Web Dev Notes

Remember back in April when I became the new writer for Web Dev Notes? I started off by introducing Joomla, PHP-Nuke, phpBB and PHP. I even recommended some cool software like the ALT-Tab Replacer, Virtual Desktop Manager and the Firebug plugin for Firefox. After a slow start, I finally got my big break when my article Formatting Text in Wordpress started to bring in steady traffic!

In my early Web Dev Notes days I stuck to covering more technical topics such as how to insert CSS on your website or how to create your first PHP page. However, after testing out the use of humor in posts like the Top Ten Stupidest Joomla! Administrator Tricks and When will GoogleBot index my Brain I discovered that this unique approach was actually quite well received! I also realized website marketing and SEO was a very popular aspect of web development so I decided to venture into this area with posts like The Battle for Traffic - SEO vs Content, No Contacts, No Money and Validate Your Website for Better SEO!

Of course, even though I would later discover that marketing and SEO would be a very popular topic on my blog, at the time I had no idea yet! Looking at my stats, the posts about PHP were the most trafficked so I decided to cover this area more extensively! In May I introduced some great web development resources and then discussed the relationship between PHP and a Web Server/Browser in order to build a solid foundation before diving right into PHP for the rest of the month. I then covered how to comment PHP code, the debate over using Print or Echo, how to use variables, how to use concatenation with variables and variable naming conventions. Using this introductory material, I was then able to go even deeper and cover topics like using arrays, if/else programming logic, nested IF/ELSE conditional statements, and PHP Loops. Since the topic of loops is already an extensively covered subject, I decided to make my articles sound unique by naming them, “The magic of WHILE Loops“, “The incredible FOR Loop Multi-Tasker“, and “The FOREACH Loop Love Affair with Mr. Array“.

In order to stay informed, I subscribed to many RSS feeds relating to my topic. In so doing I noticed that Digg and Google were two very popular topics. I decided to explore these subjects a bit with articles like, “List of Google Hoaxes“, “Who’s Digging You?“, “Google’s PageRank Explained by Phil Craven“, “Declare Warr on Digg Doondles!“, “I Hacked Google and Stole Their Robot lolol“, and “Are Your Archives Burying You Worse Than Digg“. These articles continue to bring in traffic to this day!

During the month of June I was taking a course on Interface Design so decided to cover similar topics on Web Dev Notes. I began by discussing the advantages of using personas during development and then decided to list nine causes of software error before discussing software quality and the three general principles of quality assurance. I introduced the subject of human/computer interaction and demonstrated how good design can help us better interact with computers. In fact, making the interaction between humans and computers as easy as possible is an important goal of improved user interface design. I also mentioned that building the right product is even more important than building a product right.

It was around mid-June when I also began to notice how well my SEO, blogging and marketing tips posts were doing! I therefore decided to write about the guaranteed way to generate incoming links and conquering the crowded niche! I also wrote about some issues I was having with trying to follow my own advice when I noticed my trackbacks were being kidnapped and asked if it were possible if my bullets were killing them! Not wanting to stray too far from the very roots of web development, I also introduced the Pixel Groovy website, discussed how to created animated favicons and threw in 21 CSS tutorials answering frequently asked questions.

During the month of July I continued to cover a lot of marketing topics. I created a new Top 11 Posts section and asked if people thought linking to other sites increases incoming traffic. I also started to learn a great deal about blogging and realized that my very own archives contained in itself the power to help WebDevNotes succeed. I therefore stopped considering old posts like dirty socks thrown into a laundry bin, and instead began viewing them as cornerstone content that should be linked back to frequently so that new visitors could access my best content easily.

Upon making this realization, I began offering my visitors some blogging advice with the help of Lolcats to make the posts more fun and easy to read. For example:

Don’t let Chihuahua’s hold back your website! Start working with the purrrrfect partners and plot your plan for success. Make sure you plant the seeds for success early and listen to feedback so you can feed your readers a happy meal. Make good use of article directories and other marketing techniques and never forget the secrets to writing a successful blog!

