One benefit of having valid HTML on your web site is the likelihood of your page looking pretty much the same no matter what browser is being used by your visitor. One of the problems a developer may face is lack of access to various browsers (for example, a developer using a Mac may not have Internet Explorer available). Netrenderer to the rescue! Here you can put in a web address and see what a site looks like in three different versions of Internet Explorer:

http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/

Now if I could just find one of these for showing what things look like on a Mac! Please leave a comment if you know of one. Thanks!! 

phplist is a wonderful, free program for managing your mailing lists. I'm setting it up for a client, and she wanted to know if the subject line could be personalized, because that's a very important part of the newsletter. People just love to be addressed personally. It turns out, that's a feature that needs to be added to phplist, but I did find a solution on the forums. It was easy to do and points out one of the great things about open source software - you can change it to fit your needs, if you're so inclined. Here's a link to the forum post, in case you're interested:

phplist mod to personalize the subject line

I've always thought if you build a nice site, with lots of good content related to your central theme, the search engines will rank you appropriately. But it turns out there's much, much more to consider when optimizing your site for the search engines. Here's an article presenting the "collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization". It's quite lengthy and involved, but great reading if you're wanting to know what you can do to help your rankings in Google:

SEOmoz - Google Search Engine Ranking Factors

If you would like help implementing any of these items, please contact us - we're here for you!

Ah, Flash… the bane of a designer's existence. So pretty, yet so overused and underutilized for anything with a purpose other than eye candy. Anyways, it's important to place the files in a page properly. The old method of "embedding" just doesn't make for valid HTML. So I went looking for how to do such a thing, and found my answer here:

http://www.joostdevalk.nl/code/valid-flash-embedding.html

He provides a clean, simple way to place Flash on a page and still make the validator happy. Yay! 

This week I'm working on redoing a web site, and in the process I'm consolidating some FAQ pages to make them more useful. The bad part is, links to those pages are already in the search engines, so I need a way to tell search engines that these pages have moved. This is accomplished with a "redirect" and like most things with computers, there are multiple ways to get it done. I chose to make PHP do the work, and found out how to do it here:

How to Redirect a Web Page

When you're reorganizing your site, it's very important to use redirects to preserve your search engine rankings, and also to make the transition smooth for your visitors. You don't want them getting a "Page not found" error when they click through to your site! 

Recently I designed a page and fought a bit with screen size issues… I ended up using a Javascript solution. The script detects the browser window's width, then displays a picture based on how much room is available. If your window size is greater than 800, you see a picture of a lady. If it's 800 or less, you see a very narrow picture of a guy. To test it, visit Kakoon.com , then resize your browser window and reload the page. I found the script for it at javascript.internet.com - one of my favorite reference sites.

Also during this project I wondered how many people were still using the smaller screen sizes, and I found my answer at - where else - the W3C web site. They have a great Web Browser Statistics and Trends page.

Here's the command to dump the contents of a MySQL database into a text file. Type or paste this command at the unix (shell) prompt:

/usr/local/bin/mysqldump --opt -u $dbuser -p$dbpassword $db > $filename.sql 

Fill in the $ variables with your own (leaving out the $) to create a plain text file with the contents of your database. You can use to reload all or some of your data in the event of accident or emergency. Download it to your computer for safekeeping as a backup! Be careful if your database contains any sensitive personal information… stuff like that should be encrypted before downloading.

Here's a neat service which protects your email address very nicely! Visitors have to enter a security code (captcha) to see your email address. We're using this on our site now, with an address set up especially for this service. We'll report if we get any spam at the special address, but I think it's going to work great.

One of the great things about the Firefox web browser is add-ons. You can get all kinds of nifty widgets to make your browser do more. Lately I've been trying to modify some web page layouts and found two tools which make the job easier. One is Aardvark - shown to me by Kevin over at Acorn Creative. Thanks, Kevin! Aardvark lets you see the HTML of any element on a web page just by hovering over it (note to self: press H for help on the keys!). Another very good one is Web Developer - it lets you see how a page looks without CSS, without Javascript, without images, all kinds of interesting stuff. It sure makes figuring out a web page design much easier. Check out the add-ons, there's something for everyone!

Recently I found a new solution to hide your email address but still have a clickable link. The new script is very secure and extremely easy to set up and use.

www.jracademy.com/~jtucek/email/download.php

I plan on donating a portion of the proceeds for any installations of this script that I do. In fact, I plan on doing that with all of the open-source software I install. Gotta keep the whole movement going!