picasa , Fotki, Photobucket and Custom Images.
- Enable / Disable “Print Screen” ( requested by Photographers )
- Easily Customizable
- Full Screen mode. ( on the Right Click – Flash Player 9)
- Supports both RSS and Custom Images.
- Liquid Layout – Fits to any size you specify.
- Background MP3 music.
- Multiple language support.
- Notifies if a new update is available. 1.003b
11- Flash Page Flip Photo Gallery template for Picasa
12- Flash Photo Stack Gallery
13- Polaroid Gallery
A FREE, open source flash gallery developed by Christopher Einarsrud. The script loads images and image titles dynamically from an external xml file or a Flickr RSS feed.
14- 3D Flash image viewing
TiltViewer is a free, customizable 3D Flash image viewing application.
15- AutoViewer
AutoViewer is a free, customizable Flash image viewer. AutoViewer is designed to display a linear sequence of images and captions.
16- PostcardViewer
PostcardViewer is a free, customizable Flash image viewer. The interface is based on the real world metaphor of a set of postcards shuffled onto a surface.
17- Zen Flash Gallery
Zen Flash Gallery combines simplicity and elegance.
Main Features:
- Flash component (cs3) and swf-xml versions available
- Elegant author’s design
- Smart usability
- Multiple image folders
- Gallery parameters configuration via XML
- Image captions
- Slideshow mode
- Sound effects
- Gallery code is optimized for high productivity
18- Art Flash Gallery
Art Flash Gallery will organically blend with any design thanks to multiple appearance settings.
Take a look to some of features.
Features:
- Flash component (cs3) and swf-xml versions available
- Advanced appearance configuration possibilities
- Gallery parameters configuration via XML
- Convenient thumbnail bar
- Navigation bar
- Image captions
- Slideshow mode
- Full-screen mode
- Sound effects
- Gallery code is optimized for high productivity
19- Nineteen Free Picasa Flash and HTML templates to showcase your photos
Here are nineteen Picasa web templates to create web Flash and HTML photo galleries and slideshows using Google’s Picasa without any knowledge of Flash, HTML, CSS and Javascript. Use these free templates to showcase your photos and images.
Filed under Apple, Blog, CSS, Database, Design, Flash, Java, Mac, Open Source, PHP, Programming, Site Navigation, Web Development, XML by DeveloperFox
September 19, 2011
13 Excellent Tutorials On Creating jQuery Navigation Menu
jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. In this post I’ve selected 13 jQuery navigation menu tutorials for implementing your own jQuery based navigation and have some great effects. Before getting stared you may be interested in looking my post about making navigation menu using CSS and Adobe Photoshop.
[13 hand-picked Vertical and horizontal CSS Menus]
1- How To Create A ‘Mootools Homepage’ Inspired Navigation Effect Using jQuery
As you know there are a host of competing javascript libraries around these days. Though I prefer jQuery, I’ve always liked the way the menu on MooTools worked. So in this tutorial we’ll recreate that same effect.
2- How to make accordion menu using jquery
In this post I’ll show you how can you create fancy accordion menu using jQuery. In this post, you’ll see two examples of accordion. First menu’s visibility get’s toggled on clicking on the header while the another menu’s visibility get’s toggled when the mouse is moved over it.
3- jQuery idTabs
4- Create a multilevel Dropdown menu with CSS and improve it via jQuery
5- Using jQuery for Background Image Animations
6- jQuery & CSS Example – Dropdown Menu
This article is intended to describe an extremely basic, yet extremely powerful, technique for adding dropdown menus in your application user interface or website design.
7- Create an apple style menu and improve it via jQuery
8- Creating a Floating HTML Menu Using jQuery and CSS
9- Drop down menu with jquery
Here’s a drop down animated menu example made with jquery.js 1.2.2
10- Jquery Vertical Slide (Dropdown) Navigation
11- Multi-level drop down menu with jQuery
There are a lot of horizontal drop menus around the web today and they are becoming more and more popular. If you have ever seen these menus and wondered how they work, then today is your lucky day! Here I will be discussing my thoughts as I build a drop down menu from scratch and add some jQuery to it to make it just that little bit more unique and special.
