Idevs

I was checking my statistics the other say and noticed that someone had some to the site using the query “Developing Secret Powers“, interestingly this site has nothing  to do with the subject but It gave me a great idea for a series of article.

Enhancing your “powers” is something every good developer has to do. Whether it is learning a new language , solving new and interesting problems or even creating the problems yourself.

Over the next few days I am going to discuss various aspects of these powers and list ways of improving them. By the weekend you should be a super code monkey!

I can’t remember the source but a few days ago a came across an article which stated that one could never redesign a site without rewriting the markup. This infuriated me somewhat since the author of the article clearly had not concept of semantics or document structure.

If you develop a site and outline your markup in such a way that it is structured and semantic you should never have to touch the markup again, of course there are always exceptions to these rules e.g. if you wanted to add a new section like a sidebar or menu. But the underlying structure of the page e.g. the header, the main body content, the navigation menu, the footer etc. don’t need to be touched.

CSS Zen Garden shows this concept of brilliantly and also raises a very interesting point which developers should take into consideration when developing their site structure, the concept of redundancy. I will illustrate this concept a bit further:

When I markup forms I always wrap each label and input in a div, this always me extra flexibility in the design and means I can create far better forms. I have been considering taking this one step further and assigning a unique id to every element, this would build in a lot of redundancy and most of the ids would never be touched by the stylesheet, but they would be there just in case the need did arise.

I would be interested in knowing other people’s opinions on this subject. Is redundancy a good thing? Does it cloud markup? Is content without style possible or will one always have to mess with markup in a redesign?

The Site Structure Handbook or Real SEO Guide is a short book dedicated to teaching people how to correctly structure their sites. This first version goes through headings and paragraphs, links, semantic tags, meta data and rounds off with a discussion about page rank and SEO.

I finally got around to writing a this short handbook this afternoon, I would be interested to know all your opinions and criticisms of the book as well as what you think should be in future versions.

I came across a nice roundup of PHP techniques that might have slipped through the fingers of those new to the language, there were a few in there that even I didn’t know about. Including this one:

Partially validate email addresses by checking that the domain name exists with checkdnsrr(). This built-in function checks to ensure that a specified domain name resolves to an IP address. A simple user-defined function that builds on checkdnsrr() to partially valid email addresses can be found in the user comments section in the PHP docs. This is handy for catching those occasional folks who think their email address is ‘joeuser@wwwphp.net’ instead of ‘joeuser@php.net’.

Right, there has been a lot of talk recently about reciprocal linking or rather does it violate Google’s terms of service. I am now going to outline this in the shortest possible sentance.

 You should link to a site if it will benefit/amuse your visitors

There we go, sorted. Don’t link for the sake of a back link. If your site has valuable content then people will link to it.

If people contact you and say they will put a link to your site if you put a link to theirs, ignore them, or better yet, send them an email explaining why they should hang up their web site and go and do gardening or something, because they clearly don’t understand the web.

Jamie

Today I am going to direct you to this article on creating the ultimate web development tool using firefox. It is one of the best round ups I have read of all the available extensions.

When properly configured, Firefox can become the ultimate web development tool, giving you direct access to the page you are working on so you can style your page in real-time, debug javascript or even edit the html.

Ok, so even though I haven’t got through the last chapter yet (although by the time you read this I should have) I am going to write this review.

Genesis Machines is a popular science book based around biocomputing. Written by Martyn Amos, the man who achieved the first ever Ph.D in Genetic Computing, the book takes you on a journey through the origins of computer science, molecular biology and eventually the combination of the two.

Computing Theory

After a general introduction the book starts taking a look at the history of computing and computer science, if you have ever taken a computing class or have a general interest in the subject then a lot of the stuff raised in the section should be nothing new (although I found it to be a very good history of computing and even I learned a few things). I would say that if you haven’t had any experience of computing then this section might be a bit confusing at first although most people should get through it ok.

Biology

This is the section I found hardest to get through, the subject matter itself was really interesting and when it is related back to the concepts raised in the computing sections it becomes exciting to read. The only problem I found with this is that I don’t have any previous exposure to the biology and so much of the background information in this section, although well explained, took a while to get through and on several occasions I did have to consult other sources to enable me to fully understand the concepts being explained.

Maths

If you have ever taken a discrete mathematics class, all of this section of the book is just a recap. If you haven’t then this is a great introduction to logic problems and how to solve them with many examples given in the book.

When it is related to the biocomputing sections this chapter produces a read which is impossible to put down.

The Last Chapter

Personally, I don’t like it. Having gone through all the interesting theory and practical applications the author decides to round the book off on a biology lesson, as a computing guy I didn’t find this interesting in the slightest (and hence why I am writing this with still a few pages to read), and I have a feeling that if you are a biologist all this chapter is going to do is go over well known ground.

Later on the chapter discusses practical applications that were hinted at in earlier chapters, and while some readers may enjoy the greater depth, I found it was unnecessary and didn’t add anything to the book.

Overall

I enjoyed the book throughly, it is very well researched (with over 40 pages of references at the back) and for anyone interested in computer science or genetics it is a very good read.

I had planned to write a book review for today but I started reading some Asimov along side of the book I had planned to review and so still have a chapter left to read. So the review will be tomorrow.

Instead I would like to talk to you about chipmunking, the name I like to give to increasing the speed of music so it sounds like it is being sung by the chipmunks, if you don’t remember the chipmunks then look them up! The point of the matter is by doing this to my music collection I have trained my brain to process the songs faster to the extent where I can no longer listen to normal music without feeling it is somewhat to slow.

The more alert among you would have noticed that this principle has been applied to increasing the effectiveness of audio learning, and certainly I would feel comfortable listening to someone speak at 150% to even 165% of their actual speed and I intend to put this into effect during my second year of university.

And another benefit? Some songs sound tremendously better when chipmunked, I will leave you to find out which ones.

Today, I would like to briefly talk about search engine optimisation, and why most of it is complete rubbish.

The problem is that the majority of “techniques” and “tips” you will find are nothing more than keyword spamming. You just have to look at what most companies do, they go through your content and increase the number of keywords in that content, how many times have you read a site online that features the sites keyword once every 3 lines?? I can think of a certainly think of a few.

This is all part of the “write for machines not people” mentality of including all your keywords in heading tags, strong tags and emphasis tags, leaving out all the other ‘non-important’ phrases because you “don’t want to lower the other keyword’s ‘score’”

SEO encourage people to treat their content as advertising copy. They should realise that by producing valuable content you will provide a better experience for the reader and that will lead to more inbound links from quality referrers. This will drive more traffic to their site and ultimately increase their chances of selling their product/attracting advertisers etc.

So please make your motto “I will write decent content for people not machines”

The fight is on against ignorant web developers, and it is with great joy and delight that I find Idevs named Cool Site of the Week on the Walk on my Path blog. I have received a few emails regarding the the entry, all of them asking for resources detailing how they can join in this fight and make their sites better. This is great news.

Here are a few of the links I have collected which will get you started if you to want to join in the revolution.

http://www.subcide.com/tutorials/csslayout/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/practicalcss/
http://www.glish.com/css/
http://mondaybynoon.com/2006/04/24/click-here-to-read-this-article/
http://idevs.co.uk/blog/how-to-write-semantic-markup/

As always I will place these link on the Idevs del.icio.us account as well. Although a few of them are there already. I will keep you updated on this as time goes by and please if you have any questions feel free to email me or post a comment.