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!

Recently we added a new section to our web site evaluation report – page size. Why is this important? Because you have less than 10 seconds to make an impression on a visitor and if your page isn't showing something by then, you may well lose a visitor because they clicked on to something else in the meantime. It's rough out there! Our attention spans aren't what they used to be.

While researching page size and speed issues, I came upon a little script which will measure and report the speed of your site. It's called – what else – Site Speed! This nifty program measures how long it takes a web page to load. It requires PHP and can be loaded to track any kind of web page (HTML or scripted), and it's available for both Linux and Windows hosts.

http://www.numion.com/SiteSpeed/index.html

I've installed it on our home page and it's been tracking for a week – there are a few results to look at, anyway. If you click on the little N icon at the bottom of the page, it will bring up our stats. 

I'm in the process of restructuring a site for a client, and one of things we're changing is the content of the home page. He wanted to have current news articles displayed along the right side. So I went searching for a program to display an RSS feed, and here's what I found:

http://apptools.com/phptools/xml/rss.php

It's a nice, simple script in which you set the URL of the feed, include the file in your program, and away you go! It took about 5 minutes to set it up. It will take longer to customize the look and feel of the feed, but I thought it was really easy to set up. And it looks pretty good coming out of the box, too.  

After poking around on the site a little bit, I found some other interesting stuff… Dreamweaver Password Recovery, and a script to create a dynamic site map. Neat!

Today I found a great article about how to do your site maps correctly. It depends on the size and structure of your site, and the article  suggests strategies that seem good. I'll be checking out some of the software as needed for different clients, and I'll post the results as they come in.