SEO thoughts of the day

Posted on August 4th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

Today at work at we had a someone from Spring Digital do a basic introduction to SEO. At my work we have been working a bit in this space and always trying to gain SEO advantages over other sites but I thought it could be good to check out any possible new nuggets. As it stands I learnt some new things and reinforced some interesting points which have been floating around:

  • Twitter links like a "NOFOLLOW" - One of the things which I thought gave a little bit of weight was the fact that links appearing in twitter apparently hold no seo weight. I had obviously drawn an incorrect conclusion given that twitter started appearing on google searches.
     
  • Concept of "link baiting" - To follow on from the above point of twitter linking and focusing back on the idea that back linking is important, advertising yourself with interesting content obviously starts people talking. With a bit of luck, all that chatter of your site will hopefully spawn a few backlinks on other sites. Basic idea of marketing through social media I know but hey it stuck out.
     
  • PPC vs SEO - I find it interesting that SEO and PPC can sometimes both work together and against. But the majority of the time they complement each other. PPC generally is seen as the short term traffic driver with SEO requiring alot more strategic and medium/long term commitment before a good ROI.
     

Finally I have been reading a bit from The Art of SEO. As a developer I wonder about the process of our site builds and whether we are doing the correct "thing", reading this book had definitely given me some more insight. One of the points which sticks out is the advice to not use pagination. There are a few points he makes for it being bad :

  • Provides no topical relevance - since pagination results in a page of just links with no focus on seo this is bad.
  • Content between different pages can create dupe content - Duplicate content is a factor of the amount of SEO juice google gives.
  • Can create spider traps - Spiders generally can only dig so deep and if it catches the spider in a infinite spider trap then there is less chance of the page you want the spider to find, is found.

This pagination point sticks out as it goes to show that there is a site usability opportunity cost of choosing to not to use pagination. The book does concede though that it takes a seriously alot of planning to try build a certain large sites without pagination.

0 comments.

clearoverlays in google maps v3 api

Posted on July 27th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

Since api v2 has been now officially deprecated, I've been recently relearning some of the stuff to the new v3 api and trying to figure out the differences. One of the annoying things (as of writing) is the lack of clearOverlays().

There's a few ways to do it but the easiest way to do is maintain a separate array of markers then remove them one by one. So the code would look like :

while(markerArrayList[0]){
   markerArrayList.pop().setMap(null);
}

We keep going through the array in the while loop and pop an item until we don't have any more at which point the markerArrayList[0] will return false and stop the loop.


Example code here

I hope this helps some out there! Please feel free to comment!

1 comment.

Interesting modx bookmarks May 2010

Posted on May 31st, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I don't have much to post about this month so I'll post some interesting Modx links I have.

Introduction to MODx Revolution, Pt. I - http://vimeo.com/8335791?hd=1

modx and kohana - Someone has attempted to bridge between Modx and Kohanahttp://forum.kohanaframework.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=4221
 

Getting back into modx when you have locked yourself out - http://www.lucidgreen.net/webbybooth/?p=27

WordPress vs modx - I just found this thread recently, old but interesting http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,15341.0.html

Stats plugin for modx - http://modxcms.com/about/blog/zaigham/slimstat-plugin-for-modx.html

More modx tutorials - http://www.modxrules.com/

0 comments.

ultimate SEO list

Posted on April 13th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I thought I'll start creating a SEO checklist for my personal and whoever likes to reference this, at the moment itd quite small but will add more and more over time.

General site structure

  • "keywords" meta tag - google ignores
  • h1 tag - descriptive term
  • description meta tag -
  • friendly url - that describes the page hint: should be close to H1 tag
  • Keep content as high as possible
  • Vary the media
  • Add alt tags to all picture
  • If using flash add spiderable content of what the flash content should have

Making google happy

  • Optimise for speed

More techie stuff

  • Robot.txt
  • Sitemap.xml - generate automatically
  • rel="Nofollow" - add to outbound links which you do not want the search engine to give weight or scrae through
  • When using ajax to update content, make sure we can degrade to non-javascript mode as I do not believe the spiders render the page to figure out what content will appear

Content guide

  • html site guide
  • Privacy policy

Tools

  • Googleweb master
  • http://www.pluginseo.com/
  • majesticseo.com - report on backlinks
  • ubervu.com - tracking how people respond to your website. Helps with building relationships and back linking further?

