Webmaster

Liquid Layouts and IE

I have spent some time recently revisiting CSS while trying to throw together some fairly simple layouts. The problem with CSS 3 years ago was lack of consistent support from various browsers. That problem still exists today - even with IE7 gaining a large market presence.

Since IE 5 is now becoming a forgotten browser, and CSS support has grown up a great deal, are we getting to a point where we can now create effective layouts? Yes and no.

IE7 Font Sizes Too Large

I'm working on some new layouts, and I decided to (shudder) open up IE7 and see how things looked. Whoa! My fonts in IE were way too big. I searched around looking for problems with IE7 and with Dell computers since I had found a similar problem with my wife's Dell laptop, but all of the solutions I found were not appropriate for my machine.

Amazon EC2 now has Static IPs

I've talked a little bit about Amazon's elastic computing cloud lately. One of the problems I lamented was the lack of a static IP which made a lot of web-centric services difficult to manage.

That problem is now gone, but there is a price.

Data Centers and Cosmic Rays

Does your data center do anything to prevent cosmic rays from entering the building? Are you not sure? If you aren't sure, you should absolutely be using ECC RAM.

I finally got started with EC2

So amazon has had this service I've talked about on the blog in the past called EC2 - the elastic computing cloud. I'm moving forward with this service, and I'm seeing why it hasn't been exceptionally well received to this point - it's complicated.

I'm not up and running yet, but I do hope to get things going in the very near future.

Backing Up Files with Snapback

In my last blog entry, I mentioned that automated backups were a concern of mine. I also linked to Mike Rubel's rsync page. On Mike's page, I found a perl module that makes things easy, it's called Snapback2.

You can download Snapback2 from CPAN or install it via the MCPAN shell. I have a few notes on getting it set up and configured.

HTML Purifier for PHP

I caught a link to this library from ajaxian. It's a PHP based html parser intended to be used to clean up user provided html - for instance within a commenting system.

I don't know that I'm completely sold on it yet, but I do find it interesting to review.

Replacing Your Boot Hard Disk

I went through a disaster over the end of last week and the weekend. The end result of the disaster is that I had a web server with not one, but two failing drives. Once I had determined the problem to be failing disks, the question arose - 'how do I replace a failing hard disk'? There are a lot of answers to that question on the web, especially where the linux OS is concerned.

Unfortunately, most of the sites out there that provide advice - at least the one's that I found - assume that the boot drive is not the drive that is failing. Mine was, so here's the advice I have for the next guy.

The solution actually works regardless of whether or not you are dealing with a boot drive, and will probably. work to repair a failing windows boot volume as well.

VRML - the Next Revisited Technology

I was thinking to myself tonight - whatever happened to VRML? I don't know if you remember, but it is a 3D modeling language used in web browsers, provided you have the right plugin installed.

It looks like the language is alive and well. It is poised to be the next big thing even though it's a good 10 years old - kind of like AJAX.

HTTP Success Codes You Should Know About

Every time I reference the HTTP spec or reference a book with a decent level of detail, I find something interesting. From my latest venture, I decided to share a few of the HTTP responses that I found interesting - especially from the perspective of somebody writing interactive web applications.

Active Moderation

The need for moderation has been highlighted by the amount of spam that we all deal with. Some interesting automated solutions have been developed, but I have a new idea. (No implementation just yet, but an idea. feel free to implement it).

Network Monitoring with Nagios

Nagios is an open source tool that allows you to monitor network resources for uptime and more complex health checks. You can use the tool to make sure your websites are up and running, or do more complex activities like ensuring that your server's hard disks are reliable. Actually, the number of things that you can monitor with Nagios is a little bit intimidating.

Adding Groups in vBulletin

I ran into a few problems creating groups in vBulletin, so I thought I would share some tidbits of knowledge with others out there.

Attacking a Market

As I sort through my own plans for putting a project into the market place I thought it would be a good idea to jot down some notes regarding an attack plan. This isn't a complete solution, or even a complete article, but it does offer some of my own thoughts and perspective.

Acquiring Marketing Techniques from Uncle Sam

Given that I've been off on a bit of a political rant lately, I thought I'd shift these thoughts into the webmaster / web marketing world. Propaganda is a term that most people associate with conspiracy theories or war-time government marketing efforts.

I think it's time that we examined what exactly these "powers that be" have been up to and see if we can't apply the same techniques to our web marketing efforts.

Easy Ways To Promote Your Site

When you go into promotion mode for a given website, it's easy to completely ignore the obvious ways to promote it - like all of the free ones. I review a list of easy ways to promote a web site.

So Many Domains, So Little Time

Like many webmasters who have had the idea of making money online, I've amassed a pretty decent collection of domains. I haven't done much with them, but with good reason. Better to not publish than to publish a bunch of junk.

Scriptaculous 1.7.1 Beta Compressed

I have placed up for download the compacted version of the newly released Scriptaculous 1.7.1 beta. It now actually includes support for playing sounds, and includes several speed improvements. I haven't tried this out myself just yet, other than to play around with the new features, but it is enough in my mind to warrant at least a 1.8 tag, if not a 2.0. It's significantly more than just a few coding updates.

