Google Web Elements are just another web widget – so can you trust them on your site?
Widgets and badges like the Google Elements are an ideal tool for quickly adding content to a page or a site. They bring in third –party functionality without needing much in the way of code- and they also mean that you can quickly swap out a widget if it doesn’t provide useful functionality without affecting your page design or code. They’re also Yahoo! will be taking the web to TV.
A Web Standards Checklist, How to make a proper website
The term web standards can mean different things to different people. For some, it is ‘table-free sites’, for others it is ‘using valid code’. However, web standards are much broader than that. A site built to web standards should adhere to standards (HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, XSLT, DOM, MathML, SVG etc) and pursue best practices (valid code, accessible code, semantically correct code, user-friendly URLs etc).
Some optimizing tips to take away
As you can see, creating an animated optimized banner is not only about animating skills, but mostly about custom tricks for optimizing without damaging the original pieces.
Throughout the whole process we saw that one of the most important things when creating an animated banner is not only that you are skilled as a animator / programmer, but also that you or someone in your team is skilled when reducing file sizes to fit the specs that the publishers will give you before making the pieces . These are some tips that may be useful for you in the future, to reduce file sizes without damaging the banners too much:
Solving the Google Canonical Problem
When Google indexes sites, it sees URLs with and without the preceding www as entirely different sites. Referred to as the Google canonical problem, this indexing approach can negatively affect your PageRank as some inbound links to your site may include the www while others may not, which divides the number of links to your site from Google’s perspective and splits your PageRank. You can tell if your site is suffering from the Google canonical problem by checking the PageaRanks, then you’ll want to fix this issue. We can solve the problem using an Apache module called mod_rewrite, which can automatically map all requests to a single, consistent format.
Google releases IE speed-boost plug in
Google has released a free plug-in for Internet Explorer that forces Microsoft’s browser to use Chrome rendering engine, increasing JavaScript performance by almost eight times as much.
The Chrome Frame plug –in (http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe ) works on all versions of Internet Explorer from 6 higher, and also allows websites that use HTML 5 to be displayed properly. Web developers have to explicitly choose choose to support the plug-in ability by inserting a Chrome Frame specific tag into the HTML code for their web pages, telling Internet Explorer to load the plug-in .
20 Great Google Secrets(part 3)
Online Extra: More Google Tips
Here are a few more clever ways to tweak your Google searches.
Search Within a Timeframe
Daterange: (start date–end date). You can restrict your searches to pages that were indexed within a certain time period. Daterange: searches by when Google indexed a page, not when the page itself was created. This operator can help you ensure that results will have fresh content (by using recent dates), or you can use it to avoid a topic’s current-news blizzard and concentrate only on older results. Daterange: is actually more useful if you go elsewhere to take advantage of it, because daterange: requires Julian dates, not standard Gregorian dates. You can find converters on the Web (such as
When twitter goes bad
Top tips
- Is your brand ready for social media? Has the impact on communications, media and the everyday running of the business been considered ?
- Has thorough research been done to ascertain whether your audiences and sector are ready for social media? Do you know how to promote your social media efforts via your channels and social media search engines and the like?
- Remember the global culture and implications of social media. They are published online and as accessible as webpages are, with the potential to reach wider audiences more quickly.
Choosing and managing domain names
Domain names are also a great place to include keywords that can help users find you. When choosing a domain name, it doesn’t matter which extension you choose: .com , .net ,.biz and all other extensions start on equal footing and will not in any way impact search engine rankings. Of course, .com domains tend to be more memorable to users because of their popularity, and therefore may be more desirable for word of mouth referrals.
Pro Flash Techniques(part5)
Conditional Compilation
You can create one flash file and compile it many times with different behaviors by using conditional compilation. Basically it allows you to turn on and off blocks of ActionScript when you publish so you can use the one base file for many purposes.
To set up a config constant go to Publish Settings, choose the Flash tab, select ActionScript 3.0 and then click the settings button. Then choose the Config Constants tab.
Here you can add or remove constants , eg add one and call it ‘CONFIG::ONLINE”. Set its value to true. Add another called ‘CONFIG::LOCAL’ and set its value to false.
Then in your ActionScript you can wrap any code inside CONFIG::ONLINE{} or CONFIG::LOCAL{}. For example in the online version you might have a link on a local file.
If you publish the file it will include the code inside the ONLINE config tags. If you change the values in the Publish settings it will publish the code inside the LOCAL config tags.
20 Great Google Secrets(part 2)
Suppose you want to contact someone and don’t have his phone number handy. Google can help you with that, too. Just enter a name, city, and state. (The city is optional, but you must enter a state.) If a phone number matches the listing, you’ll see it at the top of the search results along with a map link to the address. If you’d rather restrict your results, use rphonebook: for residential listings or bphonebook: for business listings. If you’d rather use a search form for business phone listings, try Yellow Search
(www.buzztoolbox.com/google/yellowsearch.shtml).