In conclusion, to those who say linking to old content is difficult, I beg to differ! Don’t let those archives go to waste

Marketing is a big part of achieving success in any domain. If you want your website to become more popular you will need to plan your strategy attack in order to take the world by storm. So… where to begin?

more funny pictures

It’s never too early to market your website, however, before undertaking a significantly large marketing campaign it would first be a good idea to make sure you have a product worth marketing. The majority of the readers of this website are individuals looking for advice in order to make their own personal blog more popular such that it can eventually return a profit. If you find yourself in this position then before launching a huge marketing campaign make sure you have quality posts ready on your website. Make sure you have a good landing page and then make sure your best content can be easily found from this page. This will greatly increase the chance of a visitor subscribing to your RSS feed or adding your website to their favorites.

If you want to take the world by storm, you’ll need to invest some money into advertising programs such as Google Adwords. These types of programs will allow you to place your advertisement on web pages throughout the internet. Clicks will also be of higher quality with a program like Google Adwords because your ad will be shown in contextually relevant places which would imply that generally the user viewing the add has interest in the subject.

If you don’t have money to invest, there are ways to get visitors to your website for free. While it’s nice to invest a chunk of change and see your website take off instantly, it’s just as rewarding to build your site from the ground-up bit by bit. You can’t always rush success in life, sometimes you’ll need to earn it

If you read any website providing marketing tips related to blogging you’ll see the same advice repeated time and time again. JOIN DISCUSSIONS. It really is that simple and even after reading it over and over again most people won’t do it. Join a forum, but don’t advertise your website with a new post. This will only result in your post being deleted and marked as spam! What you should do is simply add your link to your signature then join in the discussions. The more helpful you are to other users of the forum the more likely you are to receive clicks to your website. Also take the time to comment on blogs related to yours. Do not see these people as the enemy or as competitors, see them as friends and post meaningful comments. These people will not only then visit your site, but may possibly also post a link to your site on theirs which could send your lots of traffic and help build up the page rank of your site!

Take the time to help others and in-time you will enjoy the rewards of being a good person. Spamming can get you traffic spikes, but in the end you will not have gained much if the visitor never returns again. Don’t be afraid to take the world by storm… bit by bit!

Remember when I explained Webalizer Website Statistics? Understanding website statistics is important, but becoming obsessed with them will ultimately lead to your destruction and/or total annihilation! First of all, your website statistics will be horrible when you first start a new website and ironically enough, that is the time you will probably check them the most! Don’t torment yourself this way! Checking your stats religiously will only make you sad because nobody visits your website!

Statistics will mess with your perception. They are an ego pleasuring drug we seek out to satisfy ourselves but we will never be satisfied no matter how big they grow! Checking your stats for no reason is a complete waste of time. They will either depress you or distract you. Forget about them completely until you have set some goals! Plot your plan for success then set realistic goals and reach them! Check your stats only to see if you have achieved your goals or to assess if you are on track or not to reaching your goals.

Checking your website statistics 10 times a day will not make them any better! In fact, you would have been much better off checking them once, then using the time you wasted to check the other 9 times to write a new post or create some new content. Investing your time productively will help make your website successful.

At the end of the day, statistics are just numbers. Forget about the numbers. Make your blog about your readers! Measure your success in terms of incoming links from other websites or active participation in your comments!

First things first, what is a favicon you ask? A favicon is the small icon that you see in the URL field in your browser when visiting a website. Depending on the versions of your browser, when you bookmark a page, you will also see the websites favicon when looking through your bookmarks. If you look up into your URL field right now, you will see that the favicon for this particular website is the 451press logo, which consists of a red square with white flames.

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of favicons while browsing the internet as they are becoming more and more common. However, have you ever seen an animated favicon? That is to say, have you ever seen one that shows a moving image? It’s actually quite easy to do!

To add a favicon to your website, all you need to do is create an icon named favicon.ico and put it in the root directory of your website. It will then automatically show up for all users visiting your site! Pretty simple.

So how do you create this favicon.ico file? For more advanced users, you can draw it in Photoshop. If you do this, you will need to download a plugin which will allow you to save in .ico format. Of course, I have found that you can just save as favicon.gif, then rename the file to favicon.ico and it will still load in all browsers. Please note, for your favicon to work, it must be exactly 16×16 pixels.

