A comprehensive intro to SEO from SEOMoz in the form of a slide deck. This covers a lot of areas. The pyramids, for example, are a nice visualisation to the different layers of SEO. Continue reading
SEOMoz’s intro to SEO
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Firefox 4 change: input type image only submits x and y, not name when clicked. Keyboard as before
Partly a note to self, and further details for a bug logged in Firefox’s bugzilla:
Firefox 4.0 (and IE) do not send name/value for input type=”image”; only .x and .y coordinates
Earlier Firefox, Chrome (latest) and Safari do send name/value, which is what we’d expect… Continue reading
XSLT Performance tip: don’t indent output
When transforming XML via XSLT, make sure the output setting for indenting is turned off and honoured by your code.
Turning it off will often speed up the transform and save a bit of output size. Continue reading
CSS: inner elements breaking border-radius
Some browsers support border-radius for rounded corners. But inner elements may break those corners. Simply using overflow:hidden on the outer element can often help solve this problem Continue reading
Web Standards – a good thing, but won’t help with SEO
There are many good reasons to follow web standards principles, to use CSS-based layout and progressive enhancement but SEO, unfortunately, is not one of them. Continue reading
Use CSS display:table for Layout
For a few years now, web developers doing CSS-based layouts have used floats or absolute positioning for layout web sites to avoid using non-semantic HTML <table>s.
While doable, extra hoops often have to be jumped through (mostly for IE) and some seemingly simple things can be harder than necessary (like equal height columns).
However, for a simpler solution, CSS-based display:table, display:table-row, display:table-cell etc are all usable today across Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, Opera 9+ and IE8. Continue reading
Google App Engine as your own Content Delivery Network
24 Ways has an excellent article on using Google App Engine as your own Content Delivery Network.
A CDN is a network of servers around the world to serve content from your site from the nearest physical location. All the large sites (Yahoo, Google, Amazon, etc) use them.
After reading the above post, I was also curious to find out how if Google App Engine helps in the following: compression, expires headers and versioning. It looks like it does. Continue reading
Jonathan Snook’s jQuery Background Animation as a Plugin
Jonathan Snook recently posted a really neat background animation technique using jQuery. This was something I was looking for and it seemed like a good candidate for a jQuery plugin.
So, following on from my recent post about turning jQuery code into richer, unit testable plugin code, I thought I’d describe the quick process of doing so here. (It’s worth reading Snook’s post first though!) Continue reading
Turn your jQuery code into a richer, unit testable, plugin
I find myself increasingly using jQuery as my JavaScript framework of choice.
It’s by-line of “write less, do more” really seems apt.
But sometimes, by writing just that little bit extra, you can do even more.
For example, I often try to do the following:
- Make most jQuery code into reusable plugins
- Use the jQuery plugin development pattern for added flexibility
- Use QUnit to unit test JavaScript
- Combine the two approaches to drive out a richer API for the plugin
By unit testing with QUnit, I find I often need to trigger additional events or add additional code from within the plugin so the test can be meaningful.
But this extra code isn’t only useful for testing, it becomes a useful part of the plugin’s API, improving its functionality and flexibility without sacrificing maintainability and readability of the code.
I’ll try to demonstrate that in this post. Continue reading
Google to host a number of JavaScript libraries
Google just announced their AJAX Library API, where Google will host many major JavaScript frameworks for you, such as jQuery, Prototype, Mootools, Dojo, etc.
This will allow you to write web pages that refer to those scripts rather than copies on your own site, reducing your bandwidth, but also leveraging the infrastructure capabilities of Google, such as their content distributed network (which means users would be served those files from a location much closer to them), properly compressed, minified, cacheable files, etc. Continue reading