Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Massive Regular Expressions Toolbox


Regular expressions (”regex’s” for short) are sets of symbols and syntactic elements used to match patterns of text and they are pretty powerful. Regular expressions have been around for a very long time (in computer industry scale) and was first introduced as part of the powerful UNIX search tool grep.

The regex syntax used commonly today is compliant with Extended Regular Expressions (EREs) defined in IEEE POSIX 1003.2 (Section 2.8). EREs are supported by Apache, PHP4+, Javascript 1.3+, MS Visual Studio, MS Frontpage, most visual editors, vi, emac, the GNU family of tools (including grep, awk and sed) as well as many others. Extended Regular Expressions (EREs) will support Basic Regular Expressions (BREs are essentially a subset of EREs). The BRE syntax is considered obsolete and is only still around to preserve backward compatibility.

I believe mastering at least the most basic elements of regex is essential for any programmer. Further I know that having direct access to references, examples, ready to use patterns etc. is essential to speed up your work.

This is a toolbox for getting started and/or becoming more serious about regex. It provides details on commonly needed regexs that you can just pick up and use right away. Lets get started!

Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/tutorials/tutorials/massive-regular-expressions-toolbox.html

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Excellent Free Editors and IDEs for Developers


Most developers have picked their favourite editor and/or IDE and use it many hours every day (and night). Still it can be quite useful to know what the free alternatives are. Some of the free editors and IDEs available are really high quality and may be worth investigating. If your manly using a large IDE it is likely that having a simple editor as well may improve your efficiency when just editing single files. The free alternative IDEs are also very powerful oprions and may beat some commercials competitors easily when it comes to feaures and easy of use. In this article tripwire magazine provides a list of more than 20 free Editors and IDEs useful for most developers. Let us all know if I missed a great product by posting a comment.

Editors

  1. Notepad++
  2. CodeLobster PHP Edition
  3. netpadd
  4. HAPedit
  5. Arachnophilia
  6. Visual Web Developer 2008
  7. Amaya
  8. Programmer’s Notepad
  9. RText
  10. Nvu
  11. PSPad
  12. NoteTab Light
  13. Crimson Editor
  14. Komodo Edit
  15. TotalEdit
  16. Scriptly
  17. HTML-Kit

IDEs

  1. aptana
  2. netbeans
  3. Eclipse

Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/tools/tools/excellent-free-editors-and-ides-for-developers.html


7 Great Ad Server Solutions

Ever feel overwhelmed by your advertising? That’s where ad servers come into play as they let you swap out ads quickly after only putting the HTML or JavaScript tags in your site once. After you’re all set up, you just need to head to your server whenever you need to change an ad. You can also monitor stats, geo-target ads and make numerous other little tweaks to make sure you are optimizing your returns.

What are you waiting for? Find the server solution that best suits your needs!

1) ADTECH

2) Atlas Solutions

3) Bluestreak

4) DoubleClick

5) Google Ad Manager

6) OpenX

7) Smart AdServer

Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/08/10/7-great-ad-server-solutions/


10 SEO Tips Search Engine Optimization

Here are ten tips that we have found to help you get better page rankings on your website.

1.) Limit Multimedia

What is old is proven and true. Web designers are constantly competing against each other to design a more hip website but is it actually a site that is functional. A lot of time I just click past the Flash screens. They take up to much time and time is money. So, get into the head of the visitor to your site. Use multimedia for training and for informative pieces. Keep away from Flash screens because Google ranking bots don’t understand them.

2.) Use text, not graphics

Graphics are cool but not functional. When search engine bots go to a site they are looking for content. Search engines bots cannot find the information if it is located in a graphic. If you are using graphical buttons for navigation, make sure you have textual links located somewhere on your page. The search engine will then be able to naviagate the site. if the search engine cannot navigate the site then it will not rank the page well within the searches. Keep the graphical links to a minimal. Make sure that the search engines can get to the text links. If you have a complicated page, then position the links at the top of the page.

3.) Don’t be too clever

Stay one step behind the current technology. The web was built for research and usability. Entertainment sites, Games etc are all great. We are in the business of selling products and services. Have you ever looked at Amazons website? Amazon is one of the leaders of selling information. They do not use fancy Flash presentations. They are using black on white text. Search engines like this type of text. It is simple to navigate and that
means more visitors will come to the site. The easier your site is to navigate and search the more visitors will come to your site and tell others about it.

4.) Be straight forward

One of the pitfalls of designing a website is being evasive or being too cute. If you can understand the information that is great but what about your audience. A major downfall is a large graphic with hotspots on it. Unless you move your mouse around the image you will not know that it is
clickable. The search engine bot will not be able to do this and so you will end up failing on navigation. This will push your site lower in the rankings on the search engines which means less customers.

5.) Avoid Frames

Everyone wants to be cool and stylish. Red alert frames are outdated. They are from the 90’s. Search engines do not like them. If search engines
(momma) are not happy with it. Then avoid it. Remember not everyone is using the latest brower, so keep it simple.

6.) Make it easy to move around

When you are designing your site remember you are not the one using it. You need to design the website for navigation by the visitors. If the website is not easy to navigate then visitors will not come back. Ask yourself these questions:

• Does the website make sense from a visitor’s standpoint?

• Is information easy to access?

• Do you have unavailable links? – Search engines do not like broken links and you will be penalized.