There is however a great alternative for users who just wish to generate a favicon from an image file. HTML-kit.com offers a great tool which will let you choose an image file on your computer and have it converted into a favicon for you. All you will then need to do is save the file it generates and upload it to your server in your root directory.

Great, now you know how to create a favicon and where to put it. The next question is, how do you make it animated? Well, .gif files can actually be made into animations. Again, you can use Photoshop to create animated .gif images. You can also visit GifAnimations.com if you are looking for some free animations you can use. To use your animated .gif file as your favicon, you will need to then use the following code on your webpage:

<link href=�images/favico.gif� TYPE=�image/gif� REL=�icon�>

If you’d like to see an animated favicon in action, visit Pod1.

So why bother using an animated favicon? Well, since the favicon will be displayed when a user is browsing through their bookmarks, the fact that yours is animated may make it stand out a bit more and this could help remind visitors to visit your website more often!

About to begin that big development project? Where do you begin? It’s important to discover exactly what needs to be developed before you develop it, so start by collecting information. This information will help you answer the question, are you building the right product?

Here are some things you will need to identify and write down:

1. The people who are involved with the work - You are developing a program or tool that will be used by users for a specific purpose. Who are these users? Who they are will affect how you program.

2. The thing the people you identified above use to do their work - You are being asked to develop a program or tool most likely with the hopes of making a task easier for workers. In order to find the best solution, you need to understand how the people are currently solving the problem. What program are they using to do the work right now?

3. The processes that are involved with the work - You need to have a good understanding of all the processes needed to complete a task. If the work the users are doing involve multiple steps, you need to make sure the program coordinates all of these tasks effectively.

4. The information required to do the work - You could make a great program, but it can be totally useless if it doesn’t provide the information required to do the work. Identify the information the users will need and find a way to make it available within the program. If the users need to look elsewhere for the information, they may look elsewhere for the entire solution as well.

5. The inputs required to do the work - You need to find out exactly what sort of information will be input into the system before you begin creating the system. You don’t want to reach a point near the end of development and realize the entire thing is useless because users cannot include vital information! While a keyboard and mouse are also common input devices, you may find that your users specifically also need a webcam or microphone input device to complete certain tasks.

6. The outputs created by the work - Fairly logical, but still necessary to discover! How will you manipulate the users data to provide useful results? What is the end goal the users hope to reach by using the program you are developing?

Once you have discovered all the necessary information, you then need to begin interpreting it!

1. Create descriptions of the people who do the work - Do this by creating personas for all of the main groups of users that will likely be using the system.

2. Describe the different goals involved with the work - Based on the information you collected, you should be able to identify all the goals the different users hope to accomplish by using the system. You need to know all of these, as this is what you will be developing your program to do!

3. Document the work step by step - We all hate documents, but if you want to save time and money, get the job done right the first time and write down exactly what you need to do. According to the Nine Causes of Software Error, faulty requirements and documentation errors are the leading causes of bugs and errors.

4. Create different scenarios regarding how various aspects of the work are done - By now, you have identified different types of users, you know what each of their goals are with respect to using the system and you have written down step by step processes to achieving these goals. Now, how do you combine all this information logically? Think about how the work is done by the users. If one user is using the system to enter available inventory and another is selling the inventory that is available, the program you develop needs to coordinate this logically such that the total inventory count is correct! What happens if you have 10 toasters and you sell one while Bob is counting boxes in the stock room? Then Bob goes to his computer and types in 10 toasters, while Joe hands one to a customer and there is really 9! Later that day, Joe will sell someone a toaster when there are none left!

5. Create charts and diagrams showing the work flow - If you’re working on a large project, you need charts to show the entire work flow. This makes it much easier to see and find the associations between various methods.

6. Trace the different scenarios, the different people, and their work descriptions through the charts and diagrams - Make sure all the users can in fact reach their goals by tracing paths through the charts you created. If all users can reach and accomplish all of their possible work tasks, you’re on the right track!

As you can see, when you’re working on a large project, there is plenty to do before you even write a single line of code. Many people like to jump to coding and creating prototypes right away in order to get user feedback more quickly. This is a mistake. Don’t waste your time creating something the users will ask you to change or modify once you show them. If you know what they want from the start, this will limit the amount of modifications you will need to make after the users get to test the software. When in doubt, look back to the Three General Principles of Quality Assurance to make sure you are on the right track!

