9 Ways to Instantly Code Faster

There are a wide variety of tools and techniques which can drastically improve the speed at which we code. Particularly during time-sensitive settings, even a savings of a few seconds per iteration can add up substantially over the course of the month. Here are 9 ways to save time coding;

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/general/9-ways-to-instantly-code-faster/

Inbound linking strategies explained + Tool to help out

Inbound linking explained..

Almost every website owner wants high organic rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing for specific keywords, relevant to the content on their website. When taking on the task of building quality inbound links to you website, apart from having to have the most relevant and interesting content on your site, it is extremely important to have links from a balance of paid directories, industry specific websites as well as blogs and from social network user profiles of people, or businesses, that are specialists or experts in the area your website. Search engines aren't silly and the guys that work on improving them aren't either. Using services that claim that they will add a link to your website in 1000's of directories, may create inbound links to your site, but if the majority of the directories are barely relevant to your websites content, then they are of little benefit to your websites ranking and in some cases can be of detriment, most probably due to the fact that the search engine will pick up a sudden huge surge in inbound links from the same old directories and work out that these inbound links are not links to a website with valuable content but an attempt to try and push your website up in the organic search results by using an automated service.

Generating inbound links to your website / blog from other industry related websites and from people in your industries social media pages is in reality something that is not going to happen overnight. Realistically and ultimately promoting and creating inbound links is an ongoing task that is going to be something that will need to be considered for the life of your website, should you wish to obtain high organic search ranking for your relevant keywords.

What I want to get across in this post is that a search engines aim is to provide the most relevant content for the keyword the user has entered. The service / script that I stumbled across today is an excellent concept, which I can't see why wasn't thought of earlier. I believe its development was inspired by the concept that approximately 6% of page views generate some sort of user interaction. This interaction could be leaving a comment, copying some of your content for reference or 'retweeting' your latest post. Now if a user is copying and pasting some content from your site, this obviously tells you that what they have copied is something this user is interested in and most probably going to end up on a relevant page somewhere on the web. The user may just be copying the content for a document of theirs but in the social web culture that we are current living in there is a big possibly your content is going to be pasted on a blog, in a comment on someone else's blog or on a social networking site that will generally relevant to you website industry and quite possibly a resource of information relevant to your website. Now this type of inbound link is one that will make a difference in your search engine ranking. From tests I have done over the years with search engines and how there complicated and sensitive algorithms work, this is why as soon as I saw this service I got excited. Having a script that can automatically create an inbound link to your website from a website that is relevant is going to take at some hours I spend building up relevant inbound links to my website and implementing this script on your site can help you out too! In my opinion this little bit of script has made my day.. hopefully that doesn't sound too sad..

Here is the link to the service called "Tynt" - http://tynt.com/ - It literally takes a couple of minutes to create an account and about the same time to install the code on your website if you know web programming languages. If you don't it's not a huge problem, it may take a bit longer to get working on your site, but there are instructions of how to install the script provided.

If you want to see how it works just select some text in this blog post, copy it, open up 'notepad', or better still 'tweet' the selected text and you will notice that under the pasted text is a link to this blog. Enjoy any SEO enthusiasts out there. Hope you will share the same enthusiasm I had when I first stumbled across this service. Please stay posted if you are into SEO as I have a few more posts in coming weeks that reveal some further SEO strategies I use.

<strong> and <b> / <em> and <i> - Which is for what?

A question that has been bugging me all day today when I was conducting some SEO work today was is the <strong> and <em> tag any different to the <b> and <i> tag. The conclusion I have come to after researching the topic is that you use the <strong> and <em> instead of <b> and <i> tag when you are trying to emphasize keywords on a page as readers treat the two tags differently. They achieve the same visual effect however the <strong> and <em> tags are "logical" tags. This means that they are for when the developer wants to add emphasis to particular words or phrases. A reader for a user with disabilities may say the word louder for example. The <b> and <i> tags are for visual layout effects on a page and do not have the same effect on a reader or add any weight to your keywords in the search engines. I suggest when crafting a page and that if you want to format something purely for visual effect then you use the <b> or <i> tag, as they will reduce you page size very slightly, hence increase load time. This post by Nikki Pilkington also states that there is no effect in the SEO world.

