Posts from — June 2006

An important feture of every website is search. An effective site search engine allows your visitors to find the information that they require with minimal effort. This adds to the overall ease of use of your website resulting in a better user experience and as a result…repeat visitors. Phpdig is a free search engine for your website. Although it takes some elbow grease to get it working as avertised, once it is up and running you are left with a powerful, self-sustaining search engine that gets the job done.

PhpDig is a web spider and search engine written in PHP, using a MySQL database and flat file support. PhpDig builds a glossary with words found in indexed pages. On a search query, it displays a result page containing the search keys, ranked by occurrence.

PhpDig.net - Web Spider and Search Engine

Lets face it, unless you have a photographic memory, no developer can remember all the different functions, options, tags, etc. that exist. Documentation can be cumbersome at times, thats why I like cheat sheets. They are quick references that feature the most commonly forgotten things on a specific topic. You can print them out and hang them on your wall, or just keep them handy in your bookmarks for quick reference.I have rounded up over 30 cheatsheets that developers might find useful.

Cheat Sheet Roundup - Over 30 Cheatsheets for developers

Business blogs can be a good choice for both large and small companies - most companies already have a profile on the internet, but especially smaller companies are struggling to get visitors, and have serious problems reaching people interested in their field of business. Start a blog and use various ping services to reach out to millions of readers all over the world!

Why business blogs are important | The undersigned

While most web users rely on Internet Explorer when surfing the net, it might also be a good idea to redesign your site for Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Why? For one thing, more than 140 million people have downloaded Firefox to date, and 40 million to 50 million use it on a daily basis, according to Mozilla.

All Fired Up

These libraries include JavaScript, Ajax, Colors, PHP, and CSS. These should be in any web developers bookmarks, so go ahead and look through these libraries and bookmark your favorite ones. The list is in no particular order.

Top 10 Web Developer Libraries

The 25 European Commission member states and nine accession countries have all signed up for a plan that could make accessibility in e-procurement mandatory.

The 34 countries all signed an agreement in Riga, Latvia, on Wednesday, committing themselves to the “Internet for all” action plan, designed to ensure that the most Web-disadvantaged groups can get online.

The EC has now pledged to increase broadband coverage across the continent to 90 percent by 2010. Rural areas are still underserved, according to the Commission, with about 60 percent penetration. Urban areas fare better and are already at the 90 percent mark.

The EC has also committed to putting new measures in place to halve exclusion rates in skills and digital literacy by 2010.

Web accessibility soon mandatory in Europe? | CNET News.com

Blogged with Flock

In this day and age, your business card is a website. When people hear of your company or wish to seek further information on it, they want to do so on their own time, online. From there they can e-mail you with questions, or place an order if you offer products online as well. In fact, with the amount of trade that can be achieved through a website, it’s no wonder that so many brick-&-mortar small businesses have made the jump to e-commerce.

Taking Your Business Online

Imagine if web applications could store megabytes of data on the client-side, in the browser, both persistently and securely. No server needed.

Imagine if web applications could work offline with the click of a button. Want to access your web based word processor when you are not on the network, with your private files stored privately, right on your own machine and not on some server? Now you can.

Even better, imagine if all of this worked across the existing web; 95% of the existing browsers on the web could start using these features right now, with no software installs or funky new browsers.

What could you build if you had these tools? How about a truly collaborative, web-based word processor with client-side storage for your private documents, as well as offline access? Maybe an Ajax RSS aggregator with client-side caching of the feeds you read and offline access? An offline, web-based book reader using data from the Internet Archive’s Open Library would be cool.

Brad Neuberg: Coding In Paradise: Now in a Browser Near You: Offline Access and Permanent, Client-Side Storage, Thanks to Dojo.Storage

So you have a beautiful website complete and you have no idea what to name it. You have tried to think and think over and over, yet nothing seems good enough and every name that you do like is taken by some other website that probably doesn’t even deserve it. I know how painful giving anything a title can be so I have come up with a few ways you can name your website. Before thinking of a domain name you should remember that all good domain names are:

• easy to remember
• easy to spell
• less than 15 characters
• suggestive of the nature of your product or service
• free of legal conflicts with trademarks belonging to other businesses.
• have low google search counts
• etc…

All right, now that we have gone over a few of the basics as to what makes a good domain name, lets consider a few techniques to name just about anything ranging from your social science project on bananas to your wonderful websites.

CarbonPipeline » 5 Great Domain Naming Techniques

Should you use CSS or (horror of horrors) tables? And what do you do when images are ‘blocked’?HTML email - you either love it or you hate it. Some love the simplicity of text-only emails, while others praise the flexibility and good looks of HTML. But it doesn’t really matter whether you love it or hate it because sooner or later a client will ask you to design one of those ‘pretty looking email thingies’ for their own customers, and then what do you do?

Vitamin Features » HTML Emails - Taming the Beast