12- Seven jquery plugin to build lovely menu
13- Superfish – “menu jQuery plugin”
Superfish is an enhanced Suckerfish-style menu jQuery plugin that takes an existing pure CSS drop-down menu (so it degrades gracefully without JavaScript).
Filed under AJAX, Apple, Blog, CSS, Design, Java, jQuery, Photoshop, Site Navigation, Web Development by DeveloperFox
September 16, 2011
Google Survivor Tips
The first day of the SMX New York saw an interesting and informative session on surviving tips post the Panda update. The participants of the session were:
Moderator: Matt McGee, Executive News Editor, Search Engine Land
Q&A Moderator: Chris Silver Smith, Director of Optimization Strategies, KeyRelevance
Speakers:
- Alan Bleiweiss, Director of Search Services, Click2Rank Consulting
- Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Senior SEO Manager, Become, Inc
- Mark Munroe, Senior Director, SEO, Everyday Health
Everyday Health’s Mark Munroe took the stage first. He began with recalling the doomsday- February 24th when the Panda hit. He said that the sites that had managed to remain unaffected by the Panda must be on their watch as they can be hit anytime. He further threw light on the types of sites that were hit-
- Content explosion sites
- Thin content sites
- Heavy content aggregation sites
But the sad part here is the quality sites were hit too. Panda is the most important update since PageRank and link reputation.
How the Panda changed Google Search?
Mark said that in the Pre-panda Google, the search relevancy was defined by content and links (anchor text). As an SEO, one could get good results by creating new content and new pages, regardless of its relevance to users. They managed to get some conversions and clicks.
But post the panda, the scenario has changed. Now SERPs are modified based on site’s whole quality. This quality is determined by Google on the basis of how users are interacting with your site in the SERP. Now site owners may wonder what the users can do apart from blocking them straight from the search results. But there is more, and Google knows it.
Google Knows It All
The crux here is user experience. Google knows much more about the SERP user experience of a site than its SEO. As an SEO, one knows about conversions, bounce rates, 2 page visits, 3 page visits. But not more. Infact an SEO knows very less about a user’s SERP experience with his site.
As Mark said, “Google knows more about the user experience of an SEO visit to your site than you do!” If user goes to one site but dissatisfied with the site hits the back button to go on searching, Google makes a note of it. It measures behavioral actions, that is based on extensive data collection.
What Does Google Want You To Do?
Google wants a better user experience. It cares about the customers and their pages. You need to improve the SERP experience to recover from the Panda. For the same address the pages that drive traffic.
The Takeaways-
Other steps recommended by Mark are:
- Survey your users, those who represent your overall traffic.
- Do usability testing starting on the SERP, by using keywords that drive the traffic. Try to work out what are people looking for in your site.
- Find out if the users trust your site.
- Drop the non performing keywords or the content.
- Use spam filters for comment and user generated content.
- Content should be very focused on the title.
- Link freely to relevant content (to direct user to the right content)
- Avoid irritating the users with too many ads.
- Site up time and performance must be top notch
- Optimize your site for mobile browsing.
- Analyze bounce rates on the metrics of 15 sec, 30 seconds and 1 minute bounce rates.
The floor then went to Alan Bleiweiss, Director of Search Services, Click2Rank Consulting. He spoke on the tips to make sure that a site is not hit in the next update. He brought to light two types of SEO- Myopic SEO – This SEO form focuses only on Google based magic bullet methods.
- Topical cross contamination
- Text anorexia
- Internal link poisoning
- Unnatural anchor text
Sustainable SEO – This SEO form works on the basis of user experience as seen through the eyes of search bots and algorithms. Sustainable SEO helps you achieve long term success and survive the Panda.
- Consistent signals on topical focus?
- Does this confirm or confuse focus?
- Does this page overwhelm the senses?
- Have to help Google better understand your sites
- Off-site diversity (links, social..)
- A stronger inbound link to root ratio- more sites sending fewer links to your site
- More visits from other search engines
It is possible to recover from Panda, you just have to be willing to make changes and focus your content. He then gave the specifics of a page with sustainable SEO-
- Section specific sub-navigation
- Micro-data bread crumbs
- High quality topic focused unique content
- Main area content
The idea is to understand your site and work on keywords that have close link-to-root ratio. He assured that if you do sustainable SEO well, you’ll find traffic coming from sites besides Google (20% to 40%).