http://nikkipilk.sc10.co.uk/blog/2008/09/30/tip-49-the-bold-and-the-beautiful/

Speed up your page load times with a simple trick

Here I have for you a simple image trick to make your pages load faster. This might sound simple but it is something that i notice allot of web developers overlook when adding images to pages, whether it is because they are lazy or just didn't think about it, this is a fact. Every time you web page loads the browser looks for the width and height of an image. This is specified through the attributes width="236" & height="657" which allows your browser to instantly know, through your HTML / XHTML code, how big the image is and where to place it. What happens behind the scenes now is that you browser will load your page text before the graphics. If your graphics do not have width and height attributes set then as the browser reads the HTML / XHTML and gets to one of the images with no attributes, it causes the browser to have to perform a function to work out the actual size of the image, which hence slows down the load time a little bit. So the trick to making you pages load quicker is to make sure that all of your graphics, even the small transparent gifs and bullets have a width and height set. After some testing that I have done on a dial up connection you can really notice the difference. Give it a try.

Apple "Safari" - New Windows Browser

Long time no tech tips post. This is a true reflection of amount of current project work I have at the moment. Anyway lets explore my latest Internet discoveries..

There is now a forth major contender in the browser market for Windows users. Most of us have heard of "Internet Explorer", "FireFox" (My personal favorite), "Opera" but now there is one from Apple "Safari". So after installing and having a play with it I quiet enjoyed the browsing experience. It is quick, has all the features the other browsers have, and has quiet a nice look and feel. I even set it as my default browser for a couple of days, however as a developer could not trade all of my FireFox extensions, for the new browser, so switched back not too long after.

I'm not going to lie, the browser does render pages and launch quicker than all of the other browsers and features all the modern features, such as "tabbed browsing", "pop-up blocker", "auto-fill forms" and built in "RSS Reader" and does come with the classic Apple look and feel (just like i-Tunes really) but it is really a browser for a basic Internet user. Another cool feature is the find feature which actually highlights the word searched upon in a pretty cool animated way.

One thing I don't like is that I couldn't use my de.icio.us bookmarks with the browser and I'm not sure Apple are going to open up the browser for developers to build in extra functionality. We will see I guess as it still is in beta.

I think that the main reason that Apple launched this browser is because the i-phone has just been released and the browser on this phone is Safari. It is definitely a strategic move to attempt to get Windows website developers to build support for the browser into their websites so that the i-phone can handle web based applications. I mean if they had not released the browser then I'm sure that the majority of us web developers would not bother supporting the browser unless it is a major contender on Windows machines. Another interesting point to make is there are millions of i-Pod users who download i-Tunes to manage their music, in the near future I can for see a move from Apple to include the browser with the download of the i-Tunes application. This will put them in a good position to take a good share of the browser market for Windows PCs.

I suggest you give it a go, check its features on the Apple site and start supporting it as a developer, as I imagine with the i-Phone and i-Tunes download amounts will make this browser quiet available to the public. On top of that why not reach the i-Phone mobile application market by making sure your website works in the browser correctly. Download the browser from the link below;

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

Ensure Googlebot crawls your site feeds

Want to get ensure Googlebot crawls your site feeds? To get your site feeds indexed and appear in the search results for Google's personalized homepage and Google Reader the code that needs to added to ensure that your feed is included in the index is listed below. This code is to be added to the header of your web page and uses the <link> tag.

For an Atom Feed;
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="subske's tech know how?" href="http://subske.blogspot.com/atom.xml">

For an RSS Feed;

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="subske's tech know how?" href="http://subske.blogspot.com/rss.xml">

Australian date format with date field in notes view column

Have been working on a Domino based website today as the client reported that the date format of their promotions listings had changed to American date format. After playing with the date and time settings on the server, then on the field that contained the date I decided a workaround was needed so that regardless of these settings the date would display in Australian format regardless. So from no on if you are displaying a date in an embedded notes view's column, on the web, why not use this work around. Solution is to break each part of the date up and rebuild the date in the desired Australian format. The code below speaks for its self as is pretty simple. Now should the domino database ever move servers or date and time settings on the server change this will have no affect on the display of the date. Here is the simple notes formula language to use.

day := @If(@Length(@Text(@Day(specialweekend))) <= 1;"0"+@Text(@Day(specialweekend));@Text(@Day(specialweekend)));
month := @If(@Length(@Text(@Month(specialweekend))) <= 1;"0"+@Text(@Month(specialweekend));@Text(@Month(specialweekend)));
year := @Text(@Year(specialweekend));

day + "/" + month + "/" + year

disable button based on text link

Wrote this bit of JavaScript to basically disable the next button unless a link in the content is clicked. It was built to run out of a CMS system so that the JavaScript can go on any page without causing an error, but only disables the next button if the link is contained in the body. It can be used to force users to view links before they can move onto the next page.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Enable me once link is clicked</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>