Update: If you’re about to begin work on a software project, do not underestimate the importance of Software Project Management. Project Management plays a HUUUUUGE role in the final success or failure of a project. Read this article from Software-Engineer-Training.com which provides an Introduction to Software Project Management.

Search Engine Optimization, often referred to as “SEO”, is basically a method for fooling search engines into ranking your website higher! The reason this sounds evil is because it is! When we search the web, we want to find relevant search results that provide high quality content! However, when we then go to work on our website, we use SEO to try and get our results ahead of others! In a perfect world, we would sit down and write higher quality content in order to rank ahead of others, but this is no perfect world! Given a reasonable level of quality and some good SEO, you could find yourself showing up in search results in no time! The trick is knowing exactly what to tweak and how to tweak it.

For more articles relating to SEO, check out the WebDevNotes SEO section. The point of this particular article is not to teach you SEO, but to make sure you are aware of it’s importance. If Darwin were around today, he’s be more than happy to explain his theory of evolution and relate the idea of survival of the fittest to websites and their ability to rank in Google.

As usual you may be asking yourself, what the heck do I mean? Nobody will eat your website, but your website does need to eat in order to survive. Unless you are writing a script for a horror movie, your website should not literally be eating people, however, it does need a constant supply of visitors to serve any useful purpose. Unless you are willing to invest in advertising, the only way you are going to get visitors to your website is by either posting actively on other web-sites or ranking higher in Google. It’s survival of the fittest because as soon as a more SEvOlved website comes a long and starts ranking better for your keywords, that website will start stealing all of your visitors, hence starving your website species into extinction!

Unless you want your website to become obsolete and extinct, you need to make sure it is SEvOlved! Keep reading our SEO section on a daily basis in order to stay up to date on the latest web-mutations that can give you a competitive advantage over other website species. Unlike human evolution, web-evolution does not take millions of years, it takes weeks.

5 - You try to visit your web site but pages take 30 seconds to load. Upon informing your web host about the problem they promptly assure you that the problem is a Wordpress issue or that your ISP is blocking the site…

4 - You setup your domain for automatic renewal but notice it’s status has not been changed in your account. To avoid problems, you contact your web host a month ahead of time to ensure that automatic renewal is indeed setup properly. After being assured that all is well, your website goes down a month later and your web host informs you that it is your fault and you should use automatic renewal in the future to avoid this problem.

3 - Your host advertises tons of bandwidth and storage space, but limits concurrent connections to their MySQL database to 10 so that your website goes down way before you could even get anywhere remotely close to using your bandwidth limit. If you complain you are told to upgrade your account!

2 - You contact support and try to explain that there is an on-going problem that causes all your pages using MySQL to take forever to load. You explain that this problem is affecting all customers and has been for a long time. They respond asking for the exact URL where the problem is occurring… You humor them and give one example URL, re-iterating that it affects ALL pages that make any access calls to MySQL. They reply asking you to do a trace route, even though you’ve tried to explain the problem is server-side! You humor them and send the trace route results just to have them reply asking for the exact URL where the problem is occurring.

1 - And the number one reason to change web host is if your web host is Ipower, because you will inevitably have to deal with all of the above and more! I haven’t even mentioned the fact that your email will usually not work since I gave up on even trying to use that service long long ago..!

For more information about Ipower please read More Reasons to Avoid Ipower at all Costs and Ipower Hosting Slow PHP and MySQL.

For a better web host, please visit HostJury to find reliable reviews of web hosting companies. HostJury continually makes an effort to make sure all reviews on their site are real and honest. If you’d like a recommendation, I’d personally suggest HostGator or 1and1.com.

We recently discussed that Organized Blogging is no Easy Task. Catherine then wrote her own Get Organized post which brought up some other great points to consider when trying to get organized! For example, she stresses the importance of a paper organizer and I couldn’t agree more!