Realizing and Recognizing Success

I'm seeing some early success at stopmomstop.com, although it is very early in the process, being that the site is just a few days old. Taking a look at some of the early returns in the log files shows that I'm doing a few things right. Here's a quick look at what I've done so far and why I see it as success.

Calculating Real World Page Load Times

You think your pages are loading fast enough, but what are your users experiencing? A simple script can help you keep track of this information, and have an accurate picture of what sort of performance your end users are seeing.

Optimal Management of Keepalives

I've been spending some time analyzing page loading times in a theoretical fashion, and how they relate to keepalives and my own templates in an attempt to ensure that my own web servers were configured in such a way that an initial visitor achieves the best possible experience. These are my preliminary results.

Creating Repeatable Success on The Web

I've been churning away night and day for months trying to build a repeatable solution for web publication. My goal is to create something that will allow me to put together and manage a series of sites - each with the goal of achieving a modest level of success in terms of end user acquisition and revenue generation that combined will achieve an acceptable level of monetization as a return on my effort investment. This entry serves as a clarification of my goals.

Webmaster Concerns

What follows is a quick list of concerns that webmasters should make themselves aware of. The list may be obvious to some, not so obvious to others. Regardless, it is always good to review lists like these.

Community Building

Building a community around a given website is a task - especially in the early stages. As I prepare to launch a site with the goals of building a community around that site I see some concerns and opportunities that I feel are worth discussing.

Ico-Content

I've been less active at DigitalPoint than I'd like to be for some time now. As I was perusing the forums today, I discovered an interesting product called ICo-Content - it uses Yahoo! Answers to automatically generate threads and reply's for inactive or slow forums to help get them underway.

Update on the Update

I ended up losing a fairly significant amount of work this afternoon, so my efforts towards a new templating system have been dramatically slowed down.

Blog Comment Spam

It looks like I'm getting on a few more comment spamming lists. I've received over 100 spam comments in the last couple of days. Strange that I would be targetted seeing that I moderate all of my comments, but such is life.

The SSL Cert Ripoff

SSL Certificates take almost no energy to generate. Why then are they so expensive? Because people will pay.

IE 7 and ClearType hoses Web Design

Surprise surprise - IE7 has specific issues of concern to web designers. This article describes one such problem - the use of ClearType by default which can dramatically affect your site appearance.

Social Network Headlines

The kinds of headlines that work across various social networks - courtesy of Graywolf. Uses real estate as an example.

Five Web Technologies to Keep Your Eye On

Five technologies to watch for big short term gains. All of them will prove important as foundation technologies for the next generation of internet startups.

Nutch and SEO and What it Means to You

How the Nutch search engine can provide insight into SEO techniques and can also prove effective in site analysis regarding SEO implementations. Nutch isn't the base for Google or anything like that - but the semantics regarding full text search all have the same base, and Nutch does implement a pagerank-ish system.

Playing with Nutch

After a brief review of Solr, I decided to give Nutch a run. Nutch is a more complete product - more mature at least, although they both use the same search technology provided by Lucene. This article points out the pros and cons of both engines.

Reviewing My Own Site

Redesign efforts pushed me to actually review my own publication habits. The review showed some serious deficiencies in my work practices and planning, but proved very important as I prepare myself for future web site projects.

sIFR 3 Beta

sIFR released version 3 beta 1. I put together some samples and analyzed my own potential use for this product. Unfortunately the file sizes accompanied by a requirement for a newer version of flash left me thinking more towards standard image replacement techniques and usage of less common but still widely adopted font families.

Migrating from Zend to ionCube

How I actually alleviated my dependency on Zend optimizer by migrating towards a superior product. The combination of ionCube and eAccelerator blows the performance of Zend products out of the water. Not only that, they scale better too.

Zend Optimizer = Crap

More on Zend's mysterious release schedule surrounding the PHP 5.2 security updates that rendered the zend optimizer unusable - and by extension any products encoded by the zend encoder. All of this left users of commercial products susceptible to security problems for weeks on end.

A Few Thoughts on Google Sitemaps

A brain dump of my opinions regarding the now widespread usage of xml sitemaps based on the google standard. Highlights include the fact that sitemaps are misused by the majority of webmasters, and this is largely due to general misunderstanding of the proposed structure.

Reviewing Solr

Solr is one of the open source full text engines that I recently mentioned. Implementing Solr in a development environment was actually relatively easy and the power of the application along with it's Lucene underpinnings is readily apparent.

Sender Policy Framework

SPF provides an easy to implement layer to your spam filtering toolkit. It's actually most effective at pseudo-white-listing non spam email, but as the methodology proliferates it actually has the potential of reducing junk mail significantly.

Open Source Full Text Search

There are certainly a plethora of commercial products out there for full text searching with varying abilities concerning scalability, customization, and performance. The open source options are actually quite exciting and leave many commercial products in the dust.