He then went on to Bing and said that it finds it difficult to find content on their own so you submit a sitemap file to Bing webmaster tools. The next tip was that Bing prefers diversity of anchor text and also displays social results prominently.
The TakeAways:
So, what will be future SEO trends? Alan specified that you will need to go social big time. Also you will need to provide more diversity of deep information regarding-events, products, locations, people profiles. All this will be ranking factor in 2012. Also he believes that schema.org will be a ranking factor. With the idea to tell the search engines what you are about.
Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Senior SEO Manager, Become, Inc took the stage next. His focus was on – How to deal with Panda updates? For the same, he put forward a list of questions that the webmasters needed to answer. The list of 11 questions were designed to create steps and processes for figuring out what is happening, in the case of an algorithm update. Before you decide how to respond, you must turn to see what authority figures with more experience are doing. Remember that not eery traffic drop is from an algorithm update. There can be other reasons too, that you need to investigate.
The list of his questions and thought process following it are-
- Is the data fully in? (gather the pieces, learn the details of the damage with hourly analytics )
- Who else is affected? (look around and communicate with the others
- Algorithm update rumors? (has there really been an update?)
- What was recently launched? (can you rollback some changes that you made on your site?
- What areas are affected? (work on them)
- Did anything break? (your back-end functions may have slipped somewhere)
- Who’s talking? (learn all you can if an algorithm update is confirmed, learn from authoritative sources)
- What sites dropping? (are you the only one? Those not affected- study them)
- What are the theories? (understand what the search engine is trying to address-find the problem and work on what to fix on your site )
- What theories fit? (learn and analyze-why this happened)
- What can we do to recover? (what does a search engine want from you? Look at coding clues and do testing)
The Takeaway:
Micah believes that to stay informed and have a multidirectional approach to the problem will help you recover faster. The session ended here and went on to Q and A. PageTraffic Buzz has more session coverage coming up. Stay tuned.
Filed under Blog, Google, SEO by Navneet Kaushal
The topic of this session of SMX New York 2011 Day 2 is on “Real Answers For Technical SEO Problem”. This session is an interactive session and more of Q and A among the moderators, speakers and audiences. The aim of this session is to find out the root cause of issues and how to get them fixed once and for all.
Moderator:
- Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox)
Q&A Moderator:
- Michael Martin, Senior SEO Strategist, Covario (@googleandblog)
Speakers:
- Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox)
- Todd Nemet, Director, Technical Projects, Nine By Blue (@nemet)
Todd Nemet, Director, Technical Projects, Nine By Blue, begins the session by saying that he has learned about titles at SMX and it does not really matter. So he renamed his. He then said that, we are not going to look at the web site or any of that stuff. Instead, he emphasized to look on things like:
- Network
- Web access longs
- HTTP response codes
- HTTP response headers and
- Talk to the network admin/developers
Questions for IT/Developers:
- Is your load balancing round robin?
- How do you monitor your site? [Because it's rude to ask "DO you monitor your site?"]
- Are there are reverse proxies or CDNs in your configuration?
- Do you do any URL rewriting
- May I have a sample of your web access log files?
From there he will:
- Check load balancing
- Check server latency. Do 10 real quick grabs of the home page and time it.
- Check network latency: They can see a slow network, packet loss. You’ll want to talk to a network, engineer.
- Check for duplicate sites to see how many have DNS records
Web access log analysis:
Todd explains this by saying that , “you have browsers that go to a Web server and a bot that goes to a Web server. Every time something is accessed, an entry gets written into a log file.”
He wants to get all the log files from the server. What kind of data is in there?
- IP address and user-agent: Whose doing the crawling?
- Date: How often are we being crawled?
- Referrer: What’s the referring inbound link?
The URL being requested.
What are the http response codes?
They have created a web log analyzer where their clients upload web log files and take the relevant fields. In the Excel file you get the bot activity, a hierarchical view of what’s happening, query parameters, reverse DNS, HTTP response codes, etc.
Todd comes up with more examples which are as follows:
- He shows an example of crawling inefficiency and a site with about a zillion dynamic sitemaps. For this, Google was spending all its time crawling the million sitemaps and nothing else. Then to fix it, they changed the way sitemaps were generated.
- His next example was about a site that was getting badly scraped. What they did was monitor it to block all the bad IPs.
