IT Consulting :: Design :: Events Management
While I do not officially support URLList, nor was I planning to further develop it, a requirement for a slight change in functionality arose, which led to the fixing of a couple of long-lasting bugs, and the addition of this new functionality.
The new functionality is the ability to output it’s data as a list of URLs as HTML links (a href’s), the bugs that were fixed was that it previously ignored archive pages, which are now supported.
What tools do you recommend to help other Website Developers?
This is a particular tough question. My background is in UNIX administration, and all my web and development work is performed using Firefox and Vi1.
However I have come to rely on a few tools in particular, and found some others very usefull on occasion. All of these tools are browser based (and therefore cross-platform) and more importantly freely available. Please contact me if any are broken, shouldn’t be here or you have suggestions.
For sometime now i’ve been meaning to investigate Christine Davis‘ plugin “Ultimate Tag Warrior” for wordpress. The main reason for this is the benefits1 that can be acheived by participating in things like technorati.com.
The main concept of things like technorati is that by tagging and searching using tags more acurate searches with more reliable results can be found, instead of relying on plain language search string matches through content that may or may not be relevant. You can be pretty sure an article tagged with seo is going to be about search engine optimization, while one that is tagged as audio probably won’t be. This kind of search is particularly more useful when searching blog content, and more inline with the way a network of blogs works then the “conventional web”.
Installing the “Ultimate Tag Warrior” was mildly straight forward, there is plenty of info out there that helped to solve a few of the problems that popped up. I still have on problem with re-writing URLs so that I can have my “tag” archive pages appear under jaredquinn.info/tags/sometag instead of jaredquinn.info/index.php?tag=sometag - but I’ll get this fixed up soon.
If you do need assistance installing UTW, you can try these sites:
If you need assistance with a UTW installation, I am available, Contact Me and we’ll discuss your requirements.
The “Blog Archive” page has been renamed to “Browse Archive”, and now lists the Tag Cloud (or balloon) at the top, the Date Archive list and the Category Archive list. These may one day be seperated into seperate pages, when or if it becomes required.
Each previous post has been tagged with some relative tags, this will help eventually when I am able to claim this blog at technorati.com, which I have been unable to do as yet.
Again, there is no point attempting to drive additional traffic to a site unless there is useful content for people, firstly no one is going to point links at useless content, and unless the content is relevant, useful and fresh, you may as well have a static page that gets updated once a year and not a blog. At least that is my theory on it.
Giving up extra real-estate on a page over to ads is a hard choice to do. A balance needs to be acheived between the space used for advertising and the user experience. You want ads to get noticed by visitors (so they click), but you don’t want the experience to feel like they are sitting through 15 minutes of ads to watch 5 minutes of quality television (dispite how well it works for commercial tv networks).
The layout and design are important to keep things asthetically pleasing for the visitor, however making ads stand out enough to be clicked on is also important as far as adsense revenue goes.
I’ve added an extra AdSense block to the foot of single posts on this site, to see if they get noticed.
Currently my banner ads across the top of the page, which take up very little real-estate, blend in well with the rest of the site and do not get in the way are the most popular ads to click on at this site. The little google ad bar down the right hand side under the contact details and paypal link are probably placed very badly, because they never get noticed, or if they do rarely get clicked on.
So I’m trying an ad block below the content before the comments when viewing a single post (not on search results or semi-static pages). I only want to keep 2 ad blocks on the site in total, as I really am against bombarding the users with ads, but unless the advertising is actually getting some attention i’ll continue to tweak it until it does, as without it getting attention I would rather not have it at all.
I’ll post again on this topic in a couple of weeks and let you know the results of my adsense experiment.
I finally managed to dig up the specifications for the TX-900 Receiver we repaired a couple of months ago, I had attempted on a couple of occasions to find something reliable, but the best I can come up with are some E-Bay listings which contained the specifications; they are:
This is a great little receiver, and has not failed to provide superb sound quality.
I have decided to release a sneak preview of a PHP Rapid Application Development framework I have been working on, which is currently named fluidic. The name comes from the name of the application I was developing that spawned the framework, but seems more appropriate for the development framework.
Fluidic is designed to be used with PHP and MySQL and provides rapid List/Edit/View style interface which is extremely customisable. Filters/Search and custom buttons can be implemented easilly and with a little more coding subforms and sublists and other custom code components can be implemented.
It also currently supports pop-up calendar for date entry, customisable formatting and verification functions and an extenable framework for plugging into various interface events.
There is little documentation available for fluidic at the moment, but I intend to develop the documentation, including more working examples in the near future. It is currently aimed at experienced PHP developers who will be able to gain an understanding of how to implement systems utilising fluidic by reading the sample code.
If you are interested in contributing to the fluidic project, please contact me.
You can find information and the current code base at my fluidic page.
