archive for April, 2006

Aaron Wall's SEO Book

mikesmullin — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 17:31:44 -0600

What better way to proove that you understand SEO to the world than to write a book about it and make sure it is the #1 rank on Google, Yahoo, and all major search engines? I love this guy's approach.

On his blog he promises "a new chapter every day" as he himself is a consultant and always learning new and better ways to optimize content for search engines on the web.

I read his blog, I have his book, and I would recommend both!

CSSVista

mikesmullin — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:39:41 -0600

CSSVista is a free Windows application for web developers which lets you edit your CSS code live in both Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously. If you like this, you may be interested in their browser compatibility service, SiteVista. Yes, that's why this software is free!

I have personally fallen in love with this application. I can't imagine how I ever wrote CSS without it. Dreamweaver is no match, and neither is the Firefox inline CSS editor that comes with the Web Developer plugin. This has saved me literally hours of work and I highly recommend it if you are a cool web developer like me.

You can download it here.

Also for those who don't know...

SiteVista is the company behind it and their site is very fresh and I'd put them right up close to 37Signals. I recommend you browse around their site after you check out this product.

Yesterday I was thinking I should start a .com where people could go to test their sites with different browsers on different platforms (eg. IE5, IE5 Mac, Safari, etc.)

Well, of course, they have already done it and although its a bit slow it does look like something I will have to purchase soon. Either that, or a Mac.

I'm still crossing my fingers for the OS/X-on-PC hack.

Spiffy Corners

mikesmullin — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 15:20:35 -0600

Over 2000 people dugg Spiffy Corners.

What is it? A pure-CSS alternative to Nifty Corners by Greg Johnson.

I found it on WaSP, as Ian Lloyd was lamenting its redundancy and non-standards markup.

What's wrong with what we have? Nothing. Except like Greg, when I found Nifty Corners, I too was dismayed at yet another js include for something as trivial as rounded corner effects.

Spiffy Corners is a step closer toward optimizing the process, but...

I still think it is up to us to bring together the most important elements:

I should be able to define an id or a class for my DIV and automatically have the corners rounded.

It should work in ALL browsers, on ALL platforms.

It should comply with existing Web Standards.

With Spiffy Corners I may avoid another js include, but now I have another css include.

So, the real question is:

Can we use minimalist javascript to add these important features and still keep it as compact as this pure-css solution?

I think if we utilize a) compact code to begin with, plus b) obfuscation, c) condensation (removal of all comments/whitespace), and possibly even d) mod_gzip we can.

Pending testing in other browsers, I plan on adding this to my Prototype library.

AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar

mikesmullin — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 23:34:58 -0700

This is a Google AdSense widget I designed for the new WordPress Sidebar Widgets plug-in.

However, as a loyal reader has lovingly pointed out, if you want AdSense or any other kind of JavaScript component added to your sidebar all you need to do is paste it inside the standard Text Widgets that come built-in with Automattic's Sidebar Widgets plugin!

Unbelievably easy! And all this work for nothing. However, for fun I have left the original plugin up here in case you were interested in how I made the plugin.

Thanks to the people at Automattic, it is easy to install and requires no coding or template modification.

The Color, size and h2 title of your AdSense widget are all fully customizable from within the WordPress Presentations tab. No joke!

Requires:

Wordpress Sidebar Widgets Plugin

Download:

wp-widgets-adsense.zip

Here are the installation instructions...

Installation:

Unzip and upload to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin from inside WordPress (Plugins tab)
Drag AdSense widget to your sidebar from inside WordPress (Presentation tab > Sidebar Widgets)
Click the configuration icon and enter your google_ad_client ID
Optional: customize the color, size, and sidebar h2 title

That's it! Enjoy.

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