Web Development Blog

OK.. Its been 2 weeks.. and today I’m sharing my experience

OK, so I decided to try something new…

Going without the social sites is one thing.. I can probably get on easily without that, but messenger is quite a big chunk of what I do… so we will have to see.

Luckily this is only for two weeks. After the two weeks I will make a video again that will give some feedback on what I experienced bu making this change.

(This is day one, and I already miss my online friends)

OK, as from this point I’m calling it out of fashion to use “SEO” as a buzz-word. (I know it should have been called long ago, but hey, we all got distracted by “Web 2.0″) So can we please stop throwing it around like its.. well.. going out of fashion.

The reason that I’m bringing this up is because this is something I see quite often with clients who don’t have a clue about the Internet and doesn’t like new design trends and as a result keep the companies they represent in the dark ages.

Wait, let me give you some background information about myself. I started out in the industry as a SEO consultant for a online casino company. So for the 1st 6 months of my web career, I did everything in my power to rank high, and let me tell you the main thing I’ve learned:

Good content structured in a proper HTML document (which is W3C compliant) will do wonders in search engines.

We easily forget that even though we would like our sites to rank well in search engines, the visitors to our site is real people like you and me, and the chance of them returning is a lot better if the site contains good copy that wasn’t raped with bold and italics and id the site was esthetically pleasing… and this is something that gets dumped daily as a result of “SEO”.

I want to give you real world examples.. but I like my job I’m sure that if you have been in this industry for longer than a year you will have some examples of your own…

Unless you have a photographic memory (and I don’t believe any person with normal brain function does), you probably have a hard time remembering all the functions, options, tags, etc. that you need in everyday development.

The fact that documentation can be a total pain in the ass most of the times makes cheat sheets a favorite of mine.

You can print them out and paste them on the wall of your cubicle or office, or just keep them handy in your bookmarks for quick reference.

Here is a list of over thirty cheat sheets that you as a developer might find useful.

Web Development Cheat Sheets:

- JavaScript
- CSS
- CSS
- CSS
- Colour Hex Codes
- HTML
- HTML Entities
- XHTML / HTML
- XHTML

Databases / SQL Cheat Sheets:

- MySQL
- MySQL
- Oracle
- SQL
- Sybase
- PostgreSQL

Language Cheat Sheets:

- ColdFusion
- PHP
- Ruby
- Regular Expressions
- JSP
- Java 1.5
- Python

Version Control Cheat Sheets:

- CVS
- Subversion
- Subversion

Other:

- Google
- Windows
- Unix
- Unix
- Unix
- Vi
- Vim
- mod_rewrite
- ASCII Character Codes
- htaccess
- Debian
- Perl
- Perl

Do you have one in your bookmarks that’s not on the list? Feel free to post it under comments.

A question I get asked a lot by die IM posse is how to “get that little icon in the tab on Firefox” so after giving these instructions quite few times I have decided to put a post on here so that I can just direct the next person directly to a complete guide to installing a favicon (Yep, that’s what the little icon is called )

So, firstly we have to create this icon that we want to use, and the best way to do this would be with a graphical application like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and create an image with the dimension 32px x 32px. You can also have transparent parts in your favicon, just remember to save it in PNG8 format for that.

OK, so now you got your creative on and you have a favicon that you absolutely love! Now you just need to get it to the .ico format and for that I am going to direct you to a online converter at http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

On there you basically browse for the file, say “convert” and tada! You have a favicon.ico file and even ‘n preview of what it will look like.

All that is left to do is to ad the file to your website and that is also a pretty easy thing to do. Firstly upload the favicon.ico file into your root folder of your site. (This is the same place where you can find you index file)

All you need to do now is to enter the following line into the head section of your site:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon” />

There you go, that was pretty easy hey.. Your site can now boast with his/her own little piece of site bling!