Sunday-Edition

Leading Internet search engines have begun incorporating social media tools
to meet the niche needs of the ‘long tail’ market

Move over SEO, SMO has arrived. With Internet users contributing, tagging
and ranking content in Web 2.0, search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and
Altavista have been compelled to re-engineer their algorithms to incorporate
social media search. As a result, search engine optimization (SEO) is giving
way to social media optimization (SMO). Read the rest of this entry »

The MVC paradigm is a way of breaking an application, or even just a piece of an application’s interface, into three parts: the model, the view, and the controller. MVC was originally developed to map the traditional input, processing, output roles into the GUI realm. Think of it this way:

Input –> Processing –> Output
Controller –> Model –> View

The user input, the modeling of the external world, and the visual feedback to the user are separated and handled by model, viewport and controller objects. The controller interprets mouse and keyboard inputs from the user and maps these user actions into commands that are sent to the model and/or viewport to effect the appropriate change. The model manages one or more data elements, responds to queries about its state, and responds to instructions to change state. The viewport manages a rectangular area of the display and is responsible for presenting data to the user through a combination of graphics and text. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start off by saying the iPhone is a very cool and unmistakably innovative product. What I’ve got put together here can in no way replace Steve’s gift to the mobile world. But, I think you’ll be interested to find that while you can’t match the style of the iPhone, you can mimic and even best many of its features for less. Read the rest of this entry »

Experiment with your user logs to measure how successful your site is at adding new readers and retaining your regular customers.†Any good business has to know who its regular customers are and how the new customers are getting their information. From this research, you can then build lasting relationships and form new ones for long-term website growth!

If you are like most webmasters or bloggers, you are constantly searching for fresh ideas to add content to your website. You are already well aware that adding more pages to your site will enhance your search engine rankings. You realize that you require more keyword phrases to find their way into searches. The question arises as to where to find ideas that appeal to your visitor traffic. The answer may lie in your own visitor traffic logs. Read the rest of this entry »

During the ’90’s it was forgotten that technology is a service industry where growth is linked to the economy; rather, tech stocks were treated as end products for which demand was unlimited.

Creating a user-friendly website can be a little bit like cooking chicken. If over-cooked, nobody really enjoys it — in fact they just look forward to clearing the palette with something else. If under-cooked, we end up in the hospital with salmonella. OK, perhaps our site won’t send anyone to the ER, but it could certainly make them leery about coming back for more! If cooked properly however, it will be a nice all-around experience for all, and our friends will be begging for the recipe.

So how do we cook the perfect web-site? Well, honestly, perfection is perhaps a little bit high of an expectation, but we can get nearly there if we follow some basic rules. Oops, I used the ‘r’ word (I see you all grimacing). Sorry, let’s change that to principles! Or maybe super-fun-happy-guidelines. Ahhh — much better. Read the rest of this entry »

Balancing the pros and cons of the two most popular means of building web applications

When it comes to Web development these days, you have a lot of options. Many of these methods involve preprocessingóthat is, embedding code into HTML pages with special tags that signal to a preprocessor that they contain code, and that it should do something with it. Much like a CGI, this code is then run on the server, and it returns some content, which then assumes part of the shape of the resulting HTML page sent back to the browser. Both the open source scripting language PHP and languages within Microsoft’s ASP.NET framework fall into this category; JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Perl/Mason operate this way as well.

In this weeks weblog post I’ll focus on PHP, the technology Oracle has chosen to incorporate into its products, and ASP.NET. I’ll overview the various strengths and weaknesses of each, discussing in particular those areas that will help you make your decision on which to go with for your development project. There are a lot of factors to consider, and different projects may appeal to a different technology. In conclusion you’ll find a point-by-point comparison in terms of price, speed and efficiency, security, cross-platform support, and the advantages of an open source solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Functionality

Above all, a website has to function correctly. The HTML, graphics, JavaScript, CGI, forms, etc. must be seamlessly integrated and display properly on a wide range of computer systems and browser software.

Designing for the web requires expert knowledge of several programming languages and an ongoing commitment to education in order to stay current in this exploding field.

True interactivity requires both client-side and server-side technology. All forms, search functions, e-commerce services, etc. must be backed up by extensive CGI scripting and database integration. Read the rest of this entry »

Good article summarizing the dangers of Cross-Site Scripting and how to prevent them. Examples are in Perl but the basic message is never trust anything from the browser.

Where cross-site scripting is concerned, particular caution needs to be taken if you allow visitors to your site to add content to it or “echo back” values they’ve submitted (such as a word they’re searching for).

These days it’s better to use PHP libraries like PEAR::HTML_QuickForm or PEAR::Validate to prevent oversights when using regular expressions to validate incoming data.

When you need to allow visitors to add marked up content, the most effective approach is BBTags (common to vBulletin and phpBB) - PEAR::HTML_BBCodeParser can help. “One to watch” in that area is KSES which is an “HTML and XHTML filter”, if you want visitors to be able to use native tags.

I also found these excellent articles:

http://www.phparch.com/sample.php?mid=16

http://shiflett.org/talks/apachecon2003

PHP is now running over a million web sites and with good reason. PHP is open source, it runs equally well on NT and UNIX, it’s well documented. PHP is no doubt stealing market share from Microsoft’s Active Server Pages, but the media has been unusually quiet about the issue. Even as Apache’s success has become front page news, PHP has gone largely unnoticed. Maybe Microsoft wants to keep it that way. Read the rest of this entry »