PHP 5.2 Released, Zend Optimizer Isn't Ready Yet

Zend has proved to be an extremely disappointing corporate entity - slow with releases, slow and unresponsive with their public support channel. This article was written shortly before my decision to stay completely away from Zend products long term.

Force Feeding IE7

Microsoft has decided to increase the market share of IE7 by force feeding it to unsuspecting end users via Windows Update. It wouldn't be a problem if they actually provided a choice.

Never Make Assumptions

Performing developer level testing is a very important part of the cycle. Waiting for QA to come around and report bugs can lead to disaster. In the webmaster world, that means paying attention to less common browsers and platforms that you may not use with regularity (i.e. Apple and Linux)

Firefox 2

A review of the new Firefox 2 functionality and how it affects things from a webmaster perspective. Although Firefox enjoys a significantly smaller market share, the market share among webmasters and technically knowledgeable individuals is significant.

Pay Attention when Planning

If you actually do go through the trouble of planning out your web sites, there are several details that should be addressed in the planning stages to make your life easier down the road. Some are obvious, but a checklist of dos and don'ts is always a good thing.

Stock Photos Spice Things Up

Stock photos can make articles pop a little bit better. Using the same stock photos as everybody else is something that you need to watch out for. One way of alleviating this problem is to use several services so that you have a larger variety to choose from.

Taking Controversy Too Far

Controversial subject matter can inspire community interaction, but the popularity of controversy has been taken a bit too far by more than a few webmasters out there. It's just one tool in the box and should be used responsibly.

Adding Line Numbers to Code Fragments

Adding line numbers to code wrapped in >code< or >pre< tags is difficult but not impossible. Javascript is the ideal solution for the task as it will also provide you with the ability to remove the numbering for easy copy and paste of code directly from the web page.

Making RSS Feed Pages Readable

This article introduces an upcoming feature outlining the steps required to customize RSS feed layouts using a bit of javascript and xslt.

Resizable Fonts using EMs

Most websites do not account for user resized fonts with their web design which has the potential for breaking many CSS based layouts in particular. This article introduces the concept of implementing fonts using EM based measurements and thereby enabling greater and more stable layout control.

Threaded and Flat Views within vBulletin

An review and screencast of an exciting new development with threaded vBulletin views - including the ability for end users to easily switch between their preferred formats and cool ajax functionality.

Javascript Pullquotes

Simple and easy pull quotes using javascript. All that is required at time of publication is wrapping the desired text with classed span tags.

Font Families for Web Design

Which fonts should you be using in your web design. The simplest way to figure it out is to actually build a web page that shows you how the various fonts look that you can use with multiple browsers.

How many Programming Languages Do You Need to Know?

From javascript to perl to php to HTML, xHTML, xml, xslt, java ruby and so on and so forth, becoming an effective webmaster these days requires solid knowledge across a wide variety of programming languages. This article discusses how many you really need to know.

Alternating Row Colors in vBulletin

A template modification and plugin set that allows for alternating row colors (as opposed to alternating column colors) in vBulletin.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarks have turned into powerful promotional utilities for webmasters. I did find a tool that combines 41 social bookmarking services, but it adds an additional layer of action preventing it from being exceptionally useful.

A Few Interesting Javascript Libraries

This article describes my early opinions of the jQuery, scriptaculous, and prototype javascript libraries - all of which I eventually came around to using extensively.

Too many Links

vBulletin pages are filled with links - not all of them that you want the search engines to see. This article discusses the various options between unobtrusive javascript and nofollow related links.

vBulletin and Movable Type Integration

An architectural overview of the vBulletin / Movable Type integration that I have finally gotten around to building.

Keyword Tracking

An alternative solution to keyword tracking that I haven't seen made available yet. Again, I see this as a good opportunity for somebody to make a great tool if they can get around to it before I do.

Using Putty SSH Keys to Authenticate Automatically

Enabling key based authentication for automation routines or for simply making remote access more user friendly.

New Ideas

Some ideas and concerns moving forward with web development.

Press Release Sites

A comprehensive and unreviewed listing of sites for managing press releases.

What Image Sizes Work?

Image file size is important, but also very important are image dimensions and how they fit into your web design strategy.

Sitemap Generation

The initial development of a custom sitemap generation utility.

Adsense Placement and Appearance

How you integrate your advertising into your website has a direct affect on user experience and revenue generation. Spend some time thinking things through.

Home Page Management

Making the home page of your blog a little bit more like you would expect a normal web site to be.

Utilities I want to develop

A list of utilities that I would like to put forward as soon as time permits. Unless you build them first.

Putting Together a Template

Out of the box MT templates are getting easier to deal with. I originally implemented this site with nothing but the out of the box stylings and was pretty happy with the results.

The Definition List Tag (DL)

The Definition List is underutilized, but provides a nice structure for a lot of common list items that are normally implemented with nested unordered list items.

Inspiring Sites

A list of a few sites that are either very useful or very inspiring for web designs. The article includes commentary on templating in general and how most retail templates don't account for things that a webmaster should deem most important, including SEO, accessibility, and load speeds.