Posts Tagged ‘pretty’

Search engine optimization-Swap Links

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Similarly many bloggers swap links with other bloggers. Sometimes this happens pretty naturally (you see someone linking to you so you link back) but in many cases the links are strategic ones and formally arranged between site owners. I get daily requests for such reciprocal links (I rarely act on them). Whilst there is some benefit in such link swapping I would again advise caution here as many SEO experts believe that the search engines have methods for tracking such strategies and devaluing the links. Some try to get around this by doing indirect or triangulated links. ie instead of site A and B doign a direct swap they involve other sites. So A links to C in exchange for D (also owned by C) linking to B (also owned by A) - makes your head hurt doesn’t it!?! There are also a variety of systems around that say they’ll take care of such interlinking for you - I know many who use Digital Point’s Free C0-Op Advertising system. Personally I tend to avoid such schemes and have a policy of linking to sites I think are valuable to my readers. If they link back then so be it.

PHP:Useful in-browser development tools for PHP

Monday, June 30th, 2008

While debuggers exists, there isn’t much of a tradition for using them in PHP. People have largely come to rely on injecting debugging code directly into the program, for inspecting program scope. The infamous var_dump have served for this purpose and version 4.3.0 of PHP brought us another equally useful function — debug_backtrace.

Tracers and error handlers
Both of these functions produce a rather crude output though, so naturally people have written wrappers around them to remedy this. I think Harry’s pretty bluescreen was one of the first dedicated libraries I’ve seen. Xdebug spouts a similar output on error, although arguably not as pretty. Or blue.

What bluescreen is for debug_backtrace, krumo is for var_dump. Recently, FirePHP — building on Firebug — does a similar thing. FirePHP uses HTTP-headers to send data from server to client, which turns out to be very handy when dealing with non-HTML output (Eg. Ajax stuff). Because it builds on Firebug, it only works on Firefox, and in particular only on Firefox 2 (Another reason for Ubuntu-users to downgrade from Firefox 3).

Frameworks
Apart for these general general tracing tools, a couple of frameworks have their own, more or less specific, tools. Symfony’s Debug Toolbar is probably the most impressive …

GOOGLE FACTS

Friday, June 20th, 2008

Google’s index is updated every day as Google crawls the web. There pretty much is always an update going on.

Google has algorithms and data pushes that are going out on a less frequent basis. The latest were on 27 June, 28 July and 17 August.

Google’s BigDaddy update was a software infrastructure upgrade that finished in February. The BigDaddy update introduced a new way how they crawl the web.

Matt Cutts mentions in the video that another software infrastructure update is on the way. The new update should increase the quality of the search results:

“If we find out that we can improve quality by changing our algorithms or data or infrastructure, or anything else, we’re going to make that change.

The best SEO’s in my experience are the ones that can adapt, and that say ‘OK, this is the way the algorithms look right now to me, if I want to make a good site that will do well in search engines, this is the direction I want to head in next.’”

DreamHost Security Leak

Friday, June 20th, 2008

I was pretty amazed when I heard a company as prominent as DreamHost have a security leak as massive as 3,500 FTP accounts. Caydel was one of the unfortunate customers who had his account bypassed. Apparently he noticed a ton of spam links placed on his website, but didn’t think of anything at the time. Nevertheless, DreamHost still hasn’t discovered the security hole.