<body>

To access the document and enable next button <a href="#" id="fixednext" onClick="javascript:enableMe('next');">click here</a>
<p>
<input name="Next" type="button" id="next" value="Next">
</p>
<p> </p>

<script language="JavaScript">

if (document.getElementById('fixednext')==null) { }
else {
document.getElementById('next').disabled=true;
}

function enableMe(nextid) {
document.getElementById(nextid).disabled=false;
}
</script>

</body>
</html>

Smooth Image Buttons

I am always browsing and have decided that I am going to start posting just about anything new that I come across that I find on the web. This will mean that I have a place that myself and others can come and find out what is new to web developers like myself out there. Here is a cool script to create a set of buttons that can be used either as navigation or to create a web based tool bar. The buttons you can create can have up to four states: none, over, down, and up. This makes the button feel more real than a simple mouseover. In addition, the different button states are all part of the same background image.

http://javascript.internet.com/image-effects/smooth-image-buttons.html

Auto reply email script - LotusScript

Today I had to write a script to run in a Lotus Notes database that generates an auto reply email when a form is submitted. The email is sent to the email address specified in the "Email" field on the form. This script is relatively simple, written in LotusScript and works a treat. One tricky thing that I had to work out was to be able to send the email from a specific email address, as setting "From" field did not work. When the email hit the Domino server its value was set Anonymous. This causes problems as allot of spam filters reject the email, including Google's, which was what I was originally testing with. I have commented out the "ReplyTo" as even without this set, when you click reply in your Inbox the email still replies to info@munchtechnologies.com.au. If someone out there knows why this is I would be interested.

Sub Initialize

Dim Session As New NotesSession
Dim DocWeb As NotesDocument
Dim DBCur As NotesDatabase
Dim tmpEmail As String
Dim EmailTo As String
Dim rtitem As NotesRichTextItem

Set DBCur = Session.CurrentDatabase
Set DocWeb = Session.DocumentContext

tmpEmail = DocWeb.GetFirstItem("Email").Text

Set WorkApps = New NotesDocument(DBCur)
Set rtitem = New NotesRichTextItem( WorkApps , "Body")

WorkApps.SendTo = tmpEmail
WorkApps.Principal = "info@munchtechnologies.com.au"
WorkApps.INetFrom = "info@munchtechnologies.com.au"
WorkApps.DisplaySent = "info@munchtechnologies.com.au"
'WorkApps.ReplyTo = "info@munchtechnologies.com.au"
'WorkApps.From = "info@munchtechnologies.com.au"
WorkApps.Form = "Memo"
WorkApps.Subject = "Job Application Received - Munch Technologies"

Call rtitem.appendtext("This email is to let you know that we have received your job application.")
Call rtitem.AddNewline(2)
Call rtitem.appendtext("If you are required for an interview, a member of the Munch Technologies Management Team will contact you directly.")
Call rtitem.AddNewline(2)
Call rtitem.appendtext("Thank you for taking the time to complete the application form. Your application will be kept on file for 3 months.")
Call rtitem.AddNewline(2)
Call rtitem.appendtext("For any further information please contact us directly through the contact us section at http://www.munchtechnologies.com.au")
Call rtitem.AddNewline(2)

WorkApps.send True

End Sub

Hope you Lotus Notes heads out there find this useful.

Mailto function

After doing some investigation I found that you can actually cc and bcc mail recipients using the simple HTML mailto function. This can be done by using the following syntax mailto:test@test.com?cc=test@test.com?bcc=test@test.com?subject=This is a test subject. This is something that might be useful to some people as I always believed that you could only use the to field and that the cc and bcc were not able to be accessed.

CSS trick - reveal an area when printed

I had to complete some work for a client where they wanted an additional area where the employee could sign off the printed version of a form. They did not want the viewable version of the form to display the signature area until the document was printed. This is the code that i used to present a block of code however only when the form was printed. It worked really well as in the web browser you could just see the form where as when it was printed the additional signature area displayed at the bottom of the page. This code is probably quiet useful to some so I though that I would post it.