If there is anybody out there who loves to use every online tool and application it’s me. I’ve tried everything from Google Calendar to simple to-do lists, from online application to desktop tools. I always figured, since I’m constantly at a computer, I might as well use the darn machine to organize myself rather than distract myself

Try and try as I may, every online organizer failed for me. There may be people out there who are happy with such tools and use them successfully, but all the ones I used led to me waisting time rather than gaining time. Still, such applications can be especially handy if you set them up to sync with a portable device like a cell phone or PDA! Either way, I’ve since returned to using a simple paper organizer. It is easy to carry around and pull out whenever you have to scribble down a note. It gives you the freedom to easily draw diagrams, sketches or just a simple 2 or 3 word note. Often the simplest solution is best, even if its not the coooooolest!

As I commented on Catherine’s blog, there are two small innovative improvements which could bring paper organizers back to world organizing domination:

First, being able to touch a link you have written with a special blue-tooth enabled pen and then have that link open up on your computer screen would be incredibly awesome. You might have to do more than touch it, perhaps drag over the link as if you were highlighting it so that the pen could read the destination and then open it!

Second, if the first tool above is invented, that means we now have a pen with a special tip that can read words as it passes over them. This means we have completed half the process required to create a copy/paste pen! We could of course now copy from paper and send the text to our computer just like the first tool did with links, but it would be even more awesome if we could also paste on our paper. Perhaps this will require some new sort of digital paper, or perhaps the pen could output the text if we slowly drag it across a page.

Well, thats enough rambling for today, see you all again tomorrow!

The following image from Host Jury shows just how many domains Ipower is currently losing due to its lack of service. Head over to Host Jury to read the full post and details.

If you have a website hosted with Ipower, don’t be surprised if you start running into problems as soon as you hope to do anything beyond hosting a static HTML website. As soon as you require a MySQL database to run a PHP website such as Wordpress, phpBB, or Joomla, you will immediately start experiencing extreme downtime. If you do find any positive reviews about Ipower online, you may want to read this post about how Ipower has been caught posting fraudulent positive reviews!

So how slow will your website be and how long will it take Ipower to fix the problem? Read the comments to this post and see how one user discovered that his website was averaging below 60% uptime! On one day, reports said his website was only available 6% of the time… You can also see via the comments to this post that this sort of problem has now been going on for well over half a year, yet technical support still replies back that either nothing is wrong or that it is a temporary issue!

HostSearch - Visit HostSearch to see how users have been rating Ipower there.

Digg.com - Take a look at some interesting comments regarding Ipower posted by Digg users.

North Country Gazette - Read this extensive article about Ipowerweb and how they are basically putting companies who rely on their online revenue right out of business.

If all of this extensive information has not already convinced you to avoid Ipower at all costs, take a look at another post I wrote yesterday titled Slow MySQL and PHP with Ipower, which links to even more examples of their failure to provide adequate hosting.

The next question on your mind is probably, where to go from here…! Who is a good host? I’d recommend HostGator or 1and1.com. Before making a purchase from any company, take the time to research reviews first on reliable websites such as HostJury. HostJury continually makes an effort to make sure all reviews on their site are real and honest.

Drupal, phpBB and Wordpress are among the most popular content management tools used for building active communities. By building a community, you are creating more than a website. You are giving your visitors something to become a part of and a feeling of belonging. By creating a community, you are more likely to see return visitors, comments and increased page views.

A web site is something people search for when they need information. Once they consume the information, they leave. A community is something people join, something people will open their computer to go check up on, something people will contribute too.

If you’d like to learn more about creating a prosperous online community, I recommend checking out, Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress. This is a very good book written by Robert Douglass, Mike Little and Jared Smith. Douglass is a developer and member of the security team for the Drupal project. He has plenty of experience with content management systems and knows what he is talking about. Mike Little is one of the Wordpress founders and developers. Wordpress is the software which powers my site here and millions of others around the world! Jared Smith is a support team member of phpBBHacks and has therefore been involved with phpBB for many years and has helped create many mods.

The book has sections on Drupal, phpBB and Wordpress which cover everything from configuration to maintaining your website. If you are looking to get started creating your community, this is a great resource to help get you setup and running quick. It contains all the information you will need to be successful!

If anybody has read any other great books on the topic of content management, please let me know as I would be eager to check them out!