Duplicate content problems:
Site has 7 version of their home page indexed. Links are going all over the place and being diffused and you’re wasting your crawl time.
Solution: URLRewrite (IIS7+) and URLRewriter (IIS6+)
Todd mentions about other duplicate content problems that come from sorting issues. The solution is to use the canonical tag or redirects so Google is ignoring certain parameters. Your log files will tell you how bad that problem really is.
Poor error handling: Your error pages tend to be the most crawled pages so they’ll look like they’re very important pages, which will bump down other pages.
TakeAways from Todd’s views and examples:
- Look to see if a site is cache friendly.
- Look for character encoding. You want to URL encode those characters.
- Cache control headers
- Compression
- DNS configuration
- Domain health
This session of SMX New York 2011 Day 2 ended here and went head to Q and A. Details are enlisted below:
Q: The client’s home page had an internal server error which was corrected after Google re-indexed the page. Now the home page has been taken out of Google’s index. How can we get it back in?
To this, Vanessa, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land replies by saying that she does not think that it has been re-indexed. She says as Google frequently crawls to your homepage, you dont have to submit. But if your home page is not in the index, something is wrong. Even crappy sites should get their home pages crawled every day.
Q: Should multiple sites be on different IPs to help with link development? Should domain registrations be private or public?
If you’re not a spammer, then the answer would be that there is no reason to hide from the search engines the site that you own. There is no problem with owning multiple sites. If you ARE a spammer, Google will find out that you own those 15,000 domains that are linking to one another.
A: Todd and Vanessa: No, you’re fine. If you don’t do it, you’ll have a major problem.
Googlebot does not crawl the name domain, it is making request via IP.
Todd: I see this quite a bit. It will be in the Webmaster Tools as one of the most frequent linking domains.
Question on going international: They can only sell specific products if they’re going to Canada. But it’s their regular .com product pages which are ranking really well in the top few positions.
Vanessa: What happens with internationalization is that Google says its fine to have 4 different English language sites (US, UK, Australia, etc) but there’s all these different relevance signals that go into ranking. Further, she says that One of them certainly is the country. Part of that is currency, shipping, TLD, having it on a subdomain, etc. All of those should go toward country relevance. The problem is there are other signals that go into ranking as well. Sometimes those other signals outweigh those location relevance signals. You can have IP detection that redirects Canadian users to the Canadian version. It’s a tough problem. You want to start getting local authority by going after local links.
Todd: If you can get shell access, then you can filter that and then zip it.
For Vanessa, Google’s in an infinite loop because the site is pointing at a short URL. When someone has a cookie they can load that URL, but when you arrive for the first time, it appends session information. So Googlebot is never getting a 200 on that short URL.
The Q and A session ended here. For more information on SMX New York, keep tuned to Page Traffic Buzz.
Filed under Blog, SEO by Navneet Kaushal
September 12, 2011
3 Handy Free Tools to Check for Broken Site Links
Have you checked your company website or personal blog for link errors recently? If not, I bet you’d be surprised of how many issues you find using one of these handy free tools.
Regardless if you run a blog, small static website, or a large corporate site; finding and fixing broken site links is extremely important for user-experience, proper indexation, and better search engine rankings.
One way to do this would be to go through your site and test each hyperlink by clicking on them one at a time, but that’s not really feasible for most websites. Especially when most of us are already strapped for time. You could also verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools and check for crawl errors through there. Which I recommend you do anyway. But even then you’re likely working with outdated data and extremely limited features.
A better way would be to use an advanced website audit tool that allows you to crawl and diagnose each website on the fly. Luckily, there are 3 free tools I like to use that make broken link detection and repair super quick and easy.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is undoubtedly my favorite free website spidering tool for small websites. It crawls and analyzes websites extremely fast, then displays the information in a very straightforward and easy to navigate interface.
In addition to helping you detect broken links, Screaming Frog SEO Spider also collects and reports a ton of other helpful search engine optimization related data:
- Server Errors
- Head Section: Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords,
Meta Robots, Meta Refresh, Canonical Link Element - Internal / External Links: Permanent and Temporary Redirects,
Nofollow Link Attribute, Anchor Text - Duplicate Content
- Heading Tags
- File Size
- Page Depth
- Image Information: Alt Attribute, Address, File Size
The free version of Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows you to perform a number of basic tasks while crawling up to 500 URIs. But, for a £99 per annum license, the 500 URI limitation is removed and all configuration options and enhanced features are enabled.
