Programming and Coding Archives

Carsten Cumbrowski has written a nice piece at Search Engine Journal about the 50 questions that you should ask to evaluate the quality of your website. He groups the questions into categories from Accessibility to Design to Security and even Legal questions. A sampling of questions:

Security: How resilient are forms to special characters? Accessibility: How compliant is the website with W3C coding standards? Valid HTML/CSS? Navigation: Call to action on every page, no dead ends

These are great questions and this is a checklist that should not be ignored when designing a website (and then performing QA on it afterwards).

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Larry Constantine recently wrote The Open-Source Solution: If most commercial software isn't any good, why not use a more communal approach?

Open source may be superior in producing robust, reliable code. It can hold its own in providing functionality. But its weakness remains usability, which increasingly is the battle­ground for competing programs.

He writes that the joint efforts by a million programmers increases software reliability, but overall usability hasn't been reached yet, especially as new functionality is added. Joe Dolson brought this topic up for discussion, and it appears as though the consensus is that in some cases, usability has been accomplished. They point out WordPress as an example. What do you think?

Cre8asiteforums discussion: Open Source Software Weak In Usability?

We all know about PPC fraud and that some of the fraud is caused by bots (robots) that click on the ads and drive up your bill and unwanted traffic. But it gets more serious than that. Bot are also used to steal your content, spam your site with comment spam, guestbook spam, dhtml spam and some very bad hacks.

Often, when someone writes a script to have a bot do any of the evil things they may do, they let the bot run wild. Sometimes that may take down your server.

Discovery at Search Engine Watch Forums links to a Wired article named Attack of the Bots.

The latest threat to the Net: autonomous software programs that combine forces to perpetrate mayhem, fraud, and espionage on a global scale. How one company fought the new Internet mafia – and lost.

Bots have gotten to us, they have. They got to WebmasterWorld, DigitialPoint Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums and many many other sites.

Discovery asks, not only in terms of PPC fraud and click fraud;

Have your concerns with bots grown over this past year?

I answer, Yes.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Remember when you booted up your computer and that friendly browser quietly appeared, ready to take you anywhere with no fuss?

Not anymore. Now, Microsoft is going to sneak in an upgrade to your IE 6.0 browser. If you don't want it, (and what developer isn't cautious about environments?), read the instructions first.

1.Use the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to prepare for the release of IE7

2.Test and resolve any issues with their Web sites and applications using the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 (ACT 5.0).

3.Determine if their organization is ready for IE7 or needs to delay deployment. Find information on deploying the nonexpiring IE7 Blocker Toolkit on our Web site.

Some programmers and web developers are having a blast testing it. You may want to stop by and take the training, or just watch the daring ones, like John.

Ah, and of course: No, it's not just a browser update. It also forces me to install some tool to avoid bad software. Isn't my system slow enough already? Software firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, etc. Now I am also forced to use some tool which I have no idea about - no idea what it really does, if it's running now as I type or what it will do.

Forum discussion:
Cre8asiteforums

I'm convinced, after reading Cre8asiteforums' Multiple Domain Names & IIS?, Just set it in IIS or 301 Re-Direct ..., that programmers are not unlike football players. They like to call out code words to their team mates and spend hours practicing plays to fake out the offense. Okay. I take that back. Programmers AND SEO/M's are like football players.

"An ANAME points a domain name to an IP, i.e.:
blah.com => xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

A CNAME points a domain name to another domain name, i.e.:
blah.com => webserver.blah.com"

What I tell ya?

Google organizes the worlds information, according to its Mission Statement. One of the biggest problems for Google is dealing with multiple sources that cite the exact same information, or even what they would consider "very close to the same." This area of Google's indexing algorithm specifically deals with the issue now commonly known as duplicate content. As we can tell by research, "duplicate content" is a little misleading since it refers to "nearly duplicate" as well. We recently covered this subject in specific regards to Article Syndication.

A thread at Search Engine Roundtable Forums brings up a nice real-life example of how Google sometimes omits certain pages from the default results due to being considered duplicate content. The member suggests that the solution in this case (the example discusses SER Forum pages indexed) is

to reduce unnecessary code on page

Barry wonders when "Google will "get it right..." However no further opinions have been added. Please join the Search Engine Roundtable Forum topic and give your thoughts or relate your experiences on the subject of Google unique content determination. Real "live" case studies usually lead to nice concrete discussion.

Nice thread over at HighRankings Forum about problems a member is having instituting a 301 redirect. This is a hot topic right now, since so many people are becoming aware of using a 301 redirect to avoid duplicate content issues, dynamic content issues, and canonical problems, to name a few.

"Just setting up a 301 redirect" is not as simple as it may sound. Can this process be easily accomplished using any server framework? Apparently not, according to one poster:

...asked a hosting company if they could turn on ASP processing for HTML pages. Yes, that's possible, but no, they'd rather not because it creates a security problem. Am I going to take that risk, against advice, and risk hosing the client's server...

See the thread at HighRankings Forum

and a topical thread at Search Engine Watch Forums

and a nice intro found at Cre8asite Forums.

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets have some amazing implications to help the SEO create better optimized pages without tables in addition to a fluid and clean design that not only helps visitors put helps search engines get to the content of your page. There is a very good thread on Crea8site Forums I wanted to highlight as its got some gems to take away for those that use CSS to design websites. Barry Welford started the thread with a tip that helps many browsers deal with DIV tags by using a containing block to help get the positioning right. He says "It's so simple too. It's always to use two divs one inside the other." He goes into detail that his tip works well for many browsers such as Firefox and IE that might treat the width, padding, and borders differently.

Some of the members go into detail why this is and not useful in most cases. Adrian goes into saying that unfortunately we wouldn't need to use the hack unless all browsers handled div's correctly, basically stating that the hack is using 2 div's to do the job of one. Most designers I run into don't go as far as the hack mentioned in the thread but instead use container div's for overall page layout as Adrian mentions. There are some good posts and information from some experts on how they design. Plus some nice resources for other sites to help with CSS. Felt this thread deserved a mention for its great content.

Check out CSS, Style, and Positioning - The Single Best Rule No One Told Me