Other

  • Backlinks - get other sites to create a link to your site

2 comments.

using xdebug on wamp under windows 7

Posted on April 13th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I recently had windows 7 installed on my machine at work after it had been running like a dog for the past 6 months, previously I had Win Xp. I tried to install WAMP and xdebug but was finding that I kept on having random connection issues and breakpoints was not working, bloody annoying! At first I thought this was because I was running php 5.3 wamp but then tried to put in php 5.2 but pin point it to recent versions of Xdebug not playing very well with WAMP.

I read a couple of posts and just changed dll used to version 2.0.0 and it suddenly worked!

Also for future reference :

zend_extension_ts="C:/wamp/bin/php/php5.2.9-1/ext/php_xdebug-2.0.4-5.2.8.dll"
xdebug.remote_enable=on
xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
xdebug.remote_host=localhost
xdebug.remote_port=9000

Got this from the netbeans wiki

UPDATE: Really useful xdebug wizard to work out which binary and instructions for your specific setup. Awesome juice!

0 comments.

CMS and Modx introduction presentation at london web

Posted on March 19th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I decided to spread the word about my fave CMS framework, Modx,  last night at the London web meetup. It was really good fun, the initial nerves was banished once I got going. I made the mistake of trying to build a whole site and do a code demostration. I managed to do about 70% of it though obviously got stuck here and there! Still, it was a pretty good presentation and people kindly commented how good it was being my first presentation! Definitely a very positive experience and looking forward to more of these things

I think I managed to get a few people interested in Modx and through this I'm hoping that I can give back to the community. After all, the more people who use it, the more it will spread!

My talk was then followed by a great informal chit chat of SxSW from Nathan. He discussed his faves talks, the mad life, the interesting people and situations plus the general sub-culture around it! I really do fancy going next year and planning to book my ticket :)

Here's my slides on the modx talk to download

UPDATE:

Check them out on slideshare and the video is available also

0 comments.

IE9 first impressions

Posted on March 17th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

Just read the gizmodo.com round up of ie9. Looks quite interesting, especially the following:

  • h.264 video - Whoot! No more needing to install flash!
  • SVG and 2D acceleration - Again above and will look cool when we have some people building some extra funkness into site. Maybe building a version of Mario to natively run in the browser?
  • HTML 5 - Though on the face of it I see this as being a VERY good thing. I'll like to see how MS will "interpret " the standard

Another big surprise is the dropping of WinXp support! Sigh, I guess I'll have to leave my cozy WinXp machine at some point then :(
 

0 comments.

How to add an event when googlemaps is dragged and calculate the distance from a previous point

Posted on February 22nd, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

Just to remind myself how to capture the event when the map is dragged AND work out the distance to a previously recorded center point on the map

GEvent.addListener(gmapFn.mapObj,'dragend',function(){
   var ctrLatLng = gmapFn.mapObj.getCenter();
   alert(ctrLatLng.distanceFrom(gmapFn.lastRefLatLng));
});

Very handy! gmapFn.mapObj = the object of the instianted gmap object and gmapFn.lastRefLatLng is a GLatLng. You can quickly get the center of a google map by calling the function gmapObject.getCenter() which returns the center as a GLatLng.

Enjoy!

Update : handy refrence of all the events you can to a google maps listener http://econym.org.uk/gmap/gevent.htm

0 comments.

development best practices (web dev, php, javascript, databases and security)

Posted on January 25th, 2010 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

I've been seeing alot of php/web dev best practices recently and I'm always looking at whats the "best" way to do things ...just so that I can be a lazy ass over the long term and not have to go back (and fix) potentially naff code :)

Here is a small collection of them that has ended up in my delicious bookmarks.

0 comments.

Modx quick variable reference

Posted on November 30th, 2009 by thiswayup.
Categories: dev.

Just for my own personal reference. Here's a quick list of the different types of variables in Modx.

  • [(varName)] = site setting, set site wide
  • [*varName*] = content or template var
  • [*#content*] = content var, like before sets in the document edit screen but the hash allows Quickedit
  • {{chunkName}} = chunk
  • [[snippetName]] = cachable code snippet
  • [!snippetName!] = uncached code snippet
  • [+placeholderName+] = place holder used inside snippet templates such as Ditto to show page id or Page title. Need to double chk what the specific snippet supports

0 comments.

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