Archive for December, 2008
Understand Your Web Visitors
A new service launched today called Userfly. This service was created by Chris Estreich a senior engineer at Oodle. The service is designed for to help web developer understand how users interact with their websites. The service is added to a website by pasting a small snippet of JavaScript code in the head of the [...]
Pulitzer Prize Says Online-Only Newspapers are Legit
The Board that governs the Pulitzer Prize announced today that online-only publications are now eligible for all 14 Pulitzer Journalism categories. Here is an expert from the press release: “New York, Dec. 8, 2008 – The Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, which honor the work of American newspapers appearing in print, have been expanded to include [...]
To Niche or Not to Niche – Effectively Marketing a Web Design Firm
When I was in graduate school, I remember one of my professors was a niche evangelist. He constantly preached the need to specialize in business. He would say over and over again that was the most efficient way to gain expertise and increased credibility in an industry. I remember another professor pointing out that if [...]
Happy Birthday… To Me
I don’t really have any exciting web news or programming tips for you today. I spent most my day celebrating my birthday instead of working. I did spend a couple hours cleaning up some of my code on VoiceTales which is nearly ready to launch. I think next week will finally be the opening of [...]
Creating Symbolic/Softlinks Using PHP
PHP is a fantastic language and it has some very useful capabilities. I am currently developing a website that has a unique structure. Basically, I am using symbolic links to act as subdomains that all point to a single program. I am then using PHP’s built in $_SERVER array to find the HTTP host. From [...]
Testing Websites for Cross Browser Compatibility: Adobe Meermeer
Most web developers will tell you that the most frustrating and time-consuming task in web development is getting your websites to render the same in all browsers. It has gotten easier in the last couple of years with the latest generation of browsers but until all browsers become standards compliant or one browser monopolizes the [...]
Create an Array of The Last X Days using PHP
Today I needed to generate a graph that showed activity over the last 30 days. Realizing I was going to have to create multiple customizable graphs in the future, I wrote a simple function that takes an argument for number of days and then returns an array of the last X number of days from [...]
Search Engine Optimization for Non-Profits
Today while I was reading Aaron Wall’s advice regarding blog optimization (Available here: http://www.seobook.com/bloggers) I noticed he had a more recent guide for non-profits interested in SEO. As I have discussed before, I have been looking for various resources that I can provide to clients to help them understand search engine optimization. Often for many [...]
Stemkoski.com Version 2
I haven’t been blogging that long but it has become something I really enjoy doing. Thus far, my blog has done better than I expected and thanks to Google I get an acceptable amount of traffic each day. Most of these visitors are looking for technical information contained deep within posts and rarely do these [...]
Free Graphing/Charting with PHP Using the Google Chart API
This morning I have been searching around for a free graphing solution for a program I am going to be writing today. I am basically creating a simple analytics package that analyzes the number of hits and conversions per day to an online application. During my searching through pre-built PHP solutions I came across the [...]