Compatibility: Windows PC, Mac
Xenu Link Sleuth
Xenu Link Sleuth is a completely free broken link checker I like to use for analyzing large and small web sites for broken links. It’s a very basic looking tool specifically designed to detect and report on broken links only; it doesn’t come with a bunch of other fluff which makes it extremely fast and easy to use without having to wade through a ton of irrelevant data just to find important link errors.
The free and only version of tool fully-featured and completely configurable. It offers a number of advanced features such as allowing you to check for specific errors and including or excluding groups of URLs and directories from your analysis. There are a number of export options available, and you can set it up to automatically email you a report upon completion. In addition, the user interface it very straightforward which makes it easy to navigate when you’re looking for particular errors and other important information.
Standard Reports Include:
- Broken Links, Ordered by Link
- Broken links, Ordered by Page
- List of Redirected URLs
- FTP and Gopher URLs
- Valid Text URLs
- Page Title and Meta Descriptions
- Download Speed
- File Type
- HTTP Status
- Orphaned Files
Compatibility: Windows PC
IIS SEO Toolkit
The Free IIS SEO Toolkit is a bit cumbersome for checking web sites for broken links. Especially when you just want to quickly check for any 404 not found errors. It was obviously built with developers and webmasters in mind. However, it’s completely free so once you get a grasp on it you’ll find it does a great job of auditing your website and reporting a ton of important search engine optimization related issues, in addition to finding broken links.
From within the link report you will be pleased to find the link URL, status code, page title and meta description of the linked pages. Simply right click or double click the URL to find additional details such as the linking page, last modified date, HTTP headers and content type.
Summary of all items reported:
- Invalid Markup
- Robots.txt Restrictions
- Duplicate Content
- Hyperlink Errors
- Performance Issues
- Missing Image Alt Attributes
Note: after you download and install the IIS SEO Tookit on your Windows PC, you’ll have to bind your website URL to the “Default Web Site” within the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, if you want it to crawl your hosted website or blog on a remote server rather than a local copy on your computer.
Like I said, it’s a bit cumbersome for simply doing broken link checks, but is one of the best “free” tools available for doing complete site audits – including checking broken links.
If you have an extremely small website you might also want to use the free crawl test tool from SEOmoz. It’s a fairly informative tool that will crawl and report on up to 250 site links for free.
I like to start with my favorite tool, then after I’ve fixed all of the concerning issues I double check my site with another preferred tool. All three of these broken link checkers do a fairly good job, but they don’t always find and report the exact same error codes and site issues. So I recommend not relying solely on one of them to sort out all of your site’s kinks.
I know there are some other really great paid tools, but keeping in-line with the topic of this post; what’s your favorite “free” broken link checker tool? Do you know of any good ones I haven’t listed here? Please take a moment to share your favorite with the rest of us below.
Thanks for reading and sharing!
Filed under Blog, Design by Wesley LeFebvre
September 9, 2011
Elmah.MVC NuGet Package Released
ELMAH stands for Error Logging Modules And Handlers (ELMAH). As Scott Hanselman puts it, “ELMAH is Tivo for your ASP.NET Errors.” Alexander Beletsky made changes and wrote a how-to on installing it. ELMAH’s recent release on NuGet makes it that much easier.
Atif Aziz developed ELMAH in 2004 under the New BSD License. Since then it has caught a lot of attention and just this week Alexander has created a NuGet package for ELMAH v1.1 to make installing it easier. Installing is as simple as:
PM> Install-Package Elmah.MVC
There are some changes to make still for working with routing administrative pages and there is a known issue.
Darren Cauthon has published a fairly extensive Tutorial on ELMAH which gives a feel for how ELMAH works and what it has to offer. Atif has a diagram of the classes involved on his website which gives an inside look. Atif and Scott Mitchell produced perhaps the most comprehensive article on ELMAH on MSDN.
Scott Hanselman says that ELMAH has been rocking his world since it was released and says “it just works.” Take advantage of the wonderful world of error logs on your ASP site with ELMAH or the like.
Filed under ASP, Blog by Joe Purcell