7.) Provide visitors with different routes

When visitors go on your site you want to provide multiple routes to progress around the site. By doing this you will provide more information to the search engines. Some of the different ways:

• Sitemap – A sitemap will list the different links within your website providing more ways to navigate the website. Search engines will find this appealing.

• Table of Contents or Index Page – This is another technique that you can use. This will list your links in alphabetical order.

• Navigation bars – These are very handy for navigation. Caution!!! – If using JavaScript and other dynamic programming you need to make sure you have another way of accessing the links. Search engines have a hard time negotiating script to find the information. So, the links that you have will not be indexed correctly.

• Navigation text links – Links in text will help individuals find more information on your website. If individuals can easily navigate the site then the search engine bots will also. Some SEO professionals will recommend that you put these links towards the top then at the bottom.

8.) Use long link text

The more information that you provide with your links the more information you will give to the search engines. This also easier for the visitors to navigate your websites. Try to stay away from “Click Here”. This does not tell the visitor why they should click on the link. When designing your website links make sure that you include your keywords. This will help in calculating your keyword density. This is the % of keywords on the page.

9.) Stop restructuring your website

Broken links are mostly caused by restructuring of the website. When visitors bookmark your site they will be presented by 404 page not found. You can prevent this by not changing the structure of your website. Plan in the beginning and keep that structure. Only make changes that will not cause broken links. You can also create custom 404 page not found. A custom 404 page can redirect an individual to a page within your website which can keep the visitor within your environment.

10.) Spell Check

Nothing annoys visitors about a site more then misspelled words. This ensures that your keywords are utilized to their maximum value. So, before you publish your site have someone proof read the site. Make sure you use the spell checking services in your web design software.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Encrypt the POST-GET Data when you submit a form using jCryption

Cryption is a JavaScript HTML-Form Encryption JQuery Plugin, which encrypts the POST/GET-Data that is sent when a form is submitted. For the calculation it uses the Multiple-precision and Barrett modular reduction libraries and JQuery. The data is encrypted on the client side (JavaScript) and decrypted on the server (PHP).

jcryption

Features include:

  • It is easy to install, use and extend
  • RSA form data encryption up to 2048 bit
  • AjaxSubmit supported
  • no SSL required
  • Does not block the browser on calculations

jCryption first serializes the form, converts the string into hexadecimal values which is required to encrypt it. When the keypair was generated on the server, the script receives it, encrypts the string with the public key and sends it to the sever where the string will be decrypted. When this is done you have your original serialized string back which is equal to a normal form submit (GET or POST).

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

A jQuery inline form validation, because validation is a mess

When it comes to form validation, it’s hard to have a versatile solution that works with every form. Figuring out how to display errors is not a simple task. This is something I tried to remedy with this script. When an error needs to be displayed, the script creates a div and positions it in the top right corner of the input. This way you don’t have to worry about your HTML form structure. The rounded corner and shadow are done with CSS3 and degrade well in non compliant browsers. There is no images needed.

When you submit a form, it will look for inputs with predefined class selectors, and validate them accordingly to their type. It also does on the fly validation when you click outside of the input. When validating on submit , every errors will appear in absolute position above the input in question, and slide the scroll bar to this first error (diminish your browser window if you don’t see the effect).

The on the fly validation will validate the modified input when you click outside of the text zone.

View demo

Localisation language is also available, I already did a (poor) french localisation. Do not include more than one localization at a time in a page. Custom regEx rules with error messages can also be added very easily for you crazy guys that understand how regEx rules actually work.

Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.position-absolute.com/articles/jquery-form-validator-because-form-validation-is-a-mess/

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Easy ways to fix common WordPress headaches, best for developers and designers

There always seems to be some common WordPress problems that need you to dive into the code and hack away, here is a sample of plugins to help stop the hacking!

Exclude Pages

‘This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).’

excludepages


Read the rest of this entry »

http://guidesigner.net/extenshion/easy-ways-to-fix-common-wordpress-headaches-best-for-developers-and-designers/

How to SEO Optimize WordPress

Here are the advanced tutorials on how to optimize your WordPress inSearch Engine websites. Just encase you are very new to WordPress, below tutorials really help with the development of your WP Blog site.

How to SEO optimize WordPress


Read the rest of this entry »

http://r3.elasticweavers.com/how-to-seo-optimize-wordpress.php

Sunday, August 2, 2009

The 30 Free SEO Tools You Must Know

Recently a “101 free SEO Tools that don’t suck” list went popular on Sphinn. I love 101 items lists and I love free SEO tools especially if the tools “don’t suck”. While checking out the list I’ve encountered some tools I haven’t been using much or been familiar with at all. On the other hand I was missing some tools I use daily. When I noticed that the list actually contains SEO tools that measure the so called keyword density I finally decided to compile my own list.

Here I want to focus on those few free SEO tools you must know to be able to practice SEO in a meaningful way.

Using 101 tools for whatever purpose is not productive. At the end of the day you got to find your set of say 10 or 12 tools you’ll use. Everything else is just playing around and wasting your precious time. Thus this list will be the size of the usual SEOptimise list, approx. 30 items. I’ll concentrate on free SEO tools here as everybody can test them this way. Some of them are freemium that is they offer basic functionality for free and make you pay for the full fledged product.

This list of the 30 free SEO tools you must know will be a mix of

  • web based tools
  • stand alone software
  • Firefox extensions

Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2009/07/the-30-free-seo-tools-you-must-know.html