Tools of the trade

As I enjoy using MooTools and since almost all my work here is centered around it, I was pleasantly surprised when Packt Publishing asked me to review “MooTools 1.2 Beginner’s Guide” by Jacob Gube and Garrick Cheung. Now, that I read the book, I must tell you that things would have been a lot easier for me when I started to learn MooTools if I had this book.

One of the main problems with MooTools in my opinion is that entry level is set a bit high and you need some programming knowledge to be able to start learning it. Docs on mootools.net are simply great but in some cases aren’t very helpful, especially if you’re trying to learn the framework. That happens because they assume you already know things that you probably don’t. This usually ends with searching for additional information on different blogs, talking to people, waiting for answers and mainly wasting a lot of time. (more…)

From time to time there is a task that needs to be accomplished and it’s a quite difficult one. When that happens and the deadline is tight it’s a very good solution to search the web for what you need. Below, I’ll put some good stuff I found on the web. (more…)

Smaller pages mean smaller downloads and faster page loading. As a programmer, my primary goal is to develop PHP code that parses fast and consumes the minimum amount of resources. Bandwidth and filesize were not a problem that I realized until lately. So, what can you do to reduce filesize and as a consequence to that to use less bandwidth? (more…)

This SEO thing is a pain in the @$$ sometimes. You work and try to find good partners with good page rank to help your domain rank higher and in exchange for a link on his website, you put one of his on yours.

Well, some webmasters are honest. But some are not. And that’s when the process starts to get messy. You put his link and than you start the watch: did he put your link on his page? Is the link clean (no rel=’nofollow’, javascript, frames or other things)? So, you start typing his web address in your browser, select the view source option and perform a search. This is time consuming and not very productive. In this time you could do something more useful.

For that particular reason I started the development of a tool I called backlink verifier. For now, what it does is simply crawl your partner’s page that you specify and search for your domain in all the links available on that particular page and when it finds it it checks whether your link has a nofollow attribute on it or not. Simple, no pain, no source code for you to search into. It will also display the number of links available on page, how many are outbound links and how many nofollow links are on the page.

If this tool will provide itself useful, I will develop it further so please feel free to comment on this article any problems, wishes or things you think it should do.

As a future development “to do” list, I have in mind the following:

• display outbound links available on partner’s webpage
• user accounts so that you simply log in and start testing all addresses you added to your accound
• crawling at least 2 levels deep on your partner’s webpage (for now it only crawls the address you insert)
• cronjob that will e-mail you if one of your links gets changed / is removed
• listing of the title text used on your link

Again, you can find the backlink verifier tool here.

This is so cool. By accident I found the web.archive.org website. It has web pages dating since 1996 from what I’ve found out reading the info available. It looks like it’s based on an open source web crawler called Heritrix. The list of contributors is huge and thanks to them we can now see how the internet was looking like 10 years ago. If you are an internet addict you’ll love this.

Pages available for a certain domain are chronologically ordered (years, months) and you can browse the whole website not just an index page.

I really REALLY recommend you to visit this website. It made me remember of my teenager period with Starcraft (lots of it) and unfortunately no internet.

For fun, this is how various big fishes used to look like not so many years ago.

Google webpage at Nov 11, 1998

Yahoo webpage at Oct 20, 1996

Blizzard webpage at Oct 19, 1996

If you are like myself, than you considered a long time ago that Firefox is the tool you need when it comes to web browsers. I used to be an IE user, but that was at least 5 years ago. What I like the most is the easy way you can install addons and that you can find A LOT of those. Well, below you can find the Firefox add-ons that are a must if you are a developer (at least in my opinion). (more…)

If you ever need a graph generated with php, if you ask me you have 2 solutions: use GD or use Flash.
Here are the best two of them in my opinion:
1. jpgraph is a PHP-GD graphing tool
2. amCharts is a Flash developed chart solution.
Both offer the same thing with very different results. Go check them out.